Reading time has been slim these days, but a short vacation to visit an old friend afforded a bit of time on her gorgeously comfortable leather sofa to finish a book and a begin another, a gift from that said friend.
The book I finally managed to complete was Doug Brinkley’s The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey. This has been on my shelf forever and I got to it from my revisionist history reading. Brinkley created an on-the-road history course and spent a summer criss-crossing the country with his students, immersing themselves in America, using the country as textbook. The book itself was a hybrid: part textbook when Brinkley took time to provide background as well as his own personal and professional spin on the locations being visited and part travelogue with details about attractions, restaurants and night spots. Mostly, I walked away with a huge list of musicians and writers added to my must-listen, must-read lists, starting with Robert Johnson and Thomas Wolfe. Johnson was easy…I found recordings on the Internet archive. Locating Wolfe was actually easy as well since I inherited a copy of both Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again from the good doctor whose spirit enshrouds the farmhouse.
I had started the former right before leaving and then did not take it along. When Brinkley’s chronicle came to an end, I turned to one of the books from my friend whose preference is British lit: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz. Each chapter revolves around one of the novels and I found myself connecting to the network to download Emma, a book I read many years ago.
We also went to see the newest version of Jane Eyre, which was terrific, atmospheric, moody, just the perfect vision of the novel. I actually prefer the Brontes to Austen and have read Jane Eyre multiple times, but a new copy now resides on my Nook.
This morning, I stole a few minutes from unpacking to pick up Thomas Wolfe and begin the story of Eugene Gant from the beginning. The sweeping panorama of the first few pages was beginning to make me wonder if there would be something more intimate when Wolfe pulled me down to the very birth of Eugene. But before that it was the description of his tortured father’s garden that washed over me:
Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched four hundred feet behind the house he planted trees and grape vines. And whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into golden life: as the years passed, the fruit trees–the peach, the plum, the cherry, the apple–grew great and bent beneath their clusters. His grape vines thickened into brawny ropes of brown and coiled down the high wire fences of his lot, and hung in a dense fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around. They climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows in thick bowers. And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his yard–the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny dyes, the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily. The honeysuckle dropped its have mass upon the fence; wherever his great hands touched the earth, it grew fruitful for him.
Aah…I suppose some might find it too prosey but I just dove in, relishing the thick description, thinking about our own property with its sprawling vines and towering trees.
So, I suppose I don’t have a dilemma: I’m going American for now.
NB: It took me two days to write this entry and I haven’t picked up Wolfe in all that time. We are making almost daily trips back and forth between the city house and the farm with car loads of our possessions. The weather is horribly hot so if we take a break, we end up napping, storing up energy for the next explosion of energy. So, the reading dilemma may be a moot point.
