And I know that he knows I'm unfaithful/ And it kills him inside/ To know that I am happy with some other guy

Clearly I would love this article. Anything that references Betsy and Joe will, of course, be loved by me.

The $64,000 Question

I'm conflicted about this post, since the subject doesn't interest me much. That said, I get asked about this a lot.

So, how do I do it (i.e. read so many books at the rate I do)?

I do want to highlight again that I don't really like this question. It simply doesn't interest me, and I think it makes this project sound more impressive than I think it is. Given that caveat, here are some of the factors:

1. I make some jokes here about my attention span and ability to focus, and while I do have a short attention span and sometimes have the focus of a hyperactive rabbit, I'm actually pretty able to read in stolen moments. If you can't focus on a book on a 15min bus ride or while killing time before a dance class on an elliptical machine, this project would be harder for you. I'm pretty good at this.
2. Reading is sort of like working out, actually, in that the more you do, the better shape you are in to do more. I'm in the best reading shape I've been in my entire life. I read more quickly now, I'm more able to focus and digest complex novels, etc.
3. Different types of reading material take different muscles, I guess; I've only really built my literary fiction muscles. This isn't great for me as an overall reader, but for this project it's excellent. That said, if I needed to jump back into reading copious amounts of dense academic theory, that would take some re-training.
4.  Reading has always been part of my life; we are a family of serious readers, so this hasn't been a huge adjustment to me.
5. Along those lines, I enjoy this project.

Ultimately, I think that last point is the most important. I do this for fun.

Balancing act

Have you ever wondered which Fiddler on the Roof daughter you are? I'm just going to assume the answer is yes, because then I don't have to explain why I have considered this question. Yay!

So, when I was younger, I definitely wanted to be a Hodel. I mean, who wouldn't want to get with the hot guy from Kiev? She also gets to do the two dancing scenes with him, and the solo, so clearly she's sort of the most fun to be. Plus, as the second oldest, I sort of felt entitled to be a Hodel.

That said, I have come to realize that I definitely am a Chava, and I have come to terms with this fact. Actually, I've even really embraced it and come to love it, I would say. In some ways, this actually makes sense. Sarah is so much more a Hodel than a Tzeitel.

Tonight we're gonna party till they shut the club down

I really admire The Bridge on the Drina. So many novels are remarkably similar, which you realize when you read a lot of them. I'm a bit tired of biographical novels, and thus this one was such a breath of fresh air for me. I loved the way it is constructed; having a novel about a bridge rather than a person gives such an interesting perspective and sort of highlights the complex relationship between people and the worlds we create for ourselves.

That said, I was predisposed to like this one going into it, since I have a strange sort of thing for Bosnia. I know this sounds terrible, but let me try to explain. I've been asked multiple times if I am Bosnian, specifically a Bosnian refugee. This has led to me feeling like I should have this connection to Bosnia. Okay, explaining it doesn't really make this sound any better.

Actually, that sort of thing happens to me not infrequently. The most memorable instance was the argument I had with a Parisian in Vienna about how he was certain that I had to be French or perhaps Polish, and that there was no way that I could be American. It was a surprisingly long argument. Different people have provided me with different interpretations about his motivations for this discussion. I maintain that his motivation was that he needed to have his eyesight and hearing checked.

Anyway, a favorite passage from The Bridge on the Drina:

 Men who knew the world and its history often thought that it was a pity that fate had given this woman so narrow and undistinguished a part to play. Had her fate not been what or where it was, who know what this wise and humane woman, who did not think only of herself and who, predatory yet unselfish, beautiful and seductive yet chaste and cold, ran a small town hotel, and emptied the pockets of petty Casanovas, could have been or could have given to the world.

We've Been Busy

So, I recently got a bit of feedback on my blog. This is rare for me, since generally I like to pretend that no one reads this, and my readership goes along with this belief by not providing any reaction. Works pretty well for me, since it actually sort of freaks me out to think that people read this at all.

That said, I love feedback generally, and I do try to be responsive. Word is that I don't provide enough statistical information about my project. I thought I'd remedy that a bit with some quick information.

I have read 374 books on the list. I've been working through the list in earnest for almost exactly three years now. I read about two books per week or 104 books a year. The goal is always to do at least 100 a year. If I do keep up this rate, I'll finish in the fall of 2018 when I am 31 years old, almost 32 (if you want to know how old I am, I encourage you to do your own math).

This year, I have read 50 so far:


1.      Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
2.      The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
3.      The End of the Story – Lydia Davi
4.      Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
5.      Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
6.      Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
7.      The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
8.      Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
9.      A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
10.  Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
11.  Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
12.  The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
13.  The Double – José Saramago
14.  Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
15.  The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
16.  Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
17.  The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
18.  The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
19.  The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
20.  Mao II – Don DeLillo
21.  The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
22.  Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
23.  Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
24.  The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
25.  Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
26.  The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
27.  Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
28.  The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
29.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
30.  The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
31.  The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
32.  How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
33.  Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
34.  On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
35.  Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
36.  The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
37.  The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
38.  Germinal – Émile Zola
39.  The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
40.  Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
41.  Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
42.  Typical – Padgett Powell
43.  On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
44.  The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
45.  Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
46.  Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
47.  July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
48.  The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
49.  The Hours – Michael Cunningham
50.  Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory

I am seriously excited about this one. I feel like I should write an Oscar acceptance speech-esque post (I'd like to thank my parents for teaching me how to read, WMATA for single tracking and thus giving me a lot of unplanned time to read. . .)

Oh, RoTP, you nearly did me in, but I triumphed! I don't think that I can adequately convey the sense of immense relief I have for having finished this one, for having it behind me. The next longest one is only(!) 1,800 pages long, about half as long as RoTP. Finishing Proust's tome makes me believe this project is actually possible.

Was it worth it? Meh, hard to say. For me, yes. But would I recommend it? Probably not, unless you are stuck on a desert island or a submarine.

I could write about my thoughts on the novel, but I don't really feel like it. It's an overwhelming proposition, given how much there is to really talk about. I suppose that I could focus in on the character I was most intrigued by (Odette, no surprises there if you know me), or about the cork room (not actually relevant to RoTP exactly, but as the only person I've encountered who has read this book told me, it's kind of more interesting than RoTP), or about my own experience of involuntary memories (like the smell of this chapstick that suddenly reminded me of the time I took ice skating lessons; that was ill advised). However, I'm not really in the mood.

My poll on how to celebrate led to some interesting suggestions. Since I do like sort of poetic celebrations, I am attempting to find a madeleine cookie. Now, I know what you are thinking (honey, the last thing you need is to eat a cookie), but life is short.

You're Committed Now

If you read a very long book, people will take note and then they will comment. This is inevitable. I tell you this so that you are forewarned if you should decide to attempt RoTP (but seriously, there are so many reason to not make this attempt, so. . .).

For example, my latest awkward encounter with a random gym member:

RGM: Remembrance of Things Past. Huh. That looks really long.
Me: This is actually one of three volumes.
RGM: Huh. You're at page 900?
Me: Yeah, of this volume. The whole book is 3,500 pages. I'm about 2,000 into it.
RGM: Is it any good?
Me: It's okay.
RGM: Sh**, girl. For something that long it better be more than okay. I guess you're sort of committed now, though.

This probably would have been less awkward if I had then explained the project to him. I did not.

The times they are a-changin'

Sometimes I amaze myself. When I saw the film of The Hours (ten years ago! I am so old!), I loathed it. Intensely. There was really nothing redeeming about it; Sarah and I saw it together, and we were mostly sad that we weren't alone in the theater so we couldn't make nose jokes. I also wasn't a fan of the first Cunningham that I read, so I went into this novel with some trepidation.

That said, I just absolutely loved it. It is so beautiful! Another one where I had to pause after some sentences and just mediate on them and ache with them. Yes, it is extremely bleak, but I'm feeling bleak, so it worked for me.

I was surprised to have such an immense gulf in my feelings about the film versus the novel, but I think this is due to several factors:

1) I've probably grown some generally in the last ten years (actually, I know I have; I weigh about 15lbs more; sigh).

2) I've read Mrs. Dalloway; that seriously helps.

3) I've become enamored with Virginia Woolf; not Mrs. Dalloway so much, but adoring and appreciating The Waves and The Voyage Out certainly helps.

4) I think this does work much better as a novel than a movie. The beauty is in the language and the peculiar intimacy that you can have in a novel that is hard to translate into a film.

5) I'm in the middle of RoTP, and so anything is a relief, particularly anything that treats women as full human beings.

Some favorite quotes (particularly the last one):

He could. . . have had anyone, any pageant winner, any vivacious and compliant girl, but through some obscure and possibly perverse genius had kissed, courted, and proposed to his best friend's older sister, the bookworm, the foreign-looking. . . who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read.

******

It seems possible (it does not seem impossible) that she's slipped across an invisible line, the line that has always separated her from what she would prefer to feel, who she would prefer to be.

****** 

What she wants to say has to do with all the people who've died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss. If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not ,exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy, but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half. . . Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

I also love the whole passage on Clarissa's feelings about beauty.

Do I feel superior?

Maybe just a bit!

Yes, I've read everything on the Brit list, and all but four on this list.

I'm Doomed

Seriously. As we discussed recently, sitting is lethal, and I sit for 8-10 hours at work each day. Also, I'm not a big fan of touch, and apparently my independence is going to kill me, too.

Without a hurt the heart is hollow

Right now I am reading Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time (all 3,500 pages). Well, not right now; technically, right now I am blogging about reading RoTP. But my current read is RoTP.

Um, so, the thing is, this is kind of a long book (3,500 pages), and I kind of have a very short attention span. Not the best combination, but I am determined. Fortunately (?), my incredible stubbornness is stronger than my short attention span.

That said, my focus issues have led me to think about many random things while reading this book (that is 3,500 pages long):

1. Proust wrote in bed. If sitting is so bad, lying down all the time must be very bad, right? Given how long this book is (3,500 pages), and how long reading it is taking me, writing it must have taken a very, very, very long time. His poor leg muscles must have atrophied in rather serious ways.

2. If reading it is so painful, translating it must have been worse. Poor, poor translator. That must have taken awhile. On the other hand, if you can read it in the French, you'll never bother to read the English version, so I suppose you could just breeze through it. We'll all just be so relieved to have it done that we won't wonder if it isn't at all like what Proust wrote.

3. Is it worth it?

You're Doing It Wrong!

I generally am. Le sigh.

Anyway, I finished Infinite Jest recently. I actually enjoyed it much more than I had expected to (but hey, I'm sort of secretly obsessed with tennis and the notion that I secretly am a tennis savant and just don't know it [I'm not]). That said, I mostly just read it. I didn't really, really engage.

Thanks to a tip I got before I started the book, I read the footnotes. Go me! Generally, yes, I'm very, very lazy and do not read footnotes. However, after reading this little article I realized that I did not read this book properly. Ah, well.

Definitely a book that leaves you with more questions than answers, but more or less in a good way. Still, my back is going to thank me for finally finishing this one (lugging it around at 3.2lbs got a bit old).

Stranger than fiction

The other day, I was thinking about the common point that in real life you can get away with stuff that you can't in fiction in terms of plausibility. The other piece is that you also can get away with more cliches in real life than you can in fiction.

I was thinking about this in relation to my own life recently. No one would believe me as a fictional character. For example, a slice of my life: after going to my barre class (ballet/pilates fusion, sort of), I go to Whole Foods to buy organic yogurt as part of my vegetarian diet (with a dash of guilt for not being vegan); I live in a tiny apartment in a major urban center and work for an NGO; most of my wardrobe comes from ModCloth; I hack IKEA furniture; I've even flirted with brunching and book clubbing. I am such a twenty-something cliche.

Even my life dialog has its share of cliches (seriously, I've gotten all the classics: "you're too good for me" "it's not you, it's me" "what are we doing?" "we need to talk "etc.)

An Acquired Taste

At first, I was not a Virginia Woolf fan. I did not really care for Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room, etc. Then I read The Waves, and I just adored it. My feelings for The Voyage Out are similar. I didn't love it as much as The Waves, but I did love it.

Here are my favorite quotes, particularly the first one (I rather identify with it; it  nicely explains why I find it so jarring when I find out someone has been observing me or people have been talking about me).

A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she does. Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t listen to what you say . . And that’s what I like. . . I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a damn to anybody. . . I like the freedom of it – it’s like being the wind or the sea.

*****

In her curious condition of unanalyzed sensations she was incapable of making a plan which should have an effect upon her state of mind. She abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents. . . Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with Rachel, and she had never been in love with anyone. Moreover, none of the books she had read. . . suggested from their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that her sensations had no name.

***** 

I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work, hindering me

Si on allait voir le dernier film de Juliette Binoche?

It's an excellent question, is it not? I must confess, though, it's not one I would have given any thought to without the prompting of a piece of paper left behind in a copy of Wittgenstein’s Nephew. It seems to have come from a French-phrase-a-day calendar. That said, given that I did stumble across this, I figured that I probably should give it some consideration. Clearly a cosmic question was being asked of me.

Conclusion? I'd rather not, actually, since it appears to be La vie d'une autre (summary: A young woman falls in love, then wakes up a decade later as the mother of a young boy who is also in the middle of a divorce, which confuses me grammatically; I assume that it is the woman, not the young boy in the middle of a divorce). At the moment, The Avengers is next on my movie agenda.