Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone is having a good Halloween so far. In honor of the holiday, I thought I'd share some of my favorite spooky reads with you. Well, some are spooky. Others just fit the holiday spirit but don't provoke terror, which is nice, too. Here are some of my favorite Halloween-ish reads:

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski: This strange novel is definitely one of the creepiest books I've ever read, possibly the most creepy. It's a slow treatise on the psychology of fear, a meditation on the value and failures of narrative, and a haunted house story all in one. It's a hard read, with its stories-within-stories and it's endless footnotes. But when I read it late at night, it took me forever to fall asleep. If you want to really work for your terror, this is the book that'll do the trick.

Salem's Lot, by Stephen King: There are lots of people who claim Stephen King is actually not that scary to read, but whatever. When I read this horror novel, I couldn't sleep facing my bedroom window for weeks. I'd never want to see my vampiric best friend floating outside my window wanting to come in....

"Stone Animals," by Kelly Link: This short story from Link's collection, Magic for Beginners, isn't scary so much as it is deeply unsettling. I can't read it without my skin crawling for no discernable reason. Nothing actually scary happens, but the idea of things and people becoming "haunted" makes me feel weird inside. And the end...well, quite frankly, I have no idea what's up with that.

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman: By now, you all know my love for this coming-of-age novel exceeds bounds. But it really does make a great Halloween read, what with all the ghosts and the werewolf and the vampire guardian. Not to mention the super-weird ghouls and the clever, lovelord witches. Such an awesome and emotionally-satisfying little book!

"Requiem for a Friend," by Rainer Maria Rilke: This long, challenging elegy for a dead friend is both beautiful and scary. Rilke writes with an authority about the dead that no other writer has ever quite mastered, and this poem may be his greatest treaty on the subject. In the poem, Rilke pleads with his friend (the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker) to stop haunting him, leaving him to his mourning. The poem is creepy, but it's also extremely moving. His grief is so immense you can't help but feel it yourself.

World War Z, by Max Brooks: Well, here it is: the book that made me fear the living dead. This fake oral history on the worldwide war against a zombie outbreak is surprisingly literary and imaginative, even as it piles on the scary and unsettling. For me, the memorable moment takes place when a woman recounts the night she and her family looked out a sliding glass door to see a zombie standing on their back deck. Not long after, her husband is dead and her hometown is completely plagued by the virus. But that early moment when the terror is just beginning to invade is really where the horror lies.

I hope you all enjoyed the list. Feel free to recommend your favorite Halloween reads. And to get everyone in the mood, here's one of my favorite Halloween songs, Saint-Saens's fantastic orchestral piece, Danse Macabre.

Paul Muldoon Reading

Last night, I went to a reading at Notre Dame given by Paul Muldoon. Muldoon, an Irish poet, is an extremely important literary figure. He's won dozens of awards, and he currently serves as the poetry editor for The New Yorker. I like Paul Muldoon - his poems show a love of language and people and places - but he's never been one of my favorites. For some reason, his poems have never caught me the way other poets' have. But that didn't matter last night. Because for an hour, he had me completely captivated. He was funny, rambling, and had that crazy writer look, complete with messy hair and tweed jacket. The man obviously loves poetry and the world it comes from, and it was his love for his work that proved infectious. He spent more time talking about the background for his poems than he actually spent reading them, but that wasn't a problem. I could have sat there and listened to his Irish accent telling me about the history of horse hair used as housing material for hours.

So instead of a Favorite Passage today, I thought I would post my favorite poem Muldoon read last night. He told a charming story about the poem's background, and his love for the people in the piece really came out in full force. If you pay close attention while reading, you'll find some surprising rhyme and sound going on. Enjoy!

The Sightseers, by Paul Muldoon

My father and mother, my brother and sister
and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July
in his broken-down Ford

not to visit some graveyard - one died of shingles,
one of fever, another's knees turned to jelly -
but the brand new round-about at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.

Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle

and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
that there was still the mark of an O when he got home.


Note: On Saturday, you can expect a Halloween-related post for the holiday. Also, I just bought Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours, which I am really excited to read. Carson mixes prose (particularly the essay form) and poetry in really interesting ways, and as a former classicist, her stuff is super-intellectual. This book has essays about Sappho and Virginia Woolf and poems about Tolstoy and Anna Ahkmatova, and it will probably be the "smartest" thing I've read in quite some time. I'm really looking forward to it!

Zombie-Killin'! Ten Characters I Want on My Side in the Case of a Zombie Apocalypse

For those of you who don't know, my biggest fear in life (after heights and choking) is the possibility of a zombie outbreak. Zombies are scary and, in my opinion, a lot more likely to happen than you might think. But if zombies are one of my biggest fears, then the opposite also holds true: There are few things I love more than some real, honest-to-God zombie killing! While watching the very funny and entertaining movie, Zombieland, a couple weeks ago, I really got into the parts where characters wipe out waves of the walking dead with nothing more than a gun and clever human thinking. It got me thinking. I mean, what would I do if I found myself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse? Easy: I'd get a super-awesome team of zombie-killers together to fight our way through the new world order.

Of course, as always happens with me, this led back to books. There are some literary characters I would really really really want on my zombie demolition squad. So who are these lovely and capable fictional folk? I'm glad you asked. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Rorschach (from Watchmen, by Alan Moore): Moore's super-violent, strange, and interesting creation would be the perfect zombie fighter. He wants to defeat evil, and anyone whose read the graphic novel could tell you that he's not afraid to go to horrifying extremes to show someone who's boss. If I were a zombie, all I'd have to do is see his masked face and my head would explode.

2/3. Denisov and Dolokhov (from War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy): Okay, I'm cheating a bit here by including two very different characters from the same book. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the unlucky, speech-impediment-addled Denisov, but by the end of the book, he proves himself a smart and capable soldier. I have no doubt he can do what it takes to get the job done. Dolokhov, meanwhile, is something of a magnificent bastard. Unpleasant, greedy, and just a plain old jerk, Dolokhov's black heart would never let sentiment or emotion get in his way of killing zombies. Is that his friend Anatole over there munching on some peasant meat? Bam! He didn't even like the guy that much anyway...

4. Allan Woodcourt (from Bleak House, by Charles Dickens): The literal epitome of brave and useful, Woodcourt would no doubt prove useful during a zombie outbreak. He already heals the sick, comforts dying orphans, and marries girls with pockmarked faces. And now, he can add Zombie Killing Machine to his resume.

5. Jordan Baker (from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald): Yes, I know, I seem a bit obsessed with Jordan Baker. But that girl always comes off as tough as nails, and she can swing a mean golf club. Also, she already cheats at her chosen profession and gets paid for it, so she'd have few moral dilemmas about shooting a zombie Daisy Buchanan in the face. Although by the end of Gatsby, she probably wouldn't have a problem shooting HUMAN Daisy Buchanan in the face either.

5. Captain Wentworth (from Persuasion): Yes, crush-worthy and zombie-war-worthy both. The Bennett sisters might be the zombie-fighting Austen characters to grace Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but us real Austen readers know that Captain Wentworth is the one to put your money behind. And, you know, if the post-zombie-apocalyptic world required some repopulation, Wentworth would be nice to have around, if you catch my drift...

6/7. Silas and Bod (from The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman): Silas, with all his vampiric powers and desire to protect those he loves, would make a truly awesome adversary for the undead. And Bod, a tough kid who's used to hanging out with the (un)dead, would be a fantastic sidekick, if only Silas would let him. These two have fought off some truly deadly foes in the past (human and ghoul alike), and they could do it again in a heartbeat.

8. Taylor Greer (from The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver): Kingsolver is one of the few writers who can create a female character that is rough and tumble without being annoying. Taylor Greer can fight with the best of them, and she is fiercely loyal to those on her side (but if you piss her off, it might take you a while to get back in her good graces). If she became part of your zombie-killing crew/family, you can bet she'd have your back every moment.

9. Otto Köster (from Three Comrades, by Erich Maria Remarque): Truthfully, nearly all of Remarque's characters would make pretty great zombie killers. But Otto always struck me as particularly right for the job. A great friend of the highest order, he watches out for those around him while still being bad-ass. And our crew could always use a sweet car like his, the beloved racer "Karl."

10. Casey Jones (from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles): Okay, so I definitely got this from watching the original live-action movie and not a book, but it's my list, so he stays on it. While watching the movie, a friend told me she thought Casey would prove extremely useful in a zombie apocalypse. She's right. He wants to punish evil (in this case, the evil dead), and like Jordan Baker, he knows his way around deadly sports equipment. One swing of his hockey puck to a zombie's head, and we'd be on our way to winning the war.


I hope you all enjoyed the list. Please sound off below and let me know who'd you want on your side during a zombie war!

Spoon-ing

On Thursday, I finally finished Pete Dexter's brand new novel, Spooner. It took me a long time (2 weeks for only 459 pages) to finish, but it was worth all the time I spent with it. This is the first book by Dexter I've ever read, and I think I might have to go and check out the rest of his work now, too. Because Spooner is good at everything that makes a novel a great read: funny, sad, well-written, and filled with wonderful, memorable characters. The book centers around the relationship between the titular Warren Spooner, who begins the novel as an injury-prone, mischief-loving little mishap of a child and ends it as a successful adult who takes care of those around him, and Spooner's stepfather, the super-patient and hardworking Calmer Ottosson. Dexter does an absolutely fantastic job at exploring all the complexities of love and family.

The set-up sounds a little sentimental, but the book is anything but. In fact, it's downright bittersweet in even its lightest moments. The story is all about being human, trying (and failing) to understand the people we want to love. From the very beginning of their time together, Calmer cannot understand Spooner. Dexter lets us readers see both the sad desire for attention Spooner craves as a child and the inevitable frustration and confusion Calmer feels towards the strange creature.

Calmer begins the novel as an upright Navy officer with the world at his fingertips, only to have an almost-funny accident derail his career. He ends up working in the South, marrying Spooner's unhappy mother and becoming a default father. He obviously cares about Spooner and wants to love him, but Spooner makes it extremely difficult. Meanwhile, as Spooner tries to find his way in the world, he often fails miserably, usually getting maimed in the process. He wants to make Calmer happy, but he seems incapable of doing right by the man despite his good intentions. Dexter details this bumpy connection between the two with sentences that somehow manage to be both incredibly funny and incredibly heartbreaking at once. I honestly don't know how Dexter manages to do it, creating a world where we readers can laugh and cry in reaction to a single line. The prose in this book, particularly in the first half, is really something special.

As the book continues, things begin to flip for Spooner and Calmer. Spooner eventually finds happiness and family, and Calmer meets mostly with disappointment and loneliness. In the final chapters, as Spooner cares for the aging Calmer, he gets the chance to show his stepfather just what his love really meant (Spooner thinks of Calmer as "the greatest man he'd ever known, or at least the greatest man who had ever known him"). The ending refuses to nicely tie everything together with a hug and kiss, but it also manages to be an extremely cathartic dissertation on what it means to be connected to a person you can only understand through your own eyes. For Calmer, it means trying to love Spooner despite not fully "getting" him. And for Spooner, it means showing you care in the limited ways you can manage.

The whole book is a joy to read, and it's something I would definitely recommend to anyone who is interested in literature tracing entire lives and relationships.

Poem of the Week: "Midsummer," by Louise Glück

A couple years ago, during a poetry reading at my alma mater, I read this poem by Louise Glück, an important contemporary female poet whom I have mixed feelings about. I liked the poem a lot, but I was a little worried I might be the only one. However, the reading was a smashing success, and a lot of people praised my choice of poem. Even though it's a poem that takes place during the summer, it's really about the lost chances of a late autumn day such as this, so I thought it would be appropriate for this week.

Midsummer, by Louise Glück

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls' clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off the high rocks - bodies crowding the water.

The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
building in cities far away.

On cloudy days, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end - sometimes they'd keep watch,
sometimes they'd pretend to go off with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they'd show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.

At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we'd meet
and the nights we wouldn't. Once or twice, at the end of the summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.

And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We'd sit on the rock smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren't there.

And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.

And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.

Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of the boy or girl you'd be meeting later.
And you thought of walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn't see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.

The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.
And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:
You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you'll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you can't say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.


Note: Today is the birthday of one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Anne Tyler. I wrote about my love for Tyler's underappreciated Saint Maybe a couple weeks ago. Once again, I urge you to check out the book. It's quite wonderful.

Birthday Musings and Some Notes

Well, today I turn 23, which is exciting I guess. Truth is, I don't put much stock in the importance of my own birthday anymore, although I am always happy to celebrate it with friends and family. My birthday also gives me time to reflect on all the great reading I did the year before. And the age of 22 was a great year of reading. I encountered two of the best books I have ever read: War and Peace and Gilead, and I explored the poetry of Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Overall, it was a successful reading age. To celebrate, I am including another passage from Gilead, even though you've heard about the book a million times here before. I can't help it; it's genius.

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson:

I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping into the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.


Note: Sorry my posts have been more erratic lately; they may stay that way for awhile. My new job currently has me on a six-day work week, and I will be extremely busy with graduate school applications for the next month or so. I will always post a Poem of the Week, and I will update you all on anything I read or recommend. For example, you will soon hear about Pete Dexter's new novel, Spooner, which I am set to finish in the next 24 hours. It's been a fantastic read so far. Otherwise, I will try to update as often as possible and stay on schedule as time allows. Thanks for being understanding! Happy Reading, everyone!

Poem of the Week: "Talking in Bed," by Philip Larkin

When I am looking for a good poem, or rather a poem to love and squeeze the life out of, I tend to make the decision based on the ending. If I read the final few lines of a poem and it feels like someone has punched me in the gut, I know I've found a winner. Good endings do many things at once: they end with an image or idea that's memorable, they tie together everything that has come before, and they leave you thinking deeper and wanting more. One of the best end-liners of all time is Philip Larkin. I have mentioned Philip Larkin on here a couple times already, and I apologize if I sound like a broken record, but he is just so incredible. His rhyme and meter manages to be complex and simple at the same time, and he buries nuggets of philosophy in images of common, even mundane, tasks and descriptions.

So, here we have "Talking in Bed," my single most-favorite Larkin poem in a long list of favorite Larkin poems (and quite possibly my second favorite poem of all time in all of poetry). It's deceptively simple, and yet so beautiful and sad and honest. And those last two lines: Killer gut-punchers. Enjoy!

Talking in Bed, by Philip Larkin

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.