Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

In the relative quiet of morning - or what mellowed into the quiet of morning, I huddled in bed to finish memoirs of a geisha. It's a convincingly written story, rather true to an oriental sensibility. Hatsumomo and Sayuri's rivalry, and the subtle brutality women, especially lesser women, display towards one another is an ancient theme since the dawn of civilization. It recalls "Wan jue gak gak" and the like.

And so, I imagined criticizing the novel with my parents. I know they would find the Chairman's magnamity unrealistic, and so do I - mainly because he remains a dream figure whom we do not know or understand as well as Sayuri, Mameha or even Nobu in his arrogance. We only see the Chariman through her eyes, and his hidden passion for her is hard to believe. I don't know if it is forgiveable. So the ending fails to reconcile my anxiety for Sayuri's fate.

Sayuri's story and enduring faith in the Captain does not convince me that hope will bring true love into fruition. All along I had a stake in Sayuri's enterprise, for winning the affections of her Chairman - how could I but relate to her romance, and wonder if this was the stuff true love is made of? All that she had done in her life was fueled by her dream-life of romance with the Chairman. He permeated her every thought. When she had sex, she wondered what it should be like with him.

And what filled my nightly dreams, or as I sat reading with my skirt inadvertently hiked up under the blankets?

What is truly admirable is Golden's thoroughness in creating Sayuri's character. The novel is by no means flawless; as convincing as Sayuri's voice sounds, the writing style and tone flow but in an amateur way. The "nature similes", in speech and thought, seemed overdone in western writing yet I know how common that sort of thing is in Oriental speech. But very rarely does a male writer portray the female psyche realistically, and Golden's heroine is thoroughly female in her conniving cleverness, studied winsome charm (a reminder of how women inviegle their way into cracks and spaces in civilized society, and what intelligence it requires to achieve what one wants indirectly and with subtle arts!), memory for minute detail and impassioned longing. I'm not sure about the malice and kindness. But never once did Sayuri seem to be painted sentimentally, to beggar pity, to speak without confidence of her past. Retrospective reflection, analyzing situations and uttering proverbs of psychology - eg. "I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it." - probably passe since the day of Dickens, adds to the authenticity of Sayuri's voice even when I do not believe in her convictions.

In all I loved the novel even despite, or perhaps for its flaws. And finishing it leaves me with a sort of heaviness, of the same weight Sayuri describes her sorrows and desolate plight. A mingling of no choice, and that this is fortunate. Peppered with questions of choice and fate. It's easy to read and easy to comprehend, and causes a comfortable amount of self-reflection. The proof of a good, successful novel. And Golden's success is inspiring because you can see the flaws indicative of how it might be achieved, the details that create realism and the unrealistic fictions readers are hoodwinked by.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

"They say that this has not just begun to happen: actualy, it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead" (110, Calvino - Invisible Cities)

"The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes." (128)

"I think you recognize cities better on the atlas than when you visit them in person."

The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

There is Eliot's The Mill of the Floss which I am reading too. Characterization is the key word - there is wonderful characterization in that too, such that we understand why Tom is confident, always right, why imaginative Maggie is ever questioning herself and magnifying her tragedies. I'm not very good at characterization and these two books offer a great study.

I just finished The Mill on the Floss - couldn't put it down after I had begun, although the ending disappoints me. The entire book is full of Victorian melodrama which I revel in, but if I were inclined to cry over novels, I would cry over Maggie Tulliver's death. She seems real to me - the ever wronged, tragic, fallen clever woman. Couldn't Eliot have allotted a better fate for her after all? Jane Eyre got her Rochester and Catherine and Heathcliffe's love are requited in their children, but Maggie Tulliver's - only relief - is in death.

New to Eliot I loved her writing and her art of evoking sympathy - truly of describing human psychology. Is that what a novel is - character studies, and wisdom imparted as to a mode of life? Achieved through conflict of course, internal and external. Lessons in human nature. I will give you a sample of some of Eliot's words which strike me:

Of those two young hearts Tom's suffered the most unmixed pain, for Maggie, with all her keen susceptibility, yet felt as if the sorrow made larger room for her love to flow in, and gave breathing space to her passionate nature.

This is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of egoism - the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy homours to be gathered and worn.

Perhaps the emphasis of his admiration did not fall precisely on this rarest quality in her -perhaps he approved his own choice of her chiefly because she did not strike him as a remarkable rarity.

The middle-aged ,who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half-passionate and not merely contmeplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair.

Where, then would be all the memories of early striving, all the deep pity for another's pain, which had been nurtured in her through years of affection and hardship, all the divine presentiment of something higher than mere personal enjoyment which had made the sacredness of life?

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Then there is Philip's letter with echoes of Jingle in Pat. Are there truly those who love so, who love devotedly and gladly and unrequitedly, finding that such love sustains them? Is there really anyone like Tom - so unimaginative and quick to judge, so decisive in his sense of righteousness? Was Maggie's bravado in the final rescue enough to convince Tom to give her merit? There is something so vaguely dissatisfying about the ending.

But we know there are women like Maggie - we female readers know that we are ones ourselves. Do writers write anything except for the like-minded? We are clever and forever slighted - we are impulsive, self-doubting, imaginative to the disregard of consequences and self-sacrirficial. We strive to do right and find that it doesn't pay. We are hurt when we hurt others.

And there are of course many like dear Lucy, like Maggie's simple mother - who thwart the circumstances against themselves in benevolence and guilelessness. We laugh at them, we clever women, we find that our souls are fashioned of different stuff than theirs are - but we flock to their comfort all the same in our hours of need.

How different from Atwood where she gives the dullest Roz and simpering Charis credit. For perhaps even dull women have backstories and uncanny powers. They have strived too, to carve themselves a niche in this world of women-who-oppress-women.

Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

I have been reading Atwood's Robber Bride. It is delightful to feel pleasure once more in reading - to cherish every written word as inspiration. Atwood's novel is inspirational - it is, first, a series of real, exaggerated, character sketches - each of the three very different women in their appearance, tastes and perception of the world. There is less dialogue than I would have thought would've flown in a novel, but the stream-of-consciousness keeps interest. The characters are accurate - Boyce the artistic, sensitive gay - or meaningful - the giggling twins, harsh Augusta. I love how one incident leads to each woman's backstory - a book of the lives of women, told through stories. The plot itself is gripping - we want to know what happens to Zenia, what happened with Zenia, who she is. Then there is the characteristic word-play, zenophobia and backwards words, the cool ending tying things into the larger scheme of history, the story told through Tony the historian's eyes. All the stuff about women's psyches and their longing for drama and murder and viciousness, which Zenia embodies. What a theme to center around! It's a very cool piece of work, and I admire - want to analyze - feel alive, in brain and soul, hungrily reading such manna.

Booklist 2007

Robber Bride, Magaret Atwood
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
The Wreckage, Michael Crummy
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodr Dostoevsky
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes
The Need for Roots, Simone Weil
The Golden Compass / "Northern Lights", Philip Pullman
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
The Old Curiousity Shop, Charles Dickens
The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman
London - A Short History, A. Wilson
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
Lyra's Oxford, Philip Pullman
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
The Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaajte
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
My Name is Anne, she said, Anne Frank, Jacqueline van Maarsen
Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
Man and his Symbols, Carl Jung
Ireland, Frank Delaney
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
HP & the Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
HP & the Chamber of Secrets, "
HP & the Deathly Hallows,
Hp & the Prisoner of Azkaban,
The Death of the Maiden (play), Ariel ___
Tennyson - Selected Poems (Penguin Edition),
Elizabeth Regina, Alison Plowden
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel, Jose Saramago
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The Broken Bridge, Philip Pullman
The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino
Under the Jaguar Sun, Italo Calvino
The City of the Sun, Thomas Campanella
Manifeste du Tiers Paysage, G. Clemente
Italian Journey, Goethe
The Book of the Courtier, Castiglione
Heroides, Ovid
The Return of the King, Tolkien
The Golden Road, L. M. Montgomery
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisnero
Dr. Zhivago, Boris Paternak

Enchantment and Sorrow, Gabrielle Roy

Gabrielle Roy's work never fails to delight me. Her writing touches my heart in a way no other author does (aside from L. M. Montgomery) and her autobiography was especially akin to my soul. I relived my days in Paris through her - looked forward to my plans for London. Marvelled at the fragility and faith she saw the world through, and knew the guilt and quandaries she felt. Lost and eager, I took heart that one day I too shall find my voice. I mourn that she did not live to write the other two volumes of her biography, to tell how she finally found her way as a writer.

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

I just read this, and I didn't like it. Am posting this in hopes that all the JA fans here will enlighten me to its merits.

I found Marianne, Colonel Brandon and Willoughby all very one dimensional. Marianne was a stereotypical daydreamy, irrational girl: is she really so fragile that elinor has to shelter her 24/7? Colonel Brandon was "too good to be true" magnanimous, and Willougly too transparent a cad and villain. Lucy too blatantly shallow. Plus, what was the use of having Margaret around as a little sister when her character was never developed? And Colonel Brandon to fall in love with Marianne just because she reminds him of his old love? The brother and sister in law too. And that quick ending for Elinor and Ed.

I find it a very commonplace story.

Mirror, Mirror, Gregory MacGuire

Countless recommendations for Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West drove me to read Mirror, Mirror by the same author. It was a sorely disappointing introduction to MacGuire.

Mirror, Mirror is the story retold of Snow-White, set in Renaissance Italy. Feature historical characters are Cesare Borgia of Machiavellian fame, and Lucrezia de Borgia whose historical references I knew little of, save Emily Starr and Dean Priest of Emily's Quest hung a portrait of her in their home, describing her as a pleasant aunt who would have a sweetmeat for you under her dress.

Mirror, Mirror is instead, a banal little tale weaving together trying to lend a coherence to the fairy tale in most arbitrary fashion. The famed looking glass, a two sided mirror allowing people to viewers to see into each other's worlds, was fashioned by the seven dwarves to study humans. Lusty Lucrezia is no vain stepmother, but a powerful beauty who owns the castle of Snow White's father and conspires to send him on a grail quest for the golden bough, three golden apples finally used to poison Snow White. Finally, Bianca de Nevere "Snow White"'s prince is the hunter Rannuccio who was first commanded to cut out her heart. His abrupt reappearance in the ending does little to justfiy his status as the story's hero.

The story is coupled with a most graphic representation and a-religious discussion of sexual matters. As if such brute realism is a mark of maturity!

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

(I began War and Peace in August 2005, reading through Book 1 before I departed for Paris. In October I picked up the book once more, re-reading it from beginning in French until Book 3, when I was peeved by the incessant military strategies and forced to return the novel. At Christmas, my friend gave me the Audrey Hepburn/Humphrey Bogart film, which made me exigent to finish the book so I could watch it. After exams in April 2006, I signed out the book and read speedily but pleasurably halfway. I was once again forced to return it when I moved out, and finally, in mid-May, I commenced reading again.

Despite the length of the book, the writing style is surprisingly undaunting. Leo Tolstoy writes as directly and simply as C. S. Lewis, making the book a far easier read than many classical authors such as Jane Austen or Dickens.)

I finished this last night/ this morning. This was a happy story. For a classic, I found the plot unpredictable. I love Tolstoy's ability to evoke the minute details of family life and human relationships. The final scenes showing the interaction of the two couples are real, admirable, vivid.

Princess Mary is my favourite character, whose quietness, tolerance and relentless affection I could relate to. I was joyous for her in her romance, finding its obstacles rich with revelation of her character and Nicolas's.

The novel pursues a really interesting idea - the portrayal of little details of humanity, of everyday life playing a part in the unfolding of history, like how (this is the analogy Tolstoy used) bees all enact a role in the larger scheme of the beehive. quite incredible how he demonstrates what is essentially a new *theory* of looking at history (as opposed to history which merely describes the actions of the ruler, he looks at many minor circumstances of different people which influence or are governed by the course of history) in a story with a fascinating plot.

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe

On a sunny summer day, I left the computer lab while it was processing and ran across Queen's Square Quad to revel in the library. I had two hours to kill before I needs check on my machine, so I found the children's section and collected Little Men, a french translation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, or The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe. I quickly perched myself by the window and began the "chapter book" I had wanted to read since "I saw the movie first.", and yet had felt secretly ashamed and childish to sign out.

This first "Narnia" book only took me an hour and a half, and was enjoyable and engrossing. Of course, I couldn't help envisioning the children of the movie: I loved little Lucy Pevensie and her staunch braveness, and had trouble reconciling the girl in the film with the blond in the novel.

It bothered me that Susan never really "did anything" in the fray. Father Christmas said that "Wars are ugly things for girls to be in," which can explain Susan's minimal involvement. Was she supposed to portray a different role - more traditionally female/domestic guidance for the group, maybe? Aren't wars ugly anyhow? C. S. Lewis was ready to acknowledge that Lucy is brave. Why this - is it supposed to be a sexist statement?

I had previously debated with friends over the extent to which the story is a Christian allegory. I found the references very pointed, as phrases like, "Daughter of Eve," "Son of Adam," denote. (For instance, in The Colour Purple, the story begins with "Dear God" and is first and foremost about religion). Father Christmas as well. I wonder what the "deep magic" and "deeper magic" would be.

As for Aslan's sacrifice to save edmund's life with his own was ... it was very nice. Edmund is a child who has realized the enormous consequence of his greed/temptation/mistake, and it would be cruel and heart wrenching and ... indicative of a very unbenevolent world if he was forever condemned for his sins. aslan's ressurection "made everything okay" too - aslan being wisdom ultimate of the story, if he didn't come back [just like how Gandalf came back and how i think Dumbledore will continue to have a presence in HP... opening a whole new can of worms here though.] Narnia would be a very dark world indeed. Aslan the lion doesn't lack in virtues of gentleness and humbleness associated with lambs.

Who is Lilith? What is the story behind her being Adam's first wife?

By the way, did you know C. S. Lewis's full name is Clive Staples Lewis? What a mouthful!

Booklist 2006

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Mirror, Mirror - Gregory MacGuire
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

Reading Lolita in Tehran

reading lolita in tehran

personal

"do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth" (3)

"Yaasi was shy by nature, but certain things made her lose her inhibitions" (4)

"Only there is no room, just the teasing void of memory" (7)

"my nomadic and borrowed life"(7)

"we felt their presence only through the disembodied noises emanating from below" (8)

"understood each other at the first word, since they had words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences" (20) Nabokov

"every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you the freedomes that reality denies. in all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of life, an essential defiance." (47)



other
"each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self" (6)

"But to steal the words from Humbert, the poet/criminal of Lolita, I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary circumstances of life, listening to music, falling in lvoe, walking down th shading streets or reading Lolita in Tehran."(6)

colors of my dreams (11)

private gestures interpreted in political terms (25)

we tried to live in the open spaces, in teh chinks created between that room, which had become our protective cocoon, and the censor's world of witches outside. (26)

imagination shapes vision and identity, what occurs outside the room (26)

liking small things

"in some perverse way, the physical punishment was a source of satisfaction to her, a compensation for having yielded to those other humiliations"

"but my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind that they had never felt on their skin. this generation had no past. their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. it was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry." (76)

German thinker Theodor Adorno: "the highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's home." I explained that the most great works of imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they feel too immutable

Fitzgerald in Conrad's preface to The nigger of the Narcissus: 'artists appeal to our capcity for delight nad wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.. and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humaity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

Mike Gold, Marxism

"A novel is not an allegory; I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience." (111)

"A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil..."(133)

fitzgerald - absolution - "honesty of imagination"

"as i walked thsoe dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot." (145)

"turn their small corner into a sanctuary" (169)

four quartets, eliot

Baudelaire - "Le Fleurs du Mal - "Hypocrite, lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frere!"

Diderot - Jacques le Fataliste
Racine -

shadows of a conditional smile

Bertolt Brecht - poem

balance between public private in p&p

bellow, mandelstam, sinyavsky,

"she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity." (29)

list

nabokov

scheherazade, a thousand and one nights
llose, aunt julia and the scriptwriter

muriel spark - loitering with ntent


reflections:

- polyphonic voice of many novels
- reader/writer redressing quotations in new context, giving words new meaning, contrast/foil of like and unlike -- similar situation, accurate context? is new context accurate?
- mythicizing experience - regime is mythicizing
- recalls personal memories - tacos' passion

Booklist 2005

The O. Henry Prize Stories
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Oxford Book of Love Stories
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas
La Petite Fadette, Georges Sand
Mary Queen of Scots Biography
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
The Steppe and other Short Stories, Anton Chekhov
Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa
Fast Food Nation
Wuthering Heights (reread), Emily Bronte
Boundaries, Maya Lin
Nietzsche
Montaigne
*Perpetua and Gargantua, Rabelais
*Of Man, Thomas Hobbes
The Prince, Machiavelli
*In Praise of Folly, Erasmus
*Meditations, Descartes
*Candide, Voltaire
Survival, Margaret Atwood
The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery, Irene Gammel
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling
span style="font-weight:bold;">In Praise of Shadows (reread), Tani?
Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
Therese Raquin, Emile Zola
Le Proces de Marie Antoinette
Snow Falling on Cedar
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Le Fantome de l'Opera, Gaston Leroux
Paris, Ile de France
Le Fantome de l'Opera, Gaston Leroux
Emma, Jane Austen
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

This book made me ill, literally. I lugged it home excitedly for reading week ... I had wanted to read it since I saw the poster with my friend at Indigo, and we thought it resembled The Handmaid's Tale. But it was always, always signed out at the library.

Oryx and Crake is a biotech dystopia. Elite biotechnological companies (such as for genetically modified foods) and their employees live in exclusive guarded cities with all amenities; exit to the outside world is controlled, betraying company secrets result in horrible deaths. Crake, the narrator's childhood best friend with whom he played at various computer games and hacks, becomes a mastermind in one such company, and even designs his own human species which he keeps hidden in a dome. Oryx, a child porn star whom Crake and the narrator love, is brought in to nurture the people. Crake's plan fails (or was it his plan to fail?) and we find the narrator in a primitive world, charged with taking care of "the children of Oryx and Crake."

I didn't find neither the plot nor the writing style half as captivating as The Handmaid's Tale. There was something compelling about Offred's voice, about the circular narrative that's perhaps incomplete, about the nostalgic wordplay that isn't present in Oryx and Crake. We still have Margaret Atwood wit. But Snowman's post-apocalyptical flotsam isn't Offred's regime: Snowman is just any man, Offred is ... a woman, a Eurydice, calling with a haunting voice from the dark.

And too, somehow a genetically modified pig is more unappetizing than cloaked figures hung on The Wall.

I ran through Oryx and Crake in 5 hours one night, and my copy of the novel stank of liniment. It made me ill with a sniffly snuffly cold for the rest of the week.

Booklist 2004

Selected Journals of LMM v.4, L. M. Montgomery
Emilie de la Nouvelle Lune [Emily of New Moon translation], L. M. Montgomery
The Odyssey, Robert Farthes (?) *
Oresteia, Aeschylus *
Delight in Architecture, ______ *
Great Dialogues of Plato *
The Philosophy of Aristotle *
Shirley, Charlotte Bronte
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
De quoi m'ennuie toi, Eveline?, Gabrielle Roy
Aeneid, Virgil *
Satyricon *
Metamorphoses *
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
The English Patient, Michael Ondatje
Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
J'ai quinze ans et je ne veux pas mourir suivi par Il n'est pas si facile a vivre, Christine Arthony
Harry Potter et l'Ecole de Sorciers, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et la Chambre des Secrets, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et le Prisonnier D'Akazaban, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et l'Ordre de la Phoenix, J. K. Rowling
Lives of Mothers and Daughters, growing up with Alice Munro, Sheila Munro
Dance on the Earth, Margaret Lawrence
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Confessions of St. Augustine

* signifies course [school] reading
italics indicate non-fiction works | standard print indicates fiction

Booklist 2003

The Piano Man's Daughter, Timothy Findley
Tess of the Dubervilles, H. Hardy(?)
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
My Dear Mr. M., letters to G. B. MacMillan, L. M. Montgomery
The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer Dixon
Elske, Cynthia Voigt
Goldengrove Unleaving, Jill Paten Walsh
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
The Waves (re-attempt), Virginia Woolf
Making Avonlea, Irene Gammel
A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L'Engle
Enchanted Summer, Gabrielle Roy
A Recipe for Bees, Gail Anderson Dargatz
Storyteller*
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, G. M. Marquez *
Waterland, John _______ *
The Ogre, Micheal Tournier *
Letters to Ephraim Weber, L. M. Montgomery
Periodic Table, Primo Levi *
Shoah, Claude _______ *
Maus, Art Speigelman *
L. M. Montgomery and the Mystique of Muskoka, Sylvia duVernet

* signifies course [school] reading
italicized signifies non-fiction works | standard print signifies fictional works

Booklist 2002

I hardly remember everything I read this year. There's probably much more.

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (reread)
Streets of Riches, Gabrielle Roy
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shield
Childhood, Alexander _____
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
The Quest of the Holy Grail
Innocence and Experience: Essays and Conversations on Children's Literature
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad *
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Hidden Mountain, Gabrielle Roy
Where Nests the Water Hen, Gabrielle Roy
The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell
Essays, Henry Thoreau
Best of Alice Munro, Alice Munro
Frankenstein, Mary Shelly *
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

* signifies course [ school ] reading