So last night, I went to a reading and book-signing for Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton. I went because I adored Monsters and because it was at the bookstore that is closest to my house, and because it popped up on Librarything, and I had earned a break. I went because I had never gone to one of those things and I was very very curious. Who is this person, who I know is fairly young, and who with her very first published novel created something that I find so spectacular?
The answer to that question is, of course, far more complicated than anything that I could have gotten from an hour long reading. But the parts of the answer I could see: she's much like a lot of my friends. She is young, and she comes off younger than she is, due in part to a face that seemed almost adolescent. She's enthusiastic and she talks with her hands. She loves what she's doing, and it seemed to me at times that she can't quite believe that she is actually getting to do it. I'm not sure if I was able to recognize that delighted disbelief in her because I so often feel it myself or if I projected that emotion onto her enthusiasm and slight self-effacement because it's how I would feel in her place, how I do feel in my own life sometimes.
She is not great, perhaps not even good, at reading her own work aloud. She rushes, and her tone is flat. I find this very surprising, not because I assume that all author's are actors, but because her prose reads for me with wonderful inflection, in particular the passage from The Monsters of Templeton that she read aloud. I imagine therefore, that the writing has a similar quality in her mind, and should from her mind to action, keep that quality when she presents it. I don't know if the reality of the situation is that she lacks talent for translating the words in her head to the "performance" of a reading (which seems a likely possibility) or if I, as someone who reads aloud often and dramatically during the editing process am again projecting my thinking patterns into the minds of others. Either way, charming as she is, I don't think that she did her own work justice reading it aloud.
An interesting moment for me during the reading: someone asked a question, I forget what it was, but it led Groff to ask if she was a writer, and then who in the audience was a writer. Now I was sitting in front, so I couldn't do a comprehensive survey, but it seemed like just about everybody raised their hand. I did not.
What does that mean? Are these book readings attended more by people who write as opposed to just enthusiastic readers? Certainly plausible. Maybe something about this particular author or signing brought those other people away from their writing desks and out to Joseph-Beth last night? I couldn't tell you.
And I wonder how much of a writer any one of those people are. I'm not trying to be a snob here, and I know it sounds that way, but I wonder if a single one of them makes a living with writing, or even wants to. What makes a person decide to call themselves "a writer"? Would these same people answer the question "What do you do?" with "I'm a writer." Or would they say first, "I'm a banker/teacher/student/real estate agent." Are they simply raising their hand to confirm some small part of their identity, as I would if someone asked, "Who here is a slob/lover of peanut butter/Red Sox fan?" Or do they think first, "I am a writer" the way I think first, "I am a student. I will be a doctor."?
I think I wonder this for entirely self-conscious reasons. Because I didn't raise my hand. Because I want to be a writer. I have always wanted to be a writer, I can't remember a moment in my life, even during those brief periods when I wavered on medicine, that I was not sure that publishing a book would remain a life goal. If I don't get that in before I die, I will have failed somehow.
And I recognize that there is something silly about wanting "to write a book" it's sort of like wanting "to be an inventor." You can't do it without an idea. I have had several ideas in the past, and I'm sure that I will have several ideas in the future. Non-fiction seems likely, I continue to hope that my work will present me with a shiny topic I simply can't resist, but who knows where it will come from in the end. Still, sitting here at 26, I am not ashamed to admit that I hope, one day, to be accurately described as "a physician, scientist and author."
I've been thinking about writing a lot lately, even before this moment last night when I did not raise my hand. Perhaps this is because I have also been reading a lot. Perhaps too much. (Possible? I'm still not sure.) When I got home last night, I started reading Stephen King's On Writing, which unlike the other library books I have out at the moment, I didn't just grab off the shelf. I requested it, from another library, because I was thinking about writing.
And I'm going to be writing more, not just here, maybe not even here. I have a couple of short stories that I want to get out of my head and down on paper (or onto hard drive as the case may be). So maybe I do have some fiction in me. I'm not sure what's going to come of it, but I am going to allow myself the little luxury of spending some time each day, because for me along with the reading sometimes comes the writing itch, and from childhood to today, these are two of the great joys in my life.
Maybe that does make me a writer. But if asked again this evening, I'm still pretty sure I wouldn't raise my hand. At least not yet. I feel I am a writer like I am a physician, like I am Andrew the Wonderful's wife. It's something I have decided to become, something I am on course to become, but something that I am not yet. This is funny to me, because lately the combination of loving medical school and being so very excited about my future with AtW has left me with the feeling that I have grown into my real life, that I am getting what I've always wanted. But really, I'm not there yet. The change in the last year is not that I have a become the adult that I hope to be, but rather that I am not waiting for others to make the decisions that give me the opportunity to become that adult. I'm not waiting for an admissions committee to decide that I am worth training, for Andrew to decide that he wants to keep me. It's happening now, I've been picked.
The writing though, it's something that I decide when it happens. Nobody has to accept me or ask me, at least not at this stage of the game. I suppose there will have to be some accepting once I get rolling, but first I must get rolling all on my own. And I guess, in the face of feeling like the other parts of my life are working out, I have to admit that I sort of adore the striving. My life, at the moment, is clearly charmed, so there's no time like the present.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Songs Without Words
I remember reading Ann Packer's first novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier on my mother’s recommendation several years ago, and liking it very very much. In my mind I am reading it in Weathersfield, but it came out in 2002, so either it was a summer read or my mind in playing tricks on me. Couldn’t tell you which for the life of me. Anyway, I had glanced over and passed over Songs Without Words several times since it came out, and when I saw it at the library (free!), I decided to finally pick it up.
Before reading the book itself, I read the summary on the inside of the dust jacket, which starts with the following sentence: “Ann Packer’s debut novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chronicles of the interior lives of women.”
That kind of introduction not only made me slightly skeptical about this book, it made me wonder if I had really liked The Dive From Clausen’s Pier as much as I remembered. “Oh dear.” I thought. “I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means… the dreaded CHICK LIT.”
But that was indeed what it meant, at least for this book. Song Without Words is a portrayal of the friendship between two women, Sarabeth and Liz, and how that friendship is tested by a challenging time for Liz’s family. The book just didn’t take off. Neither of these main characters were overly compelling or sympathetic, I found Liz’s husband annoying, and I was very unsure what Packer was trying to accomplish with the character of Liz’s son, which I suppose means she didn’t accomplish it. The only character I found even remotely interesting was Liz’s cripplingly depressed daughter, Lauren, but even she seemed one dimensional at times.
Overall, I was disappointed with the book. While I was emotionally invested in Lauren’s recovery, I didn’t care overmuch about the friendship between these women, and I suppose it only mattered that they were reunited in the end because it was obvious that they would have to be. For a book that seems intended to be more about that relationship than any particular plotline, that’s a pretty major failure. Not impressive.
Read something else. Maybe The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, if for no other reason than to tell me if it really is excellent, or if I was just in a chick lit mood when I read it. On that point, I am curious, but not near curious enough to even think about reading it again.
LT: 2 stars, modified excerpt from this.
Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.
Before reading the book itself, I read the summary on the inside of the dust jacket, which starts with the following sentence: “Ann Packer’s debut novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chronicles of the interior lives of women.”
That kind of introduction not only made me slightly skeptical about this book, it made me wonder if I had really liked The Dive From Clausen’s Pier as much as I remembered. “Oh dear.” I thought. “I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means… the dreaded CHICK LIT.”
But that was indeed what it meant, at least for this book. Song Without Words is a portrayal of the friendship between two women, Sarabeth and Liz, and how that friendship is tested by a challenging time for Liz’s family. The book just didn’t take off. Neither of these main characters were overly compelling or sympathetic, I found Liz’s husband annoying, and I was very unsure what Packer was trying to accomplish with the character of Liz’s son, which I suppose means she didn’t accomplish it. The only character I found even remotely interesting was Liz’s cripplingly depressed daughter, Lauren, but even she seemed one dimensional at times.
Overall, I was disappointed with the book. While I was emotionally invested in Lauren’s recovery, I didn’t care overmuch about the friendship between these women, and I suppose it only mattered that they were reunited in the end because it was obvious that they would have to be. For a book that seems intended to be more about that relationship than any particular plotline, that’s a pretty major failure. Not impressive.
Read something else. Maybe The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, if for no other reason than to tell me if it really is excellent, or if I was just in a chick lit mood when I read it. On that point, I am curious, but not near curious enough to even think about reading it again.
LT: 2 stars, modified excerpt from this.
Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Island of Lost Girls
I saw this book for the first time on one of those tables in Borders that will eventually be the end of me. On that day, I decided that half off or not, I was only allowed to buy one mystery story about a person trying to solve a modern abduction mystery that might in some way be related to the disappearance of one of their own childhood friends... and on that day, I picked Tana French's In The Woods (Which, by the way is very good. I sat down on a couch over Christmas break during a blizzard, and read the whole thing. It was a wonderful time. It's a good book.)
But then I saw this on the shelf in the library, and decided that if it was free, I didn't have to feel bad about reading it. And last night, when I finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but still couldn't sleep. I picked it up out of the library pile.
It sure as hell didn't help me fall asleep. I started it sometime around 11pm, read about half of it before falling asleep (with it still open in my hand), and I finished the rest of it doing laundry and having my Sunday morning bagel. It's a bit of a page turner.
It's a great mystery. It's two mysteries really, and they're both intriguing. Some of it is predictable, but I still couldn't put the damn thing down.
Sure, when a compulsive reader like Maggie compulsively reads something, it's not news. And I'm not saying that this is the best book of 2008, but if you are looking for a quick read, and you like complex mysteries, it would make a fabulous companion for your next plane ride or beach trip.
Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.
But then I saw this on the shelf in the library, and decided that if it was free, I didn't have to feel bad about reading it. And last night, when I finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but still couldn't sleep. I picked it up out of the library pile.
It sure as hell didn't help me fall asleep. I started it sometime around 11pm, read about half of it before falling asleep (with it still open in my hand), and I finished the rest of it doing laundry and having my Sunday morning bagel. It's a bit of a page turner.
It's a great mystery. It's two mysteries really, and they're both intriguing. Some of it is predictable, but I still couldn't put the damn thing down.
Sure, when a compulsive reader like Maggie compulsively reads something, it's not news. And I'm not saying that this is the best book of 2008, but if you are looking for a quick read, and you like complex mysteries, it would make a fabulous companion for your next plane ride or beach trip.
Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.
The Shadow of the Wind
LT Review:
This is an excellent and thrilling tale with complex and likable characters and a Barcelona setting that becomes a character itself. I was engrossed from the beginning by the complexities of the connections between the characters and their beautifully developed relationships. The history behind the story is gradually fleshed out through a series of flashbacks, but rather than feeling fragmented, it is easy for the reader to remain connected to the emotions the characters must be feeling as they learn the same information. Full of twists, magic and coincidence, heroes and villains (both truly evil and just misunderstood), this is a book that will keep you engaged throughout. A delightful read. (4.5 Stars)
Maggie's thoughts:
So I initially picked this up as a book on tape to listen to driving back and fourth to visit Andrew the Wonderful. When I was buying it, I had apparently forgotten that I live MUCH closer to Andrew than I used to. This is a good thing for pretty much every aspect of my life, except that it means that the drive isn't long enough to finish most audiobooks.
I do have to say, while I only listened to the first half of this book, the recording is WONDERFUL, and if you are an audiobook person, I VERY highly recommend it. It had me sitting in my car outside the hotel and listening while Andrew the Wonderful was at work.
Anyway, I didn't really have time to listen to the rest of the book, but I found myself thinking about the story *all the damn time* so during finals, when I knew that I was going home for break, I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy. I decided that since it had been a couple of weeks and it's a pretty complex story, I would start again at the beginning. I spent part of my evenings at the Mountain View Grand in New Hampshire sitting either in front of the fire or in a wonderfully warm tub getting totally sucked into the story (again). (I should also note, the more important activity of my time in New Hampshire was getting engaged. This is the now the blog of the future Mrs. Andrew the Wonderful!)
I didn't finish the book in NH, and when we got back to my place in CT, where, after reading until I was about 30 pages from the end, I left the book on the bedside table in the basement bedroom.
It would seem that God didn't want me to know the end of the story.
But who cares, because I wanted to know the end of the story, so I got ANOTHER copy at the Cincinnati Public Library, and finally finished the damn thing.
The real point though, is that the book was worth all the effort. It's wonderful. Go read it. Now.
This is an excellent and thrilling tale with complex and likable characters and a Barcelona setting that becomes a character itself. I was engrossed from the beginning by the complexities of the connections between the characters and their beautifully developed relationships. The history behind the story is gradually fleshed out through a series of flashbacks, but rather than feeling fragmented, it is easy for the reader to remain connected to the emotions the characters must be feeling as they learn the same information. Full of twists, magic and coincidence, heroes and villains (both truly evil and just misunderstood), this is a book that will keep you engaged throughout. A delightful read. (4.5 Stars)
Maggie's thoughts:
So I initially picked this up as a book on tape to listen to driving back and fourth to visit Andrew the Wonderful. When I was buying it, I had apparently forgotten that I live MUCH closer to Andrew than I used to. This is a good thing for pretty much every aspect of my life, except that it means that the drive isn't long enough to finish most audiobooks.
I do have to say, while I only listened to the first half of this book, the recording is WONDERFUL, and if you are an audiobook person, I VERY highly recommend it. It had me sitting in my car outside the hotel and listening while Andrew the Wonderful was at work.
Anyway, I didn't really have time to listen to the rest of the book, but I found myself thinking about the story *all the damn time* so during finals, when I knew that I was going home for break, I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy. I decided that since it had been a couple of weeks and it's a pretty complex story, I would start again at the beginning. I spent part of my evenings at the Mountain View Grand in New Hampshire sitting either in front of the fire or in a wonderfully warm tub getting totally sucked into the story (again). (I should also note, the more important activity of my time in New Hampshire was getting engaged. This is the now the blog of the future Mrs. Andrew the Wonderful!)
I didn't finish the book in NH, and when we got back to my place in CT, where, after reading until I was about 30 pages from the end, I left the book on the bedside table in the basement bedroom.
It would seem that God didn't want me to know the end of the story.
But who cares, because I wanted to know the end of the story, so I got ANOTHER copy at the Cincinnati Public Library, and finally finished the damn thing.
The real point though, is that the book was worth all the effort. It's wonderful. Go read it. Now.
Monday, February 02, 2009
2009 Booklist
I'm not even going to bother trying to keep track of exact dates this time, but here's the list of books for this year, with as much information as I have on hand or LibraryThing has attached to the description. I will do my bestest to actually put in all the books that I read this year. Here's hoping.
Note: If the title of a book is linked, that will take you to the entry in this blog that talks about it.
A * next to a book's title indicates that I wrote a review for LibraryThing as pursuitofsanity
A ** next to a book's title indicates that I wrote a review for LibraryThing as troubleactingnormal
January
The Shadow of the Wind*
by Carlos Ruiz Zafron
2005
487 pages
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
2003
624 pages
Just After Sunset*
by Stephen King
2008
384 pages
New England White**
by Stephen L. Carter
2008
640 pages
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death*
by Charlie Houston
2008
336 pages
The Addict:
One Patient, One Doctor, One Year*
by Michael Stein
2009 (Advance copy, not yet released)
288 pages
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere *
by ZZ Packer
2003
256 pages
January totals: 7 books, 3015 pages
February
The Path of Daggers
by Robert Jordan
1998
685 pages
Winter's Heart
by Robert Jordon
2000
780 pages
The Memory Keeper's Daughter **
by Kim Edwards
2006
432 pages
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest **
by Ken Kesey
1962
277 pages
Island of Lost Girls **
by Jennifer McMahon
2008
255 pages
Songs Without Words
by Ann Packer
2007
322 pages
Totals for February: 6 books, 2751 pages
Late February, March:
The books that I read between then and now:
Rise and Shine
by Anna Quindlen
2008
352 pages
Anne of Green Gables
by L.M. Montgomery
1908
425 pages
Anne of Avonlea
by L.M. Montgomery
1909
276 pages
Anne of the Island
by L.M. Montgomery
1915
243 pages
Anne of Windy Poplars
by L.M. Montgomery
1936
288 pages
Intern: A Doctor's Initiation
by Sandeep Jauhar
2008
299 pages
An Irish Country Doctor
by Patrick Taylor
2004
337 pages
Books from the time that I was doing a crappy time keeping track: 7 books, 2220 pages
April
Brain Surgeon:
A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles *
by Keith Black
2009
225 pages
The Book of Lost Things*
by John Connolly
2006
339 pages
Sarum: The Novel of England *
by Edward Rutherfurd
1987
1032 pages
Tell Me Where It Hurts
by Nick Trout
2008
304 pages
Outcasts United
by Warren St. John
2009
320 pages
Totals for April: 5 books, 2220 pages
May
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
1984
271 pages
Delicate Edible Birds
by Lauren Groff
2009
306 pages
Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
2008
501 pages
What is the What
by Dave Eggers
2006
538 pages
Fantastic Voyage
by Isaac Asimov
1966
186 pages
Between Late May and Late July (with Promises to Try Really Hard to Do Better!)
Cutting For Stone
by Abraham Verghese
2009
541 pages
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
1844-1845
1243 pages
The Given Day
by Dennis Lehane
2008
720 pages
A Wolf At the Table:
A Memoir of My Father
by Augusten Burroughs
2008
256 pages
Full Circle:
One Man's Journey by Air, Train Boat and Occasionally Very Sore Feet Around 20,000 Miles of the Pacific Rim
by Michael Palin
1997
320 pages
Embracing the Wide Sky:
A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind
by Daniel Tammet
2009
304 pages
A Study in Scarlet
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1887
90 pages
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
2006
514 pages
The Angel's Game
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2009
531 pages
An Instance of the Fingerpost
by Iain Pears
1998
685 pages
My Stroke of Insight:
A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
by Jill Bolte Taylor
2009
224 pages
Different Seasons
by Stephen King
1982
508 pages
What Patient's Taught Me:
A Medical Student's Journey
by Audrey Young
2004
228 pages
The Overacheivers:
The Secret Lives of Driven Kids
by Alexandra Robbins
2006
439 pages
The Children's Hospital
by Chris Adrian
2006
615 pages
Weekends at Bellvue
by Julie Holland, MD
2009
308 pages
ARC
The Elephant Keeper
by Christopher Nicholson
2009
298 pages
ARC
Strength in What Remains
by Tracy Kidder
2009
272 pages
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
1932
268 pages
Note: If the title of a book is linked, that will take you to the entry in this blog that talks about it.
A * next to a book's title indicates that I wrote a review for LibraryThing as pursuitofsanity
A ** next to a book's title indicates that I wrote a review for LibraryThing as troubleactingnormal
January
The Shadow of the Wind*
by Carlos Ruiz Zafron
2005
487 pages
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
2003
624 pages
Just After Sunset*
by Stephen King
2008
384 pages
New England White**
by Stephen L. Carter
2008
640 pages
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death*
by Charlie Houston
2008
336 pages
The Addict:
One Patient, One Doctor, One Year*
by Michael Stein
2009 (Advance copy, not yet released)
288 pages
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere *
by ZZ Packer
2003
256 pages
January totals: 7 books, 3015 pages
February
The Path of Daggers
by Robert Jordan
1998
685 pages
Winter's Heart
by Robert Jordon
2000
780 pages
The Memory Keeper's Daughter **
by Kim Edwards
2006
432 pages
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest **
by Ken Kesey
1962
277 pages
Island of Lost Girls **
by Jennifer McMahon
2008
255 pages
Songs Without Words
by Ann Packer
2007
322 pages
Totals for February: 6 books, 2751 pages
Late February, March:
The books that I read between then and now:
Rise and Shine
by Anna Quindlen
2008
352 pages
Anne of Green Gables
by L.M. Montgomery
1908
425 pages
Anne of Avonlea
by L.M. Montgomery
1909
276 pages
Anne of the Island
by L.M. Montgomery
1915
243 pages
Anne of Windy Poplars
by L.M. Montgomery
1936
288 pages
Intern: A Doctor's Initiation
by Sandeep Jauhar
2008
299 pages
An Irish Country Doctor
by Patrick Taylor
2004
337 pages
Books from the time that I was doing a crappy time keeping track: 7 books, 2220 pages
April
Brain Surgeon:
A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles *
by Keith Black
2009
225 pages
The Book of Lost Things*
by John Connolly
2006
339 pages
Sarum: The Novel of England *
by Edward Rutherfurd
1987
1032 pages
Tell Me Where It Hurts
by Nick Trout
2008
304 pages
Outcasts United
by Warren St. John
2009
320 pages
Totals for April: 5 books, 2220 pages
May
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
1984
271 pages
Delicate Edible Birds
by Lauren Groff
2009
306 pages
Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
2008
501 pages
What is the What
by Dave Eggers
2006
538 pages
Fantastic Voyage
by Isaac Asimov
1966
186 pages
Between Late May and Late July (with Promises to Try Really Hard to Do Better!)
Cutting For Stone
by Abraham Verghese
2009
541 pages
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
1844-1845
1243 pages
The Given Day
by Dennis Lehane
2008
720 pages
A Wolf At the Table:
A Memoir of My Father
by Augusten Burroughs
2008
256 pages
Full Circle:
One Man's Journey by Air, Train Boat and Occasionally Very Sore Feet Around 20,000 Miles of the Pacific Rim
by Michael Palin
1997
320 pages
Embracing the Wide Sky:
A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind
by Daniel Tammet
2009
304 pages
A Study in Scarlet
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1887
90 pages
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
2006
514 pages
The Angel's Game
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2009
531 pages
An Instance of the Fingerpost
by Iain Pears
1998
685 pages
My Stroke of Insight:
A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
by Jill Bolte Taylor
2009
224 pages
Different Seasons
by Stephen King
1982
508 pages
What Patient's Taught Me:
A Medical Student's Journey
by Audrey Young
2004
228 pages
The Overacheivers:
The Secret Lives of Driven Kids
by Alexandra Robbins
2006
439 pages
The Children's Hospital
by Chris Adrian
2006
615 pages
Weekends at Bellvue
by Julie Holland, MD
2009
308 pages
ARC
The Elephant Keeper
by Christopher Nicholson
2009
298 pages
ARC
Strength in What Remains
by Tracy Kidder
2009
272 pages
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
1932
268 pages
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Studying as my Reading Breaks
In my last post, I said that I have been reading as my study breaks, but that is not exactly true. The truth is something more along the lines of studying during my reading breaks... and while I probably need to tone it down a little bit, I am having a grand old time.
The problem with reading being my vice is that unlike so many other vices, the recently cut out TV for example, it doesn't FEEL like a vice when I'm doing it. It's an intellectual activity, one with some level of educational and cultural value (depending on what you read I suppose). A love of books and reading is a trait that I would cultivate rather than squash in my children if ever I have any. (Imagine for a moment the financial disaster that could result form setting me loose in a bookstore with a little mini bibliophile with the same lust for full sets that I have... there are currently something well over 60 American Girl historical fiction books alone!)
The point being, I have trouble making myself feel guilty about reading, even when I am reading The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death when I should, instead, be reading my microanatomy syllabus. Blame my parents for all that relentless positive reinforcement, reading aloud to me and buying of books when I was a child. (You created a monster!) It still, as an adult, seems wrong to set a timer that beeps when I have to stop reading when the only beeping timers that I heard of as a child told my brother that he could. Not wanting to stop was not a problem for him, but I can assure you, it is a big problem for me.
Still, after overindulging a little, and knowing my personal tendency to binge read, I have pulled out the little purple timer bookmark that Andrew the Wonderful bought for me sometime ago, and started limiting myself to 1/2 hour or 45 minute stints...or at least trying to. I am trying to convince myself that while Saul Bellow's collected short stories will still be there for me to read when exams are over (although I may have to renew them from the library), I will not be able to reclaim the study time after the tests have passed.
And with that, I am off to study. After reading for half an hour, of course.
The problem with reading being my vice is that unlike so many other vices, the recently cut out TV for example, it doesn't FEEL like a vice when I'm doing it. It's an intellectual activity, one with some level of educational and cultural value (depending on what you read I suppose). A love of books and reading is a trait that I would cultivate rather than squash in my children if ever I have any. (Imagine for a moment the financial disaster that could result form setting me loose in a bookstore with a little mini bibliophile with the same lust for full sets that I have... there are currently something well over 60 American Girl historical fiction books alone!)
The point being, I have trouble making myself feel guilty about reading, even when I am reading The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death when I should, instead, be reading my microanatomy syllabus. Blame my parents for all that relentless positive reinforcement, reading aloud to me and buying of books when I was a child. (You created a monster!) It still, as an adult, seems wrong to set a timer that beeps when I have to stop reading when the only beeping timers that I heard of as a child told my brother that he could. Not wanting to stop was not a problem for him, but I can assure you, it is a big problem for me.
Still, after overindulging a little, and knowing my personal tendency to binge read, I have pulled out the little purple timer bookmark that Andrew the Wonderful bought for me sometime ago, and started limiting myself to 1/2 hour or 45 minute stints...or at least trying to. I am trying to convince myself that while Saul Bellow's collected short stories will still be there for me to read when exams are over (although I may have to renew them from the library), I will not be able to reclaim the study time after the tests have passed.
And with that, I am off to study. After reading for half an hour, of course.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Seriously, How Did It Get to be 2009?!
OK, Not only is it 2009, but it's damn near February 2009. And I haven't written in here since July. What happened?!
The answer, of course, is MEDICAL SCHOOL. But what are you going to do?
So it's January, time for my annual entry thinking about how I am going to read this year. And my annual promise to write more in the book blog. We all know how well those have turned out. Perhaps this one will be better. Either way, here's what I am thinking:
I gave up TV. The official reason being that this block of classes is important and I want to do well so that I can get good grades and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The actual reasons are a little more complicated. Certainly, I do want better grades, and spending more time studying is a good way to work towards that goal, but there's more to it than that. And if you asked me whether I would rather spend my Thursday evenings with Gross Anatomy or Gray's Anatomy the answer is easy and not the one that Dr. Giffin would like to hear, but there will be no more Dr. McDreamy in my life. Seriously.
Part of this comes from the fact that I am engaged now, and Andrew The Wonderful will be moving here in the spring/early summer. This means that I have to do some thinking about the way I spend my time, especially my "alone time," since there will be less of it. Now, I am not complaining about that. In fact, I couldn't be more excited to be trading my alone time for more Andrew time, but it does mean that I'm thinking about the way that I spend my evenings. Mostly what I've come up with is that I know that I will want to be spending time with him, and that he will not want to be spending that time watching One Tree Hill. The way that I live my day to day at the moment (odd hours, etc) is not overly conducive to sharing living space with another person, and probably also not overly conducive to my own health. It needs to be, at least, thought good and hard about, and nixing the TV seemed a good way to add some thinking time (and maybe some sleeping time as well). And of course, the good grades I want, not just for their own sake, or for the sake of the good feelings and pride that comes with them, but also because with being engaged comes the reality that all future life choices will be made as a pair, and I sure as hell am not going to be the one that limits our choices of future locations by having grades that prevent me from matching wherever I damn well choose. So there.
But there's more to it than those things too. I was sort of thinking about the kind of person that I want to be, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the way that an author would describe me were he to be introducing my character in a novel. This is not new patten, but I turned the lens toward the TV watching. Now, which would you rather: Maggie is a voracious and thoughtful reader OR Maggie is the type of person who can tell you, exactly, what happened on Desperate Housewives last night?
One of those things is better than the other, or at least, closer to the way that I see myself, closer to the way that I want to be.
So I'm reading as my study breaks, which makes them more flexible and more enjoyable and better for my brain and my ability to hold interesting conversations. And is certainly better for this blog. We'll see how it goes. I suppose that I could promise to write in here once a week, or something like that, but I am trying to make more reasonable resolutions this year. Ones that take into account all the little things in life that you can't predict. So no number based promises, just some thinking, and a promise that, at the very least, there will be more thinking.
The answer, of course, is MEDICAL SCHOOL. But what are you going to do?
So it's January, time for my annual entry thinking about how I am going to read this year. And my annual promise to write more in the book blog. We all know how well those have turned out. Perhaps this one will be better. Either way, here's what I am thinking:
I gave up TV. The official reason being that this block of classes is important and I want to do well so that I can get good grades and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The actual reasons are a little more complicated. Certainly, I do want better grades, and spending more time studying is a good way to work towards that goal, but there's more to it than that. And if you asked me whether I would rather spend my Thursday evenings with Gross Anatomy or Gray's Anatomy the answer is easy and not the one that Dr. Giffin would like to hear, but there will be no more Dr. McDreamy in my life. Seriously.
Part of this comes from the fact that I am engaged now, and Andrew The Wonderful will be moving here in the spring/early summer. This means that I have to do some thinking about the way I spend my time, especially my "alone time," since there will be less of it. Now, I am not complaining about that. In fact, I couldn't be more excited to be trading my alone time for more Andrew time, but it does mean that I'm thinking about the way that I spend my evenings. Mostly what I've come up with is that I know that I will want to be spending time with him, and that he will not want to be spending that time watching One Tree Hill. The way that I live my day to day at the moment (odd hours, etc) is not overly conducive to sharing living space with another person, and probably also not overly conducive to my own health. It needs to be, at least, thought good and hard about, and nixing the TV seemed a good way to add some thinking time (and maybe some sleeping time as well). And of course, the good grades I want, not just for their own sake, or for the sake of the good feelings and pride that comes with them, but also because with being engaged comes the reality that all future life choices will be made as a pair, and I sure as hell am not going to be the one that limits our choices of future locations by having grades that prevent me from matching wherever I damn well choose. So there.
But there's more to it than those things too. I was sort of thinking about the kind of person that I want to be, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the way that an author would describe me were he to be introducing my character in a novel. This is not new patten, but I turned the lens toward the TV watching. Now, which would you rather: Maggie is a voracious and thoughtful reader OR Maggie is the type of person who can tell you, exactly, what happened on Desperate Housewives last night?
One of those things is better than the other, or at least, closer to the way that I see myself, closer to the way that I want to be.
So I'm reading as my study breaks, which makes them more flexible and more enjoyable and better for my brain and my ability to hold interesting conversations. And is certainly better for this blog. We'll see how it goes. I suppose that I could promise to write in here once a week, or something like that, but I am trying to make more reasonable resolutions this year. Ones that take into account all the little things in life that you can't predict. So no number based promises, just some thinking, and a promise that, at the very least, there will be more thinking.
Reading on the T
Once or twice a year when I was in college in Boston, I would decide that I wanted to disappear for the day. Always on a Sunday, always in the winter, usually after a bit of dreary weather. I would decide the night before, and wake up earlier than usual for a Sunday, say 9 or 9:30. I always wore the same thing, a pair of worn out jeans with lots of holes and a dark grey form-fitting turtle neck sweater from J.Crew, fuzzy socks in comfy shoes, hair down or in a braid, no makeup, cute hat if I was feeling trendy, no gloves, coat only if the wind chill dictated that it would be foolish to go without one. I didn't have glasses at the time, but if I did I would have worn those, too. In this outfit I thought that I looked cute and comfortable, smart and Bostonian. I would pack my wallet, my journal, a pen and a novel of medium length that I had been meaning to read but hadn't really started, then grab breakfast, head for the BC stop at the end of the Green Line, and get on the train.
On these days there was no set plan, no errands, no real mission except to get away from everyone, enjoy Boston, and read whatever book I had brought along in its entirety. I would ride the T for hours, getting off and switching lines and directions whenever the mood struck me or I knew that I was going to have to pay more if I went any further, getting coffee at the in-station Dunkin' Donuts in the Government Center Station and reading my book. I would get off sometime in the early afternoon when I got hungry and grab food. I remember eating at a bagel place near Park Street, pizza in Harvard Square, at the little cafe in Trident on Newbury. Then I would spend some time in a nearby location that was unbothered by someone who wanted to just sit and read: a coffee shop, the Harvard bookstore, the Barnes & Noble in Brighton, the BPL. When I needed a break from the book I would people-watch or window-shop, just walk around or write in the journal. When I deemed myself near enough to the book's end, I would get back on the train and head to BC, always taking the B line, and always finishing the book at some point on the way back.
All the times that I did this, I think it was 6, I never once ran into anyone I knew. During the whole day, I would hardly talk to anyone, mostly just the people I ordered coffee from, bums asking for money, tourists asking what stop they should get off at for Harvard Square or Boston Common. Nothing that would qualify as a real conversation, say a couple hundred words all day long at the very most. Once I had a cell phone, I suppose that I brought it with me, but it was off or on silent. I spent those days, surrounded by people sure, but really, alone with my book.
This is simply not possible in Cincinnati. For one, obviously, there is no T, no train of any sort, and also, not really much of the same friendly downtown walk around areas, but that is not really the problem. The problem is that the fine people of the mid west are friendly. These people, whether they know you or not, see being in the same place at the same time as the ONLY prerequisite for conversation. They all want to chat.
In the past two weeks, I have not once managed to wait for a bus without a conversation, without learning at least some part of the life story of someone else waiting. I have met a graduate student from Sri Lanka who told me about the parts of America he wanted to visit and asked me to explain how Connecticut was different than Ohio, a pink-hatted woman from India who told me that global warming is making New Delhi both warmer in the summer and colder in the winter, and that homeless people there are freezing to death, a fourth year medical student infuriated with the irregularity of the shuttle, a man who complained that since Cincinnati was a smaller city there were no clubs open long enough to be worth going to when he got off work at midnight, and a woman taking her four year old son (in superhero pajamas just like the ones my brother used to wear) to the doctor to get his strep throat taken care of.
These people are interesting, and I am not saying that I don't enjoy the conversations, but it is nearly impossible to, without being rude, pull off the surrounded by people but still alone thing. People just start conversations. It's fascinating.
Today, my cell phone missing, a productive studying day yesterday, I decided to sort of try the reading in public thing. I did have a couple of errands to run too, and once I got my car from the garage at school, I drove, but I was thinking of those Boston days when I set out. I sat for a while in the bagel shop near my apartment. One of the guys that works there came by cleaning tables and sucked me into a 5 minute conversation about what the Sox should do about Tek. Then, waiting for the bus to go to campus, another woman waiting asked when the next bus was coming, and then chatted until it arrived. The woman waiting next to me for our food at Panera wanted to know what I had ordered, if I liked it, would she like it even if she didn't like spicy food? The checkout lady at Target was pregnant and due in two weeks, the customer in front of me in line started the conversation, and soon she was asking both of us what we thought of her baby names. The clerk in the bookstore noticed what I was reading, asked if I liked it, then if I had read something else slightly related, and talked about books for 10 minutes. These things just don't happen in Boston.
Now, this is something that I like about Cincinnati for the most part, I have enjoyed these little chats and the whole series of people that I have had long talks with but know none of their names. It's charming, most of the time. It sure makes waiting for the bus go faster.
But today... today I really really missed those days alone with my book and all those people providing an interesting, but not terribly interactive background. Today I missed those jeans and that sweater, thrown away because I wore them out a little too much. Today I really, really, really wished that I could have been reading on the T.
On these days there was no set plan, no errands, no real mission except to get away from everyone, enjoy Boston, and read whatever book I had brought along in its entirety. I would ride the T for hours, getting off and switching lines and directions whenever the mood struck me or I knew that I was going to have to pay more if I went any further, getting coffee at the in-station Dunkin' Donuts in the Government Center Station and reading my book. I would get off sometime in the early afternoon when I got hungry and grab food. I remember eating at a bagel place near Park Street, pizza in Harvard Square, at the little cafe in Trident on Newbury. Then I would spend some time in a nearby location that was unbothered by someone who wanted to just sit and read: a coffee shop, the Harvard bookstore, the Barnes & Noble in Brighton, the BPL. When I needed a break from the book I would people-watch or window-shop, just walk around or write in the journal. When I deemed myself near enough to the book's end, I would get back on the train and head to BC, always taking the B line, and always finishing the book at some point on the way back.
All the times that I did this, I think it was 6, I never once ran into anyone I knew. During the whole day, I would hardly talk to anyone, mostly just the people I ordered coffee from, bums asking for money, tourists asking what stop they should get off at for Harvard Square or Boston Common. Nothing that would qualify as a real conversation, say a couple hundred words all day long at the very most. Once I had a cell phone, I suppose that I brought it with me, but it was off or on silent. I spent those days, surrounded by people sure, but really, alone with my book.
This is simply not possible in Cincinnati. For one, obviously, there is no T, no train of any sort, and also, not really much of the same friendly downtown walk around areas, but that is not really the problem. The problem is that the fine people of the mid west are friendly. These people, whether they know you or not, see being in the same place at the same time as the ONLY prerequisite for conversation. They all want to chat.
In the past two weeks, I have not once managed to wait for a bus without a conversation, without learning at least some part of the life story of someone else waiting. I have met a graduate student from Sri Lanka who told me about the parts of America he wanted to visit and asked me to explain how Connecticut was different than Ohio, a pink-hatted woman from India who told me that global warming is making New Delhi both warmer in the summer and colder in the winter, and that homeless people there are freezing to death, a fourth year medical student infuriated with the irregularity of the shuttle, a man who complained that since Cincinnati was a smaller city there were no clubs open long enough to be worth going to when he got off work at midnight, and a woman taking her four year old son (in superhero pajamas just like the ones my brother used to wear) to the doctor to get his strep throat taken care of.
These people are interesting, and I am not saying that I don't enjoy the conversations, but it is nearly impossible to, without being rude, pull off the surrounded by people but still alone thing. People just start conversations. It's fascinating.
Today, my cell phone missing, a productive studying day yesterday, I decided to sort of try the reading in public thing. I did have a couple of errands to run too, and once I got my car from the garage at school, I drove, but I was thinking of those Boston days when I set out. I sat for a while in the bagel shop near my apartment. One of the guys that works there came by cleaning tables and sucked me into a 5 minute conversation about what the Sox should do about Tek. Then, waiting for the bus to go to campus, another woman waiting asked when the next bus was coming, and then chatted until it arrived. The woman waiting next to me for our food at Panera wanted to know what I had ordered, if I liked it, would she like it even if she didn't like spicy food? The checkout lady at Target was pregnant and due in two weeks, the customer in front of me in line started the conversation, and soon she was asking both of us what we thought of her baby names. The clerk in the bookstore noticed what I was reading, asked if I liked it, then if I had read something else slightly related, and talked about books for 10 minutes. These things just don't happen in Boston.
Now, this is something that I like about Cincinnati for the most part, I have enjoyed these little chats and the whole series of people that I have had long talks with but know none of their names. It's charming, most of the time. It sure makes waiting for the bus go faster.
But today... today I really really missed those days alone with my book and all those people providing an interesting, but not terribly interactive background. Today I missed those jeans and that sweater, thrown away because I wore them out a little too much. Today I really, really, really wished that I could have been reading on the T.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Everything's Eventual
Everything's Eventual
Stephen King
7/18/2008-7/20/2008
LT Rating: 4 stars
LT Review:
I very much enjoyed this collection of short stories by Stephen King. While some of the stories fall clearly within the realm of his reputation as a king of things that go bump in the night, others are more literary, and there are pieces in both categories that really shine.
The best of the bunch: "The Road Virus Heads North" was deeply creepy, and kept me awake and a little antsy for a good bit after I finished it. "The Little Sisters of Eluria" is a great little slice from the life of Roland, of Dark Tower fame, and makes this collection worth picking up for DT series fans. 'Everything's Eventual" is dark, complex, and simply excellent. "Riding the Bullet" is compelling, honest, and somehow finds a balance between feeling driven by a sense of love and feeling driven by a sense of dread.
There really weren't any stories in this collection that I didn't enjoy, although I think that "Luckey Quarter" was the weakest of the set.
Overall, an excellent collection. King says in the introduction that he mourns the short story as a dying art form, (something that he will claim with greater passion in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories: 2007.) With this collection, he laid a powerful reminder in front of me that the genre is a rich a lovely one. I certainly hope that the prognosis is not so bad as it may seem.
Maggie specific thoughts:
My thoughts on my new Stephen King habit are all included in the post for Four Past Midnight. Go find them there
Stephen King
7/18/2008-7/20/2008
LT Rating: 4 stars
LT Review:
I very much enjoyed this collection of short stories by Stephen King. While some of the stories fall clearly within the realm of his reputation as a king of things that go bump in the night, others are more literary, and there are pieces in both categories that really shine.
The best of the bunch: "The Road Virus Heads North" was deeply creepy, and kept me awake and a little antsy for a good bit after I finished it. "The Little Sisters of Eluria" is a great little slice from the life of Roland, of Dark Tower fame, and makes this collection worth picking up for DT series fans. 'Everything's Eventual" is dark, complex, and simply excellent. "Riding the Bullet" is compelling, honest, and somehow finds a balance between feeling driven by a sense of love and feeling driven by a sense of dread.
There really weren't any stories in this collection that I didn't enjoy, although I think that "Luckey Quarter" was the weakest of the set.
Overall, an excellent collection. King says in the introduction that he mourns the short story as a dying art form, (something that he will claim with greater passion in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories: 2007.) With this collection, he laid a powerful reminder in front of me that the genre is a rich a lovely one. I certainly hope that the prognosis is not so bad as it may seem.
Maggie specific thoughts:
My thoughts on my new Stephen King habit are all included in the post for Four Past Midnight. Go find them there
Four Past Midnight
Four Past Midnight
Stephen King
7/20/2008 - 7/22/2008
LT Review: 3.5 stars
LT Review:
This is a collection of four short novels (although they are short only by King standards, each runs around 200 pages). Overall, it's quite entertaining.
The first, The Langoliers is the best of the bunch. The story of a group of passengers on an LA to Boston fight that manages to travel through time, it's suspenseful, exciting, and driven (as many of King's tales are) by fear of both supernatural and more human evils. It's 250 pages that readers like me will plow through in a single sitting.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is the basis for the recent Johnny Depp movie "Secret Window." And tells the tale of a writer accused by a stranger of stealing a story that he knows he wrote himself. While I suspected the twist ending well before I got there, I expect that at the time this was published (well before a more recent and absurdly popular tale with a similar twist) the thought would have occurred to few readers, and maybe it won't occur to you. Overall, it's good but not great.
The Library Policeman is a gripping read, and enough to make someone currently pretty deep into library fines (like yours truly) more than a little bit nervous. The characters are what makes the story work here, and they are all elegantly flawed. I have trouble when King gets too into the descriptions of his monsters, but perhaps this is because I am not much of a visual reader, but overall, I enjoyed this one very much.
The Sun Dog, the last in the collection is by far the weakest. Centered around a paranormal camera, the events of the story seem a little too random and confusing. While some of the moments and secondary characters have a wonderful textured existence, the story fell flat for me overall, and I found myself not nearly as wrapped up in the action as I was with the other three.
Overall, it's a satisfying bunch of stories, although I see no real reason why it has to be read or considered as a collection at all. All of the novellas stand independent of the others, and there is no real theme particularly connecting them. (Aside from their tendency to keep you up past midnight, by which standard we could combine a large percentage of King's work into a single monstrous volume.)
Unless you are a die hard fan, you can skip The Sun Dog. I would recommend reading The Langoliers and The Library Policeman, and Secret Window, Secret Garden is certainly worth the 150 pages for quick readers, but if plowing through it is going to take you more than an evening, your time could probably be better spent somewhere else.
Maggie Specific thoughts: **Complete with a SPOILER ALERT**
I stole this book from the basement of my house, I have no idea how long ago, but I've been lugging it around unread for quite a while now. The thing that I have finally really admitted to myself is that I very very very much enjoy reading Stephen King. Perhaps the collected works of the master of horror is a strange new pastime to pick up shortly after moving into an apartment all by myself for the first time (sounds like something that might end up in one of his stories) but I'm having fun. Thinking about it, my affection for these stories specifically, and the others that I have read and am reading more generally, goes to the base of what I want as a reader. I like to be told a story. I am reading not as some grand academic exercise (that's what the lab is for) but to be entertained, and while I see value in the literary greats, I also have started to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving an author because he tells stories that I can't help but get wrapped up in. I guess, in the end, I don't want reading to be hard, I want it to be powerful, and moving, and entertaining, but this is not work for me, this is pleasure. That attitude is something that I am just coming to terms with (as a perfectionist, I feel sometimes like perhaps it is a waste of my time to have read the complete works of say Dennis Lehane but not War and Peace, because I want to be "good" at all the things that I do), but if I really think about it, that is the thread that joins all the books and writers that I love most... plan old good story telling.
King is unashamed to admit that storytelling is basically his goal, that he's not trying to work great constructs of language, but rather to tell good tales. He accomplishes that, and I find that I like and respect him more for doing what he does, doing it well, and not trying to be something he's not. Thinking about it I think is helping me to let myself be the kind of reader that I am at my core, and I am having a most wonderful time with it.
I should note here that John Irving, who I also really love (to the point where I get a little excited thinking about all the John Irving books that I haven't read yet, like presents waiting to be opened) says something similar about his own writing in an interview included in my copy of A Widow for One Year. Irving claims that he is trying to persuade the reader emotionally, not intellectually, and that he writes "plot-driven" novels. Both Irving and King seem to think about the story in their work, think of themselves as someone setting out, by writing words on a page, to get their readers emotionally involved in the tale they are weaving. And sure, A Prayer for Owen Meaney is something very different from The Langoliers, but what they have in common is that they are both great stories with wonderful characters. Both stories that, as I read them, involved me so totally that I was most annoyed when anyone wanted me to pay attention to anything else.
So I'm going to read a bunch of Stephen King now, and then maybe some more John Irving, and I am sure a bunch of other things, with some non-fiction thrown in. And if I never get to Finnegan's Wake... well, I'm just not going to feel bad about that anymore.
As an aside, the "more recent and absurdly popular tale" that I am referring to in the review of Secret Window, Secret Garden is, of course, Fight Club. And knowing that should tell you how the whole thing ends. Right.
Stephen King
7/20/2008 - 7/22/2008
LT Review: 3.5 stars
LT Review:
This is a collection of four short novels (although they are short only by King standards, each runs around 200 pages). Overall, it's quite entertaining.
The first, The Langoliers is the best of the bunch. The story of a group of passengers on an LA to Boston fight that manages to travel through time, it's suspenseful, exciting, and driven (as many of King's tales are) by fear of both supernatural and more human evils. It's 250 pages that readers like me will plow through in a single sitting.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is the basis for the recent Johnny Depp movie "Secret Window." And tells the tale of a writer accused by a stranger of stealing a story that he knows he wrote himself. While I suspected the twist ending well before I got there, I expect that at the time this was published (well before a more recent and absurdly popular tale with a similar twist) the thought would have occurred to few readers, and maybe it won't occur to you. Overall, it's good but not great.
The Library Policeman is a gripping read, and enough to make someone currently pretty deep into library fines (like yours truly) more than a little bit nervous. The characters are what makes the story work here, and they are all elegantly flawed. I have trouble when King gets too into the descriptions of his monsters, but perhaps this is because I am not much of a visual reader, but overall, I enjoyed this one very much.
The Sun Dog, the last in the collection is by far the weakest. Centered around a paranormal camera, the events of the story seem a little too random and confusing. While some of the moments and secondary characters have a wonderful textured existence, the story fell flat for me overall, and I found myself not nearly as wrapped up in the action as I was with the other three.
Overall, it's a satisfying bunch of stories, although I see no real reason why it has to be read or considered as a collection at all. All of the novellas stand independent of the others, and there is no real theme particularly connecting them. (Aside from their tendency to keep you up past midnight, by which standard we could combine a large percentage of King's work into a single monstrous volume.)
Unless you are a die hard fan, you can skip The Sun Dog. I would recommend reading The Langoliers and The Library Policeman, and Secret Window, Secret Garden is certainly worth the 150 pages for quick readers, but if plowing through it is going to take you more than an evening, your time could probably be better spent somewhere else.
Maggie Specific thoughts: **Complete with a SPOILER ALERT**
I stole this book from the basement of my house, I have no idea how long ago, but I've been lugging it around unread for quite a while now. The thing that I have finally really admitted to myself is that I very very very much enjoy reading Stephen King. Perhaps the collected works of the master of horror is a strange new pastime to pick up shortly after moving into an apartment all by myself for the first time (sounds like something that might end up in one of his stories) but I'm having fun. Thinking about it, my affection for these stories specifically, and the others that I have read and am reading more generally, goes to the base of what I want as a reader. I like to be told a story. I am reading not as some grand academic exercise (that's what the lab is for) but to be entertained, and while I see value in the literary greats, I also have started to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving an author because he tells stories that I can't help but get wrapped up in. I guess, in the end, I don't want reading to be hard, I want it to be powerful, and moving, and entertaining, but this is not work for me, this is pleasure. That attitude is something that I am just coming to terms with (as a perfectionist, I feel sometimes like perhaps it is a waste of my time to have read the complete works of say Dennis Lehane but not War and Peace, because I want to be "good" at all the things that I do), but if I really think about it, that is the thread that joins all the books and writers that I love most... plan old good story telling.
King is unashamed to admit that storytelling is basically his goal, that he's not trying to work great constructs of language, but rather to tell good tales. He accomplishes that, and I find that I like and respect him more for doing what he does, doing it well, and not trying to be something he's not. Thinking about it I think is helping me to let myself be the kind of reader that I am at my core, and I am having a most wonderful time with it.
I should note here that John Irving, who I also really love (to the point where I get a little excited thinking about all the John Irving books that I haven't read yet, like presents waiting to be opened) says something similar about his own writing in an interview included in my copy of A Widow for One Year. Irving claims that he is trying to persuade the reader emotionally, not intellectually, and that he writes "plot-driven" novels. Both Irving and King seem to think about the story in their work, think of themselves as someone setting out, by writing words on a page, to get their readers emotionally involved in the tale they are weaving. And sure, A Prayer for Owen Meaney is something very different from The Langoliers, but what they have in common is that they are both great stories with wonderful characters. Both stories that, as I read them, involved me so totally that I was most annoyed when anyone wanted me to pay attention to anything else.
So I'm going to read a bunch of Stephen King now, and then maybe some more John Irving, and I am sure a bunch of other things, with some non-fiction thrown in. And if I never get to Finnegan's Wake... well, I'm just not going to feel bad about that anymore.
As an aside, the "more recent and absurdly popular tale" that I am referring to in the review of Secret Window, Secret Garden is, of course, Fight Club. And knowing that should tell you how the whole thing ends. Right.
LibraryThing Wins
So since I got started on Librarything, I have been more obsessed with books than ever. I'm not sure if that is really a good thing. (Does anyone ever really NEED to be more obsessed with books that I have been for as long as I can remember? Probably not.) Either way, I'm enjoying it. It's keeping me reading, but I feel compelled to write about the things that I read (at least a brief review) and keep track of them in my posting for that purpose, so it's keeping me on track with those habits that I was trying to solidify.
That being said, writing those reviews is not really the same as what I do when I blog about books, since the things that I post on the site are seen by users outside the context of "me." Therefore, the things that I post don't always touch on the ways that the things that I am reading hit me personally or connect with the little goings on in my head and my life, or how I ended up with that particular book in my hand or anything like that. I like the reviewing, and I hope that the things I contribute help people out, but it's not the same. I want to do both maybe, both to synthesize my thoughts into something useful for the general non-Maggie knowing reader in terms of a well-thought out opinion of a book and how good or bad it is, and to take the time to organize my thoughts for the Maggie-knowing reader, or perhaps more importantly, for the Maggie herself to better know what I was thinking when I read something, and how it plays out with the other things in my life. I think doing both is important, and I am not sure that I know how to find time for both, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, I guess that I am going to post my reviews here as well, for the three people that might occasionally read this thing, and when a book touches me, or I have thoughts that just don't fit with a review, I'll put them in after the review. We'll see how that works for now. Cool.
That being said, writing those reviews is not really the same as what I do when I blog about books, since the things that I post on the site are seen by users outside the context of "me." Therefore, the things that I post don't always touch on the ways that the things that I am reading hit me personally or connect with the little goings on in my head and my life, or how I ended up with that particular book in my hand or anything like that. I like the reviewing, and I hope that the things I contribute help people out, but it's not the same. I want to do both maybe, both to synthesize my thoughts into something useful for the general non-Maggie knowing reader in terms of a well-thought out opinion of a book and how good or bad it is, and to take the time to organize my thoughts for the Maggie-knowing reader, or perhaps more importantly, for the Maggie herself to better know what I was thinking when I read something, and how it plays out with the other things in my life. I think doing both is important, and I am not sure that I know how to find time for both, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, I guess that I am going to post my reviews here as well, for the three people that might occasionally read this thing, and when a book touches me, or I have thoughts that just don't fit with a review, I'll put them in after the review. We'll see how that works for now. Cool.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
So I have had this book sitting on my shelf ever since I stole it from my mother long long ago on one of my visits home. (I really do just pillage her library...sorry Mom.)
Anyway, I had heard good things about it, but had never gotten around to picking it up, but it was one of the books that jumped out at me as having been on the shelf too long without attention being paid to it when I was making my TBR Challenge 2008 list. Once on the list, it was clear, to me at least, that I would get it read. Today, I realized that I very much needed a break of a little bit from The Wheel of Time (5 volumes and thousands of pages in) so I started this book sitting in Panera this morning...
... and finished it about 10 hours later.
I loved it. I'm not even sure how to explain why I loved it as I did, but I simply could not put it down. I adored the two central characters from the very first page, and felt compelled to know their story, in it's entirety, before I did anything else. (Although I did spend some quality time in Borders this afternoon, because I am a addict, and I needed a book fix.)
This is a love story of the highest caliber. More than that, a story of longing, and the compromises that are part of living and loving with imperfect people. It's a beautiful tale, and I must give Niffenegger credit for her ability to create little phrases just perfect for the moment at hand, five or six words ideally placed together... it's a gift.
I suppose that perhaps part of the reason that I loved this book is how deeply I related to Claire's sense of longing, of missing the one that she loves when he has gone where she can't follow. I feel that way a lot these days, missing Andrew. Time travel and war are perhaps not the same, but the emotion that she describes on the very first page was certainly a part of what pulled me in.
"It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired... Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love so intensified by absence?"
Overall, I can say nothing more than that it is a beautiful book, one that left me feeling transfixed and transported, a story that demanded to be read so strongly that I simply couldn't put it down.
by Audrey Niffenegger
So I have had this book sitting on my shelf ever since I stole it from my mother long long ago on one of my visits home. (I really do just pillage her library...sorry Mom.)
Anyway, I had heard good things about it, but had never gotten around to picking it up, but it was one of the books that jumped out at me as having been on the shelf too long without attention being paid to it when I was making my TBR Challenge 2008 list. Once on the list, it was clear, to me at least, that I would get it read. Today, I realized that I very much needed a break of a little bit from The Wheel of Time (5 volumes and thousands of pages in) so I started this book sitting in Panera this morning...
... and finished it about 10 hours later.
I loved it. I'm not even sure how to explain why I loved it as I did, but I simply could not put it down. I adored the two central characters from the very first page, and felt compelled to know their story, in it's entirety, before I did anything else. (Although I did spend some quality time in Borders this afternoon, because I am a addict, and I needed a book fix.)
This is a love story of the highest caliber. More than that, a story of longing, and the compromises that are part of living and loving with imperfect people. It's a beautiful tale, and I must give Niffenegger credit for her ability to create little phrases just perfect for the moment at hand, five or six words ideally placed together... it's a gift.
I suppose that perhaps part of the reason that I loved this book is how deeply I related to Claire's sense of longing, of missing the one that she loves when he has gone where she can't follow. I feel that way a lot these days, missing Andrew. Time travel and war are perhaps not the same, but the emotion that she describes on the very first page was certainly a part of what pulled me in.
"It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired... Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love so intensified by absence?"
Overall, I can say nothing more than that it is a beautiful book, one that left me feeling transfixed and transported, a story that demanded to be read so strongly that I simply couldn't put it down.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
The Dragon Reborn
The Dragon Reborn
by Robert Jordan
The third book in The Wheel of Time series, and I was just as involved as I was in the first two. In this volume, the characters are on separate journeys, and Jordan does a good job staying with each story long enough to keep the action moving, while still switching back and forth often enough to allow you to keep track of where everyone is and stay involved in all of the separate story lines.
What else is there to say, if you like epic fantasy, The Wheel of Time seems a great series to tackle, at least from my perspective four books in. I suppose it would be foolish to start if you don't think that you want to read the whole series, since the story makes no pretense of ending at the close of each volume, and if you start in the middle, I think you'll miss far too much. It almost seems silly to try to review books in the middle (unless one turns out somehow shocking bad). The epic continues, and continues well and interestingly, but this book was never intended to stand on it's own.
by Robert Jordan
The third book in The Wheel of Time series, and I was just as involved as I was in the first two. In this volume, the characters are on separate journeys, and Jordan does a good job staying with each story long enough to keep the action moving, while still switching back and forth often enough to allow you to keep track of where everyone is and stay involved in all of the separate story lines.
What else is there to say, if you like epic fantasy, The Wheel of Time seems a great series to tackle, at least from my perspective four books in. I suppose it would be foolish to start if you don't think that you want to read the whole series, since the story makes no pretense of ending at the close of each volume, and if you start in the middle, I think you'll miss far too much. It almost seems silly to try to review books in the middle (unless one turns out somehow shocking bad). The epic continues, and continues well and interestingly, but this book was never intended to stand on it's own.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
TBR Challenge
Librarything is a dangerous place. There I can easily locate the blogs of other book obsessed people, who have come up with nifty reading related ideas.
Today's discovery: The TBR ("To Be Read") Challenge.
Basically, you make a list of 12 books that have been on your to-be-read list for more than 6 months, than you read them. It's supposed to be an annual challenge, but I am starting late, and I'm still going to do 12, because I am determined like that.
After some time spend staring at my bookshelf, I have chosen the following 12 books:
1) A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
2) Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
3) Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
4) Native Son
by Richard Wright
5) A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
6) American Psycho
by Easton Ellis
7) Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
8) One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9) Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
10) The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Read 7/12/08
11) Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
12) The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulix
Now I promise not to edit this list, aside from linking the titles to the blog posts about those books once I actually read them and write about them. And we'll see how this goes.
Books are good. Decreasing the size of my to-be-read list is very good. Let's go!
Today's discovery: The TBR ("To Be Read") Challenge.
Basically, you make a list of 12 books that have been on your to-be-read list for more than 6 months, than you read them. It's supposed to be an annual challenge, but I am starting late, and I'm still going to do 12, because I am determined like that.
After some time spend staring at my bookshelf, I have chosen the following 12 books:
1) A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
2) Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
3) Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
4) Native Son
by Richard Wright
5) A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
6) American Psycho
by Easton Ellis
7) Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
8) One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9) Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
10) The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Read 7/12/08
11) Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
12) The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulix
Now I promise not to edit this list, aside from linking the titles to the blog posts about those books once I actually read them and write about them. And we'll see how this goes.
Books are good. Decreasing the size of my to-be-read list is very good. Let's go!
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Library Thing
So joining LibraryThing.com has got me thinking. I am sort of in love with the site, and with reading the posts and thoughts of people who seem to be readers of the same obsessive sort that I am. Still, I have to ask myself how I want to use all the tools that they have there.
First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.
But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.
So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.
So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.
I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.
And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.
First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.
But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.
So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.
So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.
I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.
And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.
The Great Hunt
The Great Hunt
by Robert Jordan
The problem with the way I read is this: once I get started with a book (or series of books) that I find particularly interesting, it becomes all consuming. An epic fantasy series with 11 existing volumes all over 700 pages long might be a great summer project for me, but I also have to make sure that other things get done, like sleeping, which has suffered since I started reading The Wheel of Time. Such is life.
Anyway, this is the second book in the Wheel of Time series, an epic fantasy tale with all the usual features: a battle between good and evil for the fate of the world, magic, monsters and interesting creatures, a reluctant hero with a number of lovable sidekicks, and a tremendous number of strange names for people and places that will make you truly glad for the glossary at the end of each book (at least, if you are in any way like me, challenged in the remembering of these things). It's a very good book, good enough to suck me in and truly distract me, with a divinely detailed world that holds together and has a tangible realness to it providing the background for an adventure tale that makes 700 pages fly by. It is not The Lord of the Rings, but I can see where the comparison is made, and it is saying a bit that I don't think that Tolkien would roll in his grave at the thought.
But there's no point in recommending it unless you have already read The Eye of the World, and unless you believe that you are going to have the time to read at least The Dragon Reborn (the third book in the series). Jordan seems to make no accomodations for readers that decide to enter the series midstream, so I think that a reader would gain more confusion than enjoyment out of starting here. These are not so much separate books as volumes of one long story, there are no neat endings to make you feel like you completed something when you turn the last page. To be honest, I am grateful for that, I loathe spending my time reading catchup put in for people who didn't read the first book. So yes, I haven't read the whole series yet, so I can't promise that every book is as good as the first two, but I am going to dive right into volume 3, probably tonight, even though it's already 2:00am and I really (really, really) should be sleeping.
So if you have time for 11 volumes this summer (with a 12th forthcoming, and being finished by another author, since Robert Jordan passed away last year) dive right in and join me, if not, I should be getting to something that I could actually recommend to you in about a month.
Right. Obsessed.
by Robert Jordan
The problem with the way I read is this: once I get started with a book (or series of books) that I find particularly interesting, it becomes all consuming. An epic fantasy series with 11 existing volumes all over 700 pages long might be a great summer project for me, but I also have to make sure that other things get done, like sleeping, which has suffered since I started reading The Wheel of Time. Such is life.
Anyway, this is the second book in the Wheel of Time series, an epic fantasy tale with all the usual features: a battle between good and evil for the fate of the world, magic, monsters and interesting creatures, a reluctant hero with a number of lovable sidekicks, and a tremendous number of strange names for people and places that will make you truly glad for the glossary at the end of each book (at least, if you are in any way like me, challenged in the remembering of these things). It's a very good book, good enough to suck me in and truly distract me, with a divinely detailed world that holds together and has a tangible realness to it providing the background for an adventure tale that makes 700 pages fly by. It is not The Lord of the Rings, but I can see where the comparison is made, and it is saying a bit that I don't think that Tolkien would roll in his grave at the thought.
But there's no point in recommending it unless you have already read The Eye of the World, and unless you believe that you are going to have the time to read at least The Dragon Reborn (the third book in the series). Jordan seems to make no accomodations for readers that decide to enter the series midstream, so I think that a reader would gain more confusion than enjoyment out of starting here. These are not so much separate books as volumes of one long story, there are no neat endings to make you feel like you completed something when you turn the last page. To be honest, I am grateful for that, I loathe spending my time reading catchup put in for people who didn't read the first book. So yes, I haven't read the whole series yet, so I can't promise that every book is as good as the first two, but I am going to dive right into volume 3, probably tonight, even though it's already 2:00am and I really (really, really) should be sleeping.
So if you have time for 11 volumes this summer (with a 12th forthcoming, and being finished by another author, since Robert Jordan passed away last year) dive right in and join me, if not, I should be getting to something that I could actually recommend to you in about a month.
Right. Obsessed.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Back to Blogging: Booklist and New Tool
OK, so I live in Cincinnati now, and I have been thinking that I wanted to get back to blogging (since summer is PRIME TIME for basking in the sunshine and reading my afternoons away) but "the road outside my house, is paved with good intentions" as it were.
Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.
So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.
This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**
So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.
Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.
So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."
And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.
Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.
Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.
So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.
This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**
So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.
Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.
So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."
And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.
Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
Things that are dangerous for Maggie to decide:
"Oh, since I have this $100 bill that I need to break, I'll just let myself buy a book when I get to the airport at that Boarders in the terminal, and they'll give me change and I'll have something to read..."
Three books later, I dove into Gone Baby, Gone while sitting and waiting for the plane to Minneapolis to take off. Since I got there super early, and since the plane was delayed, and since I read rather quickly, and since this book is addictive to the point that I am not sure I so much as looked up more than once an hour or so while reading it, I was done with the whole thing with enough time to take a nap before the wheels touched down in Minnesota. Allow me to say that there is not better way to spend a snowy day trapped in an airport/on a plane than with a good thriller like this one.
And a good thriller it is. I have not seen the movie, although I will now be adding it to my netflix, but I can see how an amazing movie could come out of this book. (I should point out, that the bar's pretty high, since Lehane is also responsible for the book that is the basis for one of my favorite movies, Mystic River.)
Anyway, the plot is fast paced without being overwhelming or making the action hard to follow. The characters are reasonably complex and realistically, likably, flawed. There are true villians, and sort of villians, and people who do bad things for good reasons, and I truly didn't have it figured out before the end.
I'm not saying that I would classify this as a great acheivement in literature. It's not. I don't think that it aspires to be. What it does, though, it does well. And there is something to be said for airport the day before the interview ficton. This one makes you think just enough to keep you very busy, but not enough to make you very tired.
Want to see what else I've been reading, or track just how much a bookworm I am:
The 2008 Booklist and Tally
"Oh, since I have this $100 bill that I need to break, I'll just let myself buy a book when I get to the airport at that Boarders in the terminal, and they'll give me change and I'll have something to read..."
Three books later, I dove into Gone Baby, Gone while sitting and waiting for the plane to Minneapolis to take off. Since I got there super early, and since the plane was delayed, and since I read rather quickly, and since this book is addictive to the point that I am not sure I so much as looked up more than once an hour or so while reading it, I was done with the whole thing with enough time to take a nap before the wheels touched down in Minnesota. Allow me to say that there is not better way to spend a snowy day trapped in an airport/on a plane than with a good thriller like this one.
And a good thriller it is. I have not seen the movie, although I will now be adding it to my netflix, but I can see how an amazing movie could come out of this book. (I should point out, that the bar's pretty high, since Lehane is also responsible for the book that is the basis for one of my favorite movies, Mystic River.)
Anyway, the plot is fast paced without being overwhelming or making the action hard to follow. The characters are reasonably complex and realistically, likably, flawed. There are true villians, and sort of villians, and people who do bad things for good reasons, and I truly didn't have it figured out before the end.
I'm not saying that I would classify this as a great acheivement in literature. It's not. I don't think that it aspires to be. What it does, though, it does well. And there is something to be said for airport the day before the interview ficton. This one makes you think just enough to keep you very busy, but not enough to make you very tired.
Want to see what else I've been reading, or track just how much a bookworm I am:
The 2008 Booklist and Tally
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The 2008 Booklist
Welcome to 2008. I'm going to do better this year. I know I've never said anything like that before. ;-)
This year, there will be a slight change in the nature of my reading. Andrew gave me a Sony Digital Book for Christmas (Best Present Ever!) so while I will be doing some of my reading in the traditional way, I will also be reading the classics (100 free books!) digitally. I'll be blogging those the same way as other books, but I will note which ones are digital and which are the more traditional page turning sort.
I'm also keeping a tally, because I think that it will be interesting, and because maybe if I have the motivation of keeping an accurate count it'll get me to do this blogging thing with slightly greater regularity.
With that:
2008 Paper Books Read: 16
2008 Digital Books Read: 3
2008 Total Books Read: 19
January 9, 2008
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages
January 11, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin
Sony Digital Book
Good Dog, Stay
By Anna Quindlen
82 pages
January 17, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
By Dennis Lehane
443 pages.
January 22, 2008
The Green Mile:
The Complete Serial Novel
By Stephen King
544 pages
February 9, 2007
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Perfection
by Atul Gawande
257 pages
February 17, 2007
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
846 pages
February 18, 2007
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
by Pauline Chen
222 pages
The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff
357 pages
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Sony Digital Book
March 20, 2008
The House of God
by Samuel Shem
397 pages
March 23, 2008
A Drink Before the War
by Dennis Lehane
277 pages
March 25, 2008
Darkness, Take My Hand
by Dennis Lehane
355 pages
This year, there will be a slight change in the nature of my reading. Andrew gave me a Sony Digital Book for Christmas (Best Present Ever!) so while I will be doing some of my reading in the traditional way, I will also be reading the classics (100 free books!) digitally. I'll be blogging those the same way as other books, but I will note which ones are digital and which are the more traditional page turning sort.
I'm also keeping a tally, because I think that it will be interesting, and because maybe if I have the motivation of keeping an accurate count it'll get me to do this blogging thing with slightly greater regularity.
With that:
2008 Paper Books Read: 16
2008 Digital Books Read: 3
2008 Total Books Read: 19
January 9, 2008
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages
January 11, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin
Sony Digital Book
January 13, 2007
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
By Stephen King
272 pages
Good Dog, Stay
By Anna Quindlen
82 pages
January 17, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
By Dennis Lehane
443 pages.
January 22, 2008
The Green Mile:
The Complete Serial Novel
By Stephen King
544 pages
February 9, 2007
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Perfection
by Atul Gawande
257 pages
February 17, 2007
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
846 pages
February 18, 2007
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
by Pauline Chen
222 pages
The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff
357 pages
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Sony Digital Book
March 20, 2008
The House of God
by Samuel Shem
397 pages
March 23, 2008
A Drink Before the War
by Dennis Lehane
277 pages
March 25, 2008
Darkness, Take My Hand
by Dennis Lehane
355 pages
March 26, 2008
Shutter Island
by Dennis Lehane
369 pages
March 28, 2008
Sacred
by Dennis Lehane
358 pages
March 30, 2008
Prayers for Rain
by Dennis Lehane
375 pages
March 31, 2008
1st To Die
by James Patterson
462 pages
April 1, 2008
2nd Chance
by James Patterson (with Andrew Gross)
Sony eDigital Book
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Go Ask Alice
Go Ask Alice
Annoymous
So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.
Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.
The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.
First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.
Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.
Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.
And then in the epilogue, she's dead.
What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"
This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"
But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.
I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.
Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.
It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.
I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.
But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.
***************************************************
Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:
1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.
2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.
3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.
and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!
Annoymous
So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.
Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.
The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.
First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.
Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.
Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.
And then in the epilogue, she's dead.
What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"
This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"
But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.
I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.
Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.
It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.
I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.
But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.
***************************************************
Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:
1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.
2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.
3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.
and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!
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