girlreads

a sky is so small

2012-02-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

Aside from being a total fox, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, or just Colette as she is known, was an amazing writer. I first read My Mother's House and Sido and just wanted to curl up in this world with these beautiful french provincial characters. There is not a whole lot going on plot wise in these stories, the main thrust is characters. As I am a seriously character-driven reader, I adored her writing. I scoped out the local Half-Price books and found her collection of short stories, The Tender Shoot, and dove in.

The first of the short stories, "Belle-Vista", follows Colette at a provincial hotel as she waits for her house to be worked on by contractors. The hotel is run by a lesbian couple that befriends Colette. They have another guest, a man named M. Daste, who provides special intrigue for Colette.

"If I observed M. Daste more carefully than he deserved, it was because I am always terrified, when chance throws me among unknown people, of discovering some monstrosity in them. I search them to the core with a sharp, distasteful eye as one does a dressing-table drawer in a hotel bedroom. No old dressings? No hair-pins, no broken buttons, no crumbs of tobacco? Then I breath again and do not give it a second thought."

The second short stories is "Gribiche". Colette spent some time in theatre productions and ran into many interesting characters there. Gribiche was a young woman who worked there and had an acident. While bringing flowers and a collection of money for her, it becomes apparent that Gribiche is having an abortion aided by her mother (who does this for a living) and no doctor's aid. This is a great example on how unsafe abortions can be when they are no provided by trained medical professional and I will give you two guesses as to how young Gribiche fares.

"These memories are distant, but precise. they rise out of the fog that inevitably drowns the long days of that particular time, the monotonous amusements of dress rehearsals and suppers at Pousset's, my alternations between animal gaiety and confused unhappiness, the split in my nature between a wild, frightened creature and one with a vast capacity for illusion. But it is a fog that leaves the faces of my friends intact and shinning clear." - "The Kepi"

"The Rendezvous" is a story that does not have Colette as a character but rather follows a group of four on a vacation. One of the men and woman ,Bernard and Rose, are in a covert affair and arrange to met at night through meaningful looks. However when they reach the meeting point, a young man who was their guide earlier is there bleeding profusely. Bernard wants Rose to run back for help while he stops the bleeding but Rose is appaled by the fact that people will know she was out there with him and what a scandal that will be to her family. This causes Bernard to see her in a new light and he is left with the decision to help a man he does not know who is bleeding to death or to escort the woman he loves back to the hotel.

I am going to skip a few short stories in this collection, not because I did not love them, but because I don't want this blog post to be to long to handle. "Rainy Moon" is a beautiful story about Colette interacting with two sisters who live in the house that she used to live in. One of these sisters is going through a severe breakdown and the other thinks she is using sorcery to kill her estranged husband. In "Green Sealing Wax" we get another slice of Colette's parents and I just adore Sido and was so happy to see her again. The last two stories, "The Sick Child" and "The Photographer's Missus", both compliment each other well I think. In both we get a inside glimpse into two people who are eager for death and come face-to-face with it.

"'What do you expect?' said my mother. 'She's an old maid.'

'But Mamma, she's married!'

'Do you really imagine,' retorted Sido acidly, 'people stop being old maids for a little thing like that?'

I really, really enjoyed this book and cannot wait to read more of Colette. Apparently she is best know for her work Gigi which was taken and turned to a play and musical, so I think I need to check that out.

I could lift it alright

2012-02-11T09:59:00.000-08:00

I have never seen or read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but I knew that it was one of those classics and frankly after drowning myself in a lot of science fiction I threw this little paperback in my bag and tore through it.

The book takes place in the 1960's in mental institution. We see this world threw the eyes of Chief Bromden, a Native American who is a giant of a man and yet pretends to be deaf and mute to get through life in this institution ruled by Nurse Ratched, who is a horrible as her name sounds. A new, and presumably mentally stable, man named McMurphy comes into the ward and proceeds to turn things on it's head. He fights against the system, and yet the deck is so stacked against him that we know he will not succeed.

"He's shown us what a little bravado and courage could accomplish, and we thought he'd taught us how to use it. All the way to the coast we had fun pretending to be brave. When people at a stop light would stare at us and our green uniforms we'd do just like he did, sit up straight and strong and tough-looking and put a big grin on our face and stare straight back at them till their motors died and their windows sunstreaked and they were left sitting when the light changed, upset bad by what a tough bunch of monkeys was just now not three feet from them, and help nowhere in sight."

Bromden sees society as a great Combine that chews up those that do not function as "normal" people. Through him we see the way that other patients were unable to fit due to a myriad of issues and who have their spirits raised and dashed by the coming of McMurphy. McMurphy uses them at the same time tries to help them, and although his motives seem to be almost all selfish, he does seem to be working for the good of those on the ward. In the end McMurphy cannot escape the Combine now that he is in the ward anymore than the rest of them can.

"Yes. This is what I know. The ward is a factory for the Combine. It's fixing up the mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is.When a complete product goes back out into society, all fixed up and good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse's heart; something that came in all twisted different is now a functioning adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold."

I really, really enjoyed this book. I think that I like most books about how society treats those that are mentally unbalanced (the Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted, Fingersmith, and others) and this one had me right there with the patients. Nurse Ratched is so realistic that she could be prowling the wards today, albeit she would have to use much more tact to not get caught condoning orderlies raping patients. The lack of control of the patients and the absolute tyranny of the staff makes for a fascinating and terrifying environment.

There is a reason this book is on lists of great books. I highly suggest it. I really want to check the movie out and see how it compares up. Has anyone seen it?

I had made something out of my own voice

2012-01-15T08:39:00.000-08:00

First book of the year!

I picked up Good Eggs a Memoir by Phoebe Potts after a review from Bitch Magazine. The story follows Pheobe and her hubby as they try to have a baby, using all of our medical advancements. The graphic novel also shows Potts' journey to her current career, her journey in religion, and battles with depression over the years.

I am a big lover of graphic novels, but I had a hard time reading this one for a couple of reasons. The text was off putting and there was a little too much white-girl whining

The text was hard to read, squished and some of the letters looked so strange that I had to really focus to figure out what was being said. The art was interesting, nothing breathtaking but cute and funny.

Potts' volunteer work has her set up as a martyr to public good, but I just kept thinking, "Yeah it sucks that your job stinks, but you have an easy out anytime you want - you just go spend a year in Panama to learn to speak Spanish and then live at your parents for months without a job" I cannot relate to this. Yes, real life is hard, especially if you are trying to please other people and dealing with depression, however, I could not understand a lot of these choices. You have great insurance that helps with infertility procedures while desperately trying to get pregnant and you just quit because you need art? Maybe I am being too harsh.

I know nothing about the troubles of getting pregnant and it was interesting to learn just how many hoops some people have to jump through just to have a kid. I also felt that Potts dealing with depression was handled very truthfully and well. I wish that there had been more humor; some choice moments come through for me but with all of the heavy problems in her life (I haven't even mentioned her father's cancer) story-wise it would have been nice to have more balance. I needed to smile more, and the drawings of sperm just were not enough.

It's worth checking this book out - especially if you are interested in stories of artificial insemination and like stories that end differently than you expect them to.

First book of the new year checked off. I'm wrapped up in A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin right now and it is roughly three million pages so we'll see when I finish.

2012

2012-01-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

I realize that I have not updated this blog in forever, but I want to let you know that this year one of my goals is to blog about the books I read more. So look forward to it!

Right now I just finished the Adolescent by Dostoevsky and am currently reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and the Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. Both are amazing so far.

Any recommendations for this year's reads?

Consider our fight begun

2011-04-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

Having seen and fallen in love with the movie, I picked up the firs two books of the Scott Pilgrim series. I tore through them both super quickly. The art has that distinct manga feel, yet I feel less embarrassed to be reading these as opposed to my old Sailor Moons.

"Okay, this might sound vague, but do you know this one girl with hair like this?"

Scott is twenty-something, no job, in a band, living in a shitty apartment with his gay friend, Wallace. Also he is dating a high schooler. But then he falls for Ramona Flowers.

Getting his shit together enough to date Ramona is one thing, but she comes with her own baggage. Seven evil exes that Scott must defeat in order to be with her.

"this song is for the guy who keeps yelling from the balcony, and it's called 'we hate you, please die."

The book goes into much more detail than the movies and includes fun things like guitar tabs for Sex Bob-Omb songs and a recipe for vegan shepard pie.

I think this comic is extremely well put together and I cannot wait to read the rest of them.

Also, hey I am back again. Guess i just don't know how to quit this blog. More updates to come!

Wisdom has no need of violence

2011-01-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

That's right. I finally finished War and Peace, this master work by my man, Leo Tolstoy. Having read and loved Anna Karenina, I was excited about reading this book that seems to sit atop best classical book lists, daring anyone to actually read it.

"The solitude exhausted her, tormented her; but it was necessary for her."

This book is dense and complicated and at times annoying and at other times beautiful. I love Tolstoy when he is showing the characters interacting with each other and their world and I want to smack him when he is rambling about grand ideas all on his own.

War and Peace is about Napoleon's was in Europe that Russia got involved in and Napoleon's subsequential war on Russia, which did not end so well for him.

"Such is the inevitable fate of all men of action, and the higher they stand in the human hierarchy, the less free they are."

There are basically two families that we follow, the Rostovs and the Bolloskys and those that are their friends, foes, and acquaintances. The Rostovs have four children, Vera (who I forgot all about until I looked at my notes, Nikolia, Natasha, and Petya and one rather mopey cousin, Sonya. Nikolia and Petya end up serving in the wars while Natasha and Sonya are more focused on battles of the heart.

"Natasha fell in love from the moment she entered the ball room. She was not in love with anyone in particular but with everyone. She fell in love with whomever she looked at, the moment she looked at him."

Andrei Bollonsky and his sister Marya are much richer and while Andrei begins married, he later becomes involved with the beautiful Natasha. Andrei also serves in the war and is determined to distinguish himself as a great hero for Russia. He goes through much spiritual and emotional change throughout the novel, and never seems to die until you want him to finally live.

"Nothing, nothing is certain, except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something incomprehensible but most important."

Also running around Russia is Pierre, the bastard son of a count who is adopted and made extremely rich. He marries a horrible woman and joins the Free Masons in his quest to find spiritual peace. While he does not serve in the army, Pierre is present at the burning of Moscow and is taken prisoner by the French.

"They could not believe it, because they alone knew what their life was for them and thereafter did not understand or believe it could be taken from them."

My main beef with this novel was the points when Tolstoy would tell me repeatedly that history is not made by the choices of great men, or any man, that free will is a bunch of bunk and that power and authority are abstract ideas. This mostly came about in the second part of the epilogue (of course the epilogue had multiple parts) where we leave the story completely and do not pick it up again. I thought that Tolstoy said everything he needed to say in the novel, and at the end was just beating me over the head with it. Perhaps this was necessary when it was originally published, but these ideas are not new to me and I did not enjoy reading twenty pages of them. It was a lot like reading John Galt's gigantic speech in Atlas Shrugged - get to the point!

"If everyone made war only according to his own convictions, there would be no war."

That being said, this novel is great for a reason. I loved Natasha, Pierre, the Rostov parents and even, at times, Marya. I loved all the little details about their lives and how the wars changed so many things for them. He does a great job of illustrating how orders given in war time matter much less than the thoughts of those who are actually in the action (and does so without preaching when focused on the actual characters).

Worth reading. I'm glad that I did and I am looking forward to reading more classics in this coming year. But first I have to finish my book about superheroes.

You've become The Vegan Freak

2011-01-04T16:14:00.000-08:00

Having recently made up my mind to become a full-fledged vegan, I have been scouring cookbooks and other vegan guide books. This little one caught my eye at the local library and I devoured it very quickly.

Vegan Freak is written by a married couple that are laid-back and not afraid to drop an eff-bomb.They mostly handle advice on how to respond to questions and attacks one might receive as a vegan, such as where do you get your protein? (I have already gotten this question several times - a few from vegetarians) and what on earth do you eat?

I really, really enjoyed this book and found reassurance that my little family and I are making the right choice. This book is funny and smart, and gives lots and lots of sources for further learning on specific subjects (like vegan pet-food!). They give a brief overview of everything from animal rights to vegan sex toys.

To sum up their advice, do what you can to be happy and healthy since, like it or not you are a poster-child for all vegans. And try not to be a douche because that will not convince anyone.

Bob and Jenna Torres run veganfreak.com which has an interesting blog and lots of links to related websites and sources.

Note: I've posted this over at my vegan themed blog (girlveggie) with a bonus Taft the cat story if you are interested.

Something more solid than love

2010-12-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

First of all sorry for the long time between my last post and this. I moved and am now in Ohio, and am trying to get used to sharing a computer with someone else since mine crapped out on me.

I have not read a lot of French fiction and as this one is pretty famous I gave it a whirl.

Charles Bovary is an ordinary man who is a doctor of no real skill and has no real big dreams. After the death of his first wife (whom he married basically for her money) he marries Emma. Madame Bovary spends her time trying to be in love with Charles, but feels as if love has fallen so short of what she expected from reading. She wants passion and never ending poetry in life, while Charles would be happy with just a good dinner and a pipe. In order to keep herself from going crazy, Emma throws herself into reading all about Paris and the society there, buying the popular clothes, furnishings and foods that Parisians buy.

"But she, her life was chill as an attic with a northern skylight, and ennui, the silent spider, spun its web in the shadow in every corner of her heart."

She has flashes of romances that burst into her heart and fade away, only to be brought back to flame by the next gentleman who smiles at her and seems to be more in-tuned to emotions than her husband. Nothing comes of these romances at first and Emma has a child with her husband who she is not interested in at all.

"It was the first time that Emma had such things said to her, and her pride, like one reclining in a vapour-bath, stretched itself out languidly, yielding itself wholly to the fervor of the speech."

She falls in love, or at least thinks she does with a man who seems to genuinely care for her, but does not act upon those feelings. However, he leaves and she falls prey to a gentleman who uses her and plays all kinds of games on her emotions. He promises to run away with her, but then doesn't because ew, commitment.

"She was the sweetheart of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague she of all the poetry books."

She falls ill, and her inept husband fails to see what her real problem is and falls into deeper debt trying to buy things to please her. In the end, like most women characters who have a book named after them, she ends her life.The real sad thing about it though is that her poor daughter has just a shit life because of this woman's selfishness.

I don't know about this book. I felt like I was reading about a modern housewife who religiously reads US Weekly and buys the same Prada bag that Angelina Jolie has while ignoring her mounting credit card bills. I was disappointed that she didn't get more comeuppance and never seemed to learn anything, but I kept reading until the end.

In other news, I am almost 800 pages through War and Peace! Also I am reading a couple of other little books because I can't seem to limit myself to just one.

I passed out on a park bench

2010-11-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of Julia Wertz. She won me over with The Fart Party volumes one and two and delighted me with I Saw You, an anthology of comics based on craigslist missed connections. So when I happened upon Drinking at the Movies at B&N, I grabbed it and didn't let go.

Wertz's website is updated often, but most of the comics included are ones I have never seen. They capture the uncertainty of living in your twenties and having a lack of real goals and ambitions and insurance. I find this lady totally relateable, probably because she seems to love drinking in the bathtub as much as I do.

Check out fartparty.org and check this lady out.

Real or not real?

2010-11-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

Having read and loved The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, I had to pick up Mockingjay. After waiting on the library wait list, I finally got my copy and tore through it. Collins great skill is her ability to end a chapter while leaving me dying to know what happens next, which led to a great deal of me staying up well past my bed time to finish the book.

"If we burn you burn with us."

If you haven't read the other two books, I highly suggest you do so. They create a distopian world where the US has been destroyed and rebuilt as districts, each serving the Capital in come capacity. Katniss Everdeen is from District 12 and is a participant of the Hunger Games. These are fights to the death among two children from each district. Katniss sparks the flame of revolution, albeit involuntarily, and in Mockingjay, she is the figure-head for the rebellion.

Those who have not read these book beware of spoilers.

Katniss gets involved in the politics of District 13, which is eerily similar to the Capital. She is subject to TV spots and promotional shots and kept in the dark about what exactly she is standing for. Peeta is still captured in the Capital and she is desperate to save him in order to reconcile her feelings between him and Gale. She is as much a captive in District 13 as she was in the Capital and sees the hidden torture methods that are used.

"I'm sick of people lying to me for my own good. Because really its mostly for their own good."

Finally Katniss is forced to go into the heart of the Capital on her quest to kill President Snow. She and her companions face horrible threats similar to those in the Hunger Games and frankly many of the characters die violent deaths that are still freaking me out.

Some of the imagery in this book is truly frightening. To picture tons of children being bombed and then set on fire is horrific. The lizard-creatures eating people are also disgusting. However, I liked how Collins took some of the things we read in the first book and twisted them. Katniss was the girl on fire. In this book she is that literally. Her whole mission was to save the life of her sister, Primrose, so it was sadly eloquent that Primrose dies at the end.

"We're fickle, stupid being with poor memories and a great gift for self destruction."

The last chapter, much like J.K. Rowlings epilogue, left me feeling a little underwhelmed. I wanted a more complete ending. I felt that the relationship between Peeta and Katniss was rushed over and I wanted more.

Read these books. Prepare for frightening dreams and read them.

my soul is made of raw meat

2010-11-12T18:32:00.000-08:00

Zadie Smith is one of those authors whose books I look at in every book store and now and then buy one to put on my shelf without ever having read any of her books. I did read a short story of hers once in class, "You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town." And what I vaguely remember of it was good.

On Beauty is not what I expected it to be at all. I am not really sure what I expected it to be, maybe something more like Toni Morrison, but this is not the same at all. Smith writes about an academic white man, Howard, who is married to a large black woman, Kiki. They have a family and they all have issues that are being dealt with. They have three children, all with completely different mindsets on the world around them. Their oldest son Jerome is away interning with Howard's academic nemesis, Kipps, and he falls in love with his daughter. But she has plans of her own and suddenly the whole Kipps family is back in Howard's hometown, working at the same university.

"Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but he did not really know what a software engineer was."

The story is constantly shifting, jumping ahead in time and changing perspective when you think you know what is going to happen. Howard is struggling to keep his marriage together despite the fact that he had an affair and then lied horribly about it. I found it very interesting to see how Kiki dealt with all of this, interesting and depressing.

"A five-year gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three month apart allows the weeds to grow up between you."

All in all, I found this book pretty depressing. I am not sure what the reader is meant to feel at the ending. I did not think much of Howard at all and frankly most of the other characters seemed very stuck in one mindset for most of the book. Everyone acts how I predicted they would.

It did made me long for college in a very strong way. Smith does a great job of creating a college that has all of it's pieces running and captures the feel of academia. I just would have liked something more plot-wise. I think that my biggest complaint was that (almost) every time she builds up to a conflict, a scene where shit is going to hit the fan, we are let down. Time is skipped and the characters are already on to another thing while I am still trying to figure out how the hell things happened.

Despite my feelings about this book, I think I would still read her other works. I have White Teeth and really want to read it; hopefully I have a better review for that one.

the right constellation of words

2010-10-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

I have been so excited waiting for Great House to come out. I have both of Krauss's other books, A History of Love and Man Walks Into a Room. I also have all of her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer's books and love all of them. So I was pretty pumped for Great House.

"It was then, looking at his strange face, that I knew that a door had opened, but not the kind of door my father had imagined. This one I could walk through, and right away it was clear to me that I would. Another wave of nausea came over me, nausea mixed with happiness and also relief, because I sensed that one chapter of my life had ended and another was about to begin."

Like A History of Love, Great House is told from many different points of view all loosely connected through ways that aren't clear right away. Krauss is able to capture different voices during different time periods and who have such different thoughts. All of the characters are complicated and complex and parts of them are still hidden from the reader. At one point I had to make a chart to get it straight in my head how the characters related to each other - and this chart shifted as I read on.

"I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoon in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon."

But the dominating presence in the book is a piece of furniture, a desk.This desk has special meaning to almost all of the characters and the massive, many-drawered desk is constantly moving in location and meaning.Krauss keeps her characters rooted in the Jewish faith and a great deal of the action takes place in Jerusalem.

"Alone, I could slip into a kind of stillness, into a place like that bog those children once drew, where faces rise up out of the elements and all is quiet, like the moment just before the arrival of an idea, a stillness and a peace I've only ever felt when along."

Her writing is beautiful and touching. When I reached the last page, I turned to the next hoping to read on and feeling a sinking pit in my mind that the book was over. This also happened when I read Everything is Illuminated by her hubby. I kept thinking about the loose ends and untold details and how I wanted to know more about every character and I realized that she ended the book perfectly.

a little happiness

2010-10-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

I clearly like Lisa See's writings since I have gone through three of her books lately. Shanghai Girls is a little different from the other two; it is more modern and a lot of the action takes place in America. However, the essence of the story, the relationship between two sisters and the struggle to connect with their past traditions are familiar.

Pearl and May are sisters in Shanghai during the 1930s. Their family has money so they overlook much of the unpleasant aspects of the world around them (like dead babies in the street and malnourished men pulling their rickshaws) and instead focus on fashion and romance.

Their father has arranged marriages to men who live in America for the girls, but the refuse to go. The Japanese attack China and the girls and their mother do their best to make a run for it. They see and experience firsthand the horrific aspects of war, yet somehow Pearl and May survive and make their way to America, where they are put in Angel Island and kept for months in prison like conditions before they are able to join their husbands in an America that makes it very clear they are not wanted.

"You're like a bird that's been freed from a cage,' May says, 'but doesn't remember how to fly. You're my sister, but I don't know where you've gone in your mind. You're so apart from me now."

See is so great at capturing the complexities of relationships and the heartache that can come from unspoken words and unasked questions. Pearl and May share a deep secret that turns out to have disastrous effects on their family and leaves the end of the book very open.

"As I speak, I'm reminded of the old saying that disasters go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves."

My one complaint about this book is the ending. I am not sure if See is planning on doing a sequel to the book (I'm guessing not) but I just felt that we get all of this build-up and then see the result of the sister's actions but not a resolution. Not as good as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but still an alright read.

Also, poll is closed but since the only one who voted was my fiancee - yup, boyfriend proposed this weekend :) - I am going to just read what I want. Also I might have put the Magus in his car when he left so it'll be hard for me to read it. I'm thinking Madame Bovary since I don't think I have read a lot of French fiction.

religion, while a fine thing, could be taken too far

2010-10-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

After reading Bleak House and The Idiot, I needed something a little lighter and frankly a little more humorous. So I turned to Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Pyramids doesn't have any similar characters from the other books (with the exception of Death, of course) and seems like it could be read without reading the ones before it. But I would recommend it.

Young prince Teppic is sent to Ankh-Morpork's assassin school and is not looking forward to going back to his kingdom, which resembles ancient Egypt. But when his father dies, Teppic goes home to take over the throne and build his father the largest pyramid that has ever been built.

"It wasn't a particularly pleasant smile. It was thin and dried-up, a smile with all the warmth long ago boiled out of it, people normally smiled like that when they had been dead for about two years under the broiling desert sun. But at least you felt he was making the effort."

These pyramids mess with the fabric of time and through some quantum physics sends Teppic's land into a new dimension. Thankfully, Teppic and a handmaiden escaped on a camel who happens to be the best mathematician on the planet. Teppic then struggles to find a way to bring his country back into the here and now.

"These men were philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no one else would consider for five seconds."

The writing was just what I needed, clever and dry and ridiculous at times. I remain in love with Discworld.

"They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart."

Don't forget to vote on my next classic read! There are only four days left!

What can you do? It's fate.

2010-10-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

First of all, how awesome is this copy of The Idiot? Super awesome, I know. I snatched it from the boyfriend. Dostoevsky never lets me down.

Prince Lev Nikolayevitch Myshkin returns to Russia after years of treatment for his disease of "idiocy" in Switzerland. He makes a friend on the train who talks passionately about his love for Nastassya Filippovna. Myshkin searches for his nearest relatives, the Yepanchins. They have three lovely daughters, the youngest, Aglaya, the loveliest of all. Despite being labeled as an idiot, Myshkin makes a good impression on everyone he meets and seems to speak his mind honestly and without regard for social norms.

"And what made me take you for an idiot before? You notice things other people never notice. One could really talk to you, but - one had better not."

There is a scandal involving Nastassya Filippovna, a "fallen woman" who everyone seems to want to marry. Myskin himself is so taken with her beauty that when he meets her he pleads with her not to marry Ganya.

This novel is told in four parts. The first introduces us to a wide range of characters, the second reconciles Myshkin with the Yepanchins, the third has some romantic intrigue between Myshkin and Aglaya and an attempted suicide by one of the characters, and the fourth brings about the inevitable clash between Aglaya and Nastassya over Myshkin.

"But all this had flown from his mind, everything except the one fact that she was sitting there beside him and that he was looking at her, and it made no difference to him then what she was talking about."

These characters are so complicated that I feel hard-pressed to sum them up in a few lines. Nastassya views herself as a person with a most shameful past and constantly runs between Myshkin and her other suitor, Rogozhin. She is the ultimate drama-queen ex girlfriend bent on her own destruction. Myshkin sees the good in everyone and can not hold a grudge to save his life (or sanity). Despite his honest love for Aglaya, he cannot lie about his sympathy for Nastassya.

"And how can he love two women? With two different kinds of love?"

The writing is just amazing in my opinion. For an author to have a character say "I don't love you" and without any explanation the reader knows that she is absolutely in love with the other is a feat. Dostoevsky paints the characters so well that we know what is going on in their minds.

"But in later years the general never complained about his early marriage, never attributed it to the rash folly of youth and he so respected his wife, and at times so feared her, that he actually, in face, loved her."

Thank you for voting for this one! I adored it. I put another poll up for my next big read - so be sure to vote! At the moment I have a couple of lighter books going, Shanghai Girls by Lisa See and Pyramids by Terry Pratchett.

The list of my souls.

2010-10-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

I realized when going through the book I keep all my reading notes in that I haven't blogged about reading Dead Souls by Gogol. I am, and always will be, a big fan of Russian Lit and have read a lot of Gogol's short stories. This novel is unfinished but is still pretty substantial and fleshed out.

"it became clear that, though all else in the world might conceivably be possible, never could the hatchet be buried between ladies who had quarrelled over a neglected visit."

Our main character is Chichikov and his is on a mission to collect as many "souls" as possible. In Russia there were serfs that were often referred to as souls, as in he had an estate with five thousand souls. Chickikov goes to towns and people's houses and has them write over all of their "dead souls" to him. Because (and this was a little confusing to me) the landowners still had to pay tax on these dead people, but Chichikov was trying to wheel and deal some serious fraud.

"and the spring night which, laying its elbows upon the tree-tops, and spangled with stars, and vocal with the nightingales which were pouring forth warbled ditties from the recesses of the foliage, kept glancing through the door, and regarding the company within."

Chichikov integrates himself so well into a new town, making friends with all of the local officials and getting invited to every one's house for tea. Appearances are extremely important to him as people are not so sure about selling their dead peasants and he has to warm himself up to them first.

The first big chunk of the novel follows Chichikov in one particular town and then towards the end time passes and we jump places as there are parts of the manuscript missing. We learn a little about Chichikov's upbringing and how money was placed as the most important thing and strives to get money by whatever means.

"And even devious methods I employed only when I saw the straight road would not serve my purposes well."

It is hard to judge a novel that is unfinished. I am not sure that I liked the character enough to enjoy a whole book about him. I would sooner read his "The Nose" or "The Overcoat" - those are amazing.

Does art save?

2010-10-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

While working my way through the Idiot (almost done with part two of four) I took a break yesterday and took a long bath with a graphic novel. I am a big fan of the saying "plain Jane" so this book caught my eye at the library. It is part of DC's short-lived Minx books which were geared towards teen girls. Since I am also a perpetual teenager, this seemed like a good pick.

Jane is present at a bombing in Metro City and her parent move her out to the suburbs where things will be "safer." Jane has trouble finding her place in the new high school. She wants to be friends with three girls who are outcasts but interesting and also all named Jane (or Jayne).

All of the characters seem to be just really exaggerated stereotypes. Drama Jane is always quoting playwrights and dressing up dramatically. Science Jayne spends her time getting to the lab early and doing homework at lunch. Sporty Jane is on all the teams but only as a bench warmer. And our main Jane isn't sure what she is.

After the bombing, Jane grabbed the notebook of a man who was next to her and writes him letters throughout the book, even though he is in a coma back in Metro City. Because of his sketchbook, she is inspired to create a new club, P.L.A.I.N. People Loving Art In Neighborhoods. She gets the other Janes in and they quickly get to work creating guerrilla art installations around their town. The local law enforcement does its best to shut P.L.A.I.N. down, but our gals keep on trucking.

I love the idea of art out in the community. In college, one of the art classes did something like this. As we students woke up and went around campus to classes we saw cut-out silhouettes of figures dancing or sitting in random places. I remember interviewing the professor for a reporting assignment and he had been really excited about getting art out where people can see it in unexpected places. Even my girl Keri Smith has a book on how to be a guerrilla artist, which I sadly do not own.

I liked this graphic novel and would recommend it even though the end was a little abrupt. I am interested in seeing if I can get more of the Minx books, and think that it is too bad that DC stopped that endeavor. Girls like comics too!

So readers, what do you think of art in the community like this? Have you ever experienced art in an unexpected place? What did you think about it? Don't be shy; leave me some comments!

I caught trends like I caught colds

2010-10-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

While reading Bleak House, I broke up my reading time with this book of essays written by teenage girls. The editor, Amy Goldwater, sent out a request for submission on any subject, as long as the writing was true. She was amazed with the results and complies them according to subject and then by age.

"Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. We, Mr. Marx! We have this oh-so-shiny new development. It's called the television, and if it isn't religion, then I don't know what is."

There are 58 different girls who have pieces in this book and each one was interesting and made me revert back to my teenage self. The angst of high school, parents divorce, crushes, and the struggle to fit in all made me taste the cafeteria egg salad sandwiches and feel the sting of tears in my eyes from notes passed back and forth. But it also made me think of the fun of being a teenager, the thrill of driving anywhere with your friends, sneaking out, and wearing too much makeup.

Some of the essays are better written than others, but these are still developing writers. This book is an easy read for the most part (if you can get past those high school flash-backs) and was a nice contrast to Dickens. These girls come from so many different backgrounds and all have voices that demand to be heard. And I was happy to listen.

Fashion and whiskers have been my weakness

2010-10-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

Well readers, true to my word, I finally finished reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens, since the poll deemed it so. I am not an avid fan of Dickens and frankly expected this book to be dry, boring and bleak.

Bleak House chronicles the court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce and all those who are connected with it in some way or another. The court system is portrayed very harshly as a massive, time-consuming and expensive endeavor that never seems to get anything done.

"Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here."

Ester Summerson is our main narrator (for the most part) and she is under the care of one of the Mr. Jarndyce and friends with his young cousins, Rick and Ada, the other Jarndyces in the aforementioned law suit.

Dickens covers the whole scope here, from the high and mighty family of the Deadlocks down to poor little Jo, a boy who lives covered in filth in the heart of London and is as poor as can be.

"Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject."

Ester falls somewhere in between - there is a mystery about her birth (which is no real mystery, at least not to me) and she gets a lot of marriage proposals for a girl who gets smallpox and has her face altered for the worse. I found her to be most frustrating and annoying because she always is chipper and trying to work hard and do her best to make everyone around her happy that she seems to have no emotional range. Which might be why she got all those proposals, who knows?

"I often thought of the resolution I had made on my birthday, to try to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love if I could; and indeed, indeed, I felt almost ashamed to have done so little and to have so much."

Late in the game, 700 pages or so late to be clear, there is a murder and a great hunt to discover the true killer. Again, although it seems like Dickens wants to throw us off my suspecting a few different characters, I could tell how things were going to go down.

I think that I get too distracted by the social commentary aspect of Dickens writing to actually enjoy the story. I did laugh and chuckle at some of his phrasing and I think that he may be the best at naming secondary characters, but I really did not care about the characters. And that for me is a big deal. But I have to give credit, Mr. Turverydrop, Mrs. Pardiggle, Mr. Jellby, Mr. Smallweed and Mr. Bucket are all pretty great names.

"Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly."

Next up is the Idiot, since that got just as many votes as Bleak House. I know my man Dostoevsky will not let me down and am really excited to read this one.

Yeah, that's pepper spray.

2010-10-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley is still pretty new, but as I am still trying to save every penny, I got this from the library. I read I Was Told There'd Be Cake last year and loved it, so I had some pretty high hopes for this one.

"After that first day, I awoke to the vague but identifiable smell of cheese. The kind of cheese where if you didn't know it was cheese, you'd think someone took a crap on the metro and set it on fire. And then put it out with milk."

Crosley writes about her life as a late twenty-something, referring back to her past to tell stories of her childhood pets, jumping forward to tell of getting kicked out of Paris and enduring a shady relationship. And on that particular smell that lives in taxi cabs:

"This is a scent that does not waft in real time so much as it seeps into your memory to replace every pleasant aroma you have ever smelled with its pungency."

She has a way with words that sits so well with me, but this book lacked the humour that her first one did.The stories were a little long and seemed to drag in places, but still left me with a smile, if not the belly-laughs that her first one gave me.

I am working my way through Bleak House and have my copy of the Idiot on hand. Dickens is surprisingly not what I expected and I am enjoying the book a lot. I have a few "lighter" reads to break up my time so I will still be updating while working through this massive Dickens book. My past experience with Dickens is mainly A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. Any thoughts on favorite Dickens books?

Audio books

2010-09-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

I have shared my thoughts on the new wave of e-readers before (here if you missed it) but I have never experienced an audio book. However, with a six-hour bus ride across the Mid-West looming before me, and myself unable to read in a moving vehicle without becoming violently ill, I did something drastic. I loaded up my ipod nano with all of the Harry Potter audio books, read by Jim Dale.

The one I chose to listen to first was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince because it is one of my favorites in the series and I wanted to brush up on it before I moved on to Deathly Hallows.

I do have a special place in my heart for the art of storytelling. My father read The Lord of the Rings series, yes all of them, to my two brothers and I when we were very young. He did voices for all of the characters and though I cannot remember everything from his reading, the story has a very special place in my heart.

Anyway, back to Harry Potter. Jim Dale does an amazing job of creating voices for all of the different characters, and has a beautiful narration voice as well. " So much so that even when I turned off my ipod, I could still hear him in my mind, narrating away about what I was doing. The only thing I couldn't stand was the way Dale had Hermoine whine "Haaaaarrrrryyy" every single time she says his name.

I have listened to a good chunk of Deathly Hallows after finishing my first audio book, but I am not sure how much I like this medium. I mean, for my travelling purposes, it was wonderful. And I suppose if I was the type to actually go to the gym it would be nice to be able to listen to something literary while on the elliptical. But I am just first and foremost a fan of the printed word. It is nice to have these audio books in my back pocket, but I think I will save them for when reading an actual book just isn't practical.

Do any of you readers listen to audio books regularly? Have any favorites? Any that you cannot stand?

I supposed all printed words to be true

2010-09-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is a book I plucked from my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. I had never heard of it before and had to special request it from our library system. I have a lot to say about this book but first I want to start with a problem, or maybe more of an annoyance I have had while reading lately.I find that I have no trouble telling where the plot is going, telling where the twists are going to be and which minor characters are going to come in at a critical moment and revel something shocking. There are just a few books out there that have generally causes me to exclaim "What the hell?"

Fingersmith had me exclaiming this over and over again. I was so shocked and amazed by how complicated and beautifully crafted this story was and could not read it fast enough. Geoff would come home from class and I would be reading and chewing my lips telling him I was freaking out because of this book. It was wonderful.

The novel starts in the heart of the shady part of London, with a girl named Susan Trinder. She is raised in a family much like Oliver Twist, loved by the woman of the house like a daughter even though Sue's mother was hanged as a murderess. Sue is happy with her life and one day a friend of the house, Gentleman, comes by with the scheme of a lifetime, and it all hinges on Sue. He has a post helping a real gentleman in the country work on his library and this man has a niece, Maud, who needs a maid. Maud is set to inherit a ton of money, but only if she marries. If Sue can help persuade Maud to marry Gentleman, the plan is to then put Maud in a madhouse and make off with her money. So Sue goes to the country house Briar to be maid to a fine lady.

"The skin of her hands was smooth - but, like the rest of her, to smooth to be right, I never saw it without thinking of the things - rough things, sharp things - that would mark or hurt it."

Maud and Sue quickly become close, though Sue always tries to keep in mind that she is plotting against this woman. Because of Maud's night terrors, they sleep in the same bed and soon Sue realizes that she has strong feelings for Maud.

"But by then I could only see that there was once a time when we had walked about, and then a time when we walked together."

After agreeing to marry Gentleman, Maud and Sue share a very intimate night together and Sue is just seething with jealousy. But the wedding goes through and off they go to the mad house. And then shit gets crazy.The second part is told through Maud's eyes and we get her perspective from the start and onward. In the third part we return to Sue and her determined quest for vengeance.

I don't want to spoil the rest of the book but I will just say that it does an amazing job of parallelling the lives of Sue and Maud. Both end up trapped in situations they are desperate to escape and both expect the blood of their mother's to show up in themselves. Sue's mother was a murderess so she is always sure that her bad blood will see her through her misdeeds. Maud's mother died in a mental institution, and she grew up in one and is desperate not to go back.

I imagine that the reason I have never heard of this book before is because of the lesbian aspect of it, but truthfully it is a beautifully done story about two women who love each other despite their own intentions. Because of the time, neither could come out and say how they felt at the start for fear and my heart ached when they had moments where if only one of them would have reached out perhaps they would not have had to go through the pain they end up going through.

"But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin."

After finally finishing (I literally could not put this book down and read it in two days), I have to say that this is one of my new favorites. Top ten, even. The characters were realistic and complex, the plot was so amazing and the pain and longing seemed to seep right off the page and into my heart.

They were not used to asking much, they had had practice.

2010-09-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

A.S. Byatt did an awesome job at Possession, and this little book caught my eye at the library. These five short stories were all easy and interesting reads, some feeling more like modern fairy tales.

"The Thing in the Forest" was one of the ones that seemed so much like a modern fairy tale or scary story. It just starts out beautifully: "There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest." Simple yet hooked me right away. They share this wonderful and horrifying experience and then reconnect after years of separation.

"Body Art" was a little more realistic and a little longer, about a doctor who has a complicated relationship with an art student.

"There was a man, who had been dying, and then dead. And there was an idea of who he was, which was a dream, which was a poem, which was a moral cage, which was a film over a clear vision of things."

"(for Torfi Tulinius) is beautiful. A woman's mother dies and then she begins to discover that her own body is transforming into rocks and minerals. This is a slow process that has her body evolving every day. She goes in search of a final resting place, and instead finds her way to where she belongs.

"...a necklace of veiled swelling above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids."

"Raw Material" is another more realistic story about a creative writing teacher and the writing of one student that captivates him. The ending is shocking and unexpected, and delightfully unresolved.

"The Pink Ribbon" is a bit of a mix between the more fantastical stories and the realistic. A man is caring for his wife who has pretty severe brain damage and he hallucinates - or does he - a woman who comes in and visits him at night.

I love a good book of short stories and this one was wonderful. Each was interesting and fantastical and the whole book flowed together very nicely. Short story lovers - get your hands on this!

The ghost of a tree

2010-09-24T19:53:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the absence! I have been in Ohio visiting the boyfriend on a little vacation and had a wonderful time. And I somehow managed to get a ton of reading done, so be ready for some updates this week!

Having loved The Time Traveller's Wife, I knew sooner or later I would get around to this one. The story focuses on twin girls, Julia and Valentia as the inherit the London flat from their mother's estranged twin (Elspeth). We get chapters from so many perspectives, Roberts (Elspeth's lover and downstairs neighbor), Martin (the OCD neighbor upstairs), and Elspeth herself, a ghost trapped in the apartment with the twins.

"I think perhaps if that sort of thing does happen - ghosts - it must be more beautiful, more surprising than all those tales would have us believe."

Valentina and Julia are so wrapped up in each other that at the beginning neither can do anything without the other, though one may want to. They explore London and the graveyard next door to their flat where Robert works and which houses Elspeth's tomb. And then Elspeth finds a way to communicate with the twins and things get very complicated. Valentina starts a romantic relationship with Robert while Julia starts taking daily tea with Martin and Elspeth's ghost continues to scheme, trapped in the apartment.

"Everything in the room seemed to have been drained of colour. Julia wondered is the colour had all collected somewhere else, perhaps it was in some closet, and when they opened that door it would all flood back into the objects it had deserted."

I really enjoyed this book and had to stay up super late finishing it, however, the ending left me a little underwhelmed. The twists and turns were gripping, but I just cannot help but feel a little let down. The characters were wonderful though, and maybe I just missed something since I was reading so late.

In other news, the poll has closed and I am left with a tie! Bleak House and The Idiot both had the most votes so I will just have to read them both. Luckily Geoff had a copy of Bleak House on hand and I'm already working my way through it. I was alarmed to look at my bookcases and not find the copy of The Idiot I wanted on my Russian shelves so I may have to dig through the boxes to find it. Or I might just have to read the paperback version I found at a garage sale. I am still working my way through Dead Souls by Gogol, so The Idiot will just have to wait a little longer.

Coming up this week: a book of short stories, another graphic novel, a book that just may be in my top ten faves, and thoughts on finishing my first audio-book ever.

Am I the only one who made a costume?

2010-09-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

Runaways Volume 2: Teenage Wasteland by Brian K. Vaughn and Adrian Alphona.

I'm probably not going to blog a whole lot about the rest of this series, but I will say that it has hooked me enough to have a stack of them waiting to be read. The teens continue to hide away from their parents, determined to do what is right. They pick up another young teen who seems to be in a similar situations, but he has some dark secrets of his own. Also everyone starts kissing everyone.

In other news, I'm taking a gigantic bus trip tomorrow to see the boyfriend and am fully prepared with all of the Harry Potter books on audio. Some of you may know that I am a giant snob about books in other mediums but so far I have enjoyed listening to Jim Dale read me Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. But I do get his voice stuck in my head and end up imagining him narrating my everyday actions. I know that the HP audios are hugely popular - are there any other shining examples of good audio books out there?

Just a few more days left on my classic poll and Bleak House is still winning. No Russian love?

Stories tell us how to live

2010-09-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

After reading and loving Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I picked up Peony in Love from the library the next day.

Peony lives in a world where dynasty change has occurred and everyone is still adjusting. By that I mean the men are adjusting and the women are continuing to live inside even though they had a brief time where they could travel and, gasp, write books that would actually get published and read.

Peony is an only child in love with an opera called the Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu (which is a real opera). Her father gave her a love of reading and learning which perhaps was not the most useful thing for a wife back then.

"Had you been a son," Baba went on, "You would have made an excellent imperial scholar, perhaps the best our family have ever seen." He meant it as a compliment and I took it that way, but I could hear regret in his voice too. I was not a son and never would be."

Her father stages a showing of the opera in their family gardens and the women get to hear it while hidden behind a screen. Through a crack in the screen, Peony sees a very handsome man who then runs into her in the garden, something very improper. The poet, Ren, and Peony meet for three days and then the opera is over and Peony must face that fact that she is to be married out.

"I will follow the course my father sets for me, but all girls have dreams, even if our destinies are set."

She becomes obsessed with the Peony Pavilion and sees herself as the woman in the opera who loves even after death and is then brought back to life through the power of love. Peony neglects to take care of herself, eat and eventually dies while working on her commentary of the Peony Pavilion.

"Everyday I see it and I don't know what to do. Literacy is a grave threat to the female sex. Too often I've seen the health and happiness of young women fade because they will not give up their brush and ink."

The rest of the book follows Peony's afterlife as she attempts to watch over Ren and learns more about the women in her family. Because Peony's tablet was not dotted correctly, her spirit is not at rest and she fears that she will remain a hungry ghost for all time.

One thing that I really liked was that in the afterlife Peony meets a group of other girls who all died young after becoming obsessed with the Peony Pavilion. It reminded me of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Wurther where young men were killing themselves for the romantic gesture of the thing. Thankfully, Kate Beaton did a little comic which illustrates (clikc her name for a larger version):

Ren goes on to have two other wives and Peony is there, watching and trying her best to make him happy for she just loves him so much. And while I personally would have haunted the crap out of Tan Ze (Peony's old friend who is Ren's second wife), Peony does seem to have Ren's happiness at the heart of all she does.

This book has some interesting insights into how women slowly became more accepted as poets and writers, but I was not as enthralled with this one as with Snow Flower. I still would recommend this book, but if given the choice stick with Snow Flower.

Also side note - I've got a poll up for what my next big classic read should be! So far Bleak House is winning but you should totally check out the other options and vote. Do me a solid!

Are you trying to make holes in me?

2010-09-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

I am slowly working my way through 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and this one is on the list. I thankfully have not seen the movie version yet, but now am dying to.

The Reader takes place in postwar Germany and follows young Michael Berg as he gets sick on the street and is rescued by an older woman. After recovering from his illness, Michael brings her flowers to thank her, and they develop a relationship. He reads to her, they take baths and make love all in Hanna's apartment. She is more than twice his age and Michael struggles to keep her separate from his school-life, even as he knows he is doing Hanna wrong by doing so.

I love the way their first days are described, how ardently Michael adores Hanna. He loves that she is not trying to seduce him really, it is more that she isn't trying to impress him, she just is impressive to him.

"It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world."

Hanna disappears and Michael later sees her on trail for crimes committed as a guard of a group of Jewish women at one of the concentration camps. However, Michael realizes that Hanna is taking the blame because she is ashamed of a secret she has kept from everyone, even him. Michael is so conflicted because he (and his generation) is trying to deal with how to view their parents and elders who were either complicit in the Holocaust or stood by and let it happen. Just as we Americans had our "Great Generation", for Michael it seems that they had a Failed Generation. And yet he cannot completely condemn Hanna because he loved her.

"And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal"

What struck me most about Hanna's situation was that during her trial when she was accused of her actions and inaction she turned to the judge and asked him what he would have done. And there can be no answer. While she serves her sentence in prison, Michael begins to send her tapes of himself reading to her, and yet cannot bring himself to visit or write her a letter.

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as a matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive."

There is a soft spot in my heart for tragic love stories, and this one is very bittersweet. It is difficult to remember that people who have done horrible, horrible things are often times just people who at their core are not bad or evil. Hanna did at least take part in a horrific act, and yet I cannot view her as a bad character.

I am very excited to see the film version and see how they handle all of this. But I would highly suggest this book to anyone.

Our parents are super villians!

2010-09-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

I'm no stranger to comic books and graphic novels and picked Runaways up while looking through my local library's teen graphic section.

Six teenagers are brought together when the discover that their parents are all part of a secret super villian group called the Pride. Unable to trust their parents after what the kids saw, the band of teenagers search for proof to give to the police while discovering that they have abilities of their own.

I really enjoyed this story and plan on continuing the rest of it. I can see why this stroy would appeal to teens, I might be speaking for myself, but I know I grew up wishing that some latent super-powers would show up one day. But perhaps I just watched too many X-Men cartoons. Anyway, I am interested to see how the teens' characters develop.

We are old sames

2010-09-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

I need to listen to my friend's recommendations in a more timely manner because I have let this book languish on my shelves for months and simply nodded every time Liz would tell me "You will love it; you have to read it." As always, she was right.

Lily is an old Chinese woman looking back on her life now that all those who might be ashamed of what she has to say are dead. Lily grew up in a home that was not the best financially and as a daughter was thought of as basically worthless. She detailed her foot binding days, how harsh her mother was with her and how painful the process of breaking her feet was but Lily always accepted that this was how it was supposed to be in order for her to make a good marriage.

Just in case you needed a visual of the way these girls (sometimes as young as three) had their feet broken:
picture source

But the real meat of the story is the relationship between Lily and her laotong, Snow Flower. The laotong relationship is basically a contracted friendship that began when the two were extremely young and is to be an emotional love that is valued even over their husbands. Snow Flower is much more refined than Lily, but we see that she is ignorant towards household tasks that she will need in her future.

"For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life."

Lily and Snow Flower communicate using women's language, nu shu, and record the events of their lives on a decorative fan that they pass between each other. Because of the interpretive nature of nu shu, there is a misunderstanding and Lily and Snow Flower's lives are cut apart.

This book was such a fascinating read. I knew nothing about Chinese family dynamics and felt the most connected to Snow Flower and her plight. The laotong relationship is so fascinating to me. The nature of friendships change over time, in my life I have seen friends who I thought would be with me always fade away over things that I cannot comprehend and other friends that I never expected to love become sisters in my heart.

2010-09-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

I am currently having a hard time figuring out which of my books to read. I am a big believer that there is a right time to read each book and they let me know when the time is right. If it isn't, I'll let a book slip away while reading and move on to something else. But, as most of my books are still packed up, I'm at a loss.

Anyway, what are you guys reading right now?

I am I am I am

2010-09-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

I've never read any of Sylvia Plath's poetry before but you pretty much have to be living in a cave to have never heard of this book.

I had a very easy time connecting to our narrator, Ester. She's a young small town girl in the big city, with everything in life ahead of her yet feels hopelessly out of sync with everyone around her.

"I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

I read that sentence and knew that I was going to love this book. Plath captured the detachment that comes with a nervous breakdown perfectly.

Some of the secondary characters are so well executed in just a few words. I would latch on to Doreen and follow her around all the time. She does her own thing and exudes confidence and independence, which is probably why Ester eventually does not want to be around her.

"Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones."

Ester goes back to her hometown after her month in NYC and recollects on her past interactions with her boyfriend. I wish he had been the one to fall down a mountain and break his leg. With Buddy, Ester sees the narrow life that will be expected of her as a wife and mother. So she rebels the only way she can, withdrawing further into herself.

"And I knew that in spite of all roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showers on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat."

But she is stuck in the fifties and after awhile her mother takes her in for therapy. After a poorly done electro-shock treatment, Ester goes says enough and makes several suicide attempts. She is discovered and taken to a group home for treatment.

I read a review of this book that said it was Salinger-esque in a female voice and I completely agree. The writing style was so accessible and easy for me to get into.

"From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, the plopped to the ground at my feet."

This is my problem with life right now - I feel exactly the way she describes. I would highly suggest this book to anyone, although maybe not when you are currently having your own little breakdown.

Now I've begun again

2010-08-31T17:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time.

I'm just going to get right back into the swing of things here. Lady Chatterly's Lover has a lot of history behind it; it was banned both in the UK and the US for being pornographic. This is one a lot of lists of the classic great books so I thought I better give it a shot.

I did not like it.

Connie Chatterly's husband was wounded in the war and is confined to a wheelchair. They live on a great English estate that included a giant industrial mine. While Connie is set up to be an educated and forward-thinking woman, I found her annoying. Surrounded by modern thinkers and culture, there is no meaning in any of the actions or thoughts of any of the characters. They just go through the motions.

"Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect and amounted to about the same thing."

Connie has affairs that seem just ways to pass her time. Until she meets him, Mellors, the groundskeeper. He is also married, but his wife left him and lives on the other side of town. They start on together and there are some pretty explicit scenes. I've never been a fan of bodice-ripping romance novels, but this doesn't seem like the same thing. I mean, Connie weaves flowers into his pubic hair.

I guess my problem is that I don't buy their idea of love. Connie and Mellors just seem to be in lust. They don't really have conversations, he mauls her in the woods and has sex with her while she is half-passed out. He has some really strict demands on what a woman does during sex.

While her father and sister are fine with her having an affair, they are not pleased with the thought of such a scandal over a man of lower class.

There are bigger things going on in this book besides these two having sex. Old England is being destroyed by a newer, industrial England. The characters are only half-living, crippled by their inability to deal with the changing world.

I think that the idea of the scandal around this book is more appealing to me than the actual book itself. Color me unimpressed.

Not knowing how to live

2010-04-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

Hey look guys, I read another Russian book! Who is surprised?

Oblomov tells the tale of Oblomov, a man who really doesn't want to live life to the fullest. He'd rather take a nap after diner and leave those errands for tomorrow, or maybe next week. He is a land owner who knows nothing of his country estate; he lives in town with his personal servant Zahar who does everything for Oblomov. A childhood friend, Stolz, tries continually to get Oblomov out and into the world. Oblomov drags his feet the whole way until he becomes infatuated with Olga.

What is interesting to me about this book is that if Oblomov was alive today he would probably be diagnosed with some type of social anxiety issue. Day-to-day functions of writing letters and reading books just are too much for him. However the root of his problem seems to be that his ideal life is one where he just lays around and is taken care of by loving servants and family.

"Oblomov's youth had been spent among companions who knew all about everything and believed in nothing."

Even when he falls in love, Oblomov can't imagine doing all the work Olga expects him to do. She thinks he should check in with his estate to ensure the serfs are paying proper taxes, make sure the house there is suitable for them to live in, and get out of his contract for his apartment before they can tell anyone about their engagement. He does have moments where he is able to get up and get something done, but truthfully I think he expects to laps back into laziness once they are married.

"He felt that the light cloudless festival of love had gone, that love was, indeed, becoming a duty, that it was mingling with his life as a whole, forming part of its everyday functions and gradually losing its rainbow coloring."

Olga realises that this love affair cannot be and eventually breaks off the engagement. She gets majorly depressed and goes abroad with her aunt where they run into Stolz, who, of course, realizes that he is in love with her.

Olga's fate makes me a little sad. She is an intelligent and curious woman, and while she gets her happy marriage to a man she loves, she is never satisfied with life. She gets depressed due to feeling that she should be doing more with her life. Her husband, Stolz, talks her through everything and does his best, but I just feel like she was one of the poor women who had to suffer with the times. I mean, throughout the book, a man had to read books before her and decide if they were something she should read or not.

While Olga makes Oblomov run around, his new landlady is content to take care of his things and feed him. She, Agafya, is the polar opposite of Oblomov, she never sits and is always working on something. She doesn't think of rest because there are things to do and work makes her happy.

"He looked at her with slight agitation, but his eyes did not shine or fill with tears, his spirit did not yearn for the heights, for heroic deeds. All he wanted was to sit on the sofa and watch her elbows."

I loved the exchanges with Oblomov and his servants, especially Zahar. They had the ability to be so contradictory and would take everything to the extreme, swearing to God that they didn't even know the name of a neighbor they had just been caught gossiping with.

Fate with a document? A rare combination

2010-04-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Mikhail Bulgakov is one of my favorite authors. His best known work, The Master and Margarita, has remained my number one favorite book for years. The Fatal Eggs is a lesser known work of his; my dad picked this up overseas and gave it to me. It is about the same length as his Heart of a Dog, which I reviewed early last year.

There are a lot of similarities between The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog. Both are about scientists that perform controversial experiments that go horribly wrong by going right. In The Fatal Eggs, our scientist, Persikov, discovers a ray of light that increases growth in frog eggs exponentially. Frogs the size of cats are hopping around his laboratory. Persikov is a character that can't see the larger implications of what he is doing and is very annoyed when anyone asks him to think about them.

Because this takes place in communist Russia, the government, represented by Comrade Alexander Semyonovich Faight, takes the ray into their own hands. Faight does this because all of the chickens in Russia have died off from some unknown illness and the other countries are laughing at Russia. However, what hatches from Faight's eggs is not quite the Frankenstein chicken I expected. It's better.

"Alexander Semyonovich brought the flute up to his lips, have a horse squeak and, gasping for breath at every second, started to play the waltz from Eugene Onegin. The eyes in the greenery immediately began to burn with an implacable hatred for that opera."

I thought that this book was very good. This book seemed to have more direct government influence than Heart of a Dog and in this book the scientist doesn't learn anything from his actions. This edition of the book has a great foreword by Doris Lessing and is translated by Hugh Aplin. Normally I am a bit of a snob when it comes to Russian translations and like to stick with Pevear and Volokhonsky, but I thought that Aplin's translation was well done. There were some footnotes that were helpful, however to get a full understanding of the work I think you need at least a basic understanding of what was happening at Russia during this time.

"All Moscow rose, and the white sheets of the newspapers dressed it, like birds."

This is a quick read, only about a hundred pages. If nothing else, it teaches the importance of reading the shipping list on all packages delivered to you, especially if you are a crazy scientist.

Let her air out her heart

2010-03-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

The first of my inter library loan books came in yesterday! After reading Chicken with Plums I knew I needed some more Satrapi. Embroideries is a super quick read, and I had it done in about an hour or so. Basically Marjane and her female relatives sit and girl-talk about marriage, men, sex, and life. I'm pretty fascinated by the culture in Iran, so this book was really interesting. Their whole culture is so different than ours, but I was really able to relate to some of the stories the women were telling.

"To speak behind other's backs is the ventilator of the heart."

I would recommend this book to any ladies out there. I'm not sure how the fellas would like it. The characters all get a chance to weave a story either about themselves or about someone they know. I think it illustrates how women bond really well.

"That's life! Sometimes you're on the horse's back, and sometimes it's the horse that's on your back."

Side note: Can you believe I've been blogging on schedule lately? I'm trying to make it my morning thing with my coffee.

Since this post is so short I'll give you an update on what I'm reading. Still working on Oblomov - just got to part three last night so I'm on the final stretch. I'm reading the Fatal Eggs by my man Bulgakov as my at-work read. I think I'm taking a pretty big break from the Complete Sherlock Holmes. I love the stories, but my motivation to pick that one up hasn't been there lately. I'm going home tomorrow for break and my brother's giving me the fourth Wheel of Time book. AND I'm waiting on a few more graphic novels to come in to the library.

What about you? What are you reading?

All men are dangerous

2010-03-29T06:48:00.001-07:00

Since I started this series, I think I may have to see it through to the end. Whenever the end comes that is, because I think there are thirteen books so far and at least two more to come. My brother read all of these and I've been borrowing them from him. I blogged about the first book, the Eye of the World, if you recall.

The Dragon Reborn is the third book in the Wheel of Time series. This book was much more interesting to me than the last two; the characters were just fleshed out a lot more. Also Rand, who is the Dragon Reborn, is hardly in the book directly, which is fine by me because he became a diva super fast. Min wasn't in most of the book either, which was a bummer - she kicks ass and wears pants when all the other ladies are flouncing around in fancy dresses. She can "see" things about a person's future, which is cryptic but fascinating to see unfold.

This story spends a good deal of time on our three other ladies, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Elayne as they spend their time at Tar Valon, learning to use saidar (magic that can only be used by women) to become Aes Sedai, and getting mixed up in a giant mole hunt that sends them to Tear. Egwene is getting more annoying to me as she strives to make Nynaeve see her as more of an equal. They run into some Aiel, who are crazy fighters and looking for Rand.

The other boys from Two Rivers, Matrim and Perrin, are both on their own separate journeys that lead them eventually to Tear. Mat is healed at Tar Valon and quickly sets about being awesome, making money gambling and taking fireworks apart for fun. Perrin is much more broody; he is stuck following Morriane (Aes Sedai) and gets stuck with Faile, a woman hunter who teases him endlessly and makes him blush like crazy.

Rand is also making his way to Tear (since that is where the party is at) to reach Callandor, a sword that can only be touched by the Dragon Reborn. The Dark One is not too happy about this and many forces try to stop him.

If that summary seems confusing I'm sorry, but this is an epic fantasy novel of almost 700 pages. Jordan seems to borrow heavily from the Lord of the Rings, and in this novel the Arthur legend, but also makes it his own.

I think it is interesting that the "hero" of the saga, Rand, is the least interesting character to me at this point. I'm much more interested in everyone else. Matrim and Perrin are finally as fun to read as the girls.

"Any fool knows men and women think differently at times, but the biggest difference is this. Men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget."

If you like fantasy novels, I'm sure you've already read these. If not, they are worth a look.

Side note - the covers of these books are fantastically awful. The first one, the Eye of the World, appears to have Jerry Seinfeld riding a horse in the background and this one Perrin looks like Rambo with that bandanna on his head. Also Rand looks like he is wearing some blue jeans.

Chicken with Plums

2010-03-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

Marjane Satrapi is best known for her Persepolis books, which are amazing. So when I saw that she had another graphic novel out, I quickly snatched it from the library shelf.

Chicken with Plums is about Satrapi's great-uncle, a musician who looses his will to live after his instrument is broken. The novel chronicles his last eight days as he slowly starves to death in his own home. We get glimpses of the past and of the future for his family. Soon it becomes clear how a man like him could give up on life.

This is a beautifully done story. I am remain enchanted by Satrapi. The art is detailed and well done and the story flows very well. This was a very quick read, perfect for a lazy afternoon.

I've been on a graphic novel kick lately and am enjoying it immensely.

Biting the Sun

2010-03-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee was suggested to me by my cousin's husband. He raved about it and I had a bit of trouble tracking it down. I special ordered it through work and it took forever to get in. From the first line, I knew this would be interesting:

"My friend Hergal had killed himself again..."

This is a futuristic society, Four BEE, where pleasure is everything. The world is run with the help of a lot of robots who are there to make sure the humans are as happy as can be. There is a lot of slang used in the book, which has a helpful glossary at the beginning. Young people, or Jang, are encouraged to steal and get married as many times as they wish. They can change their body after a certain period of time to whatever they wish - guy, girl, and look however they want. And if they don't want to wait for the prescribed time period, they can always kill themselves and get a new body that way.

Our main character (who remains unnamed) steals, takes drugs, kills herself, returns to life in a new body she has designed to be incredibly beautiful, eats exotic food, has sex with pretty much everyone she knows and yet is unfulfilled. She's mostly female, but does spend a few stints as a guy.

"I can hardley remeber the laughing and the running now and the playing an dthe dancing but I remember the happiness, the happiness like a wound, that bleeds the life spark."

The narrator (who I called Ooma - or darling) tries her best to make herself happy. She tries to be an adult and get a job, tries to have a child, but remains hopelessly unhappy. Ooma has a great connection with a pet she steals; he is wild and mean but she cannot help but cart him everywhere she goes. She eventually takes an expedition out to Four BAA and then to the wilds of the desert, which turn out to be too domestic for her. Ooma continues to push boundaries until the government finally cannot take anymore.

"Do not bite the sun, traveller, you will burn your mouth."

This book was fascinating. The characters kept changing in appearance over and over and even the other characters had a hard time telling who people were at times. There was humor and heartache. Two characters have a hard time because one loves the other for her essence and the other remains transfixed on outward appearances.

I was so surprised that this book isn't talked about more. As far as dystopias go, this was a really good book. The slang was a lot easier to get around than A Clockwork Orange, so I didn't have much of a problem with that.

Note: this book was originally published as two works, Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, but has since been combined in this volume.

rocks is an acquired taste

2010-03-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a long time and I'm sorry for that. I've started graduate school and a new job so my life has been a little hectic lately. But I want to be sure I'm making time for this! With all of my text books, I wanted to read something light and fun so I immediately turned to Pratchett.

Wyrd Sisters is another Discworld book, a fantasy that will make you laugh until you think you might pee your pants. This one parodies Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet. We start out with the murder of the king and his transition into being a ghost. Three witches, including Granny Weatherwax who was a big part of Equal Rites, are given his son to hide away so that the new king, the Duke, doesn't kill him. They give him to a travelling band of actors to raise until the time is right.

"She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it."

The witches try their best not to interfere with politics, but somehow get pulled into it. The Duke is suffering from some major Lady-Macbeth-itis and his wife is hellbent on killing anyone who doesn't get with her program.

"The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo."

These books are nothing but fun and the characters are what make them that way. They each are so realized and delightful. Even the cook, who has no speaking lines, has a personality that comes across clearly.

I'm hooked on this man's books. Thankfully there are about a million of them.

As I said above, I've been super busy with school and it has cut into my reading time. However, I am working on a few things at the moment (slowly but surely), such as Oblomov by Goncharov, The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan and the Fatal Eggs by Mikail Bulgakov (which I hope, hope to finish by the weekend).

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

2010-03-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

This is a book I see on a lot of book lists but didn't really know anything about. I found a cheap paperback the other day and decided to give it a whirl. I was hooked on this thing like no body's business. I couldn't read it fast enough.

"I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say."

The little lady narrator of this tale is not named (a trend lately in the books I'm reading) but she meets and married a man named Maxim de Winter and goes off to live at his estate, Manderly. Our narrator is obsessed with the image of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who died at sea nearby.

Our narrator's stress is so high you can't help but feel it yourself. She is constantly second guessing herself and is never sure how to act around the staff that is supposed to be catering to her. Added in is Mrs. Danvers, who runs Manderly and was Rebecca's personal maid. She does not make things any easier for the new Mrs. de Winters.

"I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again."

Mrs. de Winters does her best to fit in to her new surroundings, even though she was not raised in such a high social class. She loves her new husband but does not always know how to be the wife he needs.

There is a huge twist in this book that blew me away. In conclusion, this book is on reading lists for a reason. Highly recommend.

he is a man and not a piano-key

2010-02-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

As I have made clear before, Russian lit holds a special place in my heart. Now, I'm usually more of a Tolstoy gal than Dostoevsky, but you can't deny that this guy was a genius.

"I am a sick man...I am a wicked man."

Thus begins Notes From the Underground, a tale told to us by an unnamed man who attempts to explain how he could go from a seemingly normal and stable citizen to the depraved creature he is now. The first half is his ranting at us, explaining his philosophy.

"Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.
That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind."

His issues with society and with human nature really make you think. A lot. About conformity, logic, imagination, intellect, and so many other issues. Every page has big idea that really challenged me.

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."

The second half of the book recounts an incident with the narrator and several of his old classmates that end up having dinner together. Our narrator makes a pretty big fool of himself and ends up bearing his soul to a whore. That incident reminded me a lot of the scene in the Catcher in the Rye where Holden has the prostitute over in his hotel room.

The writing style and the characters were familiar and fit right in with Dostoevsky's other works. This is a short piece but it packs a powerful punch. Read it.

Apparently, you've developed a soul

2010-02-13T11:35:00.000-08:00

"When man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom."

We was written before 1984 and Brave New World and influenced both works. This is a futuristic society where people are referred to as numbers and where they work in unison for the One State, ruled by the Benefactor. In this society, the sum of all parts is greater than the individual; a single person is nothing without the whole. Personal freedoms are extremely limited and all must sing the praises of the One State. Guardians are among them, watching over them in case any should defy the laws. One State. D-503 is our narrator, he is writing notes to be put upon the Intergal, a space ship he is building to bring the One State's ways to other worlds.

In this society, everyone has the right to have sex with anyone else, all one need do is register for that person and receive a pink ticket to lower their blinds. This is one of the only instances of privacy they have, as the buildings are made of glass. The society is encased in a dome, the Green Wall keeping the outside world apart since the 200 Year War.

D-503 meets a woman, I-330, with whom he falls in love with. She is part of a group called Mephi, which is trying to organize an uprising against the One State. D-503 struggles to justify his actions with I-330 with the ideals that have been instilled in him. She challenges the rules and ideals of the One State, and while D-503 claims that he hates her, he cannot but do what she tells him to do.

"You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved."

What interested me a lot about the beginning of this book was D-503's interest in mathematics, and his fixation upon the square root of negative one. As an imaginary number in a very cut and dry world, D-503 cannot wrap his mind around this concept and even recalls throwing a fit in school when he learned of it. Imagination is not desirable in this society, and there is talk of an operation to remove it from the brain.

"Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one."

The appearance of math in dystopian literature is really interesting to me. I just finished reading Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground (I'll try to blog my thoughts on that soon) and one thing that stuck out there was the notion that 2+2=5 (this notion is not exclusive to Dostoevsky, but also connects to Tolstoy, Orwell, and Turgenev, among others - interesting wikipedia entry here). In Dostoevsky, he uses the equation to assert his free will over logic.

We has some great imagery in it. According to the Table of Hours, every number wakes at exactly the same moment, chews the same number of times in precision and marches down the streets in time with each other. The great Benefactor's machine deals with those who rebel by vaporizing them in front of a placid crowd. He is able to describe the women in the story almost exclusively by describing their mouths.

Obviously this novel has some deep allusions to communism, an issue that Zamyatin was dealing with in Russia. In the novel, private property isn't an option anymore, even children are considered property of the state. Nothing is private, even voting is done out in the open, in front of everyone.

To me, a dystopian novel can have but one ending, and that is not a happy one. This one is no different; and even though I could see where the book was heading, what fate lay in store for I-330 and for D-503, it did not lessen the impact.

And that will heal you?

2010-02-13T10:01:00.000-08:00

I consider myself well-read, but I think I dropped the ball by not picking this one up sooner. I've had it sitting on my self for a year or so. Once I started reading, I could not put this book down.

The book is based on Eggers's real life, when both of his parents died from cancer and he was placed in charge of his younger brother. Eggers (21) and Toph (8) move from Chicago to California and Eggers does his best to be a parent/brother and juggle a new career and find a sense of community with his friends. Also, he auditions for MTV's the Real World.

I think that Eggers does a beautiful job of capturing the joy and fear of being responsible for another human being. The conversations and interactions between him and Toph are ones I can easily imagine my brothers having.

"Then, at the moment that I am turning the corner, I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing - it happens every time I leave him anywhere - that Toph will be killed. "

That fear is something I can identify with, if to a lesser degree. I have two siblings much younger than myself, who I am babysitting at the moment, and am fiercely protective of them. I worry about them a lot and when I am watching them I feel much like an auxiliary parent as opposed to just a sister like I feel around my older-younger brothers.

I did have a bit of trouble getting through the introduction the first time I picked this book up. Eggers' style is very different from the type of book I usually enjoy (old Russian novels) but I think that reading his short story collection, How We Are Hungry, helped a lot. His writing is different, very different, but very real. He breaks the fourth wall, his characters yell at him for using them as plot devices and the copyright page is unexpectedly hilarious.

I loved this book and highly, highly recommend it to anyone. I'm sure I have mentioned before that Eggers founded McSweeny's, which I also suggest checking out.

"Please sound normal, Toph, you are normal, we are normal so just sound normal please can't you? Don't sound like I've been beating your, like you're in the bathroom hiding from me, because I have been there, have hidden from parents before, have been on the other side of a door being stuck with all conceivable parental force, have searched the bathroom for places to hide, have found a place in the closet where the bath toys are kept, under the lowest shelf, and I have hidden there, and have seen, darkening the white slit of light under the door to this closet, his shoes, and then the white light everywhere as the door is opened..."

looking for the library where it lives

2010-02-13T09:32:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging too much lately because I have been very busy starting graduate school! I am going for my Master's degree in Library and Information Studies. Classes started about two weeks ago and I am really enjoying them so far.

Library: An Unquiet History, was my first assigned book for one of my classes. I actually picked this one up awhile ago because it seemed like an interesting read. It was certainly nice not to have to buy this at the school bookstore, where it, along with every other book, was overpriced.

Battles covers an overview and histories of libraries throughout time. The book is a bit scattered, jumping from place to place and from idea to idea. It seems a bit unorganized but interesting. Many of the things he talks about I would want to read more about, such as the ancient Muslim libraries which were just as impressive, if not more so, than the library at Alexandria. He hits the big topics, Alexandria, Guettenburg, the Nazi book burning, and the development of modern libraries.

I think this is a good book to get a quick look into the world of library history, however, I think that there are some better more complete works out there, such as A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes, which covers book collecting and libraries. Basbanes book is much longer than Battles, but far more interesting.

One, heartbreaking quote:

"Andras Riedlmayer described a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking. 'This forces one to think critically,' Riedlmayer remembered his friend saying. 'One must prioritize. First you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust?' I asked Riedlmayer if his friend had any books left when the war was over. 'Oh yes,' he replied, his face lit by a flickering smile. 'He still had many books. Sometimes, he told me, you look at the books and just choose to go hungry."

Don't be a phony

2010-01-28T19:53:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time and I'm sorry about that, December and January have been crazy months for me. But here's me hoping to get into a new blogging groove.

I had to post today in response to the news that J.D. Salinger past away yesterday at the age of 91. I've seen a lot of people's take on the whole situation and just have to throw in my two cents. Yes, he hasn't published anything since the 60s, yes, he was an incredible recluse that no one ever saw.

He was the first author I fell in love with. I reread the Catcher in the Rye constantly. I had to go buy the rest of his books and was so sad when I learned there were only four. This man could write. He captured characters in a sentence so perfectly.

This death isn't the same for me as when Vonnegut died, because with him there was the shock that nothing more would be published (or at least only a few more things). With Salinger, I am very interested to see if they publish what he's been writing. But a big, BIG part of me is worried. I'm worried that somehow someone is going to push through "Catcher in the Rye: the Musical" or the "Glass Family on Ice." And that scares me.

All in all, a sad day.

Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me!

2009-12-21T08:24:00.000-08:00

I became aware of this play with the rest of the world, when Daniel Radcliffe played Aaron on Broadway. And yes, of course I saw the pics of him and will never look at Harry Potter the same way again.

Equus is a play about a young man who idolized horses to the extreme and ended up blinding six of them with a metal spike. He was subsequently institutionalized. His sessions with his therapist attempt to uncover the reasons why he would do such a thing.

Like reading any play, I'd love to see it to get the whole experience. I'm not too wild about it, but the characters are very interesting. One of my college professors mentioned that this play doesn't age well, that it made much more sense in context of the times than it does now. I can see how the jingles sung at the beginning are pretty meaningless now; I didn't even know what half of the products were. But I think that the idea of passionately connecting with an ideal and destroying that passion is still relevant.

My inner teen girl cringed the whole time; I was so worried about the horses. Not a thing to read if you are looking for something uplifting, but worth a look for sure. Also, I love the cover of my edition. Old paperbacks are where it's at.

And so live ever - or else swoon to death

2009-12-18T06:03:00.000-08:00

I really want to see this movie and picked up this book even though I'm sure I've got all of Keats' poems in another book somewhere.

I am hopelessly smitten by love letters. I wish that we could read the letters Fanny wrote to Keats, but I also love that he was buried with them. They were young and in love, yet because Keats was so poor and ill they were unable to get married.

This book contains the letters that Keats wrote to Fanny and his love poems. The poems are beautiful, as expected, and the letters are very sweet. This is a good book to have just to pick up every now and then and read a letter or poem and then put down again. Especially if you're reading something a little dense.

"Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast?
What stare outfaces now my silver moon?
Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least;
Let, let, the amorous burn-
But, prithee, do not turn
The current of your heart from me so soon.
O save, in charity,
The quickest pulse for me!"

~from "To Fanny"

the Humbling

2009-12-17T05:46:00.000-08:00

This little book was on the new in fiction shelf at my local library. I have never read Philip Roth before, but he's one of those authors that I look at in bookstores and think that I should probably read someday.

The Humbling is about an older actor who suddenly loses his ability to act. Simon Axler was an amazing performer and is devastated when, for no reason he can see, he is unable to act at all. His wife leaves him and he mopes around his farmhouse before checking himself into a mental institution before starting a new relationship with a woman from his past.

This is a short book but it is pretty dense and some of it was hard to read. The lady that he meets at the mental institution has such a heartbreaking story. And Roth is pretty graphic while describing Axler's sexual relationship.

I thought this book was interesting, but I don't think I would read it again or tell anyone else they have to read it. Maybe this just isn't the best Roth book to start out with. The man can write, that's for sure, I might have to see which of his is the best to read next.

Against the Lore

2009-12-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

We had our big employee shopping day at work last weekend and I grabbed a lot of good things. Most of them were Christmas gifts for my family, but I had to buy some things for me. I got Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett, This is Not a Book by Keri Smith (click for her awesome blog), and the next two volumes of Y:the Last Man.

After reading the first two Discworld books, The Color of Magic and the Light Fantastic, I knew I'd pick up the rest sooner or later. Equal Rites is about a dying wizard trying to pass on his powers to an eighth son of an eighth son, who turns out to be a woman. Since there has never been a woman wizard before, she has a pretty hard time.

I thought this book was very well done. It was funny, interesting and smart. Esk and Granny Weatherwax were great characters to read about. Esk is so confidant and fearless that it's very easy to root for her. Simon is another character I liked and I hope he and Esk pop up in another one of Pratchett's books. Esk's wizard staff acts a great deal like Twoflower's luggage from the first two books, causing trouble for anyone who's got it out for its owner.

"She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you."

It's the whole world

2009-12-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

How could you not pick this book up?

I bought this book without realizing that I'd actually already read a short story by Miranda July. I knew nothing about her but grabbed the book and read the first few pages in the bookstore. The first short story "The Shared Patio" is at once interesting and relatable.

I felt that this collection of short stories had a really great flow. There weren't any that I wished hadn't been included. When I started "Something That Needs Nothing" I had the feeling that I had heard the story before and realized I had read it in the New Yorker while sitting in my college library. I loved the story then and still do.

While I would recommend this book to anyone, I do think that it would appeal more to women than men. I think it is just easy to relate to July's voice as a woman.

"I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself, now that I had finished my book and gone to meet the man who said I had promise a year ago but wasn't home today." - from "Making Love in 2003"

"Some people need a red carpet rolled out for them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees." - from "Ten True Things"

Also, I checked out Miranda July's website and it is pretty snazzy. Check it out! www.mirandajuly.com

Happy Hunger Games

2009-12-07T07:22:00.000-08:00

After reading and loving the Hunger Games, I quickly checked out Catching Fire from work and tore through it. We continue following Katniss during the aftermath of the Hunger Games and see the repercussions of her act against the Capital. Most of the book takes place in District 13, but we do get to see the next year's Hunger Games, although it is a great deal shorter than the last book. We do get more political activism in this book I think, at least from Katniss's part.

I could not put this book down. I cannot wait for the third one, which supposedly is coming out next summer. I am really not sure how Collins is going to end everything with just one more book though. Highly, highly suggest these books to anyone.

"I really can't think about kissing when I've got a rebellion to incite."

hello there December

2009-12-01T09:18:00.001-08:00

Ok guys, down to the last month of the year. I'm going to be spending the next three days trying to finish all the books I'm currently reading so I can devote the rest of the month to reading something new. Any suggestions on what the last few books I should read this year should be? Right now I'm leaning towards the third Wheel of Time book and Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Also, I am super excited because B&N's employee appreciation week starts this Friday. Normally we get 30% off of books but this week it is upped to 40%. I am pretty pumped. I am trying to buy mostly holiday gifts, but I know I'm going to end up with a lot just for myself. Anything you think I must buy?

Radiant as the sun

2009-11-30T06:51:00.000-08:00

I have loved distopian fiction ever since my dad stuck 1984 in my hands when I was twelve. I've heard things about the Hunger Games for a long time, but for whatever reason did not feel compelled to pick it up. However, after hearing for numerous people how great the sequel, Catching Fire, was, I check this one out from B&N.

The Hunger Games takes place in a futuristic country that was once America, where the land is divided into districts. These districts work for the Capital and are pretty destitute. Katniss is our main character and narrator, a young girl who breaks the law hunting to feed herself and her mother and sister. Every year two children (between the ages of 12-18) are chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, where they fight all of the other kids to the death. The winner is the only one to live and gets extra food for their district. Katniss takes her sister's place in the hunger games along with a boy named Peeta from district 12.

We follow Katniss from her district to the Capital where she is pampered and prepped before the games. The tributes are paraded in front of everyone in order to secure support from people donating. The tributes also have to sit through interviews and events that make the whole situation comparable to our current reality tv show "stars."

This book is amazing. I have been talking it up at work and all but shoved it into my brother's hands. I think that this book and The Book Thief are two of the best young adult fiction books I have read in a very, very long time. The book is smart, funny at times and heartbreaking at others. It seems like I'm one of the last people to jump on this book, but if you haven't read it then I would highly suggest it. This is a chilling look at what we currently think of entertainment and how easily that could progress, or regress, to a entertainment system that resembles Rome's hay-day.

Two quotes:

"I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be."

"You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope."

New Book Monday

2009-11-16T09:08:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to recap my recent book finds.

I picked up Y: The Last Man the other day and blogged about it here. While I was there I picked up No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. I'm digging short stories and this book cover demands to be picked up. Peter & Max by Bill Willingham I got as an advanced copy from work. Willingham is the guy behind Fables, the great graphic novel series. I usually never get advanced copies and was super excited to get one that I was planning on buying anyway.

Today I went and picked up number 2 of Y: The Last Man since I had a coupon at Borders. While I was there I picked up two more books, The Book of Lost Things for myself and a secret Christmas gift. Then my brother and I went over to Barnes and Nobles where I picked up American Nerd and Bright Star. I'm really excited to read all of them.

I'm dealing with a bit of family drama right now so I've been spending a lot of time reading to escape. Hopefully that will equate to lots of blogging to come! Right now I'm about halfway through of The Great Hunt, the second Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan and I've gotten back into The Complete Sherlock Holmes part I.

the key to Paradise

2009-11-15T21:41:00.000-08:00

Alamut, by Vladimir Bartol, is a book that I doubt I would have read had someone not put it in my hands. But I'm pretty glad someone did. This is a work of fiction, although it is bases on actual events and people.

Alamut is about a man named Hasan, who runs a fortress in Iran named Alamut. He is claimed to be a prophet who has been giving a key to Paradise by Allah. He trains young men as fedayeen to become religious martyrs to support his vendetta against the sultan.

I really enjoyed how the book begins by switching between a young man and young woman who both come to Alamut around the same time. The boy has a very strict and structured time, while the girl pretty much romps around in gardens. Both youngsters face very serious harsh realities soon though.

Hasan is a man trying to deal with some very deep spiritual issues. He does some horrible things to those in his care and when no god strikes him down he sees this as proof that either there is no god or that god does not care about what happens here on Earth. Even thought Hasan seems to be the bad guy in the story, one can't help but relate to his crisis of faith.

This book is very different from most of the books I've been reading lately. I haven't read a lot about the middle east and it was very enticing. The characters and descriptions were compelling. I would suggest this book to anyone, especially those interested in books that tackle spirituality.

"It's true, some wishes have miraculous power. They function as though they had substance, as though they were a hammer made of actual steel." - 371

Graphic Novel Goodness

2009-11-13T11:08:00.000-08:00

I've been checking out the graphic novel section of the bookstores more and more lately. I picked this one up the other day after reading some good reviews on amazon.

What would happen if all the males in the world died, all in an instant? All except for Yorrick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. That is the basic premise of this series.

Yorrick's mother is a congresswomen and his girlfriend is currently in Australia. Though he desperately wants to go find his gf, what's left of the American government wants to keep him on US soil. Yorrick and a guard woman, known only as 355, hit the trail to find a certain scientist that has been doing work with cloning to try and figure out what happened and why Yorrick is the only man left.

Typically when I think of comic books I think of superheroes, but the only thing out of the ordinary here is the fact that all the men are dead.

I really, really enjoyed this graphic novel. I can't wait to pick up the second one today. Highly recommend.

All women are Aes Sedai

2009-11-08T08:02:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure many of you are aware, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series just released a new book, the first after Jordan's death. One of my brothers is very into this series and would not stop talking about how great it was and how I should read them. I am not a huge fantasy reader. I like fantasy stories though; I grew up listening to my dad read The Lord of the Rings books to me before falling asleep.

Ryan finally got me to read the first one of Jordan's, The Eye of the World. This is an adventure story, full of magic and beasts, and the battle between the Light and the Dark. Magic in this world is used by tapping into the One Power, something that only women are able to do. Men who do so go crazy and have to be destroyed. A group of three boys from the backwoods, along with two young women from their town are caught up in the fate of the world when an Aes Sedai woman and her Warder rescue them from Trollocs (nasty critters half-human/half-whatever animal seemd handy).

I liked this book, although I did find myself comparing the whole thing to the Lord of the Rings. Some times it seemed like Jordan picked what he liked from Tolkien and just tweaked it a little bit and threw it in his books. My brother did not feel the same way and said I was being unfair.

Aes Sedai is a group of women who can wield the One Power and they are the most interesting part of the story to me. I would be inclined to read the rest of the series just to learn more about them.

The story starts off a little slow, but to be fair Jordan is setting up an epic story here. The whole thing is going to be something like thirteen books long. At the end of the book I was interested in the characters and the various plots. Luckily, Ryan left book two waiting for me.

Doctor Zhivago

2009-11-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm a big lover of Russian Literature. Right now I'm trying to work my way through a bunch of Russian books that I've been collection over the years. Doctor Zhivago is one of those books that has been sitting on my shelf for awhile and I keep meaning to read.

I really enjoyed the writing style. I wrote down a lot of favorite quotes and was generally impressed with Pasternak's ability to turn what seems a filler paragraph into something very special with just a few words. The love between Yurii and Laura was beautifully written.

However I did have some problems with this book. I feel like a history lesson on the Russian Revolution would have made things a lot clearer. Or perhaps if I had an edition with better footnotes. My other big problem was that there were just too many coincidences. There are just so many ways that Laura and Yurii's lives dovetail that instead of coming across as "fate" it just seems like I'm being bashed over the head with the whole idea that the two of them were meant to be together. And maybe this is a generational or cultural thing, I'm not sure.

I'm also not sure if this novel stood up to all the hype I've heard about it. I have never seen the movie and I think that I always just thought this was a sad love story. I didn't really know that it had so much to do with the aftermath of the revolution. My expectations were just a little off.

That aside, I was glad to read a Russian novel that is post-revolution. Most of what I have read is set prior to the revolution and I want to branch out more. Despite my problems, I did enjoy this book, but I don't think it's in the same class as Anna Karenina.

"Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom, dropped out of the sky, freedom beyond our expectations, freedom by accident, through a misunderstanding." 146

"How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing that even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes." 291

Fart Party

2009-10-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

After picking up I Saw You... I had to check out Julia Wertz's website and soon bought both volumes of the Fart Party. This collection of comics is all about Julia's life as a twenty-something gal in San Fransisco. She drinks, she swears, she serves tables and has adventures with her boyfriend Oliver.

I was really able to connect with the book since I feel like I'm in a similar point in my life. I too love reading (and drinking) in the bathtub and swearing at my mom in an endearing way.

Here's a sample page from her book:

Wertz's website is here. What I like about this book is that you can open it to about any page and just read a few and enjoy them or you can read start to finish. The art isn't the same as Fables, but it works with the whole feel of the book. Some of the humor is a little crude but at least it's honest. I highly suggest at least checking out her site where she posts a lot of her comics.

Fables Part Two

2009-10-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

I jumped right into Fables Animal Farm. Basically all of the fable creatures that can't pass for humans in New York City live at a farm upstate to keep out of sight from the normal people. Snow White goes up there to double check on things. Goldilocks and the little pigs happen to be planning a revolution and things take an ugly turn. Snow White has to fight to put down the rebellion and get out of the farm with her life.

This one was better than the first one in my opinion. The story, character development and art is just wonderful. Although the thought of Goldilocks and Baby Bear sharing a bed makes me cringe a little. I can't wait to get my hands on part three.

Fables

2009-10-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

Fables is more of what I think of an actual comic book than the previous two entries. I borrowed these from a friend and was very excited to read them because I love to read retellings of classic tales.

In Legends in Exile we find that all of the characters from classic tales are alive and have come to live in our world because the "adversary" has driven them out of their lands. Rose Red has been murdered and the Big Bad Wolf and Snow White are on the case. Beauty and the Beast, the three little pigs, King Cole and Prince Charming all make appearances along with a slew of other characters.

The murder mystery was well done - I did not see the end coming. I really liked this comic and rushed to read the second one. Reading this has made me want to check out what other comic I've been missing. Anyone have any suggestions?

Blankets

2009-10-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

Blankets by Craig Thompson is a book I picked up after seeing it mentioned on Julia Wertz's blog. This is a pretty hefty book, 582 pages. It covers Craig's childhood and his high school romance with Raina. It's a serious book covering some very heavy issues of divorce, abuse, religion and rebellion.

The art is beautiful and the story flows easily. It's painful to read at some points, but the whole thing just feels so truthful that it's hard to put down. I would highly recommend this book. Who can't connect with that first real love that you think is going to last forever? And as someone who went to a Jesus Camp, I can really relate to his experiences there.

I've got some more graphic novel reviews for this week but I quickly want to say that I read Hunger Games yesterday and was blown away! I'll try to put up more thoughts on that soon.

you were in the blue sweater...

2009-10-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a lot of graphic novels and comicy things so this week I am going to do a post every day on them. I really enjoy both reading and drawing so this type of book really works for me.

I Saw You... is a collection of short comics inspired by those missed connection posts on craigslist.com. At my old desk job I used to check the missed connections all the time. Some of them can be really funny. I Saw You... takes different entries from craigslist and the authors put their spin on them. Some of them are funny, some are sad and some are just a little weird.

This was a fun read because it gives you a little taste of a lot of different comic styles out there right now. And all of their websites are listed in the back pages. The book was put together by Julia Wertz who does Fart Party, which is hilarious.

I left this book sitting around the house and my mom read some of it and thought it was good. She was kind of shocked I had a book named the Fart Party though. Parents just don't understand.

Also, funny story, I once wrote a craigslist missed connection after some cute guy held the door open for me at a bookstore. To my shock, I actually got a response from the actual guy and we had coffee together. It was nice and all, but that's about it. I was just amazed people actually answered those things.

trip to the bookstore

2009-10-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to update this blog more on a more regular basis, even if I don't have a book review every day. Anyway, I took my little brother to the bookstore yesterday and we hung out for awhile drinking some hot beverages and reading some books. I drew a picture of it. So look at it.

I took this with my iphone so the quality is kind of crummy, but frankly so is the art so I think it works out. Anyhow, I bought a copy of Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I'm really excited to read this one, but I've got to work my way through a couple more first. Dr. Zhivago is getting pretty interesting right now.

I also thought I'd comment on the new Barnes and Noble Nook. I think that the lending capabilities are a good thing, however you can only lend a book once which is a little silly. I'm sticking with my guns on the whole e-reader issue: I don't like them. Yes, it's wonderful if more people read stories this way, but in my mind it's not the same thing. I've got no desire for one. If you feel like reading my blog on the Kindle 2.0, which goes in to more detail on my e-reader thoughts, click here.

meh

2009-10-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

This book caught my eye while I was working at B&N the other day. One of the great things about working and B&N is that you can check out hardcover books for free. This is so we can talk about the books to customers or something crazy like that. So I checked this one out.

I'm a big fan of Klosterman, but this book fell a little short. The chapters are surrounded by interview excerpts, but these interviews aren't labeled and I didn't know who any of these interviews were actually with. Give me a footnote or something. Jeesh.

While I enjoyed his chapters on time travel and ABBA, this book just wasn't what I hoped for. I even stuck it out during the chapter on football and chuckled a few times, but still. Meh.

Side note: I sometimes am really surprised when I read about things that are happening right now. I'm so used to reading literature from forever ago that's it's weird to see the word Twitter in an actual book.

all that were left of mercy

2009-10-18T20:12:00.000-07:00

I started this book in June and finished it this afternoon. This is one of those books that would catch my eye continually at work and when a friend recommended it to me I got my hands on a copy from another friend, who seems to have every book I want to read but haven't bought yet.

I'm not going to lie to you, this book was difficult at times. Bolano often goes for pages without a line break and chapters are hundreds of pages long. Character names tripped me up a lot. And I'm still not sure if I got the book. But the writing is beautiful. We get pieces of personal histories from almost every character we meet and all of them are written in a way that you care about what the man with glasses who saves Hans from drowning thought about human nature. No character seems to be a throw-away.

This book is broken up into five parts: The Part About the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi. The parts are all connected with the town of Saint Theresa in Mexico, where hundreds of women are being murdered.

I really enjoyed the Part about the Critics because I felt that I could really connect to the character of Liz Norton. She is described best as not being "what one would ordinarily call a woman of great drive, which is to say that she didn't draw up long-term or medium-term plans and throw herself wholeheartedly into their execution. She had none of the attributes of the ambitious" (page 8). She and three other scholars all are experts on Benno von Archimboldi, a German novelist.

The Part About Amalfitano wasn't quite as good as the first part. I think I tried too hard to connect what was going on between the different parts and was a little annoyed that the connections seemed so tenuous. This section was still wonderfully written though.

The Part About Fate focuses on a reporter, last name Fate, who comes to Saint Theresa to cover a boxing match but ends up trying to write a piece on the murders. He also becomes tangled in the fate of Amalfitano's daughter.

The Part About the Crimes really dragged me down. This is also the longest section of the book and it chronicles the murders that have occur ed in and around Saint Theresa. We get a history on most of the girls and the police that are trying to solve the crimes. The end of this section really picked up for me, but I'm still unsure if I got the point of most of this section.

The Part About Archimboldi was my favorite. Here we learn about the mysterious author Benno von Archimboldi and are taken to Poland, Germany and Russia during World War II. I wish that this had been the longest section. I had no idea how everything was going to come together, and really there are a lot of things left open, but the last hundred pages just does it's job.

It took me a long time to read this book. Mostly because during parts three and four I would set it down and wasn't excited about reading it. Now that I finished I wish I had read the whole thing in a shorter time span, that way I would be able to view this as a whole work more. I read part five in something like two days and as I reached the end I found myself reading slower and slower. I didn't want it to end.

All of the quotes that I loved tended to be huge paragraphs and chunks of text that would be too much to take out and place here.

I would be really interested to read another book from Roberto Bolano, especially since this book wasn't technically finished when he died.

A Storm is Coming

2009-10-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

I find myself loving Neil Gaiman more and more.

This book is about a man named Shadow who is just getting released from prison. On his way home he is seated next to a man called Mr. Wednesday who changed Shadow's world in incredible ways. Shadow ends up working for Wednesday as they prepare for a storm of clashing gods.

There are just so many gods in this book that have their own distinct personalities and powers. One thing I really like about this book is that Gaiman doesn't come out and say "well this is this god and he does this and this one is this guy and he does this." Sometimes we get no explanation about a character's motives or background but they are so lovingly described that I have no doubt I could research them and discover that Gaiman captured their essence.

This book is just enjoyable to read. Shadow spends a lot of time in the Midwest, which I always like. The writing is beautiful and the plot is complex. While reading this book I also had a lot of people come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed it. One of my coworkers at Barnes even went and grabbed a used copy of Gaiman's Fragile Things for me.

I highly suggest checking out Gaiman's personal blog.

42

2009-10-07T11:51:00.000-07:00

When I was in college, some boy gave this book to me in exchange for my extra copy of Fight Club. I put it on a shelf and never thought about it until now. But lately I've been reading and scoping out a lot of science fiction so it was only a matter of time before this one came along. Neil Gaiman does the introduction to this volume of all six hitchhiker's stories.

These books are bizarre. Sometimes I can figure out if the writing is funny because it is lazy or because it is genius. People can fly, mice are not all they appear to be, there is a restaurant where you can watch the end of the universe, all sorts of crazy things are going on here. The ending of the whole thing didn't quite do it for me, but other than that I had a good time reading these stories.

Arthur Dent is your average British citizen who goes on adventures in space with his friend Ford Prefect after Vogons destroy the Earth to but in a new galatic freeway. They join up with Trillian, a woman from Earth, Zaphod, a guy with two heads who is president of the galaxy and gets into all kinds of trouble, and Marvin, a very depressed robot. Zaphod reminds me a lot of Zap Branigan from Futurama, which I'm sure is supposed to be the other way around.

Ford works for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a travel book for tourists on the cheap. Throughout the series we get experts from the Guide on different peoples and planets. Ford and Arthur travel through time, go a little crazy, and attended the longest-lasting party which happens to fly around in the sky.

While I find these stories really amusing, I don't know that I'm as crazy about them as most people who talk about them are, especially that guy from college. I love humor, but I wanted more depth. Still worth a read.

The Wild Glow of a Scientist

2009-09-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

How We Are Hungry is the first work of Dave Eggers I have read. This book is a collection of short stories. It seems to me that I've been reading a whole bunch of short stories lately.

Egger's short stories range in length, some of them clocking in at less than two pages long. They aren't connected like A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing; each story can be read and enjoyed on their own. They vary in voice, some from a man's point of view and some from a woman's and they are all very distinct.

"Up the Mountain Coming down Slowly" was one of my favorites. It chronicles Rita as she climbs Mount Kilimanjaro. Eggers did a great job of describing the journey up the mountain and capturing the sad determination of Rita.

My other favorite was "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" which a girl named Pilar visits her friend Hand down in Costa Rica. The two have a romantic encounter and surf. This story has the thoughts of the horses, clouds and shadows as well, which is a little of what I expected from Eggers.

"HORSES: It's never like we planned.
HORSES SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I wish I could do more.
HORSES: We want violence, so we can kick and tear the world into thirds."

Some of these stories I wish had been longer, so I'm looking forward to reading one of Egger's novels. I own A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, so maybe that will move up on my to-read pile.

In other breaking news, I'm still in the process of reading 2666, but yesterday I finished part 4 so I only have one more section! This book is really interesting, but at the same time I feel like I can't read it for hours like I can with other books.

I've also kind of stalled out of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I was really disappointed with the first story in it. Holmes catches the bad guy, but we never find out why he killed someone or even how Holmes figured everything out. Hopefully the rest are better.

Some people I know are rereading Hunger by Knut Hamson so I've started working on that as well. I read this book for a course in college and had a very interesting time with it. I would get so frustrated with the protagonist that I wanted to throw the book at the wall, and yet the book is so fascinating to me.

The tiger does not eat far away

2009-09-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

I picked this up from my local library the other day. I've read two of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's books before, Love in the Time of Cholera and Love and Other Demons, and adored them both.

This short work is the recollections of a ninety year old man who wants to celebrate his birthday by having a night with a young virgin. We follow him for a year as he falls in love with this girl who he only sees sleeping night after night.

I liked this book, sort of. I enjoy the way that Marquez tells a story, but I feel like this could have been better. I got confused at some points as to who the old man was talking about and I don't feel that he really talked about the rest of his life satisfactorily. The secondary characters were more interesting to me than the narrator, especially Rosa Cabarcas. I just couldn't get into this story the way I could with his other works. I wouldn't classify this one as a "must read" but I would still give the rest of Marquez's books a read.

I've got a stack of books on my desk I need to blog about. Unemployment means I have lots of time to read. I've also been having a lot of trouble sleeping and have been staying up very late reading. I finished the rest of the Charlaine Harris vampire books, Dave Eggers How We Are Hungry, and am almost done with Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Also almost done with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Still slogging my way through 2666, though I'm stuck in a slow part right now.

Lately it seems that everyone is lending me books to read. My dad lent me Sharon Kay Penmans When Christ and His Saints Slept, my friend Liz gave me the first three books in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series and my brother Ryan keeps harping at me to read Robert Jordan's the Eye of the World. I'm not sure which of these I'm going to start first, but I want to finish a couple of the one's I'm currently reading before I start anything else.

Also one more note, as I said earlier I got this book from the library. I went and got my first library card in years the other day. I don't think I've had one since I left for college since during college we just used our student ids. The library out here is pretty small, smaller than the one I grew up with, but it is well laid out and seems to have a good selection. I might go hang out there before work today.

The charm of those provincial ladies

2009-09-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

I make no secret that I am a big fan of Russian lit. I have a hard time not buying books by Russian authors whenever I see them and so I have a big stack of Russian books yet to be read.

I read the Queen of Spades and Other Stories for one of my Russian Lit classes in college and really enjoyed Pushkin. Puskin is best known for Euguine Onegin and for being the father of Russian literature.

This novella is a short collection of tales from the travels of Belkin. These short tales rang in scope from love story, revenge and horror. "The Snowstorm" and "Ladymaid" may be my favorites. It's a hard call though. Pushkin manages to tell stories that seem both familiar and new.

This is a very short little book, part of the art of the novella series published by Melville House Publishing. I highly recommend this book.

"Young men, who consider bravery the height of human accomplishment, and an excuse for every shortcoming, rarely forgive a lack of courage." page 25

"Maria Gabrielovna had been raised on French novels; it should therefore go without saying that she was in love." page 39

Shopping Trip

2009-09-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

I had the need to go to the bookstore the other day and thought I'd share what I got.

First up is McSweeny's Issue 13 which is pretty cheap if you buy it from the actually website: Here or if you get a discount because you work at a bookstore. I've been reading a lot of graphic novels and reading a bunch of comics online lately, so I'm excited to read this one.

Second is American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I've heard a lot of good things about this one. I read Coraline (my thoughts on that here) but that's it from him. I really enjoyed Coraline so I'm looking forward to reading this one. Actually finishing this one, since I am already on chapter three. Gaiman's website is worth checking out if you haven't yet: neilgaman.com.

And, finally, Tales of Belkin by Alexander Pushkin. I've recently read an article about this series of book, the Art of the Novella Series. I unfortunately can't seem to find the article anymore which is frustrating me, although the publisher's website has several links to related articles. Aside from my infinite love for Russian Lit, I picked this book up because the design is really simple and appealing. Melville House Publishing has a variety of different stories in the Art of the Novella series, which can be found here. These just look so good and are most are from authors that have yet to disappoint me. I'm planing on reading this one on Saturday.

Not photographed was the amazing pumpkin spice latte I got. Book and coffee make me one happy girl.

I prefer empty cages

2009-09-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

I often pick up books from Anaïs Nin even though this is the first thing by her I've ever read. Reading A Spy in the House of Love was a little strange. The edition I have is only 117 pages and yet it took me forever to read it. The weird part is that I wasn't bored with this book, I found most of it to be really interesting and relateable; I just set it aside and forgot about it.

The book focuses on Sabina, an actress who is about as restless as they come. She's married and claims to love her husband Alan very much, but she can't seem to help having affairs where ever she goes. She uses her career as an actress to conduct her affairs, by telling her husband she has an performance out of town, when in reality, we hear very little about her actually acting. She seems a much more successful actress in her own life than on the stage.

Sabina has extreme anxiety due to the fact that she's making up stories and pretending to be different people all of the time. She never wants to stay in one place for very long and feels confined by everyday life. The book jumps around a lot from one affair to another, from one Sabina to another.

It's always intriguing to me to read about the minds of cheaters and liars, to see how the morally dubious justify their actions. What's interesting about Sabina is that she seems on one hand to be very concerned about her behavior and on the other hand tells herself there is no other way she could live. She mentions that her father appeared to have many extra-marital relationships but doesn't seem to spend time connecting that to her current behavior.

Anaïs Nin is pretty famous for writing erotica for a dollar a page for a friend of Henry Miller. She's also well known for her Diary, which is roughly nine-thousand volumes. Just kidding, it's only over 150.

Two quotes:

"His airplanes were not different from her relationships, but which she sought other lands, strange faces, forgetfulness, the unfamiliar, the fantasy and the fairytale." - page 71.

"In this world they had criminals too. Gangsters in the world of art, who produced corrosive works born of hatred, who killed and poisoned with their art. You can kill with a painting or a book too." - page 110.

Don't be such a square

2009-08-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

This is one I read awhile back but hadn't gotten around to blogging about until now. I picked this up and really enjoyed it. I know that they made a movie of it recently, but I don't really have an interest in seeing it.

The basic plot is that on graduation day, Dennis Hooverman, during his high school graduation, tells the whole school that he's been in love with Beth Cooper. He also makes some accusations about some of the other members of the student body, including outing his best friend Rich. Even though Dennis is your typical "nerd" and Beth, of course, is a cheerleader, and the two of them have never hung out, they spend the rest of the night bopping around suburban Illinois together. Also, they're trying to avoid Beth's drugged-up army ex. Along the way Dennis realized that the Beth Cooper he's built up in his head isn't really real, and gets to know the actual girl in front of him.

Parts of this book were a little much for me, going just over the top. The drugged up ex and his army buddies and the super slutty friend of Beth's, Treecee, got on my nerves sometimes. Dennis and Rich get the crap kicked them so much yet don't go to the hospital. A car drives into and back out of a wall at a party.

One thing I really enjoyed was that I grew up where this book is set. Some of my cousins went to Harper Community College (Beth's probable choice) and I know my way around the streets they were careening down. I had a very, very clear picture of where this book took place.

Another thing I enjoyed was that Doyle starts off each chapter with some quote from popular culture revolving around teen drama. I didn't recognize all of them, but it made me smile to see Lloyd Dobler and Lorraine Baines quoted.

Some of the background characters were interesting. The drug dealer who deals exclusively in prescription drugs (Claritin-D, Adderall) was pretty much on the money for someone you'd actually meet in a suburban high school. Cammy, on of Beth's homegirls, was snarky and bitchy, so you know I loved her. My favorite though was the d.j. at the big party they all go to, Zooey Bananafish. Actually there was not too much to her character, but that name is such a shout-out to Salinger that I can't help but like her.

I enjoyed this book. The writing is easy and youthful, like a high-schooler is telling you the story. The ending isn't what you'd expect from a typical high school graduation piece, and it seems like Doyle plans on continuing the story.

Quotes:

"There's another Beth Cooper out there," she told him. "One just for you. The world is full of Beth Coopers." page 21

"She wore her party face, not unlike her real face, but with the hue and contrast dialed up...She still smelled like Beth Cooper, only more so." page 55

If love is worth the misery

2009-08-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine lent me this book and I read it in little more than a day. Dead Until Dark is another vampire/human love story with a murder mystery. Sookie Stackhouse is our main human who can read people's minds, except for the handsome vampire Bill.

Reading this story I was amazed at the similarities to Twilight. I'm actually surprised Harris hasn't sued Meyer over the whole thing. I mean, we have characters who reads minds, Sookie and Edward, except they can't read the minds of the one they fall in love with, Bill and Bella. The vampires in Dead Until Dark "glamour" people into doing what they want while in Twilight they "dazzle" people. There is even another guy in love with the main gal who changes into some kind of dog, Sam and Jacob. Also, someone is trying to kill the girl. I'm pretty sure people have sued for less.

There are some more similarities, but the one big difference is that in this book there's a lot of sex.

Twilight aside, I really enjoyed this book. I've been working my way through 2666 and this was a nice lighter read. I thought that the mystery murderer element was well done; I wasn't able to tell who was going to be the bad guy ahead of time. I thought the lovey-dovey stuff was a little rushed, but apparently vampires don't have time to mess around when declaring their love.

I'm probably going to pick up the next one and may have to check out that HBO show, True Blood, which is based on this series.

IV

2009-07-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

The first Klosterman book I read was Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, purely because Seth Cohen was reading it on the O.C.

IV starts off with mostly interview pieces of rock starts and other famous people. Some of it is a little dated, but all of it is interesting. The middle section is more social commentary and the end is a fiction piece. I enjoyed the middle section the most. The last part was really interesting though; he has since written a fiction book called Downtown Owl: A Novel. It'd be worth checking out at least.

I like Klosterman because I can related to the things he's writ ting about. Music, drinking, relationships, the perils of buying an outfit from the Gap, and more music. He writes one piece about going into a store and buying a complete outfit that a mannequin is wearing and how that changes the perception people have of him.

He talks about the difference between a nemesis and and archenemy and why it's important to have both. He writes about eating nothing but McDonalds' chicken mcnuggets for something like a week.

A quote from the first section:

"The dumbest guy in Radiohead is still smarter (by himself) than all three members of the Beastie Boys and two-fifths of the Strokes.”

And my favorite quote from the book:

"In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act like that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings and everybody cried for two weeks. And then Enron went bankrupt, and then the U.S. became a rogue state, and then The Simple Life premiered, and then gasoline became unaffordable, and then our Olympic basketball team lost to Puerto Rico, and then we reelected the same unqualified president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and the release of a horrible movie titled Crash.

Things, as they say, have been better."

I love this kind of thing

2009-07-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

For this meme, you list a favorite book that starts with each letter of the alphabet. If you don't have a book for a letter (such as Z or X) than you can substitute a favorite book that simply has that letter in the title (ex. The Lost City of Z or Hot Six by Janet Evanovich). However, you can only do this a maximum of 3 times. (Z, X, and Q. But not Z, X, Q, and V.) Books can be of any genre from fiction to non-fiction to poetry to textbooks.

A: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

B: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

C: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

D: Dune by Frank Herbert

E: Extremely Loud and Increidibly Close by Jonathan Saffran Foer

F: Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott

G: The Giver by Lewis Lowry

H: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

I: Island of theBlue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

J: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

K: Katherine by Anya Seton

L: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

M: Moon is Down by Stienbeck

N: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

O: Oh! Pioneers! by Willa Cather

P: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Q: Queen of Spades and other Stories by Alexander Pushkin

R: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

S: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

T: Tulips and Chimneys by e e cummings

U: Utopia by Thomas More

V: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

W: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

X: The Sylnx by Tatyna Tolstaya

Y: Yertle the Turtle and other stories by Dr. Suess

Z: Zipporah: Wife of Moses a novel by Marek Halter

What is girl reading now?

2009-06-10T07:38:00.001-07:00

I was over looking at my goodreads.com page and realized that I'm currently reading eight books. Jeesh even I think that is too many to be reading at once.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker:
I think this book is really, really interesting. However it is also really long and a little dense. I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but my dad talks about this Pinker guy all the time. And I find linguistics pretty interesting. That being said I have been "reading" this book since last year. I did actually just read one of the chapters about a month ago. I'm determined to finish it. Some day.

Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
This is another book I started last year and another that my dad gave to me. It's a knights of the round table story that I cannot enjoy for the life of me. Some passages are pretty clever but I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to finish this, even though I only have like two chapters left. For some reason I own two copies of this book.

The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 byEric Hobsbawm
I got on a little history kick lately and am actually really enjoying this book. I haven't made it too far because I keep leaving it in weird places all over my apartment. I found it the other day in my cupboard with the plates.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 ed. Dave Eggers
I keep forgetting I'm reading this. I loved the list of hobo names.

McSweeny's Issue 18
This is my at work book for my lunch breaks since I finished IV by Closterman. I've just made it through the first piece which I liked so I hope the rest is as good.

A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin
Oooooh I like this book. I've been picking up a lot of stuff by Nin lately, even though this will be the first I've ever read. Hot stuff.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño
This was recommended to me by a couple of different people. This book is freaking huge. I'm only about 100 pages in, but I really, really am enjoying it so far. Of all the books I'm reading right now, this is the one I'm most excited to finish.

Katherine by Anya Seton
This is my book club book for the month. So far I think it's pretty good. A love story in old England with the knights and kings and horses and plagues and whatnot. Always a good time (except in Parzival). It has been awhile since I've picked up some historical fiction and this seems like a step up from Phillipa Gregory.

So I'm not sure that I'm going to finish all of these anytime soon. The last three for sure will be done soon - or at least this summer in the case of 2666.

Also, I'm looking around for a new bookshelf. Any ideas?

suicide...by tiny, tiny increments

2009-06-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

High Fidelity has been sitting on my shelves for not too long. I picked it up and read it one Sunday.

I loved the movie; it's one of those I could watch over and over again. John Cusack helps a lot. But I really love talking about or hearing about people's connection with music. I also love making lists, so this book has a lot going for it.

Rob has just been dumped by Laura and the book chronicles his time trying to deal with this. He starts by listing the top five breakups he's ever had, and eventually searches each of these women out to try and find some answers. Laura is not on this list. Rob also runs a small record store which causes him to have some issues about his success in life. Music is a big part of Rob's life. Big part.

I love the idea of the top 5 lists that Rob and his two coworkers make all the time. They start out as lists dealing with music, but Rob has a hard time not thinking in top 5 lists. I especially love thinking about his top 5 breakup stories. Not all of them are what you would expect. They aren't all soul crushing, long-term relationship breakups. But they all had a huge impact on who he became as a person. I wonder what my top 5 would be.

In his angst about Laura leaving, Rob reorganizes his massive record collection. This is something I completely understand. I could spend days organizing my books - it's a kind of therapy.

This book is part love story and part coming of age tale, even though Rob is in his 30s. But I think that is getting more and more typical in our society - you don't quite know what you're doing with your life until later and later.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone. Pick it up.

Few quotes, sorry no page numbers

"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party." ~ how true do you think this is - I'm leaning towards agreeing completely.

"Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time."

"Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship." ~ This is another thing that is so true for a lot of people I know. All or nothing baby.

Books that Stick

2009-06-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

From Booking Through Thursday
“This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.”

These are in no specific order - just as they came to me.

1. The Master and Margarita by Mikahil Bulgakov
2. Anna Karinina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
4. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
5. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
6. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
7. Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
9. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
10. The Giving Tree by Shell Silverstien
11. 1984 by George Orwell
12. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
13. Extremely Loud and Incridebly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

I now want to reread all of these.

All is mere illusion and calamity

2009-05-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Candide is one of those books that I bought because, frankly, I felt that my bookshelves were lacking in some hard core classics. Books that I might never actually read but tell myself that someday I will. And the cover is cute. So, I was trolling the shelves the other day, looking for the next big thing and I picked this guy up. I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't what I got.

The premise of the book is that Candide is brought up living with a Baron and is taught by his tutor Dr. Pangloss that this world is the best possible of all worlds. Everything is how it should be and it's all hunky-dory. Cue every bad thing you could imagine happening to happen. Candide tried to make sense of all the tragedy around him while trying to reunite with his main squeeze, Cunegonde.

I adored this book. I thought it was funny and witty and smart. Every time someone (usually Candide) would say how great things were or how their fortune had turned for the better I was itching to know what catastrophe would happen next. I haven't felt the burning need to write a research paper on a book for a while; where was this book when I was in college? The secondary characters had lines I could see coming out of my own mouth. Martin especially. I could see him rolling his eyes as his sarcasm bounced off of the ever cheerful Candide.

Interesting note - this book has the first recorded use of the word Optimism. The word is only used twice in the whole book.

Voltaire does a great job commentating on the purpose of philosophy. The introduction of this edition goes into Voltaire's use of the word "but" to make this clear. The characters can go on and on about their viewpoints on human suffering, but they still have to deal with the real things going on in the world around him.

One thing that bothered me about the book (and this spoils the end) was the fate of Cunegonde. Everyone who we thinks has died come back through some miracle coincidence (save the Barron and his wife) and we catch up with Cunegonde twice during Candide's travels. The second time she is continually mentioned as being extremely ugly. They all keep harping on how horrible she looks now. Candide, ever the honorable man, does still marry her, but has to literally step back when he sees how ugly she is. I just wasn't really sure why this was necessary to the story. But I'm nitpicking here.

These are a few quotes that stuck out to me, although I underlined a whole lot of this book.

"He could prove to wonderful effect that there was no effect without cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, His Lordship the Baron's castle was the finest of castles and Her Ladyship the best of all possible baronesses. " page 4

"If this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?" page 16

"My dear young lady,' replied Candide, 'when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do." page 22

"Private griefs are crueler even than public miseries." page 56

"The man of taste explained very clearly how a play can be of some interest but of almost no merit. He showed in few words how it was not enough to contrive one or two of those situations that are to be found in any novel and which always captivate the audience; that one needs to be original without being far-fetched, frequently sublime but always natural; to know the human heart but also how to give it a voice; to be a poet without one's characters seeming to speak like poets; and to have perfect command of the language, using it with purity and harmony, and without ever sacrificing sense to rhyme." page 64

"the honest ones admitted that the book dropped from their hands every time, but said one had to have it in one's library, as a monument of antiquity, like those rusty coins which cannot be put into circulation." page 76 in regards to Homer - who I also have and I am pretty sure I've never really read the whole thing

"Fools admire everything in an esteemed author. I read for myself alone; I only like what I have a use for." page 77

soon soon soon

2009-05-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

Books that I have finished reading and am going to try to blog about sometime soon I promise!

High Fidelity
Driving with Dead People
Candide
The Vagina Monolouges
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

I'm have a super busy work week and have to work this weekend but I haven't forgotten about these books (at least not yet)!

Poetry in the Morning

2009-05-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

I've taken to reading aloud a poem, usually just one, before I leave my house in the morning to start my day. I've got a lot of poetry laying around the house and it usually just ups my mood. I read this one today and I fell in love with it. It's from April's Poetry magazine.

The Second Trying

If I could only get hold of the whole of you,
How could I ever get hold of the whole of you,
Even more than the most beloved idols,
More than mountains quarried whole,
More than mines
Of burning coal,
Let's say mines of extinguished coal
And the breath of day like a fiery furnace.

If one could get hold of you for all the years,
How could one get hold of you from all the years,
How could on lengthen a single arm,
Like a single branch of an African river,
As one sees in a dream the Bay of Storms,
As one sees in a ship that went down,
The way one imagines a cushion of clouds,
Lily-clouds as the body's cushion,
But though you will it, they will not convey you,
Do not believe that they will convey you.

If one could get hold of all-of-the-whole-of-you,
If one could get hold of you like metal,
Say like pillars of copper,
Say like a pillar of purple copper
(That pillar I remmebered last summer) -
And the bottom of the ocean I have never seen,
And the bottom of the ocean that I can see
With its thousand heavy thickets of air,
A thousand and one laden breaths.

If one could only get hold of the-whole-of-you-now,
How could you ever be for me what I myself am?

by Dahlia Ravikovitch
Translated for the Hebrew by Chana Bock and Chana Kronfeld.

Words are things

2009-05-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

This novel was all but shoved upon me by my father. Now I can't say that I'm a big Byron; I've never delved too much into him. And I have never heard of Ada Lovelace, Byron's daughter. This book weaved together three different stories: A novel that Lord Byron could have written, Ada's notes on the novel, and the email correspondence of the woman who is researching the work.

The story that Bryon tells is very interesting. A young man, Ali, is brought to England with his father, Lord Sane. He is treated pretty horribly and has several romantic run ins. The whole story ends up mirroring Lord Byron and his relationship with Ada Lovelace.

Ada's notes revel her strain with her absent father and the pain she she has to deal with from her cervical cancer.

The emails are also between a young woman and her estranged father. She emails him because he was a Lord Byron scholar. She also emails with her girlfriend back in the states.

The book is a little long, I had a hard time sticking with it at the end. I got a little confused in some of the email sections because their names aren't used, just their emails. A little hard to keep track of.

I liked this book, but not as much as I thought I would. Parts of it really held my attention and parts of it kind of bored me. The whole thing did make me more interested in Lord Byron's actual work and about Ada's life. I had no idea that she was involved in the development of the analytical engine. Her mother was pretty crazy and kept her from anything creative so Ada poured her brains into science. I'm going to have to pick up a bio of hers sometime soon.

A few quotes:

"Unbearable did it soon become to them - who were a world to each other, and yet could not shake the world from them!" page 347

"The dead we love keep on dying for us again and again, and he is one of those I love." 273

"Sticks and stones, so the children cry, may break my bones, but names shall never hurt me. Ah no. He said it himself: words are things." 314

"Happy endings are all alike, disasters may be unique." 268

Take better notes

2009-04-30T14:06:00.000-07:00

Mr. Abernathy by Tony Delgrosso.

I bought this online after scooping out Delgrosso's twitter and tumblr page. He's a super funny guy and writes some really great short pieces. I ordered his book from this website: http://www.delgrosso.com/

This book is a mystery, involving a modern day young man in search of who his late father really was. Now I'm not much of a mystery reader, but the first chapter had me hooked.

The book brings together a few different story lines at once. I love reading pieces of the story from one time, then from another, building you up to a conclusion that anchors the separate stories together. Delgrosso does a very good job of capturing these different points of view without being distracting. The characters are interesting and authentic.

There are no real quotes that stuck out to me in this one. The story was fast paced and not bogged down by a lot of flowery sentences. However, there were some scenes that definitely caught me by the throat. I don't want to ruin anything though, because there are a few twists in the book.

This is a book that I am going to have to reread. I really enjoyed it and would highly suggest it to anyone. There is mystery, action, romance, and heartache. Check it out.

Is it a pony?

2009-04-28T17:23:00.000-07:00

I read this on my plane ride over to Italy instead of sleeping on the plane like I should have. This book is a collection of short essays about life for a young woman.

Right off the bat, the first essay really got me. "The Pony Problem" is about how Sloane always seems to get some type of pony figurine from her boyfriends and keeps them under her sink because she can't bring herself to get rid of them. She can't stop thinking what would happen if she died and her parents found her pony collection.

Oregon Trail, cookies shaped like bad bosses, and the pain of being a bridesmaid to a girl you hardly know make up some of the other essays. The book is a good read, nothing too heavy. A good vacation book.

"I figured a one-night stand happened when two people. one of whom was a woman, went to a man's apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the entire time, trying not to spill them." page 99.

New on the shelves

2009-04-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let you all know the books I bought this week that are now gracing my book shelves.

I bought one book while I was on vacation because the brothers would not let me go into any books stores. I only managed to sneak away once to one when we were sitting around some plaza waiting for my dad. I'm so glad I did though because I found a copy of the Master and Margarita as a graphic novel. There was no way I was leaving the store without it.

Back home I stopped at Half Price the other day and picked up a few things. I was looking for some history books on various revolutions and found The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsawm.

I also bought Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume I, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Equus by Peter Shaffer and The American Dream and Zoo Story by Edward Albee.

I did buy one book online before I left for vacation that I opened this week. This is one I am really excited about reading - I read the first chapter last night and loved it. Mr. Abernathy by Tony Delgrosso. He's someone I follow on twitter and tumblr. Anyway, his book isn't on amazon but you can check him out for yourself on his website: http://www.delgrosso.com/.

I'm way behind on my book reviews. I've just been so lazy this week after the stress of vacationing with one's family. Expect a lot of them this weekend though.

French Milk

2009-04-21T07:03:00.000-07:00

I picked up French Milk by Lucy Knisley along with I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley the day before I left for Italy. French Milk is described as a comic journal. It's the story of a girl who goes to Paris with her mother and lives there for a little over a month.

I've actually been meaning to pick this up for awhile. I stumbled across Lucy's blog one day and love her artwork. Her website is lucyknisley.com; check it out she's pretty awesome. She makes me giggle and want to kick myself into my own creative frenzy.

Anyway, back to her book. I liked it. I did feel like she didn't really deliver on the coming of age turmoil/deeper issues of facing adulthood, but she got me super excited about travelling and (sort of) excited about growing up. And really made me want to try fois gras. Her drawings were wonderful and the photos were beautiful. I read this in only a couple hours and then passed it on to my mom. She said she really enjoyed it too.

Perfect book if you are going to Europe and want a quick read to get you in the mood.

A blast from my blogging past or something

2009-04-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

So I was randomly checking out my older book blog - which was over on livejournals and thought I might post up an old entry every now and then, you know, for fun. I think I tend to be seriously snarky and a little less formal over there on livejournal, but that's starting to bleed into this blog too. You people can deal with it though, you're cool.

So here is one that pretty much sums up a lot about myself. Its about Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. There are some serious spoilers, but if you haven't heard how this books ends by now I'm guessing you are not going to read this anyway! I like this review - so I hope you do to.

BTW this is from December 10th of last year. And the link to my old livejournal is here in case you were wondering.

I was talking Harry Potter to one of the girls I work with at Barnes and we both agreed that this is our favorite book. I love so much about it, especially the flash backs to Voldemort’s past. I am kind of in love with J. K.’s writing.

The first chapter starts off with the regular British Prime Minister getting the low down on the mishaps of the wizarding world. This ends with perhaps the best exchange between a wizard and muggle throughout the whole series:

“But for heaven’s sake - you’re wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out – well – anything!”

….”The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.” (page 24).

Harry gets more time with Dumbledore in this book than in any other book (I’m pretty sure) which is a good thing considering the ending…dun dun dunnnnnnnn. Harry is also super obsessed with Malfoy which gets his face smashed in right away. And we learn OMG Snape finally gets the Defense Against the Dark Arts post! In the potions class we see Felix Felicis, or liquid luck. I could use some right about now! Although it is lucky that I got a snow day and thus have time to post. Anyway, Harry has a mysterious used potions book that helps him win the potion and teaches us that used books are super sweet.

We see the first memory about Voldemort’s origins, the Gaunts. Merope, a squib, or at least a witch who isn’t very good at magic, is Tom Riddle’s mother and is horribly treated. In fact, her father and brother treat her much like the Dursleys treat Harry. And (as we learn in book 7) Dumbledore also had a squib(ish) relative that was put down upon as well. So we have a connection between the three of them again. Throughout the series we see the comparison between Harry and Voldemort, but only after reading book seven are we (or at least am I) able to make big connections between the two of them and Dumbledore. Or at least the similarities are more pronounced to me. But I’ll get into that next time.

Back to Hogwarts, we get more of the kids actually growing up and girls noticing them! More specifically, Lavender trying to get Ron’s attention. And let’s face it, if you had to live in the shadow of Harry Potter, the fact that any girl had eyes for only you would be super exciting (even if it isn’t Hermione). I feel bad for Lavender throughout this book only because this kind of stupid relationship happens to a lot of young people. You get in a relationship with someone you don’t even really like, but neither of them really know how to end the damn thing.

One cool thing about this book is that Aragog is back – not that I like giant spiders – but this does bring the whole theory of parallels in the series. This being that book 1 and 7 parallel each other, books 2 and 6, books 3 and 5, and finally book 4 the center. Aragog is a central part of book two, both in the now and in Hagrid and Tom Riddle’s past, and his death is a very important part of book six. Well done J.K.

We get more of Tom Riddle, now as a child at the orphanage. And I have to wonder, if Harry had not been sent to his Aunt Petunia and had been dropped at an orphanage, would he have turned out the same? Tom wants power over the other children (the quest and obsession for power is a big theme) and Harry has no power growing up. I just would think that if you are all alone in the world and find you have magical abilities as a child, it would be hard not to become a bully like Tom, since he has no one to set him straight.

Ginny gets some action in the hall until Ron and Harry interrupt and Ron flips. Now, I have younger siblings and yeah that would be gross to walk into them making out but I don’t know that I would be so pissed. But Harry realizes that he’s into Ginny now. Again, in this book and in the second, she is an extremely dominant character. Only now she gets a great make out scene with Harry.

Even with Fudge gone, the ministry still sucks. The minister is too focused on getting Harry to play ball instead of oh let’s say – hunting down Voldemort. But then again, that would be a lot of work. Got to leave something for your second term. AND – isn’t it a little bit like our fearless leader not looking for Osama and just diverting everyone’s attention to something else.

Ron gets poisoned and my heart breaks for a moment. Thankfully it gets Hermione to talk to him again and he realizes that maybe he should break up with Lav Lav. Harry uses a bit of the Felix Felicis, and gets the memory from the new potions professor. We get a lot more mention of Lily, Harry’s momma which is a shift from the first few books I think. We get so much of how Harry is like James in his recklessness and ability at Quidditch, but now it seems more and more that Lily’s connection to Harry is becoming more prominent.

This is getting super long and I haven’t even mentioned Horcruxes. Tom Riddle broke his soul into seven pieces in order to keep himself as immortal as possible. The soul being such a mysterious intangible thing already, the thought of breaking it into pieces (though murder) is a little sickening. We also learn that Snape was the one to overhear Trelawney give the prophecy to Dumbledore. Harry (rightfully so) flips his shit and goes nuts. But (once we read book seven) you have to feel so, so awful for Snape since he did not know that in doing so he was handing over the life of the woman he loved more than anything. Angst!

The book ends with Dumbledore and Harry going after a Horcrux in the cave – which will be freaking amazing on film. This also has one of the best and saddest lines ever:

“I am not worried, Harry,” Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water, “I am with you.” (540)

Dumbledore is weak and they return to the Dark Mark over Hogwarts. Malfoy threatens to kill Dumbledore but can’t follow through, and I feel a little bad for the kid. Life can’t be too great when your dad is in jail and an evil whack-a-doo is threatening you mom. But Snape pulls the trigger and kills Dumbledore. And my heart breaks again.

At the big battle at the end the only one who is really hurt is Bill Weasley who now loves raw meat and having his ears scratched. Molly assumes Fluer isn’t going to marry him but haughty French girl takes control and the two finally accept each other. Nothing brings a girl and her future mother-in-law together than the boy being attacked by a werewolf.

At the end, Harry sticks it to the man at Dumbledore’s funeral, breaks up with Ginny so she doesn’t get killed and he, Ron and Hermione decide to drop out of school to hunt down those Horcruxes.

Book Meme

2009-04-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

1. Hardback, trade paperback or mass market paperback? I'd go with trade paper if it is something that's been around awhile. I grab hardback's if they're new.

2. Barnes & Noble or Borders? I worked at Barnes & Noble (and still do during holidays) so I got to go with them. Plus the one I work at is one of the biggest in the US and one of five (or four, cannot remember) with a used book section. And they have some of the best people to work with.

3. Bookmark or dog-ear? bookmarks, which don't have to be real bookmarks. My book here at work has a post-it

4. Amazon or brick and mortar? real deal baby

5. Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random? This is a big deal. Right now I don't like how my books are organized because I just have too many for the bookcases I have. I tried to do alphabetical but then I would find another box of books and get really frustrated. Right now, in two of my bookcases I have them mostly alphabetical, with poetry and plays separate. I also have a bookcase that is pretty random. The one in my room has all my Russian lit, alphabetical, and favorite books, arranged randomly.

6. Keep, throw away, or sell? keep

7. Keep dust jacket or toss it? Keep that sucker.

8. Read with dust jacket or remove it? I usually just leave them on.

9. Short story or novel? I read more novels but I love a good short story. Nine Stories is one of my favorites.

10. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket? don't even get me started on how much I love Harry Potter.

11. Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks? If I have to stop I do so at chapter breaks or at least when there is a break in the chapter. Although I have a hard time stopping.

12. "It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"? "Once upon a time"

13. Buy or borrow? Nine times out of ten I buy. Every now and then I borrow, but usually only from my dad or my friend Liz.

14. New or used? I love used books.

15. Buying choice: book reviews, recommendations, or browse? Browsing mostly. I'll go on recommendations from a few people with similar tastes every now and then. I have picked up some from book reviews, but not a whole lot.

16. Tidy ending or cliffhanger? hm I like endings that aren't quite tidy, but I wouldn't call them cliffhangers. I really don't know how to describe it other than how Foer's novels tend to end. Or Catcher in the Rye. I'm not sure.

17. Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading? I am usually reading any time I'm not at work or around my friends.

18. Stand-alone or series? Both.

19. Favorite series? Harry Potter

20. Favorite children's book? The Giving Tree

21. Favorite YA book? The Giver

22. Favorite book of which nobody else has heard? hm, Winkie by Chase

23. Favorite books read last year? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Smith, On Writing - King, A Gentle Madness - Basbanes, The Collector - Fowles, In Cold Blood - Capote, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Foer, Wuthering Heights - Bronte, A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Bank, and the Twilight books.

24. Favorite books of all time? The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Pride and Prejudice - Austen, Cat's Cradle - Vonnegut, Anna Karenina - Tolstoy, and The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner.

25. What are you reading right now? Consider the Lobster and other essays by Wallace, The Stuff of Thought (still!) by Pinker, and I just started Grendel by Gardner

26. What are you reading next? Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land by Crowley, Rabbit, Run by Updike, and War And Peace by Tolstoy (my man).

28. Favorite book to reread? Pride and Prejudice or HP

29. Do you ever smell books? Sometimes.

30. Do you ever read Primary source documents? um not really

Embodied Instruments of Fate

2009-04-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

I know I've been slacking lately, sorry sorry! I read this one sometime last week, in only a day or two. I have read Age of Innocence by Wharton and loved, loved it. This is the second book by her that I have read.

To me, this book is not to the same level as Age of Innocence. We get the classic start of the narrator coming to a town and seeing a peculiar gentleman, thus filling him with desire to learn everything about him (see Wuthering Heights - though Ethan would be a bit more likable to most than Heathcliff). Wharton seems to love writing books about people in love who are never able to get it together. Which I love.

Ethan is married to Zeena, who is a hellish woman obsessed with how sick she is. I mean, thank god those two didn't have kids or Zeena would be that mom who pours drain-o in the babie's soup just so she could get some attention. Anyway, she's "sick" and has her cousin Mattie stay with them to help around the house. Of course Ethan is in love with Mattie. Ethan is tied to his family farm and his sick wife so he's all around unable to achieve a real life of his own.

I've noticed on goodreads.com that this book has tons of low ratings due to it being about as depressing as can be. Which it is. But, there's got to be some beauty in despair and doomed situations. Otherwise why would anyone read Romeo and Juliet? For whatever reason I'm more drawn to love stories that don't quite work out so well, so I enjoyed this one.

As I expected, Wharton's writing was wonderful. She's able to capture nuances of behavior very well. Her descriptions of the landscape are also pretty boss.

In short, I would suggest reading Age of Innocence over Ethan Frome. However, if you are the type who drools over Wuthering Heights (like me!) then pick this up and prepare for some angst.

Lines that I loved:

"But since he had seen her lips in the lamplight he felt that they were his." - 57

"It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his heart." - 153

"they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods... "154

page numbers from some random old edition I have - not the one pictured.

I had to do it for myself.

2009-03-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is the second book by Jonathan Safran Foer I've read. I adored his other, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I had high, high hopes for this one.

I was not disappointed. What I like most about this book was the way that Foer is able to weave together not only several different stories, but different voices to create a full narrative that really hits home. We get the tale of a man named Jonathan Safran Foer searching for a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. His guide, Alexander, and Alexander's grandfather bring their own distinctive voices. Foer's grandfather's village history is included, along with Foer's grandfather's personal history.

Personally I enjoy a book that uses different points of view, and I think that Foer has a great handle on this technique. I was not as moved as I was with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I think this is because I, a non-Jew, have an easier time relating to the events of 9-11 than the horror of the Holocaust. That being said, I was unable to put this book down and could feel my heart aching at his phrasing - it was just beautiful.

I thought that this was a wonderful book, one that I would recommend to anyone who wants not only a gripping tale, but one that will leave you helplessly enthralled. I will be waiting with bated breathe for Foer's next work.

A few quotes to tempt you:

"The final time they made love, seven months before she killed herself and he married someone else, the Gypsy girl asked my grandfather how he arranged his books." ~ page 229

"We were stupid," he said, "because we believed in things."
"Why is that stupid?"
"Because there are not things to believe in"
(Love?)
(There is no love. Only the end of love.) ~ page 245

"She wore my teeth marks on her body like other wives might wear jewelry." ~ page 264

And - the exchange that stopped my in my tracks and got me really thinking about love and why we hang on to hurt:

"Do you like thinking about Mom?
No.
Does it hurt after?
Yes.
Then why do you continue to do it? she asked." ~ page 92

Top Five

2009-03-19T08:48:00.000-07:00

After that last post I realized I had to come up with my current Top 5 Favorite Books.

1.) The Master and Margarita by Mikahil Bulgakov
2.) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3.) Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
4.) The Sound and The Fury by William Falkner
5.) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

(ok so Top 10)

6.) Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
7.) Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
8.) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
9.) Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
10.) All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

I now want to reread all of these. Oy!

And just an update on what's to come. Right now I am reading Consider the Lobster And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker and Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

from politics, it was an easy step to silence

2009-03-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

Continuing on my Austen binge, I picked up Northanger Abbey. This is one of those books that I've always felt a little weird about not reading. I own a lot of books and read a lot and yet I feel that there are some "classics" that are just not on my radar. Case in point, I didn't pick up Wurthering Heights until last year and I have yet to read anything other than Great Expectations by Dickens. I'm working on it people.

I've made no secret that I love Austen. Pride and Prejudice is in my top five favorites and Emma would be somewhere in the top tier as well (I'm now trying to figure out what my other top five are and top 100 and so on). That being said, I did not like Nothanger Abbey. It just did not do it for me. Here's why:

Catherine and Isabella have such a fake friendship that everyone can see but Catherine. Isabella is such a parody of a flirtatious woman and an insincere friend that it made me cringe to read about her. Her speeches on how important friendship meant to her contrasted with her abandoning Catherine in favor of any man seemed like they were meant to be humorous but just came off disappointing me. Perhaps if I too had been fooled to think that Isabella actually cared for Catherine, then I would have cared about Isabella in some way. I was not surprised by anything Isabella did, no matter how shocking it appeared to Catherine.

Catherine herself was a big issue for me. She's pure, innocent and about as naive as they come. That I could handle if not for the fact that she doesn't seem to be acting like a woman in that day and age should in regard to men. In other Austin novels, women who are not rich are always at least aware that they need to get a man to marry them before they become a horrible burden and shame on their parents. Men and marriage occupies a lot of their thinking. Catherine seems to be oblivious to it. She is not a rich woman, though yes not poor either, and so should be concerned about getting married. Yet the girl couldn't pick up a hint from a guy if he dropped it in her lap. Which they do, a lot. Yes, she is smitten with Tinley and may be in love with him, but we the reader never really get to know this until very late in the novel. I felt like Austen had Catherine tip-toe around the thought of marriage . This fact of Catherine's obliviousness to men and marriage bothered me the most about this book.

There are moments in Northanger Abbey where you can clearly tell that the writer is brilliant, but, in the face of her other works, this is not a great book.

Two quotes I rather liked:

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."

"To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive."

Is 5

2009-03-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

Now, I usually don't read a book of poems straight. I tend to pick them up randomly and read a poem from a random page. But for whatever reason I wanted to read this one through.

I am a big fan of e e cummings. I find his poetry to be beautiful, sensual, and alluring. In college I always chose his poems to read for class.

Some of the poems in Is 5 were a little lost on me, but I'm not too worried about it. Maybe in five years I'll reread them and be able to see just what cummings is saying. Cummings is known for his free style, words scattered across the page, phrases thrown together seemingly at random to create the perfect image in your mind. He writes about love and war, and eschews the normal rules of punctuation. The above poem is not in Is 5, but I thought it was a good example of how playful cummings' poetry can be.

Several poems jumped out at me in this book. "my sweet old etcetera" has always been one of my favorites. I had a poetry class and that was the only cummings poem in the text book.

I do want to include one poem from the book. This one stood out to me as special. I've heard the "eyelids' fluttering" line before and love it even more in context. Enjoy!

VII

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry

-the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then

laugh,leaning back in my arms

for life's no a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Pride and Prejudice

2009-03-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

What can I say about this book that has not already been said?

I turned to this book because I feel like I'm reading so many books that are new to me, and every now and then I need a familar face. As I've said in my Kindle review, this book has a lot of sentimental value to me. I love this book a lot. I would have a hard time believing that there are people out there who haven't read it (I'm sure there are, but it's more like I don't want to believe it) so I don't really feel like I need to recap the plot. Mr. Darcy is dreamboat.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." ~ I actually had a friend quote this at me the other day in regards to some guy we know and it pretty much made me idolize her.

There are too many lines I have underlined and too many comments I wrote in the margins for me to recap here. I need to go drink a cup of tea.

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

2009-03-06T07:11:00.001-08:00

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

I've been meaning to read this since the movie came out, which is about the same time that I bought the book. I read this in conjuncture with Pride and Prejudice. Seems to me like I picked the two books I own that are least like each other to read at the same time.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book a lot. The movie was pretty faithful to the book, so I felt familiar reading it. The writing style that McCarthy uses took me a while to warm up to though. He does not use quotation marks for dialogue at all and has no apostrophes anywhere. After a few chapters is flowed, but that defiantly took me by surprise. Names also took me a little while to get the hang of; I kept having to picture their movie counterpoint.

The book is as bloody as the movie, which gave me about six heart attacks. I think that the book is creepier though. In the movie they have Anton Chigurh creeping around murdering people and the sense that he is amoral really comes across. However, I think there is one scene missing from the movie towards the end that hits that point home in the book.

I also think that the book does a wonderful job of leaving things unsaid. There are some great line breaks that cut right from a heightened situation to Chigurh suddenly having what he needed, which leaves the reader to determine what actually happened.

I read this book in a very short amount of time; it was really hard to put down. I'd read something by McCarthy again. Just a few quotes:

"It takes little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. OR if they could I never heard of it." - page 64

"the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed." - page 124

"Well I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change." page 128