5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from Matthew Sharpe, whose perverse and wonderful novel Jamestown is the Lit Blog Co-op’s Read This! Selection for summer. Join the LBC discussion of the novel happening this week, which features a podcast, entries from Sharpe and Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash, and other shenanigans.
When I think of the novel as it blossomed in the nineteenth century, I tend to think of plucky, independent-minded young men and women who, despite a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, succeed in marrying above their station in the closing pages; or, alternatively, languid, morbid-minded young men and women who, succumbing to a series of insurmountable obstacles, succeed in being crushed to death by love or fate in the closing pages. But defying this identification of novels with youth are what I like to call geezer novels, a sub-genre wherein the protagonists are old, or nearly so, and the adventures that befall them therefore all that much more surprising. So here is my mini-celebration of five geezer novels, in alphabetical order by author, more or less.
1. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. This fantastical novel whose author is probably better known as a painter concerns a 90-year-old woman whose family cannot distinguish between her, a rooster, and a cactus. She dies and comes back… as a 90-year-old woman.
2. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Whose protagonist is the OG (Original Geezer).
3. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattaruso. My fellow Soft Skull author’s novel is wise and beautifully written and its protagonist, being an unfrozen dinosaur, is way older than any of the others on this list.
4. All the Names by Jose Saramago. An epic journey undertaken by a lowly late-middle-aged filing clerk in an unnamed European city that may be the same one where Kafka’s The Trial takes place.
5. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett. “…waiting for the joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy.”

I’ve been working like a fiend all week in anticipation of a trip to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend with my friends Hortense and Boozy (who live in New York). Although, I’ll admit, the furious pace of this work flow may have been compromised by my trotting to the bathroom every ten minutes to see if my Dr. Denese self-tanner had taken effect. It (the self-tanner) did eventually kick in, and I now emanate a lustrous St. Tropez glow, especially if viewed at night, in a well-curtained room, illumined by the benevolent light of a lone flickering candle. Alas, in direct sunlight the effect is somewhat diminished. In short: If you’re in Martha’s Vineyard this weekend, and you spot a woman whose unevenly streaked skin suggests recreational hours spent rolling joyfully in a basin of coffee grounds, I hope you’ll say hello.
Still: the beach, ocean! Gin! Our trio’s required reading for the trip is Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds of Nantucket (a Dido Twite special), with additional reading on the subjects of whaling, cannibalism and tragic shipwreck strongly encouraged. I have Moby Dick packed (my second trip through), along with Kate Christensen’s Great Man (see Terry’s recommendation in the Top Five at right) and Northanger Abbey, for a bit of Gothic before bedtime.
I’m not taking my laptop, so not a peep from me till Tuesday. See you then!

At the library last week I picked up the first volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read many of the mysteries before (“The Red-Headed League” was a particular favorite when I was a kid) but never the first one, A Study in Scarlet (published 1887), in which Watson and Holmes meet for the first time and arrange to set up digs together on Baker Street.
In that first interview, Holmes warns Watson “I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days at times.” Am I the only one who thought “being in the dumps” was a modern construction? (Linked to town dumps, junkyard dogs, being put to the curb, etc.) It is not. A friend with a copy of the OED was kind enough to send along the appropriate dictionary entry — forthwith, the three definitions of “in the dumps” with their earliest usages:

1. A fit of abstraction or musing, a reverie; a dazed or puzzled state, a maze; perplexity, amazement; absence of mind.
1523 Skelton Garl. Laurell 14 So depely drownyd I was in this dumpe, encraumpyshed so sore was my conceyte, That, me to rest, I lent me to a stumpe of an oke.
2. A fit of melancholy or depression; now only in pl. (colloq. and more or less humorous): Heaviness of mind, dejection, low spirits.
1529 More Comf. agst. Trib. i. Wks. 1140/2 What heapes of heauynesse, hathe of late fallen amonge vs alreadye, with whiche some of our poore familye bee fallen into suche dumpes.
3. A mournful or plaintive melody or song; also, by extension, a tune in general; sometimes app. used for a kind of dance.
1553 Udall Royster D. ii. i. (Arb.) 32 Then twang with our sonets, and twang with our dumps, And heyhough from our heart, as heauie as lead lumpes.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from Katharine Weber, whose fascinating novel Triangle is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
I was a morbid child, they (teachers, my mother) said. My favorite moments in the relatively sunny Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books were the near-death of the entire family in the “Fever and Ague” chapter in Little House on the Prairie
and the threat of starvation in The Long Winter . My Ordeal by Hunger Donner Party book report in sixth grade was deemed tomboyish and strange by most of my classmates (the boy before me reported on a biography of Thomas Edison and the girl after me reported on My Friend Flicka). My Evanston relatives were impatient with my wishes to visit landmarks to feed my Chicago Fire fascination. Whenever I had a cold I would try to suppress my coughing the way Anne Frank in her secret annex had to, during office hours. I was a font of Titanic trivia long before Leonardo DiCaprio was born. Maybe feasting on all that disaster helped my own chaotic childhood feel comparatively safe and organized. Maybe all those disaster books were like survival handbooks for me, illuminating my private secret sense that I could have endured and managed to find my way through those events; surely I would have been one of the canny ones, equipped with fine-tuned survival instincts.
1. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George Stewart. The very words “Donner Party” offer a frisson of horror and then a snicker you don’t want to own, because you don’t quite know what to do with that incongruently festive designation. Bad decisions, snow, worse decisions, more snow, bad luck, more snow, and then comes the cannibalism you anticipate from the first page.
2. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Who cares if the prose is merely adequate when the story is among the best tragedies in the history of the civilization? This is the definitive account for those of us who prefer our Titanic the way she was last seen, strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (probably) wafting from the strings of the heroic musicians who played on the deck until the end, when the ship upended and slid to the bottom of the sea. Lord’s book was published the year I was born, many decades before technology could dilute the mystery by providing salvage loot and glimpses of that sad rusting hulk on the ocean floor (not to mention a terrible framing device for that movie).
3. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury. Endless winter plus starvation and cannibalism, plus Nazi atrocities — so many of my favorite obsessions are represented in this stirring, majestic book.
4. The Circus Fire: The True Story of an American Tragedy by Stewart O’Nan. Circuses and clowns are creepy anyway, even without a conflagration. The horrific 1944 Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford that killed nearly 170 people, more than half of them children, took only a few minutes to ignite, because the immense circus tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline. As the tent went up in flames, the waterproofing mixture rained down on the crowd of some eight thousand souls like napalm. Adding to the mystery and horror, several of the children were never identified, most famously the eerily beautiful Little Miss 1565. This elegant account, which gets my vote for best Stewart O’Nan book, is informed by dozens of interviews with survivors of the fire. Many of them described the hideous, unforgettable sounds of the trapped animals burning. The eerie still point at the heart of the book is when O’Nan follows the eyewitness accounts of the animals screaming with the quiet statement that no animals were burned in the fire.
5. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. Ambition, hubris, bravery, selfishness, death, and a bizarre cast of characters. An irresistible, horrible sequence of events with all the elements of a thriller, this is a book that succeeds because Krakauer tells the story with clarity and insight.

Maybe I’ve been exposed to too much craft in the past few years — you can’t walk out your door in Asheville without falling over a potter’s wheel — but if I were a rich man all of my friends would be sleeping under these. My favorite is “Skullf***ed”.
(via Mighty Goods.)

With apologies for talking about the weather, but it’s like the steaming pampas here in the mountains. Walk anywhere in jeans and in about ten minutes it feels like you’ve got a pair of these strapped on top, and while that’s weirdly gaucho appropriate it’s also kind of a drag.
Full-body torpor aside, my plans for the weekend are mostly hermit-y. I’ve been a stressed-out monkey about work the past month but I have just one more deadline to hit this afternoon and then I’m caught up (chorus of angels say yay). So I can work on my book this weekend instead of doing work-work, and play with Scrivener, and go to the (air-conditioned) university library and race around the stacks doing weird little research projects, and it will be mole-like and good.
Because of work my reading’s been helter-skelter the past few weeks too — I’m currently about a quarter of the way through a half-dozen books, and loving none of them — so the other big project is to draw up a giant list of what I want to read in the next couple months and then commit to it with fiendish intensity. Good times.
The one social outing on the schedule is to see Paprika at the Fine Arts Theatre . In the Mountain Xpress, Cranky Hanke — who’s a friend, and it’s true, he is cranky! — gave it an explosion of stars. Also, I’ve rented The Goonies, because I’ve never seen it and my husband insists this represents a GIANT, incomprehensible gap in cinematic knowledge. (Speaking of GIANT, incomprehensible gaps, Terry, how is it that you’ve never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark?)
[Bracketed and possibly incomprehensible sports asides: I was jazzed to read about Ankiel’s homer last night. I follow the Braves so witnessed the Meltdown of ’00, which was so painful to watch I hid in the kitchen for part of it. Also great: Having Kornheiser and Wilbon back after an interminable vacation hiatus. True or untrue?: Dan LeBatard is to PTI what Donny is to Big Lebowski. Discuss.]
Have a great weekend, folks!

For the past year my exercise regime has been to walk to a big hill near my house and then walk up and down it as long as I can last. It’s Nature’s elliptical! I take the dog and, in an arrangement we’re both probably too comfortable with, she gets carried after the second trip up the hill, looking, I imagine, like a tiny, disagreeable sultan riding on an elephant.
Somewhere on the 1,000th trip up the hill, I exhausted the music on my iPod and so I started listening to downloads of old episodes of “This American Life” instead. I know the show’s been around forever, etc., but I’d never really listened, and now I’m a little addicted.
Three of my favorite episodes:
• “Fiasco!“: Listen for the opening story by Jack Hitt about an amateur production of “Peter Pan” that goes terribly, terribly wrong. As readers of Tingle Alley know, I have a great weakness for the “amateur theatricals gone awry” genre of anecdote — traceable to a formative viewing of “Sweeney Todd” during which the prop knife kept misfiring, squirting gobs of prop blood as far as the fourth row — and this one is a doozy. (The first time I listened to this story I had to sit down mid-walk because it was so funny.)
• “Act V“: Another story by Jack Hitt, this one about a prison staging of “Hamlet.”
• “My Brilliant Plan“: Listen for the “Second Act,” about Ron Mallett’s decades-long quest to build a time machine in order to see his dead father again. His first time-machine model, built when he was only 11, was based on an illustration he found in a comic-book version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from author Nicola Griffith, whose gripping novel Always is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
When I read I want to immerse myself in the word world: to taste it, hear it, feel it on my skin. I want the people and places and modes of thought to invade my mirror neurons–to persuade me, just for a while, that this narrative is my lived experience.
I grew up with the notion that ‘escapist’ reading was intellectually inferior to coolly analytical text, but now I’m on the side of Tolkien: those most likely to be upset by the notion of escape are the jailers. Now I’ll read anything, as long as it’s good, as long as it gives me that sense of multiplication, of time travel and life extension.
1. All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue. Poetic bricolage brimming with energy. With cinematic jump cuts and scene notes, Logue reimagines the first battle of the Iliad, renaming familiar characters and gleefully mixing imagery that’s historically accurate and wildly anachronistic (arrows carve tunnels through people’s necks the width of a lipstick, Idomeneo would ‘sign a five-war-contract on the nod’). As I read I felt dust gritting under my palms and blood in my mouth. An experience as startling as a flick in the eye.
2. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (trans. in collaboration with Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s American partner). The physical embarrassments of age, memories of cold skin and hot fires of youth, the awfulness of no longer being able to hunt. With brilliant precision, Yourcenar delineates the physical and cultural environment’s influence on character. (For insight into Yourcenar’s life and work, see Joan Acocella’s lovely essay.)
3. A History of the English Church and People by Bede (for maximum culture shock, try the Plummar/Sherley-Price edition with its mind-bogglingly literal mid-twentieth century introduction). Here is an eighth-century English monk inventing the notion of cultural history in the short, snappy one- or two-page chapters I thought had been first used by twentieth-century bestsellers. Now I’m wriggling with excitment at the imminent arrival on my doorstep of a new complete translation of the 20-book The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, translated by Barney, Lewis, Beach, and Berghof. This was the Wikipedia of Bede’s time–his version of time travel. Want to know why architects used green Carystean marble to panel libraries, or whether amber is born of the sap of poplar or pine? Look no further.
4. The Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. The first book, Master and Commander, is essentially the opening chapter of a 20-volume novel set against the naval engagements of the Napoleonic wars. Jane Austen on a boat. Although the quality dims over the last five volumes, the first fifteen are faultless. I marvel at, to quote A.S. Byatt, O’Brian’s ‘prodigal specificity’, his humane touch, his humor and subtlety, the perfect balance of exuberance and restraint, his unerring eye for the exact word, the comic detail, and his ability to delineate changes in the friendship between two men with the same authority as volatile politics in South America or a brutal cutlass fight. I was utterly swept away by these books, and returned delighted and increased.
5.The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. A chapter in the history of a world that never was but should have been. As we travel with hobbits and dwarves we taste elven bread and good honest beer, smell the fumes of Orodruin and the existential rot of the marshes of Mordor. The book is stuffed with satisfactions: hobbit delight in a good snug hole in a sandy bank, dwarfish appreciation of a beautiful cavern, the soul-stirring gallop of the perfect horse. The film adaptation was enormous fun–at times even moving–but it lacked understanding of the Anglo-Saxon burdens of noblesse oblige and elegy which lie at the book’s heart. Journeying with Tolkien in print is stunning; when we get to the end and come back, home looks different.