They quote Shakespeare quite a bit, did you know? And make references to things like The Odyssey and Plato’s allegory of the cave. So it’s icing on the cake to happen upon a book club on their blog! And Mr. Mumford himself cites Steinbeck as his favorite writer! I think I’m in love.

So with baby boys on my mind, it’s fitting to write a word or two about Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. It’s written entirely from the perspective of Jack, a five-year-old boy who has been trapped in an 11-by-11-foot room since he was born, along with his mother who was kidnapped and raped by a man he calls Old Nick. Sounds pretty rough, but the whimsy and innocence of Jack’s narration makes it bearable and somehow like a great big adventure. And the tenderness between him and his mother is almost painfully beautiful at times. As Janet Maslin says in her New York Times review, “One of his favorite books is ‘The Runaway Bunny,’ a tale that raises the thought that a mother and child could be separated. That’s still scarier than anything else he can imagine.”

I don’t know if any novel could (or should) be contained entirely within an 11-by-11 room, so I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: they escape, and the second half of the book is about the equally terrifying adventure of adapting to the outside world. The two halves of the novel read almost like different books, the energy is so disparate. I think I preferred the first half, maybe just because it was so unusual and so finely written. I agree with some reviews I’ve read that Jack’s voice can get a bit tiring or too “cutesy,” but I really didn’t mind it all that much, and I found that when all the tightly wound tension of the first half rushed out in a frenzy, the end lost some of its resonance for me.

It’s quite an engaging read — I think I tore through it in about a day — and chilling because it’s similar to a few recent real-life horror stories. Room won or was short-listed for a number of awards, and it’s certainly worth a looksee.

Secondly, I just finished Nabokov’s Pnin, and I don’t get it! Can somebody help me out here? It seems to relate a string of events that happen to dear Professor Pnin, and then he drives off into the sunset. But I’m left wondering where the story was. David Lodge writes in The Guardian that “the stories describe a continuous narrative arc, poignantly tracing Pnin’s quest, which is ultimately frustrated, to find a home, or to make himself ‘at home’ in alien Waindell,” but I didn’t get a very strong sense of quest. (Although now, the word quest draws a strong association in my mind between Pnin and Don Quixote.) Everyone seems to agree that it’s a comedy, but I found it only very mildly so. I’m sure I just didn’t get the jokes.

Lodge continues: “Novel of character, roman à clef, campus novel, epiphanic short story, postmodernist metafiction – Pnin contains elements of all these fictional subgenres, but ultimately it is sui generis, uniquely and quintessentially Nabokovian, having a family resemblance to his other works without being exactly like any of them.” Perhaps this is the cause of my consternation: I can’t quite pin down what this book is supposed to be because it’s so many things at once.

I’ve not stopped reading, at least. Let me tell you a little of what I’ve been up to during my long radio silence.

• Room by Emma Donoghue
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
• Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe edited by Sonny Brewer
• Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
• Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis

Some of these books I enjoyed quite a lot and one or two not so much. I’ll fill you in on the pertinent details in upcoming posts.

And so, since I’ve missed it all, I hope you had a lovely Columbus Day, Halloween, Reformation Day, and All Saints Day. Holla.

I was still dumb.

I thought Romeo and Juliet was drivel, for one thing. And I thought the universe was Jessocentric, for another. (As DFW said in his Kenyon College commencement speech: “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. … Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.”)

But today I was reminded that teenagers are dumb when I read this article in The Rumpus. It’s not a unique phenomenon, teens complaining about the books they have to read for English class, and I’ll concede that most teenagers are not intellectually or emotionally mature enough to appreciate Shakespeare (but God, how passionate I was about my college Shakespeare class; it changed my life). But let’s consider the quote from darling little Olivia Reed: “Current required readings often make students skip the book and go straight to the movie or use Spark Notes to pass the test.” Yes, Olivia, when things in life are too difficult for you, make sure you always take the lazy way out and cheat on the test. That’ll get you far and give you a deep sense of satisfaction.

The article solicits suggestions for modern-day equivalents of current high school reading requirements, contemporary books that would be more engaging and accessible to teens. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about branching out of the canon and exposing kids to great literature that will make lifelong readers of them; one of the article’s commenters is a teacher whose kids are reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and I think that’s amazing. But The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn isn’t accessible? What do they want? Would See Spot Run satisfy them, or would Spark Notes find a new market in children’s literature?

Young Jacob Stroud tries to sound intellectual when he says, “The veil of time often blinds young readers to a book’s meaning.” No, Jacob, being a teenager tends to blind you to what’s actually important in life. Here’s a tip: it may not be you.

As of Monday, the University of Michigan Press has begun serializing two novels on its facebook page, Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s A Spell On the Water and Becky Thacker’s Faithful Unto Death. The online serializations are free and will likely be available until Labor Day, but you can still buy a print or electronic version.

I think the concept is interesting, and I love to see facebook being used in such a creative fashion, but I certainly don’t want to sit at my computer to read a whole novel.

Onward and upward, though, I suppose. We’ll see how it goes.

That said, check out my new tiny piece of fiction over at the always fantastic Requited Journal!

Now I’m headed over to Powell’s Books to spend some gift cards I received for my birthday. There’s a book just waiting for me to fall in love, and I’m going to find it or die trying (it’s that important).

Lots of people on the Interwebs seem to have a problem with the obsessive portrayal of couponers (which I didn’t even know was a thing) and others see early signs of hoarding. They do all seem to have a touch of the OCD, what with their insistence on stacking everything neatly in their carts and then their immaculately organized stockpiles (they all seem to be preparing for some apocalypse). Then they all freak out at the register, afraid their hundreds of coupons will overload the computer, as though the items cannot simply be put back on the shelves. Sure, it would be a stockboy’s nightmare, but these people don’t seem to have any regard for other people’s time (spending an hour and a half at the register, then going back for more stuff when their coupons leave them with an overage) or for other people at all, really, since they love to clear the shelves of an entire item, leaving none for anyone else.

But what really bothers me about these extreme couponers is their attitude toward food. Food should not be an issue of the bottom line. Food is not just fuel. Food is not just about money (I say just because due to the upside-down nature of the machine known as US agribusiness, food that’s bad for us is often cheap, while food that’s good for us is pricey). Food should be about nutrition (extreme couponers fill up their baskets with snack-sized bags of Cheetos and packets of Kool-Aid) and identity and pleasure and relationships, even. To quote Michael Pollan, these couponers don’t seem to spend much time “think[ing] very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.” In an article in The New York Review of Books, he says, “The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just ‘good value’ but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.”

After watching the show, C., worried about money, suggested we do something similar. I flew off the handle. It’s not that I’m opposed to using coupons (I do use them when I have them, but I don’t get the newspaper or have a printer right now, so my coupon access is limited), and Lord knows I love a good deal. But I didn’t see any produce in the couponers’ carts. I didn’t see anything fresh at all, really. I don’t know when they buy fruits and vegetables and dairy products, but I don’t envision them browsing at their local farmers’ markets. I’d love to pass along to the couponers Marion Nestle’s guide to shopping at supermarkets.

Pollan recently asked New York Times readers for their personal rules for eating, and he posted a list of some of his favorites (he received more than 2,500 responses). One reader said, “Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it,” and another quoted his Italian grandmother as saying, “It’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor.”

I wish I’d never seen the show, but the damage is done. I think I need a grapefruit.

Eat well, my friends.

So today I picked up Saul Bellow’s Herzog from the library, and so far I am not enjoying it, but I can see myself falling under its strange spell. Irving Howe says, “Bellow offers not a full-scale characterization but a full-length exposure of a state of being. We do not see Herzog acting in the world, we are captive in the world of Herzog.” Perhaps I shall become a captive. For now, I am reading onward cautiously.

Stay cool out there, space cowboys.

You may also accompany it with a cup of coffee, black, fresh from your french press. Oh, and you’ll need a spot of sun, a breeze or two. You’re welcome.

An Indication I May Be an Optimist

Inside my condo, books and magazines
sit in unstable piles, dust bunnies swirl
under my kitchen table, letters from my
credit union demand immediate action
to prevent repossession or foreclosure,
and some kind of black crud is growing
in my toilet.
In Washington, politicians do nothing
as usual, except blame the opposition.
My TV mumbles of some celebrity
having another affair. Unemployment
remains in double digits. I wake
a half-dozen times each night to pee,
and almost nothing I eat tastes good.
Yet, this afternoon, I’m standing
in our courtyard, just standing here
breathing, air smelling of new leaves
and the promise of flowers, and I’m smiling,
eyes closed, sun on my eyelids like warm
loving fingers as I glide through the belly
of this ridiculous, gorgeous day.