obsession

It always starts with "Rebecca." The book that is so good you don't want to share it with anyone. It never leaves you. It possesses you. It possesses me, and now so does its author. I'm not sure I could accurately explain how my obsession with Daphne du Maurier has come about, only that I'm basically in love with her. Or maybe I just wish I could have been her in another life. Alas, I can only hang onto the thought that I was born about eight years before she died -- so we shared some meaningless time on Earth together. Twenty years later, the dormant presence has come back to life.

The obsession began when I declared "Rebecca" my favorite book. But I wasn't convinced the author could interest me further until I learned of her association with Alfred Hitchcock. I let the thought marinate all through "Jamaica Inn," but the fever hadn't quite peaked. The day I bought the story collection "Don't Look Now," I knew I was in for something, and it took me to about page 3 to figure out that du Maurier would soon dominate me. With each page she owned me more and more, and by the time I'd finished "Monte Verita," I knew I had to get my hands on every piece of this woman's work.

I bought a decrepit copy of "Rule Britannia" at a used bookstore (surprisingly not The Strand) and added a heap of fiction and biographies to my Amazon wish list. I repeatedly fondled a copy of "The Daphne du Maurier Companion" at my nearest Barnes & Noble, but opted not to drop the $18 in favor of my favorite contemporary author, A.M. Homes, when a coupon begged redemption. But The Strand did beckon, and I swooped in on the D shelf and snagged a handful of relics as a Christmas present to myself. Those plus a couple more I got for Christmas, and my current collection is as follows:

Rebecca
Jamaica Inn
Rule Britannia
Don't Look Now
Myself When Young - The Shaping of a Writer
Mary Anne
My Cousin Rachel
The du Mauriers
The Young George du Maurier
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories
The Daphne du Maurier Companion
Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster
Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng

It's a short list compared to what I'll continue to compile over the years, and doesn't even include other things I'm buying as companions to the collection, such as works by her grandfather and sister, and others that inspired her in some way (I've already invested in "Tales from Shakespeare" by Charles Lamb and "Stories" by Katherine Mansfield). I've also now seen the Hitchcock "Rebecca," as well as "Daphne" and its accompanying "Vanishing Cornwall."

It's time I admit it: I'm a total geek. But why not? It's about time I had something to collect other than random books I "might" like. Besides, it's a match made in heaven -- there's the sea, there's writing, there's reclusive nature, a desire to wear pants rather than dresses ... there's Cornwall (can I mention that's where Tori Amos lives? Rereading my mention of the Tori song in an earlier post has total new meaning. It wasn't just a coincidence!).

There are so many details I'd love to go into, but I'm just a du Maurier baby-fan. I can dream of being an authority, writing research papers for no one but myself to read, attending the festivals, acquiring that rare, signed first edition (I already made one purchase from The Strand's Rare Book Room -- so it was only $15 and unsigned, it's still cool as hell). I want to dig, I want to know, but it's barely the honeymoon stage and I'm already the jealous boyfriend. I'll read the professional criticisms but shield my eyes from Goodreads or Amazon "comments" on the lady. What could they know?! They don't love her like I do! It's mine and you can't have it. More to come.

picking some brains

Moving into an apartment that puts you one short subway stop away from work is a surefire way to slow down your reading progress if you're used to the trip taking an hour. In the past five months, I've managed to make it through a few great books, though. Unfortunately, the closest I've gotten to blogging about them is the automatic Goodreads updates that tell you things like I'm on page 100 of "Comic Book Tattoo," a Tori Amos collector's item I got for Christmas, and will likely get into here a little later.

The first book I started after Olive Kitteridge, I believe, was Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I was heading back into my nonfiction stream, and I wanted to wax philosophical. I didn't quite make it all the way to the end, though the 225 pages I did read were amazing, and I plan to finish it off in the not-so-distant future. That book is best read in long sittings, and after August and September I was quite short on those. But I can say I underlined in red something on almost every single page of that little 380-page pink book. I'd like to do a more in-depth post on it one day when I start reading the end of it. But I'll grab a random snippet: "She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before." How appropriate.

"Zen" was too heavy for short sittings, but I wanted to stay with the "inspirational" nonfiction, so I read "On Writing" by Stephen King. And it was very inspiring -- it made me want to write both fiction and memoir (and even read more memoirs of authors). I've always been a King fan, though I've barely put a dent in the 10 or so novels of his that I own, my favorite being "Dolores Claiborne," of course. Anyway, I liked "On Writing" for its honesty. You got to see Stephen at home, letting his wife make sweeping literary decisions for him, and him being perfectly happy to have it that way. He made me want to get on paper every potentially silly (read: groundbreaking) idea that pops into my head. I'll have to spend some time identifying my Ideal Reader, though. Maybe it's him. I feel like I could go to "On Writing" with a question, and Stephen would answer it. Reading that book is like having a conversation with the man. He made himself the protagonist of a plotless narrative, and I felt I knew him pretty well by the end.

Inspired by King's "Carrie" confessions, I decided it was high time I read that classic. I can't remember why, but I was quickly distracted from it. There's a mysterious black hole in my memory (well, that's not so mysterious if you know me), where I might have picked up something else, but eventually I ended up cracking another author memoir, this time A.M. Homes's "The Mistress's Daughter." I put a short review of this one on Goodreads, where I express my desire for "more narrative and less fact-spewing" about the adoptee's reunion with her biological parents. I hope Homes writes another memoir, and I'd hope for something under the category of "more personal," but you don't get much more personal than your search for identity. And the drama isn't missing. On page 60 Homes drops the drama into one succinct sentence: "Ellen thinks I'm her mother, Norman thinks I am Ellen, and Norman's wife thinks I am the mistress reincarnate." But it's interesting to watch Homes dig into her ancestry, more so on the reflective side than the genealogical analysis. When her biological mother dies, she goes through this relative stranger's things and finds pieces of herself: "It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine" (page 98). You don't have to be adopted to appreciate her words. "Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel--on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?" (page 117)

the only olive i'll consume

I finished "Olive Kitteridge" quite happily just over a week ago. I've started recommending it at work, emphasizing its ability to portray silver linings amid all the dark clouds. I've been distanced from the book because I've already started reading "On Writing" by Stephen King, but I'll do my best to stay true-to-form today, but covering just a few of the stories. I also owe Goodreads a review, since that's why I have the book in the first place. Random House sent it to me all shiny and crisp, but even the short time it spent traveling in my bag wore it out pretty well. Nothing's ripped, but the edges are soft now, and you can see scratch marks from my keys and wallet. I knew this book wouldn't stay pristine, though, because I marked important passages with fun little arrows. Some look like sideways smiley faces, others like enigmatic Chinese characters.

A Different Road
I didn't mark much in this story, because most of the words simply drove the narrative to the climax, where the reader is left to gawk at Olive and Henry's near-lethal bickering. Coming home from a restaurant one night, Olive is in dire need of a restroom. The closest one is at the hospital (remember, we're in the sticks), and Olive remarks that since she was born there, the least they can do is offer her a toilet. The emergency-room doctor insists on checking her out, and I was surprised when Olive didn't resist. But the timing was unfortunate, because two masked gunmen arrived and forced Olive, Henry, a doctor and a nurse into the bathroom. One masked man remained their captor while the other presumably stole drugs. As hostages, Olive and Henry spewed insults at each other. They were uncontrollable under the pressure and revealed deeply buried resentments. This, combined with the already traumatic experience, had sad consequences for their relationship.

"No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl ..." The captor had unmasked himself, revealed his fear and vulnerability, and Olive had taken notice. I could probably write a whole paper on how this event allowed Olive to embrace a side of herself she had neglected. But the author didn't revisit this, so I'll not dwell on it. That's something both good and bad about this book. The stories involve deep issues of so many characters, your imagination could run wild with any one, and as a result, we're left to make our own assumptions about Olive. Just like everyone else.

This wasn't my favorite of the stories, but it was pivotal for the characters' lives. I wish it had felt more dramatic so it would have had more entertainment value. As it is, no one is shot, and the event is both shattering and inconsequential. I suppose the author thought the conversation needed something extreme to bring it about, but if the event were too extreme, it would overshadow other important events in the book. The town believes Henry shuts down because he was faced with his mortality, but Olive knows the truth. Unfortunately, we don't have a second story from Henry's perspective, since he soon lapses into a vegetable state because of a stroke. Some insight might be available in the initial story, but the average reader doesn't have time to revisit that without devoting much too much energy to one (albeit Pulitzer-winning) book, and neither do I.

Highlights from Winter Concert
"Funny to have tickets in order to get into a church."
"What a lonely thing to be a young girl!"
"Mrs. Lydia was looking at her with those new eyes; unnerving to have a sixteen-year-old's eyes looking at you from an old woman's head."

In this story, a man admits to cheating on his wife. But first, they comment on the marriage of Olive and Henry Kitteridge, and introduce the idea that Henry can "stand" his wife simply because he loves her.

Tulips
Another plot-driving narrative, though this one includes more palatable circumstances and just plain better writing. The most poignant moment occurs when Henry collapses: "She shouted at him, waiting for the ambulance to come. His mouth moved, and his eyes were open, and one hand kept jerking through the air, as though reaching for something beyond her." This statement brings up valid questions. Was Henry continuously reaching for something beyond Olive? Was his love for her really enough?

Olive visits her neighbor, Louise, and we get a juicy back story concerning Louise's son, who stabbed his wife to death, thus driving his mother to the brink of insanity. Olive has problems, but she's grateful they're nothing like Louise's. Louise claims to live for her son, so he knows he's not alone. This parallel story magnifies Olive's issues with not being needed by her own son. "Oh," said Louise, laughing softly. "You came here for a nice dose of schadenfreude, and it didn't work."

I love some of the author's imagery, and one of the best examples of this is when moving windshield wipers are compared to shaming fingers: "It was shame that swiped across her soul, like these windshield wipers before her: two large black long fingers, relentless and rhythmic in their chastisement."

-------

In the rest of the book, I did a little marking, but mostly I was ready to finish it and get back to my nonfiction foray. Olive attends a funeral, reminisces about a lost love, visits her son in New York with his new wife (while relating the visit to the dubious ear of vegetable Henry), watches her husband pass away, and meets a potential kindred spirit to live out her days with.

Unfortunately for my constant reader, I'm even more eager now to get back to Mr. King's advice on fiction and writing in general, so the rest of this page-turner's meat will stay in the freezer unless you decide to cook it yourself.

quarter in a mud puddle

After reading the first of the 13 stories in Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge," I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. How can you like a novel if you can't like, or at least relate to, its protagonist? I was barely into the second story when I started grumbling to myself that this book was too depressing. Olive was just a mean old lady who knew a lot of people who died. Maybe I didn't want to like this book because of the prominent Oprah quote on the cover, or because it's one of those books "everybody" likes. But I kept reading, and at the end of the second story, I knew this book was unlike anything I've ever read. Olive isn't just a mean old lady. She's something completely different to every person she encounters. She's an angel, a fuddy-duddy, a wife who doesn't appreciate her husband, a stern mother. Or is she? Each of these stories reveals a new side of Olive through the eyes of her fellow townspeople.

Pharmacy
The book's opening story gives us some background on Olive's marriage. The focus is on Henry, a pharmacist who watches his way of life mold to uncontrollable circumstances in the progression of modernity. The story alternates between the "good old days" and the "we're getting old" days, and we find that Henry is a gentle, naive soul who just wants everyone to be happy. His reliable old assistant is replaced by a newly married young girl, and Olive teases him that he has a new girlfriend. Denise is sweet and Henry admits only to himself that he is intrigued by her. She ends up leaning on him quite a bit when her husband is killed in a hunting accident, but she later remarries and moves away. Henry's pharmacy is replaced by a brightly lit chain drugstore. "People are never as helpless as you think they are," Olive tells her husband. Denise sends Henry greeting cards for years to come.

Incoming Tide
Wondering why I should care about this woman, Olive, and why she hasn't yet appeared in the second story, I begin to make notes in my book to mark things I don't like. I feel the book is too depressing, and unnecessarily descriptive passages are putting me to sleep: "He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety."

But I want to find out: Does Kevin commit suicide at the end? His mother did as much when he was younger, and he left town. Now he has returned to follow in her footsteps. He parks by the water and is approached by Olive Kitteridge, his former teacher who knows of his past and wants to empathize. I get annoyed when the author spells out what should be implied: "It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning." But I appreciate observations on New York: "...he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn't know it." And I give in to the blatant explanations: "He missed his mother. ... But this turbulence in him was torture." He's turbulent like the waves, see?

He is saved from his rising surf when he literally jumps out of the car and into the water to save a woman from drowning. She clutches him more tightly than he thought possible, and he is inspired: "...oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on." I don't want to like this, but I love it.

The Piano Player
Angie has played piano in the cocktail lounge for years. She is highly cognizant of her stage fright and relies on vodka to get her through it, to get her to that place where she is alive only inside the music. "...when she played, it was like being a sculptress, she thought, pulling at the lovely thick clay." I can hear the jazzy lounge piano in my head while the author reveals Angie's secrets, and we see Olive and Henry enter. Olive is grouchy, Henry is a breath of fresh air. But our focus remains with Angie, who spies in the crowd a former lover. Simon comes to talk to her, to make himself feel a little better about the life he doesn't love. He's married with children, and Angie hasn't changed. He stabs her with a dull knife of knowledge: Angie's prostitute mother had once sought him out in desperation. That night, Angie decides to stop seeing Malcolm, her married lover, and tells him so. He's angry, but he doesn't hurt her. She has friends. "A face like an angel. A drunk." She thinks of her mother, paralyzed and thin and cared for by attendants who are rough and leave bruises on her frail arms. Tomorrow Angie will mention this to someone kind.

A Little Burst
In the most humorous of the first five stories, we get a glimpse of Olive as a mother. Her son, Christopher is marrying at 38. He's known his wife only a short time, and the reception is being held at the home he and his parents built for him. The author describes Olive "[w]edging her paper napkin into the slats of the picnic table," and I realize that all the little details that had been putting me to sleep are there to help me out. Each story is in a vastly different setting with new characters, so being able to visualize seemingly unimportant details serves to ease the reader's transition into and grasp on the current moment.

Olive isn't fond of her son's bride, or that bride's mother, for that matter. "Don't I hate a grown woman who says 'the little girls' room.' Is she drunk?" Olive is tired of the company and ready to go home and take a nap. She siestas in the master bedroom while Henry says his long goodbyes, and she overhears tidbits of the bride's conversation with a friend. She hears enough to know her dress is insulted and her husband adored. She also hears Suzanne refer to Chris as having had a "hard time," with no explanation. Depression runs in the family, but Olive has taken care of her son. She has loved him. Olive is enraged by the know-it-all bride, and she decides to steal a shoe and a bra from the room, and to draw a magic-marker line down the sleeve of a sweater she knows won't be worn for months. Just to show "Dr. Sue" that she doesn't know everything. "Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they're finished with loneliness, too."

Olive knows her body is wearing out, and she believes that her soul is, too. She progresses day to day on the lookout for "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are obvious, but little bursts can be just as fun. Like stealing a shoe from your daughter-in-law to "keep the self-doubt alive." She figures it's a better solution to life's potential emptiness than her husband's method: "He is an innocent. It's how he has learned to get through life." He prefers his bursts slow and gradual, and not a bit bursting. And just like that, I was fond of Olive.

Starving
Harmon is the owner of the hardware store. His wife, Bonnie, is increasingly distant, so he begins having Sunday rendezvous with Daisy Foster, a widow. "His brief Sunday moments with Daisy were not untender, but it was more a shared interest, like bird watching." He doesn't understand what's happening till he hears a local young couple use the phrase "fuck buddies." Appalled, he halts his sexual activity with Daisy, but continues to bring her a doughnut each week, and they start talking.

The young couple Harmon has been observing starts to have problems. They're busted for smoking pot and kicked out of their apartment. The boy leaves town, and the girl, Nina, loses her cinnamon (doughnut) complexion while giving in deeply to her anorexia. In need of a bed, she ends up staying briefly at Daisy's. When Harmon comes over, he stays longer than usual, talking with the girl. Olive arrives on her Red Cross collection rounds, and a mini-intervention takes place. Olive tries to reach out, telling Nina that we're all "starving" for something, but the girl sarcastically rejects the comment, bringing Olive to tears. "I don't know who you are, but young lady, you're breaking my heart." The conversation continues, and Harmon senses a strange energy, "something astonishing and unworldly," in the room. Nina goes home to her family, who keep Daisy updated on her illness.

Harmon feels his marriage unraveling as he is drawn nearer to Daisy. News arrives that Nina has died of a heart attack, and Harmon realizes he wants more from life than a quarter in mud puddle. He professes his love to Daisy, and rents out the room Nina had shared with her boyfriend.

----

The morals of the book are unfolding beautifully, and I can see the merit a book like this will have in classrooms and book clubs. I could probably devote an exorbitant number of blog posts to answering the questions in the reader's guide. Every person has to find his or her own way to "get through life." Death is imminent, but the way you live is so important because it's all we have. Olive's "little bursts" are the silver linings of her life, and they're no different from Harmon's quarter in the mud puddle. It's no hundred-dollar bill, but it sure might come in handy.

hey, i think i like this whole "true story" thing

My foray into the nonfiction world has begun, and as a result, I want more nature books and a job with the Central Park Conservancy (they're not hiring). Reading "Central Park in the Dark" was like pulling on my old hiking boots, grabbing a bag of gorp and embarking on an adventure through NYC's elegant treetops -- but without the sunscreen, because all of these wildlife dramas unfold after sunset.

I'll never again enter Central Park without turning on my long-lost wilderness senses. I might not know what kind of bird is on that branch, but I'll take a minute to observe it, or to say hello. Marie Winn has inspired me to think back fondly on my days in field-studies class, and to wonder why I didn't get my degree in forestry. Alas, I can school myself indirectly by memorizing everything I learned reading this book and will learn when I become obsessed with its many related blogs. I wanted to whine that there were no maps or photos included in the book, but I'd rather buy my own map of the park to hang on the wall, and I like the optional interactive aspect of going online to see what slug sex looks like beyond my imagination's eye.

I can never bring myself to underline things in a new book, but this one includes a handy index for referencing everything from the history of cars in Central Park to moth bait, pinking time and the Perseids. That means I can verify the Snapple "Real Facts" I started throwing at my friends: "Did you know the scariest-looking wasp is one that doesn't come after people? It's the cicada killer!" I'm not sure my pseudo-knowledge of shooting stars and roosting birds will help me convince anyone to go to the park with me at night, but perhaps at twilight you'll find me pointing out how you can tell the difference between male and female lightning bugs by where they're flying when they flash. Marie Winn does her best to comfort the reader by noting that in a decade of night visits, she's only had two scary experiences, one involving men who want to be cops, the other involving men who actually were cops. But the park has such a bad reputation, I'm not holding my breath till I'll convince anyone to go on a night walk there.

I did not want this book to end, and lucky for me the nature knowledge can continue by following Marie Winn online, and I can monitor the book for a whole month when I make it my staff rec in August. It just came out in paperback, though I was reading the hardcover version I received for free at NYU last year. And if I ever get money, I'll pick up a copy of Winn's other popular tome, "Red-Tails in Love," the story of some red-tail hawks who built a nest on a building on Fifth Avenue and had babies there for something like 10 years.

So I've got a whole heap of nonfiction stacked upon my television set, but I'm compelled to take a tiny hiatus from nonfiction. I happened to have won a free copy of the Pulitzer-winning short-story collection "Olive Kitteridge" from Goodreads.com, and since the point of a contest there is to read and review the book, I'll be starting on that today. It marks the second time I've read an honest-to-goodness bestseller ... the first being "Eat, Pray, Love." I'm not selling out, I'm expanding!

memoirs of a vampire in the dark

I have, of course, a few things going on in my reading world. When I finished "Jamaica Inn," I had a hard time picking what I would read next. There are just too many books on my "to read" list. Just check out my Goodreads account. I grazed the stack and grabbed a Doris Lessing book I found at The Strand recently: "The Memoirs of a Survivor." My radar pinpointed Lessing because we've had "The Golden Notebook" on our Fiction Favorites table a few times at the old Barnes & Noble. I scanned the cover, and decided this might be one of those hidden classics. Turns out it is. There are a lot of people who seem to like this book. It claims to be slightly autobiographical, so I figured I'd give it a go. At 189 pages, it should be a breeze, right? Well if there's anything I learned from Virginia Woolf (and actually, there was a lot) it's that a short book can sometimes take much longer to read than a long book. It's all about cognition. Lessing starts what seems to be a beautifully abstract story, but she philosophizes with the best of 'em, and halfway through this work, I got bored. Obviously, not all philosophical writers are boring, and I think when the mood strikes me I'll return to this book. But it's not quick train reading.

Lessing's genderless narrator tells the reader of the current times, in which Britian is becoming a wasteland. People try to cling to their homes, but government services and consumerism have fallen to the wayside. Bands of young people rove the country, and this narrator is seemingly randomly assigned to become the caretaker of a 13-year-old girl, Emily, and her odd cat-dog. The narrator lives in an apartment building, and begins seeing visions of another person's home on the other side of the living-room wall. This is not a neighbor's home we're peeping into, for on the other side of the wall is actually a hallway. The narrator can step into the other world and roam the rooms, and even spends time cleaning them and otherwise interacting with the space, which we later find to be scenes from Emily's childhood. Emily is no trouble to the narrator, but begins hanging out with some of the gangs that pass through, and the narrator fears she will leave. She does not, though, partially because her cat-dog (Hugo) would be in danger of being eaten.

I attempted to scan the book for a good example of Lessing philosophy, but I got bored. I'd much rather my mind migrate to the next book I picked up, "Let the Right One In." I borrowed this book from a coworker after having seen the Swedish film. This book was quite the opposite of its half-finished predecessor. There's not a lick of philosophizing among the hundreds of pages of vampire-story goodness -- Lindqvist leaves that to the reader. Because I already knew the story, it was easy to visualize the events, if not a tiny bit distracting. I prefer to read a book before I see its movie version, but had I not seen the film, I don't know that I would've picked up the book. I suppose it sounds redundant to say the book was like an expanded version of the film, but it's true. There was an additional subplot and more explanation of what in the movie were mysterious details.

There were a few points in "Let the Right One In" (originally titled "Let Me In") where I could tell the translator had trouble making a sentence flow without repeating itself, but I appreciated the straightforward style the novel uses to lay out the events. That doesn't really mean this was a light read -- the subject matter made sure of that -- but it was quick. The main character is Oskar, a young boy who is bullied at school, which causes him to fantasize about killing more than most, I would think. So it makes perfect sense that he would enter into a passionate friendship with a child vampire who recruits men to do her killing for her. Eli took notice of Oskar because of his violent tendencies, so she intended to exploit him. But like the boy who is dared to date the loser and then falls for her (see "10 Things I Hate About You") Eli finds that her relationship with Oskar is unique. In a moment of potential weakness, she cannot kill him even though she is starving for blood. Her prior blood-seeking sugar daddy, Hakan, was exploited by Eli because of his perversion. He was able to love Eli because of her still-childlike body, and his desire to be with her competed viciously with the conscience that plagued his murderer self. Hakan lost Eli because he could no longer kill, and it's ironic that he wanted so badly to die but instead became a vampire and needed to kill to simply survive. Hakan's eventual demise is outlined in the major subplot that didn't make it into the movie. That scene is more gruesomely played out than Eli's killing of the school bullies, which thus became the peak of gruesomeness in the film.

I'd like to see a sequel to this book, and there may very well be one. I know the author has other vampire books, so I'll have to do some research, because they just may not be translated yet. But I'd like to see how the story plays out. Oskar told Eli he wanted to kill people who deserved it, so the randomness of vampire killing may not suit him, unless he becomes a Robin Hood-esque vigilante vampire. And there's another question: Would he let Eli turn him? Eli offered and Oskar declined, but who says he couldn't change his mind? Eli's cycle of leaching off human killers won't end until she partners with another vamp for eternity, and a child-vampire duo is tragically romantic. In this respect I had hoped for a little more from the book's ending, because just like in the film, the last scene is Oskar taking Eli in a trunk on a train with no known destination. The book did highlight what is only implied in the film -- that Eli was actually born a male. This touch is intriguing but sad because of the mutilation he endured. Oskar is confused but accepting of this knowledge, and in the end I like to think it only makes him love Eli more.

During (though not because of) this reading, something struck me. I knew that next I wanted to read something real. I've ignored nonfiction for a long time, but there are so many great books that I want to add to my "read" list, and I don't mean that book I read about how to find a job ... although I guess that counts. And now, for a list of nonfiction books I've read.

David Sedaris "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris "Holidays on Ice"
Chuck Klosterman "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs"
Cynthia Shapiro "What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here?"
Tori Amos "Piece By Piece"
Donald Miller "Blue Like Jazz"
Amanda Hesser "Cooking for Mr. Latte"
Virginia Woolf "A Room of One's Own"
Rick Warren "The Purpose-Driven Life"
Greg Behrendt "He's Just Not That Into You"
Lynne Truss "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"
James Frey "A Million Little Pieces" (yes, I'm counting it)

There may be a few more but that's the gist from the shelves I have here in NYC. That list is too short. A few essays, a few biographies, and a few life lessons. So, I went through those shelves and pulled out the nonfiction that I haven't read, and I stacked the books up on my TV to pick something new. Some highlights I hope to devour soon:

Truman Capote "In Cold Blood"
Mary Roach "Stiff"
Stephen King "On Writing"
David Grann "The Lost City of Z"
Elie Wiesel "Night"
Anne Frank "The Diary of a Young Girl"
Bob Dylan "Chronicles"
Adam L. Gollner "The Fruit Hunters"
David Sedaris "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"

You may remember me starting something called "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." Yeah, I wanna finish that, too. But for now, I'm reading a few things at once. "The Autobiographer's Handbook" is for inspiration in writing. Wade Rouse's "At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream" is for entertainment. And Marie Winn's "Central Park in the Dark" is for substance and train riding. Naturally, I could write all day about the book's first 60 pages, but I'll save it for a day when I'm in less danger of being late to work. Let it suffice to say I'm loving every page because it reminds me of field studies in high school, and it's a way of exploring the park I can't experience while just passing through. Which reminds me, I'm also making my way through the poetic essays of Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York." Go, nonfiction!

quick trip across the moor

I left the UK still full of zombies, but I'm confident Darcy and Elizabeth will survive to be old and gray (or grey, as they'd prefer). As will Mary and Jem, the heroes of "Jamaica Inn," the second book I've enjoyed by Daphne DuMaurier. The author is officially one of my favorites now, and I plan to use my B&N employee discount to buy the other volume of hers we carry, a story collection that includes "The Birds." That's right, Hitchcock made films from at least three DuMaurier stories.

Never did I time the reading of a book so well as when I read the final page of "Jamaica Inn" on the 1 train as it approached 207 Street today. It took me no more than a week to read this, and it was pretty fantastic. I still like "Rebecca" the best, but I rooted for Mary even when she ventured where most would never wander. She talked a lot about stereotypes against women, which I appreciated. She would notice that she was treated a certain way only because she was a women, and everyone knows women are fragile and can't handle physical or emotional stress! She also took an opportunity to point out how, specifically, she would be treated in a certain scenario if she had been a man. I like that she made a statement without being obnoxious, and it fit the character well. She proves herself in the end, of course, when she courageously follows her heart and chooses the life that will truly make her happiest -- a life of adventure with the man she loves. She gets the best of both worlds, despite once vowing she didn't require love:

"If loving a man meant this pain and anguish and sickness, she wanted none of it. It did away with sanity and composure and made havoc of courage. She was a babbling child now when once she had been indifferent and strong."

But much of her existence at Jamaica Inn required her to take risks. After the death of her mother, a widow, she went to live with her aunt and uncle at the most loathed and avoided residence known to the people of the moors. Jamaica Inn was no longer serving its nominal purpose, but sat a dark and sinister hub awaiting smuggled cargo from ships wrecked by land-locked pirates. A witness to the illegal activities and a self-appointed guardian of her wilting Aunt Patience, Mary conspired with fate to bring her uncle and his cronies to justice. Little did she know, her sole confidant, an albino vicar, was the leader of the pack, and the man she loved but mistrusted would come through for her in the end.