Fiction – The Selfish Book Club

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex is a tough act to follow, and Jeffrey Eugenides third novel, The Marriage Plot, seems thin and humorless in comparison. It has been in a resell bag in my car and was not going to earn a blog post, but I brought it back into the house and placed it back on the shelf next to Middlesex based more on Middlesex’s merit than it’s own.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

When an author becomes really famous they earn the right for first editions of their subsequent books to be more opulent than their earlier efforts. and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things (TSOAT) is gorgeous. Since the book is set in the 18th and 19th centuries, the look of it is antique, with unevenly cut, thick ivory pages and a dust jacket printed to look like aged parchment. There are dreamy colored illustrations of orchids on the end papers and the hardbound cover is a soothing green-tinged ivory with an olive colored spine, the author’s initials stamped in gold on the front. The feathery edges of the pages are soft and the book is very sensual, befitting some of the subject matter. My copy is even signed!

In Our Time, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Byline by Ernest Hemingway

I’m writing the week after the 2022 mid-term elections when the expected Republican “red tsunami” never materialized and hope for civility and moderation returned to many places in the USA. The insensible, egomaniacal rantings of Le Grand Orange and his minions aren’t as omnipresent and I’m reading and listening to some politicians who actually can string a few sentences together intelligently and who don’t resort to schoolyard name-calling. Reading a lot of Hemingway during this time has helped tune my ear back to the recognition of strong, clear, sensible American English.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

From Gravity’s Rainbow to elevated chick lit! It’s astounding how enjoyable the ride of a good, straightforward novel can be after a Pynchian or Joycean brain wreck. It’s like going from a groaning board of beautifully prepared pigs feet and sweet breads served with absinthe and laudanum in a darkened hall to a simple morning repast of a scone and coffee in the sunlit corner of a cozy kitchen. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is smart historical fiction about one of the historical figures I’m most fascinated by, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

In 1991 I was hanging out occasionally with a wine magazine editor who lived in New York and would visit San Francisco once a month to make forays into wine country for tastings and interviews with winemakers. He had graduated from Princeton and was a real east coast snob, but when I was young many of my self-improvement activities were attempts to win the approval of various snobs and iconoclasts, or at least get them to have sex with me. The editor had written his thesis on Pynchon, so in order to prove to him that I was not the California air head I thought he thought I was, I devoured Pynchon’s V, then slogged through Gravity’s Rainbow.

Warlock by Jim Harrison

One of the first Jim Harrison books I ever read was Warlock and I remember loving it. In the fall of 1993 I went to Bordeaux as an ignorant young wine writer for Wine & Spirits magazine and had dinner at a modest chateau in one of the more modest appellations of the region–Cotes de Bourg or Cotes de Castillon or something like that. I learned two things at that dinner that I have never forgotten. One was that butter leaf lettuce drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt makes a delicious, wine friendly (no vinegar) salad. The other was an introduction to the existence of Jim Harrison, an American writer almost more highly regarded in France than in his home country. “You Americans,” the host Denis Dubourdieu fairly sneered, “You don’t even know your best writers!”

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

1Q84 was hyped as Haruki Murakami’s magnum opus before its American release in 2011 and I remember being as intrigued by its description as I had been about Donna Tartt’s equally hyped The Secret History many years earlier. Even though I rushed to buy a copy, my cherished hardback with its amazing translucent dust jacket is a somehow disappointing Third Printing.

Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

When I first began my career as a personal organizer I worked with a few hoarders. A hoarder is defined as someone who accumulate so much stuff that their life is unmanageable and several rooms in the house are unable to be used for their intended purpose. I stopped working with hoarders when I realized that the disorder is much more of mental illness than disorganization and, even with therapy, is very difficult to “cure.” But people are fasciated by it and it is usually the first thing someone asks me about when they find out what I do. E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer & Langley is based on the lives of two men who are sort of the original American hoarders, Homer & Langley Collyer.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

For some reason I was hesitant to pick up this book again. I’d read it at least twice before and remembered loving it but didn’t recall too many specifics; it had been a long time. Nothing about the Library of Congress list of themes particularly appealed to me: hermaphroditism, teenagers, Greek Americans, Detroit. One did lightly strike a chord–gender identity–because I’ve recently completed an experimental class on body image and sexualization of females. So I pulled Middlesex off the shelf.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Back in late March 2020 I was on a kick to think of books that would be good to read during the pandemic, specifically under the shelter-in-place conditions. A Gentleman in Moscow immediately came to mind, reviewed earlier, as did Bocaccio’s The Decameron, which I don’t own, so won’t review. Then I remembered Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett, a favorite novel of mine that has only dimmed a bit in favorite-ness because I have liked so few of Patchett’s other novels. Continue reading “Bel Canto by Ann Patchett”