Four Summer Reads:

("Reading by the Brook" Winslow Homer 1879)

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Started about a week BEFORE seeing Midnight in Paris, but was able to appreciate the movie 100 times more because I was in the middle of reading it. I didn't realize it had been fifty years since headlines across the country looked like THIS. Either way, these coincidences have pushed me into reading this American master of story. (I think)

The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

You can read a lot of my thoughts about this book if you click on the link. I wrote about it exclusively at my "Student" blog.

Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven by Karen Salyer McElmurray

The prose is dense, something I expected because I know Karen (not only is she one of my current professors, she is also my Thesis Advisor). This is her first novel, and I really like the structure of it. In place of "chapters" each character has sections told in years and dates. The first few sections match up perfectly with the last section. Very chilling.

Uncensored by Joyce Carol Oates

Because this is a book of critical essays, I only focused on the ones that deal with novels/stories I have read. It is interesting to see what JCO honed in on concerning Sylvia Plath, Richard Yates, Alice Sebold, and Emily Brontë. She also writes about the short story, the form I work with--in two essays. When I'm more familiar with some of her other topics, I will revisit this book.

"The crack's in me." I said heroically.

Three personal essays were published in Esquire in February, March, and April of 1936.

I read them this morning whilst lying upright in bed--highlighter in hand so I could mark the parts that resonated with me.

F. Scott was at a low point, reflecting and writing--writing and reflecting on his life and his writing life and things in between.

It almost felt a bit like cheating--like skipping to the end of a really good book to see what happens.

I found The Fitzgerald Reader: A Collection of His Finest Work [1963 Scribners] Edited by Arthur Mizener sometime over the summer. The essays appear on pages 405-420 (although they are printed all over the place).

I don't know exactly HOW to write about them...I can include the parts I marked though:

"Of course all life is a process of breaking down..."
(so it begins)

"One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

"I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked."

"...hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night."

"...in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
(apparently a famous quote by F. Scott)

"I took a beating on English poetry; when I got the idea of what it was all about."

"Life around me was a solemn dream, and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city. A man does not recover from such jolts--he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about."

"Once I had had a heart but that was about all I was sure of."

"I felt--therefore I was."
(and then I wrote and then I was reduced to tears--for all the feeling--Me)

"I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempt to be a person--to be kind, just or generous."

"I have now at last become a writer only."

"My own happiness in the past often approached such as ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books--"

So beautiful, heartbreaking and filled with recognition of key moments, feelings. All the world exploded into nothingness. And he died four years later.

~~J