On the nightstand

Or on the kitchen counter. Under the pillow. In the knapsack or, more recently, the messenger bag. On the shelf behind the cat. Atop the toilet tank. Under the front seat in the mini-van. And so on. This is the thirty-fourth "On the nightstand" entry.

Let's begin with a recommendation for poolside reading:

:: I Hate Other People's Kids (Adrianne Frost)

The unending permissiveness and passiveness with which parents treat their kids ends up dampening your enjoyment of everyday life.

Ayup. Like, oh, at the pool? Chuckling at the occasional spot-on observation in this slim read helped me survive amidst OPK (Other People's Kids) today, and for that, I am grateful.

(By the way, my fear and loathing of OPK has a rich history, including, for example, the episode that inspired this entry.)

:: Triangle (Katharine Weber)

Over the years, Rebecca had come to feel that some of their friends with children, and they had many, both in New York and in New Haven, were threatened by their apparently voluntary childlessness--as if children were the obligatory glue necessary to hold a couple together after a certain number of years--and in their unlamented failure to bind themselves with babies, they were breaking some unwritten rule.

SFP recommended this. Like SFP, I appreciated the writing, but by the inclusion of Robert Pinksy's "Shirt" particularly captured my imagination. Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000), was one of my assigned topics some months ago, and when I listened to him read "Shirt" that work-night --

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--

I remembered that the 1911 fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Manufacturing Co. building, which resulted in the death of nearly one hundred fifty people, mostly female employees, had been the subject of a television movie, "The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal." I would have been about sixteen when I saw it, but I still recall how frightening it was to learn that one could be treated so poorly at work and pay for the privilege with her life.

(I've written about the synthesis of my reading, thinking, learning, writing, watching, working lives before; it never ceases to interest me.)

:: My Man Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse)

"Jeeves," I said. It was a few weeks later, and I had just finished looking at the comic section of the Sunday Star. "I'm an optimist. I always have been. The older I get, the more I agree with Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest before the dawn and there's a silver lining and what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts. Look at Mr. Corcoran, for instance. There was a fellow, one would have said, clear up to the eyebrows in the soup. To all appearances he had got it right in the neck. Yet look at him now. Have you seen these pictures?"

"I took the liberty of glancing at them before bringing them to you, sir. Extremely diverting."

"They have made a great hit, you know."

"I anticipated it, sir."

I leaned back against the pillows.

"You know, Jeeves, you're a genius. You ought to be drawing a commission on these things."

If there is a more delightful literary pursuit than Wooster and Jeeves, I have not yet discovered it.

:: PG Wodehouse: A Biography (Frances Donaldson)

No boy who is good at games ever has a bad time at school. He is assured the admiration of his fellows, and, to those who are physically well coordinated, there is nothing in the world more exhilarating than regular games.

:: Wodehouse: A Life (Robert McCrum)

The story of these years is work, work and more work. His childhood had left its mark. Better to be alone than take the risk of company. Better to enjoy the fiendish complexity of plot than the troubling complexity of everyday life. Better to exert control over an imaginary world and keep the demons at bay than suffer the manipulations of fate and allow the intrusion of melancholy.

Of course, I must know more about the mind that yielded Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and his man.

:: Q's Legacy (Helene Hanff)

But that night I dreamed of the bookshop. I'd never dreamed about it before but I'd never had a concrete picture of it in my mind before. Now I saw it vividly.

In this memoir, Hanff describes her discovery of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's volume of lectures and her desire to read every book he recommended. "Then I set out to buy the books he'd taught me to love." Only most were out of print... which lead Hanff to her legendary correspondence with the proprietor of Marks & Co., Antiquarian Booksellers, the subject of the beloved book 84, Charing Cross Road.

:: The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

Therefore I have heard of military operations that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen one that was skillful and lasted a long time. It is never beneficial to a nation to have a military operation continue for a long time.

Master M-mv and I are reading and discussing this.

:: My Latest Grievance (Elinor Lipman)

I got my parents' attention the old-fashioned way: by falling off the honor roll. Of course we had to dissect every psychosocial factor, and the coincidence of my taking up with a boy just as double form duty was watering down their parental intensity. Thus the weekly family meeting in our Griggs Hall kitchen, instituted since the bifurcation, had only one unwritten item on the agenda: the correlation between Ritchie Almeida and my C in Honors Chemistry. They spared me the relations-are-a-beautiful-thing speech, which I'd been hearing since I attended my first coed party at eleven, and went directly to their true quandary: What did I possibly see in a boy like Ritchie, who played hockey, who wasn't going to college, and didn't ever--as each of my parents had independently observed--make eye contact with adults? Was it a daughter's cry for help?

Lipman has been one of my favorite authors since I "discovered" her seven or eight years ago. Her latest is pitch-perfect.

While searching for the Amazon link, I found Fay Weldon's review of Lipman:

Elinor Lipman is a far more serious novelist than she pretends to be or is allowed to be by reviewers. (I learned a long time ago that to be taken seriously you need to cut back on the funny lines. I once all but won the Booker Prize for a novel from which, on Kingsley Amis's advice, I had removed anything remotely mirthful. Alas, it was still "all but," so I reverted to my old ways.) Lipman, declining to learn this worldly wisdom, goes on making jokes and therefore tends to get described with adjectives that are good for sales but bad for literary reputations: "oddball," "hilarious," "over-the-top," "quirky," "beguiling" or, worst of all, "summer reading." The prose slips down too easily and pleasantly to allow her to rise into the literary top division, where the adjectives become "piercing," "important," "profound," "significant," "lyrical," "innovative" and so on. Dull, in fact.

But up there at the top is where this enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original and Austen-like stylist belongs. Delicately, she travels the line where reality and fiction meet. Reality being more oddball, quirky and chaotic than fiction can ever be, Lipman inures us to the truth about the way we live by making it up as she goes along, cracking jokes and pretending it's all fiction.

That about covers it.

Read. Think. Learn.