Hey! I’ve probably mentioned this, but I’m in Canada for a lot of the summer, because my mother just had another knee replacement (moms, right?), so my reading habits are firmly in Rural Canadian mode. Which is to say: plenty of re-reading, and finding out how successful my familial book recommendations have been recently (very!) This, of course, is also why you don’t know how I feel about the new season of The Newsroom yet. I hear it’s a little better, but I sure hope it isn’t. Being a little better would ruin the experience, you know? Then it would just be a mediocre show. On to the books.
Before I talk about our main book this week (Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee), I wanted to let you know that I just finished Bring Up the Bodies this morning, and am in dire straits as a result. Now, I thought Wolf Hall was the stronger of the two, but mainly because it’s in Wolf Hall that Mantel gets to really create Cromwell for us, front-ending his childhood and his marriage and his relationship with Wolsey, etc., which is her really extraordinary achievement. This is excellent, but it’s more “here is the second-finest novel about the Tudors currently in existence,” and less “I must move to England and worship at your feet.” But now, you see, I’m dreading/anticipating the third. There’s such a weird pathos in knowing what’s going to happen, right? I mean, HISTORICAL SPOILERS, Cromwell is going to push Anne of Cleves on Henry, and it’s going to cost him his head, and I’m pretty fond of him at this point. I wish I could send him a kitten poster. Or just rock him in my arms and say “tell me about your day.” Or…more. Did anyone else develop really specific feelings for Cromwell? Or is he my Teen Wolf [Hall]? Sorry.
I’m really here to talk about Jeff Himmelman’s book.
It was excerpted in Vanity Fair, I read the excerpt, I enjoyed the excerpt, I did what publishers hope people will do after reading excerpted books in Vanity Fair. And then, after gulping the entire thing in a sitting, I sent it to my father and my uncle and my mother and one of my other uncles. The same copy, I should mention. There’s nothing that brings divorced sixty-somethings together like having to responsibly co-parent a large hardcover about Ben Bradlee.
It’s tremendous, is what I’m trying to say. It’s really great. I feel like we should hear more about it. It’s just relentlessly engaging. And, as my Dad said, “I almost put it down after he finished talking about Watergate, because who cares what the Post did after Watergate, but then we were into Janet Cooke and the whole Sally Quinn shitshow.”
(It’s a real shitshow. You don’t want to miss it.)
I was interacting socially with an editor at Vanity Fair, and attempted to extract a promise that VF would immediately commission a piece on “the Yoga Boys,” because, Jesus, have you ever heard anything which seems more like there should be a really long piece in VF about it with lots of pictures and anecdotes?
Seriously.
What I found particularly enjoyable, though, apart from the ROLLICKING TRIP THROUGH 20TH CENTURY HISTORY AND JOURNALISM and the sex parts (JFK kept trying to get up on Bradlee’s second wife) was Himmelman’s obvious effort to write a good and correct book. He was coming in with a lot of hero worship, Bradlee gave him access to everything, and the picture of Ben Bradlee you get seems to have the right number of liver spots.
Oh, and he also produces really clear evidence that Woodward and Bernstein got a member of the grand jury to talk to them (the judge having previously stated that the only reason they weren’t put in jail for jury tampering was that no one actually responded to their entreaties), not to bury the lede.
The other book I want to briefly mention is Robert J. Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment, which lives in my old room, and I tend to find myself reading it whenever I spend more than a few nights there. He’s one of my favourite Canadian SF writers, and this one is just exquisitely Robert J. Sawyer, and about medicine and souls and great apes and killer computers and marriage and predicts FreshDirect (it was written a few decades ago.)
Okay, what are you reading this week?
Works Referenced:
Jeff Himmelman, Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee (Indiebound | Amazon)
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Indiebound | Amazon)
Robert Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment (Indiebound | Amazon)
Tags: ben bradlee, books, hilary mantel, jeff himmelman, reading with nicole, this week in reading
I just read Deenie for the first time! I think I would have found parts of it confusing as a kid (in the same way that I found things about Beezus & Ramona confusing, like their spelling of “cooky” and what on earth tiddlywinks was), but aw, Deenie.
I was just reading the wikipedia entry for “The Terminal Experiment” (because I am a spoiler-philic monster, and, really, if knowing how it ends is going to diminish a book, how good was it in the first place, which is all to say SPOILERS BELOW, I suppose, if you even believe in that), and this sentence makes me laugh, lots, still:
“Peter is hurt and angry when his beloved wife, Cathy, admits that she had sex with Hans Larsen, whom neither of them respects.”
Just started Matt Bell’s “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods” (which is CRAZEBALLS awesome), and I picked up Helen Garner’s “The Spare Room” from the library about twenty minutes ago. Also I would like to go on record as expressing solidarity re: Cromwell feelings. ALL THE FEELINGS, about, like, everything in those books.
Oh, I REALLY want to read that, but my library doesn’t have it. Worth buying new, you think?
I just started King Kong Theory in preparation for Book Club (ahhh, excited!), and it is fist-pump inducing and EXACTLY what I need right now, so thank you so much Nicole. I was in this nasty little pit of self-loathing last week and here comes this kickass French lady to shake me by the shoulders and say “GIRL. (FILLE?) Ideal feminine beauty is a fucking stacked game, and we ugly ladies, we who are queer or slutty or celebate or prostitutes or otherwise DOIN IT RONG, we can still desire and kick ass and march in the fucking street and resist this bullshit”. All of which I knew already, but it helps to be reminded. I will stop now, and save this topic for book club!
I am also reading Clarise Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, which is just terrific. Dense and stream-of-conscious-y and full of fabulous quotable lines.
Also, does the third Cromwell book have a release date yet? I want to start reading them, but I don’t think I can bear to finish without a conclusion at least in sight.
I’m reading George Eliot’s letters and remembering how much I like reading letters. Anyone have suggestions for great collections?
I also recently reread a couple of the Foundation books because they were available in my library’s ebook collection. Wow, they are so badly written! I always thought I turned away from sci-fi because I was a shallowly pretentious teenager but it’s possible that I was reading really clunky sci-fi and actually making a reasonable assessment of its literary merit.
I really liked Winston and Clementine, and my mother loved Noel Coward’s. I want to read Willa Cather’s but feel a teensy bit of guilt knowing she never wanted them published.
Samuel Beckett’s letters! They are very funny and both dark and reassuring/encouraging at the same time.
I liked James Thurber’s letters, if you can get ahold of them. I think the collection is out of print.
Check out “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters.” Oh I love those girls.
Somehow I had never read The Handmaid’s Tale because I had read the 2-page summary of the plot in The Great American Bathroom Book* at a young age. Devoured it this weekend and found it so, so relevant to 2013 and the increasing reproductive rights restrictions in many parts of the country. Also, Margaret Atwood can WRITE (which everybody knows on a vague level but I at least am prone to forgetting until I read something she’s written and her words haunt me at night).
*The Great American Bathroom Book had at least three volumes, and contained trivia and literature summaries. A must for any child’s bathroom– increase their knowledge on the go!
We were Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader people when I was a child, but I also gained a wealth of knowledge whose source I always have to lie about.
Re. Margaret Atwood–if you haven’t devoured her poetry yet, I highly recommend it!
I am catching up on my Vanity Fair’s and read the excerpt from a (unpublished? I couldn’t tell) biography of Ava Gardner and loved it and was bummed I couldn’t figure out if it was an actual book or not.
In book-length things, I am reading Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, and while it is relevant to me as an introvert and is generally very interesting, I’m starting to wonder if I’m actually going to get anything out of it – so far she’s discussed introverism/alone-ness as being vital to creativity, but I’m not creative, and now she’s moved on to discussing raising children who are introverts, which a) I’ve already got that down, you know, being one and all and b) children are a far, far glimmer in my eye right now.
So if anyone’s read it: Does she ever actually discuss how to make the most of your introverism as a normal, 20something lady who wants to lean in while leaning out?
I read it a while ago so I may be a bit fuzzy, but I believe she does get into introverts in the workplace and as leaders, which I found interesting.
Nicole, I really dig these columns. You’re helping make my Amazon wish list 8 miles long, and I love it. I am reading “Homeward Bound”, whose author is coincidentally interviewed on the Hairpin today! I like it so far; it’s helping me suss out my own weird feelings about work and home life and why on earth I really want chickens when I also think chickens are kinda gross.
And re: Cromwell… I too found him tremendously endearing! So did Caitlin Moran: https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/339470283…
I haven’t been able to stop talking about Homeward Bound–it 50% helped me figure out my weird feelings about things and 50% gave me more weird feelings about some things I hadn’t previously interrogated OR I felt special snowflake-y about. (Of course I love to knit! But I learned to knit from my mother and my grandmother, so I’m DIFFERENT and would’ve been doing it anyway without a trend, right…?)
Oh, and 10% made me talk about anti-vacc people and nothing else for a week.
After the introduction, I actually thought about putting it down because I knew it would churn up weird feelings about things I haven’t explored yet (and would probably make me angsty, as a lot of “work/life balance” writing tends to do). BUT I’m glad that it has stuck with you so strongly, that makes me more excited to finish it 🙂
Yeah, keep going. It does pick at some things that maybe we’d prefer left unpicked but I think she comes to a fairly satisfying conclusion.
(I love this book and am pushing it on everyone in my life, whether they care about New Domesticity or not. Especially if not.)
I also just finished Bring Up the Bodies and share your feelings of dread/protectiveness toward Cromwell. He’s a wonderful creation and I’ll miss being inside his head once the third book is out and read.
I’m also starting to populate a list of fictional works that rehabilitate somewhat maligned historical figures. Of course, the Wolf Hall books and Robert Graves’ books about Claudius come to mind right away. Anyone have more suggestions?
Gore Vidal’s “Burr”?
So I take tai chi classes with Richard B. Wright, whose book Clara Callan won the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. He’s a really nice guy and we chat a couple of times a week, so I figured I should read his books. But I didn’t start with Clara Callan and now I kind of wish I had. I started with The Teacher’s Daughter. I’m a little past the halfway mark and…it’s okay, but the female main character’s voice just doesn’t feel authentic. The completely horrible male main character’s voice feels real (and thankfully not at all like Richard Wright!), but I just keep thinking “this book would be better if a woman had written it.” Also, I don’t think the editor he had in 1982 was especially good. There are some weird things happening with tense and point of view that might have been stylistic choices but read as mistakes.
Huh, somehow half my comment disappeared! The rest of it was asking if anyone had read Clara Callan. It was written 20 years later than The Teacher’s Daughter, and was certainly much better received, so I’m cautiously optimistic but also a little concerned because the main characters are women.
I just finished Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories and it was so good. I had read The Lottery a few times, mostly in school. The majority of the stories in the collection (maybe all of them?) were written during WWII yet I don’t think the war is ever mentioned and as a result you feel a sense of unease that feels really relatable 60 years later. I started it while traveling and just finished it and would highly recommend it for traveling. Now I need to get back to reading The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes which I only stopped because my Kindle broke. Which means I need to fix my Kindle.
Man, I read those for the first time this year (not The Lottery, I did attend school in the United States), and good God! There is some trenchant feminism in there that I would have benefited from reading in high school. I enjoyed her steadfast refusal to make most of her stories less bleak.
I very carefully took a whole list of books from the cocktail thread to the library on Saturday morning, but I found none of them there. 🙁 So instead I checked out Yael Kohen’s WE KILLED, which was rad, and then today I hunkered down and knocked out four kids/YA books in a row.
I’ve also been making my way slowly through Rebecca Lee’s BOBCAT, recommended by a bookseller who knows my love of the Alice Munro genre of short stories. It’s pretty good so far!
If you are firmly in Rural Canada reading mode, I have been firmly in new-job-new-state-new-stress-level reading mode, which means I’ve been reading…nothing, not even a little bit, not even at all. So it’s really kind of a feat that in the past week I purchased The Spare Room, King Kong Theory from Emily Books, AND WOLF HALL, which is HUGE and a little DAUNTING but AWESOME and I am going to CONQUER IT/enjoy it.
It’s so good so far. Hilary Mantel did anyone ever tell you you’re good with words? Hoo-ee. WORRRDS.
Anyway this is a comment about Wolf Hall and a comment to thank Nicole for getting me to read again.
You just bumped up Any Robert J Sawyer At All higher on my to-read list! Thanks, Nicole! I have a few of his books and read the summaries but keep not reading them. I’ve been afraid they’d turn out to be of the great-ideas-terrible-writing school of SF, and I haven’t been up for that since reading Childhood’s End in the spring.
Currently I’m trying to finish a re-read of Order of the Phoenix because of podcasting reasons, but I’m also reading the summer issue of Tin House and trying to connect with the poetry.
I really like Robert J Sawyer! Which ones do you have?
Let’s see… Flashforward, Calculating God, and Factoring Humanity. Have any suggestion where to start?
Flashforward is the only one of those three that I’ve read. It’s a pretty entertaining story, and a quick read, but it might feel a little dated now because the future Sawyer envisions is in the mid-2000s-ish.
I just started reading Jim Gaffigan’s “Dad is Fat” last night. Whatever, I’m lowbrow. It seems pretty funny, if a little “traditional” re gender roles.
I just finished reading The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls & thought it was beautifully written (good enough that I read the better part of it in a day), but wouldn’t recommend it if you have a low threshold for a) the emotional/sexual awakening of a well-to-do white girl or b) horses. I just started The Middlesteins, but I’m not far in enough in to have an opinion yet.
Re: the Mantel books, I read both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, but really struggled with them. I felt a little bit like I was I was in high school English class & was doing assigned reading. You know? Like, you really do read it, but you struggle to retain any details and when your teacher is going over things the next day you start to worry that you read the wrong thing because you don’t remember any of the things they’re explaining? I did better with Bring Up the Bodies because I had more of a baseline re: who people and places were… But I think I might just have to get my Tudor fix by reading the YA Tudor fantasy novel that goodreads keeps recommending to me (it’s called Witchstruck!)
I think that’s a side effect of their being so slow burn -you get completely immersed in all the names and plotting, but when you come up for air you realise the books are absolutely enormous and god knows how Mantel kept track of anything, let alone a reader.
This might be the most embarassing thing I’ve posted on the internet: but I found it semi-helpful that I had watched the first season of The Tutors before reading Wolf Hall. Not that the show is accurate or even good, but I had faces to put to the names to help keep them straight and a vague outline of where things were going.
Ok, everybody. I recently finished I Capture the Castle, and why didn’t anyone tell me that We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Shirley Jackson taking that book and being like, “There, I fixed it. This book is perfect now.”
I mean!
Is that what that is?! I was recently berated for not having read We Have Always Lived In The Castle, and wrote it down for the future, but is it really a riff on I Capture The Castle? Because if so I will simply take the day off from life and read it right now.
So, no need to read I Capture The Castle?
We Have Always Lived In The Castle was indeed perfection in book form.
I Capture The Castle is also lovely in its own right.
No, definitely, you should. It is utterly charming. I have seen many recommendations for it, and am happy to add my own. WHALITC is not like some weird scene for scene rewrite of ICTC or anything. I was happily reading along im ICTC, and then I hit a line where the protagonist resolves to be kinder to everyone, and I thought, as one does, “I must be kinder to Uncle Julian,” and then I saw certain other parallels. The lack of a “Literature That Appeals Specifically to Me” course of study is the thing that kept me out of a career in the academy, but such a ham-fisted undergrad paper I could write about this!
Like, I love the image of Shirley Jackson picking up this sweet little coming of age story, loving the main character and her voice, and being like, “Cool story. But needs more amanita phalloides,” and then writing it.
I love that everyone here appears to be having a Shirley Jackson week. I’m halfway through The Haunting of Hill House and it is SO creepy and perfect and why didn’t anyone tell me about all the lesbian subtext and I don’t want it to ever end.
Plus, I LOVE I Capture the Castle, so now I’m extra excited for We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Spoilers!!
I am not a history person and I did not know that Cromwell gets his head chopped off 🙁
I am aware it’s a little ridiculous to call spoilers on historical events, but still.
It’s so confusing! I mean, it’s clear from the outside that he’s conniving and Not Very Nice, but inside his head everything is perfectly necessary and natural. I love the bits about the Princess/Lady Mary.
I’m currently reading the proof of Laura Lippman’s newest standalone (due out in February) – loving it, as I almost always do.
Before that I read Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments and wondered why she just can’t write all the books in the whole world because Attachments and Eleanor & Park are both basically perfect.
I am commenting for the first time despite being on my phone at work event to say that I fell madly in love with Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall and have not recovered yet.