Here we go again

Another entry in my awkward gym conversations series. So, when I arrived for hip-hop class, I had my current read with me, and the front desk guy asked me what I was reading. I do what I always do when someone asks, which is simultaneously show the cover and say the name out loud. I'm not sure why I do it that way; I could just as easily say the name.

Anyway, that's not the point. It happened to be Cancer Ward, and he asked me if it was Russian. I confirmed that it was, and he then commented that he likes Dostoevsky. I nodded cheerily in acknowledgment of his statement and wandered off. It wasn't until about 90 seconds later that I realized that this was likely supposed to be a conversation starter. Ah, well. I never said I was an easy person to talk with/get to know.

Drum roll please. . .

We have now read 1/3rd of the books on the list! Maybe not quite as clean a milestone as the quarter mark, but still exciting for me. Clearly the next milestone - the half-way mark - will really be the main one. That said, I'm going to celebrate every reasonable chance I can with these; primarily, that will mean the quarter, third, half, two-thirds, and three-quarters marks, but I also get a little excited about any of the 100 marks.

So, what am I doing to celebrate? Getting a massage! Now, I know what you are thinking: but you don't like being touched! And you are right. Generally speaking, I really don't like being touched. However, there are two main exceptions: 1) massages, 2) having my mom brush my hair. Now, I can't actually explain why those two exceptions are true, because yes, in most circumstances I'm not a fan of being touched.

In strange coincidence news, the book for this milestone was Brighton Rock; I'm not sure why, but Graham Greene seems to be the milestone author for me. I wonder if I have enough of his left to keep on with this pattern.

Deju vu

Sometimes, I think that I could write a whole series of posts about reactions to my reading habits by people at the gym. I'm not sure why, exactly, but this keeps cropping up. Most recently while waiting for a zumba class, a personal trainer (who I have never spoken to/seen before) came up to me to ask what I was reading and what it was about. It happened to be The Woodlanders, and after I summarized he gave me a look of half sympathy for my poor plight in reading it, and half incredulity that I would choose to read it. He then said "well, at least you can work out after reading it and get the tension out."

Now, I realize this isn't much of a story, and is not, really, all that noteworthy. However, you need to understand something about my brain. I generally go through life thinking that I'm semi invisible, that I don't really register on people's radar, and that I can be as idiosyncratic as I please because no one will really notice. It always really jars me when someone comments that they've been observing some behavior of mine or that they were talking about me, etc. In some ways this is similar to being a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

In all seriousness, though, I think if I wasn't already writing this blog I should start one called "Awkward Encounters with Men at the Gym," since not all my awkward encounters relate to the list project, but they sure happen all. the. time.

Sometimes. . .

I do things besides read, as evidenced below demonstrating how I spent part of my weekend. Take that, doubters.

So close

And yet, so far. I still have one Thomas Hardy to go after The Woodlanders. Sigh. Sad. I really had hoped that this one would be my last.

Have you noticed that no one ever cites Thomas Hardy when you ask them about their favorite author? There is a reason for that, and The Woodlanders epitomizes that reason.

Look, I don't need my books to be The Happy Hollisters. I get it, bad stuff happens, that's where we get plot, etc. But seriously, Hardy, seriously? Gah. It's like a bad Country Western song or that romance novel at the start of Romancing the Stone (shot my dog and burned my Bible). It's like he is punishing his characters simply for existing. I can't tell if he delights in their pain, in taking anything they ever desired and turning that against them, or if he's just super depressed, but either way, it gets very old very quickly. This one was another where pacing was important for me; I had to just plow through it as quickly as possible and get on the other side.

My other recent read was Brave New World; I don't really have anything to say about it, certainly nothing that likely hasn't already been written in millions of high-school papers. It wasn't what I was expecting, though, I will say that.

It's not me, it's you

Remember when I said that I seem to be losing my ability to describe books based on their plot? I think maybe I was at least partially wrong! I didn't realize until reading Stone Junction, but it's been quite a while since I actually read a book that had a real plot, that was truly a story. Now, I do love beautiful prose as much as the next person, perhaps even more so, and I've developed a fondness for some extremely literary authors. That said, though, there really is something nice about having a plot. Simultaneously cozy and exciting.

Stone Junction was a fun change of pace, and overall was just a super fun read. It's hard to describe it without spoiling it a bit, so consider this your warning!

Now that we got that out of the way, let's talk about that plot. It's essentially a coming-of-age story about Daniel, though it starts just after his conception. The plot mostly takes off after his birth, laying the foundation for the story, with his mother's connections to a secret organization made up of a very eclectic bunch of folk whose only common thread seems to be their quirkiness (though they are all quirky in their own way), and perhaps a mistrust of the established order. Daniel's mother dies under questionable circumstances, and the rest of the story is about Daniel's quest to learn what happened and come to terms with it (along the way he apprentices to a safe cracker, a master of disguise, and a professional poker player, among others, who are part of the secret organization).

There's also one great quote about school (Daniel elects to not attend institutional school as a child), where someone says the only thing you learn in school is to interact with people under strange circumstances. Indeed.

I also read Written on the Body, which is a great example of the more typical books I'm reading on this list. At first I was thinking, I really expected this to be more explicit/erotic, and then I got to that part and I realize, yeah, it definitely is explicit. Anyway, not much to say, except just read this one if you sort of want to be depressed.

We carry more luggage than the porters at King's Cross

This hasn't been the best few weeks for the list project, I'll admit. Those of you who know me IRL (which, let's be honest, is all of you, since I've done nothing to promote awareness of this blog), know that the past fortnight has been manic at work. Plus, not going to lie, we've been on a Downton Abbey binge. A serious one. I am so completely a Mattharys shipper it's not even funny, but Sybil is my favorite.

I am (not) a camera

Lately I feel like I've been having some trouble focusing on my reading material on the bus. Thursday morning, for example, I barely made it through the day's Express and onto The New Yorker before arriving at my destination. I didn't even crack my novel!

The other possibility, of course, is that I may be bringing a tiny bit too much reading material for a 15-20min bus ride. It's hard to say for sure.

I think that I'm in love

This site is so much fun! Okay, clearly my picture problem is me and not my topic.

Maybe I'm not meant to be a code breaker

What to say about The End of the Story? I have mixed feelings. It was quite good, but also painful and uncomfortable. Yet, I just didn't really get into it. It would have felt better to me as a short story or novella. The novel just went on for far too long. Near the end it was like, yes, I get it, you were seeing this guy, then you stopped. Okay fine.

What made this particularly interesting though, was all of the underlined words from the one other person who has ever checked this book out of the DC public library system. Whoever it was underlined so many words throughout the whole novel.

At first I thought that maybe the person had been underlining vocabulary words/words to look up in a dictionary, but since underlined words included dozed and briskly, I have to hope not.

So my next idea was that this person was trying to convey a top secret message to the next reader. I wrote out the first few underlined words, but I must confess that I do not understand the super top secret message:

Crouched slatted flushed pitted coaster briskly vagrant parched plaid atrium stream bed misstatements marshland cedar hovered loamy. . .

In other news, I read Tropic of Cancer. The less said about that one the better, trust me.

I have got to stop reading at the gym

Seriously. It just gets me in trouble. All the time. Most recently, it led to a lovely conversation with someone about the books she's been reading, but the conversation went seriously downhill near the end when she said when she finishes her current read she wants a recommendation from me. Now I am experiencing book recommendation anxiety; we've covered this before, but in case you forgot, I'm terrible at recommending books.

In other news, I'm continuing my quest to add pictures to this thing. Here is one that shows that even as a young child, reading was serious business.

My New Year's Resolution

Well, that may be distorting things a tiny bit. I'm not much on resolutions, in all honesty. Sometimes I aspire to have resolutions (maybe my resolution should be to come up with some resolutions for next year). But! I did decide to fill out the books that I am missing from Modern Library's top 100 books this year.

I should clarify that these two lists are not at all connected; there are plenty on the ML's top 100 that aren't in the 1001 (so we'll just not be reading those; yay!).

Here's what is on tap for the next little bit, after I finish this Henry Miller one (blurg).

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Native Son – Richard Wright
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
"The Good Soldier," Ford Madox Ford
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
"A Dance to the Music of Time" (series), Anthony Powell
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
The Magus – John Fowles
Loving – Henry Green
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth

What I wouldn't give for a copy of "The Tattooed Potato" right about now

I feel like I should have something to say about every book that I read for this project. I mean, someone took the time to write it, and some people read it and didn't hate it, so that's all good, right? And yet, there are some that just do nothing for me. Like, say, The Tin Drum. I feel like I should have a reaction of some sort, given that when it first came out apparently some called it blasphemous (though Wikipedia lacks a citation for that). Mostly, I was just bored and sort of in pain.

The plot revolves around a dwarf who is writing his memoirs from a mental institution where he is confined; our unreliable narrator recounts his experiences leading up to this, including living in Poland during the rise of Nazism. Doesn't that sound like fun? Trust me, it's as much fun as it sounds!

It did lead me to read Wikipedia's article on the term Midget and on Dwarfism. They were enlightening.

Alice would hate my blog

Sometimes, generally when I am perusing the three Mormon lifestyle blogs that I follow, I think that my blog needs pictures. I mean really, this is very boring. I haven't even really customized the layout for this thing. The problem though, and this is a pretty serious problem, is that I'm not sure what these pictures would be of, exactly (the grammar of that sentence is making my teeth hurt, but whatever).

Pictures of me reading don't sound very exciting. Pictures of the book covers also sound pretty terrible to me (seriously terrible). Hmm. I'm not really sure what this leaves, exactly. This is why I should be a lifestyle blogger instead of a book blogger. The problem with that, though, of course, is that I don't exactly have a lifestyle.

Well, at any rate, to break the monotony, here is a random picture of me being random.

There's a Fine, Fine Line

Hallucinating Foucault was not one that I expected to love. A plot synopsis sounds less than inspiring (young academic writing about the fictional works of an author who is in an insane asylum becomes obsessed and goes to meet said author and has an affair with him), and it honestly took awhile for me to get into this one. However, once I got to the parts in France, I tore through it even though every few seconds I had to pause to process. This is such a forceful, unsparing, brutal, beautiful novel. Loved it. Cried like crazy on an airplane because of it (and may have freaked out my seatmate).

There is so much to unpack in this novel. It touches on such a variety of issues/themes, and weaves them altogether seamlessly and ruthlessly. There was more than one moment that I had to stop because of the force of what had just happened. It's also an intensely tender novel, and so tragically sad.

The two key themes in my opinion were the relationship(s) between writers and readers, and madness/sanity (questioning that dichotomy). Quite a bit could be said about both themes, particularly the first one since it really is the heart of the novel and the issues with which it is interested. That said, you can't separate that theme from the second theme. The narrator is fascinating, since he isn't the most attention-grabbing narrator, and in some ways is a bit of a cipher, but at the same time his journey is the center/focus of the story.

Makes me want to go brush up on my Foucault, since I am a bit rusty (my memories relate to power-knowledge and something with a prison where we police ourselves; rusty, I know).

So many good quotes:

"You ask what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you... You do not ask me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you."

"Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance. Maybe the remoteness of my texts is the measure of my personal involvement? Maybe that chill you describe is a necessary illusion?"

"This is my first and last letter to you. But I will never abandon you. I will go on being your reader. I will go on remembering you. . . You said that the love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated, can never be proven to exist. That's not true. I came back to find you. And when I had found you I never gave you up. Nor will I do so now .You asked me what I feared most. I never feared losing you. Because I will never let you go. You will always have all my attention, all my love. Je te donne ma parole. I give you my word."