Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

You probably think I’ve slowed down with my reading but nothing could be further from the truth! At the moment, I have taken a breather from books to catch up on a large backlog of issues from The New Yorker. I was a ridiculously lucky/spoilt thing and received a gift subscription. It makes for excellent, provocative reading but it’s pretty hard-going!

Tonight, I thought I’d set aside my mags for the graphic novel version of Coraline. I’d seen the stunning film adaptation last year but still hadn’t read the book. I know it might be biased to say so, but Gaiman can’t disappoint.

Coraline Jones is a sullen girl with parents who largely ignore her for their work. Not wanting to wallow, she takes it upon herself to keep entertained by exploring her new environs – an old house divided up into flats. She has wonderfully quirky neighbours who insist upon getting her name wrong and who seem to inhabit another plane of existence.

It all starts with a door that is bricked up. Somehow Coraline is able to go through this door and finds creepy alternate reality versions of her parents who seem terrific compared to her actual reality. She soon learns that they are not all that they seem and her parents disappear. Coraline ends up having to rescue them and other lost souls, all with the help of a cheeky but very clever black cat.

This is the kind of book that would scare the shit out of you, but you would not be able to stop reading, as a child. There are great elements of horror, and some of sadness – the phenomenon of parents not having enough time for their children is all too common these days. Just the other day I heard one of my brother’s in-laws telling her four-year-old to go and stop bothering Mummy and play his Nintendo DS.

It’s nice too because it allows us to imagine what escaping our authority figures might be like, and hints that responsibility is actually pretty hard. After all, parents are too busy for good reason, most of the time.

The book isn’t long, and absolutely well worth reading. P. Craig Russell’s illustrations do it justice – evident from small things like the drawing of the black cat in characteristic poses, and smatterings of Poe-like horror (detached hands creeping about the place). My largely grown-up mind did not want it to finish.

I thought these would be Potter’s take on various nursery rhymes but instead, they are portions of nursery rhymes illustrated, interspersed with Potter’s own. I didn’t find them particularly enthralling, and I really like nursery rhymes and the like. These two books really could have been just one, as they are really very short. Was she doing it for the money by this stage, assuming that I read them in their publication order?

Another Potter book about bullying! A cat gets teased by a mouse, so she teases him back. Not really sure how I feel about that. Again, not one of the greatest in the Potter tales – they’re a bit downhill after The Tale of Little Pig Robinson which was really good.

I warn you in advance, I’ve read the last four of the Potter books but I promise I have been doing some ‘real’ reading – I’m finally halfway through The Duchess, the biography upon which the film was based. I really wish I was ploughing through a novel at present, but I’m trying to get through my unfinished books.

Potter’s running out of ideas, it feels. I didn’t quite expect this to be as short as it was: basically a ‘fierce bad rabbit’ bullies a good rabbit but he gets his just deserts! Serves him right.

If you’re expecting more, that’s it. Of course the rabbits are exceedingly cute.

Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy is probably the most intelligently written children’s fiction/fantasy I’ve ever read. I didn’t find the first one The Northern Lights as easy to read as this one – it’s fast-paced and thoroughly interesting.

It can be confusing at times too – Lyra and Will live in alternate Oxfords and somehow end up in each others’ worlds and move between the two. With this, we also have a thinly veiled critique of the Catholic Church and some concepts relating to physics. Pretty heavy stuff. I read on Wikipedia that Pullman weaves Milton’s Paradise Lost through the trilogy. Sadly, I’ve not read Milton, so I can’t quite identify this.

Gobbled up two thirds of it one insomniac-riddled evening, or rather, morning. I honestly don’t know what took me so long to pick this off my shelf. Can’t wait for the third one, though I’ll be really sad when it’s over…will probably buy those other smaller companion books.

It’s also fantastic to read books for children that doesn’t talk down to them and treats them as the beings they are – capable of extreme intuition and intelligence.

This is the longest story out of all the Beatrix Potter tales. It starts off innocently enough – a pig goes to market to run errands for his aunts, as he is a sweet-natured little piglet. Alas, the market is riddled with dangers that a naive pig might not be ready for.

It also makes references to other famous literary works – poor Pig Robinson gets pretty much abducted by sailors and meets a cat that helps him escape – the cat of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ fame. Pig has further adventures on Bong Island, and the reader is told that they should read Robinson Crusoe to find out more.

Anyway, it’s delightful and you should all go out and read it. It proved to be excellent respite from the postmodernist text I’m currently making my way through.

No one likes Ginger and Pickles and they are determined to run their store into the ground, despite their store being cheaper, and letting people buy things on credit.

Perhaps I’m just being a grumpy pseudo-Marxist, but what is wrong with these people/animals? Ginger and Pickles work hard and are generous to their customers. Their shop eventually folds and the townspeople are forced to shop at Tabitha Twitchit’s more expensive shop and she does not offer credit! Ginger becomes stout and Pickles becomes a gameskeeper (which immediately made me think of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, another novel about the difference between the various social classes).

Not one of my favourites from the Potter collection.

This is one of the sillier Beatrix Potter tales.

A cat invites a dog over for a party. The dog worries that she will be served mouse pie, and so sneaks her own pie into the cat’s oven to cook. Dog ends up eating cat’s pie, but then worries she has accidentally eaten a metal patty-pan in the process. Cat’s party is thrown into disrepute as she has to call the doctor for the idiotic dog.

I’m sure that this is all just a comedy of manners and very much indicative of the time Potter lived and for this reason, I’m not sure it really works as a story for children. One of the Potter tales I’ve least enjoyed, but then that could be because I was taught to suffer whatever the host(ess) served up.

Excellent revision and introduction on this important facet of Western cultural theory, with great everyday, down-to-earth examples. I already knew Catherine Belsey, its author, as an esteemed critic and am really pleased with how approachable she made everything sound. As a result, I now have passing knowledge on Lacan (less so on Lyotard, but that’s due to lack of exposure on my part).

I’ll be buying up more of these beauties for reading. It’s a great series.

More Beatrix Potter delight! I don’t necessarily know that this was Samuel Whiskers’ tale as it seemed to have lots of cats in it. Notable moment included poor dear Tom Kitten nearly being turned into kitten dumpling to be gobbled up, and also getting ’smuts’ (chimney ash) all about him. Of course he gets saved, which is the important thing!

I don’t have many of the Potter books to go…I’ll feel a bit lost once I finish them all. I’m really glad that Tom Kitten reappeared. Peter Rabbit appears in other tales too.

I struggled greatly with this book. I’m not sure why I read the first two thirds so quickly, because I did actually find it quite disturbing: nearly all the main protagonists are wicked, miserable people. A lot of their misery is of their own making and for this reason, it’s hard to look upon them in a sympathetic manner. The last third or so I really had to push through.

I don’t get the aura of Byronic hero around Heathcliff. Were it not for Mr Darcy’s social standing, I would that it would be more appropriate for Darcy (of Pride and Prejudice fame). Cathy I find equally unlikable as a supposed heroine.

Interestingly, I think Brontë predates or rather anticipates Ibsenian (and then Zolaesque) naturalism in that the sins, afflictions and pecadilloes of the parents are visited upon their progeny. Yet again another reason why this classic was not overly enjoyable.

Make no mistake though: Brontë is an astute observer and chronicler of human nature – interesting given that she was quite reclusive. Characters like Joseph are so vivid and believable. It’s worth reading, but probably not unless you’re in the mood for it. I think of it as a bleak, wintry read.

I am desperately trying not to start new books, but rather finish the ones I do have in progress. Very hard given that my mind is racing and wanting to fill itself with new ideas at the moment (poststructuralist book, I’m looking at you).

After reading a bit of Wuthering Heights, decided to wind down with another delightful Beatrix Potter tale. This one is an extension of the nursery rhyme ‘To market, to market / to buy a fat pig! / Home again, home again / jiggety-jig!’ and quite enjoyable, though it does make one a little sad at the thought that these adorable piglets could end up as bacon – for example, when the farmer pinches Pigling Bland in the ribs to see if he’s ‘ready’.

Interestingly, Beatrix herself is also present in the story. It is obvious that for all of the stories I’ve read thus far (I’m about halfway through the complete box now), that she is the narrator, but in this one, she is part of the action, so to speak.

I tell you, I’ve never seen anything quite so adorable as pigs being drawn running on their trotters! Very, very cute.

It was a bit of a whim to get this: a gorgeous and far-too-trendy-for-me blog I read did a feature on this and I knew I just had to have a copy. It was quite a while before it became available, and when it did, I snapped up a subscription.
Remedy Quarterly is inspired by a time contemporaneous to my parents’ time – when your mum had daggy but inexplicably alluring collections of recipe index cards and cookbooks accidentally kept from your local library (well, my mother has late 70s-early 80s cookbooks that look like they were from our local English library! oops!). I don’t know what it is about those damned cards that fascinate me so – they looked so exotic (though in hindsight, they aren’t at all), even though they are not necessarily things I would ever make for myself.

I admit it, RQ is trendy, but it’s also gorgeous. There are heartwarming stories and recipes. All of the recipes published have a personal history attached to them. Don’t think I’ll be making curry turkey anytime soon (too hard for me!) but am so going to try corned beef pie, and the chilli. Mmm.

I know the publication is US-centric, and for that reason, some of the ingredients I found confusing. What I’d give to have a Melbourne-centric issue as a special!

My favourite piece was about the Barbados-born crossing guard. He sounds like such a warm man, chatting to the locals, and giving one of the contributors some ingredients for old-school remedies. It’s also a wonderful reminder that community spirit is not dead, at least not in some parts of the world.

Ravenously read through this fantastic first issue, and look forward to the next three issues of my subscription. I do feel spoilt.

It has inspired me to ask my mother if she has those gloriously outdated recipe cards. They seem appealing to me, all of a sudden. I’ll post some pictures if I unearth them, pretty sure they made the trip from England to here.

This isn’t the most recent issue but I’m carefully working through a backlog of (excellent) Australian periodicals and Heat 19 was one on my nightstand.

It begins with some sad reading – Judith Beveridge recalls her close friend Dorothy Porter, who sadly passed away due to complications with breast cancer last year. Porter is one of Australia’s best known female contemporary poets, and sought bring attention to the verse novel form. She’s probably best known in the non-poetry public for The Monkey’s Mask, which was adapted for film.

The anthology stands at 200+ pages but I devoured it greedily, over half of it last night. There is a subtle thematic undercurrent that links all the contributions. If I had to pick my favourite, it would Jasmine Chan’s poem ‘Tyrant’. Honorable mention to Tim Thorne’s ‘Easy Sushi in 7′ for making me crave Japanese something chronic!

So yes, if I had the money, I’d be subscribing to Heat, and definitely recommend it. It’s a beautiful publication.

More Neil Gaiman, more Dave McKean. It took me a while to fully embrace the grim world of a boy remembering his childhood spent in Portsmouth – at first it seemed slow-paced, and the art is schizophrenic, and very, very creepy.

What I like best about The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch is that it focusses on what must seem to be an innate fear we all have – what on earth is it about fairgrounds and carnivals that we all find so sinister? I actually spent my summers in Portsmouth when my family still lived in England, and I was terrified of the carousel. I was scared of the actual ride, it being so high and so fast, and also of getting lost and being separated from my parents. I didn’t often have separational anxiety, so even today this strikes me as odd.

In any case, McKean and Gaiman do a fab job of tapping into this almost primal fear. One cannot help but wonder how much of Gaiman’s childhood is in Mr Punch.

I was one of those poor sots who didn’t get to read the Beatrix Potter books as a child. I guess once I could read my parents figured there was no point reading them to me. Recently, my mother purchased two sets of the entire series – one to give to my future nephew, and one to give to their in-laws’ newborn.

To say I was gutted was an understatement. I promptly threw the closest thing I could muster to a tantrum and one set was given to me. I read them in bed when I cannot sleep and my mind has tired of Grown Up Stuff.

The Tale of Mr Tod is not one of the most delightful in the series – it is very long and is about two cruel animals seeking to prey upon even cuter animals (I confess I find it hard to see badgers and foxes as evil – just think The Wind In the Willows or Fantastic Mr Fox).

However, I can recommend Potter’s oeuvre. I’ve been harping on about how delightful these illustrated gems are, and reading them brings back a child-like joy I forgot I had a capacity for.

Beginning my personal quest to read 75 books this year, 5 of which must be from the ‘1001 Books To Read Before You Die’, and 10 of which must be from the ‘Novel 100′ lists, we have 2010’s first casualty.

I’ve read three issues of Torpedo cover to cover and fucking loved it. Odd given that I am very fussy about my short fiction. Chris Flynn, the editor, is doing a stellar job with this periodical. I need to get off my arse and subscribe.

The periodical is Melbourne-based and is just beautiful – the layout, fonts, submissions chosen. My favourite comics in this was ‘Johnny Three NNNs’ – a piss-take on the pulpy 50s Western adventure epics. Think cowboys on acid. The comic is split up into sections and interlaced between several other stories and comics.

My aim was to read fifty books this year. It’s always a bit of a struggle come December (I did it last year too)!

Thought I might do a ‘breakdown’ of the list, which can be found here:

teenage fiction/vampire literature
Stephanie Meyer, Twilight
Stephanie Meyer, New Moon
Stephanie Meyer, Eclipse
Stephanie Meyer, Breaking Dawn

poetry/verse novel
Jeanine Hall Gailey, Becoming the Villainess (USA)
Jordie Albiston, Vertigo: a cantata (Aus)
Dorothy Porter, Akhenaten (Aus)
Carol Ann Duffy, Selected Poems (UK)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Far Rockaway of the Heart (USA)
Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems edited by Simon Armitage (various, Armitage is from the UK)
Judith Rodriguez, Mudcrab at Gambaro’s (Aus)
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (UK)
Anne Sexton, Transformations (USA)
Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn (various, Paglia is from USA)
Jane Holland, Boudicca and Co. (UK)
Sascha Aurora Akhtar, The Grimoire of Grimalkin (UK)
Dorothy Porter, Crete (Aus)
Sallie Muirden, The Fable of Arachne (Aus)

non-fiction/biographical
Felix Feneon, Novels In Three Lines
Deborah Curtis, Touching From A Distance
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

periodicals/literary magazines & journals
Torpedo magazine, vol 4 (Aus, Melb)
Wet Ink journal, vol 14 (Aus, Adelaide)
Overland journal, issue 195 (Aus, Melb)
Wet Ink journal, vol 15
Going Down Swinging journal, vol 28 (Aus, Melb)
Capgun magazine, vol 1 (USA, thisrecording.com)
Overland journal, issue 196
McSweeney’s 22: The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford (USA, SF)
Ampersand magazine, edition 0 (Aus, Melb)
McSweeney’s 22: The State of Constraint
Torpedo magazine, vol 5
Island magazine, vol 119 (Aus, Tas)
McSweeney’s 22:From the Notebook
Wet Ink, journal, vol 16
Blue Dog journal, vol 4 no 8 (Aus, Melb)

visual/comic art
Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Kyle Cassidy et al, Who Killed Amanda Palmer
R Stevens, Crush All Hu-Mans
Marc Ellerby, Chloe Noonan, Monster Hunter
Gris Grimly, Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Death and Dementia
Neil Gaiman, Sunbird
Ragnarok, vols 6 & 7
Jeff Smith & Charles Vess, Rose
Bill Willingham et al. Jack of Fables vol 3
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Bill Willingham et al. Fables vol 11: War and Pieces
Marvel Illustrated: Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Nancy Butler.
Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910
Nicholas Gurewitch, The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack
Porn For Women

classics/literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Gris Grimly, Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Death and Dementia
Marvel Illustrated: Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Nancy Butler
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jeremy Fisher
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Tom Kitten
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Two Bad Mice
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse
Beatrix Potter. The Tailor of Gloucester

fiction
Tracy Chevalier, Fallen Angels
Phillippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
Neil Gaiman, Sunbird

theatre/play
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I stuffed up on the list, recounted one of the Beatrix Potter books but can’t be bothered reopening thread and editing. So total for 2009 stands at 67.

This year, I’ll try to do mini-reviews of the books I read and post them here. Let’s see how it goes!

The poetry of Charles Bukowski.
The poetry of Mary Oliver.
The poetry of Alison Calder.

The music of Bloc Party (though their most recent album Intimacy is freaking awesome).

The fragrances of Possets (sorry Possets, I still love you!)

Neighbourhood puss Bruno.

Mind-altering substances.

Thank you one of my fave US fellow poet-lovers for putting up a list to test my ignorance and highlight just how bad a former lit student I am.

33/100

I’ll put an asterisk in front of what I feel I should have read and actually want to read.

Good thing I’ve stopped binge drinking…

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
*3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (some of…yeah, scary, huh?)
*7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 1984 – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (1st volume)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
*15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (I nearly stole the copy of this they had at the place I was staying at recently. Should’ve…)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
*25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
*26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
*32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
*34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres (screw the film – this is a fantastic novel. Seriously)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
*40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (don’t hit me. I was bored, at parents’ place. Lulled away a few hours)
*43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
*45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
*48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
*52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
*54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
*55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
*58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
*62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
*66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce I FUCKING READ IT!!! FTW!!!
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
*80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
*84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
*87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (bitches! I read en francais, w00t!)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
*98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo