Chicago Lambda Literary Reading--TOMORROW 5/22

What: Reading by multiple Lambda Literary Award finalists from Chicago & the Midwest
Where: The Center on Halsted, 3656 North Halsted Street in the Senior Center
When: Wednesday, May 22 at 7:00 PM
Why: The Lambda Literary Award Ceremony is just around the corner on June 3rd
Who: Co-hosted by The Lambda Literary Foundation and Gerber/Hart Library & Archives. Dr. Judith Markowitz, President of the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF), will MC the event and the following authors are scheduled to appear:

• Ramon H. Rivera-Servera, finalist in LGBT Studies, reading from Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics 
• Chris Paynter, finalist in Lesbian Romance, reading from Survived by Her Longtime Companion
• Lewis Wallace, finalist in LGBT Anthology, reading "Dirt Story" from Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
• Laura Knight, finalist in LGBT Debut Fiction, reading from Three Cubic Feet
• Tracy Baim, finalist in LGBT Studies, editor of Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in American
• Anne Laughlin, finalist in Lesbian Romance, reading from Runaway
• C.P Rowlands, finalist in Lesbian Mystery, reading from Jacob's War
• E.M. Kokie, finalist in LGBT Children/YA, reading from Personal Effects
• Marty McConnell, finalist in Lesbian Poetry, reading from Wine for a Shotgun

The only book I've read from this list is Runaway by Chicago writer Anne Laughlin who I met last year at Women and Children First for the book's launch.

For the complete list of finalists in all categories click here.  For more information about tomorrow's event contact the Gerber/Hart at (773) 381-8030.

Have you read any of the above?

 

Monday, Library Fun Day.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading is hosted by Sheila @ Book Journey

CURRENTLY READING:
The past few days I've been reading a short story a day from Flannery O'Connor's last collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Along with every-other person who has attended high school in America during the last forty years I read A Good Man is Hard to Find as a teen (the story, not the collection). I re-read A Good Man last year and liked it so much that O'Connor has been on my mind ever since. And since May is short story month and I've been writing short stories this year, I thought now was a good time to dip into more Flannery. Her stories immediately grab me and hold me tight as she slowly cranks up the tension.

LISTENING TO:
Still on Robert Cato's The Passage of Power. There are 27 discs in this audio book and I'm on disc 15. I only listen to it in the car and as my commute is, at most, 20 minutes it's taking me awhile to get through this one, but it is engaging. Makes me want to take a road trip.

COMING UP:
1. For The Classics Club Spin #2 I'll be reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. I want to read more Fitzgerald and put two of his novels on this spin list. My lucky number (#6) came through for me again! (All copies of this novel are checked out at the library where I work as well as at my local library. I downloaded a digital copy on my old Kobo so I can start reading it later tonight.)

2. Thomas over at My Porch is hosting a Barbara Pym Reading Week, June 1-8th. I've never read Pym. In fact, I'd never heard of her until I started reading Thomas's blog. Have you heard of Pym? Read anything by her?

The library where I work had nine Pym novels on the shelf this morning. I chose An Academic Question. Why? Because none of the other books had this fabulous photograph on the back cover:

Pym at work at the International African Institute, Fetter Lane, London.

I adore pictures of writers at work, and Pym looks like she's having such a fun time writing that I couldn't leave this book in the library and checked it out to read during Barbara Pym Reading Week.

3. More short story month: I also checked out The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Her novel A Ship of Fools is on my Classics Club list and I thought I'd warm up with a few short stories.

What are you reading today?

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

In recent memory I've never been happier to return a library book than I was when I dropped off The Accursed.

I liked the book, but I'm glad its over.

It was a challenge to read, at times, until I let go and gave myself to it. I quit trying to want it to be somethings else, I suppose, although I wasn't conscious of wanting it to be anything in particular. Maybe shorter? Less windy? But that would have taken away the flavor and pleasure of reading this story.

From the publisher: This eerie tale of psychological horror sees the real inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Princeton fall under the influence of a supernatural power. New Jersey, 1905: soon-to-be commander-in-chief Woodrow Wilson is president of Princeton University. On a nearby farm, Socialist author Upton Sinclair, enjoying the success of his novel 'The Jungle', has taken up residence with his family. This is a quiet, bookish community - elite, intellectual and indisputably privileged. But when a savage lynching in a nearby town is hushed up, a horrifying chain of events is initiated - until it becomes apparent that the families of Princeton have been beset by a powerful curse. The Devil has come to this little town and not a soul will be spared. 'The Accursed' marks new territory for the masterful Joyce Carol Oates - narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling fantastical elements to stunning effect.

That brief description makes it sound like the book is a cohesive, chronological story, a unified narrative, but it is not. There is a narrator, a self-proclaimed amateur historian who is the son of one of the main characters in the book. The events he relates bounce around between various characters, some of their journals and letters, actual events, and imagined dialogue. He makes it clear that he's trying to piece together--in a much more comprehensive manner, he claims, than past historians--the tragic events that occurred around Princeton in the early years of the twentieth century. Yet he also condenses time and burns some evidence, which makes him a rather unreliable historian and narrator.

I was left with the impression that novel is practically a textbook example of issues surrounding historical interpretation, primarily of how subjective historical interpretation always is, to varying degrees for a plethora of reasons (ego, class, gender, race, available evidence, hearsay, etc). The novel shows how history is not something concrete, but is rather an individual's piecing together of "evidence" that he or she decides/prefers to use when trying to create a larger "story" where there sometimes is no story and/or attempting to mold an argument for this or that interpretation of events.

The Accursed will appeal to readers who are:

• Established Oates fans (who certainly don't need me to tell them about this book)
• Aficionados of late 19th century/ early 20th century fiction
• Gothic fiction fans
• Interested in any of the historical personages represented within the novel

Oates does an excellent job of weaving historical figures into this novel with multiple story-lines, some that cross paths, some that do not. The storyline that I most enjoyed was the one featuring Upton Sinclair. There's a scene where Upton Sinclair and Jack London meet at a bar after a socialist rally that was so sublimely written that it was both beautiful and painful to read.

I've enjoyed the handful of books that I've read by Oates and plan on reading more. My advice for this one is to read a few pages and if you get sucked in take it home and stick with it.

The Accursed
Joyce Carol Oats
Ecco, March 2013
Source: library copy
Rating: 4/5 stars (really liked it...and its growing on me the more I think about it!)

I've often read books that I hated to see come to an end, but its more rare (at least in my experience) to read a book that I liked but was happy to be done with it. Has this happened to you?

The Classics Spin #2

I signed on for The Classics Club back in September 2012 and since then have read only three of the books on my list. Lame-o! At this pace there's no way I'll finish the remaining 97 books on my list by my deadline (9/23/17), so I'm taking part in the The Classics Spin #2.

How the spin works: participants choose 20 books from their list of classics by Monday, May 20th. The moderators pick a number between 1-20 and participants read the corresponding book from their lists by July 1, 2013.

The 20 books I selected below are a combination of books I really want to read (especially the Fallada, Ferber and Fitzgerald) and books that I'm a bit neutral about. I am not exactly thrilled at the prospect of reading two of these books--Grant's Personal Memoirs and Shaar's The Killer Angels--but added them because I don't know much about the Civil War and we are in the midst of the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War.  There are two books that I'm dreading.

1. On the Good Life, Cicero
2. Personal Memoirs, Grant
3. The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett
4. The Good Soldier, Ford
5. Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson
6. This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald
7. Three Soldiers, Dos Passos
8. Les Miserables, Hugo
9. So Big, Ferber
10. Berlin Alexanderplatz, Doblin
11. The Maltese Falcon, Hammet
12. Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald
13. Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood, Christopher
14. The Drinker, Fallada
15. The Caine Mutiny, Wouk
16. From Here to Eternity, Jones
17. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson
18. Ship of Fools, Porter
19. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway
20. The Killer Angels, Shaara

 If you're curious about my complete list, click here.

Have you read a classic lately? Wanna spin with me?

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell (audiobook)

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
Julie Powell
New York: Hachette Audio, 2009
Source: library copy
Rating: liked it okay: 3/5 stars
 
Earlier this year I listened to Julia Child's My Life In France. As a fan of the movie Julie & Julia, I was fascinated by what Nora Ephron chose to use and what not to use from Julia's memoir in the storyline she wrote for the movie.

Prior to listening to My Life in France I wasn't interested in reading Julie Powell's memoir, Julie & Julia. But the more I thought about how Nora Ephron used what she used from Julia's story, the more curious I became about how she used Julie's story.

If you haven't seen the movie Julie & Julia, what Ephron did was tell Julia Child's and Julie Powell's stories a parallel fashion based on their respective memoirs,  My Life in France and Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Powell's memoir was based on her blog The Julie/Julia Project.

Listening to Powell's book cleared up a few things about the movie. For example, the scene where her boss tells her a republican would have fired her always struck me as odd, a bit out of place. It fell flat because that was the only overt political reference made in Julie's storyline. But this lone remark in the movie is clarified in the book where consistent reference is made regarding sniping between democrats and republicans. In the movie, Ephron was more consistent in weaving the poltical divide between Julia (a liberal democrat) and her father (a conservative McCarthy supporting republican). I can only imagine the amount of film they had to cut from what Ephron actually shot, so perhaps the contemporary political arguments ended up on the cutting room floor.

Ephron also cleaned Julie up. Way up. In the book you get her potty mouth, more dirty dishes, and a lovely description of the maggots that Julie found thriving in her kitchen, among other things.  Like Julia Powell, I used to have a potty mouth (courtesy of the United States Marine Corps). I've cleaned it up over the years and listening to this book showed me how far I've come to the other side of this issue. I am certainly no prude, but now believe that less is more when it comes to swearing. Words like 'fuck,' 'bitch,' and 'goddamn' are more effective when used sparingly and intentionally. Knock-on-wood that I'll never have to deal with a swarm of thriving maggots.

I did, however, get a kick out of Bitch Rice. And I enjoyed Powell's reading of her own work as well as her writing. She has some nice sentences that made me rewind to hear again. One example is this one made in regard to addressing her weight gain over the year of cooking buttery food and eating too late at night: "And while I have not bloated to a New Yorker's Midwest airport nightmare proportions, neither would I call myself svelte or sophisticated."

As a Midwesterner who usually rolls her eyes over regional put-downs, I can also appreciate those that are new and fresh.

One thing that was not cleared up by listening to this book--and which I'd hoped would be--is the issue of aspics. Why were they ever created? Who ate them and why? When?

Have you made or eaten aspic? Please share your experience. Inquiring minds want to know all about it!