the luminous outset became the interminable middle

(I want to apologize for the lateness of this post. I'm sick and this is the clearest my head has been recently.)

This is a post for the book club some people on my circle run every year. It's very fun and lowkey; and I've found some good books to read. The theme is changed every year.


A True Novel by Minae Mizumura was originally written in Japanese and translated to English. It was very successful in Japan, winning its prestigious Yomiuri Literature Prize.

This novel is a retelling of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, a book that was pretty popular in English courses in the United States (at least when I was in high school) and often misidentified as a love story because the central characters of Heathcliff and Cathy take up so much space throughout the tale.

In short: I do recommend this book, with a note that it is quite long. This post will focus on the first part ‘On Long Island’ in Volume I.

( Read more... )

This is a post for a summer book club hosted by skuf.

( Left Hand of Darkness discussion )

The Books They Gave Me - a tumblr dedicated to books given to people by loved ones. I've just read the first page, and can vouch that the entries aren't full of bitterness and feel bittersweet more than often and enjoyable; and they aren't just all ex romantic relationships.

The Film Experience is one of my favorite sites, not just film sites, but favorite; when I'm not scrolling through dreamwidth, I'm often there. I check the site daily, Nathaniel is absolutely charming and presents his pov well and he applauds different kinds of film. Recently, the site has posted an Oscar Symposium with a roundtable of film bloggers and the discussion has been great to read. Part one focuses on elevating a film beyond itself, critical wars, The Artist, and Moneyball. Part two discusses what makes a good supporting actor and movies that are self-congratulatory (ex, Drive, TGWTDT). I'm missing some topics but each entry has been so worthwhile.

The New Inquiry - a literary/culture tumblr I need to peruse but does look interesting

The Millions made a post compiling a host of literary tumblrs and I'm still going through them.

39) Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan. Fresh in a standard way I'm used to with these two; that sounds like backhanded praise but what I mean is that if you've read their other collaborations you will understand the tone set out in this novel. I still contend that the two of them are essentially writing the same story just with minor differences but I do enjoy reading this story so that is not a complaint.

38) Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth by Adrienne Rich. Poetry collection I picked up because I was in love with the author's previous work, I probably should have just left it alone. There are some good poems in here but nothing that moved me the way The Dream of a Common Language

37) view with a grain of sand by Wislawa Szymborska (There's an accent mark missing here but I can't figure out how to insert it without pasting from elsewhere). This is probably one of my favorite books ever. I definitely plan on buying a physical copy of this one: Szymoborska just contains so many layers and weaves together these grand details...ugh, I still have to post some to the poetry comm.

36) Nemesis by Phillip Roth. Okay, I picked this up on a whim and on its small size. It was okay, the protagonist felt so distant and I pressed on because I was interested in the scenario surrounding the story but then there was this narrative switch at the end that felt like a copout that I can't get over. But I do plan to read something this author is noted for to get a better feel.

35) Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar. Pleasant book, real clean prose that just moved along without notice; but this book hit on my issue of the double standard of Older women sleeping with teenage boys vs Older men sleeping with teenage girls. His stepmother was, I think, twelve years older than him and closer to his age than she was to his dead father, but still.

34) Tonight No Poetry Will Serve by Adrienne Rich. Paste what I said about #38.

33) Goliath by Scott Westerfeld. Nice cap to a rather good trilogy though I wish the romance part hadn't happened.

32) Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda. Lovely collection.

31) The Magician King by Lev Grossman. I did enjoy this one more than the first, mostly because the crew managed to mature a bit though I still couldn't stand the protagonist and I'm glad he sacrificed something for someone instead of the other way around, though I was hoping Alice would turn out alive. I am more interested in the third after reading the second than I was for the second after reading the first.

30) Crush by Richard Siken. After seeing parts of this poem all over my flist, lj, and on tumblr I had to track down the full thing and I wasn't disappointed. It's not often I can use visceral and not feel cheap.

I just signed up for inkingitout on DW with a goal of 100,000 words. Ugh, I approach these with a certain level of trepidation though I can only look at myself for consistently failing these sort of things.

Moving to an attained goal for 2011, I did say I wanted to do some wrap up posts so here are my thoughts on books 45-50:

50) The Stranger by Albert Camus. This was a reread and I took it in better this time around than when I was in high school and just burning through books because they were classics, no it did not make me want to go through my existentialist phase again but I could appreciate the sparseness of the prose and how clean everything was. No drama was around really any part of it until the protagonist was shaken out of himself by his predicament.

49) Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Another reread but, wow, did I actually feel everything more this time when I'm in my midtwenties and am dealing with depression and just life. I'm just thinking about how I read so much Plath when I was younger because the darkness of it attracted me and her life story was like some sort of magnet for my teenage self but now with some years between my first reading, this second one made me feel so different. She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two.

48) Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Just fine. Quick play to read. I already own it and this reading didn't make me want to give it away but it didn't make me want to keep it either.

47) Mule: a novel of moving weight by Tony D'Souza. Very enjoyable fast read about a dude falling into drug trafficking (marijuana) when the recession hits. Varied characters, the protagonist was one of the weaker characters but his situation was intriguing enough for me to speed through the novel. I could definitely see this being a film

46) Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief by Rick Riordan. I saw this twist coming early on but that's not much to brag about considering this book's intended audience; but while this was a quick read and the idea was interesting, I am not continuing with the series because I really didn't care about the main character at all. Now I just need to see the film.

45) The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard. Lovely. Hurtful. Makes a point without beating me over the face with it. I've owned this book for years (bought it during a phase I wasn't exactly proud of but did end up with me owning some great books so it wasn't all that bad). Unrequited love blows. I couldn't even work up a righteous fury because Mo wasn't even that horrible, just obtuse, and considering the time period very good about it all. Housman restricting himself and his views of Wilde made me sad too. It was this book that made me pick up Indian Ink because I figured if I loved TIOL I'd love his other play, not so much. I really have to stop picking up an author's work I loved because it has most often led to disappointment.

The United States, the rising world power (...), seemed the least harmonious culture of all. He could already sense that what would triumph in the world was a civilization---rigid, formidably efficient, spiritually demented, militaristic, and mercantile---which had extracted analogies to the Universe from two thousand years of thought, in order to select those laws that would prove useful for making nature subservient, and for serving Progress.

-Stéphane Audeguy

Since 2011 I've read twelve books, a rundown (in reverse chronological order):

Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan
Nation by Terry Pratchett
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin
Before I Fall and Delirium by Lauren Oliver
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
Among Others by Jo Walton
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Pushcart Book of Poetry
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

( expansion on the books )

I started 2010 with the goal to read 50 books. I fell short by 7 but I'm not stressing over it. Considering I went through a three month spell where I barely read anything, and other health issues popped up, I'm okay with what I managed to get done. Enough about the books I didn't read and now time to discuss the ones I did read.

Breakdown: 43 books total, 15 Young Adult, 2 books of poetry, 3 Graphic Novels, 2 nonfiction works, the rest majority Literary Fiction and some other mainstream fiction.

( expanding on what I read )

Plans for 2011

Following some challenges from this post. Specifically the Shakespeare, Chunkster (books over 450 pages but I am including ebooks with this one), Quirky Brown. I have no plans in officially signing up for all of these (maybe Quirky Brown and Chunkster) but I do plan to unofficially lurk. Also, make some headway on all the books I own but have yet to read and maybe some rereads. More poetry and more nonfiction. Fill in some cultural holes perhaps. 50 books again for this year.

The trick is balancing the measurable known against the vast chaos that defines everything else.

--Cristina Garcia