Well, my hope of blogging all the books I read this year has fallen by the wayside. Who knows what I read in a year? I now won't be able to report.

Anyway, according to the gp, I was depressed. And I am now on generic prozac. And a slightly elevated dosage. And actually, I feel fabulous. Life seems like a grand adventure. I suspect I have been depressed for years. At least two. Maybe longer. Maybe I am permanently depressed in my natural unchemically altered state. I don't know. But I think it helps explain the lack of blogging.

Because I have recently wanted to blog. About CSI:Miami. Today, I just wanted to mutter that now it is December, I figure I should send my paycheck straight to Amazon. Is their a more dangerous site out there? How many amazon boxes will my house collect this year?

I also went to Toys R Us yesterday. This didn't happen. But I can picture it happening. Easily.

I have been reading (as always). John Connelly (yes, I do read Michael Connelly too) which is a bit like a crime novel with a little bit of Stephen King mixed in. I think I rather like it. And well, I have been indulging in my complete and total guilty pleasure, regency romances. Ah....

Julia Quinn. She is fab. Read two. Cried over both. I am such a sucker.

Now rereading The Stand because it is 30 years old. Not as old as me. But still.

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More Books!

So I read Everybody Worth Knowing by the woman who wrote The Devil Wears Prada (which I also read, years ago). Why'd I read? It came free with a magazine and I bought it thinking I was getting the free mystery. What can I say, its about impossibly rich new yorkers and working every minute of the day. And finding true love.

I also read The Outcast by Sadie Jones. Why did I read it? because I convinced my mother to buy it when she was looking for books to buy. What can I say. Period details. bits of brutality. Oh yes, and finding true love. Because people do that when they are fifteen.

Then I read Fame Fatale. Because I wasn't sure I had read it before. I had. Its a typical Wendy Holden. Heroine working under miserable conditions, horribly partner. Truly horrible female lead who is all about materialism and bad fame. Then you find true love.

Read Louise Bagshawe too. I am obviously rebelling against the lit fic I have been reading. Horrible sister. Downtrodden heroine working heroically in today's world. And then you find true love.

I promise I am reading a proper book at the moment.

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What have I been reading, other than the fabulous Brief Wondrous Life? Well, I can tell from my bookshelf that I read Straight Talking (free chick lit with a magazine) at some point and then immediately forgot about it. Speaking of which, I have now had enough of Harlan Corben. Read Gone For Good, had to big up book to remember title, characters, plot. And well, I am tired of it. I've read three stories of his now. Really liked the first. But I can't remember any of them individually and they all seem to follow the same narrative arc and with the same narrative twitches. Love, separation, crime committed in the past, Some one isn't who you think it is. The bad guys get killed in a divine providence kind of way, often there is a minor character of a Jersey crime family and we have had two reunited children too! Don't think I will read anymore.

Read another Tess Gerriston. The Apprentice. Which occurs in time before The Body Double. I enjoyed the novel. I like how its a bit of a literary CSI. Lots of explanation of the tech and forensics. Good villain. However, I could live without the clunky romance and well it builds nicely and then bam! its over. I kept thinking how can she finish this novel in the pages that are left and well she does it with a Hamlet ending. One villain dead (we never find out who he is, why he does what he does, how he hooked up with the other guy). Heroine saves herself and well the baddy ends up with his just desserts. Must admit I will read more but I may be looking to see if this is a pattern.

Read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Which surprised me. Old Country and The Road are both quite stark in style and language. This wasn't. It was verbose and bloody and well, I think keeping with the milieu. But much as I haven't watched Ride with the Devil (and I love Ang Lee), I don't think nineteenth century blood thirsty American complete with mud does much for me.

Which may come as a surprise when I talk about my classic for the year, Huck Finn. Loved it honestly. Loved Jim. Thought Tom Sawyer was a twit. Loved the language and Huck's gradual conscious awakening. And I can cross one more 'great work' off my list.

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(cross-posted on the bookies--where it did have formatting).
Wow. No tears this time for a book of such brilliance it humbles me even as I watch in awe as Diaz manages to weave so many different currents, different, worlds, different universes together in a narrative both original and yet part of so much great literature. This is a work of genius. At first, I had a hard time imagining someone teaching creative writing at MIT. What kind of a (schizophrenic) person could do that?!? Having finished Wao, I now have no problem imagining Diaz holding his own with the geeks while writing (and I suspect reading) fiction. I think this is a book that could be read several times, and each time, the reader would learn more, see something new, appreciate it in a different light. Diaz speaks in so many languages like Spanish, the new footnote style of David Wallace Foster, incorporating the style of magic realism used by Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. And I am not even mention the comic book/graphic novel references, all the rpging terms scattered about or the hip hop. Each a language telling the reader that little bit more, adding another layer to the compelling story of a family and its curse. I think I am most impressed at Diaz’s calling out to the literary canon(like a rap artist). Years ago, rocks were soft, dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in an American High School in a small town and actually I was 15, sophomore year, the year you have to do American Literature. More a lot of people that meant The Scarlet Letter. I was college prep. In our classes it was Thorton Wilder and Emerson and Thoreau (On Civil Disobedience not Walden) and a little bit of Hemingway. Specifically, The Old Man and the Sea and the Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. You think Diaz just picked his title out of then air? He’s running with the giants and I like him a whole lot more than Papa. Wao, like Mr. Macomber, takes life in his own hands, find happiness, if only for a brief time (fyi, Wao’s happiness is of a longer duration that safari participant Francis) Then final year, we had to read a lot (looking back on it now) including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And that is what I recall in Oscar’s last words. In his life, it is not “the horror” he sees, but “the beauty”. For all the tragedy and unhappiness of the life of his family, Oscar finds love. But it isn’t just Oscar’s story that captivates me, its all those women: his sister, his mother, his abuela. Great story telling. But more. A book that illuminates on every page. Though I am not sure I am going to give it to my mother to read.

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Other crime book: The Bone Garden by Tess Gerriston. It got slated by readers on amazon but I thought it was okay.

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Got to keep bloggin on books or who knows where we will end up. I am sure there should be another crime novel in there somewhere but I can't remember what it was. I did also read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. I quite liked it. Cyberpunk meets detective noir. I am not sure all of what happened. Or why some people did somethings. But it did read a little like a 25th century Big Nowhere. And we know how I feel about that.

Oh a completely different note, I am contemplating joining the Women's Institute. Do you think they read cyberpunk?

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Don't blog for a month. Forget all the books I read. I know I read two Harlan Corben. And I enjoyed them. But I can only remember the plot of one and I have no idea what the title of either was. I don't know that this is a good thing in a book.

I did read Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams of My Father and I'll cross-post what I wrote about it.

I also have read Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day so now I think I will try and get the library to get me When We Were Orphans and The Unconsoled. I also read No Country for Old Men. I think I preferred the movie but my what is a sparse novel, a bit like The Road. Oh and I read Diary of a Nobody because my podmate loves it. I thought it was okay. I am planning on doing Huck Finn for my classic of the summer. But that is it for me for today.

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Me and the Canon.

More confessions of a reader, I am afraid.

I don’t know when I fell in love with books. I do remember as a child learning to read and needing to sound the words out loud. I was fascinated and jealous that adults could silently read the paper and I thought this was a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I also remember being six and forgetting to bring my library book to school on Monday (it was about the Easter Bunny and how Easter Eggs ended up different colours). Because I didn’t return the book, I wasn’t allowed to check out a new one. I cried. I told the teacher and the librarian that I knew where the book was (I did!) but to no avail. No new book for me that week. Strangely, though I remember the trauma, I still manage to keep out my library books for too long. Which could be a question(or two) for fellow readers. Do you have a library car? Do you return your books on time? Do you have a favourite library?

Some other time maybe I’ll blog about my childhood reading, lifelong love of Enid Blyton, how my brother denied me books, and my occasional interaction with comic books. The only important result of it was, I spent a lot of time at school having to read a lot of the western canon, though not necessarily the books that most other people my age did (not my choice, I think we had a renegade English teacher for four years). What do I mean? That for American Lit, instead of doing The Scarlet Letter, like other fifteen year olds, we did Thorton Wilder’s Our Town and Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience. We did do Hemingway. I was underwhelmed.

We did Marlowe’s Faustus as a warm-up for a whole six months of Shakespeare. I did The Epic of Gilgamesh for the mythology six months and lots and lots of poetry. Final year we did bits of The Cantebury Tales (and got tested on our ability to translate middle English), Ibsen (I loved The Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler), Crime and Punishment(which as far as I was concerned was the Tell-tale Heart only much, much longer), some Becket, Dante’s Inferno, Heart of Darkness and who knows what else. Somehow, I successfully argued that Kurt Vonnegut was a serious Author and got to do an in-depth study of him (as my brief infatuation with DH Lawrence was wearing off). [this is also where I like to point out that a) I went an american comprehensive high school in a small rural town and b)I’d match my American education with any here in the British Isles, not that I am sensitive or anything, mind you].

But it meant I arrived at university not needing to do any more English Lit, unlike most American students. I spent several years living with English majors and reading some of their books before seriously keeping company with and English major and well we ended up very close to getting married, arguing over books and playing that great game of trying to think up authors in the canon that no one else at the party has read (I swear this is an honest to goodness post-grad English student party game. I swear).

Despite this, or because of this, there are all sorts of ‘great books’ I haven’t read. Or authors I have read one book of and sworn never again (are you paying attention Misters Dostoyesky, Hemingway, and Dickens?). Me and the canon aren’t as well acquainted as if I had been male, raised in the 30’s and educated in St. John’s. Or face it, just educated at St. John’s (and my familiarity with plays by Machiavelli are entirely down to those political theory classes—again that substandard American public education system). So several years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I resolved to read one ‘classic’ a year. Some I like. That new translation of The Illiad (in verse form). Edith Wharton (starting with House of Mirth), Henry James. Less, not as successful (Mr. White Whale I am talking about you and you madwoman, Madame Bovary).
And its that time again, time to read a ‘classic’. I keep losing Conrad’s Nostromo (I had a similar problem with both 100 years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children—neither wowed me. Rather read Morrison’s Song of Solomn). Think I might try Middlemarch despite almost universally hating all 19th century literature. So, I will end with another question for my fellow readers, what is your favourite ‘classic’?

oh and if my library ever stops taking industrial action, I will be ordering in those Cormac McCarthy books and mr. Ishiguro.

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You know, I used to funny. And witty. And entertaining. Now I couldn’t type to save my life. But I used to send my opinions out to the blogsphere and well, it was amusing!

I’ve just been reading old blogposts. In part so I can remember what my top 10 films list looks like (for the record its:
Chinatown
Yojimbo
Miller’s Crossing
Matewan
The Big Sleep
Philadelphia Story
Heathers
Valley Girl
FightClub
The Killing
And well I was amusing. Admittedly, all I did was talk about Vegas, alcohol, CSI, alcohol, say disparaging things about my child (and now that would be children). But I gave the appearance of having a life! That wasn’t completely composed of a)not eating; b)playing Age of Mythology while c) waiting for my plants to grow in Plant Tycoon. Look at me now. Maybe I will try and be a bit more inspired.

Anyway, I have read a bunch. In particular a double volume of Jenny Coglan of Finding Addison and Amanda’s Wedding. I needed to buy a cheap book because the H weasled out of taking me out to a nice serious grown up lunch so that he could work in his office. I don’t know why he isn’t a slacker like me. Alas, I think I read Finding Addison once before from the library but can’t really remember. So, no, I don’t think I would recommend her work. I also read Harlan Corben’s Don’t Look Back, which I also can’t remember but thought that I enjoyed quite a bit.

On the non-fic side of things I did Blood River which may have convinced me that I don’t want to go and work in Africa doing something worthy but also Under the Banner of Heaven. Crazy Mormons!
I ploughed my through Mary Queen of Scotland and the Western Isles by Margaret George. Someone gave me her Autobiography of Henry VIII when I graduated high school and I really enjoyed it. But I didn’t like Cleopatra and I didn’t really like this. Though I did spend a bit of time on wikipedia afterwards. I could update some more but as I don’t know how to blog below the fold, I am quitting now.

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