Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Inspired by that list of bestsellers I posted a few days ago, I’m happy to report that I just finished reading Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery and found it absolutely delightful. It’s been a while since I read anything quite so uplifting and I actually got so engrossed in it in the bath last night that I let the bath water get tepid!

The Spring Reading Challenge is well and truly over. I managed a total of eleven books which I’m not really all that happy with as a lot of them I’d already started and I didn’t get through as many as I would have liked. My own silly fault for attempting to read too many damn cerebral books, methinks. Yep, that’s my excuse; if the books I wanted to read weren’t quite so taxing on the brain then I’m sure I’d read more. Still haven’t finished Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine!).

For those of you who might not know, John Hollander is a contemporary American poet. As well as having a lot of poetry published, he also writes about poetry, and I found out about this particular title in the bibliography to another book about poetry and poetic form.

It’s very well done and not at all boring - Hollander writes in verse constantly to try and explain/illustrate the concepts he’s discussing so it ends up being very amusing, entertaining as well as highly informative. There are also examples of others’ work quoted, as well as his own.

I honestly had no idea there were so many different forms of poetry, I’ll bet there are way more than is discussed in this slim volume but it’s an excellent starting point if you want to discover the main ones and how they work. Be warned, it’s also a lot of information crammed into a small book! But I know I’ll be using it as a reference text from this point on.

I might be useless and depressed at the moment but at least I’m finishing up some books. I didn’t enjoy this volume of Japanese love poetry as much as I thought I would - a great surprise given that I quite like Japanese literature. This book contains selections from the Manyōshū which I believe is another great work of ancient Japanese literature and the poems are not all romantic love poems but also express love for one’s parents, siblings, country, mountains even. The Japanese are often known as being extremely appreciative of nature. A lot of these do discuss nature even when referring to the objects of their desire.

The most unusual line I read was in the last few pages of the book and is as follows:

Her tresses black as a mud-snail’s bowels…

(p. 102)

Not exactly the most romantic line I’ve ever come across in my life…you wouldn’t catch me writing that sort of thing to my loved one that is for certain!

Two I did like are as follows:

(by Taniha Ōme, a young woman)

Here where the wild ducks
Sport in the pond,
The leaves fall from the trees
And float - but no floating heart
Have I who love you true.

***

I will not comb my morning hair:
Your loving arm, my pillow,
Has lain under it.

The second one I do adore, as it’s a very touching image. Please note the formatting isn’t exact but I can’t get it to appear as it does in the text.

I have read translations of Japanese poetry and liked it immensely. I think this would be a good introduction if you’ve never read any such poetry before.

Wow, this book is amazing. I’d read the first part of Art Spiegelman’s Maus a long while ago and recently found myself stranded in a chain bookstore for a few hours so decided to read the second part of this incredibly sad graphic novel. Maybe I was feeling down or something but it almost had me spill a tear or two in public, just to give you an idea of just how depressing it is.

Maus is an account of the graphic novel author’s father’s experiences in Auschwitz, a Polish Jewish man, and one of the most notable things about it is that the Jewish people are characterised as mice, the Nazis are cats, non-Jewish Polish are pigs and so on. It’s a pretty horrific read though at times is funny, tender but always disturbing. It’s the sort of thing that makes one wonder how on earth other human beings can be so horrendously cruel to one another.

It’s absolutely worth reading if you can manage it, though you might not want to read it if you’re feeling down to begin with. The illustrations are absolutely fantastic and grainy in that ink-pen kind of way. It’s also a terribly clever book and gives a glimpse into the life of a Holocaust survivor and just how much of a continued trauma existence afterwards is.

I’m all nonsensed out! This wasn’t quite as enjoyable as I thought it would be, especially as everyone loves ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ which is just an adorable poem. The humour is more adult than suited to children, and very surreal. In any case, it was good to finish a book I’d been in the midst of for quite some time.

It was a good day for reading today - one of those wintry wet days so I spent my rainy Saturday afternoon snuggled up with a book. That book was the most recent collection of poems by one of Britain’s most acclaimed female poets, Carol Ann Duffy. The recent volume is entitled The World’s Wife and each poem focusses on an imagined woman attached to a famous man either in history or in myth - Pilate, Midas, Darwin, Pope Joan - even Elvis’ twin sister.

One of my favourites in the collection (which I devoured fully in the space of a few hours) is ‘Mrs Icarus’:

I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock

Fantastic poetry, but I’ve been a fan ever since reading her early one ‘Warming Her Pearls’ - it’s available in The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited and chosen by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

Done is the whining of Achilles over his dead friend Patroclus, done is the dragging of poor Hector’s body around Patroclus’ tomb (how twisted is that?!? Thankfully the gods decided to preserve Hector breaker of horses so he could be returned to his father Priam in pristine condition).

This is an epic translation of Homer’s The Iliad, make no mistake! I can’t believe I finally finished it, it’s been quite some journey. At times, the descriptions of killing during the actual war scenes are somewhat…visceral? One can imagine truly - without the aid of television when reading this tome just how graphic and violent war was when they used swords and spears…ugh.

Anyway, if you’ve not read any version of The Iliad then I highly recommend giving this one a whirl. I’ve read it before and still had to read this one. It’s pure poetry - a wonderful, rich translation and you can just see everything unfold before your eyes as you read. Put it on your list!

Dorothy Porter, Wild Surmise (2002)

I can’t find an image of the cover of this novel written in verse by one of Australia’s most well-known female poets but it’s available on Amazon.com.

Alex is a proclaimed glamour girl of astronomy because of her research on the satellite Europa (satellite to Jupiter). She’s married to a failed academic who spends his time complaining about all the shitty undergraduate poetry he has to mark (and oh sweet jesus I can only imagine how bad undergraduate poetry must be. Mine barely passes for real poetry now and I’m almost in my thirties…shudder!).

So Alex is obsessed with Europa, and also with another woman she’s had an affair with - also in her field, called Phoebe. Wow, how saucy - a lesbian affair, big deal.

This novel tries far too hard to do things that have been done before. I know I’m not exactly a published poet so it’s all well and good for me to criticise this but reading this was too easy and I had very few ‘connecting’ moments with the words - which I do expect from any poetry I read. Otherwise I’ll just stick to reading the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar. I have read some of Porter’s other verse novels - What a piece of work and The Monkey’s Mask, the latter of which I thought was brilliant. What a piece of work is flawed but still engaging.

Wild Surmise has some really poor examples of pieces that apparently pass for poetry. If that weren’t the case, I’m sure I wouldn’t have rush-read through it in a matter of a few hours. Anything that makes me think “duh, I could’ve written that” can’t be that remarkable.

I feel a bit like I’m cheating by adding this to my ‘finished’ pile, because it’s a trade paperback collecting four issues of the ongoing comic Fables which I’m a big fan of. I love reading comics when I’m depressed - they’re entertaining, not too taxing on the grey matter and they still manage to be very clever. I don’t know why some adults think comics are for kids because judging from the ones I’ve read, I’d say as a kid I’d miss half of the references!

Anyway, I recommend the Fables series - it’s about a bunch of fairytale characters living in 21st-century Manhattan as they’ve fled their original Homelands because of the evil Adversary (you would never guess what fairytale character the Adversary actually ends up being). The reason I enjoy this series so much is probably because it refers to contemporaneous events and political climate, but not too much - it’s still mainly fun and very well done.

Besides, don’t you want to know what the Big Bad Wolf got up to after that Red Riding Hood gig? Hence the subtitle for this volume, the eighth in the series, ‘Wolves’.

Now NMD could have just lent this to me after my periodically begging but alas no, he kept forgetting as bloody usual. So while I was out with Rob when the loony bin let me free, I bought a copy of it at Readings (one of my favourite Melbourne bookshops, near my old uni).

This is a book that tells old stories, stories that have been passed down for centuries - primarily of Anglo-Saxon origin. The stories are based on ballads, yes, those ones you sing. They are rephrased by some extremely eminent fantasy writers, and illustrated in the inimitable style of Charles Vess. Makes me think I’m a kiddie all over again - the illustrations are sumptuous and really add to the storytelling. Neil Gaiman has a ballad in here, but my favourite is probably one by Charles de Lint (very famous in the fantasy world, I hear) called ‘The Three Lovers’. This book should also be a big hit with BPAL-lovers (hint hint ViolentKitten and Baudelaire; though ralenth I think you would gobble this up!). Sometimes the art has a very gothic edge to it, other times a very Aubrey Beardsley feel. I was very sad to finish reading this and made sure I did it in a deliberately slow fashion.

Verdict: loved it and will definitely reread, as I have Stardust.

I also decided that it was time to give these reviews their own category. I’m hoping there will be a lot of ‘casualties’ in this reading challenge.

Yes, I finished Professor Solomon’s Japan In a Nutshell, a small book on the customs and culture of Japan. It was a wonderful read - light, informative, entertaining but I best not give away too much seeing as I’ll have to write a review for it for Blogcritics. It has chapters on legends and religious customs of Japan, etiquette like bowing and how to behave at a tea ceremony, recommended sight-seeing spots, and pop culture phenomena such as Godzilla (or Gojira as he is called in his native land). I’m a bit perplexed as to why it didn’t have anything about romaji (the Japanese language rendered in the Western alphabet) as there are a lot of Japanese terms in the book but one might not know how to pronounce them. I was just lucky I have some basic knowledge of the language.
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The first casualty of Spring Reading Challenge is…

*drumroll*

…a graphic novel called Age of Bronze: A Thousand Ships by Eric Shanower. You can take a look at it here.

Again, another edit to show it in its glory thanks to the discovery of aNobii - here’s the cover.

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I got a shoebox and filled it with some of the titles I want to get my teeth stuck into for the Spring Reading Challenge (yes, it’s not spring in the Southern Hemisphere. Apparently the people that come up with this stuff forget there is no season on the blogosphere, pout pout).

It’s not quite as scary as it looks - a few of the titles I’m already in the middle of reading…
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