Willa Cather and reading rules – welcome to episode 133 of ‘Tea or Books?’!
In the first half, we discuss reading rules – when we’re picking up a book, are there certain things that will definitely put us off? In the second half, we compare two novels by Willa Cather: Sapphira and the Slave Girl and A Lost Lady.
You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. Among the bonus things you’ll find is our talk from the Marlborough Literary Festival!
The books and authors we mention in this episode are:
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Back by Henry Green
Living by Henry Green
Loving by Henry Green
A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmondeley
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Katherine Mansfield
Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather
I completely agree with both of you, and especially with Rachel, as regards Fantasy, Magical Realism (and in my case I also add Science Fiction). They are simply not for me, because I need to believe in the story I’m reading. If it’s set in another, imaginary world, I just don’t care (the same applies for films, I watched 2 of the Lord of the Rings films when they came out in cinemas and I was completely bored, especially by the third film). The only time I (unintentionally) read science fiction was with Never Let Me Go by Kazoo Ishiguro, and that was because I didn’t know at first what genre it belonged to. I found out a few pages in, looking at the blurb I think, and was hugely disappointed. I went on with my reading, and even finished it, but wasn’t interested anymore. With magical realism, I’ve never tried reading anything yet, but I have The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton which I heard great things about (and the magical realism element is not meant to be a very important part of the plot from what I understand). I’m hoping to try it at some point. So, I always stay in my comfort zone, which is fine, because as you both said there are so many interesting books out there that I prefer to focus on what I like.
About the present tense, I’m really not a fan. I’ve read a few books written in the present tense, one that springs to mind is Normal People (which I read because I loved the TV series). I didn’t particularly enjoy it, and would have liked it more if it was written in the past tense. Years ago I started Wolf Hall and was very quickly deterred by the present tense, which still makes me sad because I love novels set in the Tudor period. I’m considering trying the audiobook to see if it works better for me.
Speech marks…I didn’t know how much I need them until I read Charles Palliser’s Rustication. The dialogues were in italics and without speech marks, which upset me from the start. In the end I didn’t like the book at all, mainly because I didn’t care about the story and the characters, but had there been speech marks my reading experience would have been improved.
Listening to the first half of this episode made me think of another topic, which you may have covered already in a previous episode but I’ll suggest it anyway: Reading Habits. I remember an interesting episode of The Mookse and the Gripes podcast on this topic, and would love to hear Rachel and you talk about your own habits.
I am in absolute agreement about the speech marks, authors who don’t think they need to follow punctuation are SO ANNOYING. Not a huge fan of present tense either, or books written in the second person.
Also there is a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which is ONE SOLID PARAGRAPH. The entire book! No chapter breaks either! I don’t care how great GGM is, I could never read it.
Yes, I largely agree with Rachel – inasmuch as I will avoid those genres. But I also don’t really know anything about them :D I also didn’t like Never Let Me Go, but that was mostly because I was underwhelmed by the prose – I’d expected Ishiguro to be much better than that, and it was the first of his I read. I’ve since loved Remains of the Day.
Reading habits is fun – trying to think what the question would be…
I am 100% in agreement with Rachel about Fantasy, I just don’t have the mental bandwidth anymore to learn a whole new vocabulary and keep the world-building straight. And some of the names are ridiculous, I just cannot. I have read some interesting low fantasy books set in our world which are OK, maybe more like Magical Realism? I just finished The Husbands recently which I really enjoyed and had some supernatural elements.
I’m also reading Edith Holler (thanks to the last podcast!) which may or may not be supernatural, I probably won’t know until I’ve finished it. She could be an unreliable narrator or just going through some mental stuff, not sure. I don’t read horror but this has some creepy elements.
Also loved your discussion of Willa Cather (and psst Simon Sapphira and the Slave Girl is technically . . . historical fiction!) I’ve read nearly all her works and my favorites are O Pioneers! One of Ours, and My Antonia (it is in fact pronounced An-to-NEE-a, which I learned after seeing previews for the TV adaptation years ago (which I still have not watched, but I’ve heard it’s good). I assume it’s pronounced that way because Antonia’s parents are immigrants from Bohemia and that’s how they say it.
Looking forward to your favorite reads of 2024!
Oh yes, world building! I always prefer things set in the real world, and never know why world building is praised so much… it’s just a protracted introduction, to my mind. If I have to wade through all that to have anything happen, or get to know characters and their changing behaviours, then it feels like a heck of a lot of homework.
And yes, technically historical, eek! It slipped in unawares.
I do always try to be open-minded approaching books, but I totally agree about the blurbs – all of the modern terminology and buzzwords put me off, and when you pair this with the ghastly bland cover designs, you can see why I avoid most modern fiction (also because of what I consider to be often dreadful writing). I don’t do extreme violence as a rule too…
Also puff quotes ALWAYS spoil a cover design. It must be so disspiriting to be a cover designer and then have to plaster all those things on it – and, worst of all, the horrible printed-on ‘stickers’.
Not sure if you covered this in the podcast or maybe in a previous one – but do you have any kind of rule over how far into a book you will read before abandoning if you are not enjoying it? I’m always loathe to quit on a book – I think I have some kind of ‘completist’ mentality. Whereas my husband is the opposite and will dip into lots of books but rarely finish any of them.
Good qu! I can’t remember if we have covered it, but we definitely should.
Thank you to both of you for another fascinating discussion. It’s really interesting to hear about other readers’ ‘rules’ and to consider my own. I do share many of the ones you two raised (although self-imposed rules can always be broken on occasion!). Here I think are my main ones:
Generally not historical fiction (unless it is an elderly author writing about a period they actually experienced),
I don’t like dialect, or weird, or no punctuation,
I am put off by books with no spaces! I can cope with chapters or no chapters but I don’t like pages of unbroken text. Moreover, my ageing eyes increasingly balk at too small or a faint font!
I don’t like many modern novels’ covers or overblown puff.
No to anything that is described as ‘sexy, raunchy, or ‘hot’ or ‘chilling, or horror’,
And no generally to fantasy or science fiction unless it’s Narnia or Ursula Le Guin or. as I think Simon calls it ‘the domestic fantastic – e.g.The Brontes go to Woolworths’ or the wonderful Miss Hargreaves!
Re the middle question – I love my local library. The staff are fantastic and I could not afford to read as much as I do if I did not use the library. No definitely to incurring fines though; I like to spend the money on reserving books instead so I can access books from all over the county stocks and have them delivered to collect locally.
I also enjoyed the discussion about the two Willa Cather books. I haven’t yet read either of them (nor any others by Cather) but I already have A Lost Lady reserved for me (coincidentally litlove at Tales from my Reading Room) also wrote an excellent and inspiring review of it this month too.
Wishing you both a Happy Christmas and looking forward to adding to my list of books I want to read when you post your next episode!
Thank you for your lovely comment – and yes, I loved that Victoria/litlove was covering Willa Cather at the same time as us! She wrote so well about A Lost Lady. (And I’ve just discovered that we talked about it in episode 88 too… oops! I wonder if we agree with ourselves…)
Domestic fantastic is definitely my favourite place to be – sadly doesn’t seem to be in vogue at the moment, as far as I can tell. Or if it is, it has to be menacing at the same time.
Yes, sadly you are tight about domestic fantasy having to be menacing and I am not sure I have the disposition to cope with some of it!.
I had not spotted the duplication of the discussion. Now I will go back and listen to the earlier one too!
That was entertaining! You and Rachel are hilarious together. I do have reading rules in order to respect the author. If I ever managed to publish a novel, I wouldn’t want it to be read by someone who didn’t much like the genre or had little interest in the topic, or who was tired and resented making the effort! Given all the blood, sweat and tears that go into creation, I think it’s up to me to maximise the chances of enjoying it. And that being said, doing all those reviews for Shiny showed me I can’t judge a book from my prejudices. So many of my favourite reads from that era were books I’d never have picked up to buy. These days, reading so much less, I totally agree with taking fewer risks. Loved the discussion of Cather. For me the unifying element of her work is the use of the frame and/or interpolated story. She’s so clever in the use of juxtaposition.
Another great episode! I admire how well Rachel pivoted after realizing you guys were discussing Saphira instead of Lucy Gayheart! She obviously has an encyclopedic knowledge of Willa Cather :) I hope you both have wonderful holidays. Looking forward to the “best of” episode as that has been a real highlight the past few years that you’ve done it. I hope you do the thing where you each pick a book for the other one to read again – that has been really fun too!
Thanks for another fabulous year of Tea or Books! <3