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For this Friday's 13: A list of books on my shelf that I fully intend to read. It would be even cooler if I could set myself a time line of sorts, like say, for the duration of my maternity leave (one year) but I have a feeling reading books with 2 kidlets around will be different than it was with just the one.
- Sophie's Garden (J. Gaarder)
- Atonement (I.McEwan)
- The Covenant (J. Michener)
- The Curve of Time (M.W. Blanchett)
- Empire Falls (R. Russo)
- A Recipe For Bees (G. Anderson-Dargatz)
- Understanding Ken (P. McCormack)
- Anil`s Ghost (M. Onjaatje)
- The Defiant Imagination (M. Wyman)
- Cartography and Walking (A. Dickinson)
- The Ordering of Love (M. L'Engle)
- The Genesis Trilogy (M. L'Engle)
- Celebration of Discipline (R. Foster)
Yep, some poetry, some books of 300+ pages, a crash course in philosophy, ... some light reading, to be sure. The ones that'll really fly are the ones I can read while breastfeeding in the middle of the night!
Any more recommendations? Any cautions? ;)
Rating: 3 of 5 stars.
Critically-acclaimed erotica writer Cecilia Tan comes to Chicago under her nom de plume “Ravenna” to gather together some of the world’s best-known writers of erotic fanfiction for a group reading on Wednesday, August 6 at 7pm. It's going to be more sexually charged at Quimby's tonight than the tension between Ron and Hermione at Hogwarts, as Tan leads an explicit Harry Potter reading. Come expecting to hear short, homoerotic excerpts pairing Harry with Draco Malfoy, Severus Snape, and other characters. A special commemorative zine, “The Erotic Harry Potter,” is being produced specially for the event and will only be available through the weekend.
Wednesday Aug 6 (7–8pm) @ Quimby's Bookstore - 1854 W North Ave, 773.342.0910
Find out more information at: http://quimbys.com/blog/store-events/erotic-harry-potter-night/
The protagonist is one of the funniest and most irreverent characters to appear on the literary scene in a long, long time. Yes, it also involves a school shootout, but it isn't some sort of sociological study of what happens in the heads of teenagers who are finally provoked to kill. It's not sentimental, so don't expect it to be. No euphemisms, no painstaking and annoying efforts at political correctness, no pretensions to being anything other than what it is -- the story of a fifteen-year-old trying to figure out this deal called life and in the process, to keep from being executed for a crime he didn't commit.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic--Alison Bechdel
- Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron--Daniel Clowes
- Fight Club--Chuck Palahniuk (for $1)
- The Escapists--Brian K. Vaughan
- The Enchantress of Florence--Salman Rushdie
BOOKS READ:
The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman--Lawrence Sterne
I had this really great quote about The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy. I got it from the bonus features on the DVD version of the 2006 movie adaptation, A Cock and Bull Story. I paused the movie when I heard the quote, ran off to get a piece of paper and a pen, and then replayed the quote and wrote it down. I wanted to use the quote as an intro to this review. Unfortunately, Tristram Shandy is a very long book. It took me a couple months to get through. In that time, I managed to misplace the piece of paper with my introductory quote. I guess I could go back up to the library and re-rent A Cock and Bull Story, but that seems like a waste of precious energy and time. Instead, I will forget all about that quote and quickly come up with an entirely new approach to this review. Hmmmm. Okay, I will share with you my four favorite quotes from the book itself (which I just happened to mark with Post-its). Here we go:
#1 - On Digressions in Writing
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;--they are the life, the soul of reading!--take them out of this book, for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them;--one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
#2 - On Reading the Same Thing Over and Over Again...and the Results of Doing So
O! but to understand this, which is a puff at the fire of Diana's temple--you must read Longinus--read away--if you are not a jot the wiser by reading him the first time over--never fear--read him again--Avicenna and Licetus read Aristotle's metaphysicks forty times through a-piece, and never understood a single word.--But mark the consequence--Avicenna turned out a desperate writer at all kinds of writing--for he wrote books de omni scribili; and for Licetus (Fortunio) though all the world knows he was born a foetus, of no more than five inches and a half in length, yet he grew to that astonishing height in literature, as to write a book with a title as long as himself--the learned know I mean his Gonopsychanthropologia, upon the origin of the human soul.
#3 - On the World We Live In
What a jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worships, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!
#4 - On Reading Tristram Shandy
I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good--And all your heads too,--provided you understand it.
The nine volumes of Tristram Shandy were originally published between 1759 and 1767, making it the second oldest novel I've ever read (after Don Quixote). It didn't read like an old book, though. Sure, some of the language came off a bit archaic, but the book as a whole felt surprisingly modern. I'm not going to lie, though. Tristram Shandy was a difficult book to get through. Sterne wrote and wrote and never seemed to get anywhere. I don't think Tristram was even born until a couple hundred pages in. Just about the entire book was made up of tangential ramblings and digressive loops. It was a frustrating, yet ultimately rewarding book. Reading it did my heart good...I'm not sure about my head, though.
Swann's Way--Marcel Proust
Swann's Way is the first volume in Marcel Proust's masterpiece of 20th century fiction, In Search of Lost Time (sometimes called Remembrance of Things Past). The book is divided into three sections. In the first, the unnamed narrator (supposedly a fictionalized version of the author himself) looks back on childhood memories spent at his grandparents' home in Combray. In the second, he tells the story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy. The final section of the book deals with the narrator's own love for Swann's daughter, Gilberte. Simply put, Swann's Way is the most poignant, beautifully-written examination of love and memory that I've read.
I look forward to the second book, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. If that volume is even half as good as its title, it's going to go down as an all-time personal favorite.
Buddy's Got Three Moms: A Hate Collection--Peter Bagge
When I'm not reading post-modern masterpieces that somehow managed to be written prior to modernism, and when I'm not reading the first volumes of 3,000 page books, I like to settle back with a comic or two.
Amy sent this Hate collection to me in the mail along with the original #1 and #2 Hate comics. I'm not sure why she thought I'd like them. What does it say about me that she thinks I'd enjoy a series of comic books about a cynical slacker who drinks too much? What does it say about me that I actually did enjoy them? These Hate books were pretty funny. It took me awhile to get used to the art which Peter Bagge admits looks like something drawn by "a retarded garage mechanic who copies out of Car-toons magazine." Once I got over that, I was able to concentrate on the stories themselves, which were usually hilarious...and sometimes surprisingly touching.
CURRENTLY READING:
- The Book of Yoga--Christina Brown
- Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron--Daniel Clowes
Favorites this month: Mother Night, Smoke and Mirrors, Child 44
Vonnegut's ideas about true identity cause the reader to have to consider whether the main character really is a good or a bad guy. He also challenges the idea that there can ever be a true war against "evil." Here is one quote I enjoyed so much that I had to write it down (p. 160):
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
20. A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut - After reading Mother Night, I had to have more Vonnegut! This is basically a collection of Vonnegut's ideas about our political situation, life, art, etc. One of my favorite parts of this book is when he compares our oil addiction to that of a cocaine addict who will commit violent crimes to obtain more drugs. I have to stop myself from devouring the rest of his books all in a row since there are only a finite number of them now that he's gone.
I was going to read New Moon next, but I just can't follow Vonnegut with a book about an angst-ridden teenager.
My Reading Entries
I finished Game of Shadows : Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the steroids scandal that rocked professional sports the other day and it lived up to its bulky subtitle alright. What an absolute fiasco the whole BALCO scandal was, pointing fingers at dozens of elite athletes and showing just what a sham even the Olympic steroid testing is.
One thing that really struck me was just what a pack of liars these people were. At some level, I can understand the narcissistic need to pump yourself up so you can win, but I can't fathom the desire to lie so boldly and baldly. It would be one thing to deny using The Clear, The Creme and other undetectable steroids when asked directly. But many of these cheats went out of their way to deny it. Tim Montgomery, world class runner and cheat, viciously decried CJ Hunter's positive test while he was in the middle of a massive regimine of doping. Marion Jones, self-proclaimed Fastest Woman in the World, wrote in big letters in her autobiography that she never used enhancing drugs, while in the middle of later admitted steriod boosting. Just unbelievably brazen!
The only drawbacks to the book, besides the incredible disappointment in these athletes it engenders, are its apostrophes and its redundancy. It continually bugged me that they used "Bonds's" rather than the more usual "Bonds'". I know both are "legal", but the s's is just weird. And, probably due to its being adapted from a long newspaper series, there were plenty of times when they repeat statements about who the actors are in this, even if there are many pages already spent describing them.
As for Bonds, what can you say? There is simply no doubt that he not only took a whole array of steroids, but that he knew exactly what he was doing and did it with the express purpose of breaking the home run record. They spend a whole appendix listing the various proofs of Bonds' complicity. And they also spend plenty of pages on just what a truly arrogant and annoying person he is too. Of course, using steroids wasn't illegal in baseball at the time due to baseball's "head in the sand" attitude about it, which opened up new avenues for Bonds and his trainer to explore, as they could use drugs the Olympic athletes couldn't. Then again, despite the "gold standard" of Olympic testing, plenty of those athletes escaped detection anyway.
Truly a book for any sports fan to read, as long as you don't mind coming away even more disillusioned with elite athletes than you probably already are. These people live in a rarefied world and just don't get "Real Life".
I recommend these titles:
Cassandra Clare's: City of Bones and City of Ashes
Piers Anthony's Xanth Series (I've read the first 7 books)
Ah, what can I say? I've been patiently
waiting for David Sedaris's latest book.
It was well worth the wait.
Maeve Binchy produces
another pleasurable read.
The Other Boleyn Girl~ The historical aspect
is interesting.
***** Yummy vampire series! Anita Blake
kicks major butt--this tough female character
is a breath of fresh air.
This origially started as a description alongside other books I'd been reading, but the more I typed, the more I realized it should just be on it's own.
This book was a re-read for me. I first read it in university about 8 years ago. At the time, it not only came recommended, but praised to high heaven so I was a bit skeptical going into it as to whether or not it deserved said praise. However, even with my high expectations, I was wonderfully pleased to be impressed. The book gave me much to consider and a great perspective. It did so again on my second read through.
First, I was refreshed by the concept that grace is, in some ways, 'scandalous' - after all, grace, by
definition, is unfair - getting what you don't deserve. Yet we wouldn't want to live in a world without
it. While it caused me to reflect on the grace that I receive from God through Christ, I was more proded to consider how graceful I am, or more often, not, toward others. I need to ask myself: What do I expect from others before I am willing to love them, nay, even notice them?
And I find I'm not a particularly grace-full person.
Another topic raised for me as I read was legalism, that is, the attitude or actions that dictate one must do something or earn their way to be right with God. Legalism opposes grace, which can also been defined as unmerited favour. I wrote a couple of weeks ago briefly about my vacation being a time or prayer and searching. During that time, I realized that many of the verses that spoke to me the strongest were ones about avoiding legalism in my life. It's a topic that seems to come up for me with renewed force every couple of years. In the past, God has pointed to areas in my life that I treated legalistically. For example, feeling like I was being a hypocrite being at church because I hadn't really spent any time with God during the week. Essentially, that attitude assumed that in order to come to God, to be right with God, I had to have done something (in this case, spend more time with God through prayer, reading my bible, etc.) during the week. And again, that attitude defies grace. (Don't get me wrong, those things are in an of themselves legalistic, but my attitude that I MUST do them to be right with God, was.)
This time, as I look at some changes happening in our lives, I think my 'legalism lessons' have not been so much about cautioning me about being legalistic myself, but to encourage me not to be ensnared by legalism imposed from the outside. That is, I need to know and remember that I have much freedom in Christ and my life is to be lived on his terms, not on the terms placed by others - whatever the perceived "Christian" or "biblical" way is at the time on whatever the latest 'hot-button' issue is. Legalism should have no place in my life and I need to beware that I don't fall under the yoke of others.
After all, it is for freedom that Christ set us free. And that is grace.
