Wodehouse Woes

O Wooster, Bertie Wooster! Where the hell did you go, Bertram Wooster?
Deny thy borrower and return to me,
Or, if thou wilt not, at least send me Jeeves,
And I'll no longer be a raving bitch about all the books I've lost.

With apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, but this is a real tragedy. My entire Wodehouse collection has gone astray! I am kneeling down like the Infant Samuel at prayer in hopes of its safe return. How could I have let these books out of my sight? As Bertie Wooster might say, "the imagination boggles."

To end this series on ex-books, I turn to the catalyst for the creation of the entire List. Indeed, sir, it was my search for my P.G. Wodehouse books which first alerted me to the fact that my scruples need some fine tuning in the borrower/lender relationship department.

A couple weeks ago I had an urge to spend my afternoon with the idle rich-- a Wodehouse specialty. I looked over my shelves to no avail. I walked up to the library and paid $23.75 in library fines (an occupational hazard of the irresponsible dramaturg) before I realized that this branch had just one Wodehouse in its stacks and it did not include the antics of my two favorite characters. It was about golf. I read one of the stories, but it was not as amusing as anything involving Aunt Agatha or a silver cow creamer.

I even stepped into the little bookshop around the corner to see if I could get my hands on a copy. But this tiny (but excellent) source only had Carry On, Jeeves on hand. This is a collection of short stories concerning Jeeves and Wooster. But I was in the mood for a novel. And, being that I just paid a large fee to the library, I wasn't about to settle for anything less than a full Wodehousian novel.

I've long been besotted with the Jeeves and Wooster crew. I first read their exploits when I was quite young. My sister, eight years my elder, often passed along her literary leftovers. Being the reverent-yet-obnoxious younger sibling, I would badger her for the books she was reading incessantly, even if the books weren't entirely age appropriate for me.

Unlike many of J's books, I thought Wooster and Jeeves were actually funny. They also didn't make me ask her questions like, "Why are the pigs calling each other 'Comrade'?" My sister was wise enough not to justify such queries with a response Instead, she would narrow her eyes, glaring acerbically through her thick, barely fluttering eyelashes. This is a trick I am still trying to learn today because it looks so cool and is highly effective. (Even with years of practice, I am not having much luck.)

Perhaps because of my introduction to this literary duo, I feel as if there is almost an allegorical correlation between the gentleman and his valet and myself and my sister. She is my Jeeves; I am her Bertie Wooster. While we were growing up, I was continuously concocting these impulsive schemes. She would sit back, half amused by my antics but very much operating her own more wisely constructed plots.

As our age gap has leveled out, I am less prone to such antics and J rarely needs to bail me out of whatever predicament I have fallen into. Besides, my Libran need for balance has caused me to embrace my latent Jeeves-like qualities. Or, maybe I've never been quite so feckless as Bertie but I really want the correlation to jive.

In any case, I've come to appreciate the Wooster and Jeeves novels on different terms over the years. I can think of few writers that equal Wodehouse's dexterous use of a structured comedy. Very little is off limits when it comes to his satire-- from British Gentleman's social clubs (The Drones) to fascism (Spode's Black Shorts). To add a cherry to the sundae, Wodehouse's playful and buoyant command of language is a sheer delight to read.

And this is precisely why I loaned these books out in the first place. Each borrower has an affinity for comedy, either written or performed. As much as I laugh when I'm around them, I find that lacking my Wodehouse novels is no laughing matter. Further absence of these books might lead me to do something brash like buying a terrarium and a new pet newt (to be named Gussie Fink-Nottle). Without further delay:

By Jeeves! (a final fragment in a long list of books)

The Code of the Woosters

Right Ho, Jeeves

The Inimitable Jeeves

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Perhaps those friends I've loaned my Wodehouse books are too busy reading Aunt Dahlia's magazine, Milady's Boudoir? But I say enough with this witch hunt. As a thank you for sloughing through this series, I'll leave you with the some clips from the Jeeves and Wooster television series. It's not quite the same as the books, but my raging crush on Stephen Fry makes up for that.

Jeeves makes his acquaintance and one of his famous hangover cures.



Jeeves offers Bertie some musical direction.

Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer

This post is the penultimate part of a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Parts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene. Parts #3, #4 , #5, #6 ,#7 and #8 contain relevant squawking. The end is in sight!

Ask me for my favorite book lovers haunt -- a place to enjoy reading a book, or a place to browse/buy books. I can rattle off several in the various metropolises I have called home. For a far-afield example, after picking up a title at Kenny's Bookshop, one might need to head over to Banana Phoblacht to escape Galway's gales and indulge in one of the best hot chocolates I've had in my life.

I just learned that one such haven for books (in another one of my former homes) has closed. Candida's World of Books shut its doors this February. Though I learned of its demise some six months after the fact, I still felt a great sense of loss. This bookstore was a gem.

Candida's was a half a block away from my workplace in Washington, DC. I spent many a lunch break and a good chunk of my paycheck there. After toiling away (at a place where we unabashedly created as much drama off stage as we put on stage), it was nice to have a place like this to decompress from a stressful day. I liked my job a lot, but having Candida's as a nearby crutch made it livable.

Candida's was truly a World of Books. It could have been described as a travel bookstore, but that wouldn't be quite accurate. Travelogues, maps and guidebooks were offered in abundance. It was a place to stop in if you wanted to pick up a a replacement copy of 501 Russian Verbs along with a photo journal of Thailand, an introduction to South African diamond mining, a novel written in Portuguese, Italian erotica, a shiny new copy of The Master and Margarita, a children's book about passports, and a hitchhiker's account of his journey from Bratislava to Bucharest.

Candida and her staff were extremely knowledgeable, and could provide really excellent recommendations. Say you're a big Haruki Murakami fan, but you're in the mood for a classic. Candida's staff might pluck the Japanese classic Wild Geese by Ogai Mori from the shelf. I've seldom had bookshops that have come up with suggestions so quickly and so reliably.

I have always loved to travel (perhaps more than I love books or, dare I say it, theatre) and I've kept a list of places I would like to visit since I was a little girl. Iran has been on that list for many, many years, despite the fact that as an American I am supposed to believe that I will be burned at the stake upon entering the country. (Lies!) At the time I was frequenting Candida's, I was also reading up on Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran was a relatively new and popular title at the time, and I came into Candida's one day complaining that I found it to be a disappointment. Candida of course had the perfect suggestion: Persepolis and Persepolis 2.

I began to read the first one on the ride home on the Metro. I lived at the end of the line, so I had a lengthy trip home. I finished the book, unaware that the entire train had disembarked. I sat alone sobbing for this sad-yet-affirming book had stirred me so much. A conductor finally came through and had to ask me to leave.

By the time I left the train, I had missed my bus, and I had over a 90 minute wait for the next one. This gave me more than enough time to read the second. I cried the whole bus ride home. Over the next week, I re-read this pair of books at least a dozen of times.

After my introduction to Persepolis,** I ditched the Iran phase and went through a graphic novels phase. I read all the big titles of the genre. Like many others, I'm not particularly fond of the term graphic novel, and it's true that this list isn't solely graphic novels. Ergo...

Picture Books

The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

Y: The Last Man #01 by Pia Guerra and Brian K. Vaughan

Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir by Graham Roumieu***

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi

Blankets by Craig Thompson

*Buy local and/or support the little guy!

**No, I have not seen the Persepolis movie. Yes, I would very much like to see it, so please invite me over to watch it already.

***If you haven't returned the Bigfoot book because you're still laughing, I understand. However, as a fee for having absconded with my book for so long, the courteous thing to do is to return my book along with its BRAND NEW SEQUEL, Bigfoot: I Not Dead.

Onto the Classics

This post is part #8 in a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Parts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene. Parts #3, #4 , #5, #6 and #7 contain relevant squawking. Those keeping up with the series should note that I bought a new keyboard because I got so fed up trying to type the last post without a space bar.

This is an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman set. It is a classic.


Connoisseurs of mid-century modern furniture design will tell you there is no finer specimen than the original. Its lines and proportions are perfect. The manufacture and materials are of such high quality that there is no possible substitute. People love this chair. People love this chair enough to have it tattooed on their forearm.

The thing about classics is that people are always trying to reproduce, re-imagine or generally riff on the original. In capitalist speak: people like, people buy, people demand more, people accept cheaper knock off, people are disappointed. Well.. those familiar with the original are disappointed.

Imagine you walk into an office and to have a serious conversation with someone. They offer you a place to sit, and it happens to be an Eames Lounge Chair. You sit down and close your eyes as you cozy up against the leather. Inhale, exhale. Open your eyes. You're in another chair. One that is very similar to the one you were just in but with a few "improvements" and "updates." So instead of sitting a timeless specimen, you're left in a leather lounger that screams 1994. Now tell me: are you going to be able to have a serious conversation with the person that list likely responsible for the switcheroo? Would you trust someone implicitly with such a flawed design aesthetic?

No? You wouldn't? Well shame on you for being so shallow. And shame on me for stringing you along. That really wasn't very nice of me.

Classics are classics for a reason. We can easily identify them because they stand out as innovators and as archetypes. In many ways, our collection of classic books becomes the barometer on which we gauge our critical response for that which follows. A classic can help us decide what is good and bad about what we've read or written. It can become a placeholder in a literary evolution.

Let me let you in on a little secret, I don't like all of the so-called classics. I've sloughed through many of them just so I can snicker a little harder at all the literary references that keep popping up hither and thither. For example, though I do like Steinbeck, I'd rather pull my teeth out than read In Dubious Battle or Grapes of Wrath again. I think it's important to dislike certain books. I think it is often easier to articulate what I do not like. From these criticisms, I can paint a clearer portrait of what I do like.

Here is my list of Classic Literature gone AWOL. I like these. I miss having them in my private library. I know many readers find the classics boring or dissatisfying. As it stands, a majority of this list is from the 20th century and may therefore be easier to tackle than Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene.

It's a Classic...

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Middlemarch by Geroge Eliot

The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Dubliners by James Joyce

Ulysses by James Joyce

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck*

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Useless Fact: in Ireland the title of James Joyce's book (and Irish national treasure) Ulysses is pronounced YOO-li-seis whereas in America we say ewe-LI-seez.

*If you're wary of a classics list, start here.

And now for the gents...

This post is part #7 in a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Parts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene. Parts #3, #4 , #5 and #6 contain relevant squawking.

I won't be giving these gentleman an adequate introduction. The broken space bar on my laptop is proving to be more obnoxious than the missing Y and arrow keys. I removed the space bar key so I didn't have to typelikethis (the other keys were lost thanks to dropping my Shakespeare anthology on my computer...twice). Now I can't get the damn thing back on. Without the space bar, I need to hit this tiny sensor and that can only (painstakingly) be done using my right index finger.

It's too bad that this fragment of The List has so little introduction. There are so many enjoyable reads, both heady and hysterical (sometimes simultaneously). Can you tell that my infatuations tend to be literary?

Modern Fiction by Men

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Saturday by Ian McEwan

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (technically an autobiography, but reads like fiction and it's Ondaatje for crying out loud)

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai

Standing Apart

This post is part #6 in a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Parts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene. Parts #3, #4 and #5 contain relevant squawking.

I met up with a friend this afternoon who is a borrower of my books, but not a reader of my blog. When she asked what I was up to, I told her that I was busy writing and obsessing about my missing books.

"I think I have one of them," she said. I thought she was probably right.

We finished our iced teas and dropped by her home to grab the novel. When we got to her bookcase, I spotted the title almost immediately, Zadie Smith's name in a familiar white typeset.

"It was really good," she said, handing me Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants.

Mildly surprised, I accepted the book (one of my most enjoyable reads of the past year). "Oh! I thought you were returning On Beauty," I said.

"Is that yours, too?" It was, according to the name on the inside cover.

A funny thing happened once these books were returned. I no longer really cared about the list. I didn't feel as incredulous about the shear number of books that had made their way out of my home. I didn't want them back solely on the principle that they were mine, dammit, all mine!

Even though I liked both of these books very much, I knew wasn't going to re-read them any time soon. I didn't really need to have two more books to decorate the shelf. In fact, the only enjoyment I got from having the books returned was the opportunity to have a discussion with someone whose opinion mattered to me.

Driving home, I debated about whether to abandon this series altogether. Its scale felt too epic, and this development sort of extinguished the flame that was propelling my little paper blogger boat. Eventually I decided to finish the series because at this point I really need to have the accomplishment of seeing a project through to the end.

I looked over the fraction of the list that had these two titles, Modern Fiction by Women. My notes for how to introduce the section were sparse, "Ladies First" scratched out in the margin. Loosely scrawled on the bottom of the page was a messy lament, "Shouldn't have to distinguish... these ladies stand apart."

Modern Fiction by Women was made up of nine titles. They ranged from the vivacious and picante Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel to The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif's sprawling but intricate exploration of romantic love in Egypt at the turn of two centuries.

One title, however, stands apart from the books on list. I mean the entire list because it is probably one of my favorite books of all time, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.

O! Kind borrower, please return this book. Or at least let me know if I need to buy a new one! It's the only one I really want back...

Dramatis Personae Non Gratae

This post is part #5 in a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Parts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene. Parts #3 and #4 contain relevant squawking.

This section of The Ex-Libris List reads like a syllabus for the average undergraduate theatre history course. Probably because I acquired most of these texts because they were course requisites in a class I took somewhere or another. In any case, it makes me feel like I should hurry up and get a Ph.D. Then I could (maybe) get a job teaching these classes. So I can have nice things. Like health insurance.

All you theater folks, please note: Prior to assembling this list, I checked to make sure I didn't have a copy hidden somewhere. I rummaged through the stack of plays stashed on the top shelf of my closet. I have a feeling you know the type-- Xeroxed, binder clipped and coffee stained.

For visual interest, I am offering a photo from a production during my undergraduate days. The production was of a monstrosity not worth mentioning. I dare you to play Spot the Crow.


The List, Part V

The Oresteia by Aeschylus

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

Lear by Edward Bond

Four Plays by Anton Chekhov

Plays 2 by Caryl Churchill

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

The Complete Plays by Sarah Kane

The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh

Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill

Betrayal by Harold Pinter

A Woman Alone and Other Plays by Franca Rame and Dario Fo

Machinal by Sophie Treadwell

How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

And just like that we're halfway through!

Shorter is Better

This post is part #4 in a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Parts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene. Part #3 contains relevant squawking.

While I was living in Galway, I took a brief weekender to the City of Cork. I spend an evening in a pub where I met a salty older gentleman who claimed it was his life's work to continue Ireland's long literary tradition. I bought a poem from him in exchange for a pint.

My American companion did not approve. She shot me dirty, disapproving looks that said, "How could I dare to interact with the local color!" and, "Didn't I know I was being had?"

Sure I did. Part of the fun of buying him the pint was being in on the game. Ultimately, I think I got the better end of the bargain. He got a pint of Murphy's. I had my very own six word poem, Questions to Ask of Samuel Beckett, written on a beer mat. I also had a story to tell for years to come thrown in free of charge.

On a totally unrelated note, I found a heart on the sidewalk that night while walking back to the hostel. It was no longer beating, and I think it used to belong to a sheep.

Poetry has always been very close to my (very much still beating) heart. Rolling the tape back to my childhood, I fondly recall that poems made for excellent bedtime stories. Cuing up to the days of Crow-In-Elementary-School, it was poetry that first helped me to bumble through a curriculum I wasn't sure I fit into. Mostly, I liked going to school, but I struggled a little bit.

I saw school as an infringement on prime daydreaming hours. By second grade, my favorite in-class pastimes of driving my pencil around my desk like a car or staring out the window lost in thought were deemed inappropriate behavior. Meanwhile, I thought timed arithmetic drills were a waste of time. It wasn't that I couldn't keep up. Quite the opposite. I found classroom life to be slow and colorless in comparison to the world inside my head.

That year, I failed my writing competency examination. I probably took one look at the test and decided that it wasn't worthy of my concentration. As a result of failing the exam, I was given additional writing assignments throughout the year and in the summer leading up to third grade. These assignments had a line quota, but no rules about how much space I was supposed to take up within a line.

"Can I write poems?" I asked Mama Crow. I wanted to write poems because they were shorter. I thought they were better because I could put my thoughts into a string of words, divide those words into 15 or however many lines I needed to complete the assignment and hurry back to daydreaming. Plus poems by nature did not have to make sense so long as you could explain yourself. I thought poems were easier. Mama Crow thought I was a weirdo.

Coincidentally, second grade was my favorite grade. I think my teacher still hangs my spider poem on the wall during her arachnids unit.

I don't think it's at all surprising that I first flirted with bending the rules through poetry. I think poets have been doing this for centuries. I think poetry identifies language as a system. By recognizing it as such, we play with its parameters as a way to explore the best and the worst of our ideas, our feelings and our society. Poetry, therefore, is not some forum for pedestals and elitism. It says, "I have a heart and a gut and a brain and a body and it is a joy to express my experience in the formation of words."


The best and worst part of owning poetry collections is that you end up with some old, raggedy copy of a book called The Collected Works of... The plasticine tape holding cover on is losing its battle. The pages are yellowed and smell of age. Favorite poems are falling out, making pages become their own bookmarks. Poetry collection are both anonymous and loved. For this reason I know I am missing several collections from three of my favorite poets, Federico García Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, and Pablo Neruda, but I don't know the exact titles.

Sadly, I'm almost certain I've lost these books to a case of sticky fingers. I think I know the culprit and I've decided it's time to change my perception of things. He did not borrow without asking; I have unwittingly invested in his edification.

Books that Require a Colon

This post is part #3 in a series of 10 rants about my ex-books. Posts #1 and #2 will help to set the scene.

Yesterday, as I was compiling my long list into 8 shorter lists, I realized something-- there's really only a handful of books that I want back badly enough that I would be willing to buy them again. This is a good thing. If I were to buy the entire list back, the sum total of the retail value would probably be the equivalent to a semester of schooling at a public university. Or a lengthy vacation trip to Iran (a place I really want to travel to because of reading some of the books on The List).

I also aware that I am going to have to let go of the idea of getting any of these books back. Many of these books have been out of my possession for years. And, if I recall some of the borrowers correctly, I've scattered books across several time zones and potentially across several continents.

I set about dividing the list into sets by considering what shelves I would keep them on. I have 3 bookcases, and they are designated as follows:

• Fiction: Read and Partially Read
• Theatre: The Only One that is Alphabetized
• Miscellaneous: Reference, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories, Unread Fiction

Today's posts will focus on the last shelf. Without further ado...

Non-Fiction: Books that Require a Colon in the Title

Full disclosure: I typically don't read non-fiction for kicks. Most of the non-fiction I read is limited to the work I have done as a dramaturg. This means I will go through stints in which I attempt to read all I can on subjects like Leningrad, 1942. This sort of subject-oriented binging requires a bit of detox, and I steer clear of all things factual.

As I was putting this list together, I noted the heavy reliance on the Title:Subtitle format. I also noticed that there was a really transparent theme in the titles. The titles suggest that these books are dangerous and sexy. This is all marketing. At least one of the "dangerous" books is quite dull.

Of the seven books on this listette, I am hankering for just two of these titles to be returned. One, Musicophilia, because it was borrowed before I had a chance to read it. The other was a gift. I bet you can guess which one.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices by Andrew Dalby

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

Musicophilia: Tales of Music & the Brain by Oliver Sachs

Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies & Jays by Candace Savage

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Ex Libris

One day, years ago, my friend's boyfriend came over to my apartment. I had liked this kid, and by the time he came around for a visit I knew him well enough to know that he was critical of everything. When he looked around apparently skeptical of my tastes, I wasn't surprised.

He heaved a large sigh and said, annoyed, "I thought you'd have more books."

I narrowed my eyes and glared at him in a way that suggested that he'd just bought himself a first class ticket on the Ex-Lovers' Express. "I am a very close acquaintance of the library," I sneered.

It should be noted that I only sneer when I am lying. While this visit did occur at about the same time as I was frequenting the library to read (and ogle) the Griffin and Sabine series, I was hardly depending on it for my reading materials. Truth be told, my personal library was not proportional to my love for books. For reasons I still can't quite put a finger on, I was a little sensitive about the subject.

Now, years later, I am more settled in Portland. That jerkwad boyfriend has been my friend's ex-boyfriend for many, many cycles of the moon. These days, I own more shelves, but I do not own many more books. I've read a ton of books since then that I've deemed worthy of being a keeper. Books I might actually read again. Books which were effective enough to not get sold back to Powell's for some mad money. Books that made me feel good just by looking at their spines and silently reminiscing about the good times we once had together.

So where do these books go?

It has to do with this habit of mine. If I like a book, I want everyone I know to read the book, too. I loan books out. I forget to whom I've loaned my books, so I never ask for them back. I know some of them have been read, but I'm not sure that I ever specified that I expected it to be returned.

Occasionally this comes back to bite me in the ass. Like when I want to read an old favorite. Or when I am trying to remember a particular passage that is bumbling precariously through my mind. Or when I am trying to do some dramaturgical research and my source is AWOL. Or when my life just would feel better in the company of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's personal gentleman, Jeeves.

Today I finally sat down and compiled a list of books that are now former books. My ex-books, if you will. And these are just the titles I can remember-- I am certain there are a few strays that I've forgotten about. I'm not going to disclose a number, because that would make me feel a little slutty. I will admit that I would need another shelf to hold them all in the rare instance that the entire contents of the list are returned to me. A tall shelf.