ever-fixed mark

I recently read a review of a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It’s like one of those “100 best” lists on steroids. Typically, I will have read a respectable percentage of books on most lists (English major, no social life as a teenager, lived in North Africa with no TV for three years = lots of reading time). But I hadn’t read most of (nor even heard of some of) the books named in the review.

Then I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a list that didn’t inspire either misplaced pride or self-loathing? How about a list of just really satisfying reads? I decided to compile one. It’s completely idiosyncratic, reflecting my taste only. There’s not a “should” or a “must” on this list. If on your deathbed you realize you haven’t read a one of these, you have my permission to die happy nonetheless.

My criteria for a satisfying reading experience are people (memorable characters); place (evocative setting); and plot (a good, chewy, complicated, surprising, yet grounded-in-reality story line). Here, in alphabetical order, are my top ten:

Charlotte Brontë, Villette. I’ve never met anyone who likes Villette as much as I do, and I haven’t met very many people who have liked it at all. There’s something about this novel, though, that tugs at my heartstrings. Lucy is one of the few examples in nineteenth-century literature of a truly independent woman who comes and goes as she pleases. She and Paul are both quirky characters, like no one I’ve ever met in real life, yet I have no problem believing that they could be real people. And I just love how Brontë takes the story down a fairly traditional path for the first half, and you’re pretty sure you know exactly where she’s going, and then Bam! left turn.

Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy. This series by the renowned Canadian author — The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus — is artsy (dealing with writers, painters, and musicians, respectively), juicy, and meaty. Thanks to Davies, I knew who Paracelsus was when I applied for a job at a company named after him (hint: feces is involved). And, bonus: According to Wikipedia, “Davies is one of the authors mentioned in the Moxy Früvous song ‘My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.’”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Both of these books are great in the same way, so I couldn’t choose one. They both have memorable characters and a plot you could get lost in for days. I’m tempted to give the edge to Bleak House, but that may be because I enjoyed the BBC adaptation so much. (Check it out: Scully is amazing as Lady Dedlock, and Mr. Guppy is not to be believed).

Louise FitzHugh, Harriet the Spy. Never gets old; feels like it was written yesterday, especially since Harriet’s journal is kind of a proto-blog. As someone who wants to be a writer when I grow up, but only manages to record gossip about my surroundings, I still identify with Harriet.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. I read this in college for a class Brit Lit, fell instantly under its spell, and have fallen in love again on every re-reading, although I can’t really put my finger on why. It’s a great example of an unreliable narrator, and also is one of those books that makes you wonder how the British maintained their empire for so long.

E.M. Forster, Howards End. Every person in this book seems like someone I wouldn’t like in real life, and yet I love them all. That’s kind of the point of the book; that our life’s work is “only to connect” with others, and that if we try hard enough we can connect across class, across politics — even across artistic sensibilities, or lack of them.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters. This is one of Gaskell’s less melodramatic, more bittersweetly realistic stories. You’ll come for the romance but you’ll stay for the characterizations. Her depiction of a blended family, neither blissfully happy nor utterly miserable, is a highlight.

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure. Jude stands out on this list as one of the few without a happy ending, but I’ve always liked Hardy, and something about Jude’s aspirations to the university gripped me. I may have been overly influenced by the movie adaptation with Kate Winslet as Sue Bridehead (another independent female, at least for a while).

Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet. This set of books was the basis for the “Jewel in the Crown” BBC miniseries. I read the books back in college, saw the miniseries recently, and then re-read the books. The kernel of the story is the rape of an Englishwoman in in India during World War II. Over four volumes, Scott returns to this story again and again, exploring it from different angles, adding details from different viewpoints, and weaving in other stories as well. His point of view is mostly English, but his sympathies are more balanced than in a lot of colonial lit.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. This is a fairy tale that is completely grounded in reality. I somehow missed it when I was sixteen, but it was just as good when I caught up with it in my thirties. The setting is especially magical. Smith also wrote 101 Dalmatians, a book I also loved as a child.

Anthony Trollope, the Palliser novels. It took me a long while to get to Trollope. I was underwhelmed by the Barsetshire chronicles in college, and then read Phineas Finn when I was in the Peace Corps and thought there could not be a duller subject for a novel than Parliament. Trollope impressed me as one of those quiet, “domestic” novelists. A few years ago, though, I caught the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now on TV and saw how wickedly sharp he could be. I consequently picked up The Eustace Diamonds and really admired how Trollope made avaricious Lizzy sort of sympathetic during the marvelous hunting scenes. Then I read all six pretty much non-stop, even Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux. The day I put the last one down was a solemn day in my life.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. Willis is a sci-fi writer who has written two time-travel novels: this one, and the considerably lighter To Say Nothing of the Dog. Doomsday Book is set in future England (where, as Husband is fond of pointing out, they’ve invented time travel but still can get a busy signal when they place a “trunk call”) and in England during the Plague. I found it entertaining on so many levels — as a historical novel, as a mystery, and as traditional sci-fi. It really brought the Black Death, uh, alive for me.

What’s on your “most satisfying” list?

Friday was yet another opportunity for Husband and me to celebrate our triskadekaversary. We lined up a (free) babysitter (thank you, C! Thank you!), but I wasn’t in the mood to go out for a formal dinner. I told Husband that the one child-free experience I was really craving was an hour on the lake in my kayak. Husband doesn’t kayak, but I promised him an hour lakefront with a book and a beer, unmolested by infant demands. He agreed, and we bought a six-pack of Hefeweizen and tied up the kayak.

When we got to the lake, though, we discovered we had forgotten the bottle opener. “We’ll figure something out, right?” I said.

“I might, but you’re going to be in the middle of the lake,” Husband pointed out.

I put a beer in my boat anyway.

The weather was perfect — sunny, warm, not too windy, but not too still and buggy, either. After about half an hour of paddling I started thinking about that beer. I examined the cap, thinking maybe it was a twist-off after all, but no such luck. The bottle cap even bore the words, “Use Bottle Opener,” no doubt to forestall lawsuits brought by plaintiffs like myself who found themselves without a churchkey.

I did have a regular key, though, and I tried to use it to pry the cap off. There was a little hissing sound of air escaping from the bottle, but I made no real progress. By now I was really thirsty and beginning to feel that my pride was at stake. It was a pretty sad state of affairs if, after three years in the Peace Corps, I couldn’t open a simple beer bottle without aid of modern technology. Really, I might as well hang up my Birkenstocks.

What would MacGyver do?

I surveyed the equipment at hand: Key. Child’s lunch box. Sigg water bottle. Volume 4 of The Raj Quartet. Hair band. Thousands of gallons of water. And…kayak.

The kayak has a lip around the cockpit coaming that is used to attach a spray skirt. I positioned the bottle with the cap under the lip and cracked it down. There was a gentle “poof” and then the cap came right off. I lost some beer due to the fact that the bottle was almost upside down when it opened, but other than that it worked like a charm. It was the best beer I’d ever had.

When I got back to shore, Husband had also managed to open his beer, but there was blood and broken glass involved. Score one for Peace Corps ingenuity.

The lease on one of our cars recently expired. Car shopping has never been my favorite activity, and my experience this round did nothing to endear me further to the sport. In the end, I didn’t get the car I set out to buy, and I paid too much for it, too. It wasn’t even like I was wowed by some slick salesperson; I was just too impatient to walk away when they refused to lower the price any more.

After the dealership screwed up the paperwork, forcing Husband to spend a full day at the insurance company and RMV to straighten it out, I was in an evil humor when I picked up the car. I almost blew a gasket when they made me wait while they regenerated the contract — then they had my address wrong so they had to do it again. By the time the sales guy was ready to give me the grand tour of my new wheels, I just grabbed the keys and drove away.

On the way home, I started warming up to the car. It is the same make as my old one, but despite being two models lower on the food chain, it actually feels more spacious, peppier, and easier to drive.

I was experimenting with the various controls, and I saw one I didn’t recognize. “What’s this?” I thought, and pushed it. The radio cut out, and a voice said, “At the beep, say a command.” The stereo display read, “Telephone.”

It took me a little while to catch on, but it turns out it’s an integrated Bluetooth-enabled hands-free phone system that works perfectly with my new Blackberry. It allows me to dial by voice command and hear conversations through the car radio. I have a talking car!

I know this is hardly new technology, but can I tell you how cool it is to hear someone’s voice coming through six speakers while I drive, without having to lift a finger? It’s exactly like “My Mother the Car.”

I have been experiencing the weirdest sensation, something like, I don’t know, a taste hallucination. I keep imagining that I am tasting something distinctive, even though I’m not eating anything. Most of the time it has been this black truffle cheese, but a few times it was asparagus and once, oddly, a flavor of Baskin-Robbins ice cream (cherry cheesecake) that I used to favor when I was a kid, which I now (having “tasted” it as an adult) realize was disgusting.

Am I having some untoward neurological event? (Dr. Google says yes.) Does this sound like the run-up to a Very Special Episode of “House”? (Although if it were “House,” and I were complaining about strange symptoms, the person next to me would probably go into renal failure, and I’d never be heard from again.)

Speaking of “House”…nothing quite announces, “This show has jumped the shark” like a doctor show in which the regular doctors are suddenly the patients of the week. Same thing with a cop show where the cops are suspected of murder, a lawyer show where the lawyers start taking the stand, etc. TV writers, you were sitting around marinating in your creative juices for the whole writers’ strike, and this is the best you can do?

Yet another book that the George W. Bush Presidential Library will have to forego, thanks to my efforts.

This week was a squeaker, though. I was eating less than I thought humanly possible, but the pounds just weren’t dropping. I think my habit of eating dinner late has been working against me, so I made an effort to eat earlier and cut down on the sodium the last two days. That’s one change I find it difficult to make. We really like having our dinner in peace after the boys go to bed, when we can enjoy it. Now that I’m commuting to work and eating my other two meals in meetings, I hate to give up the single relaxed meal of the day.

My intention to leave my job with a modicum of dignity and minimum of recriminations has been derailed by a Series of Unfortunate Events. They range from the mildly irritating (they took me out to lunch and stuck ME with the tab!) to the borderline criminal (my check has gone astray for the fourth month in a row). But for some strange reason, the thing that sticks in my craw is that they’re intercepting and reading my e-mail.

How did I discover this? No, it was not a case of cyber detective work, a la The Cuckoo’s Egg. (Did you ever read that? I think that’s when I realized I was a Geek in Embryo.) I sit on an industry committee, and the chair sent me an e-mail invitation to the next teleconference, accidentally using my old work e-mail as well as the personal e-mail I had asked her to use. One of my former colleagues read it and then forwarded it back to me, directing me to tell her that he would sit on this committee in my place.

I know that corporations are typically authorized to monitor Internet traffic and read corporate e-mail, although I’m not certain that applies to my situation, as I was not a regular employee and our company never stated any such policy. I have never heard of an e-mail account being kept open after termination, though. Husband says that in the past he has been asked to handle messages for a departed employee, but in my experience the account is closed and a bounce-back message directs the sender to contact another person.

What irks me the most it that my colleague thought it was appropriate to usurp my position on the committee. I explained as politely as I could that it doesn’t work that way; the committee invited me to join, not a random representative from Company X, and my place is not entailed on Company X in as if it were a piece of property in nineteenth-century England.

I hope they are having fun reading all the e-mails that the dog-walking group, Consumer Reports, and the Mothers’ Club are still mistakenly sending to my old work address. If my colleague wants to take my spot on the Playgroup Committee, he’s welcome to it.

On a Friday night when Husband has been out of town all week, I like to treat the boys and myself to a pajama party with pizza and a movie. It’s always a struggle to get a children’s movie that I find palatable, so sometimes I change it up and get a grown-up movie that I think they might like. Musicals have been the most reliable resource. Right now, The Music Man is a big hit with the boys. I haven’t seen it for years, and I remembered it as kind of dull, but it has every element a small boy could ask for: Steam train! Small children dancing and singing! Marching bands! I had forgotten how terrifically syncopated most of the music is, too.

I also rented High School Musical, the better to understand what music those crazy kids are listening to these days. The movie wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. The plot involves a basketball player who breaks out of his social circle to audition for the lead in the high school musical and then falls in love with his leading lady. It took me some time to realize that this plot had been ripped from the annals of my own high school experience.

When I was in ninth grade, the “freshmen” were housed in the junior high school; high school was grades 10 - 12 only. (This seems to be the earliest in a series of American educational experiments to reconfigure schools to keep the younger kids away from the pernicious influence of the older ones.) The ninth graders were allowed to try out for some sports and for the high school musical. That year, it was Bye Bye Birdie. The ‘fifties were all the rage in the ’seventies; we just loved wearing saddle shoes and poodle skirts and pretending to live in a time with more formal social rules.

The director of the musical had taken pains to recruit some real live boys (not drama geeks) to fill the three male lead roles. This was terribly exciting. The drama geeks were perfectly nice guys, but it was thrilling to meet older boys we would typically be terrified to talk to. Also, having males who were known outside of theater circles associated with our musical gave it a real legitimacy.

Hugo was played by a funny curly-haired boy. The only thing I remember about him is that he was one of four brothers; one brother was named Paul Newman and was a running back on the football team. The lead, Al (the Dick Van Dyke role in the movie) was played by a senior boy, one of those kids who got good grades, was involved in every sort of activity, and was a friend to everyone. His girlfriend, who was part of the chorus, had just broken up with him, and he was a tragic figure to us freshman. He went into a funk every time the song “Crazy Love” played on the radio.

The pièce de casting résistance, though, was Conrad. The director found this tall, dark, sweet-but-dumb tough guy who had probably never participated in an extracurricular activity in his life. He looked like a young John Travolta (back then, John Travolta still was a young John Travolta), and he was terrified of making a fool of himself. His girlfriend had been enlisted to accompany him to rehearsals to make sure he didn’t run away, but his head was soon turned by the screams of delight accompanying him from the chorus as he sang “One Last Kiss,” not all of which were put on. He was an absolutely perfect Conrad Birdie.

Like the girl in A Chorus Line, I could never really sing, so I was lucky to get the part of Sad Girl #1, who (silently) dances with Al to “Put on a Happy Face.” My best friend, another ninth grader, walked away with Rosie, the female lead. This was a shocker to the high school population. Ninth graders were supposed to be chorus and stage hands. She was the most qualified for the role, though, and eventually she earned the respect of the company.

Over the weeks of rehearsal, Rosie slowly fell in love with Al, who was still pining over his chorus girl. My best friend and I discussed this state of affairs for about two hours a day in telephone calls after rehearsals. Would Al ever be able to tear himself away from his ex’s memory? Even if he could, would a senior date (gasp) a freshman? We were soon prevailing upon Al to run us back and forth to MacDonald’s for the dinner break in his little green Bug. This alone was enough excitement to fuel my diary for weeks on end, but I was also suffering unrequited love vicariously through my friend. The rehearsal where Rosie and Al practiced their kissing scene was closed to everyone but them, the director, and me. He had already dropped me off after the cast party when he drove her home and kissed her for the first time “out of character,” but I still know every detail so well that I might as well have been in the back seat.

How sad. My first big role in a High School Romance, and I played not the ingenue, but the sidekick.

It looks like the George W. Bush Presidential Library will be short a few books and periodicals, because I made my goal of 2 pounds with a couple of ounces to spare.

This approach seems to be working, not necessarily because I despise GWB so much, but because having a short-term goal really discourages cheating. If I vow to lose ten pounds, well then, I’ll get started on that right after I finish this sundae; but knowing I have to be down two pounds by Wednesday really clarifies my thinking.

We’ll see what happens when I start work next week and am unable to continue with my current exercise regimen.

I bet George W. Bush that I could lose 10 pounds by my sister-in-law’s wedding.

Ask me how!

Gimmicky? Sure. Easy enough to cheat? Absolutely. But it does seem to be having an effect. Because the lovely people at stickk.com are holding some of my hard-earned money, I am thinking twice about what I am eating.

I will keep you posted next Wednesday, my first check-in date — just success or failure — no boring diet analyses.

One

On Friday, Aitch and I were roughhousing on the couch, and he wrapped his hands around my throat. I told him nicely but firmly that we NEVER put hands around someone else’s neck, because it could hurt them.

“No, Mommy, it’s okay,” he said. “Look, I’ll show you!”

He ran to the kitchen and brought back a section of The New York Times. “See?” he said, pointing to this photo. So I had to explain to him in a roundabout way that the man pictured was not a nice man, and he was not caressing the pretty lady so much as testing her neck to determine the strength of the blade required to bisect it.

I knew I would have to talk to him about sex and violence in the media, but I was thinking more along the lines of vixens depicted in comic books, not historical figures depicted in the Times.

Two

Another section of the paper contained an article about the selection of a new school board member in Bethlehem, PA, a town not far from where I grew up. A Hispanic gentleman stood for election, but a white candidate was selected, and citizens were debating whether or not the outcome was motivated by racism. One woman said this:

‘We certainly need diversity,’ said Johanna Bees, a Republican committeewoman who spoke outside the city library. ‘But the school board had to consider qualifications first.’ Ms. Bees paused and then added: “One of my gripes is that all these people should learn English. When they’re walking down the street and they’re jabbering in Spanish, that really annoys me.’

You have to love that quote. We need diversity…but maybe not SO diverse that they actually walk around, you know, speaking other languages.

Memo to Pennsylvania: It is possible, even preferable, for people to be bilingual. Just because you hear someone “jabbering in Spanish,” that does NOT mean he is not fluent in English. If you ever traveled or even moved to another country (not that you would; Pennsylvanians are some of the most home-bound people in the nation), you would certainly speak your native language when you got the chance. And don’t tell me that your parents/grandparents/great-grandparents who were immigrants spoke only English. They certainly spoke their native tongue to their peers, even if they did insist on English with their children. That, by the way, is a tragedy, not a virtue. If your family had encouraged their kids to speak German as well as English, Mrs. Bees (and I’m betting it’s German), then maybe you wouldn’t get the willies whenever you hear another language spoken on the streets.