'tude tuesday: on reading time (or the lack thereof)

So, I have running lists of books that have been recommended to me. I have lists on paper, lists on the computer and lists in my head. The problem is, I’ve turned into the polar opposite of an Evelyn Wood Speed Reading School Graduate (which would be…what exactly? Hopefully, you get my drift).

I don’t know if I’ve actually started to read more slowly or if the time I am able to devote to reading has just diminished dramatically due to life’s relentless schedule. I do know that the ratio of waiting list books to books I’ve actually read has increased a gazillion-fold in recent years. So, maybe I’ll have to name a Year of Reading Dangerously come some future New Year’s Eve.

Anyway, while full of attitude yesterday about all the authors I’ve been hoping to read but haven’t (Kate Morton, Bill Bryson, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc., etc., etc.) I found myself in two bookstores. The first was Bookman’s, a longtime Flagstaff institution and gathering spot, where you can trade your old books for new/used ones and find some real treasures along the way. One evening back in the early nineties I was hanging out in the poetry section when a guy asked me if I knew where they kept Robert Graves’ books. I didn’t know, but I wish I had. Maybe that way I could have given Michael Stipe of R.E.M. a little tour of the store and then the town while we hung out and discussed our views on life. I could have asked him about his inspiration for Fall on Me (my favorite R.E.M. song of all time – and his, too, according to this old Unplugged recording), and I could have told him that the first boy I ever really kissed had a big R.E.M. poster on his bedroom wall. Of course, once I realized who the guy in Bookman’s was, I got all tongue tied instead (which was probably just as well), and there went my fifteen-second brush with fame. The next day it was all over the local grapevine that he’d been in town.

My next stop was the local B&N where I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. I did, however, find a really cheap hardback copy of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which has been on my list ever since it came out and started that whole debate in the writing community about author photos and whether or not it's easier to get published/marketed if you're drop-dead gorgeous - especially if you've just graduated from pre-school when your debut novel comes out.

Before I dive into the Pessl novel, though, I need to finish Messud’s book. I’m in the home stretch and still, for the life of me, can’t figure out how this became a National Bestseller. Maybe you have to be a New Yorker to get it. Then, I plan to read Tammy’s Two Rivers. So, maybe Calamity Physics will have to wait just a bit. I mean, how long can it take me to finish one book and then read another? I figure I’ll easily be cracking open my new find by the time grandkids arrive.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

wednesday night lights and some minutia

Turns out Little League games are great girl bonding time. Our local team "blew it out the box" (as Randy Johnson would say, though I shouldn't even start talking about American Idol, traumatized as I am by Melinda's departure), winning their second of two games while we mothers chatted it up by the bleachers. Of course, we stopped to cheer when our boys were at bat.



Here are April's fingernails (the pink ones - mine are the plain Jane ones below hers) which I photographed before the game. Did I lie when I said they were glorious? I was hoping to get a picture of the opalescent tips she had the other day, but she'd already gotten them re-done. Because, like many women, she has her nails done on a regular basis. My nails, on the other hand, no longer look like they do in this picture, because I chew them to nubs on a regular basis. Hey, it's cheap maintenance.


My books arrived from Amazon a few days ago, all of which were recommended by another dear friend. I've started reading A Severe Mercy, which she tells me is going to be made into a movie.


Other than that, I got nuthin'.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

clearing a path

Warning: Literary ramblings ahead.

I've finished Interpreter of Maladies, that Pulitzer-winning sensation that took the literary world by storm not too long ago. Well, I finished all but the last story. And while the stories I did read are good and the characters held my interest, my overall reaction is "meh" with a palms-up shrug. This is not sour-grapes jealousy, trust me. I think it rocks that Lahiri had such success with this book, and at such a young age. Clearly, she's poised for a long, illustrious career, and when one literary author makes her mark so boldly, I believe it bodes well for those of us still in the trenches. But I didn't come away from any of these stories changed. I didn't have to put the book down in the middle of a passage just to take a breath, or to look away from the story so that I could get my bearings, which are just two of the effects that the books I love have on me.

I think immediately of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, a book so completely out-of-line in it's brazen literary greatness that I'm not sure how my basic bodily systems continued to function while I was reading it. I don't think I breathed at all the whole time, and I'm pretty positive that I didn't eat or drink or move anything except for my page-turning arm until I reached the end. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead had a similar effect on me, though more because of the quiet gorgeousness of her prose than because of the blinding intensity, which is how Frazier got to me.

As a reader, being transported like this has something to do with journeying to the heart of a story and then journeying away from it again, having learned something about the world or yourself that you hadn't known before. As a writer, I don't think there's a formula for clearing a path to this heart (so that you can take your readers there, too) in the cleanest, clearest, most-efficient way. Or, if there is, I sure haven't found it yet. The first novel I ever finished writing(over a decade ago - my true "practice book") seems to lack a strong, steady, central heartbeat, which I think is why it just doesn't seem to "work" when I've gone back and taken a look at it. My second novel, though, the one currently making the rounds (thanks to my awesome literary agent), is different. The heart of that book - the event that drives the protagonist to make choices that almost bring her down - came to me in crystal-clear form while I was just sitting around one day doing not much of anything.

And the draft I'm in the thick of now is challenging me in ways that the other two didn't. It's making me work to find its heart, which I know is there and close, just beneath the underbrush. Today I was able to resolve in my head a key scene that has been eluding me, and doing so felt like finally staking down the corner of a big tarp flapping in the wind, driving me nuts.

On the reading front, two books have taken the place left on my nightstand by Interpreter of Maladies. They are Leaving Atlanta, by Tayari Jones (who has an excellent, hype-free blog) and Journal of a Novel, which is a transcription of the journal John Steinbeck kept (a series of letters to his editor and friend, Pascal Covici, actually) while he was writing East of Eden. I've had the latter since studying Steinbeck as an undergraduate, but I haven't taken a serious look at it in years. Now that I'm hot on the trail of my WIP's beating heart seems as good a time as any to re-read the words of yet another master.

I would love to know what books threaten to send you, Dear Readers, into organ failure with their greatness, regardless of genre. What books have stayed with you for years after reading them for the first time, and why?Follow @nicole_mcinnes