Reading Slumps--What do you do when you don't feel like reading?

Sassymonkey over at BlogHer.com has a great post on "reader's slump." What do you do when you self-identify as a voracious reader, you have a pile of books to read, and yet, you don't feel like reading them?



I have felt this way at times, and for me the issue was if I felt like the reading was required in some way. In graduate school, I experienced slumps when I felt like all I was doing was reading, and the reading was someone else's idea, not mine. I got through it, but it was with mental temper tantrums.



Currently, I experience reading reluctance when it comes to student writing. If a paper or creative assignment is unbearably bad, for example, I just can't stop reading it the way I could put down an unengaging book or article. I have to finish it, and worse, think about it. I have to come up with at least one good thing to say, as well as carefully phrased criticisms that will help the student writer improve. This is more mentally exhausting than reading a well-written book about a difficult subject, such as the Teapot Dome scandal.

Also, and I hate to say this, since I started reading and reviewing books for my blog, I feel like it has transformed reading into a chore. When I pick out books for the library, the question behind my selections is usually, "Can I blog about this?" This transforms my style of reading. Normally, I am a very fast reader, but my retention is not always great. Now that I read with an eye to reviewing, I slow down my reading, so I can understand the book and come up with some sort of judgment about it. This takes time and effort, and thus reading starts to feel like a chore again.

If you blog about books, do you feel similiar? Does reading go from joy to chore, from escape to obligation?

There are times I say to myself, "I don't have to do this. I could quit blogging about books." But I won't quit, darn it! What does keep me going is the idea that someone reads my reviews. If you do read my reviews, please post and let me know what you think!

Hate Your Job? Read Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres

Do you ever fantasize about life in a Victorian country house? When you read Jane Eyre, did you imagine yourself in Jane's place, the plain little governess who wins the heart of her rich and handsome employer? Did you think being a governess could be romantic? Well, you won't after reading Ruth Brandon's book, Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres.

Brandon's study of the lives of English governesses over the span of a century (from the late eighteenth century to 1869, the establishment of Girton College for women at Cambridge Universty) reveals the snobbery, poverty and uncertainty that plagued the lives of women who taught the children of the wealthy and middle-class. Brandon's case studies include some famous governesses (the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron's lover, Claire Claremont, and Anna Leonowens of The King and I fame) as well as more typical examples of genteel women who fell on hard times and had to support themselves.

Governesses generally came from respectable families who had fallen on hard times; they were the women who had failed to find a husband. Entering a well-to-do family to teach and look after the children was one of the few respectable options available to educated young women in desperate circumstances. Governesses were in an amiguous position in English society--they weren't members of the serving class, but they had to earn their living working for their social equals. Despite their education and respectable background, governesses were generally regarded as both pitiable and threatening.

"Pitiable" is self-explanatory; often poorly paid and socially isolated, governesses were the young ladies whose families had fallen from financial grace or who had failed in the marriage market. "Threatening" is a little more complicated, and yet Brandon makes a compelling case for how nineteenth-century English society's disdain for the governess concealed anxiety about the very existence of working single women. If, as Victorian values dictated, women were meant to complement men as their helpmates and mothers to their children, what about the surplus of middle- and upper-middle-class single women? (Apparently working-class single women worked and no one felt too threatened by that.) The educated single woman hired to educate one's daughters could be seen as a harbinger of their fate if one lost one's fortune or failed to find decent husbands for them. No wonder relations between the governess and her employers often were strained and chilly.

In describing the lives of famous and unknown governesses, Brandon creates a narrative arc that shows how the limited education for women perpetuated itself through the practice of hiring a live-in teacher for one's children, usually daughters. Most governesses were versed in English history and grammar, fashionable modern languages, some math, geography, and especially music and needlework. This was the education of a "young lady" meant to snare a husband and adorn his household, not to compete with men in the professional marketplace. Brandon sees the effort of feminist reformers like Emily Davies to establish a college for women that was equal to that of men as the beginning of the end for the governess.

What struck me most as I read Governess was how much women's work was devalued, even as many women supported parents and siblings through governessing. Because the governess often lived with her employers, room and board was not an issue, so many sent their wages back to support widowed mothers, younger siblings, or even put brothers through school and establish them in a profession. Many governesses retired with almost nothing, and some of them had to deal with ungrateful male relatives who did not return the favor done for them. It's depressing to see how families assumed the governess was working for their benefit and not for her own; of course Nelly's wages should go to Tom's education instead of her own pleasure or future. For all the cultural revulsion over women working, many genteel families on hard times had no qualms about living off the earnings of their unmarried sisters and daughters.

Governess reveals the drab underbelly of the wish-fulfillment scenario of Jane Eyre and shows what could have been the possible fate of some of Jane Austen's heroines if they had not made happy marriages. I know that when I start getting down about my job, I'll remind myself it could be worse: I could be teaching French to the youngest Kardashian sisters.

Fiction: The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

The Painter from Shanghai (Historical Fiction) is an atmospheric and enthralling debut novel by Jennifer Cody Epstein. If you have never thought about twentieth-century Chinese art,or the effect of politics on artistic expression, this book will have you pondering these and wanting to learn more. Based on the life of Pan Yuliang, a woman painter who overcame prostitution and sexism to become one of the most respected artists of pre-Communist China, The Painter from Shanghai depicts Madame Pan as a woman who struggles with her shameful past and culture's sexism. In one pivotal scene, Yuliang makes a breakthrough about her adolescence in a brothel and her current difficulty with painting nudes:

And yet studying her model again now, Yulian suddenly realizes that her
troubles, then and now, arise from her own failure to see skin as either more or
less than itself; to see it outside of a spectrum of pain. In her old life
it was a liability, a soft surface waiting for wounds. As such at the
academy it inspires not creative passion but a wave of remembered
revulsion. And in both places she's been unable--hard as she might try--to
see it as beautiful. . . She thinks of Jinling, not in death, as she was the
last time Yuliang saw her, but in those impossibly early days when Yuliang first
began to attend to her. Before she fully understood a body's worth in
monetary terms, and could value it only in the currency of beauty. She
thinks of the way Jinling's skin had looked early in the morning. Sheened
in perspiration, stretched out in sheer joy. Limned in the early light of
a sunrise.

When Pan Yuliang recovers this sense of the body's beauty, she is able to
improve the quality of her nudes. You can see samples of Pan Yuliang's
paintings on Jennifer Cody Epstein's website. Madame Pan travels to France during the 1920s on a painting fellowship and returns to a China that has been wracked by revolution and Japanese imperialism. The last section of the novel takes place in 1936Nanjing, just before the horrible invasion. A new approach to the arts dictates that art must celebrate the common people and revolutionary ideals, and Pan Yuliang's last exhibit is a victim of this zeal. She flees to Paris, and never returns to China.

Anchoring the tale of Pan Yuliang's artistic growth is her marriage to Pan Zanhua, a custom's collector. Epstein sketches a sympathetic portrayal of a man who is caught between Western-style ideals and conservative Chinese values regarding marriage. Marriage to Pan Zanhua simultaneously frees Yuliang--from prostitution, illiteracy, and financial stress--but keeps her in the loving, possessive grip of a man faced with his own struggle to keep his wife close to his side while allowing her the freedom to travel for her art and safety.

I strongly recommend the Painter from Shanghai for its ability to capture the complexity of twentieth-century Chinese history, the artist's creative process, and last but not least, the character of a woman who faced so much adversity and overcame it to pursue her calling to paint.

Book Review: Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop

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Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China is so much more than a record of Fuchsia Dunlop's eating experience in China. It is a travel narrative, a coming-of-age story, a recipe collection, and a record of how China has changed within the past fifteen yearsDunlop, a British journalist who specializes in Chinese culture and food, first went to China in 1992 and returned on a research fellowship in 1994. It was at Sichuan University that she realized her true calling was cookery and food, not foreign policy, and she became the first Westerner to study at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. She is the author of two well-received cookbooks, Land of Plenty (2002) and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook , and she includes some of her favorite Chinese recipes in chapters of Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.

The theme of Dunlop's book seems to be the omnivourous approach of the Chinese to eating. As she points out, Westerners are fascinated and repulsed by stories of Chinese recipes for dogs, animal penises, lizards and insects. Early in her travels, Dunlop vowed to herself that she would broaden her culinary horizons and try anything that her eager Chinese hosts would offer her, no matter how surprising or potentially disgusting it would seem to her upper-middle class British sensibilities. By the time, she has returned to England at her memoir's end, she can view a caterpillar in the same way as a native Chinese: not as a contaminant on her salad, but as a possibly tasty addition.

I can see where the "gross out" factor might turn prospective readers off to the book, or to the Chinese as a people, but Dunlop sees this as a trait of curiousity and resourcefulness, a willingness to take pleasure in certain aspects of food (its mouth feel, its preparation) that Western cuisines limit to the safe and obvious. Along the way, not only does Dunlop's palate change, but also China. The pet food scare of 2007 that had many Americans wondering about the safety of Chinese-made products is just the tip of the iceberg for "a professional omnivore" like Dunlop:

In the old days, in Sichuan, my hunger was a free and joyful thing.
The food before me was fresh, free-range, and wholesome, and I wanted to
devour it all. But in the last ten or fifteen years China has changed beyond all
recognition. I've seen the sewer-like rivers,the suppurating sores oflakes. I've read the newspaper reports;breathedthe toxic air and drunk the dirty water. And I've eaten far too much meat from endangered species. In China I have to throw all my principles to the wind if I am to continue in my vow of eating everything.

Fortunately, a trip to Hangzhou Province in eastern China revives Dunlop's love affair with China, as it points to a hopeful future of a more thoughtful approach to food production and consumption. Dunlop shows that China is far from monolithic; different provinces have different climates and histories that shape their cuisines. Sichuan cuisine is a playful, flirtatious "spice girl" who uses its famous pepper to charm, while Hunan is a fire-breathing peasant who piles on the chiles in its cooking. Coincidentally, Hunan Province is the birthplace of Mao Zedong.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper piqued my own latent interest in Chinese food and culture. While I only have access to Chinese-American buffets in my own neck of the woods, Dunlop's book has inspired me to check out her earlier cookbooks as well as some other favorites.



and:

John Irving and the Nashville Public Library

Here's some book-related news for today:



John Irving to receive Nashville Public Library Literary Award



Now off to prepare excerpts of The Ramayana of Valmiki for my World Literature class.
Below are some of my favorite Irving novels. I especially loved The Cider House Rules.

Behind Every Great Man is a Maligned Woman: Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife

A professor of mine once described Germaine Greer as the clever girl in class who liked to say shocking things. In Shakespeare's Wife, Greer challenges the predominant view of Shakespeare scholars who believe that Ann Hathaway was a desparate older woman who entrapped young William Shakespeare into a marriage that he was only too happy to distance himself from when he went to London to try his luck as an actor and playwright. Greer, best known for such feminist works as The Female Eunuch and Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, paints an alternate portrait of Ann Hathaway Shakespeare as a capable and enterprising wife and mother who may have been just too good for her dreamy poet husband.

Greer does good old-fashioned archival research, going through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wills, lawsuits, and other documents to give a vivid, realistic picture of life among the farmers and tradesmen of Stratford-on-Avon. She does this to debunk the suppositions and received opinion about Ann Shakespeare held dear by other (mostly male) Shakespeare and Renaissance scholars about Ann as the barely tolerated bane of the Bard's existence. Greer shows that a lot of this negative image of Ann as an illiterate country wench/seductress stems from these critics' own attitudes towards the wives of great men. Somehow, it's almost always the wife's fault: Milton's first wife didn't agree with his politics, so she must have been proud and flighty. Thackeray's wife became mentally ill, so she must have been an embarassment and burden to him. Byron's wife was a prig because she liked math and couldn't tolerate the rumours of his affair with his half-sister. Greer shows that the Hathaways and their kin around Stanford were actually practical, fairly successful farmers, and that the Shakespeares may have had pretensions to grandeur that William's father couldn't live up to because of his declining fortunes. Furthermore, she shows that William attended grammar school, but was not listed as an apprentice to any tradesman in the records; sounds like a bright boy raised to think of himself as a gentleman who couldn't or wouldn't sully his hands with trade. Why not marry into the Hathaways, who were financially better off than his own family?

While Shakespeare was away, Greer paints a picture of a sensible woman, to all purposes, a single parent to young children. She combs through contemporary records to show how Ann might have supported herself and her family while her husband was barely making a living in London. She also shows that despite the distance between them, Shakespeare did not despise his wife; if anything, evidence in his plays seem to point to a man who feels slightly guilty about his absences from Ann, while celebrating the constancy of misunderstood or abandoned wives.

What I love about Greer's style is her accessibility and even sardonic zingers. Some of the descriptions of wills, Vicar's court reports, etc. can get overwhelming, but they help build her case that archival evidence does not support the traditional view of Ann Shakespeare. A picture of an English country town shifting from agriculture to manufacturing, as well as becoming more puritanical emerges, and these people's daily lives reveal a lot more complexity than we might assume.

Frankly, I admire the kind of scholarship Greer does. She could have constructed some sloppy theoretical argument about her subject and sold it on the power of her name, but she gets into the archives, digs about and presents a persuasive case for reimagining the woman behind the Bard.

Old Bedfellows: Big Oil and the Republican Party

If you are interested in what role America's energy problem will play in this year's election, you need to read Laton McCartney's The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Hardng White House and Tried to Steal the Country. Granted, it focuses on events that occurred over 80 years ago, but the story of how a few wealthy oilmen bought Warren G. Harding the Republican nomination in 1920 resonates during this year's election.
According to Maccartney's book, President Warren G. Harding let his new Secretary of the Interior take over the Navy's oil reserves and open them up for leasing and bidding to only a few cronies. Some smaller oil companies heard about this and complained about the apparent fishiness of the deal. A Congessional hearing was begun and despite Republican hostility, national apathy, and the wealth and deceptiveness of several of the defendants, the Secretary of the Interior was indicted, convicted and sent to prison, while some of the oilmen were acquitted. Other low-level players in the scandal lost their positions or fortunes, or even their lives.
Okay, so why does this matter now? Well, McCain changed his mind about no drilling in areas such as the ANWR; now it' the quickest way to lower prices and our dependence on foreign oil. This apparently occurred after he received a campaign contribution of over a million dollars from big oil interests. He's also chosen Sarah Palin, who supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as his running mate. Although both claim that their energy policy includes looking at alternate sources, their emphasis on drilling ASAP reveals their real policy. It sounds like this:
"DRILLING NOW FOR DOMESTIC OIL WILL SOLVE OUR ENERGY PROBLEM! We'll get around to checking out alternate forms of energy, BUT DRILLING NOW FOR DOMESTIC OIL WILL SOLVE OUR PROBLEM!"
Ask yourself: who benefits from drilling in these reserves? Supposedly the American people (like you think Big Oil is going to drop its prices now that it has tested how much we will endure?), Alaska, of course, and most definitely the major oil companies. You know, the same people who made such a timely and generous contribution to McCain's election. If McCain is elected President, he bears careful watching when it comes to energy policy. As Mccartney's book shows, so much of the dirty dealing in the Teapot Dome Scandal went on under the American public's radar, simply because the oil barons literally had bags and suitcases of money to buy many Republican politicians' cooperation and silence.
So read The Teapot Dome Scandal. Mccartney writes clearly and makes a complicated, potentially dry topic engrossing and understandable. He focuses on the main characters and they live again, just as hypocritical, greedy, deluded and ambitious as they were eighty years ago. The Teapot Dome Scandal reads less like history and more like a political thriller, with plenty of sordid details revealing how long the Republican Party and Big Oil have been bedfellows.
Already read Mccartney's book? Share your thoughts about it here, especially in the light of our coming election.