What can you do? It's fate.

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.

Does art save?

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!

Fashion and whiskers have been my weakness

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.

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?

he is a man and not a piano-key

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

"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.