Write Down the Title and Read This Book

The great children's book writer E.L. Konigsburg died over the weekend, a piece of news I barely noticed in all the emotional tumult of the news from Boston. Like millions of other book-loving kids, I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler -- it described exactly the sort of running away experience I wished I were cool and smart enough to pull off. She won the Newbery Medal for that book and again in 1997 for The View from Saturday. But the book of hers that I love the most -- and recommend to readers both young and not-so-much to this day -- is A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. I am so very glad it is in the collection of the library where I work so I can read it again every couple of years. The only bad thing I have to say about this book is that its title is impossible to remember. And I still don't even know what miniver is. How Konigsburg got away with her long and obscure titles beats me (her first book is called Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley and me, Elizabeth). It must have been before marketing departments had much sway in publishing houses.

But write the title down and get hold of this book if you have the slightest interest in history, medieval history, women's history any of that. This is the story of Eleanor of Acquitaine. And what a premise -- it is recounted by Eleanor herself, along with several people she knew during various periods of her life. They're in heaven, waiting to see if her second husband, Henry II of England, will be allowed out of purgatory to join them. It was the origin of my lifelong fascination with Eleanor -- any woman who had been Queen of France, then run away with a younger man to become Queen of England -- had my attention. Her other adventures along the way -- like joining her first husband on a Crusade, or joining her sons in rebellion against her second husband -- just added to the allure. Plus all that cool medieval stuff. It's just brilliant.

Shelf Consciousness

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="1529,1530,1531,1532,1533,1534,1510,1535"] For the last year, almost all of our books have been in boxes. (I use the first person plural here to refer to my husband and me, not in some pretentious royal sense, by the way.) We packed in March of last year, moved in April and have been recovering ever since. A few times over the last year, I thought maybe we shouldn't have so many books in the first place because we managed to get along without them. But I missed them -- not just specific books I wanted for a specific reason, but the comfort of those volumes we had kept because we loved them so -- and those that we hadn't read yet, so they were still full of promise.

In the last month we finally got our friend Rudi to build the set of bookshelves we had envisioned. No, that's not true. We envisioned a big set of shelves on a mostly blank wall. Our architect friends told us we should fill in the entire wall, all the way up to the peak. Rudi took that concept, and the existing circular window, and turned it into art.

A little more than a week ago it was finally done -- the fitting and cutting and sanding and varnishing. It was finally time to start emptying the boxes. Then we had to figure out how to shelve the books.

I hadn't worried about this too much -- in fact, I'd looked forward to it -- because I'd assumed that since I work in a library, my opinions on this would rule the day. I wasn't planning to insist on Dewey Decimal shelving (or, God forbid, Library of Congress). But I figured we'd divide it by fiction vs. nonfiction, shelve the fiction alphabetically like we do at the library, and shelve the nonfiction roughly by subject.

Mark objected on the grounds that "systems never work." (Tell that to all the cataloguers and shelvers in the world, honey!) But I quickly realized that in our particular situation, he was right -- my proposed system wouldn't work -- or if it did, it would require regular use of an extension ladder. We are both very fond, for example, of the works of Michael Chabon. But if we went alphabetically, he'd wind up 13 feet up.

Our fabulous new bookshelf does indeed go all the way to the peak. Which is 15 feet. It doesn't include a ladder. It probably should, but attaching hardware to this baby would kill me. So the books going on the high-up shelves are books that, by necessity, we don't expect to be consulting any time soon. Which means they are absolutely perfect for the books that used to make us feel terribly guilty for taking up shelf space. Books we've read, don't expect to read again but just can't let go of. Books that loved ones gave us that we can't bear to give away .I've got a few like that from my dad, who was a serious book hound in his later years. I treasure "Yesterdays: A History of Massachusetts State College 1863-1933," a book about the institution that later became UMass Amherst, where my parents both spent their entire working lives and is my alma mater. But I don't expect to sit down and read it any time soon, if ever.

Mark agreed with the fiction vs. nonfiction divide, with a couple of exceptions where ambidextrous authors like Nick Hornby are shelved all together, or a novelist's single book of essays -- like Chabon's "Maps and Legends" -- go with his other works. Our Trinidad section includes fiction and non. Otherwise, fiction is kind of a free-for-all though it's been unexpectedly liberating to just be able to put the books wherever we choose, defying the tyranny of the alphabet. We grouped writer's works together. We put things within arm's reach that are either in the lineup or likely to be soon. Both of us are working our way, slowly, through Patrick O'Brian so those books have a nice chin-level spot. I've arranged some recent writers from the Key West Literary Seminar together, something I'd never get away with at a "real" library except as a temporary display. I've got a section of galleys which we get at the library -- if I don't get to them in a certain amount of time, I tend to give them away so they'll circulate. True crime, a growing interest especially the historical stuff, is on the bottom shelf. It's a tad inconvenient but it's accessible.

Nonfiction was both easier and trickier. Except for the high-up books, we agreed to group those basically by subject -- but our categorizing is broad to say the least. There's natural history/science. There are essays, nonfiction about literature (including essays) and a small section of books about books. There's European history, English history and American history. I put those in mostly chronological order, though I separated out the omnibus volumes from the books that chronicle more specific times and people. I was the littlest bit sorry to see that I apparently purged Norman Davies' massive tome "The Isles," which had been sitting on my shelves reproaching me, both for being silly enough to buy the damned thing and then not reading it, for well over a decade. I'd actually have room for it now and the shelves would suit a four-inch monster like that. And I always feel comforted to own a bunch of doorstopping tomes, in case my library and I survive the apocalypse and my Kindle purchases aren't available in the post-apocalyptic era.

We're still settling into our relationship with this bookshelf. I plan some minor re-organizing within the natural history/science section. But it's just about set and it is truly wonderful to have almost all of our books in one place. The scariest part is that there is room to grow.

Not very closely related but still interesting, if you're interested in things like shelving and classification is this recent blog post from a reference librarian, objecting to the label "non-fiction" as an organizing concept for libraries. I'd never thought about it but it IS kind of irritating that such a broad and diverse array of books is most essentially defined by what it is not.

Old and new favorites

Great thing about working in a library: I spend a lot of time working with books -- checking them out to patrons, shelving them, scouting reviews, getting advanced copies. One small downside: I almost never browse for a book any more, or am caught by surprise by a new title from a favorite author.

Recently, though, I came across a couple historical novels -- one by Tracy Chevalier, whom I like a lot, and one a first novel that appeared on our New Books shelf without my having read any advanced press.

The Last Runaway is Tracy Chevalier's first book set in the U.S. so I'll admit I was dubious at first. But the lead character drew me in from the first (not only because I sympathized with her seasickness as she crossed the Atlantic from England to America in the 19th century and realized the voyage was so traumatizing that she could never cross again). It's set in a Quaker community in Ohio before the Civil War -- so the Underground Railroad was active as slaves made their way to Canada. The Quaker community, while opposing slavery in general, is divided in how far they should go in helping runaways even as the Fugitive Slave Act increased the pressure on them to help those trying to recapture the runaways.

Chevalier is best known for Girl With A Pearl Earring but my favorite of hers remains The Lady and the Unicorn (I'm the medieval-adoring geek who will go see those tapestries over and over again). I also liked Burning Bright, her book set around William Blake, and Remarkable Creatures, about English women who were fossil hunters in the 19th century.

The new book was Accidents of Providence by Stacia Brown, a first novel set in 17th century England -- a period that is neglected compared to the overpowering Tudors but offers a rich landscape as the country went through Civil War and conflict over religion and political structures that divided families, classes and communities. The story revolves around the fate of an unmarried woman who bears a child and buries its corpse -- requiring the state to charge her with murder, whether the child was stillborn or not.

The jacket copy says Brown wrote this book using material from her dissertation on martyrs in 17th century England. I hope we'll see more fiction from her, and hope the book is successful enough to inspire others to write about this period in English history.

Another newish historical novel I read recently didn't spring on me unawares as the previous two but it's well worth a read, especially if you like historical crime fiction and are looking for something on American shores. The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye is set in 1840s New York, as the city is recovering from a catastrophic fire and establishing its first real police force. Another major factor is the increase in Irish immigration -- viewed as a Catholic invasion by some Protestant residents -- that is about to be increased manyfold by the potato famine. I first gave this book a try months ago and I'll admit I was turned back by the language -- Faye has goen to great lengths to use the terms of the time but it felt forced on my initial attempt. For some reason, on my second attempt, it won me over and I was soon enthralled. If you liked Caleb Carr's early novels, this would be a good one to try. Also recommended for people like me, who are tired of waiting for C.J. Sansom to get back to Shardlake or Ruth Downie to tell us what the medicus has been up to lately in Roman Britain.

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 2 download

First of all this is not a particularly good photo, I KNOW, and if you want to see much better photos of the Seminar, head on over to Littoral, the Seminar blog. But it's my photo of D.T. Max talking about David Foster Wallace, shot on my phone from my perch in the balcony (that dark thing in the bottom right hand corner is the railing) and I'm going to use it, dammit. I'll confess I caught less of the second session, which I already regret, but I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see starting with Colm Toibin's masterful keynote on Thursday night that discussed the poets Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop, both poets whose work shows "grief and reason battling it out," according to Toibin -- along with the work of Robert Frost and Joseph Brodsky.

Both Gunn and Bishop were stylistically and personally opposed to the trend of confessional poetry that swept through their chosen field in the 1960s, which certainly did not mean they had not suffered through traumatic times in their lives. Quite the opposite. And it doesn't mean those traumas didn't show up in their poetry. Bishop "buried what mattered to her most in her tone," Toibin said, most tellingly in the villanelle "One Art," about "the art of losing." Toibin calls it "a poem about what cannot be said."

I also didn't know, until Toibin told us, that Bishop wanted the line "awful but cheerful" inscribed on her tombstone. It's the closing line from her poem "The Bight," about Key West.

Other not-quite-random stuff from the seminar:

Ann Napolitano, who includes Flannery O'Connor as a character in her novel A Good Hard Look:

• "You're supposed to be from the South if you write about Flannery O'Connor. I had barely been to the South."
• "There is no way that I could imagine hanging out with Flannery O'Connor. I just think she would eviscerate me in about 30 seconds."
• "Trying to get inside the skin of someone who is very prickly and you don't think would like you is a peculiar experience."

Brad Gooch, author of Flannery, a biography of the same writer:

• "She was her own biographer in the sense she saw her life clearly and created it."
• "As a biographer ... I have to stop where the facts stop. It's sort of annoying, but grounding as well."
• "The thing about biography is that no matter how inspired you get, you sort of need a fact to get from one sentence to another."
• Both Gooch and Napolitano were, in very different ways, inspired to write about O'Connor by "Habits of Being," a collection of her letters.

Brenda Wineapple on biography:

• As a child, "Biography was a genre I didn't understand or really much care for."
• On telling a professor at an academic conference that she was writing a biography: "'How did it feel,' he asked, 'to work on something so theoretically regressive?'" This while swirling sherry condescendingly in his plastic cup.
• "What haunts the house? I think that's what the biographer has to discover."
• "Biography matters because people matter. They matter to us because we want to know them and understand them."
• "Biography is an invasion of privacy made palatable and jusifiable .. by the empathy that inspires it."

D.T. Max, author of "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," a biography of David Foster Wallace:

• On DFW's college-age ambition to go into politics: "The thought that David Foster Wallace wanted to be a Congressman from Illinois is so weird."
• On writing a biography soon after a subject's death: "The laptop lid opens after the casket closes."
• Biography is "the only nonfiction genre that's survived basically unchanged for the last 200 years."
• On meeting readers with tattoos of lines from DFW's novel "Infinite Jest," or the dates they began and finished the book: "This is not what biographers are used to encountering."
• Comparing the reaction to DFW's death to the reaction to the deaths of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain: "There was a way in which David was toucing people the way musicians usually do."
• "If grief and sadness are what brought a lot of us to Wallace over the years, I certainly don't believe it's what kept us there."

I'll give the last word to Geoff Dyer, even though he speaks in long discursive sentences that are very difficult to get down accurately, especially if you're busy listening for his next witty comment:

• I recognized his surprise, as an undergraduate, when he realized "how quickly doing English came to mean doing criticism."
• I was surprised and delighted to hear him call F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" "one of my two favorite novels of all time." I loved that book, too, even though, at least in this country, "The Great Gatsby" gets most of the critical love.
• "Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' is one of those books everyone has read. You've all read it, even if you've not done so personally."

If there's one image from this Seminar

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 1 download

Session 1 of this year's Key West Literary Seminar wrapped up yesterday. If you missed it, I suspect recordings will be showing up soonish on the Seminar's audio archive site. And we're getting particularly good coverage this year on Littoral, the Seminar blog and from WLRN, the public radio station in Miami. If you're Twitter-inclined, check out the hashtag #kwls -- you'll even see eminences like Judy Blume and James Gleick chiming in along with us lesser mortals in the audience. This year is not as Twitterific as last but we don't have William Gibson and Margaret Atwood with us (though Gibson is scheduled to return next year -- don't wait too long to sign up for 2014's Seminar, The Dark Side, because it's selling fast). As has quickly become tradition, Jason Rowan is back making custom-crafted cocktails, tailored to the year's theme. Keep an eye on his blog, Embury Cocktails, for recipes and more information in the near future.

Phyllis Rose opened with a wonderful keynote address Thursday night, examining John Hersey (for whom the Thursday event is named) as a lens through which to view the whole writer vs. person question. Is the man Key Westers saw riding his bike around the island the same person who wrote "Hiroshima" and "A Bell for Adano"? The answer is, of course, no and yes. Rose was also refreshingly dismissive about the overwhelming adoption of deconstruction and other French-influenced critical approaches toward literature, which tortured those of us who were English majors in the latter part of the 20th century and dared to think that writers' lives and times might influence their work. For literary scholars who didn't feel like sacrificing themselves on the altars of Derrida and Foucault, literary biography became "a welcome oasis during the desert years of deconstruction," Rose said. "Writers about writers were rescued by readers who wanted to know about writers' lives."

A sporadic sample from the rest of the weekend:

From Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette and staff writer for The New Yorker:

• "Fiction is high-minded betrayal and biography is dirty-minded fidelity."
• One of Thurman's early jobs was translating pornographic movies. "It's freelance work that I heartily recommend because it's easy -- you just have to understand the words 'Yes.... yes!' and 'More!'"
• Translation is "yoga for the mind and for the ear."
• "One definition of the truth is that which is untranslatable."

From Brenda Wineapple, biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Gertrude and Leo Stein, author of a book about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

• On her subjects: "I prefer them deader and deader."
• Emily Dickinson is "the elusive subject par excellence."
• Oscar Wilde quote: "Biography adds new terror to death."

Most amazing fact learned at this year's Seminar (so far):

• Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman (amazing fact supplier: Mark Doty). Edmund White followed this with a comment on why vampire is so often code for gay in literature: "You meet someone, you kiss them and you turn them into you."

More from Edmund White, biographer of Genet and Proust, literary critic and author of a biographical novel on Stephen Crane:

• "Politics and literature are opposites. Politics are all lying and literature is all truth-telling."
• "Having come out when I was 12, I've always wondered what it would be like to be closeted."
• On fiction vs. nonfiction: "The contract with the reader is entirely different." That's why he calls the books about his life autobiographical novels, not memoirs. "Once they're called novels, you're free to do whatever you want."

From Jay Parini, biographer of William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck and author of biographical novels on Melville and Tolstoy:

• Leon Edel's five-volume biography of Henry James is "better than Xanax" as a treatment for insomnia. "He's the Xanax of all writers."
• On the difference between writing biographies of Jesus (his most recent subject) and Gore Vidal (his next subject): "At least Jesus didn't think he was Gore Vidal."
• "Biography is a form of fiction. .... I love to read biographies, even bad ones."
• In writing biography, "you're not presenting a life. You've giving an illusion of a life."
• To Edmund White: "I read your biography of Genet. I thought it was a great novel."

Literary subjects that KWLS panelists attempted as grade-schoolers:

• Phyllis Rose: Eleanor Roosevelt, after her mother rejected her earlier choice of the Duchess of Windsor as a suitable subject for an assignment to write about "an admirable woman."
• Edmund White: Peter the Great. "I was absolutely power-mad as a child."
• Brenda Wineapple, at 10 years old, wrote the first chapter of a novel and gave it to her father, whose response was "But there's no plot here." Wineapple: "My career as a novelist was over."

Books I have purchased (so far):

• The Master by Colm Toibin
• Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini
• Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, who isn't at the Seminar but the book was mentioned several times

If all of this makes you eager to sign up for Session 2, it's not too late. It all starts again Thursday night with a keynote I'm really looking forward to: Colm Toibin talking about Elizabeth Bishop. That's Toibin in the photo, by the way, speaking at the podium that Cayman Smith-Martin and his crew built from books they got from us here at the library -- they were otherwise destined for the recycling plant so it's great to see them serving literature one last time.