For any of those of you who do this;

On Friday, I finished The Shipping News at my desk before whisking away unexpectedly to New Orleans, and on my return, today, I finished Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. A few quotes stuck with me. The former was astounding, the latter had it's moments. I plan on reading anything I can get my hands on by Proulx, and I will probably try to read everything of Moore's too. Only problem is with Birds of America there were moments when it did get too droll for me to enjoy it, which kind of rained on the parade of the really really good parts.

More coming soon, I think.

I got it into gear and onto the Old Highway and drove east, running away from the sunlit rim of the plains. I wasn't traveling fast, not at first, but the rows of cultivation whipped quickly by, and in the dizzying exactness of their changing perspective they turned and opened and closed again as I shot down the middle of the fields. I accelerated but I still felt as if I had stepped wrong and was plunging backward. Like the rider on an amusement, I had that strange satisfaction that it was all designed to be scary, to be fun, and would soon be over. I wondered if that meant I was going to die. I had no reason to think I would, but I wondered.

The Name of the World by Denis Johnson

As an aside - books really seem to center me lately, all of a sudden. They bring me back into a solitude that I can't find otherwise, that reminds me write your mother a letter, call your grandparents, send so-and-so a housewarming gift, remember remember remember.

I don't know though.

"'The outlook is not all bright.'" Charlotte was reading me the draft of an unfinished Letter from Central America. "'Nor is the outlook all black.' Paragraph. 'Nonetheless--'"
She broke off.
"That's where I seem to be blocked."
"I don't wonder," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"'Nevertheless' what? I mean, Charlotte. If you say 'the outlook is not all bright' and then you say 'nor is the outlook all black,' then you can't start the next sentence with 'nevertheless.' It can't possibly mean anything."
"I didn't start the next sentence with 'nevertheless,'" Charlotte said. "I started it with 'nonetheless.'"
I said nothing.
"Anyway." Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. "It's not just a new sentence. It's a new paragraph."
It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.
Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.


pgs 233-34, A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion



This is the second book I have recently read about American women in Central America - a prostitute in Nicaragua (The Stars at Noon) in 1984; and really, a solid example of an American prototype in the 1970s in A Book of Common Prayer set in Boca Grande, which is described to be somewhere in Central America - but seems to possibly be fictional? I don't know, every time I try to look it up, all I find is somewhere in Florida. I find it somewhat strange that I have managed to pick up two seemingly random books that have such similar settings, and in ways, similar characters. In The Stars at Noon you have a character who not only accepts the harsh realities she has come across in this world, she embraces them. In A Book of Common Prayer, you have a woman who subsides on being completely ignorant, a pawn in everyone else's world, who floats about on her own detached sea. Some of the reviews on the book discuss how it paints such a vivid picture of the times, and I wonder if they just mean in war.

The interesting thing I find is that in both stories, the only way either of them addresses the way in which the war affects them is by how it mangles their own lives. Politics, too. The politics made personal, or, I don't know. I begin to wonder if they are meant to be examples, and if so, examples of what: if they are examples of American ignorance, if they are examples of what war really means to everyone. Because only some far-fetched hero would really be able to tell you what happened, other than the sketches pulled by hearsay out of otherwise thin air, and what happened beyond the tip of their own nose.

Similarly, I can relay what the experience was to me. I also read this book, almost entirely at work, except for the last fifty pages that I read on a bench on the back porch warding of mosquitoes in the heat and drinking a Heineken light. While I was reading this book during the day, during what normally should be working hours, during a time when I should be doing something to make this world a better place somehow I was reading these pages as if I was holding my breath until finished, the way I also read the only other Didion book I've ever read. I finished it in two days. The book chilled me to the bone, until I was out of the canned AC and on the back porch, where I could more accurately weight the potency of such a creation (or something more like, I could fool myself into believing that by the heat and the sun and vitamin D that the world still has a heart). I believe her other book did the same to me as well. Didion relies on dialogue to develop her characters, most of the men in her stories are sons-of-bitches, and the women aren't really all that better. I can't tell if Didion is just being honest or cynical or mean or what, but I don't know that this story was really told from a particular intention, either.

All I know is this compelled me to write this long-winded something you couldn't even quite call a review, for whatever that is worth. I don't know how to review books anyhow, I only know how to respond to them.

But the years went by in peace. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station.

pg 430, The Shadow of the Wind


I just finished this book by Carlos Ruiz Zafon today while sitting at my desk at work. It was recommended by a friend, and I picked it up immediately after reading the last novel I read, and was again astounded, but in a different fashion. Here is something similar to Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I think, in that it tells a story with a youth as a narrator and winds up in thick mystery that is improbable a touch but charming nonetheless. However, this story is perhaps a little darker (Gothic, mind you) and I think Zafon has a touch more insight into how to really captivate his reader enough to care about his descriptions.

In this story, a young boy, Daniel, who lost his mother and has lived with his father, a bookseller, his whole life, is initiated into an order an individuals who care for and tend to old and lost literature. Daniel chooses a single book and vows to protect it for the rest of his life, an act which draws him into the lives of the author, all he affected, and the strong current at work surrounding these people. At turns the plot was predictable, but it did not lessen the pleasure of reading what you knew came next. There were oh-so-many parallels, and definitely plenty of dots you could still connect after a second read.

Zafon is working on another piece of fiction right now, a prequel to this novel that is tentatively due for release next Spring. I think I will probably pick it up when it does come out, but maybe not in hardback.

I had nearly forgotten about you, my poor little book blog. How sad and lonely you must have been. Really, though, all of the books on my shelves were pretty lonely as well because with a hectic lifestyle and so much stress that it's impossible enough to focus on what is front of me (much less pay the appropriate respect and attention to a novel), I wasn't really able to read all that much. But I've found myself a new position at my job that comparatively promotes health and well-being, and as such I can sneak some reads on the side, and so my pulse has picked up again.

Actually, the book that really set me straight was Denis Johnson's The Stars At Noon. Johnson is one of those names I've always carried with me, and so one evening when my boyfriend and I were having dinner, and I got an itch to scour the Halfprice Bookstore shelves, when I saw this one title on the shelf, what with its appealing cover and description, and an alluring randomly-read paragraph from the middle of the book, I decided to take it home with me.

Best decision I could have made. I started reading, and wow. Now, I tried Johnson once before with Already Dead and was less than enchanted. Granted, Johnson's subject matter is really not for the faint of heart, but dear God. The thrill of the perspective he offers, a basic survival story in a completely foreign territory but without losing over to lengthy description and standoffishness in regards to his characters in this foreign place, was freaking rock solid. Not only that, but I made one of the coolest discoveries I have ever made while reading - I found the lyrics from the first verse to a song from my favorite Sonic Youth album, Daydream Nation. The song is called "The Sprawl", and it was actually one of the first Sonic Youth songs I ever heard, and that convinced me to check them out (well, that and the irresistable Madonna cover 'Into the Groove(y). Some of the sentences in the verse were very distinctive, others not so much. But they stuck out like sore thumbs of the best sort to me while I scoured the first fifty pages. Turns out it was lifted from the book, and that just makes me like Sonic Youth even more.

Aside from that, this story of human degradation and what lengths people will turn to when they have no other choices is completely engrossing. Enter love story? And you have a complete winner. If I met that book in a dark alley, it would totally kick my ass. I really wanted to include an excerpt in here, and even though certain passages really rocked my socks off, I had a hard time pulling it from the context of the book. It is just all so good.

In short, this book gave me a pulse again. It inspired me to actually be fair with the stack of to-reads I've been holding at bay, and for the sake of actually accomplishing them, I am not even going to list them here. It seems I jinx myself whenever I declare lists or to-do's, as if by nature of acknowledging that they are in my future I am also dismissing them at the same time. Boo! No more!

Okay. Never been a huge fan of memoir, unless it's a really stunning person, and this one still proves my dislike. Great writer, and even though his family was really very interesting, I couldn't find it in me to care about what he was writing. It mostly consists of Michael returning to Sri Lanka where he spent his childhood, and interviewing family and old family friends about his parents, grandparents, etc. He didn't even really fully know what happened to his own parents. I think, probably, if I look at it through his perspective, it was probably really healthy for him to go find out all of these things, and to document them somehow, sort them into something concrete. It's probably exactly what I would do. As a writer, it makes sense to do. Maybe if I came back to this later, and read it again, I would feel differently, but the scattered nature of the whole thing just left me completely uninterested.

Reading Into the Wild kind of made me rethink the standards by which I live my own life. I admire the integrity with which Jon Krakauer wrote - he was a journalist exploring the life of a man who fascinated him, and with that and his extensive research, he pieced back together the life of a young man, a reconstructive surgery of sorts, using the tools and knowledge of his profession. All of this, and he still wrote a book that moved him in a very personal way, which can't help but be felt in the reading of it.

I am only 21 years old, but for two years I have been submerged in the work force, earning a living for myself. I was not so privileged to be able to walk straight into a college education, even though I am an excellent student. Because of that, I have already lost my focus, and truly a sense of purpose in life. It is sad that only reading something like this book can move me enough to reconsider, but at the same token, a welcome respite. Chris McCandless was somewhere around 24 or 25 years old when he died in Alaska, but he does remind me of an earlier version of myself, one untainted by the whoredom of having to earn your keep in this world. I was in no way so extreme with the necessities of getting by, but I was so remotely idealistic. This book reminded me that I have kept this sense intact, but it is a little more fragile, a little more at risk of being spoiled out in open air.

I am a little bit in love with the idea of being find such a way to make peace with yourself, even if in a smaller way. To do something revolutionary, albeit small, within the realm of your own life. I finished this book on New Years Eve, but I am counting it as the first of the new year because of how I would like for it to serve as a small stepping stone from one year to the next. I can't help but love the arbitration with which this entire thing comes into being, but everything has to start someplace.

Books read in 2008 (that I recall)

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
The Name of the World by Denis Johnson
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
The World According to Garp by John Irving

Peace, he thought, and as quickly as the thought shaped itself, peace left him.

Sam Shepard, The Self Made Man

To be perfectly honest, I have been reading the new Harry Potter. I haven't spent nearly as much time reading since I got back from Madison/Chicago, and when I noticed on the plane home that I was dog-earing pages of The Rainbow that were exemplary of how fucking terrible I think D.H. Lawrence is, I realized it was time to call it a fair try. I think he is to blame for me being a little disenchanted with the written word for a little while there. Really though, just look at this:

Here in the church, "before" and "after" were folded together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light. Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after knowledge and experience after experience, remembering the darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after death. Then between-while he had pushed open the doors of the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the beginning and the end were one.

See? You'd have to be a masochist to enjoy reading that.

I've read the first few chapters of Wuthering Heights, I have read a few of the stories in the New Sudden Fiction anthology I picked up from the library, and I've actually enjoyed the few stories immensely and I might actually hunt down and buy these collections. Hannah and I have decided we want to read Anna Karenina together, but who knows. Mostly noncommittal, but getting back into the groove of things.

I have been reading D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, and I'm having a difficult time with it. There is something very off-putting present in the text, and I don't know what it is - I always really want to read the book whenever I get the chance, and I am always very excited to be reading it. There is emotional starkness, but also a sort of frustration not quite but akin to angst, and it's written in such a highly stylized manner! I can't dig the flow! I just kind of want to stick it to Lawrence the more I read, but I want to keep reading and make sure that's how I really feel about the book before I judge it.


I have also begun Sacred Games and while at first I was unimpressed, I have found a comfortable groove and I am pleased. Vikram Chandra is a really incredible storyteller, and so his books are the best when there is a narrator present.

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

Buddy Bolden is a cornet player who began to go mad near or at his peak. He played in New Orleans, in the Storyville district, which was sort of notorious for the large volume of prostitutes and gamblers and really, immoral behavior at large. Bolden was married to a former prostitute, by which he had had children, and was a barber by day. Largely the theme deals with the relationship between creativity and the destruction of self, and the thin line that can exist between, and it explored some of the grittier, more superfluous realms attached to said creativity. Ondaatje did a skillful job of presenting the surroundings in a way that excluded judgment, which meant that the human landscape was presented as casually as it could be, thus allowing the reader to absorb everything without repugnance or even really a flicker of conscience.

I honestly didn't know until I had finished the book that this novel was based on a real individual, although from the facts presented and the lean taken in the novel I can certainly see that it is nothing less than historical fiction. I definitely appreciate the approach he took in this novel, and honestly, if anyone were to be invasive enough to write a marginally fictionalized piece about my life, I would swoon if it was Michael Ondaatje. His way with words is beautiful, and even though this was written towards the beginning of his career, I have to say it stands as a very solid piece. I sort of feel cheated that I was not able to read this book in only one sitting - I always like to take my time with his work, to savor his words and take my time with it, but the upbeat nature of this novel had me really ruing that I couldn't devour all of it at once. It really inspired a voracious appetite in me, that wasn't even really satisfied by finishing it, and so I know that this is another book I will have to hunt down and keep a copy of so I can return to it when I'm ready.

I sort of started reading Ondaatje in the middle, and from that I've moved to this, his second earliest, and next I will read his newest novel that just came out in May of this year.


...


On the third day old friends came in, shy, then too loud as they entertained him with the sort of stories he loved to hear, stories he could predict now. He sat back with just his face laughing at the jokes. It was like walking out of a desert into a park of schoolchildren.

Pg 120, Coming Through Slaughter

Hannah texted me today after she finished reading Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje: I'm finished with the book. I held back tears as I sat drinking tea and now I feel empty. With the pages I can feel so clearly, I am receptive within my mental life but reality seems blunt and ironically so much less REAL.

I couldn't sum up the experience of reading his books better than that. I love that man.

And now, the never-ending to-read list:

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
War by Candlelight by Daniel Alarcon
Divisadeo by Michael Ondaatje
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
What is Found There by Adrienne Rich
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers
Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
People of Paper by Salvador Plascensia
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Whie Noise by Dan DeLillo
Flash Fiction Forward & New Sudden Fiction edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard
Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra

...And the thing is, once I actually make the list, it's not nearly as impressive as I would have hoped. However, I know there are numerous more titles and writers I want to check out that aren't listed here. For instance, I've never read any Kurt Vonnegut - for shame! And I call myself a reader!

Books for 2007


1. Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson
2. The Beach by Alex Garland
3. Granta 94: On The Road Again
4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
6. They Went Whistling by Barbara Holland
7. My Michael by Amos Oz
8. The Blue Woman by Mary Flanagan
9. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
10. Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto
11. Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland
12. Glory by Vladimir Nabokov
13. American Purgatorio by John Haskell
14. Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto
15. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
16. Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley
17. Perfume by Patrick Suskind
18. Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
19. Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra
20. My Antonia by Willa Cather
21. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
22. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
23. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
24. The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
25. Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2
26. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
27. The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger
28. The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
29. Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon
30. The Train to Lo Wu by Jess Row
31. Asa, As I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen
32. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
33. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

So, this is day one of a completely separate book journal. I figured it's almost high time, since I keep such silly jabber in my own journal where no one can see it. It would be neat to kind of open up a forum for more book discussion, so I will definitely be seeking those who maintain book journals of their own - I've seen it done, I know they're out there. Since I have already begun a dialog on several books I've read recently, I'm just going to link to that post for future reference, and begin this place fresh for new readins.

Books I've read in 2007, with some commentary
And just because, the books I read in 2006