Potpourri - reading a bit of this, a bit of that

I recently reached my GoodReads goal of reading 55 books in 2013.  I'm now at 56 books, and feel like I have a few good reading weeks ahead of me before getting swallowed by the holidays.

I haven't been doing quite as well blogging about everything I've been reading.  Sometimes there's not a lot to say, and sometimes there's so much that I almost feel overwhelmed by it.  So let's take the catalog approach.

The Red  Queen and The King Maker's Daughter, by Philippa Gregory - I enjoyed The White Queen so much more than either.  I found Margaret Beaufort, the Red Queen, to be one of the most maddeningly hypocritical heroines ever.  My biggest regret with regards to the War of the Roses is that Margaret was not ultimately defeated.  The fact that her precious son, Henry, founded the Tudors still rankles.  I got two-thirds done with The KingMakers Daughter, about Anne Neville, and found I just didn't have the heart to finish it.  I much prefer the Anne of Sunne in Splendour--Gregory's Anne was whiny and dull and unsympathetic.

The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, by Mark Obmascik - somehow over the past several months, my husband and I have transitioned from being mildly interested in birds to being birders. It started with the owls that took up residence across the street from our house in the open space, and soon we were trying to identify birds on our hikes.  We watched The Big Year, starring Steve Martin, et al, and enjoyed it thoroughly. So got the book and read it. It was fun, interesting, and inspired us to buy binoculars, field guides, and start going on 7:30 am birding tours on Saturday morning courtesy of our local wild bird center.  I now have a bird feeder outside my office window and have been spying on the feeding habits of Mountain Chickadees, American Goldfiches, House Sparrows, House Finches, Blue Jays, Northern Flickers, to name a few.  My rarest bird to date is the Barred Owl we spotted two Sundays ago at Point Defiance on Puget Sound when we were visiting our daughter who goes to school up there.  Can you spell N-E-R-D?

Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear - what a wonderful treat this book was to read!  I thoroughly enjoyed it--from the setting pre and post-WWI in London, to the charmingly interesting character, Maisie herself.  I actually found myself more interested in her backstory, which comprised the whole middle section of the book, rather than the mystery itself.  I will definitely be reading more books in this series.

Winter in Thrush Green, by Miss Read - as a card-carrying Janeite, it's a bit surprising that this is my first Miss Read tale of life in a quiet country village in England, circa 1950.  A stranger moves to the village, lots of gossip ensues, winter drags on, gallons of tea are consumed, and life goes on.  I listened to this book, and enjoyed it.  It was a nice break from reality and a perfect escape book...

...which leads me to the book I am currently reading:

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote - to say this book is unsettling is an understatement.  I have wanted to read it for years, but only just got up the nerve.  My husband says that the scariest movie he ever watched was Schindler's List, because it was based on a true story.  I haven't read a lot of scary books, but this is the one that has kept me up at night the most, not from reading it but from thinking about it.  The story itself is truly horrible, but Capote's clinical style coupled with the structure has made it definitely unsettling.  I'm almost done--I hope to finish it tonight.  It is good, an American classic, but very tough to read.

So how's that for potpourri--a bit of this and a bit of that?

Breakfast at Tiffany's: The Great Gatsby reimagined

I finally read Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's last week. It's a classic American novella, a quick read, and a bit of a disappointment. I've looked forward to reading this for years. I had assumed that I would like Capote as a writer, and I do like the movie reasonably well. Perhaps I was too familiar with the story to really appreciate Capote's words--and the movie, as I remember it, it's been awhile since I watched it, is very true to the original story.

For starters, there's a dated glibness to the writing that I found tired. Perhaps it was considered fresh and hip in 1958, but I had assumed it would hold up better to the test of time. I love to earmark pages with passages that resonate with me, but I finished the story with nary an earmarked page. That says a lot right there.

Last night when I was thinking about what to say about Breakfast at Tiffany's, I thought about how much I liked the first-person narrator (much more than Holly Golightly, in fact) and it struck me that I liked him in the same way that I liked Nick Carroway from The Great Gatsby so much more than Gatsby. Both are middle of the road, steady hand on the tiller types, and both are budding novelists, which makes them, in a cliche world anyway, excellent observers as well as foils for the flashier types like Holly Golightly and Jay Gatsby, who streak across their sky and then vanish into the American mythos.



Both Holly Golightly and Jay Gatsby are characters that Lula Mae Barnes and James Gatz forge out of the drab, dead-end, prosaic material into which they are born and which they can't bear to own. If Gatsby is Fitzgerald's symbol of the American Dream circa 1929, then Holly Golightly is Capote's circa 1958. For me, though, the real hero of both works is the virtually nameless writer who keeps a steady head and hand while recording the stories that he uncovers. He plugs away at articulating the hopes and dreams that he witnesses, falls in love with Holly/Gatsby but is mature enough to recognize that they are images and icons who have sold their past and so have no future.

So I wonder, did Capote set out to rewrite The Great Gatsby? I didn't want to see if anyone else had made this connection before I wrote this post, so I just Googled and found this piece in The Guardian from September 2009, which makes even more of a case than I did. Knowing the little I do about Capote, though, I doubt he would ever have owned up to consciously reworking The Great Gatsby.

Even if Capote did set out to rewrite The Great Gatsby, that still doesn't account for my ho-hum response to Breakfast at Tiffany's itself. The work is dated and just doesn't stand up to the test of time in the way The Great Gatsby does. However, I'm so glad that I read it because finding the parallels to TGG was a kick. There's always a silver lining.