all the reading what I've been doing
Dec. 1st, 2020 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee34First, a foray back in time to some poetry I loved as a teen.
Listen to the Warm by Rod McKuen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Oh, lordy. So a friend started buying me Rod McKuen books of poetry in high school; this one and one other that she gave me are autographed by him. As a teen, I loved McKuen. Hard. He was one of the first poets I read who wrote about desire and relationships in contemporary language. I mean, Donne writes about desire, but "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" did not do it for teen me. McKuen's poems felt exotic and grown up to me. I wanted to pretend I was a grown up having an affair on a beach or whatever. LOL
Does not hold up as an adult. I find most of this pretty banal and some of it kind of offensive (his comments on sixties/seventies counterculture; spoiler alert: he is against it).
I'm not getting rid of this volume because my dear friend gave it to me, and it's signed. But thus concludeth the re-reads.
View all my reviews
Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows by Rod McKuen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Again, not holding up as an adult.
This is interesting, though. When I was reading Listen to the Warm, I thought I was picking up on some gay subtext to some of the poems but dismissed it as most of the poems are about relationships with women. When I started picking up on gay subtext in this collection, I did a little research and turns out McKuen had relationships with men and women and was an LGBT activist.
He also won a Grammy, was nominated for a Pulitzer, and was nominated for two Oscars for movie scores.
View all my reviews
Lonesome Cities by Rod McKuen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Again, not holding up as an adult.
I did like these lines from "The Art of Catching Trains":
"and nighttime eats the summer up
and spits the stars across the sky."
View all my reviews
In Someone's Shadow by Rod McKuen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I like this collection best so far. It's so odd being able to see exactly what I loved about these poems as a teen and realizing that's exactly what renders them trite to me as an adult. I did like this poem quite a bit:
April 12
We come into the world alone.
We go away the same.
We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness.
Or so we tell ourselves.
But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.
View all my reviews
Coming Close to the Earth by Rod McKuen
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Oh lord.
This is the worst one yet.
There is a terrible, cringey poem about cunnilingus in this collection, and I read it out loud to my husband, and he laughed like he was dying for a full five minutes, and then he said, "Why did you do this to me? I hate Rod McKuen now. Thanks for that."
View all my reviews
What is utterly fascinating about McKuen is that he was the most commercially successful poet of the 1960s. His collections sold millions of copies in hardback. But he's been ignored critically because, well, see my reviews. LOL He was a very accomplished composer and songwriter with many songs that became big hits for famous singers like Sinatra. He also wrote a memoir in the seventies that was apparently instrumental in changing the way that adoptees can access information about their birth parents.
Next, a little Atwood:
Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Only a handful of the stories in this collection are reprinted in Good Bones and Simple Murders, so most of the stories here are new to me, but none of the new stories really resonate with me. I think this volume is completely miss-able.
View all my reviews
And the children's books roundup for November:
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The premise of this book is that a painter left behind a handful of paintings with only a few sentences of description. There's very little text; it's mostly full page images.
I'm pretty sure this was a gift to Emma years ago, but Fiona has really been too young to appreciate it in the way it was intended as an imagination aid. This week, I went into her room, and she was reading it to herself. "Mom," she said, "I'm looking at each page and imagining it's a spooky story for Halloween." And then we looked at each page and invented spooky stories for each picture. It was really kind of awesome.
View all my reviews
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The second-grader adored this.
I liked it quite a lot, too. It would have appealed to me mightily as a kid; camping by yourself on an island for days and sailing all around the lake and generally being away from adult control is a wonderful fantasy. It has a great mystery at the core, and the hero of the day in both cases of heroism is my favorite.
This is a meaty book; as you can see, it took more than two months to read aloud before bedtime (my husband and I alternate nights we read to her, and we read different books, so it's really more like a little more than one month of nightly reading straight).
There's some casual racism that I'm sure wasn't even recognized as such at the time this was written (references to natives and Indians, etc), so YMMV.
View all my reviews
Listen to the Warm by Rod McKuenMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Oh, lordy. So a friend started buying me Rod McKuen books of poetry in high school; this one and one other that she gave me are autographed by him. As a teen, I loved McKuen. Hard. He was one of the first poets I read who wrote about desire and relationships in contemporary language. I mean, Donne writes about desire, but "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" did not do it for teen me. McKuen's poems felt exotic and grown up to me. I wanted to pretend I was a grown up having an affair on a beach or whatever. LOL
Does not hold up as an adult. I find most of this pretty banal and some of it kind of offensive (his comments on sixties/seventies counterculture; spoiler alert: he is against it).
I'm not getting rid of this volume because my dear friend gave it to me, and it's signed. But thus concludeth the re-reads.
View all my reviews
Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows by Rod McKuenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Again, not holding up as an adult.
This is interesting, though. When I was reading Listen to the Warm, I thought I was picking up on some gay subtext to some of the poems but dismissed it as most of the poems are about relationships with women. When I started picking up on gay subtext in this collection, I did a little research and turns out McKuen had relationships with men and women and was an LGBT activist.
He also won a Grammy, was nominated for a Pulitzer, and was nominated for two Oscars for movie scores.
View all my reviews
Lonesome Cities by Rod McKuenMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Again, not holding up as an adult.
I did like these lines from "The Art of Catching Trains":
"and nighttime eats the summer up
and spits the stars across the sky."
View all my reviews
In Someone's Shadow by Rod McKuenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I like this collection best so far. It's so odd being able to see exactly what I loved about these poems as a teen and realizing that's exactly what renders them trite to me as an adult. I did like this poem quite a bit:
April 12
We come into the world alone.
We go away the same.
We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness.
Or so we tell ourselves.
But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.
View all my reviews
Coming Close to the Earth by Rod McKuenMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Oh lord.
This is the worst one yet.
There is a terrible, cringey poem about cunnilingus in this collection, and I read it out loud to my husband, and he laughed like he was dying for a full five minutes, and then he said, "Why did you do this to me? I hate Rod McKuen now. Thanks for that."
View all my reviews
What is utterly fascinating about McKuen is that he was the most commercially successful poet of the 1960s. His collections sold millions of copies in hardback. But he's been ignored critically because, well, see my reviews. LOL He was a very accomplished composer and songwriter with many songs that became big hits for famous singers like Sinatra. He also wrote a memoir in the seventies that was apparently instrumental in changing the way that adoptees can access information about their birth parents.
Next, a little Atwood:
Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems by Margaret AtwoodMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Only a handful of the stories in this collection are reprinted in Good Bones and Simple Murders, so most of the stories here are new to me, but none of the new stories really resonate with me. I think this volume is completely miss-able.
View all my reviews
And the children's books roundup for November:
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van AllsburgMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The premise of this book is that a painter left behind a handful of paintings with only a few sentences of description. There's very little text; it's mostly full page images.
I'm pretty sure this was a gift to Emma years ago, but Fiona has really been too young to appreciate it in the way it was intended as an imagination aid. This week, I went into her room, and she was reading it to herself. "Mom," she said, "I'm looking at each page and imagining it's a spooky story for Halloween." And then we looked at each page and invented spooky stories for each picture. It was really kind of awesome.
View all my reviews
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur RansomeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The second-grader adored this.
I liked it quite a lot, too. It would have appealed to me mightily as a kid; camping by yourself on an island for days and sailing all around the lake and generally being away from adult control is a wonderful fantasy. It has a great mystery at the core, and the hero of the day in both cases of heroism is my favorite.
This is a meaty book; as you can see, it took more than two months to read aloud before bedtime (my husband and I alternate nights we read to her, and we read different books, so it's really more like a little more than one month of nightly reading straight).
There's some casual racism that I'm sure wasn't even recognized as such at the time this was written (references to natives and Indians, etc), so YMMV.
View all my reviews
