Bookmarked

———————— THIS MONTH'S BOOKS ————————

ACQUIRED

READ

Knitting in the Old Way: Designs & Techniques from Ethnic Sweaters by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts and Deborah Robson (Fort Collins, Colorado: Nomad Press, 2004) Hot Broke Messes: How to Have Your Latte and Drink It Too by Nancy Trejos (New York: Business Plus, 2010) Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously by Adrienne Martini (New York: Free Press, 2010) Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) iPhone Application Development for Dummies by Neal Goldstein (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2009) Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor by Tad Friend (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). Kindle edition

Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope (Kindle edition) In the Hebrides by Alice Starmore (Blairstown, N.J.: The Broad Bay Company, 1995) STARTED Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously by Adrienne Martini Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope (Kindle edition) Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor by Tad Friend

The knitting world has coined a term for the chronic condition of beginning more projects than you can possibly finish: Startitis. With myriad attractive things to choose from, you choose—all of them! Throughout most of June, I have been afflicted with Startitis in my reading world—though it is a matter of opinion whether it is actually an affliction.

Suffice it to say that Kindle is unlikely to provide a respite. Being able to get entire books downloaded to my iPod in less than a minute (for a price, of course) has supplemented, but not supplanted, my library habit. It used to be that, when I heard of a book I thought I'd like, I would request it from the library or, if I thought I needed constant access to it for the rest of my life (what was I thinking?!), buy it at the nearest bookstore. Impulse purchases were reserved for trips to worthy venues like St. Paul's Common Good and Nisswa's Rainy Days.

Now I am yielding to impulse as I sit in a coffeeshop or surf the Web at home. My pocketbook is suffering, but my patronage of my public library is not; I put 12 items on hold there this month.

But let's look at the things I'm actually reading. This month I finished Phineas Finn and started Phineas Redux, both on the iPod. This is at least my second time through both of them, and this time I am trying not to skip over the political bits—just as, when I read Moby-Dick all those years ago, I made myself read all the whaling parts, and actually ended up enjoying them.

So far Trollope's mine is not as rich as Melville's, but neither is it unrewarding. For example, I went to my college reunion this past weekend and, in one of those chance conversations one has at these affairs, I ended up talking to a fellow who's edited a book by the man believed to be Trollope's model for Phineas Finn: John Pope-Hennessy, 1834–1891. (M.C. Rintoul's Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction, available here in Google Books, discusses the various historical figures thought to be Trollope's Irish M.P., as well as providing a key to other less thinly disguised political lights; Daubeny turns out to be Disraeli, for instance. If you have access to Academic Search Premier or another database that indexes the journal English Studies, also check out John Halperin's April 1978 article therein on the subject, "Trollope's Phineas Finn and History.")

In the physical world of old-fashioned print, I'm really loving Germania. Simon Winder has that light, ironic tone that seems to be wound into the DNA of the best British writers—I am thinking of my hero Nick Hornby as well. Winder is irreverent, but I find myself trusting him implicitly as he romps through German social and political history, which he cheerfully acknowledges is justly considered a cultural dead zone for today's scholars, tourists, gastronomes, and politicos. "I want to get round the Führer and try to reclaim a bit of Europe which is in many ways Britain's weird twin," he says.

Picking a page practically at random, here is Winder on the founding father of the Habsburg kaisers:

"The Emperor Maximilian I died in 1519 having spent a long and enjoyable life, fighting, having children, feasting and fixing up marriages for his own children. His reign has the air of a vastly prolonged international card game where through debonair luck and skill Maximilian winds up with virtually everything. ... Sadly Maximilian died before the [soap-opera] episodes where ... the marriage of his son Philip the Handsome to the Castilian Joanna the Mad was going to have the sensational result of their six children turning into two emperors and four queens."

I'm happy just living in a world where nutty royalists can trace their ancestry back to someone named Joanna the Mad. Aren't you?

What Would Nick Do?

A friend of mine who calls herself “Barb” on her very funny blog justly chides me for not being clear about my intentions for this page. Actually, what she really said was:

“Glad to see Erin's book on your night table, but why won't you
tell us which you are reading? If you are writing a blog, please be so
good as to reveal your real reading preferences to us!”

I think the key phrase here is If you are writing a blog. My ambivalence about this hanging-out-in-public thing is showing. So is the fact that I never really explained what I was doing when I changed the focus of this blog from my moribund "23 Things on a Stick" project to simply books.

What I wanted was to create something like Nick Hornby's wonderful monthly column in The Believer (now defunct, but collected in The Polysyllabic Spree and other books). Each column started with a list of books Hornby had bought that month, followed by a list of those he'd actually read — not necessarily drawn from the first list. (This had the effect of letting you keep score. If Hornby had read more books than he bought, he won; otherwise, he lost.) Then he described the experience of reading them, or more often what he did instead of reading them.

So the catalog of books by my bedside was supposed to be List #1 — my lofty goal — and you were supposed to learn from reading my golden words whether I actually succeeded in reading them. Clever, huh? Well, not really.

If I were following such a format for this post, my books-by-the-bedside list would look like this:

• False Mermaid by Erin Hart
• The Happiness Project; Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• In the Hebrides by Alice Starmore
• Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen

But here's the catch: I haven't been reading any of them. Or, rather, I did read The Happiness Project, but only because that was right before I gave my husband the birthday gift of a Kindle — and learned I could access his Kindle books through my iPod Touch. So here's what I've actually read this past month, all on an electronic screen:

• The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner
• So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger (read for my book group)
• Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia by Patricia Morrisroe
• The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope (it turns out that Trollope's Parliamentary novels are free in the Kindle store, but his Barsetshire ones aren't)
• Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

And I'm about one-sixth of the way through Phineas Finn as well. (Yes, I know I'm reading Trollope out of order. So sue me.)

All of which has left my literary world in a bit of a shambles. I thought I was one of those people who didn't consider a book a book unless it had pages and a cover; well, I have been drawn into Kindle's versions the same way that I would have been to the "dead tree" ones, and got just as irritated with Alice Vavasour there. (The original "Smart women, foolish choices.") At the same time, I am still buying books and checking them out of the library — yesterday I put myself on the wait list for three more — in the apparent belief that I have unlimited time to read any book in any medium.

So clearly I, like Alice Vavasour, cannot long continue on this headstrong course. But I will follow “Barb” ’s advice and do my utmost to keep you informed of my progress. Fair enough?