Cover to Cover

My Countdown

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

The Magicians (Lev Grossman)

     I had to stop neglecting this blog because of this book. 

     The Magicians started off feeling a lot like a tribute to the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. I liked that, it just felt limited. Still, the voice was unique and I was interested to see where it would go. The main character, Quentin Clearwater, through skill and luck, matriculates into a magical university called Brakebills. This is awesome because he's a huge fan of a fantasy series that sounds a lot like The Chronicles of Narnia, only this book series describes a quartet of siblings and their exploits into the world of Fillory. So Quentin is excited that magic is real, only it's super tedious to learn and there aren't cool quests and things to do. It's just...school.

     Quentin takes classes. These classes are difficult and probably sometimes really boring, not the same fun classes I imagined Harry under-appreciated at Hogwarts; Hermione was probably the only one of their trio with the intellect to get into Brakebills. I was surprised because in half the book, Quentin graduates from Brakebills. This caught me off guard. School was over, and there was more. The more is partially crippling depression and also a whole other thing that is worth falling into without knowing it's ever coming, so I won't even say. 

     Suffice it to say that the tribute-feel of The Magicians gives way to a landscape exponentially changing and expanding into a wholly unique, fantastically written, and heart-wrenching force of its own. The gems of Grossman's writing became more abundant and easier to savor; he has amazing tact in his arrangement of words. There is a heft of realism alongside the story's magical interior, and that is the hardest and most daunting to undertake. The Magicians is comical, enchanting, horrifying, and painful to read. Incredible.

   This book is incredible. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

The Donnie Darko Book (Richard Kelly)

   First of all, Donnie Darko is a movie, originated from a script, and thus not based on a book (although it certainly has books within it, including one that didn't exist in our world until after the film was shot). It was the first film that Richard Kelly had produced and put in movie theaters. So that's some background.

   The Donnie Darko Book is divided into five parts: a Foreword by actor Jake Gyllenhaal; an interview of Richard Kelly by Kevin Conroy Scott; the actual screenplay script; pages from the book inside the movie, The Philosophy of Time Travel; and images (screenshots, sketches, and works from an exhibition).

   I'd seen the film Donnie Darko once before reading this book, at least two years ago. Halfway through reading the interview section of the book, I put it down and rewatched the film with a friend. We paused repeatedly, rewinded, checked our theories with ones from the internet, and extended our "viewing" time at least an hour beyond the actual film. It was lovely. After that, I resumed reading, and for once read a book like this in order, instead of skipping around. 

   The interview with Richard Kelly was absorbing. It was interesting to discover his influences in film and writing. Just as interesting was the script itself; it revealed a number of differences in what was actually said and done in the final cut version. Insight into placebo medication was omitted from the film, and a number of lines changed, were added, or left out. I wish the book had contained an annotated script, one used in the actual filming, maybe belonging to one of the actors or Richard Kelly himself. The pictures at the end added depth to the movie viewing, and I liked the inclusion of The Philosophy of Time Travel and the fact that Richard Kelly himself considers it a tangental theory: "Writing those pages was a way for me to say, 'Here's my theory, I may be wrong, but here it is.' I considered myself to be just a viewer when i wrote it, not the filmmaker" (xxxii). 

   I don't have a lot of experience reading books about the making of films, or even books written about the film as a kind of tangental fiction, but I really enjoyed The Donnie Darko Book. I'll be looking at movies differently from now on, thinking more about actors' smiles, camera angles, things left out and included. And I'll probably watch Donnie Darko again.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

   This is one of those posts that could be traced on a bird's-eye trajectory directly from the chair outside where I turned the final page along a track indoors to the computer, with a dire need to write.

   The Poisonwood Bible is a book that I've been hearing about from behind, from time to time, and if I had devised a reading list for this year, it wouldn't have been written down. However, I am an endless forager through, and in support of, used book stores, library sales, and the abandoned. I paid a dollar in support of a library in exchange for this book, and committed it to my bookshelf. The Japanese word for the action of buying books and not reading them, or otherwise letting them pile up around the stagnant once-reader is tsundoku: 積ん読. Anyway, I came home for a weekend last month and tried to reconfigure my bookshelf to fit the thirty-pound box of published prose I pulled off my dorm-room book ledge. In that act, I dislodged Kingsolver's book and abandoned the task at hand to start reading it. 

   Hence, this month later and the overhead trajectory that brought me to the computer. 

   The novel is divided into books, most of which are accompanied by an inset from the Bible or the Apocryphal Books (which are part of The Complete Bible: An American Translation). Having not read the back of the book beforehand, the pacing of the first half and beyond made me think that the novel would stick on the day-to-day with the sisters and mother who take turns narrating the tale; eventually, I caught onto an increased spacing of time as the page numbers incline and the novel spans three-decades. 

   I know more about Africa than I know about the Bible. I knew before reading the book of what had happened to Patrice Lumumba and I knew the history of countries and sections of Africa, before and after so-called colonization. The book is well-researched and thorough, tinged through the biases of five distinct narrators, whose views overlap with other voices. I think that Kingsolver has mastered the balance between beautiful writing, narrative, and fact. I'm not sure how else to explain it. 

   I came in skeptical of the shifting perspectives way of writing, skeptical of historical fiction from a white American about Africa, but Kingsolver did an amazing job. A friend from Georgia and a former aunt of mine loved the book; my mom couldn't get into it. At any rate, I want to read more Kingsolver, but probably not for a while.

   The word "tsundoku" was confirmed in another post on tumblr, found here: http://other-wordly.tumblr.com/post/27429067169/tsundoku.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Letter to Emerson

Follow Me, With Me: Responses to Emerson

     PS 1600 is the Dewey where you’ll find the library’s stash of Emerson’s writing, even his letters (or P.S. 1600, right before you send your note along). All imaginable compilations. You will find his collected works scattered in volumes or combined in several versions of the same heavy, weaving book, but his journals and letters, once bound, take up a shelf all on their own.

     “What can I tell you?” I know it is polite to make a neat list of page numbers and book titles when applying the words of another to the text of your own, but why ruin the feeling of him? Let him be here. Let Emerson’s ghost breathe ice over the words I borrow, and say, “Follow me, with me.” Though I confuse.

     Emerson, it is beautiful to watch the struggles and triumphs of your words. They hold you. You wrote to your friend, “I see persons whom I think the world would be richer for losing; and I see persons whose existence makes the world rich.” Like you? And you continue, “But blessed be the Eternal Power for those whom fancy even cannot strip of beauty, and who never for a moment seem to me profane.” Not much more. I think I do what you did only in emails, not letters, where the sun spills its light a certain way and there are words I must send. And now, to you.

     When I was reading stories of Raymond Carver out of a book my ninth grade English teacher leant me, I was overwhelmed with the urge to write to the writer. He is dead. I created the letter anyway, and mailed it to Carver’s grave, unsigned, with no return address. Who read it? Maybe it is the writing of a thing and not its destination that matters because mortals are too temporal to make lasting audiences, and once the intended source can read no more, the direction of the written words leak out and become available to speak to anyone, anywhere; I feel like he’s talking to me. That’s what books do.  At any rate, I have developed a habit of reading you, Emerson, not as though you had made me your audience but as though you wouldn’t mind me eavesdropping from behind a curtain, as long as I was quiet about it. Does that make sense? For some reason, reading about you and reading from you made me feel real again.

     Your hair. Were those mutton chops that crept down to your jaw? Like a scarf. Only, it is the kind of scarf that was accidentally glued to the sides of your face and you managed to rip the rest off, but those tufts remained, like in Dahl’s Matilda where the rotten father went around with the rim of his hat adhered to his face. Alright. I’m being petty at this point, taking low shots at your appearance. Not the first time. I met Adam Levin and felt compelled to point out that his hair had all climbed down from his head, leaving him bald, and settled around his face. No, wait. I thought that, but what came out of my mouth was, “Your book sprained my wrist.”

    Not you, though. Emerson, it is the compilation of all your writing—ten, fifteen pounds of it, or am I exasperating the facts?—that sprained my wrist.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

What Values My Writing, for a Letter to Emerson

     I've been combing through my writing stocks, a summer-task, and questioning what I can salvage, what I can spare, what I can leave. Salvaging is writing that I deem worthy of being great; I set it aside and drill it into draft after draft, sweating out something better than it was before. I'm something like realistic. I pick what I think has a chance, and push it, trying not to torment myself with something too frail to even shake out its wings.

     When I talk about sparing, however, that refers to things I can put out into the world with far less edits. It is strange because I tend to hoard the writing that I think could be good. It's not without reason. The internet (which I loathe to put in a blog post, almost as much as I shudder to mention "social networking," because here I come [ironic or no] to get that muck of quotidian despair and straw-clutching out of my mind) is full of writers half in bloom.

     At a certain point we are encouraged to leave our caves, or it occurs to us that we are writing towards something, hopefully, perhaps. So we put our words up where others can read them. For me this happened in steps; I began sharing my writing with a few close friends, forking it over to teachers and professors when necessary, and then I began writing for newspapers and published a story in a student-run zine, all the while sending tendrils out in search of rejections that I could force myself to receive with a smile (perhaps this makes me stronger, but I'm no where near considerations of death by rejection, however Nietzsche is misquoted and left unsourced).

    As much as I support burgeoning writers (essentially: all writers) outwardly and in, as much as I can go in, I still recede and twist fists around false starts and jolts of baseless pride; in strict clarity, some writing is not sent forth at its best. I tend to view official publications, journals and the like, as more prepared gatekeepers, literal third parties or beyond who can read writing and take a view on it, staking their reputation on whatever they negotiate with the writer to present to the world. Without the gatekeepers, the unbloomed writers teeter out on their own, practicing reception before a guise, and I can't say whether or not it hurts or helps them, both or neither. It's just, when I bring myself to post something, I think of it as sparing.

     Thus, the following post (or the one before this, if you're reading down), is a piece I wrote for a loosely run non-fiction workshop. It seems sturdy enough to put on my blog, but I am not disillusioned into thinking of it as something a gatekeeper would present to the world. So I stake my reputation to myself, for you. Which I do anyway, with these posts, I guess.

     At this stage, I felt a reflection was at its time. I'm in progress.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Penpal (Dathan Auerbach)

     How far can you go into the woods?

     I started the book on a whim, anticipating the tone it would have and hoping it would draw out the sense of unsteadiness that I've been feeling today. I've read the first couple of pages, like I do with almost all the books I buy, even if I don't nestle in until later--it had compelled me to purchase, but not to take it on at once. Today, however, when I went back into Penpal, I couldn't back out; I was hooked. 

     Without giving any of it away, the books is a human's recollections of events in his life. The riddle at the top of this post is from the story. The answer, which I will spoil, is halfway--you can only go halfway into the woods before you're coming back out again. The riddle gets repeated throughout the book, obviously hooking onto an outward significance; yet it is the kind of repetition that does not give itself away. The narrator does not try to understand it. You, the reader, get to keep the question as a parting gift. I like that. 

     "Sitting in my car that night, I saw it all clearly for the first time. As an adult, I could see the connections that were lost on a child who tends to see the world in snapshots rather than as a sequence." Penpal

     The book responds to the unraveling of childhood; the sections are not chronological, but going forth they are more clearly connected. In this way, the story is told honestly, with a kind of delicacy and persistence that worked really well with the content. 

     I just feel weird about where it ended; how it ended. The last few pages, I think, cut its potential, made it ultimately linear. Everything came to a clear end--an end doesn't have to be happy to feel final, settling, complete. The smoothness of this narrative descent felt wrong, too easy. But that's only because I'm pressing on Penpal to be more.

    Semi-side note: the story and book started in the NoSleep community of Reddit, and was funded with a Kickstarter campaign. I used to think of writers as solitary individuals, working away in dusty, hidden rooms, half enshrouded in darkness, but as little as that was the case before, it's even less now. So, if you're reading this blog, thank you.  

    Final "also," if this reads strangely, it might be because I left the page and I had to rewrite the post from memory, which never seems to flow as well for me.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Human Week, and the joys of reading again

     I'm released from school and have commenced what I call Human Week, wherein I focus on human things, rather than insects. My major, in institutionalized learning, is a combination of entomology and [creative] writing; I want to clarify, however, that I consider the two separate affairs 95% of the time, in spite of all the 'original' suggestions from folks about how I should write a children's series on bug detectives, or something of that sort (inspire the youth!). Anyway, I spent my last month of school organizing an insect fair, and being a reader, I read and referenced 28 books about all aspects of entomology and the insect world. Suffice it to say, I decided it was good for me to have a human week. A side note to that, I will eventually start posting about the insect books I read and continue to read. Eventually.

     Anyway, free from the confines of education and its friendly, and sometimes beguiling, time consumption, I've kicked off reading Whatever the Heck I Want. In the past two days (and this morning) that has included A Room with a View (Forster), A Drifting Life (Tatsumi), and The Amulet of Samarkand (Stroud). Respectively, a classic, an autobiographical manga, and a book in a fantastical world, probably aimed toward older children.

   My copy of Room was previously owned by what I think was a teenage girl, high school age, who was reading Forster for school and thus annotated it in weird patterns and with questionable spelling ("she has an apiphany [sic]"). Anyway, Previous Owner is very excited with the character Lucy, to the abandonment of the other characters and their development, and what she anticipates as the theme, "Theme: learn to let go." I mean, it's not without evidence, as a glance at page 21 of the Dover Thrift Edition will clarify (see: Mr. Emerson's dialogue in which he says "let yourself go" three times in the same paragraph). Anyway, I'm focusing on Forster's critical and often humorous eye on the uptight English abroad, and trying to keep track of the other characters (at the expense of Lucy, sometimes, because Previous Owner seems to have her accounted for). 

     I relate the experience of reading previously owned and written-over books to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: sometimes the previous owner is brilliant and helpful, but sometimes they just like putting words on a page. A former girlfriend of mine loved written-on books because she felt like she was reading with someone she'd never met; another friend likes them because then she doesn't feel bad about writing in them herself. 

     I wonder, does writing on here with no replies constitute a semi-developed from of Unsolitary Reading? Or maybe I'm another foolish annotater, positioned away from the physical book.

     Human Week continues. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

What Rory's Read

Recently my roommate and I have started watching episodes of The Gilmore Girls. I've been informed that I am similar the character Rory and so I was excited to see what the show was like. It turns out that Rory loves books. She loves books so much, in fact, that the show references (and here I take into account various claims) somewhere between 316 and 339 different books. According to this quiz, I've already read (all the way through) 61 out their listed 339. It is difficult to resist so shiny a challenge. 

Rather than listing what I've already read, I might keep a toll on this blog of what I read next. Referencing either the Buzzfeed article (second link) or the quiz, I'll describe the book I read with my usual as-few-spoilers as possible approach and then perhaps mark how many of the books I've read. It took Rory seven seasons to get through the pile of books (although, my roommate informs me, some of the books were just mentioned), so there's no need to give myself a time-limit or a crazy, unrealistic goal. Also, there are probably books on that list that I have no interest in reading. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Books for My Term Paper

I think I'll go back through this later and mark ones that I truly did use. So far I've already written two pages of the requisite 20 (which is meant to include the works cited but I can pretend I missed that part of the instructions and tack it on after the 20-mark) and have used brief wedges of only two of the listed works, so it will probably be that I'll only use half of these because otherwise there will be no room for my writing. These infrequent blog posts get confusing. 

“Whatever material is at hand.”

A normal index or works cited, or both, should go at the very end. Mine will be present at the beginning, and then will revisit at the end. This way, you’ll have an idea of what you’re getting into. You’ll know where the boat is tracing. So, here are the players in order from oldest to youngest.

The Strange Story of the Quantum by Banesh Hoffmann (1959).

Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville (1962).

Quanta and Reality: A Symposium by various contributors (1964).

As They Liked It: A Study of Shakespeare’s Moral Artistry by Alfred Harbage (1972).

Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes (1977).

Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975).

The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller (1992).

The Ghost in the Atom edited by P.C.W. Davies and J.R. Brown (1997).

Plato Phaedrus translated etc. by James H. Nichols Jr. (1998).

Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz (1999).

As You Like It by Shakespeare, edited by Frances E. Dolan (2000).

Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran (2000).

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey (2000).

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (2003).

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Social Imagination by Avery F. Gordon (2008).

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (2008).

The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow (2010).

ALSO: some David Hume, probably most from his essay on Necessary Connexion. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

James on a Quilt in the Sun

I try to squeeze my academic schedule so that reading for class and reading for astonishment overlap, and in signing up for a class sole-all dedicated to Henry James I have over-accomplished myself. Like a deep-steeped tea mixture or a complex overture, James takes some getting used to, but quick enough I found myself sunk into his words. I'm still at the phase where I don't quite know what to do with them, but they dance in my mind as I go through the day, suddenly lighter, and richer. 

I want everyone to read Henry James, so expect my writings to lure and coax as the year goes on. Thus far, I have tackled "The Art of Fiction" and his short story "The Middle Years," slipping into various openings of What Maisie Knew and the nascence (if I can bend that word a little) of Portrait of a Lady. The latter work I took in sitting on a quilt with my friend at a perfect hour to align with the book, when shadows were spreading out and the weather was showing off it's happy side. We were facing the great campus lawn, which I've often scowled upon for it's absurd water consumption, but it fit the story so well I couldn't help being swept away. We had gentle, classical music warbling behind us on my friend's electronic music-maker. We took turns reading, paragraph by paragraph, stopping to marvel at phrases or discover the meaning of a strange-shaped word and exploring the depths of the text. 

I'm nearing the denouement of Woodrell's Winter's Bone and following the text of As You Like It (courtesy of the Bard). I also have the pleasure of reading "Daisy Miler" for a discussion with my class of "un-solitary readers," as our professor calls us. 

Ah! I've nearly overlooked the play The Seagull. I've been reading it on a roll in preparation of it's production in my vicinity: a chance to participate in Chekov's Russia.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Making Book Lists (And Keeping Them)

Buzzfeed has made the connection between books and their cross-media transformations (amalgamations?) in the form of this list of 16 movies coming out, all inspired by books! The list reminded me of Hank Green's Read It 1st campaign from a few years back; I was quick to make a vow that I would not see a movie based on a book that I hadn't yet read (and then broke that promise when I realized that it was inconvenient--I do try!). I must say, however, that reading before viewing has a lot of advantages; with The Hunger Games, I was able to get more in-depth with the content; with Harry Potter, I got to watch highlights of what I read (in a sense); and how I boasted, having read Coraline three times, about what I knew was different. 

I want to look at the way in which books are translated, condensed, visualized (or cinematized), and experienced, as movies. (Try writing sentences that make sense when loud conversations are going on--brain nonsense that I probably wont remember to edit later). 

From this year's list, I have read Divergent (Veronica Roth), The Fault in Our Stars (John Green), The Giver (Lois Lowry), and most of Winter's Tale (Mark Helprin). I think I can make a goal of this, especially if I team up with my uncle who runs an annual review list of all the movies he saw. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

The Sport of the Gods (Paul Laurence Dunbar)

I've known Paul Laurence Dunbar by his poetry, and am a fan of his to the degree that I did series of paintings inspired by him two years ago. That said, I've never thought about his prose before tackling The Sport of the Gods, a novel he wrote (or, rather, published) in 1902. In the Collier Books 1970 copy that I borrowed from the library (let us think of all libraries as one library, for the sake of this blog, like a mighty pool of public readership separated only as one forest is cut from another by roadway or river), the introduction by Charles Nilon describes the novel as "valid social history" and the subtitle on the cover of this particular edition calls it, "The first major protest novel written by a black American and the first portrayal of Negro life in Harlem." With all that expectation riding on it, Dunbar's third novel is far outweighed in its historical significance than by its value as literature. 

The writing lacks the quixotic luster/depth of Dunbar's poetry. It has the dryness of an outline fattened with bits of description and full sentences until it became a story--in other words, it is boring writing. The greatest spark the book held was the ideas it kindled--about justice, about what post-slavery freedom can be (and what it means), and about the degradation which occurred with urbanization. It is also a tragedy about a family where everything seems to go wrong for them whatever they try and do, from the fault of others--particularly the white family they worked for in the south who accuses Berry Hamilton of thievery, leading to his prison conviction and a lot of bad news for the rest of the family. Dunbar wraps the book up in a kind of sloppy way that allows for some redemption, but ultimately it is a dismal tale. 

One of the most interesting ideas that Dunbar hits upon/anticipates is a sort of preview/nascence of the prison industrial complex (a topic I know only dust shavings about, to the tune of "The House I Live In"). On page 178, several southern white men are discussing the way a journalist cut the ideal of "honour" and old Horace Talbot gives his two-cents: "'...a distinguished family is brought to shame, and for what? To give a nigger a few more years of freedom when, likely as not, he don't want it; and Berry Hamilton's life in prison has proved nearer the ideal reached by slavery than anything he has found since emancipation.'" Of course, character, context, and rhetoric must be accounted for when considering any kind of writing, especially controversial words. I want to put emphasis on the text post semi-colon; it's hard to determine what ideal Talbot is referring to, but there is an overwhelming sense coming from the southern white 'gentlemen', in their respective sectors of the book, that something went wrong in the transition from slavery to freedom--and Dunbar wants us to know that they don't have it right, but that there is a problem. The tragedy of this book is that freedom is not the absence of slavery, I think.

I finish my unrefined response here. My goal right now is not to be a book reviewer or to represent any ideas; I think of these blog posts as curiosity and contemplation--looking a little more into what I'm reading (which usually means, yay, more reading) and then thinking it out in a blog post. I think it's a skill and that I'll get better with time. Also, just got a great new name for the blog. 

I also read issue number 54 of One Story (a publication that presents a single story), which was "Jubilation, Florida" by N.M. Kelby. I do not want to talk about the plot or what it was about because I want my readers to go read it and have no idea what they are getting into. It has funny lumps in it that are smoothed into textured swells, and there are a lot of sentences that I like. The rest is for you to find out.

I broke up Dunbar's Sport with chapters from Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (D. Pinkwater). My idea was that if I added raisins to oatmeal, I would experience more from the oatmeal. It did have a really cool effect on my reading, and I'll probably be done with Alan soon. It is part of Daniel Pinkwater's 5 Novels.

Last note! I also noticed that PLD's book title is "Gods" plural, which is weird in its context of monotheistic Christianity. If you read it, let me know your thoughts.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

The State of My Space

Being prone to losing items of all sizes, as I am, I sometimes wonder if I would suffice as a detective. I study the scene of the incident, usually a messy (but not dirty--therein lies the distinction) room with piles of books and pathways of lost socks, a few mugs, each stained with bottom-bound teabag (long dried), art materials estranged from one another from shelf to desk to floor, and, of course, glimmers of keys and fallen change. I begin with a cursory examination--overturning a pile of laundry, shaking out each shirt and listening for fallen debris. Often, however, this look-around is not enough. That is when I thrive as a detective. I drop from my chair my backpack (empty with crumpled paper and dying pens), six books, a t-shirt from last week (or was it the week before?), and maybe some exploratory sticky notes, escaped from some project-in-process, then sit, still perched on a sketchbook or two that I didn't bother to extricate. I list what I know about the culprit (myself) and the missing item. When was it last seen? Who has been in the room since? Did it fall into someone else's pocket? Stick to the bottom of a shoe (and fall off, anywhere)? Was it borrowed without permission? I am quick to blame outside forces, despite brain-locked 'statistics' that point to a long history of being guilty. I question any related parties, send a few text messages, and narrow down my search area. 

In my long history of (auto)detective work, I have found that Occam's Razor is sharper than my memory. However, there have been some delightful cases. Today I was inspired by a search for an item that I finally realized was sticky. I discovered it stuck to the bottom of a notebook that I had overturned in initial searches. Dressers are often overlooked, but anything held in the process of getting dressed is susceptible to being forgotten there (like a glasses case that I must have left at a friend's house). It goes on. Ultimately, I like the redemption of honing my logic as ramification of my disorganization. At least, this seems to be the only development--after the missing item is located, the room returns to its original, mysterious, messy state.

I guess the connection of this to reading is that a good story can require many kinds of thinking--and also, I tend to find lost things serving as impromptu bookmarks. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Writing about Reading (again)!

Barring another major medical inconvenience, the blog is starting up again for 2014. I have no idea if I accomplished my goal of a book a week (in total). I suspect I was close. At present, my thoughts are winding around a skein about tackling a new sort of challenge. While numerating my consumption (in our society, the act of reading books, in a sense) is a very braggable way to read, it leaves much to be desired, especially in the heart of one who does not like to think of books as generic experience, per se. Sometimes simplicity is a necessity when it comes to setting goals, however. Plus, the generality of numbers leaves room with creativity elsewhere (having freedom to read whatever I want, as long as I haven't finished it before). How to contend among the two? I will take some time to ponder this, perhaps consulting other forces. Also! I am keen on the idea of blogging about other kinds of "readings"--in one sense, reading nontraditional material (the text of videogames, for example--but just dialogue? Books within games...like the legends in Dragon Pass or the books and books and books in the Elder Scrolls Series?) but also "reading" as a versatile action: the art of reading movies.

Another complaint I have with my old system is that not all books can be read straight through--or are meant to be read in that way. Thus, I want to write about books that are an experience--whether that may be a textbook (does anyone read those whole things at once?), a coloring book (with some sort of text? do I add text?), or a continuation of my parsing of Graphic Novels* (the asterisk of all that might entail). 

"Texts" and "Readings" on my Mind

King of Dragonpass - The whole game is based on its own history and mythology, and as my friend is constantly reminding me, the manual has its own wealth of information. I think this could be an interesting opportunity to think more thickly about what my reading enables me to do in the game (like getting better at it, contrary to the point blank PRACTICE mentality)?

George R.R. Martin - I leave this on its own. I'm reading tangles of his stuff but mostly from his A Song of Ice and Fire saga. I don't think my reflections on that series will be as deep as other things I might write about, because I feel there are a wealth of valuable analyses/critiques/thought-pools on it and I'm mostly reading it For Fun (let's fight those words later). 

Malcolm Gladwell has a book out that I snagged from my mom's dusty pile of pages.

I am on the verge of an entire semester absorbed in Henry James. 

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Last Days of the Wanting Carrie

I try not to think of this project as representing the organization of my life in general. I believe wholeheartedly that I will read 52 books and that I will blog about each in some way or another. However, this isn't taking the ordered shape I supposed. Fair enough.

I've read surprisingly few books since my last update. I am certain I am forgetting something, but so it goes.

I devoured a fascinating graphic novel; Fabien Vehlmann's Last Days of an Immortal came to my by way of the featured new books shelf at the library. The artwork was pleasing because it was simple, imaginative, but mature. I did not understand it. There were parts of the story that were magical, but I came away from it feeling like I'd eaten the wrapper and missed the spices. Or something.

After that I poked my toes into the lukewarm waters of The Wanting Seed, brought to us by Anthony Burgess in 1962. It is One of Those Dystopian Future Novels, and one of the funny ones. At times I thought the message was driven home crash-through-the-window-in-a-clown-car style, and I understand why it wasn't the novel that made Burgess popularized. However, I daydreamed and dreamed about The Wanting Seed in the course of reading it and I think it opened thoughtlines (I had it with a side of Adrienne Rich, hint hint of a future post).

The one that I tackled in no-time-flat was Stephen King's Carrie. The first SK book that I've read through was his instructional memoir On Writing. He talks about Carrie in there. When I read it, I felt like I was watching an old movie that lagged and pixelated. At times I found King's detail to be brilliant, but at other times my mind scraped against a kind of dryness (for instance, the details of how a bucket was mounted). I think what really got me is that even though I kept turning the pages, I didn't care about the characters or their world. It was weird. I'm not sure how a book can be a page turner for me and yet have little appeal. My friend recommends Pet Cemetery and I'm stocked with The Shining and The Stand, so King reading may continue.

Books 30, 31, and 40 of

OH WAIT

Invisible Monsters Remix, Chuck Palahniuk. I loved that book.

and 41 of 52. 19 to go.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Stardust (Neil Gaiman)

Of late, I have been reading much for knowledge: the book on earthworms, the books on writing, and examining the writing of others. Neil Gaiman's Stardust was supposed to fall into that third category. Instead, I got sucked in and cherished each word. I remember watching the film adaption when it came out, years ago, and being delighted. However, the real version pleases more. Read it first!--the ending disappointed me. First of all, it was like climbing a mountain and then sliding back down the last couple feet of incline--versus books where you climb the mountain and realize it wasn't that great. The journey beat the result, but the momentum just sputtered, like a dolphin spitting in my face. I focus on that because it is the last thing I read of the book.

The characters were there, thick--if not deep--and the surroundings painted with vigor and detail. It's the kind of book where the descriptions get stuck in your head--at least, that was my case. There will be more Gaiman in my future.

Book 29 of 52. 23 remain.

More than half way.

[librarywithinwithoutadoubt]

Digest

Since I left school, my ability to manage my time has faltered. One proof of that consists of my spotty updates on reading. I am on track, just offline.

Once again, I'm not sure if I will be able to remember all the books I have recently read.

First, comics. Rohan at the Louvre, Higurashi When They Cry vol. 1, and Wandering Son vol.1. Rowan was interesting, Higurashi alarming, and Wandering Son disappointed me; the characters of this latter work were flat and visually difficult to distinguish, the storyline had a one-degree tilt to build momentum, the script required multiple readings panel-to-panel, and overall I just wasn't impressed. The manga-ka even apologizes at the end of the volume for his work.

I have picked up two works on writing of late; Reading Like a Writer (Prose) and On Writing (King). The former gave ideas on close-reading that felt like a drawn-out version of an assignment my 12th grade English teacher gave us. I technically have a few pages to go on King, but I have found a few of his prosaic concepts as useful (if only as reminders). The more I read of authors telling me how to write, the more I realize that writing is a personal business. Yes, grammar is important (Elements of Style keeps me solid there) and it's humbling to see how even The Published and Read began by compiling rejection slips. Other than finishing Bird by Bird (Lamont) soon, I do not plan to pick up any works on writing fiction; it's not like research papers where a certain format needs to be clarified and maintained to avoid plagiarism. Creative writing isn't science or working at the DMV either. For the time being, I'm returning to trial and error. Besides, there's something about these instructive books that just rub me the rob way. No matter how many sentences King and Prose contribute to self-humbling, the odor of superiority, or at least assumed pretenses, smells through.

Returning to the idea of reading wonderful works for inspiration (rather than reading ideas about how to create works), I read and loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith). Many things got me in reading it, but her descriptive predisposition (perhaps?) created an experience that reading a book doesn't always bring, that of being swept away, or cradled in words, or any way to put it that personalizes that feeling. I think the image that my head goes back to is from early on in the book, when Francie is sitting on the fire escape and reading a book (and the one at the end, where she observes a younger girl doing the same). I stoked it with my memories of reading and reading spaces, and the book came into that, meta and imposed. I could go on.

I feel like the books I don't recall when I sit down for these digest-updates are ones that didn't quite resonate in my memory, or weren't worthy of discussion. There is one more from last week, Virtual Mode (Piers Anthony). I have mixed feelings about that book. Anthony concludes with a section of his own thoughts. It's hard to describe how personal he got with those, but I cringed reading it because of my own sense that some things aren't meant to be shared with a large audience. However, that little section took some of my doubts and questions that formed as I was reading and put them in the author's hands. Parts of the book that offended me offended me a lot. His reasoning did not result in my acceptance of his choices, but it felt nice to know that he had put thought into them. I guess that the existence of his author note section means more to me than the book itself, even though I don't like all the contact there. It strikes me as thoughtful. Though I could pick themes of the book apart here, or give you some sense of what it was about, I still hold that if you are reading this, you can read the book instead of listening to me go on about the details. Alongside King and Prose, Anthony's note stood out as blatant opinion without the presumption.

On I go, to read some more.

24 to go.