Gardening and Bathroom Lit

You spend so much of your life in bathroom, it's only logical to have decent stash of books to keep yourself distracted.

In a recent article in The Atlantic Wire, Margaret Atwood shared her usual media diet — that is, a complete report of where and when she gets her information during the day. The article had Atwood’s telltale humor and usual sense of derision (“there’s nothing except food and drink that I can’t live without,” she remarks casually, “I take these questions literally”), but what I found interesting is what she had to say about a particular kind of reading we all take part in, but rarely talk about — the one we do in the bathroom. As Atwood defines it, “[b]athroom reading is a certain kind of reading–episodic, but encouraging first thing in the morning. The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you.”

As Margaret Atwood suggests, I usually keep something episodic or anthologized to read in the bathroom, like a magazine or a short story collection, so that I can savour it a few pages at a time without loosing the thread (unless I’m reading something particularly gripping, or that I need to finish quickly, in which case that follows goes into the bathroom with me). I’ve found Lapham’s Quarterly has done that job wonderfully in the past, because it’s basically a collection of quotations from various sources about a certain subject. By picking up the issue on Celebrity (Winter 2011), for instance, you could be reading a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Et tu, Brute?”) during one visit to the loo, and an extract from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (“Stars are ageless, aren’t they?”) on another.

Recently, however, I’ve been keeping a very special volume at hand: Our Life in Gardens, by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. The book is halfway between a gardening handbook and a memoir; each chapter is concerned with a particular plant (with beautiful accompanying illustrations by Bobbi Angel) and describes its characteristics and and specific needs, but it also explores any special attachment the authors have to it, like when they started growing it, where they keep it in their garden, and who gave them their first plant. It’s a treasure trove of fascinating trivia about gardening and flowers — especially for someone as poorly versed in the arts of horticulture as I am. For instance, it’s interesting to know that when you eat artichokes (also broccoli and cauliflower), you’re eating the plant’s immature flower buds, or that a biennal is not a plant that flowers every other year, but an annual that takes two years to build up enough root and leaf in order to flower once.

I’ve always found something oddly poetic about botanicals. Maybe it’s the names — both in common and latinized form they sound so beautiful. For example, there’s the “floxglove”, the most common of which is the digitalis purperea, called that way because you will find you finger fits perfectly in one of its cupped flowers. You just have to think of the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King to find an example of a list of plant names used to create mesmerizing lyricism and simple precision. There’s definitely something vague and majestic that relates literature to gardening. Robin Lane Fox, classicist and author of such well-respected books as The Classical World and Travelling Heroes, seems to embody that relation; he has also been the gardening columnist for the Financial Times for the last 40 years. “A thoughtful gardener,” Fox explains in a video tour of his Oxfordshire gardens, “thinks carefully about which plant to choose. She then thinks, where shall I put it? What will it go well with? And she thinks above all: What will it like when its in the garden? And as it develops, she looks at it and thinks of a range of associations; maybe it’s come from a great friend, passed down through the family, maybe it’s connected with paintings, art, poetry that one knows. The plant takes on quite a different dimension to your eye.” For instance, the orange flowers tumbling down the gardens steps aren’t just orange flowers for Mr. Fox; they’re hellenium, the hair of Helen of Troy, who started the Trojan war, and, as a classical scholar, he has to have them there in honour of Homer. Talk about living with poetry.

So you now you see the range of wonderful associations and discoveries opened up by a complete embracing of the art of bathroom lit. Who would’ve thought I could skip from Margaret Atwood’s media diet to great book on gardening? That’s why I highly encourage you to live dangerously and try reading something new and exciting next time you lock yourself in the bathroom. A word of warning, however: you may find yourself staying in it for longer than you wanted to.

The Best Online Book Coverage, Made Better

"A new chapter for guardian.co.uk/books"

The biggest piece of book-related news this week was the publication of the late David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. I’ve already discussed the first sentence, which had been published online, so I won’t talk about the book any more. Suffice to say that it received what appears to be generally positive reviews, considering the difficulty of both criticizing an unfinished book and untangling the fiction from Wallace’s personal life, which has been much discussed since his death. The best review I read was by Emily Cooke, published in The Millions, entitled “The Burden of Meaningfulness”.

But what really attracted my attention this week in the book world was not, in fact, any book in particular, but rather a new step in the evolution of how books are discussed online. The Guardian’s Books website, in my opinion already the best books website out there, has just renewed itself with a new “incarnation”. The change in appearance is very subtle: the same handy purple toolbar is at the top to access the various sections of the website, but the top stories are now given more attention, with a large section, freed from the rest of the page’s content, and a bigger image (this has always been one thing Guardian Books has always done very well: assigning various images to all of their articles, and not only images of books, making their articles shine individually). A clickable arrow allows you to scroll to other top stories, allowing each article its own space to breath and more time to last on the front page, which is important because the website has a lot of new content every day. The rest of the organization of the front page has remained unchanged — latest news, Guardian Bookshop, Most Viewed articles, latest blogposts, etc. — except for a central rubric entitled “Talking Points” with four sections marked with new symbols: “Hot Topics”, “Comment & debate”, “Tips, links, & suggestions”, “Search, star-rate, & review”.

That’s where you’ll find the website’s most significant (and groundbreaking?) change: Guardian Books is now hooked up with a database of 8 million books published in English. This means you can search for virtually any book you like and see everything The Guardian has written about it. You can also rate the books, write your own review, add it to a favourite’s list, or suggest the book to the editors so they can cover it. The only issue I have found is that the database provides individual publications, like searching through a giant bookstore catalogue, which means searching a classic gives you multiple results, one for each edition. This is problematic insofar as the content on the website is not usually specific to a book’s edition, but to the book itself, no matter what incarnation. So it might be a little bit frustrating to find out what’s been written on The Master and Margarita, because you get five pages of results, and all of them are the same book.

Guardian Books is no longer just a newspaper website with good content, it has become a community for book lovers. To a degree, that’s what it already was, although I don’t think they had planned it that way. The website has a lot of very active readers, who comment with much caustic verve and wit on nearly everything on the website, providing hours of unexpected pleasure for anyone who happens to scroll down past an article and into the “comments” section. Indeed, the most popular articles can muster over a hundred of them in very little time. The Guardian has recently proved how this potentially annoying participation — comments on YouTube, for instance, seem to be increasingly idiotic and exasperating — can be turned into a strength when they asked readers to suggest the best books of continental European countries in a series entitled “World literature tour”. Now they have definitely maximized the potential of their readership by tapping directly into its knowledge base, asking readers what they should be reading and covering, and allowing them to express themselves more freely on a topic they take so seriously: books.

The editors of Guardian Books, I think, are therefore really helping literature to exist and develop online, because they’re making a creative space for readers to share and discuss their opinions and insights. The internet has often been described as lethal to books — replacing ink and paper with screens, shortening your attention span, shifting the reader’s attention away from the book itself to the merely book-related —; but it’s clear that the Web 2.0 can inject a good deal of vitality into the book world by allowing readers to come together, and giving books — new and old, good and bad — the space and time to thrive outside of the reading per se. 

The Craft of First Lines

Is it as easy to judge a book by its first line as it is to judge it by its cover? Speaking of covers, this is a really beautiful one: simple and stunning.

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King will shortly be coming out. I won’t be reading it, at least not soon, but I remain greatly intrigued by the author. David Foster Wallace suffered from severe clinical depression for most of his life, and hanged himself in 2008. He is widely recognized as one of the most original and prominent American writers of his generation. If you’re interested, there’s a very good Charlie Rose interview with Wallace, dating from 1997, which showcases Wallace’s intelligence quite vividly. Watch it here.

The opening sentence of The Pale King was released online a couple of weeks ago in The Millions. It looks like this:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Now, I haven’t read much of Wallace’s work, but it seems quite clear to me that these opening lines are almost perfect. The first word creates a movement and a direction, as the reader is immediately drawn into what the protagonist sees. The following descriptions have an uncertain beauty to them (“blacktop graphs”, “canted rust”, “tobacco-brown” and so on) which mirrors the imperfect beauty of the landscape being described. But the language is still luscious; take the “weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water”, which is such a gorgeous image, bursting with truth and life. The details root the vision in the moment and place, and yet the movement introduced with the first word continues throughout with the introduction of “the place beyond the windbreak”, a destination, of sorts, or maybe just a kind of mirage, “shimmer[ing] shrilly in the a.m. heat”, a place you’d like to get to but cannot. I just used a “you” there on purpose — the inclusion of the “you” at the end of the sentence is brilliant, throwing the reader’s gaze, which had been wandering past all those weeds and into the distance, right back to him/her and his/her personal, sensuous experience. It all ends with the simile of “a mother’s soft hand on your cheek”, which is at once modest and universal. Of course, there’s also that long enumeration, which may put off some readers (I know I sometimes unconsciously skip over lists when I read) but which, I think, really brings this piece of writing to life. Lists are a strange literary tool, with a kind of hypnotic power, relevant in this case since The Pale King is supposed to have boredom as one of its themes. I am reminded, for instance, of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, which is so potent at conjuring what it enumerates. Lists offer the most perfect form of realism, because they can’t leave anything out.

Lists can be really interesting and poetic, I swear. Even Umberto Eco says so.

Looking at the first sentence of Wallace (especially in isolation, without everything that follows) has got me thinking about the first lines in books and how tricky they are. Many people will tell you first lines are an essential part of books, and you can often tell a good book by the quality of its first sentence. There are loads of examples of fine first sentences, but I think the incontestable master is Gabriel García Márquez, who consistently begins his novels with elegant, thoughtful, fascinating, and memorable lines. Take the famous first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Here’s the first sentence of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, equally delicious, although I found the novel itself a little disappointing: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Or have a look at the first sentence of Love in the Time of Cholera, which is so contemplative, full of quiet potential: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” A master of the craft of first lines, there is no doubt.

As the examples above illustrate, good first sentences must, I think, must bring the reader in media res, that is, in the middle of things — and here, we return to Homer, who begins his Iliad and Odyssey in a similar fashion. Beginning your story this way ignites curiosity in the reader, who will naturally jump to the next sentence to answer the questions which arise out of the first. Ian McEwan usually writes unremarkable first sentences, but I think his opening for On Chesil Beach was an exception. It’s pitch perfect, albeit a tad tortuous: “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Makes you want to read more? I certainly do. Other fine examples can be found in The Golden Bowl, by Henry James (“The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him…”) and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”)

 

When the sentence is that good, why not wear it as jewelry?

Then there’s that very strange kind of first sentence which can act independently as a kind of proverb. Two examples of this are still very well known: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” and “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Although these stand very well on their own, I don’t like them too much in the context of the book (despite the biting irony which emerges from the Pride and Prejudice example) because they feel disconnected from what follows. They’re so good and they reveal so much information and truth from the start, that you feel like you’re starting the story all over again with the second sentence. Henry James begins The Portrait of a Lady in a similar way: “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Wonderful, but not altogether intriguing, I find.

There are also some first lines which are really only decent, but fit so well within the works they begin that they act as a kind of microcosm of these works, and have become famous in and of themselves. I think the first line of James Joyce’s Ulysses is definitely one of these: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” I really love the opening pages of the novel, they have a quick pace, they’re full of life and wit and the prose is dazzling, but is the first sentence particularly good? Does it stand very well on its own? Does it compel the reader to keep on reading? Well, not really. I’m not so sure “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” would be so remarkable if it didn’t introduce one of the greatest and most influential novels of the 20th century. The first sentence of Out of Africa — “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of Ngong Hills.” — is elegant and simple, like much of the book, but it strikes me as being similar to the first sentence of Ulysses in that it only bears interest in light of the entire book. It’s still a fine sentence though, and very well used in the movie adaption (I can hear Meryl Streep’s voice when I read it now, in that low-pitched Swedish accent she gave herself for the movie).

Whenever I start reading a new book, I always hope I’ll be pleased by the first sentence. It’s hit or miss. The first sentence of The Old Man and the Sea still gives me shivers: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Stunning. A last favourite of mine is the opening page of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I find so rhythmic and engrossing: “I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods…” Sometimes I get really disappointed if the beginning of a book could’ve had a really fantastic first sentence, but the author put something plain and not particularly attractive instead — for instance, I can’t understand why Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori doesn’t begin from the very first line with the alarming phone call: “Remember you must die.” It’s a little bit frustrating, a kind of missed opportunity.

I’m bound, of course, to find loads more fine first sentences as time passes; it’s something I like to keep an eye out for. If you know of any other good ones, by all means, please share them!