Retirement, Take Seventeen: My Books, My Self

I keep saying that I have more time to myself than I used to, but the trick, I have decided, is to spend my time more wisely, and I have also realized that since I spend more time at home than I used to that I need to make a little more space. And one easy way to start this is to sort out my books. Some few I have already given away.

To some people my doing so is heresy, I know. If books are not sacred, they are important enough to keep. Well, mostly. But having fewer (and better organized)  books means less dusting.

What started as a stack (well, stacks) on the top of the roll top desk is now a cardboard box of books I want to read again: Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. and E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictionalized telling of the Rosenberg trials told from a son's point of view. Montaigne's essays because I can just pick up the volume and start reading anywhere, pretty much. A couple volumes of maybe-the-last-polymath Stephen Jay Gould's essays. Dickens' Dombey and Son is there, and I also have a copy of Our Mutual Friend to read. I'd like to reread The Dalai Lama's Cat: The Art of Purring by David Michie, an introduction to Buddhism, and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have finished all of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run except the epilogue since I don't really want it to end.

And in various other locations in the house there are other books I want to read: Marilynne Robinson's Home and Lila, follow-ups to her wonderful Gilead. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. For Christmas I got a book about the lyrics to Beatles songs I would like to read, and I still haven't gotten to Klaus Vorrmann's bilingual (English and German) graphic novel about his designing the Revolver album cover. He autographed my copy for me in August and it has been on the bookshelf waiting since through no fault of its own, just as Krista Tippett's Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living and a collection of William Hazlitt's essays named On the Pleasure of Hating have been. Recently I finished both Martha Gelhorn's Travels with Myself and Another and a biography of her, and over the summer The Big Read was Claire Harman's Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart. These days I need to finish Tana French's The Trespasser for my book club by the end of the month, and about that time the U.S. version of Ian Rankin's tartan noir Rather Be the Devil should arrive.

My books, my passions: I have what I think of as the Vietnamese collection and the Beatles collection. A few books on digital photography and an assortment of travel books, Lonely Planet Vietnam, Rick Steves'  Britain, and then some aspirational travel books (Latvia and Lithuania, for instance) and a couple by Michael Palin who, after all, has been just about everywhere.

I have some old-timey Nancy Drew books and some books salvaged from the family farm: Robert Louis Stevenson's  Treasure Island, Louisa May Alcott's Under the Lilacs, a book on sex behavior probably from the early 1900s (?) that I haven't yet opened, and a heavily annotated  Complete Course in French. I keep my 1976 $4.95 version of Our Bodies, Our Selves just because.

I have a sense of what I don't want to reread or keep: I can tell you exactly where I was when I first read and loved Tristram Shandy, but I didn't enjoy it at all when I tried to read it a couple years ago. Moby Dick. John Milton. Most of Shakespeare except the sonnets. Donna Tarrt's The Goldfinch. A lot of the cheap mysteries I read and forgot I have already found a home for. But I have kept the anthologies that I amassed over the years--world, British and American literature--if only because hey, you never know. I may want to read something in them. Some day. I still have my Chaucer book stashed upstairs with the anthologies and my undergraduate German 101 textbook, also very heavily annotated; I marvel at the vocabulary list even at the end of the first chapter--eighty-eight words!--in those pre- CD and DVD days. But learn those words I did.

I have no shortage of things to read--so much to read that even sorting the books to make more space seems to be taking time from doing that same reading! And I have to confess that I have thrown out (that is, put in the recycling bin) some  novels primarily because they have dark grey words on recycled-a-dozen-times grey-white paper and thus are difficult to even think about reading again..

And  I do have an iPad, mostly because of its retina display which yes indeedy does make a difference. The iPad eye-ease resolution makes the print easy on my eyes even if the reading experience lacks the feel of a book--any book old or new: the the first opening of the cover, the flexing of the binding, the folding of the page corners. The smell.

And yes, even the dust.

Copyright Sandra Engel
January 2017

Retirement, Take Four

Two surprises: in retirement I have not been reading as much as I expected I would be, and when I do read, I find I am reading in a way far different from how I used to. Not surprisingly, my eyes are just about never tired the way they were when I was working full-time, mostly under fluorescent lights.

I was looking forward to having big chunks of time to myself once I retired, and as long as I manage my time, I do have them: I cluster errands (lunch with friends, the visit to the supermarket, the library and the gym and then finally to Dunkin' Donuts for my senior discount which I do think they should rename to the British "concession"), and some days I am busy at home for the most part, a morning of revising, then lunch, laundry, vacuuming, a little rearranging of the furniture or playing with the cats, and then I walk for an hour in the neighborhood. You get the idea.

I can's say I made a list of books, but I did have some ideas before I retired about what I wanted to read: at least the first book of Diana Gabbadon's Outlander Scotland time-travel series, since these days time-travel does seem relevant; Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend since the characters named Veneering seemed relevant to my view of the world of late; and maybe the Harry Potter series (or maybe just watch all the movies, which may be a more realistic goal, all things considered). I wanted to reread some of the Nancy Drew books, Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping, and E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, one of my all-time favorite books, a fictionalized view of the Rosenberg trials told from the point of view of one of the sons. I wanted to again read around in the essays of Montaigne (you can do that with them), and read James Joyce's Ulysses and James Boswell's Life of Johnson and maybe reread Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy just for fun. For years I said I was saving the complete Paradise Lost for retirement, but that will have to take a place WAY at the back of the line. I just got a copy of John Irving's Avenue of Mysteries.

But as of Day 150 of retirement, I have read fairly little, all things considered. I finished a biography of Eric Clapton (it ended in 1984 or so), and I reread part of Pattie Boyd's autobiography after I met her (more on this in a late blog. She is the ex-wife of both Beatle George Harrison and Eric Clapton). For me, this is not much. I read magazines (The Week, Smithsonian) and at least part of the weekday New York Times plus a local paper. I read The Guardian online.

This may be a significant change in who I am. Since I read my first Nancy Drew book, I have been a reader. There has always been a book near the couch and on the nightstand. Always. The first thing I did whenever I moved to a new location was to get a card at the local public library (even when I was working on a Ph.D. in English, no less and had plenty to read). I have no idea how many boxes of books I have in addition to those in the bookcases. I have about forty books on my iPad, the iPad's advantage being that books there don't require dusting or shelving or eventually moving somewhere. Books are heavy. Plus, the high definition retinal display is much easier for me to read than fuzzy grey print on lighter grey paper that has been recycled, recycled, recycled.

Especially in retirement, reading may no longer prove to be the necessary escape that it had to be during my time as an employee, including the months I had off in the summer. I no longer feel the powerful need to read to decompress, to get away away away from the meetings and politics any more. By reading.

Still, I have pre-ordered the latest Ian Rankin tartan noir mystery novel set in Edinburgh, and it should arrive during the coldest part of the winter. Right now I am reading Slightly Distracted, an autobiography by Steve Coogan, one of the funniest actors I know of (although he is far better known in the United Kingdom than he is in the United States). Here he is best known, probably, for the journalist (and he was the writer and producer as well) of the movie Philomena. He was also in both The Trip and The Trip to Italy a few years ago, and a summer or two ago he starred in the movie Alpha Pappa, known in the U.S. as Alan Partridge, a long-standing, downwardly-mobile goof of a radio celebrity now at North Norfolk Radio. (Alan Partridge's trajectory from being the host of chat show on British television a good twenty years ago to this is pretty clearly downhill.)

I am not sure how I found out about this Alan Partridge character except maybe by accident through a YouTube video of Monty Python linked to something. Maybe. At some point I realized this was the character whose earlier book,  I, Alan Partridge, was displayed prominently in British bookstores when I happened to be there a few years ago. At that time, even after reading the first few pages, I didn't get it. Him. I get it now. Alan Partridge is the creation of Steve Coogan and Alan is a D.J. cousin of Basil Fawlty in John Cleese's Fawlty Towers.

Alan Partridge is not just a jerk. In current parlance, he is a prick. And especially in Coogan's later work, Midmorning Matters (online) and the recent Alan Partridge movie, he can be hysterical.

Fortunately, Steve Cogan is not an academic, and Slightly Distracted  is light but interesting reading with no sensationalism. (Coogan does a lot of things well, including singing--lip synching--in the car. Check out the first twenty minutes of the Alan Partridge movie.) His is a celebrity story that is in some places surprisingly Coogan-family-focused which I am sure some will find disingenuous given the tabloid articles about him a few years ago. (I Googled him.) From the north of England--Manchester--he applied to five drama schools before he was accepted. He moved to standup; to doing voices for Spitting Image, a satirical television show; moved on to the Alan Partridge TV chat show  Knowing Me, Knowing You; and then to comedies and then to the movies. (And one of the movies was Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.)

Coogan is fifty, and it shows in a good way. Google enough, and you will learn that he once interviewed John Cleese somewhere (and it does get a mention in the book), but nowhere can I find that anybody made an audio- or videotape of it. Coogan is a grown-up with an interesting history that in the book he gets specific-enough about.

I tend to be skeptical of celebrity autobiographies, but most of the people I know have never heard of Coogan, and somehow that makes my reading about a celebrity okay. I mean, he is not a Kardashian, and even if I want more juicy details about his early cocaine years and his rehab, what is in the book will do just fine instead (even though the book ends in 1992). And I have to give him credit for leaving that rehab story (stories, more likely) out even though some more cynical than I might characterize the book as a ploy to rebrand himself as he evolves, now booze- and cocaine-free. Now a respected actor. The book even includes a photo of his parents as well as one of him with his daughter.

At this writing I am about halfway through the book, and although it consists of humorous stories and observations (sometimes with just enough of an edge), Coogan does offer two pieces of advice. The second one is to surround yourself with clever people, and the first is to "do the work."

Yes, I did the work, and I was very lucky to work with colleagues who knew all kinds of things and could certainly handle their end of a conversation.

I am not reading Slightly Distracted quickly or with any obsession, and this is exactly how I have done the little reading I have done since late May. Here is my point: I am reading it slowly. I am not reading it quickly for the main ideas or because I have to decide what I think about it and then explain it to someone who does not know much about it. I don't have to take notes on it (even for my book club) or read it with a pen in my hand unless I want to. Through Amazon, I ordered Slightly Distracted from England for cost plus  $3.99 postage, and the book arrived with an old-timey bookmark.

All things considered, I have the feeling I may find that I remember more of Steve Coogan's book than I have of much I have read in I don't know how long.

Leisure reading. Reading for pleasure.

Again.

Finally.



Copyright Sandra Engel