Musing Mondays

I’ve seen several bloggers mention reading multiple books this week. Do you frequently read more than one book at a time? Do you try to limit this to a certain number? Do you have different books for different purposes/topics?

“Could you bring me my book?” I called out to my husband the other evening as I headed off for my nightly soak in the tub.

“Sure thing,” he answered genially.

I started the water running and drizzled in my favorite chamomile and lavender bubble bath.

“Hey there,” I heard my husband calling, “so which book do you want?  There are three of them stacked up here on the table.”

“Oh, bring the one called In the Woods,” I answered.    “I’m nearly finished with that, and I’d like to be able to return it to the library tomorrow.”

As you can see, I often do have more than one book on the go, although I’m finding it more and more difficult to keep track of multiple plot and story lines.   Most recently I was reading Wolf Hall and Mrs. Dalloway at the same time…it wasn’t hard to keep track of the plot line, but it was a bit difficult to switch gears between writing styles.

When I do read multiple books, they are most often in multiple genres…a biography perhaps, or a collection of essays along with a novel.  That way I can compartmentalize each one in my mind.

Really, the most problematic thing about reading more than one book is simply deciding which one to read at any given moment.  A plethora of riches…

The Sunday Salon~Mish-mash

Sunday is nearly over, and I haven’t much to say to explain my absence for the past entire week.  No Musing on Monday, no Booking Through Thursday, no Sentences Striking me yesterday.

It was a busy week, chock full of working and running errands and preparing for this week, which includes nothing except rest and relaxation and reading.  Indeed, I am on vacation (as of yesterday) spending the entirety of a week at our home in Florida with my friend (and reading partner).  We’re all stocked up with books, movies, snacks, beverages, and plenty ‘o sunshine to keep us company.

And now a quick confession….

after my diatribe a few weeks ago about these, I find myself dangerously close to coveting one.

My friend M. had one  tucked inside her purse on the plane.  Stored within it are 60 (!) novels which she can peruse at her pleasure during this week (and during her travels next month in Sunny Scottsdale, Arizona).  While I had to make an emergency trip to the library this afternoon.

Hmm.

Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.

And my birthday is coming up quite soon…

I hope your Sunday was delightful, and your week ahead brings many good words.

Happy reading, in whatever form you may choose <smiles>

The Sunday Salon – Muck on My Shoes

So Sunday arrives again, with its inherent and most welcome sense of peace and repose.  I awoke early, and finally finished Wolf Hall  (although fascinating and wonderfully written, I was beginning to despair of ever reaching the end) and I think I’ll move forward with some lighter reading fare. 

I was on the fence about attending church today, and finally decided to stay home.  Instead, I read an essay of Frederick Buechner’s called Hope (from A Room Called Remember).  It made me ponder my own church experience of late, and ways it has changed in recent months.

Buechner says we go to church in Hope that there is a God who knows us, is keeping track of us, and wants to meet us there.  As a physical place, a church is not holier than any of the other places on earth – historically, we’ve imbued it with holiness because of our expectation for what will occur when we get inside, because we consider it God’s house if you will.  As such, we go with the hope of being able to shed the heavy overcoat of guilt and sadness we carry around during the week, of being allowed to leave our shoes, laden with the muck of strife and meanness, at the door.  And perhaps, almost superstitiously, we think that if God is looking for us at all, looking to gift our lives with His grace, then he will be more likely to find us in the pew than on a street corner, or in our favorite coffee shop, or even tucked sung in our beds.  Now I don’t really believe that part, and I don’t even believe that one has to attend church on a regular basis to be a true disciple of Christ.  I do believe that church centers us in the faith, gives us the reassurance of a community of believers, and lifts us up when we falter on the road of life. 

Nevertheless, church going has been a sporadic proposition for me.  I’ve been a member of my current congregation for almost 15 years, which represents the longest consecutive period of  church attendance in my life.  For most of those years, I’ve sung in the church choir.  But I’ve taken this year off from singing and, oddly enough,  it’s altered my worship experience for the better.  Somehow, when I’m in the choir loft, I’m “on” as a musician, I’m preparing mentally for the next song to sing.  I’m conscious of the people sitting next to me, while  feeling separated from my husband who’s three rows behind me in the tenor section.

But on Sunday mornings this year, I go into the Sanctuary alone, and tuck myself into the left corner of the fourth pew from the front.  The Steinway grand is just in front of me, and I love to watch Sandy (who is my piano idol) play the Prelude.  I can see the minister’s face as he preaches (rather than the side of his head which is our view from the loft).   And while I still miss sitting beside my husband, I can at least see him and revel in the expressions on his face as he sings.  Sitting there throughout the service, I feel not only comfortable but comforted, as if I really have left my muck covered shoes at the door, and will return to find them clean and shiny again.

“Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name,” Buechner writes, “something we know best from the empty place inside us where it all belongs.  I think we go to church looking for that something – call it peace, call it understanding – even call it Hope.  As I sit in my own stillness these Sunday mornings, I’ve come quite close to finding it.

I think if you have your ears open, if you have your eyes open, every once in a while some word in even the most unpromising sermon will flame out, some scrap of prayer or anthem, some moment of silence even, the sudden glimpse of somebody you love sitting there near you, or of some stranger whose face without warning touches your heart, will flame out – and these are the moments that speak our name in a way we cannot help hearing.  These are the moments that in the depths of whatever our dimness and sadness and lostness are, give us an echo of a wild and bidding voice that calls us from deeper still.  It is the same voice…that one way or another says GO! BE! LIVE! LOVE! sending us off on an extraordinary and fateful journey…

May your Sunday, your week, your life, be filled with hope.

 

Striking Sentences

England was always, the cardinal says, a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people, who are working slowly toward their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations.  If England lies under God’s curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal.  But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.  Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

Historical novels take the stick figures of history and paint them in vivid colors, fill in their flesh, blood, and bone, and imbue them with rich emotion.  Wolf Hall is a masterful example of the historical novel at its best, taking the figure of Thomas Cromwell, a common man who rises to a place of great favor with King Henry VIII, and viewing that tempestuous period through his eyes and from his vantage point.

Mantel’s portrayal of England and it’s national conscience during those times is equally vivid – there’s a bleak and icy coldness that permeates the atmosphere of this novel, from the intrigues at court to  the political and religious oppression and corruption.  The prevalence of torture and death does nothing to ease the misery that oozes from the pores of these people.  And if there have been golden years, it seems clear that Henry’s denouncement of the Roman church and his attempt to usurp power that rightly belongs to God, does indeed bring them to a crashing end.

Now tell me, have you read any Striking Sentences this week?

The Sunday Salon~Washed Up

It’s been a curiosly discombobulated day…chalk it up to rainy weather and a husband with the sniffles, but I’ve not managed to accomplish any of the tasks I’d set out to do.   Unable to focus, I’ve started several projects and then wandered off into another room leaving them incomplete.   Alas, the evening promises to be no different, as I’ve come here to write for Sunday Salon, leaving the remnants of tonight’s dinner still piled on the kitchen counter waiting to be cleared away.

My reading this week has been a tad more on point.  Having finished Lit, the third volume in the trilogy that traces the development of poet and author Mary Karr, I’ve actually gone back in time to 16th century England, and am immersed in the politics, intrigue, and romance of Henry Tudor’s court.   Wolf Hall is a stunning historical novel, and I’m captivated by the way Hilary Mantel has inserted herself into the hearts and minds of these men who lived and breathed 5 centuries ago.  She has breathed such life into them that I can almost hear the swish of their stockings and the rustle of their velvet capes as they stride purposefully through history.

Lit, on the other hand, is wholly contemporary, a book about a woman who has become a poster child for all of our 20th century bug-a-boos…dysfunctional family, mental illness, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse.  Not that these problems didn’t occur  before our era, but only that they weren’t spotlighted with such frequency.  Swept under the rug and locked in the closet they were, not written about in books that become best sellers and garner their authors appearances on television shows and front covers of magazines.

At first reading, Lit might just be another one in a long line of stories about messed up literary types who take to drink and ultimately hit bottom, all their genius and talent destroyed at the bottom of a bottle or the end of a line of cocaine. But Karr isn’t your ordinary literary genius.  In fact, to hear her tell it, she’s no genius at all.  “…when I went to graduate school I would’ve said I was among the least talented of the students,” she says in an interview with Huffington Post.   ”I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard. I worked very hard on these books, and one of the things I do is I rewrite, and rethink and reconsider.” 

That’s the beauty of her story in Lit, I think.  There is ample evidence of rethinking and reconsidering, both in her prose and in her life.   She’s hard on herself, she obviously expects a lot of herself, and in the end, it’s the hard work that saves her from herself.   The hard work, and the Word.  “Words would define me, govern and determine me.  Words warranted my devotion…” she writes.  Writing becomes spirituality for her, serves as her earthly higher power ~until she makes the acquaintance of a spiritual version. 

It’s late – I’m off to resume the tale of Thomas Cromwell, who had troubles aplenty of his own. 

I hope your Sunday has been pleasant and productive.

Striking Sentences

You might find sober people who don’t pray, but all the happy ones have some kind of regular meditation or spiritual practice.

I’ve never felt anything faintly mystical in my life, and tell her so.

Faith is not a feeling she says.  It’s a set of actions.  By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.  Fake it till you make it.  ~ from Lit, a memoir by Mary Karr

Once upon a time, during a very sad and unhappy period in my life, a wise person told me to “pretend” I was happy and if I pretended long enough, it might come true.  Fake it till you make it.

It sounded facile to me at the time, but it worked out to be true.  My problems were nothing compared to the situation Mary Karr is in when her AA sponsor gives her this sage advice.  When Mary embarks upon a practice of prayer, even though at first she’s only faking it, the results are just suprising and effective enough to make her believe the power of it.

I’ve just closed the covers of this memoir, a book filled to the brim with striking sentences.  They continue to roil around in my mind… more cohesive thoughts may be forthcoming.

Now tell me, what sentences are striking you today?  If you’re blogging about them, let me know:

 

Striking Sentences

Don’t you just  love when you’re reading along in your top-’o-the-stack book and a sentence jumps out at you – a sentence that makes you say “Aha!” or “Yes!” or “Why didn’t I think of that before?”  Or you stumble across a sentence  so perfectly written it resounds in your heart strings for days? 

Each Saturday I’ll be celebrating those Striking Sentences, the ones that pierce the soul with their wisdom or humor or craft.  If you’d like to share a Strinking Sentence (or sentences) from your current read, post about them on your blog, tell us why they strike your heart, and leave a link in the comments here so we may come visit.  Perhaps what strikes your fancy, will also strike mine.

 

How much she wanted it – that people should look pleased when she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things.  Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.  ~ from Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Sometimes I wish I weren’s such a people pleaser, wish I didn’t care so much about the opinions and even the feelings of others.  Wish I could go blindly forward and do just what I wanted to do for a change, without caring about the world’s view.

Alas, I doubt I’ll ever change, but like Clarissa Dalloway will continue to lament my pitiful state and go on doing things to “make people think this or that.”

Mrs. Dalloway, for Woolf in Winter

Taking up Mrs. Dalloway again felt a bit like settting sail on some remarkable ocean, where you embark gingerly at first, but soon get caught up in the gentle rocking motion of the wave, the ceaseless undulations of thoughts and impressions, the passing clouds of emotions and sensations which drift through the minds of Clarissa Dalloway and all the other characters who entwine with her life on this one ordinary day.

Such a remarkable novel, really, if one places it in the context of its day, where many novels were most often straightforward, moralistic, even a bit pedantic.  But Woolf changes all that with this novel, this fresh wind blowing across the world of literature, sweeping away the old in favor of sparkling new ideas.  This Mrs. Dalloway, this outline of a day in the life of one English woman, this book that heightens the emotions and actions and memories of a group of ordinary people in ordinary time and places them in their rightful place as paramount to the society in which they live.

So, while reading Mrs. Dalloway, I can’t help examining the trajectory of my own thoughts, wondering if the stream of my consciousness might yet turn into this exquisite bubbling brook that Woolf sets down on the page.   Sadly, my thoughts always reach a dead end, become dammed up before they explode into the myriad of beautiful reflections which emanate from Mrs. Dalloway’s compatriots.

Constructing an entire novel around the confines of one 24 hour period and one middle aged English woman must have seemed a dangerous risk to Woolf.  “I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time…it is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so.”   With Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf took a brave step toward re-imagining the novel, a bold move at a time when people were shell-shocked from the wounds of the First World War, a world where people have yet to be lulled back into the complacency they felt before the shot heard ’round the world rang out.  Yet in the midst of Mrs. Dalloway’s fresh start, death still hovers…Septimus Smith, the young soldier whose emotional war wounds turn out to be mortal after all, the news of his suicide intruding upon the long anticipated party scene.   And Clarissa herself acknowledges for one brief moment the sense of hopelessness we all fall prey to on occasion…”She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself.  She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.  The clock was striking.  The leaden circles dissolved in the air.  He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.”

Pay attention, Woolf practically shouts at the reader, clocks striking the hours of the day away.  Pay attention to time passing, to people changing, to their neediness and pain.  Pay attention to the beauty that surrounds you, to the ideas of the moment and the memories of the past.  Pay attention, for like a broom sweeping across the precipice of the mind, it can in one instant be gone forever.

~for more impressions of Mrs. Dalloway, visit Sarah, this week’s hostess of  the Woolf in Winter readalong~

The Sunday Salon – Fear Factor

You are all going to think I’m terribly silly, but I’m really worried about something. 

Actually, it’s several somethings I’m concerned about.  I feel a bit foolish, but…well…here, it’s THESE:

            

E-Readers. 

What frightens me half to death is the possibility that these electronic reading devices could one day in the not so distant future eclipse words printed on paper and bound between two covers.   Could eliminate all the diversity of size and type and paper weight and ink perfume – all those sensual qualities that add so much to my reading experience. 

It could happen you know…after all, look at the music industry.  Even I never buy CD’s anymore.  I download all my music onto my i-pod.  Why wouldn’t I?  It’s so much more convenient and portable.  I can carry hundreds – even thousands – of tunes around in my pocket.  Not to mention tv shows, and movies, and podcasts…and yes, even books.  Okay, I admit that I have a couple of books on my i-pod.  But only for emergencies…those rare occasions when I’m caught out without a real book on my person. 

Two of my best reading buddies (both ladies in their 70’s I might add) have E-readers, and I must admit I feel a bit betrayed.  Not only because two of my best sources for book borrowing have completely dried up, but because I feel as if they’re dismissing something near and dear to my heart. 

Until very recently, I had been fairly successful in ignoring these devices, as in burying my head in the sand type of ignoring.  Just before Christmas, my husband said casually, “Oh, by the way, your mother was asking me whether she should get you a Kindle for Christmas…apparently she saw them on Oprah and thought you might like one.”

“Gah!” I screamed.  “No!”

The scoundrel just laughed at me.  “I told her I was pretty sure you wouldn’t care for that,” he said.  “After all, you’re the only person I know who takes a book to bed with them even during a power outage.”

“Well, I just like to have it nearby for comfort,”  I replied haughtily.

“I know,” he sighed.

And then I walked into Barnes and Noble last week, and what greets me first thing – not the usual table laden with new releases, but a huge display featuring the Nook, and two people dedicated to telling me all about it.

My fear factor is escalating.

Somehow I can’t imagine life without books, shiny new ones, but also old musty ones too.  There is character in each book, in the size and heft and smell of it.  There is legacy in the printed page…how do you hand down favorite e-files to your grandchildren?  Where do you put sticky notes in an e-reader, how do you dog-ear favorite pages, or circle striking sentences?  How can you make a decent bookstack out of downloads?

So, what do you think?  Am I over-reacting? Should this ravenous reader be afraid?  Are you?

Striking Sentences

Don’t you just love when you’re reading along in your top-’o-the-stack book and a sentence jumps out at you – a sentence that makes you say “Aha!” or “Yes!” or “Why didn’t I think of that before?”  Or you stumble across a sentence  so perfectly written it resounds in your heart strings for days? 

Each Saturday I’ll be celebrating those Striking Sentences, the ones that pierce the soul with their wisdom or humor or craft.  If you’d like to share a Strinking Sentence (or sentences) from your current read, post about them on your blog, tell us why they strike your heart, and leave a link in the comments here so we may come visit.  Perhaps what strikes your fancy, will also strike mine

There are changes afoot at my workplace, and not all of them are to my liking.  I know that sounds awfully spoiled brat-ish of me, especially since my office is such a nice place to work and my boss has been quite generous in allowing me the flexibility to work from home and change my scheduling.  At any rate, these changes have set me thinking a bit about whether it’s time to move on, and if so, to where.   While I’ve enjoyed this job, and am grateful for the many perks it has, I wouldn’t necessarily consider it the epitome of my calling in life.    So this sentence from An Outrageous Affair, by Penny Vincenzi, struck at the heart of my thoughts this week.

Fleur felt as if she had died and gone straight to heaven in her first weeks at Silk diMaggio (an advertising agency); she was in a state of total enchantment from the moment she walked through the door in the morning until she had to be dragged out of it at night.  She sensed an instinct in herself about advertising; she could see how it worked and why; she felt serene in what she was doing, and she felt at home.  She had a sense of being absolutely in the right place, that she had been born to do what she was doing.

Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Now tell me, do you feel as if you were born to do what you’re doing?  And if not, what were you born to do?