Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

The blog habit is a hard one to break.  I have tried and failed a few times and apparently here we are once more.  Are blogs over?  It seems so, but it feels akin another question I hear sometimes, namely, Is painting dead?  I answer, if only to myself:  painting never; blogs perhaps, but writing never.  August is nearly done and I have painted and read and written less than I'd hoped to, all month long.  I have, however, read two books that I cannot contain myself about any longer and so here I am to mention them somewhere other than merely in my diary.  Which I do write in, regularly, but which doesn't offer much in the way of reciprocity in the realms of empathy or community.  Instead it just shows me more of myself, which frankly I am sick of at the moment.  Anyway.  The books in question.  Both are from the library sale haul I wrote about a few months ago.  I finally picked them up in turn and thought Read this now. 

The first is Pat Conroy's collection of bookish essays, My Reading Life (Nan A. Talese 2010).  I had never read anything of his before, none of his sagas, no fiction whatsoever, none of his memoirs.  But a good book about books I am always up for and this one sure does shine brightly.  All the essays therein are about books, reading, his family and education, and his writing life, but one of the best deals with a bookshop (p.110):

"...by accident, I had discovered the nerve center of my deliverance in a nondescript bookstore in Atlanta.... Thousands of books roared out my name in joyous welcome when I entered that shop for the first time."

He elaborates (p.111):

"Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.  You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure.  You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years.  If you do them the favor or understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart."

My Reading Life is a delight and almost convinces me to read War and Peace, so fervent is his chapter on repeatedly doing just that.  A sample (p.271):

"On the third reading, I found that spending time between the pages of War and Peace was one of the most compensatory pursuits I had ever discovered."

Another (p.274):

"...this novel will make you dizzy with joyous affection for the people you will meet on these pages."

And again, as if we remain in any doubt (p.281):

"Over the years, many critics have said that War and Peace is not even a novel, and they may be right.  Whatever it is, there has never been anything close to touching it.  It stands alone.  A star in the east.  Magnificent.  One of a kind.... I envy the young man or woman picking up this book for the first time more than any reader in the world."

Okay, okay, I'll get to it!  He out-effuses every other book reviewer or critic I have ever come across.  A noble feat.  I have a recent translation of War and Peace, should I read it this winter?  I want to, and I wonder if I actually will.  I did read another Pat Conroy book, after finishing My Reading Life.  His memoir about teaching black children at a tiny school on an island off South Carolina, The Water is Wide (originally published in 1972, still in print, I read a recent softcover edition).  Pretty rough, pretty fantastic.  Not like anything else I've ever read, it left me wanting much more.    

The second book I feel compelled to mention is Untold Stories by Alan Bennett (Picador 2005) - over 650 pages, the middle section of which is made up of his diaries from 1996-2004.  The next installment (diaries 2005-2015) will be published in the U.K. in late fall and in the usual way of things I cannot wait but will have to, unless I want to read bits online, since his diary entries have been published annually by the London Review of Books.  Apparently it's no good having set aside my reading of James Lees-Milne's diaries, since here he is in Alan Bennett's diaries.  Not James Lees-Milne himself, but his diaries, since Alan Bennett is re-reading them himself and mentions the fact in his own diary.  I am lost in diary-heaven!  The volume of Lees-Milne I left off with is still sitting on my bedside table, by the way, and has been all summer.  Even though it's on the bottom of the pile I won't forsake it much longer, I know.  Meanwhile Alan Bennett unknowingly provides me with the impetus to continue my blog, even if only sporadically, when he writes (p.179):

"Diaries lengthen the days.  To read back over a year when nothing much seems to have happened is often to be nicely surprised.... A diary is undoubtedly a comfort.  I feel better for having it written down, however hard the experience."  (p.179)

I look back in my own diaries and again here in this edited online version, and I must say I cringe sometimes, but at the same time I regret nothing!  A funny paradox.  Perhaps I have reached the stage of life where I'm no longer embarrassed by myself and my literary and artistic attempts and aspirations.  Not certain about that point yet, but there are glimmerings at least.  I don't know if I can bear to leave good books un-talked about, or diary entries unwritten, or paintings unpainted.  By me, I mean - tons of people are doing all that stuff, all over the place.  But I am talking about mustering up the bravery to make my own particular contributions, slowly, over time.  So I muddle along, and my work piles up as it usually does.  The older I get the more I think that these small day-to-day attempts are all that there is - they accumulate and may become something bigger or may not, but all start with the small choice, on any given day:  This happened; I have feelings about it and here they are.  You know?

Back to Alan Bennett, whose voice is so different from Pat Conroy's - reticence versus boldness perhaps, or even more simplistically, British versus American.  The essays in Untold Stories are terrific, and his diaries are compulsively good reading.  I want them to go on forever and dread that they won't.  Here is an example, perfect in my eyes - one entry from 1997 in its entirety.  Perfect purely for itself and also for that early-fall feeling, much in evidence around here, not to mention blackberrying, which I have been doing myself, along the roadsides of our small Maine town.  I'll leave you with this passage, which has everything I love most in prose - the decidedly rural, in contrast with the urban, where Bennett also lives; painterly colors and evocative repetitions of imagery; outward circumstances echoing inward feeling (p.217):

"15 September, Yorkshire.  Blackberrying up Black Bank, taking with me one of Miss Shepherd's old walking sticks.  Huge clusters of berries so that one can gather them almost by the handful.  Never so utterly at peace as when picking blackberries or looking for mushrooms, the spread of Ingleborough and Pennyghent still sunny while black clouds gather over Morecambe.  A flock of sheep comes up the road and won't pass me until I stand in the ditch.  The pretty farm girl who is bringing up the rear seems almost as reluctant to pass as the sheep, just giving me a shy 'Hello' and running on.  A mountain ash tree, weighed down with huge swags of crimson berries, catches the last of the sun.  It's like something by Samuel Palmer; paint it as bright and glowing as it is and it would seem like a vision."