aching/eking(s)

things I read

[kacheeking]

the lost years/months/days

haven’t revisited/thought about things that I’ve been reading on my own terms for a while, but this was the last time I was taking note roughly from July 2015 to May 2016: 

no. 3 shit i’ve been reading: circa march 2016

Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa – Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Found this incredibly illuminating re: sainthood and 16/17th century starvation in the name of religion. Made me think more about the intersections of appetite, power, religion and how this came to a head in that age. The Victorian era sections were also really interesting, I think since I’ve never thought specifically about how food and physical appetite came into the picture even though I’ve known so much about social mores of the time and how that would have been in line? I think reading this overall, esp when they started getting closer to the modern age, I just held this sheer sense of being appalled by medical practice and how eating disorders were treated, viewed and patients subjected to unfair/uncomfortable/even dangerous power dynamics. Feel like it’s so difficult to be a woman, though it’s improving, and my feminist self balked at so much that went on in the book re: this screwed up relationship between physical appetite (sexual and food-related), madonna-whore complexes, freedoms and rebellions and how in the face of so much external pressure women turn inwards and into and on themselves.)

Living Beautifully – Pema Chodron (Last Buddhist book that we had to read for class as part of a course that aimed at understanding the conception of “self” through various lenses e.g. psychoanalytic, evolutionary-biology, religious, etc. Still struggle to reconcile a lot of Buddhist concepts with the reality of a modern nation-state framework that we have to live in. Can see its merits on an individual level but in class, was agitated when the professor seemed to dismiss/relegate discussions of privilege, and power to the sidelines, or equate sufferings that in my mind seem absolutely incompatible. Maybe I’m not “enlightened” yet? Maybe I don’t want to be.)

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (Liked this more than other sci-fi that i’ve picked up. Can see why it’s a “classic”. also read this at a time when i was very much alone/wanted the experience of solitude. want to pick up more sci-fi in future, wondering why i was biased against this genre in the past??)

Devotional Poems – Joe Hall (didn’t seem clean enough, like some phrases were superfluous/didn’t add anything to the force of a poem. a lot of imagery, sound and fury but with no object or point. cacophonous but i didn’t enjoy this collection)

Once in the West – Christian Wiman (really enjoyed this. at first was disappointed – somehow poems that have monosyllable lines or single word lines strike me as irregular/ineffective (?) but this is unwarranted bias i suppose because a lot of the poems ended up having an unexpected resonance. reading wiman and also other poets in class i think you gain an appreciation for what objectively good poetry is. people say that art is subjective but that’s some bullshit at least at the preliminary stages because being an editor for a creative literary magazine i have read a LOT of bad writing and it is clearly not subjective. anyway, what was i on? always enjoy religious/devotional poetry specifically, and most of the time it is circa 16th/17th century, but wiman combines the modernist poetic aesthetic with something enduring and that always wins me over.)

Why be happy when you can be normal? – Jeanette Winterson (read this over two days, and by that i mean it took slightly over 2+/3 hours to get through it all maybe? incredibly easy to read which was why it went so quickly. liked this a lot and want to read more by winterson)

Nobody is ever missing – Catherine Lacey (read this over three days but grew more exasperated as it progressed. think i’m done with self-indulgence/characters who i perceive as self-indulgent. there is more draw for me, now, i think, to contemplate urgencies to others instead of urgencies only to yourself. i want to read not about escapism but about handling ties to history, ties to others, ties that threaten to envelope you but also uplift. this novel was about a woman who leaves a decent life to stay in a sullen silent space of isolation and somehow i cannot accept that anymore.)

numero dos: shit i’ve been reading circa jan 2016

Completed

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell (i liked this and the fact that david mitchell writes so comfortably and well about/when placing his narrative in irish/english contexts. re: this book, i guess we handle/respond to mortality differently. the dystopian end made me think about wanting to recycle/be more environmentally-conscious) – January

Civilization and its discontents – Sigmund Freud (read this for class, again with all freud that i’ve read, some resonates and some i call total bullshit on (everything related to his gender theory tbh).

Man’s Search for Himself – Rollo May (read this for class. every time i read something approximating insightful about self-knowledge i somehow find a crack of doubt that then spreads across the text. there was a short segment about physicality and self-consciousness that i could see be true (and even then only in my context), but i lie in the crevice and believe that the self is unknowable so maybe this class is really just an exercise in futility 4 me?)

A General Theory of Love – Lewis et. al. (read for class again. Generally found this interesting, esp because it put a scientific spin on a theory of attachment and human connection. felt like the presence of objective science, though that is debatable, gave credence to the kind of subjective emotions we have all felt, and so was comforting in some small way.)

February: The Moral Animal – Robert Wright (for class again. basically an evolutionary biology perspective/explanation of morality. Interesting to see but idk, something about attributing so many things/our choices, etc. to biology feels inherently…wrong? but maybe that’s his point.)

Mlodinow, Leonard. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (fascinating but Mlodinow jumps around a lot when writing and it makes me less inclined to believe him?)

What the Buddha Taught – Rahula (feel like the more I read about Buddhism, the more confused I am esp wrt to its metaphysical concepts. felt like a good introduction to something that’s been familiar all my life but i’ve never gotten to know intellectually. but there is something inherent about “unknowable” concepts that may be just shy of religious concepts, but still unacceptable to me)

Four Quartets – TS Eliot (probably one of the best collections of poetry that i’ve ever read. eliot goes into abstractions but grapples with the heart of the matter and there is anguish and brazen honesty and no hesitance to be ugly if that makes sense. need to reread this, probably aloud)

The Monk and the Philosopher – jean-françois revel, matthieu ricard (complicates/simplifies the ideas of buddhism? I can’t quite make up my mind. but the comparison to philosophy and subjecting it to the kind of ‘scientific’ and dialectical method was useful for me to understand it further. that is, beyond metaphors. side note: am q taken with this format of prose—conversation printed)

shit i’ve been reading circa July 2015 

Not that kind of girl – Lena Dunham (felt pretentious at a lot of points) – July

The diving bell and the butterfly – Jean Dominique Bauby (quite good) – July

Madness – Marya Hornbacher (this made me cry) -July

Eat and Run – Scott Jurek (motivation to run as all books about running are) – July

AWOL on the Appalachian trail – David Miller (gets boring if you haven’t been to the AT)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollen (liked this. made me think about my choices and the exact ethical structure behind it – read also: consider the lobster by david foster wallace for a similar/alternative perspective) – August

What I talk about when I talk about running – Haruki Murakami (long time coming to read this, perfect short prose about the draw of running. feel like most people who enjoy running and associate it with thinking/contemplation will get it) – August

Bad feminist – Roxane Gay (brutal at points, beautiful mostly) – August

Under the banner of heaven – Jon Krakauer (this was incredible. well-researched and comprehensive but extremely smooth narrative about mormon fundamentalism.) – September

Valley of the Dolls – Jacqueline Susann (enjoyed this) – September

Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace (title essay is a gem, the rest ranged from obscure to mildly intriguing) – September

Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng (above average) – November

The People’s Republic of Amnesia – Louis Lim (emotional reporting, slated to go one way, but expectedly so) – November

History of Chinese Philosophy – Wing-Tsit Chan (need to reread, slowly, and in detail)

Drinking: A Love Story – Caroline Knapp (well-written and need to stop reading memoirs on vice/transferable behaviours) – November

Modern Romance – Aziz Ansari (ok. choice) – November

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers (liked this a lot, eggers has great arrogant style that works) – December

Slade House – David Mitchell (perfect short read. thrilling. fantasy.) – December

Fates and Furies – Lauren Groff (liked this but it ) – December

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (took a while to get into, but enjoyed this, esp folding routines that appeared in the book into my mind. there is a quietness that steals its way through the pages when the protagonist makes his sandwiches, thinks, goes deep into dry wells) – December

[kacheeking]

the lost novel - james shea

finished this in two days. short poetry collection, which i’m gravitating towards more and more these days (feels like the perfect length for eating lunch with by the river) 

this was a part of maybe six (?) books of poetry that i bought at the midway review sale, and some have been duds and some better than others, but this was actually quite enjoyable. not all the poems were fantastic, but there were definitely more pieces that i thought were nuanced/read incredibly like a quiet moment (??), which i really like in poetry. 

a few poems in particular for me were fantastic, the second half from ‘city of the one-sided sun’: 

The walk of a stranger,

movements of the earth

are no longer believable.

It’s the act that matters: 

less the hydrant, red solid,

quiet with water, more

the belief in believing,

the faith we have even

in reason, a partial tree. 

And the short poems, like ‘prayer’: 

When the time comes, O Lord,

don’t take me on an inhale–

want to get his first collection now. 

[kacheeking]

C - Tom McCarthy

finished this painfully slowly (or maybe just felt like time has been dripping at an unreasonably glacial pace) but this 

this felt like a long book, maybe also because i was reading a lot of poetry collections in between. 

if there’s one thing i consistently felt throughout the book it was that the research that went into it was impressive. a lot of stuff about telecommunications in the early 20th century and circuitry and whatnot. read somewhere about this book that it leaves a lot of things unanswered and that’s very true. it follows the life of serge carrifax who’s father runs a school for the deaf but insists on teaching them to speak and bans signing. his mother is hopped up on opiates and nearly lets him drown as a child, and his sister is a child-genius who kills herself when she’s 17. the book is in 4 (?) parts and it follows him as he attempts to heal himself at some natural spring in europe, and then into the war, and then back from war where he’s gotten himself addicted to heroin, and then to egypt where he’s on assignment by the military. 

it was strange in that a lot of the “significant” happenings aren’t dwelled on – his sister’s death isn’t explained much, the war seems to pass through him like something cursory. the sense of distance is something i think the novel comes back to again and again, and probably makes ironic with the running theme of circuitry and (electric) connections. 

didn’t ever really have a particular part jump out at me in terms of writing, though i did enjoy the descriptions of serge roaming the streets of london looking for a hit and lounging out of his mind in drug dens. 

maybe this succeeded at the task of distancing too well (?) 

felt apart from it all, not emotionally invested in any character, plot line, etc. but i think that’s the point; to take this in a somewhat abstracted sense and have half-wrought meaning come of it. 

i really q liked this. 

[kacheeking]

forty-one jane doe’s – carrie olivia adams

been such a long time since i’ve written here/written about books that i’ve been reading. all these books have gone undocumented but i guess now’s the time to start again. 

picked up this collection of poetry at a poetry book/chapbook sale that the logan center was having last quarter (its summer now). spent a little bit of a morning reading this while having weetabix in a bowl and raspberry jam. unnecessary reading details aside, i liked this. 

“Moments after asking 

what is the meaning of love 

she makes love. 

This does not answer 

the question.” 

From “A Mystery Story” made me breathe in a little deeper i think. 

and then: 

“You’ve sat nightly and watched what I’ve put forth. 

Astronomer, you tell me, there is geometry in the humming of strings. 

I’ve said it is all bird calls echoing in a cave. 

You tell me – Make the blue a little more blue. 

I’ve touched it, I tell you. 

               It was all there once: 

               Seduced for a moment

                                          and it breathed light.”

from “Pandora’s Star Box”. 

Yesterday I went to the art institute with a friend and they were having an exhibit on american painting in the 1930s. There were several Edward Hopper pieces in there, and I think i see (and appreciate) the same sense of urban quiet in his paintings as I do in quite minimalist poetry. 

this is “gas” by Hopper. 

And “morning sun”: 

And this is from the poem “technologies” in the book: 

“I try to imagine the space without me in it.

First the bed, then the train car, the coffee line. 

It is an act of extreme egotism to believe

that my being [here]

changes the city.

Disrupts it so.

A windbreak. A shadow caster. 

My breath catches. Extends. 

Self or selfless,

I am in the way. 

In one of our stories, 

afterward, when we lie apart

I tell him that my mind

feels distant now from my wrists,

knee caps, the hinges. 

[in either life]

The refracted image of a sea caught 

still sleeping.” 

[kacheeking]

Mortality - Christopher Hitchens

finished this pretty quickly - it's more of a series of connected essays than anything else. Admittedly I've never read much of Hitchens, his columns or any of his writing before this, and yet, when the book mentions his immense repute and the strong voice he had with his writing, I think I can understand. 

These series of essays were written about his time dealing with malignant and fatal esophageal cancer. His musings and epiphanies on life and, eventually, encroaching death. 

I liked it. 

I liked the fact that death here is portrayed in its starkest, almost mundane terms. Not fantasized or romanticized. This reminds me of How We Die by Sherwin B Nuland which I read a couple of years ago, which takes apart the literary aspects of death and strips it down to clinical and practical terms, the degeneration of bodily functions and what one can expect in that situation. 

Hitchens has a beautiful way of writing and portraying the ironies of death, the little incompatibilities and, sometimes, silliness of it all. At one point he talks about people's reactions when they find out about his cancer, how a lot of them offer to pray for him, and how his cancer is couched in terms of a "fight", these small details of language, of contrary positions. This part especially, I think, was great: 

The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival. 

I think when it comes down to it, it's difficult to read a book like this, knowing its truth, feeling its sober hold on you, and realizing in full force how this is the record of a dying man. The physicality of death, how we are inextricably linked to and dependent on our bodies (it is when it fails that we die) despite some of us (I say some and I also mean me) spending all of our lives denying this physicality. 

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body. 

There were some parts of the book where he writes about voice and expression, and how, in particular it is seminal, essential in his identity as a writer, as a person. I thought about how I always believed that a man's memories makes a man, but then here, it is the expression of these sentiments, the verbalizing of it - production - that makes the difference. It's curious: 

Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I "was" my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. 

And then again: 

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can't eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it's only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: They are talkers with whom it's a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often close-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech. 

The book's last chapter written by Hitchens is fragmentary and composed of brief sketches of paragraphs and scribblings still in production, but were gathered after his death and assembled as the concluding chapter. It's, I wouldn't say disturbing, but definitely unsettling to a degree, to see these fragments of what could have beens. 

His wife provides the afterword and though she prefaces it with a disclaimer about how her words cannot compare to Hitchens', even as I read her concluding statements I feel, imperceptibly, the loss she has experienced. 

At home in Washington, I pull books off the shelves, out of the book towers on the floor, off the stacks of volumes on tables. Inside the back covers are notes written in his hand that he took for reviews and for himself. Piles of his papers and notes lie on surfaces all around the apartment, some of which were taken from his suitcase that I brought back from Houston. At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him.

When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word. Time after time, Christopher has the last word.

This was powerful. 

[kacheeking]

Hard Night - Christian Wiman

it's been a long while since I've written on here about a book - novel, anthology, memoir or otherwise. Been busy with the second year of college and it shows with the neglect of this cyber space. 

In any case, recently finished this collection of poetry by Christian Wiman. I've only read one other collection by him before (Every Riven Thing), and to be honest, preferred that a lot more than this. Overall, this was a lot more rhymed, a lot...different in terms of the themes that he chose to deal with. It's also a collection that was published 5 years before Every Riven Thing, so in terms of poetic conceptions/inspirations and I guess just overall life (?) he was probably in a different space. Reading this I felt like there were parts that I could have connected to in the past but now no longer can? It's the same feeling that I get when I read Siken's Crush now. The first time I stumbled on his poems and read them aloud in their surrealist swing of mood and their arc - there was the sense of breath and tone and, laughably, connection, which I suppose at some level you want poetry to do for you. But reading them again now, it feels like I've exhausted them.

With this, there were some poems that were hits and some that were misses. Increasingly I'm drawn more and more to the minimal aesthetic - in literature as well as, I can only hope, other parts of life. Wiman's poetry does this well I think - for me anyway. The idea of poetry as object, "no ideas except in objects", the stillness of it all, resting totality - there's a measure of it here I think. Though Wiman still does this epiphanic trick with his words that tries to capture you at the end. 

There are a couple that I liked a lot: 

Still Life: San Francisco 

The fog is the body it can't quite be

these evenings of early August,

coming together

                                    and apart

in the peach tree's fist 

of limbs, the ice plant's leaves,

center and remnant

everywhere it is.

                          How suddenly

it can happen, a room lose

solidity, the furniture permeable,

walls gone granular

as the light and nothing

intact enough to withstand

touch. 

          Hard to say

the moment

it's over, what's left,

what's lost, all of night

inside.

again the idea of poetry as still life and pictorial rather than descriptive. I like that. I think in this collection there is more of a hunger, a more desperate kind of unintelligible, unprocessed, raw desire - the kind that comes with youth maybe, or less time to ruminate and settle. 

I liked this excerpt from his poem "The Last Hour" a lot: 

                      Light carved

out of the darkness

a muscled trunk,

each clenched limb

and the difficult tips

of a plain mesquite

taking shape

over the hard ground

where they found him, 

his eyes wide 

and his whole body 

hungering upward,

as if he could hear

and bear the bird

singing unseen

deep in those leaves.

The end of this collection (in five parts), is a twenty-two part poem called "Being Serious", and though that was enjoyable at points to read and felt like-almost-but-not-quite-relatable, there just wasn't anything there that I could salvage for my memory (?) 

I finished this but it doesn't seem like poems that i would revisit. 

[kacheeking]

The Interestings - Meg Wolitzer

finished this novel in one sitting while i was stuck in an airport overnight in Tennessee. I didn't sleep much but I managed to get through all 540 pages of this book and mostly enjoyed it. 

I'm drawn to novels about youth and aging, though both subjects seem to be antithetical. I guess it's the scarcity, the brevity of it all and then the subsequent realisation or acknowledgement (of time, limitations, etc.) that fascinates me. This novel's about a group of friends who meet at summer camp for creative/artistic teenagers and follows them over the course of their lives as they move into various stages of their lives, each having to deal with success or the lack of it, money, love, careers - all of that or the lack of it actually. It's a central group of 6 teenagers but the main character is a girl called Jules (formerly called Julie) who starts of more as an outsider than anyone else. Several things that this novel talked about that I found interesting/were of interest to me: envy/jealousy-love spectrums, wasted potential, resentment at mediocrity, contradictions and being morally hypocritical. 

Satisfaction/dissatisfaction was something that the novel mentioned a lot. Jules is married and holding down a job and has a husband and child and throughout it all there is a latent dissatisfaction that she cannot shake. Something about that terrifies me. Not merely because I can (fore)see myself falling into something like that, but also because it's a situation that is ridiculously easy to become comfortable with/reside in. The normalcy of it all, the acceptability of such a sensation and emotion is disconcerting. 

Another thing was the idea of potential. Remember asking someone once (and being asked) what my/their greatest fear was, and I said: "potential", specifically unfulfilled potential and uncertain potential. Goodman, one of the six, eventually ends up "wasting his potential" and essentially living on his own terms, which are - alcoholism, drugs, half-hearted construction jobs. His sister Ash becomes a prolific director and writer. The fulfilled potential, the thwarted future. It's unclear which is/was a better path. 

I guess more than anything, it was the overall flow of the book that spoke to me. There's a sense of mundanity, of an even-toned-ness that underwhelmed. The sheer monotony of life - how boring is it all? How small are our desires and fears? How insignificant? 

This has been such a fragmented thought process. 

[kacheeking]

Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov

Technically this should be considered almost cheating since I read this book as part of my reading list for my Readings in World Literature class. But truthfully, about 70% of my reading time is now spent on college readings including biology articles, social sciences (so far this quarter including: Durkheim, levi-strauss, Sahlins, Kuhn, Saussure), french translations and my lit texts. For this quarter: St. Augustine, Nabokov, Soyinka, Bechdel. 

Besides, I enjoyed this book tremendously. So there. 

This book is a memoir of sorts, revised and revisited. It was first published as Conclusive Evidence, then published as Speak, Memory, then revisited and republished with added content. I have my hands on the latest version and got to write a paper on it. (30% of my grade wow). 

There's a lot to be said about Nabokov, his obsession with butterflies as a motif and thematic pattern is but one. In class we were challenged to think about this novel as more than just an autobiography, or rather, the question that was posed was: "To what extent can this really be considered a memoir? What is the truth that is recorded here or does it even matter? What is the role of memory here?" 

All pertinent and important questions and the type of questions that I enjoyed thinking about. I remember saying that the process of writing is always necessarily a recreation of a memory, a re-imagining of something that was experienced through sensory methods. The concept of authenticity and truth came about more than once and there's surely a lot more to be said about it but I feel like I talked a lot about it in class already so. 

As a whole I enjoyed this because first and foremost it is beautifully written. There are a lot of definitions of good writing and though it's true that simple and clean prose (ala Hemingway) grips me in a way that I cannot comprehend, Nabokov's style is appealing in its own way. 

Liked this a lot. Want to take another Nabokov class/read another Nabokov book. 

[kacheeking]

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea - Barbara Demick

Read this on the way back to Chicago on the plane and then later in a hotel downtown where I was holed up before the dorms opened on a Sunday. I remember holding this book open while lying in bed and feeling 6 degrees of separation. It's a brilliant work of journalism for sure, and I've noticed that it's these forms of writing that appeal to me the most - the imperceptible weaving of personality and the sense of the personal into an objective (often historical and political) landscape, but it's subject matter is so incredibly unsettling. 

The book is about North Korean refugees, or really, a North Korean refugee in particular and her immediate family. It traces the lives that they led in North Korea through various interviews the author conducted with them and gives us glimpses of what they're like after settling in South Korea. 

It's very compelling. Demick has an exceptional way of showcasing the human spirit - and I say that hopefully not evoking that hallmark-card, artificial sense of human triumph, but a more gritty version. These people have created some semblance of normalcy and sometimes, not often, but sometimes, wonder in their lives. There is a great deal of sensitivity in the reporting that I appreciate. So often with non-fiction, that is, non-fictional reporting and journalism, there is a conflict between extraction of a story and the sensitivity allotted to the owner of that story. 

The part that stuck with me the most, or rather, that I found the most intriguing was the brief views of Miran that Demick provides from her settled days in South Korea. Some ghost of the past hangs about her and there is an uneasy acclimatization to a new country that doesn't understand her past experience, her past way of life, her past reality. In one part she writes:

"A decade later, when Mi-ran was a mother herself, trying to lose her postpregnancy weight through aerobics, this period of her life weighed like a stone on her conscience. She often felt sick over over what she did and didn't do to help her young students. How could she have eaten so well herself when they were starving?

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn't going to share her food with her favourite pupil, she certainly wasn't going to help a perfect stranger. 

The sharp juxtaposition between the conspicuous wealth and abundance of her present existence compared to her past, and more than that, her seeming internalisation of these new values and norms, which I can only guess, cannot be total or true. 

Reading this book I thought about morality and the concept of justice and inherent goodness a lot. We're studying the origins of social thought at the moment in class and this idea about morality and an inherent sense of what is wrong-right seems somehow a creature of its own in a situation like North Korea. One of the chapters in the book is entitled "The Good Die First", and I can imagine that that is true, logically. At the same time, I wonder whether survival whilst having contravened your sense of morality (this is assuming that you have one and one that is consciously linked to guilt) may be in fact, worse. This is an extreme situation, but still, the limits of morality are interesting lines to draw. 

The book writes in a very factual way despite the personality of the prose. I can't quite seem to express this but it tells a story without the embellishments, without the often-seen "literary"/"romantic" qualities of prose or recalled memories. I think this works and is the only way to really tell a story like this, with dignity, with sensitivity, without the unnecessary insult of embellishment with imagination. 

[kacheeking]

Appetites - Caroline Knapp

one of the more powerful books I've read in a while. On the cover it's, I think, falsely advertised as "the smartest anorexia memoir ever written", not because it isn't smart, but because it's much more than a memoir, a recount, of anorexia. In it, Knapp writes about female desire - our tendency to diminish it, attempts to curb it, overindulgence of it, frustration and confusion at its source, and overall the dual questions: why and what do we want? 

I finished reading this in the month of January probably, but never got the chance to properly write about it until now (lakehouse break!). There's so much that she says that I understand on an almost corporeal level if that makes sense at all. 

Knapp is a former anorexic/journalist, a combination that seems to be rather disturbingly common. There is something perhaps about the personalities of wordsmiths and anorexics that run to a common fold - the desire to perfect/shape/construct or deconstruct perhaps? I'm unsure. Regardless, in this book Knapp speaks about so much more than just the physical-mental disorder that plagued her but also the commonalities that instigate such a psychological response. The common triggers of alcoholism, eating disorders, shopping addictions, insecurities and a myriad of other debilitating, self-imposed conditions.

She says this: 

“And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop.” 

The trifecta of "sex and power and value" - doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that sound agonizingly confusing and difficult to navigate? The whole point of this book - appetites - was so wholly intriguing for me because I feel like it's absolutely true. Women and appetites - an unceasing antagonism. If it is us against our bodies, us against our pleasures, us against our ambitions, us with our self-limitations and constraints. The constant need to control, to curb, to limit.

One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was her analysis of the balance between appetites that women attempt to juggle, and the deep-seated sense of guilt and need for compensation that accompany a success in their lives. I can't recall precisely the chapter where she talks about this, but in it she speaks of a woman, wildly successful at her career, who feels the need to serve penance for it in some other form, in some other area of her life. Think: a clearly powerful CEO subjecting herself to domestic abuse or an emotionally/physically abusive relationship. The point of this is not, however, to show women as unhinged completely illogical creatures, but as simply unable to fully derive the same pleasure and occupy the full depth of their appetites. 

I could talk at length about this, but Knapp does so much more eloquently and with such incredible sensitivity, sense and balance. 

5/5 would recommend to any female friends or actually even male friends. Really, everyone should read this.

[kacheeking]

Ms Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs

Read this while on the plane from Chicago to Dunedin. (Actually it was from Chicago to LA to Auckland to Wellington to Dunedin, but who's counting?) Needed an easy read to get me by the long flight and to read in between my final essay-writing which involved a lot of Marx (not fun). 

This novel combines both visual elements (old photographs) and text. It's only been the second book I've read that has done this. (the first that I read was the book thief I think.) The central protagonist is a young teenage boy who witnesses his grandfather's death, imagines (or does he?) that his grandfather was in fact killed by a monster, and goes to the island his grandfather told him about in his childhood to uncover truths/secrets, etc. There's of course an element of magic/fantasy in this novel where the fairy tales his grandfather tells him in his boyhood in fact (surprise surprise) turn out to be true. 

The fantastical element about the book is something I enjoy quite a bit. Read a book a while ago called the night circus, and though the plot wasn't complicated, nor were the characters necessarily complex, the visual descriptions were what I loved so much. Really rich imagery. It brought me back to why I read so much in the first place: to see. 

As a whole, the book doesn't throw any curveballs or unexpected turns. Though it's a fantasy-thriller there are a lot of things that follow a pattern, lots of instances of "revelation" where all I could think was 'i called this from page one'. Plot-wise it seemed to come to an inevitable conclusion. 

Anyway, I guess the part of this book that I found most interesting was the family relations between Jacob and his parents. There are instances where I held the book and thought, 'this would be a really interesting thread to follow' specifically about Jacob's father's anxiety/insecurity about his intellectual potential, his relationship with Jacob as reflective/in response to/in retaliation against his treatment by his father (Jacob's grandfather), the inability to connect even within a family, his wife as apart from him, notions of "settling". Felt like I would actually appreciate the book even more if it had Jacob's father as the central character because it would be nice to see the person who is left behind. When Jacob chooses to leave at the end there is no, or little struggle. Within the span of two weeks he is swayed by "magic" far enough to abandon all that he has known to be family. I don't like that unrealistic prospect. Felt like his father deserved more even though he's admittedly painted as a flawed adult/human. 

Also realising that I have a thing for reading about middle-aged crisis characters. 

This was a quick read. I wouldn't read it again. Feel like it doesn't have much to offer after the first fleeting feelings of excitement, though the interspersed images are nice. 

[kacheeking]

Half in Love - Maile Meloy

this is the fourth book from maile meloy that i've read so far (two novels and a collection of short stories) and i've realised why I like her writing so much. she captures that gasp before the fall. the hushed moment of realisation, of acceptance, of solitude, of fracture that's housed in each of us, and she does this unaffectedly. I like that a lot. 

both here and in "both ways is the only way i want it" (which i adored and could very well be my favourite collection of short stories), she writes about halves, about competing interests and the impossibility of complete devotion, the impossibility of totality, the artificiality of being always whole. her stories time and again speak to me about this reality of fragments, and hers is the sort of writing that has me think to myself "yes, this is what i feel. yes, this is how i would describe it if i had the words." 

i think above all, i like the quietness of it all, the sense of profound normalcy that is inherent in all her stories. most of the time her stories seem to follow a slow sinking rhythm rather than anything hurried or dramatic.

In this book my favourite stories were: 'Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976" and "The River". In the first, there are two couples, close friends, each sleeping with the others' wives until one of the men drowns. In the wake of that there is a residual regret. In the second, there are two women and a man, one of them is dying, they all love each other because they can't help it. 

my favourite part from the second story: 

"At 4am i wake and not a single truck goes by on the highway. I wait in the silence while my eyes adjust, and Jo turns over in her unzipped bag and sighs, eyes closed. I brush her hair from her face and she mumbles something I can't understand. Then she raises herself on her elbow with a gasp and looks toward the river. "Inger!" she calls out softly. "Inger!" She clutches my arm and her eyes are wide. 

"She's here," I say. "She's asleep." 

"Oh," she says, looking around the room. Her breathing slows. "I thought the water was rising," she says. "I thought Inger was out in the river and I wasn't watching." She turns to look at the sleeping bag by the door, Inger's braid snaking out of it in the moonlight, and she says, "It's all right. It's okay." She slides back down into bed, still mostly asleep. I stroke her dried and drying hair until she turns away from me. 

I watch, listening to the slow breathing in the room, until the moon has sunk below the bluffs. To put myself to sleep I try to remember every object in my father's examining room when I was a kid. The stethoscope, the small sink, the high white bed, the jars of cotton. The framed certificates he didn't notice any more than he noticed the doors or the windows, but that made him seem able to help people. I used to read the embossed words, the important signatures, my father's name, thinking what he did was good, and I would try to do the same." 

[kacheeking]

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness - Susannah Cahalan

started reading this book almost three weeks ago but only finished it today. Saturday mornings in the dining hall have fast become my quiet space for the week - breakfast, coffee, leisure reading. my weekends start like this. 

I liked this a lot. It's a memoir of her ordeal/experience with autoimmune disease, but told through fragments of memories, pieced together accounts of her stay in hospitals, shards of images that she can scarcely put back together. So much of what she describes in the beginning is a mental degeneration, almost, and she is diagnosed with this at some point, psychosis. There's a fearlessness in her writing, her exploration into her own mental/physical/physiological condition, yet also, what I can sense, a fear of confronting it. It's almost too jarring to see yourself in the depths of a condition. While writing this, she revisits the hospitals where she was admitted to, and watches videos of herself recorded from when she was, in more ways than one, not herself. It's a literal looking in on herself, an outsider's observation, a dissociation. The entire concept of being distended from yourself, of existing outside of yourself struck me in this book. I can only imagine how terrifying it is to unwillingly lose your sense of self to something as sinisterly fundamental as a physical illness. Most of all, it was her detailing of her loss of language, her loss of ability of expression that scared me. From being a journalist, an architect of words, she falls to someone who dribbles while lying in bed, unable to pronounce or enunciate, unable, at certain points, to even speak, or move. Even after her recovery, or rather, remission, from this disease, she talks about not feeling "herself" for a period of time. Remember reading an article about comatose/rehabilitated patients who had to relearn locomotive functions: they never felt like they were authentically performing motions, merely replicating them artificially. It never felt "natural".

Probably the other thing that struck me about this book was how it dealt with realities. She describes how memory plays such a huge part in that, and how, because of her loss of memory, so much of what she discerns is real or unreal is flawed. This account I found interesting: 

More recently, an orchestra conductor named Clive Wearing contracted a devastating form of herpes simplex encephalitis that ravaged his brain, destroying his hippocampus. Like H.M., Wearing could not retain any new declarative memories, meaning that his world was constantly new to him. He couldn't recognise his children, and whenever he saw his wife, to whom he had been married for years, he felt as if he was falling in love for the first time. His wife, Deborah, wrote a book about his case, aptly titled Forever Today. In it she wrote: "Clive as under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before." A prolific writer himself, Wearing kept lengthy diaries. But instead of filling them with insight or humour, he was constantly writing the following: 

8.31AM: Now I am really, completely awake.

9.06AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake. 

9.34AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake. 

The divide between what is real and what is not, the reliability of our own memories, the arbitrariness of it all, the constructed and the natural, the terror inherent in losing a sense of reality or grasp on reality. 

I liked this book a lot. There's a sense of thoroughness in its exploration of an illness, but through a personal perspective. Would re-read it again at some point. 

[kacheeking]

A Thousand Mornings - Mary Oliver

haven't actually been reading much since coming to college, apart from the assigned syllabus that is, which I've been burning through (Hobbes, Rousseau, Gilgamesh, EP Thompson, Adam Smith). The fact that there's been an insane amount of reading for classes in only 2 weeks explains how I haven't been able to catch up with leisure reading, but also the fact that apart from one james joyce book and the little prince, I didn't bring much else in way of books to college. (you can partially see my dorm room in the background and it is every bit as ordinary as you thought it would be)

Bought this one on amazon which has now become my site of choice for impulse buys and other such nonsense mostly because of the free two-day shipping that comes free with amazon prime which comes free with being a college student which comes free with being broke. Saw this book in the school bookstore a while back and wanted to get it after reading a couple of poems. 

To be honest, i didn't enjoy it quite as much as I had expected to. In fact, was pretty disappointed with the entire anthology. She writes a lot about nature and most if not all her imagery is rooted in the american natural landscape. Obviously there isn't an issue about that, but most of the poems capture a sort of ironically artificial sense of sereneness that I can't, for the life of me, get over or learn to accept. I guess more than anything she strikes me as a poet that is distant from her material, who chooses to be a poet-observer rather than a poet-reflector if that makes any sense at all. 

Having come from just reading every riven thing by christian wiman (which I loved and could very well be my favourite anthology I've ever read), this was a huge letdown. The sense of the poet as person doesn't come across much at all in her poems and I guess I'm a particular type of reader when it comes to poetry. I enjoy the typically dramatic-existential-drama of inner turmoil/monologue. She comes across as basically fully-formed and a knower of all things having overcome her personal demons of which we are not privy to. Her poems use simple language and all of her poems, save one, are 1-2 pages, the shortest being about 4 lines. She's an imagery-poet in that sense, poking about at capturing a particular situation or picture, but often without a clear point/issue/concern. I see poetry more as a way of communicating a message, which may sometimes comes across more strongly with imagery, but I guess never really with imagery as the main object in mind. In harsher terms I found a lot of her poems pointless, and often wished that she'd inject something more human into her verse so I'd know she was actually a person. I just found the tone of the entire anthology unnecessarily pure and enlightened, which perhaps isn't a negative trait at all, but it only distances me from the material I read and makes for a very regrettable decision in buying this book. 

Basically: would not recommend. 

[kacheeking]

Every Riven Thing - Christian Riven

it seems quite egotistical to name an anthology after yourself but I suppose when you have an as appropriate and fitting last name as "riven" (definition: split or tear apart violently), why wouldn't you? it's almost incomprehensibly perfect that his name is christian riven because it somehow encompasses a lot of the Christian experience in two words, and is apt/reflective of the fractured/realistic sense of religion within the anthology itself. 

this probably doesn't belong on this site because a. it's not on the guardian list (ha, am I even following that anymore?) b. it's not even prose, but it's too good to say nothing about honestly. I don't think I've read anything lately that I've liked as much as this anthology of poetry. It's divided into three sections, and a lot of the poetry has a distinctly religious slant to it, though somehow, he does this with so much precision and style and flow that it feels almost natural, well, it is natural really. talked to a friend about this and realised at that time that what I think would be christian riven's musical equivalent in terms of melding art and religion and self-expression seamlessly and naturally would be sufjan stevens. 

So many poems that I liked in this anthology. When I read poetry it takes about 3-4 times as long because I tend to analyse/annotate in a notebook as I read and write down lines that I particularly liked by hand, etc. somehow feels like the words run more deeply that way. 

the first poem of the anthology, "Dust Devil", easily became one of my favourites. 

Dust Devil 

Mystical hysterical amalgam of earth and wind 

and mind 

over and of 

the much-loved 

dust you go

through a field I know 

by broken heart 

for I have learned this art 

of flourishing 

vanishing 

wherein to live 

is to move

cohesion

illusion 

wild untouchable toy 

called by a boy 

God's top

in a time when time stopped. 

think that throughout the anthology, or at least the first section, there's a large theme of self-determination vs. fate/destiny at work. the idea of the creator and the creation, and to whom do each belong? for this poem I wrote down as I read it: youth, a kind of careful, tentative recklessness, contained abandon, and profound wisdom to/about living. shielded against elements by disposition and not strength. vulnerability but also worldliness of character. God's instrument, someone who recognizes a world beyond him but also "top" as in dominant and above and controlling. god, how does someone write like this? the interplay between the controlled and the one in control. mortality. the sense of an ending breathes heavily down your back. 

a lot of the poems deal with mortality, religion in the face of mortality, withering life and the recognition but not necessarily acceptance of a higher power. "after the diagnosis" was another poem I liked a lot. some of my favourite lines from it were: 

"Change is a thing one sleeps through/when young, and he was young." 

"A days changes mean all to him/and all days come down/to one clear pane" 

"as if something at the heart of things,/and with the heart of things,/had willed it." 

The sense of control - relinquishing it, accepting it, giving it over in its entirety, fear of it, is very much present. there is the quiet sense of acceptance at the end that calms me. while reading this anthology I remembered thinking "if there is anything that could convince me of god's existence it is not god himself but what i see of him reflected in those who believe". i think it is the same here. the appeal of such a faith is clear when you read his poems - you will not find any equivalent level of reassurance in anything but a higher power, a god, something that transcends mortality, physical limitations. 

Of all the poems I have read within the anthology, the titular poem is one of the, if not the best of the lot. In it's entirety (because only then can you see how beautiful and whole it is): 

Every Riven Thing 

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is: 

stone and tree and sky, 

man who sees and sings and wonders why. 

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone 

trying to will himself into a stillness where 

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made 

there is given one shade 

shaped exactly to the thing itself: 

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see 

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made 

the things that bring him near, 

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows, 

apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made. 

Next to this I wrote: can see how this would be of comfort and perfection and gratitude to one who believes and accepts the grace/love/mercy/dominion of god, but I am still struck by his language. it is the sense of an all encompassing completeness, wholeness, that lunges out at me. the repetition of the first line conveying a repetitive symbolism - reflected in every mirror, he dwells in all forms and all occasions, belonging to all. "under the tree a darker tree;/under the man the only man to see" so clever, so complete. the duality of the situation: creator and creation. To whom does each belong? is creation a part or apart from/of the creator? stunning stunning stunning. 

Other instances of stunning language within the anthology: 

from "A Good Landscape for Grief": 

Depression is a wet word, with ripe vines,

claustrophobic moss, endless dripping

instants which here have no more

purchase on the earth

than a tear from an armadillo's eye. 

Which I think is scarily accurate and justified. 

To be honest, I found the second section underwhelming when compared to the first. Most of what I found exceptional came from the first 10-ish poems and thereafter it was a matter of uncovering disparate gems of lines from within poems. 

There is something in all of this, some instances when I think "ah, the frenzied religiosity of Donne!", though I know this comparison can only be used loosely and with much reserve. But here's where it came about, from "And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud" from the third section, the ending lines: 

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things

and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my fluorescent self

my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self

withers in me like a salted slug. 

But mostly, it is the peace of faith: 

from "Hammer Is the Prayer": 

And as wind in some lordless random comes to rest, 

and all the disquieted dust within,

peace came to the hinterlands of our minds,

too remote to know, but peace nonetheless. 

from "Lord is not a Word" 

Lord suffer me to sing

these wounds by which I am made

and marred, savor this creature

whose aloneness you ease and are. 

And his last poem, "Gone for the Day, She is the Day" 

To love is to feel your death

given to you like a sentence,

to meet the judge's eyes

as if there were a judge,

as if he had eyes, 

and love.

The closest I have felt to God/god/godliness/holiness was love. 

I loved this anthology. 

[kacheeking]

Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman

stared this book on August 16th and so far it's been an easy narrative to read. Written in the first person, the narrator is an 11-year-old boy from Ghana, recently moved to England and therefore figuring out the perils of this new country. Interwoven with his train of thought is a pigeon's, his pigeon to be specific, in a different script, and very very lyrical. The one event that shakes his world thus far is the death of a boy who'd been "chooked" or stabbed. (The use of slang here is masterful I think, and especially so considering the whole premise of the book) On a slightly related note, I must say I really enjoy it when I see references or homage paid to a certain culture or language that the book is about, especially if the book is written in English. Just as how some people say that translations are never as good as the original script, I feel like the immensity of a culture and the texture of a country/area/region is the most authentic when presented in its native language. And while sometimes these references are made cheaply and without proper consideration (see some Singapore literature and the throw-away 'lahs' that are included for no reason at. all.) the very inclusion of it seems to at least indicate the author's desire to express some love and consideration of the culture and its inability to be fully detailed without that vital link to its language.) 

So far, favourite parts have included: 

"Before you start running, find an empty bit of the world with nothing in the way." 

From the pigeon's perspective: 

"Violence always came too easy to you, that's the problem. It always felt too good. Remember the first time you trod on an ant, and with an infant stamp made the moving still, the present past? Wasn't that a sickly sweet epiphany? Such power in your feet and at your fingertips such temptation! It would take some act of charity to give all that good stuff away. You'd need to be something greater than just another invention of a spiteful god." 

[edit]

Now finished the book and to be honest I don't love it. It's a delightful novel to be sure - solid storyline, interesting narrator, distinct style, great insight and texture given to the setting, it just isn't something that catches my fancy I suppose. 

Though I must say it's an amazing view of the knife culture/"rough" neighborhood setting of England, more realistic than most and because written in the style of a young boy, more poignant and believable. There's a naturalization that occurs when you go through the novel. Slowly the unbelievable - the violence, the constant danger - becomes a part of the setting in an incredibly natural way that you're led to believe that it has always been and always will be that way. It's a frightful norm, and the fact that by the middle of the novel I read "chook" in the same blasé way that the rest of the characters do is telling. 

Anyway, parts that I liked/found interesting: 

"We live and breathe within the boundaries of our charges; we reach out for them when the bridge between them and their god is blocked." 

"I can pray for what I like." 

[kacheeking]

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

this was an absolute tome of a book and took me twice/thrice as long to get through (but probably also because of the incessant travelling I was doing). Finished it in a little over three weeks but will probably re-read it in time to come because of how dense it really is - the prose is woven so tightly with imagery, symbolism, hidden gems that it's easy to gloss over some of the finer details for the sake of just getting through the damn thing.

the plot in short: saleem sinai, the narrator and protagonist, is born on the stroke of midnight of india's independence (and also partition), thus conferring upon him psychic powers that allow him to connect with 1000 other 'midnight's children', also born during that midnight hour. the story details his life and times, trials, tribulations, etc. 

to be honest, this is the first taste of salman rushdie's writing for me and i'm only slowly warming to it. the persona that midnight's children has is straightforward, effervescent, and i don't quite know how to put this, but very indian. and that's something that i've noticed with the other indian writers when writing about India specifically. always the spices, always the textures, the flavours, the layers, the colours, but i suppose that is quintessentially india and any writing that doesn't make mention of it can hardly be said to do the country justice. 

another thing that I feel is somehow also quintessentially indian, only from what i have read and i don't pretend to be an expert on it, but the portrayal of family: dysfunctional, source of destruction but also essential for survival, somehow the very air, the very breath that sustains. feel like every writer, every novel deals with this somehow, in some way, but none so much as in writings about indian families - the searching of self and identity but always within the family and with that identity as an accepted aspect of oneself. 

i like reading about this, families, I mean, and the attempt to search for identity and synthesize relationships in this very tenuous balance of self and family and overwhelming, underwhelming or suffocating love. (this reminds me of a line of a poem that I heard while at a performance recently, or not so recently. the poet addresses this to her mother: "You do not know me and yet you burden me with your love.") 

i feel like this book deserves a longer, more qualified talking-about, but i can hardly muster the strength to do that right now. So i'll wait until i re-read it, which will be, realistically, years from now, but who's counting? would still recommend this book to anyone though. it's so rich in imagery, traverses the mind again and again and again.