January Reading Wrap-up
A challenging and eccentric beginning.
January’s Bookshelf:
Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace, used paperback.
100 Selected Poems, e e cummings. used paperback.
Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Paul Muldoon. Hoopla ebook.
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley. Libby audiobook.
Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux. Hoopla audiobook.
The Orange and Other Poems, Wendy Cope. Library hardback.
As You Like It, William Shakespeare, Library paperback.
Do you devour every journalistic article in The New Yorker every week? Do you enjoy following reporters down rabbit holes regardless of how far down the fall is? If yes, Wallace’s 2006 collection of essays is for you.
I read three-and-a-half of the ten essays in Consider the Lobster, 90 of its 343 pages. Each is born from insanely well-researched reporting. The footnotes, filled with snarky details, often fill a half-page or more. DFW adores SAT words and unexplained abbreviations (like DFW.) This is especially true when describing sex acts or bad behavior (which is often.) These essays first appeared in magazines like Harpers, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. The titular article appeared in Gourmet. I respect those magazines and view publication in them as an endorsement of writing quality.
Perhaps because of the density of detail DFW provides, I struggled to stay interested in his subject matter. “Big Red Son” is about the adult video awards show in Vegas. The second essay is a diatribe against John Updike. Then a piece on Wallace’s personal challenge of teaching Kafka. And then the one that lost me, an essay about his experience reviewing a Dictionary of English Usage. I love dictionaries. As a kid, I used to read my unabridged dictionary page by page for fun. I thought for sure that essay would grab me. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I removed my bookmark several essays before I ever had a chance to consider the lobster. I hope the reader who discovers the dense volume I left in a Little Free Library will enjoy it. DNF.
We’ve all read the occasional folly by e e cummings. We know how he abandons punctuation and plays with word placement on a page. Many years ago, I spent three years living in the mews called Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. e e cummings had lived there for decades (well before my time there.) This left me with a strong pull to his work. 100 Selected Poems by e e cummings was a great beginner’s choice. The collection organizes poems from various periods of Edward Estlin Cumming’s writing life and covers a wide spectrum of subject matter. It made me take him more seriously -- to not only seek amusement in his poetry. Of course, oftentimes Cummings wants you to feel their whimsy. But that is not what he is after in every poem. Sometimes he is describing a racing passion, sometimes the brutality of war, sometimes loss, sometimes the mundanity of the weather or a city street. He wrote these poems 20-25 years before the Beat movement was even a thing, but the syncopation his word play and mispunctuation creates feels like jazz, like rebellious, blunt jazz. I didn’t love all the poems. Some worked better than others. Several are quite tremendous. I recommend this slim volume. 3.5 stars.
I’ve read a few of Paul Muldoon’s poems and listened to recordings of him reading some himself. But Joy in Service on Rue Tagore is the first of his collections I’ve read. I fully admit I am too ignorant to offer you anything in the way of literary criticism regarding Muldoon’s verse. Instead, I will give you my reactions to it.
It’s maddingly frustrating. He loads his lines with so many esoteric scholarly references and names that even a Classics major at Oxford would likely be shrugging their way through. About halfway through the book, I gave up trying to understand the poems. I decided that Muldoon doesn’t care if his readers understand. If he did, he would have chosen different words. And once I realized comprehension wasn’t the goal, I focused on cadence, rhyme, image, and story.
Despite being blinded by Muldoon’s arcane references, I could usually grasp the gist of the poem--the why he wrote it. To my surprise and delight, his reasons were usually modern and relatable. So even when he is his most annoyingly obtuse, say in “Artichokes and Truffles,” I was able, every few lines, to grab onto the slack rope of meaning to guide me forward.
What I enjoyed most was his sneaky off rhyme, his unexpected real rhymes, and his delicious song-like lyricism. They feel like what they are about! If you pick up a collection of his poetry (and I encourage you to give him a try,) read his poems aloud. Remember your first time listening to Edith Piaf or Jacques Brel? You loved the song even if you didn’t understand the meaning. With these poems, you’ll understand only some fractional portion, but you’ll also find yourself swaying.
Is Muldoon a favorite poet? No. I feel too shut out for that. But they are intriguing. 3 stars.
Poetry is a mystery. I’ve been convinced in a lecture that poems must have a clever turn roughly halfway through. Then I read Mary Oliver. I’ve been bewitched by the seeming ease of Billy Collins’ poems of the everyday. And then read Seamus Heaney. I’ve loved the strong rhyme of Edna St Vincent Millay (and Emily Dickenson for that matter) until I read “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop. Just when you think you know what a poem should be, you discover it’s something else entirely. It’s this diversity and discovery that keeps me coming back to poets I haven’t yet read, poets like e e cummings, Paul Muldoon—and Wendy Cope (below.)
I’ve visited Geneva multiple times and the Valais just to its northeast—the land of Frankenstein’s “laboratory” in Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Even with my familiarity with the actual landscape, Shelley’s descriptions lack the sensory detail that should have illuminated Victor Frankenstein’s childhood home, the village, the laboratory, or really any of the cultural aspects of the region. I was able to picture Victor’s nights floating in a boat on Lake Leman but I daresay, I probably would have formed similar images had it been Lake Winnipesaukee, Loch Ness, or Lake McConaughy.
The epistolary device of the narrator, Robert Walton, recounting the story to his beloved sister showed some early promise—but really, it only creates an unnecessary distance between the reader and the suspense. The “lovely Elizabeth” is absolute cardboard and underdeveloped. So much of the story requires the reader to believe the illogical, even beyond the existence of a monster fabricated out of non-living materials, who is a misunderstood, lovelorn wretch. Would Walton really continue to relish the friendship of a person who revealed such a terrible history to him? If it had been so easy to create him, surely Victor Frankenstein could have endeavored to kill the monster—or create another scientific solution that could.
I don’t like the message this story suggests. It doesn’t foster tolerance or make readers less likely to ostracize. I refuse to sympathize with either the monster or Victor Frankenstein. Owing to the muted and distanced tension, I never felt the least bit frightened. 1 star.
After a DNF, a 1-star classic, and two challenging poetry books, I really needed a comfort read. So I turned to my non-fiction art history list and picked up Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux, a biography of Paul Gaughin. This makes for a superb audiobook as long as you have access to the accompanying PDF. The book is not focused on the artist’s paintings, but rather on the very complex artist himself. Prideaux sets the record straight, putting Gaughin’s relationships with young Polynesian girls in the context of the indigenous culture of that time, as well as his interactions with the women in his life. She allows the reader to measure the man against their own moral yardsticks. She sees his faults and lets us see them too. The Polynesia years were not my favorite part of the biography. Instead, I found his childhood in Peru with an independent mother, attending Catholic school in France, working as a stockbroker and marrying a free-thinking woman who refused him sex to avoid babies, more compelling. His one life reads like several separate lives. Astonishing! 5 stars.
Remember when, hoping for an Oreo, your gran handed you a meringue. It melted on your tongue, disappeared. No crumbs, no extravagant bursts of chocolatey goodness, no crunch or contrast. But when it vanished like a fog, you remembered its elegant sweetness, its depth, its complex, almost magical texture? The Orange and Other Poems by Wendy Cope, is just such a meringue!
Holding open the hardcover volume, the size and weight of a graham cracker, I thought, “these aren’t weighty enough.” Cope begins with a few love poems. They capture that exuberance of new love and sometimes too the many frustrations of worn love. But I’ve read Heaney, Pound, Harjo, Angelou, Ginsberg, and so many others, whose words jolt, squeeze, twist, and shake. Cope’s felt too meager to print on a page and send out into the harsh world. But the melting was just beginning, I had barely tasted their goodness. Among the love poems, “Flowers” is a standout, inspired by a lover’s failed attempt to bring the personae flowers. Both its concept and execution are gorgeously poetic. Interspersed in this collection are haikus, funny word play poems, short rhymes, and fleeting thoughts written down. Then, the poet focuses on people: a woman who is perceived as many different characters depending on her phase of life; an unfortunate child; a teacher; old school chums; men huddled in banter. Of these, “Tich Miller” is the standout. Cope rounds out her collection with a half-dozen poems that seem to articulate more nuanced human emotions. Of these, the feminist strains of “He Tells Her (for Ruth B)” spoke to me. I loved this collection and although very scant (so much so I deducted a star,) it made me feel, and smile, and ache. (BTW, my library had a copy; hope yours does too.) 4 stars.
My last read was As You Like It, William Shakespeare’s comedy written in 1599. I found this play rather corny and nonsensical. Its themes are love-at-first-sight, power grabs and inheritance, envy and desire, and trickery. Gender switching plays a role and the love between cousins Rosalind and Celia seems more than that of close friends. The entire story is dependent on happy accidents, most of which aren’t the least bit plausible. Harold Bloom thought Rosalind was one of Shakespeare’s greatest female characters; I can’t imagine why. For most of the play she is in disguise as a man, Ganymede, and engaged in an illogical plot to convince Orlando (who she adores) to fall out of love with herself (Rosalind.) 2.5 stars.
You can still take part in the 2026 Read Good Challenge and/or Savidge Prompts. Both of these challenges are available on StoryGraph.
Read Good Challenge—read a book with a food word in the title.
My Choice: The Orange and Other Poems, Wendy Cope.Savidge Prompts—FIRST (any first. First in the title, first in a series, author’s debut, etc)
My Choice: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s debut novel. In Feb, I will finish two other debuts: The Artist and the Feast, by Lucy Steeds, and The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf—and possibly a third, Bend in the River, by Michael Banks.
What book started off your reading year?
Are you superstitious about starting your year off with something great?