Book Blogger Appreciation Week Interviews

First up below are my answers to ten questions about books, blogging, and reading sent to me by British book blogger Jodie Baker of Bookgazing. Next are my ten questions and her answers!

Jodie: How long have you been blogging? Jeanne: About a year and a half now. I started one winter while I was sitting around recovering from a knee replacement.

Jodie: Can you explain how you came up with the name for your blog ‘Necromancy Never Pays’? Jeanne: It’s an odd name, isn’t it? The name actually inspired me to start the blog; I keep a brief version of the story up on my sidebar, right underneath the title.

Jodie: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while blogging and what’s the best way it’s affected your life? Jeanne: The biggest challenge for me is finding the time to write at least 2-3 times each week, and to get around to visiting other book blogs at least once a month. I have a husband with a very full-time job, two part-time jobs of my own (one requiring a two-hour commute twice a week), two busy teenagers, and a house full of animals. But the best way blogging has affected my life is that I’ve become at least a peripheral part of some interesting conversations; part-time jobs can be very isolating, so the book blog world has become a part of my intellectual community. Also I got better classes this year because last fall I sent my department head a link to my post about what it’s like to leave a class of first-year students with no real prospects of ever seeing them again, and he took special pains to work out a year-long schedule for me with some upper-level courses!

Jodie: How technological are you and what’s your favourite piece of technology/techy tool (apart from blogs but including domestic appliances)? Jeanne: I have very little technical expertise, and don’t even like kitchen gadgets much. I like ipods; does that count?

Jodie: Do you have a favourite community building event or group in the book blogging world? Jeanne: No because I’ve been too cautious about committing my time and energy so far. I like reading responses to the Weekly Geeks question the best of anything. Do you have a suggestion—because that might help! I feel a bit like the character of Will Barrett in Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, who was paralyzed by too much possibility.

Jodie: You seem like a pretty big poetry fan – what do you like best about poetry? Jeanne: I like that moment when you read a line or two and think “I’ve felt that, but couldn’t articulate it until now…”

Jodie: Who is your all time favourite author, the one you’d queue all night to talk to for five minutes? Jeanne: Hmm, this question assumes a live author. I guess it would have to be Jasper Fforde, who wrote The Eyre Affair. I thought about Barbara Kingsolver, but she comes across as very earnest. I once met Ruth Ozeki and felt that she summarily dismissed me as an interesting person because of the way I make jokes when nervous. I can’t see Fforde doing that—or if he wasn’t as fascinating in person as he is in print, we could always have a game of croquet.

Jodie: You read around quite a bit, just wondering if you have a favourite genre or if you don’t why you enjoy reading a little bit of everything. Jeanne: My favorite genre is satire, especially 18^th-century ironic personal panegyric (blame by praise of an individual). But I aspire to be a Renaissance woman. The only genre I really don’t care for is horror. I don’t like to be scared, especially not by made-up stories.

Jodie: Can you speak a little bit about why you’re so passionate about public libraries in Ohio? Jeanne: Because I’m an American, and free public libraries are one of the foundations of our system of democracy. As John Adams said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” This is carved above the door of my local library.

Jodie: Finally what book/s do you wish more people were reading right now? If you were in charge of the world for an hour what piece of literature would you make it law to read because you think it would do the world good? Jeanne: I’m willing to wish that more people would read Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale or her new novel The Year of the Flood (which is being published September 22) because I think more of us should think about the dangers she exaggerates for effect. (Also I worry that some of the dangers we thought were exaggerated in The Handmaid’s Tale have come perilously close to true.) But I’d never be willing to make a law about reading. You can’t force someone to learn; most people just resist more stubbornly if you try.

Here are my questions for Jodie:

Jeanne: What gave you the incentive to start your blog? Has it given you a reputation for gazing at other peoples’ bookshelves when you’re invited to their houses? Jodie: I’d been reading book blogs for about five years and I always wanted to start one, because not many of the people in my life read as much or as many different types of books as I do. I wanted to be able to form a closer connection with the book bloggers I enjoyed reading and also to take part in community activities like challenges and the 24 hour read-a-thon. I am absolutely the most nosey person when it comes to houses. If someone lets me stay in their house I will check out everything that’s on display (I don’t go through their drawers, promise) especially the bookcases. I’m fascinated by what people read and I add books they own to my personal list.

Jeanne: Which book has affected you or changed your life the most?Jodie: Changed my life, wow big ask. There are plenty of novels that have affected me and made me want to get involved with causes by donating money, but I don’t think that’s really a significant change to my life. ‘Jane Eyre’ is probably the novel that had the biggest impact on my life, by giving me a role model and lots of sensible advice about how to conduct my emotional life. When I took a course on ‘Dracula’ in university I got my first introduction to the different schools of literary theory and that was pretty influential in helping me to develop my thought processes. Finally an author made quite a change to the way I think about life, Stuart Clarke, joint author of an exhaustive series of books on witchcraft throughout history, was my BA dissertation supervisor and he really helped me to think deeply about history and how it applies to current society.

Jeanne: What is your least favourite book or genre, and why? Jodie: I can’t think of one right now, but it’s probably a piece of chick-lit. I have a violent love/hate relationship with that genre. For example I’d defend ‘The Little Lady Agency’ or ‘The Juliet Club’ against the snobbiest of book snobs but I find myself wanting to bash some chick-lit novels against the wall again and again until they change their characters and plot. Violent tendencies, I has them.

Jeanne: You read poetry when you were unemployed for a while, and say it gave you optimism. Do you think this would work for anyone else, or is it a very personal reaction? Jodie: I think this was a personal reaction. I’m the last person to say ‘Hey job seekers, if only you’d let art into your life your situation would seem so much better’. When I was unemployed I was in the privileged position of being able to live at home with my parents and have them buy food for me, which is just not the case for lots of people who have to sign on. Poetry is not going to feed your kids or pay your electricity bill and cold, hungry people tend to find it hard to be optimistic. What poetry can do and what it did for me, was to remind me that I didn’t have to listen to the negative people: the ones who told me it was shameful for people to claim benefits and the ones who liked to explain ‘how the world worked’ to me, or remind me that I was claiming benefit because I had taken a degree I was interested in instead of a practical degree. No matter how depressing the job search got, no matter how many people felt they had the right to foist the opinions they’d picked up from the newspapers on me, when I was already down, there were bigger people out there, creating this astoundingly beautiful art. Even darker, morbid poems contain beauty, a kind of gothic spectacle. This gave me hope that the world didn’t have to follow the grey, set pattern so many people in authority think is the lot ordinary, working people must accept.

Jeanne: Are you a writer? If so, what kinds of project(s) are you working on? If not, what kind of book would you wish to have written? Jodie: Not yet but I hope to change that. I’m always scribbling lines down and I have lots of ideas but I can’t seem to get myself to sustain a piece of non-academic writing. I guess I’m really afraid I have no talent. Oh and I need to learn more about grammar, I suck at grammar. This past year I’ve had a lot more freedom (this is the first year I haven’t had to do some sort of ‘school work’ since I was five) and I have a couple of ideas I’ve started to develop in my head. I always thought I’d love to write comic fantasy, because I’m a pretty sarcastic kind of girl in real life and I think it’s a genre that really stems from a typical British sense of humour. Now about half of my project ideas seem to be for young adult novels. Hopefully soon I’ll know if I can finish a novel, maybe I’ll try Nanowrimo again.

Jeanne: Why do you like reading challenges? How do you choose the ones you participate in? Jodie: I’m a girl who makes lists for fun and reading challenges let you make big lists of possibilities, possibilities that involve books! They also let you read other people’s lists, which is just as interesting as looking at people’s bookshelves to nosey, old me. They’re also a big community effort – bloggers all reading similar kinds of things. It allows you to make comparisons with books you’ve read before and talk about all kinds of books, creating this big web of bookish links. I think that’s a really good way of encouraging discussion. I imagine a group read of a big, daunting classic would be just as interesting. I pick challenges created by bloggers I already know and like, but I also check out ‘A Novel Challenge’ every other month to see what other bloggers have come up with. If I see something that sounds like an area I’m interested in, but never read books from, I’ll sign up, or if I see something where you get to read lots of the kind of books I like I’ll join up. I’m easy and I’m okay with that.

Jeanne: What author would you most like to ask a question of, and what would that question be? Jodie: Arundhati Roy – why have you decided you’re not going to write another novel ? Why?

Jeanne: You collect bookmarks—what do you like about them? Jodie: They’re pretty! To be fair people give them to me, more than I collect them.

Jeanne: Who would you vote for as the worst villain in fiction, and what would be your criteria? Jodie: Like the evilest villain or the villain that was the worst at being villainous? The most incompetent villain I’ve seen so far has to be Dom Daniel from Angie Sage’s first Septimus Heap book ‘Magyk, he’s out foxed by small children and a ghost that makes his hat bigger! The most evil villain I can think of is probably the serial killer in Kathy Reichs ‘Triptych’. The novel relies a lot on the big reveal so I won’t give anything away, but let’s just say the levels of deception and self-deception he manages to maintain are truly frightening and his killer signature is disturbing. My criteria for judging the most evil villain category would be: Must be from non-realistic fiction (I can think of prison guards and dictators from fiction that are suitably evil but the word villain implies a certain kind of evil that you don’t encounter in everyday life (and yes I know there are serial killers in the world, but for most of us they are removed from our reality)). Able to hide his true evil nature from the world and insinuate himself into the company of good people. A crazy level of violent behaviour. Insane self-justification for his behaviour (because true evil always believes it is right to act the way it does). Must be alive and actively villainous in the book (some characters from ‘the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ might have edged my choice out otherwise).

Jeanne: If you could only read books by one author for six months of your life, which author would you pick? Jodie: Tough! It would have to be someone with a huge body of work and an author that I knew I could trust to craft a good story. I think I would pick Terry Pratchett, whose books have a whole shelf in my house. I could re-read his books forever and there are still six or seven I haven’t read yet.

I hope you'll take a virtual hop "across the pond" to check out Jodie's blog (Bookgazing) now that you've gotten to know her a little bit by seeing how she answered my questions!

The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood is Margaret Atwood's follow-up to Oryx and Crake, although the action takes place in the same world simultaneously, so you don't need to have read that one to enjoy this one. I got an advance reading copy from the my local college bookstore; this novel will be for sale on 9/22/09. And then you should read it.

I got to sit in the back of an overcrowded auditorium at the local college a couple of years ago and hear Margaret Atwood talk about her writing, focusing mostly on Oryx and Crake. It was a very good performance, and the line to have her sign a book afterwards was so long that I had to give it up, finally.

Those of you who follow this blog know that The Handmaid's Tale is a novel I think everyone ought to read. I didn't feel the same way about Oryx and Crake--it seemed a little on the SF side for some. But I do feel that way about The Year of the Flood. A recent interview with Atwood indicates that she's planning a third novel set in this world, so I'll be waiting anxiously for that!

Why do I think everyone ought to read this novel? The short answer is that it takes some of the things that intelligent people are most anxious about and shakes them up together to pose new and more interesting questions about what we can possibly do about any of this. Rather than escapist zombie fiction or a weighty ecological tome, The Year of the Flood is a novel that manages to explore the consequences of how we live now--particularly how we've been treating the environment and our attitude towards the inevitable pandemics to come--by showing the effects on a group of characters that includes someone with whom every reader will be able to identify. As another blog reviewer points out, no matter what you believe, this novel will "give you fits" and make you think.

The long answer is that there are so many pleasures in this novel that I can't possibly tell you about all of them. But here are a few examples. The novel includes hymns that the "God's Gardeners" sing for different occasions in the year, including predator day, when they praise the intelligence and agility of all predators, and "April Fish" day, which has some similarities to April Fool's day. It also includes short sermons by Adam One of the Gardeners, including this section on "Creation Day":
"The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data? God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are like eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him. Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology."

Despite such scathing sections, though, the characters generally show humility about what they do and understand and even what they feel. On "April Fish" day, Adam One says that "to be an April Fish is to humbly accept and wear the label of God's Fools gladly, for in relation to God we are all fools, no matter how wise we may think we are." And at another point, a character recalls her previous attitude towards a certain group and realizes "we shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."

At the same time, though, the Gardeners have human failings:
"You'll want to grow your hair," said Nuala. "Get rid of that scalped look. We Gardener women all wear our hair long."
When Toby asked why, she was given to understand that the aesthetic preference was God's. This kind of smiling, bossy sanctimoniousness was a little too pervasive for Toby, especially among the female members of the sect."
What I like most about Toby, who rises to the highest level in God's Gardeners, an "Eve," is that she has doubts, and she doesn't hesitate to express them. And I like that what she is able to do because of living with the Gardeners turns out to be more important.

The flood of the title is a plague (if you've read Oryx and Crake, you know who unleashed the plague and how). The Gardeners call it "the waterless flood" because it wipes out most previous life on earth. The flood is the focal point of the novel; we find out what the characters were doing before, during and immediately afterwards.

Some of the fun of the novel lies in the variety of genetically engineered animals the characters encounter, some of them already familiar to readers of Oryx and Crake, and others not. The "liobam," for instance, is a "lion-sheep splice...commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists, keen to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They'd reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn't been strictly vegetarian."

For readers of Oryx and Crake there are extra pleasures, including stories about the adolescence of "Crake" and Jimmy and a little about what happened to Jimmy's mother when she left the gated community where she had lived and worked. I enjoyed it when the character Toby, living alone in the former health spa where she has weathered the "flood," sees the genetically engineered people created by Crake in the distance and she thinks they're a hallucination, with their "blue abdomens" and their "crystalline, otherworldly singing."

When you begin reading this novel, you may be, like me, someone who "knew there were things wrong in the world....But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else." By the time you finish it, you'll be less able to "live with such fears and keep on whistling." You'll want to do something. Maybe just one more small thing. Because this novel shows you how much small things can matter. By extension, how much you can matter. How much you already do matter.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I came back from France thinking that Wallace Stevens, lover of things French and Floridian, might have a poem that would provide a good opening for me to share some of the experiences of what my daughter calls our "French adventure," but I haven't come up with one yet. Instead, I got stuck on one that seems to me related to my recent post about funding for public libraries in Ohio and a post over at Linus's Blanket about whether blog reviewers should add disclaimers to their reviews, in that it's about finding truth--about finding some truth calmly, on your own, in the quiet of a summer night:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Reading only books that you think you agree with--because of disclaimers or reviews or anything else--can lead to increasing narrow-mindedness. Our country is getting fragmented enough without people trying to read only the books that they already agree with. I’d like to see more people read books that challenge some of their beliefs. In fact, I guess that will have to be my summer reading challenge. I'll go out and find a book that I suspect I don't agree with, read it, and report back to you all before September.

Join me in this challenge? It doesn't even have to be a whole book--an essay would do nicely.

Update: For those of you who don't want to read non-fiction this summer, you could choose something outside your usual comfort zone--a new genre, or a classic author if you usually read new fiction. Here are a few suggestions:

Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--for a look at what theocracy could look like in the U.S.
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer--to remind yourself what it's like to be frustrated with dating and marriage rituals
Buckley's Boomsday--to decide if you should worry about whether you'll ever be able to retire
Kaufman's The Laramie Project--an explosion of the excuse that "this sort of thing doesn't happen here"
Hughart's Bridge of Birds--a good story that isn't all it seems
Ozeki's All Over Creation--if you don't know much about modern agriculture
Orwell's 1984 and then Doctorow's Little Brother--if you think safety can be more important than freedom
Anderson's Feed--if you spend much time in front of a screen
Miller's Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath--for company in economic misery

Love Poem

Here's a love poem for the week of Valentine's day. It struck me anew as lovely, in the wake of the Twilight jokes about watching a loved one sleep and towards the end (I hope) of my powerful winter somnolence:

Variation on the Word Sleep, by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

In truth, though, the odds of me being awake to watch anyone else sleep are low. I need more sleep than other people do, as I learned unequivocally 29 years ago this month when a doctor confirmed I was suffering from "exhaustion" after a week during which I got only about 4 hours of sleep a night. But hey, is romance about truth? No. Romance is about what you wish for. A person can dream!

Interview With the Non-Necromancer

Anna at Diary of An Eccentric was kind enough to interview me about books this week, in the process of passing along the "Interviewing Other Bloggers Meme" (she got her questions from Serena at Savvy Verse and Wit, and she formulated her own questions for me and also Christine at She Reads Books and Marie at Boston Bibliophile).

Anna: Out of all the books you've read, which one affected you the most, and why?
Jeanne: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I read it when it first came out, in 1986, and it made quite an impression on me. I was 26 years old, at the height of my fertility, and an adamant supporter of the pro-choice movement ever since an experience with a high school friend whose "religious" parents would have quite literally kicked her out of the house for being pregnant, except that she had a miscarriage before all of her friends could give her the money we'd pooled to get her an abortion. I had never so clearly connected being forced to carry a baby with women's rights and with what was happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan until I read the passage in which Offred has her picture taken by a group of Japanese tourists and tells them yes, she is "happy" (because she has already had her daughter, husband, mother, and best friend taken away and she has been beaten and terrified into submission). Later I came to appreciate The Handmaid's Tale for its deft weaving of the rights guaranteed by the United States Bill of Rights into the fabric of the fiction, but at first reading, it was the visceral aspect that got me. Offred is a womb with legs, nothing more.

Anna: Everyone always asks for book recommendations, but what is one book you think people should avoid at all costs?
Jeanne: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. To me, it is the epitome of a novelist's misguided attempt to write nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction. It is an environmentalist argument that she made much better in her (later) nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love most of Kingsolver's novels, but she really needs to guard against her tendency to try to preach in her fiction.

Anna: What is the first book you remember reading?
Jeanne: Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss. My parents read this to me every year on my birthday--still will, if we're together. So I memorized it very young and could "read" it before anything else. One of my favorite parts was always when the animals would stand on their tiptoes because it was such an honor to be "the tallest of all-est." I have always been taller than almost everyone else, so I liked thinking that was a good thing.

Anna: When I'm browsing books, sometimes I come across a title that hits me. I don't always read the book, but the title amuses me or gets to me in some way. What's your favorite book title? Have you read the book? (Ex: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. I probably won't ever read this book, but I chuckle every time I see the title.)
Jeanne: If I have to pick just one, it will have to be another YA title, one that I chuckle at every time I go to a bookstore: One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. I haven't read it because my daughter skimmed through it in the store once and told me it wasn't really worth reading. What a great title, though!

Anna: What's the one book you love and wish you'd written?
Jeanne: Whoa! I'm going to take this in the spirit of "what book do you think it's even remotely possible you could have been in the right spirit to be able to write if you were a million times cleverer and more patient than you are?" And the answer is: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Okay, yeah, I know. It's presumption to even think it. But it's the way I wish I could write, if I could write fiction at all, which I can't. If I had written something like that, I would have just strutted around the rest of my life crowing like Peter Pan: "Oh, the Cleverness of Me!" But really, I'm too earnest.

And that's my interview. If you would like me to interview you about books and what you think of them and all, leave me a comment with your contact information. If you would just like to comment on my opinions, well that's okay, too.

Book of Nightmares

Last night, later than I meant to stay up after the spectacular lunar eclipse, I finished reading Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Once I got to the last 100 pages, I had to finish the book lest I find myself trying to finish the story all night in my dreams. It is a book designed to give a woman nightmares, second only to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Why is Atwood's first as a book of nightmares? Because it happens here. It's the picture of what an American theocracy could look like: a fertile woman is "a national resource" and she must "be a worthy vessel." The first-person narrator says "we are for breeding purposes" and "we are two-legged wombs." This is the world as some pro-lifers would like to see it.

Hosseini's book takes place in Afghanistan, a place that I started reading about in the 1980's when newspaper columnists began pointing out the many parallels between the treatment of the handmaids in Atwood's novel and the treatment of Afghan women under Taliban rule. And what have I done to improve their lot? Not enough. Reading about women in the middle east always makes me think of Germans who managed to block out their bits of knowledge that something wasn't right about what was happening to the Jews. Ignorance is no shield against such evil.

It particularly offends me that those who should be standing up and pointing out the evil (here I think of Buckaroo Banzai pointing his finger and shouting "Evil! Pure and simple! From the 8th Dimension!") are instead doing a mealy-mouthed multicultural dance around the issue. Whatever possessed the archbishop of Canterbury (pun intended) to speak out in favor of any law based on religion? What an unworthy successor to Thomas More.

Sharia law is bad, mmkay? Let us count the first ten ways:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons_why_sharia_is.html

Of course, a good antidote to A Thousand Splendid Suns is Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley.