Reading challenge 2010 – Winter Edition is here!

Here are the 5 books I have chosen for me and Larisa to read concurrently. (Larisa will also choose 5 books.)

1. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Why?

Well, when the Ayatollah declares a fatwa on someone just for writing a book, that must be one helluva book, right?  Frankly I’m amazed Rushdie’s still with us…

2. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Because The Poisonwood Bible was fucking incredible.  This is her most recent novel.

3. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Because I like Nature.

4. Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Because I really sense where she was coming from. (And no, I do not need medical attention, thank you.)

5. The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Because I loved The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo!!!  OMG, OMG – I can’t wait to read this book!

So The Satanic Verses is up first.  Larisa has already started on it and has proclaimed it a bit “weird.”  Sounds like a good sign to me.  I plan on starting it today.

I’m a little more than half way through “The Right to Write,” by Julia Cameron. I’m going to be very dramatic here and say that it’s had a “profound” effect on me. Even before I started reading it, I had made a pretty serious commitment to my writing. I had decided that for the month of March I would write 2,000 words, or an hour’s worth, toward my novel every single night. And I found that once I made that commitment, I was also more interested in reading about writing (Not the other way around).

Julia Cameron’s best known book is “The Artist’s Way.” I have read parts of that and I was just a little turned off by the fact that I think she coddles her readers a little too much. She goes into these diatribes about how we are taught that our writing is bad because we don’t know correct grammar, etc. so I feel like this is really for people who are horrible writers. I, personally, feel like I am a halfway decent writer. My main problem is that I feel like I don’t have anything worthwhile to write about.She sort of does the same thing in “A Right to Write,” but I’m finding it very useful anyway.

First of all, she confirms a lot of things that I have found through self discovery. I read a lot about what writers say, and they are a pretty diverse lot. There are a lot of different camps. Julia seems to be in my camp. I believe that you have to let the writing take you where it wants to go. I could outline until the end of time, but when I start writing, my characters just take me where they want to go. I can’t exactly control it, and I feel like if I did, it wouldnt’ be nearly as interesting. She takes a personal approach to writing. I think that’s a female way of doing things and therefore, in my eyes, the “right” way.

The book is organized into essays and at the end of each essay is an assignment. I think these assignments are equally valid for people of all different levels of writing. I’ve only done a few of them, but I’m enjoying the essays nonetheless.

One thing I’ve done that she recommends is “morning pages.” This is 3 pages of long hand writing every morning. It’s basically journaling. I’m doing this in addition to my 2,000 words, which I usually do on an evening. The reason I said earlier that it has had a profound effect on me is because I essentially feel like I am in psychotherapy. I’m learning a lot about myself. Good things as well as bad things, and it’s profound to be confronted with these things. It’s making me a little bit moody and sensitive but I can’t help but feel that it is also making me understnad myself better. I think it’s creating a change in me that will have effects either good or bad. But essentially necessary changes.

So yeah, blobbedy blob blob blob. This writing stuff is a narcissistic thing to be sure, and probably not very inetersting to read about, but whatever, I’m a WRITER, dude, so I don’t care!

Larisa

I just finished The Making of the African Queen by Katherine Hepburn about her experiences while filming the movie in the 1950s in what was then the Belgian Congo and Uganda in Africa.  I really zipped through this book because it was a) quite short, b) had lots of pictures and c) was a witty good read.  While Ms. Hepburn was a great actress of course, I wished she’d done more writing because she reminds me of a slightly more cheerful Dorothy Parker, and without the boozing.   I’m going to have to watch the movie again to appreciate the new trove of inside information I now have.

Anyhow, I’m still working on The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  I’m also going to start a new fiction work, since it seems like I’ve been going a little heavy on the non-fiction lately.

In other book-related news, I totally scored at my local library’s book sale yesterday!  I got Shalimar the Clown and The Satanic Verses (1st edition!) by Salman Rushdie, Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Lolita by Nabokov and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.  Being the book glutton that I am, I’m considering going back again today!

So this book seemed to take me forever to finish, but I really enjoyed it.  I’d never heard of Edward Abbey before this book, but it turns out he’s quite a well-known author on environmental issues.  (He died in 1989.)  Anyways, Desert Solitaire is a great book.  It’s Abbey’s account of his time in the Arches National Monument in Utah as a seasonal park ranger (I think in the early 60s?) and the beauty and peace he finds there.  Abbey seems like a witty, ornery fellow – you know the old fart who bitches about progress and the trappings of society, especially the automobile.  Here he talks about his plan to ban automobiles from national parks and force visitors to travel by bicycle only:

What about children?  What about the aged and infirm?  Frankly, we need waste little sympathy on these two pressure groups. Children too small to ride bicycles and too heavy to be borne on their parents’ backs need only wait a few years – if they are not run over by automobiles they will grow into a lifetime of joyous adventure, if we save the parks and leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.  The aged merit even less sympathy:  after all they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled.

So now I’m ready to go to Utah and check out Arches National Park!  (Just what Abbey would not have wanted!)

Anyhow, I think my next book will be The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  It seems everyone and his mother that I know is currently reading this book, so I feel compelled to follow suit.

I just finished Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.  Apparently this book was a big sensation in Japan when it was published in 1988.  Hmm, well, maybe something’s lost in translation because this book just didn’t do it for me.  It’s actually 2 short novellas.  The main one is about a girl who goes to live with a neighbor and his transvestite father after her grandmother dies and her relationship with these 2 people.  To me, it struck me as rather trite and amateurish, and full of cliches.  Yoshimoto was only in her early 20s when she wrote this, and to me, it shows.  But it was an easy read and I got through it rather quickly.

Anyhoo, I’m also reading The Making of the African Queen by Katherine Hepburn, which is about the actress’s experience in Africa making the movie (which I looove).  Ms. Hepburn is (was) quite the wit -she’s got me in stitches with some of her sardonic quips.  It’s quite delightful.

Luckily my flights were long to Texas so I had the chance to finish “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater,” by Kurt Vonnegut. Frankly, I wasn’t crazy about this book. I mean, it was pretty light reading, but I’m getting a little tired of his characters. I don’t know why… I just must not be in a Vonnegut mood.

The book was about the unfairness of some people having a lot of money and others not much. And also addresses the issue of what to do with people who are useless… who don’t contribute to society. Then, he brings up the notion that one day we could all be useless with robots and computers and stuff to do all the work. It’s an interesting point really.

Well, whatever, it was no “Sirens of Titan,” which I still rank amongst my favorites. I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for now. Maybe I’ll give Virginia Woolf a try and read “Mrs. Dalloway.” I’ve read her before and even though I really really want to like her, sometimes I just can’t get into it. So why did I pick this one for the reading challenge? Why do I live in Maine? Because I’m a glutton for punishment!

So I’ve just completed not one but two books!  Both of them I borrowed from Larisa.  One I really liked.  The other not so much:

Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper:  The verdict?  Meh.  This book was okaaaay, but didn’t really do it for me.   It was kind of like a Cliff notes version of an actual memoir of a journalist.  I mean it was readable – maybe I was expecting too much from Anderson.  

Whateva.  And then there’s the other book….

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill:  This is a great book – it’s about an aging ex-model with hepatitis looking back on her friendship with a dowdy fag-hag who eventually dies of AIDS.  Gaitskill has a way with language that I really admire and she made a subject that I would not necessarily have been drawn to on my own extremely compelling.  Her characters are deeply flawed and seem very real and I like that.  At times I wondered how much Alison, the ex-model character is taken from the author herself.  Anyways, I really liked it a lot.

Ahh…another Murakami that I love, but really don’t get. This one takes place during one night, starting at 11:56 pm and ending at 6:52 am the next morning. The story centers around a girl named Mari, and her sister Eri. Eri is beautiful, a model, and has been sleeping for 2 months. Mari is cute, studious, and spends the whole night in Tokyo, not wanting to go home. There is also a “love hotel” involved, a musician named Takahashi, a business man who beats up a prositute, and an ex lady wrestler.

I love his settings. Tokyo after dark is sort of a dark, lonely, lawless place. The trains have stopped running for the night, so whoever is there is probably there till morning. She wanders from family restaurant to family restaurant, reading her thick book and waiting till morning. Every now and then Takahashi shows up, who is a musician but has made the decision to grow up and become a lawyer. They form a bond, even though she seems convinced that he really likes her sister instead of her.

Meanwhile, Eri is being transported through a TV set to an empty office building. In fact, the same room as the guy who beats up the prositute. She wakes up and tries to get back. Eventually she somehow does but then she’s asleep again. Mari, through her conversations with Takahashi and the girls at the love ho (as it’s called) realizes that she’s a little depressed that she doesn’t have a closer relationship with her sister. So at the end, she goes home and curls up in bed with Eri, who we think is probably about to wake up as the book ends.

This is my favorite part…his descriptions of the night.

“Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. None of our principles have any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.”

I suffer from frequent insomnia and there are those nights that are just awful. Sometimes thing just seem totally different at night…horrific, scary, nonsensical…and then like magic the sun comes up and you know everything is cool.

I really have no idea what this book is about, but well, I liked it. Maybe the meaning will come to me eventually.

I’m slowly getting out of my winter funk and have even been doing some writing. To make the most of this ambitious mood, I’m going to try to tackle “Forbidden Knowledge.” I don’t really know what it’s about, but I think it will give me lots of material for my novel. If not, I’ll abandon it and read more fiction.

Yesterday I finished reading Beloved by Toni Morrison.  It’s been a while since I really got into a book – you know when you’re reading in bed at night and you want to keep reading but you’re so sleepy you can’t hardly keep your eyes open anymore but you try anyways.  Know what I’m talking about?  Well, that’s how I felt about this book.  I couldn’t put it down.  The subject matter is not happy (just my style!) – it’s about Sethe, an escaped slave in Kentucky (and Ohio) and her children – living and dead, and the guilt that threatens to consume her after she kills one of her daughters rather than have her taken back to slavery.  The depictions of slavery – both the physical and mental aspects of it are really shocking and horrific.   And even once Sethe and Denver, her other (living) daughter are truly ‘free’, they struggle against the ghosts from the past and the reality of being black and female in a white man’s world.

To me, the book almost seemed like a novel-length poem – it’s so lyrical and dreamlike.  I loved it – it’s beautiful and tragic and sad, but ultimately very uplifting.  It was wicked good.