Emma by Jane Austen

When I people-watch, I don’t care much for evaluating someone’s physical appearance. Instead I try to figure out what they are thinking and feeling at that moment I’ve caught them in. That couple in line ordering breakfast at the Carnegie Mellon University café kissed for the first time last night, I decide. They have none of the casualness born of the reassurance of long-term intimacy and all of the enthusiasm for an exciting new experience.

I watch her press herself up to him. In response he straightens up to give himself another inch or so before he says “We’d like pancakes, please,” to the cashier. The girl wonders if she looks good enough for him. With the hand not holding his, she primps in a way frantic enough to suggest it’s driven by concern about her merits, not by normal nerves the first daylight after the first kiss brings. She settles her shirt hem over the waistband of her jeans just so—now her stomach looks its flattest—and pulls her hair forward like that, perfect. I can see what she can’t. This is silly fussing: he’s just thrilled with himself. He walks her to the silverware bar, hand on the small of her back, looking around the café for (male) friends to give a pleased good morning nod to. She dismisses him to find a table; he lurches away from her in his haste to do this right. He stands over one: This one? She—the princess of breakfast—shakes her head. Chin up, she picks a table next to the window. He scoots after her. Seated now, she rearranges herself to perfection; he scans the room for friends he might have missed. He holds both her hands. Pancakes arrive. The first breakfast in this new world begins.

I sit at a table near this couple, holding Jane Austen’s Emma open to the last page. Reading Emma is people-watching the way I like to do it, and in the company of a very talented guide. Here, Austen says, we have a gentlemen who is stymied by the sort of ordinary occurrences most of us just go with. Let’s see what he does when it snows a little more than he expected it to. Now this next woman fears herself inferior to all she encounters. Listen to her tell everyone that her brother-in-law has two carriages, not one. And now, here we have the girl who plagues herself and others with her conviction that she knows best in every circumstance. And there’s her friend who suffers as a result. They are going to sort out who should marry whom: let’s watch.

My only complaint about people-watching is that nothing extraordinary happens: I’ve never gotten to sit on a bench across from an Edison at the moment he turned on a light bulb for the very first time. Everyone I’ve watched is merely going about the business of being people as mundanely as it can be done.

And so too it was with Emma. The story was a delightful afternoon of people watching at its best. For me, it added up to nothing more significant.



Emma: 2.5 stars: indulged as well as any author has, my curiosity about people. But neither impresed me at any one point with anything it offered nor added up to anything in total.

Recommended by: my friend Fiona. It’s one of her favorites; she wasn’t sure if it was a good book for me. I read it because she convinced me to take recommendations that are not generated specifically by my chase for my ideal book. She fears I’ll miss many books that I couldn’t have guessed I’d love if I become too narrowly focused on finding my ideal.

Personal ad responses

Thank you, to John who suggested a book below (which I haven't read and am excited to), and to the many on Librarything who gave me book ideas as well. I posted the ad at the New York Review of Books as well to see what happens.

I'm thick in the middle of recommendations from the Seattle librarians as well as several that Librarything generated when I told it which what my top few favorite books were.

Clayhanger #3

**spoilers ahead**

In the next pages, Edwin announced his interest in architecture to his father and then felt bullied enough by his father’s disappointment to drop it and join his dad’s printing business. Then he met Hilda, who kissed him one day and married another man the very next. Next, his father’s brain began to deteriorate, and for the following two years, he had to pay extra attention to both his dad and the printing business. Then his dad died.

While these things were happening, Edwin did little with his private projects. I didn’t mind: I was as distracted as Edwin by all that life imposed on him to take him away from his plans.

Hilda reappears in the story, trailing a rumor that she was widowed and we’re off again—Hilda’s son is sick and needs Edwin’s care, Hilda’s bankrupt and needs Edwin’s money—and the projects are once again neglected. Neglected until the end of the story, when Edwin deals with them a final time, this time with nothing more than a few bitter sentences of regret.

Somehow though, this failure didn’t make the book a disappointment. I was pleased, quite simply, with the idea that someone would try to sustain a private program to enrich his life with no promise of reward for his efforts. To have Edwin succeed at his projects would have required some breaks—a less imposing daily life, chancing upon an activity exciting enough to inspire him to sacrifice his other commitments for it. It was enough for me to spend time in the company of someone extraordinary enough to think to try.


Clayhanger: 3.5 stars. Almost one of my favorite books

Recommended by: David Wright, Seattle Public Library, based on my reactions to Middlemarch, North and South and A Town Like Alice

Clayhanger #2

Edwin is thrilling me. He has set aside a special spot, a room in his attic, for projects with which to exhaust himself. He’s bought paper and attempted to draw a building in Paris to teach himself architecture! He’s begun reading and building a library! He’s going to practice painting!

Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett #1

Bennett had promised me in Anna of the Five Towns that if I read enough of his writing, he would describe something that would fascinate me. He kept his promise in Chapter 4 of Clayhanger when he told me that Edwin, a young man I thought ordinary, has a private desire to do something extraordinary. He is not yet sure what, particularly, he’ll do, but, to repeat what Bennett told me, he wants to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his best, in pursuit of honest and terrific endeavor. This I wanted very much to watch.

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

I like the way Arnold Bennett thinks. In Anna of the Five Towns, he asks questions that I’d like to hear answers to: what would you do you if you had unlimited funds? How do you find what we might call meaning in life, an unwavering sense of what you would to do with yourself?

Anna is a short book, too short to allow Bennett to answer these questions as thoroughly as I would have asked him to do, if he’d been writing it for me. But no matter, I’ll just read more of what he’s written.



Anna of the Five Towns: 2 stars. There was a lot of promise but not a lot of delivery, to my mind.

Recommended by: David Wright, Seattle Public Library, based on my comments about Middlemarch, North and South, and A Town Like Alice

Introducing Seattle Public Library recommenders

Nancy Pearl suggested I speak with Misha Stone and David Wright, ace book recommenders from the Seattle Public Library. They read my blog entries on North and South, A Town Like Alice and Middlemarch and came up with this list:

Misha:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble


David:

Anna of the Five Towns and Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Thank you, Misha and David.

A personal ad for the best book I've ever read

I asked readers on Librarything to see if this personal ad gave them any ideas for books I might read:


If I were to look for my the best book I've ever read the way I'd look for a mate, This is the personal ad I would write for it.

I want to read about a woman who thinks up and carries out a project of her own devising. I don’t much care what it is she does—build a school, write a symphony—but I want it to be high cost, high reward and I want it to succeed, in whatever way she defines success, ideally after difficulties and failures. I’d like to this to be a project begun without the lure of external rewards: no deadlines, no contracts, no promise of fame and glory to keep her working on it. I want her to do this project while being buffeted by those forces of circumstance and of our own creation—earn money, cook dinner, tend to children—that can fill a day from morning to night if she does not make the most vigorous of efforts to allow herself to work on her project.

I want to hear everything she thinks and feels along the way. For this reason, I think fiction story would be better: I find fiction tends to show me every inch of a protagonist better than even the most self-revelatory of autobiographies.

I’m as interested in her spirit as in her actions. I want her to be kind, upright, and generous. Accomplishment won by bad behavior means little to me. I want her to be modest, and here’s the degree of modesty I’d like to see: I want her to achieve as anonymously as she can so that she might never risk being the sort of person people want to meet so they can praise her.

Does such a book exist? Do you know of a book that has any of these elements? Or that has variants on them (a man instead of a woman protagonist? a biography instead of a work of fiction)? If so, please let me know in the comments section below. Thank you.

A Town Like Alice

I’d forgotten a book called A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute was my favorite book when I was a teenager until my sister remembered and gave it to me for my birthday a few weeks ago. Not two days later, Nancy suggested I try A Town Like Alice after she received my note about how much I liked North and South.

I liked the book, so much so that it made me think that in North and South and in A Town Like Alice, Nancy may have found the first books in a group of books that could include the best book I’ve ever read. Nancy found me these books after I told her what I liked in each of the books I've read that she's recommended.

So herewith, for Nancy, what I like about A Town Like Alice.

The book is about a young British woman, Jean, who is working in Malaya during World War II when she is a taken prisoner by the Japanese. The Japanese march her group of women prisoners from town to town, hundreds of miles across Malaya, promising that each town will hold a resting place that never materializes. The story begins after the war when Jean has inherited money from a relative and is living in London.

I liked the book because Jean behaves as I wish I would behave, and in doing so makes me feel inspired, not inadequate.

Jean is lucky enough to think creatively and brave enough to act on the ideas her creativity brings her. Throughout the march she eases the women’s path by wrangling illicit niceties—food, medicine—under the noses of the Japanese guards. After many women have died, she finds a resting place in a Malay village for those remaining by convincing the Japanese and the villagers to allow them to stop walking and to work in rice paddies.

Jean has the best answer I’ve heard to a question I like very much: What would you do if you were given more money than you feel you need? Jean thinks up and carries out a series of projects with her money—I love the creativity and the will here. She builds a well for the Malay village that took her in. And when she sees the women of a remote Australian outback town where she moves to marry a man she met during the way have done without ice cream parlors and dress shops, and other comforts of developed towns, she builds them those comforts.

But what I like best is that Jean is quiet about her good works in the way that only one who does not view them as deserving attention can be. She hides them, I’d say if I wanted to accuse her of design, behind her utterly run-of-the-mill presentation: She’s just a typist, someone says about her. I admire this in the same way I’m waiting to admire the first MacArthur genius grant winner who requests anonymity when they announce those prizes.

North and South

This is a letter I sent to Nancy after finishing North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Dear Nancy,
My enjoyment of North and South was so much the greater because you found it for me. I didn’t expect my search for books I really enjoyed to produce one this good so early. Up until now, all of my favorite books have been books I think I could have found on my own—great famous classics. This had me worried that I was asking talented recommenders for help needlessly: To find books I really liked, I need only read from 100-best-books-ever lists. And then you recommended North and South, a book and an author I’d never heard of, which I'd guess I wouldn’t have found on my own.

I haven't wanted there to be more to read when I finished a book as much as I did for North and SouthI wanted to know what Margaret did after the book ended, after she’d decided she needed to find time for a life’s work in addition to spending time fulfilling the duties life presented her with. I wanted to know what that life’s work would be and what it would be like for her to accomplish it.

I wished she were my friend. For anyone who is that appealing when each of her thoughts and feelings are exposed by a probing author is surely a treat to visit with when she’s allowed to present only her best face, as we do to our friends in real life.

So thank you.

Nancy Pearl

I met Nancy Pearl, a librarian with her own action figure and a reputation as a genius book recommender, for tea today.

Nancy found me at the back of the line at the University of Washington book store coffee shop: “We are going to discuss books!” her face said to me. We got matching teas and sat down.

I told her I was looking for books I liked more than any other book I had read. She asked first what I liked about my current favorite book.

I like what I will call Dorothea's exceptionalism in Middlemarch I said. For Dorothea is determined to create something with her life, to build something unique for her fellow humans during her time on earth. She tries to help her husband write a book she believes vital to human civilization. She tries to build cotages for the servants who live on her uncle’s land She is less willing to be buffeted by the forces of circumstance that most of us cower before and more willing to try to do interesting things.

Oh, you might like North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, then, Nancy suggested.

I want to read about Dorothea’s life if it had gone just a little bit differently from the way Eliot had it go, I continued. Eliot had Dorothea fail at both the book and the cottages. Worse, Eliot seemed to lose interest in Dorothea’s attempts: Dorothea’s book project ends when her husband dies, and Eliot says too little about why Dorothea stopped trying for the cottages to satisfy me. I wanted hear what it would have been like for her to continue to try, and, ideally, to succeed at something that incurs high cost and and produces high reward.

”Try Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, by Georgina Howell,” Nancy said. Gertrude is a woman who succeeds in doing something interesting: She creates Iraq.

Nancy was so unfazed by the specificity of my request that I felt only a hint of hesitation about making my demands for the book I wanted to read even more particular. In addition, I said, I’d really the protagonist to struggle before finding something to do that is interesting enough to hold her attention for longer than the first thrill the idea of doing it produced.

“Oh,” Nancy said, her voice suggesting she’d stopped herself from clapping her hands together with the pleasure of how well this was working out. “Gertrude Bell is perfect.”

Nancy cupped her tea and looked at me, expectant without a hint of impatience. Her air suggested she believed that I would be doing her favor if I asked her more questions about books when anyone else would believe that she was the one doing me a favor that morning. She was beginning to have me believe in her perception of what was going on, so I mentioned another reaction to another book: “I liked Madame Bovary because I am also curious, as Emma was in that book, about what is meant by words such as passion.” “If you want to see passion,” she said, “try Anna Karenina.”

Nancy wasn’t emiting any signals that suggested I should stop, so I squeezed in question after question and together we put together a reading list:

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell because I liked Dorothea in Middlemarch

Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert by Georgina Howell because I liked Dorothea in Middlemarch

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy because I wanted to see passion

What Happened to Anna K? by Irina Reyhn because I wanted to see passion

The World Beneath Her by Deborah Weisgal because there is a George Eliot like character in the book.

The best book I've read

Since talking to my brother, I’ve read 18 novels. I have enjoyed a few of these books very much: They felt they’ve been written with me in mind. A slightly larger group of books I didn’t like much. With these, their characters’ interests didn’t intersect with my interests, or the author and I shared interests I wished I didn’t have: I didn’t like feeling that what kept me reading past the initial pages of Nabakov’s Lolita was curiosity about a pedophile. With the rest of the books, I've liked enough to keep reading but found nothing gripping nor appalling in them.

To find these books, I have followed the strategy I happened upon the day I decided to read Siddhartha: I’ve taken recommendations from friends and family who tell me what their favorite book is. I’ve also gotten a few recommendations from the people who put a book at my eye level on an airport bookshelf and from the people who makes lists of the greatest books ever.

After reading these 18 novels, I began to wonder if I could do better in finding books I enjoy. I want to find the best book I’ve ever read. This blog is about that search.

I’m beginning the search by changing out my recommenders. I’m swapping people who tell me about books they like for recommenders—like librarians and Amazon.com—who, given some knowledge of me, could tell me about books I would like.

The beginning

My brother walked in my front door holding four books. I asked what they were. Just some novels that have been meaningful to me, he answered.

In the same way that I don’t understand when my mother-in-law says the painting she saw at the Met moved her, I didn’t understand what it was like to have a novel mean something. I’d just finished a John Irving book, one of fewer than five novels I’d read in the 15 years since high school. No novel I’d read had meant anything more to me than a campfire story: at best interesting enough to consider for a moment or two before sleep that night but no further.

I asked my brother what he meant. The books “spoke to a feeling” he had, he said. Wanting this feeling to become more intense is what made him decide to join a Buddhist monastery. For my brother had just finished a science PhD and then—in a lovely alignment of feeling in which what he felt he most wanted to do and what he felt he really ought to do pointed to the same activity—became a monk.

His words “spoke to a feeling” were imprecise enough to allow me an exciting interpretation of what had happened when he read these novels. They had, to some degree, I thought, created the conviction to join a monastery.

I was intrigued to learn that novels have such power. So, with the same sort of blind hope that, in unskeptical moments, makes people ask others for advice on how to fall in love, I asked my brother how one finds novels that are meaningful. He shrugged, of course: just read lots of them. I asked for a recommendation; he said Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It was one of few possessions—that and a toothbrush—that he had brought to the monastery with him.

And so, I checked Siddhartha out of the library.