The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, epigraph of Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, epigraph of Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
Happy new year, everyone!
Shall we begin by checking our list? LET'S.
The blue text denotes titles I've read.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place - Terry Tempest Williams
When Women Were Birds ("My Mother's Journals") - Terry Tempest Williams
There but for the - Ali Smith
Rules of Civility - Amor Towles
Dominance - Will Lavender
One Day - David Nicholls
What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty
A Small Hotel - Robert Olen Butler
The Borrower - Rebecca Makkai
Sister - Rosamund Lupton
Someday This Will Be Funny - Lynne Tillman
The Happiness Project - Gretchen Rubin
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple
When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine - Monica Wood
Tell the Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt
Shout Her Lovely Name - Natalie Serber
The Red House - Mark Haddon
Seating Arrangements - Maggie Shipstead
Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
Calling Invisible Women - Jeanne Ray
Both of Us: My Life With Farrah - Ryan O'Neal
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women - Nora Ephron
Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman
The Empty Glass - J.I. Baker
Tigers in Red Weather - Liza Klaussmann
The Secret Life of Objects - Dawn Raffel
Battleborn - Claire Vaye Watkins
Dare Me - Megan Abbott
Maya Angelou poetry
That... leaves a lot to be covered. *gulp* Press on, then!
Shall we begin by checking our list? LET'S.
The blue text denotes titles I've read.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place - Terry Tempest Williams
When Women Were Birds ("My Mother's Journals") - Terry Tempest Williams
There but for the - Ali Smith
Rules of Civility - Amor Towles
Dominance - Will Lavender
One Day - David Nicholls
What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty
A Small Hotel - Robert Olen Butler
The Borrower - Rebecca Makkai
Sister - Rosamund Lupton
Someday This Will Be Funny - Lynne Tillman
The Happiness Project - Gretchen Rubin
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple
When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine - Monica Wood
Tell the Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt
Shout Her Lovely Name - Natalie Serber
The Red House - Mark Haddon
Seating Arrangements - Maggie Shipstead
Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
Calling Invisible Women - Jeanne Ray
Both of Us: My Life With Farrah - Ryan O'Neal
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women - Nora Ephron
Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman
The Empty Glass - J.I. Baker
Tigers in Red Weather - Liza Klaussmann
The Secret Life of Objects - Dawn Raffel
Battleborn - Claire Vaye Watkins
Dare Me - Megan Abbott
Maya Angelou poetry
That... leaves a lot to be covered. *gulp* Press on, then!
Here we have Maggie Shipstead's Seating Arrangements, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2012, as triumphantly mentioned on the front cover.
And again, a story of upper-class Harvard families with their golf clubs and "ironic" wearing of seersucker trousers and various familial dramatis personae. This time, the story centres around 60-something Winn Van Meter, father of the pregnant and soon-to-be married Daphne and her sister, recently childless Livia: he is the ruler of a generally exceptionally estrogen-filled family.
Blahhhhh.
I don't know if Mom had some sort of secret desire to be a khaki-sporting, polo-playing, Hamptons beach house-owning member of the upper crust, but if so, this book would have been right up her alley. I, on the other hand, found it dry and honestly, not particularly funny. Perhaps if I were American and understood the notions of the "Harvard man" and the country club set I might have aligned my constant eye-rolling with that of the main character and shared in his frustration. Unfortunately, I was more frustrated at the characters because of how they were written. I found them very one-dimensional; the style of the novel switches from person to person (though centres on the Van Meter nuclear family themselves) and doesn't serve the characters or the plot as a narrative device.
The bits I did like about the book, though, were the snippets of inner monologue/Winn's musings directly related to family and the passage of time:
"Though he never wished to indulge in nostalgia, Winn would would not have been surprised to see shades of himself stretching down the railing: the boy beside his father, the collegian nipping from a flask passed among his friends, the bachelor with a series of dimly recalled women, the honeymooner, the young father holding one small girl and then two."
What an image. The quick flashes through time are what tend to come to me nowadays as my life starts to become cyclical: trips back to Canada to visit family and friends revive old conversations and ghosts from the past, while people and places around London begin to grow comfortably familiar. I see myself walking through this world in stages, and all the way I envision who I was, am, and will become when I re-enter these images time-stamped in my brain. When I walk across the courtyard of Somerset House (my favourite place in London) in five years, I will see the almost-Londoner who skated beside a big Christmas tree last year, and the year before. I will see the wide-eyed Canadian girl who wandered through that same courtyard in a daze years ago, fresh from a move to the other side of the Atlantic ocean. I will see a woman in the thrill of the moment, enjoying exhibitions on Blondie and The Jam and revelling in it all. And as such, I wonder if my mother did the same.
And again, a story of upper-class Harvard families with their golf clubs and "ironic" wearing of seersucker trousers and various familial dramatis personae. This time, the story centres around 60-something Winn Van Meter, father of the pregnant and soon-to-be married Daphne and her sister, recently childless Livia: he is the ruler of a generally exceptionally estrogen-filled family.
Blahhhhh.
I don't know if Mom had some sort of secret desire to be a khaki-sporting, polo-playing, Hamptons beach house-owning member of the upper crust, but if so, this book would have been right up her alley. I, on the other hand, found it dry and honestly, not particularly funny. Perhaps if I were American and understood the notions of the "Harvard man" and the country club set I might have aligned my constant eye-rolling with that of the main character and shared in his frustration. Unfortunately, I was more frustrated at the characters because of how they were written. I found them very one-dimensional; the style of the novel switches from person to person (though centres on the Van Meter nuclear family themselves) and doesn't serve the characters or the plot as a narrative device.
The bits I did like about the book, though, were the snippets of inner monologue/Winn's musings directly related to family and the passage of time:
"Though he never wished to indulge in nostalgia, Winn would would not have been surprised to see shades of himself stretching down the railing: the boy beside his father, the collegian nipping from a flask passed among his friends, the bachelor with a series of dimly recalled women, the honeymooner, the young father holding one small girl and then two."
What an image. The quick flashes through time are what tend to come to me nowadays as my life starts to become cyclical: trips back to Canada to visit family and friends revive old conversations and ghosts from the past, while people and places around London begin to grow comfortably familiar. I see myself walking through this world in stages, and all the way I envision who I was, am, and will become when I re-enter these images time-stamped in my brain. When I walk across the courtyard of Somerset House (my favourite place in London) in five years, I will see the almost-Londoner who skated beside a big Christmas tree last year, and the year before. I will see the wide-eyed Canadian girl who wandered through that same courtyard in a daze years ago, fresh from a move to the other side of the Atlantic ocean. I will see a woman in the thrill of the moment, enjoying exhibitions on Blondie and The Jam and revelling in it all. And as such, I wonder if my mother did the same.
Winn found himself looking out through the open doors at two young women who wore his daughters' faces and inhabited versions of their bodies but were strangers, too.
I'm afraid I don't have much to offer past a few slightly gripe-y paragraphs. I know that this book won some awards and was very well-received by a number of prominent literary critics, but it just really was not up my alley. (BUT JUST YOU WAIT UNTIL MY NEXT POST!)
My finish here may come off as rather... negative, but I can't help it. I returned to Canada for a week in February and while there, my favourite quote from the book rang loud and clear: "Everything that mattered, that was real, was somewhere across that sheet of ocean, not here in this half-imagined place, this nesting colony for bustling, puff-chested Americans where she, the dark seabird, happened to be breaking a long and uncertain journey."
I love my family and friends in Canada, and to be honest, they are the only things that I deeply miss about the country. But I realized that Canada no longer feels like home to me; this came as a bit of a blow to my Dad, though I think he suspected it. My bedroom felt like a very comfortable hotel room (albeit chock full of my favourite books, which, come to think of it, I do miss as well!) and although I thought of it as the place I might restart my life from after my time in the UK, I know now I cannot bring myself to do it. It's inauthentic. It's not me. Again I remember how much vibrancy my mother had when she was free to do as she wished when she was well in the last few years of her life. I am still striving for that.
But my life is here, in London, across that sheet of ocean.
My finish here may come off as rather... negative, but I can't help it. I returned to Canada for a week in February and while there, my favourite quote from the book rang loud and clear: "Everything that mattered, that was real, was somewhere across that sheet of ocean, not here in this half-imagined place, this nesting colony for bustling, puff-chested Americans where she, the dark seabird, happened to be breaking a long and uncertain journey."
I love my family and friends in Canada, and to be honest, they are the only things that I deeply miss about the country. But I realized that Canada no longer feels like home to me; this came as a bit of a blow to my Dad, though I think he suspected it. My bedroom felt like a very comfortable hotel room (albeit chock full of my favourite books, which, come to think of it, I do miss as well!) and although I thought of it as the place I might restart my life from after my time in the UK, I know now I cannot bring myself to do it. It's inauthentic. It's not me. Again I remember how much vibrancy my mother had when she was free to do as she wished when she was well in the last few years of her life. I am still striving for that.
But my life is here, in London, across that sheet of ocean.