dual personalities

Tag: Anne Tyler

July 22, 2015

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

11 AMERICAN HOMER

Well, as you know, I finished Lonesome Dove. I will note that at the end of the book when Captain Call is hauling Gus’s body thousands of miles to be buried in Texas, he detours into Colorado and crosses the Picketwire River into the neighborhood of my ancestor John W. Prowers. Call runs into Charles Goodnight and has a conversation with him. (Goodnight was a real-life business partner for awhile of Prowers.) It has been suggested that the character Captain Call is based on Goodnight, who hailed from Macoupin County, IL.

All of which is to say that there is only six degrees of separation between us and (even) fictional characters!

Now I have moved on to several different things.

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First, I finished The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a “spiritualist” novel of the mid-nineteenth century, which daughter #2 recommended and I started in Florida. (I had to order my own copy when I got home!) Immensely popular when it was published in 1868, it appealed to a population exhausted by the personal losses of the Civil War. Eighty thousand copies were sold in America by 1900; 100,000 were sold in England during the same time period. Basically it is a dialogue about the afterlife between the two female protagonists. I enjoyed it very much and found it easy to read (not stilted) and the characters real and easily relatable. The subject matter is one that still appeals to twenty-first-century readers–look at the popularity of Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Todd Burpo in 2010. The Gates Ajar is a much better book, and the author takes great pains to site scripture to back up her theories.

I started re-reading The Tin Can Tree by Anne Tyler, her second and one of her lesser-known books, published in 1965 when she was only twenty-four. Like all Anne Tyler books, it is deceptively simple and an excellent read (and shorter than most of her other novels).

Next up is The Handsome Man’s Deluxe Cafe by Alexander McCall Smith and another Larry McMurtry which I got on eBay. I am also working on my Jackson County, Missouri research.

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What are you reading?

FYI today is the birthday (1948) of S.E. Hinton! So “Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.”

5 Comments
February 17, 2015

Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow*

by chuckofish

We had a “snow-event”–not like the ones back East–but enough for me to call a snow-day and not go into work. The way the TV meteorologists carry on these days, you would think every time it snowed it was snow-mageddon. Which of course it is not.

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Anyway, I stayed home and continued to lug boxes of stuff up and down stairs and to read my Anne Tyler book. I have always felt akin to Anne Tyler. We are interested in the same things: “I am fascinated by how families work, endurance, how do we get through life?” (You can read a good interview with her here.) This new book makes me laugh out loud and sometimes the tears come. Yes, the characters are familiar–at least that’s what her critics say–but so what. People are familiar.

Meanwhile, there is nothing I like better than to sit and look out my window on a snowy day.

2015-02-16 17.17.23The sky looks like a watercolor painting.

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It was a good day.

Today, it is back to work for me and very low temperatures. Keep warm and have a great Tuesday!

*“Snow-flakes” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

3 Comments
September 24, 2012

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? I kept remembering where I was last weekend and what I was doing. (Last Saturday I was in Brooklyn having a bagel and coffee–you know how it goes.) Sigh. My response was to get busy.

I got my hair cut, went to an estate sale, checked out one of my favorite antique malls, caught up with my far-flung family members on the phone, scrubbed a shower, opened windows to let in the wonderful fresh air, went to Target, washed the kick plate on the refrigerator, changed sheets and did laundry, trimmed the ivy in front of the house, took a couple of walks, and finished the Anne Tyler book I was re-reading.

You get the idea. I find that the best thing for when you are sad or depressed is to clean and/or organize. Even if you don’t feel better afterward, you have a clean(er) house!

The Anne Tyler book, by the way, was Earthly Possessions, an early novel written in 1977, which is not (in my opinion) one of her best. But you know, any Anne Tyler book is much better than most, so I still enjoyed it. She always supplies a few golden nuggets. Here is one of them:

“Sometimes,” he said, “I believe we’re given the same lessons to learn, over and over, exactly the same experiences, till we get them right. Things keep circling past us.”

Maybe so. Food for thought anyway.

6 Comments
October 25, 2011

Happy birthday, Anne Tyler

by chuckofish

Doesn't she have nice squinty eyes?

Anne Tyler is another of my most favorite read-again authors. I have read all of her books and look forward to the next one, scheduled to be published in 2012:

If Morning Ever Comes (1964), The Tin Can Tree (1965), A Slipping-Down Life (1970), The Clock Winder (1972), Celestial Navigation (1974), Searching for Caleb (1975), Earthly Possessions (1977), Morgan’s Passing (1980), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), Saint Maybe (1991), Ladder of Years (1995), A Patchwork Planet (1998), Back When We Were Grownups (2001), The Amateur Marriage (2004), Digging to America (2006), Noah’s Compass (2010), The Beginner’s Goodbye (forthcoming April 2012)

My favorite is Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (also the one she thinks is her best). Here is a passage:

He rifled through the pages, glimpsing buttonhole stitch and watermelon social and set of fine furs for $22.50. “Early this morning,” he read to his mother, “I went out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt by the stable with my pinafore a mess and the perspiration rolling down my back, wiped my face on my sleeve, reached for the trowel, and all at once thought, Why I believe that at just this moment I am absolutely happy.”

His mother stopped rocking and grew very still.

“The Bedloe girl’s piano scales were floating out her window,” he read, “and a bottle fly was buzzing in the grass, and I saw that I was kneeling on such a beautiful green little planet. I don’t care what else might come about, I have had this moment. It belongs to me.”

That was the end of the entry. He fell silent.

“Thank you, Ezra,” his mother said. “There’s no need to read any more.”

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