Out of all the books you've read this year, which was the one that:

moved you most deeply/"changed your life"?
Delta of Venus, by Anais Nin - sex has so much to do with one's psychological makeup, and Anais Nin's short stories are spot-on
The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio - LMM's biography is probably the most disturbing books I've read this year. A human life can take so many sad turns.
The Alchemist, Paolo Cohello - I keep referring back the the lessons from this fable when I think about my own struggles and "quest" in life

made you laugh most?
Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine. It is really a charming rendition of a fairytale... Gail Carson Levine is a great storyteller.

you learned the most from?

Persepolis, by Marijane Satrapi
The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway

(both offered perspectives on political events I had never really thought about before)

you absolutely loved?
Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

(there's something so satisfying about classics)

was the biggest waste of your time?
The Girl with the Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier - terrible writing, cheesy.
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hossein - sorry, not a fan.
Before Green Gables, by Budge Wilson - BAD, but I guess I couldn't help reading it
Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov - just a rather unpleasant story

you are proud of yourself for finishing?
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
Utopia, by Thomas Moore
Rememberance of Things Past v.1, by Marcel Proust
Purgatorio, Dante
Faust, Goethe

(These have been on my reading list for a very long time)

Which ones do you recommend to go on someone's "must-read" list?

Definitely Persepolis, by Marijane Satrapi. This graphic novel from a child's perspective of the war in Iran is so witty and moving.

Adam Bede, George Eliot

It's a mark of how tastes have changed, that Adam Bede was popular when it was first published, but both the story and theme are hardly engaging to me. "The world of Adam Bede": farming folk and dialect, and the plot of a poor girl seduced by a rich man, is neither scandalously exciting nor profoundly moving.

But such is George Eliot's gift that I learned to become interested in the fate of the characters.

Adam: I do not know why he is the title character, and do not admire him. He is made out to be strong, earnest, handsome, truly compassionate, and good, physically and emotionally and morally. There are probably many people like him in the world, but I would not like to marry them for I find moral righteousness like his hard and binding. I feel sorry for his brother Seth, who is secondary in status and affection to him always: his long suffering mother, Lisbeth, favours Adam blatantly although Seth is very good and gentle to her, and he has to win Dinah Morris's heart. I am disappointed that Dinah married him, and eventually gave up female preaching: all throughout the novel it was so clear that she had a vocation and was fitted to it, and that she was happy in it - to have her change her heart in the final chapters is sudden and such a damper on her independent spirit. I think George Eliot wanted to show that Adam finally arrived at a woman who was fit for him, but I do not think Adam is good enough for Dinah! I am not satisfied that he is giving her a love which "sprung out of his love for Hetty, and would not violate his memory of Hetty." A second choice to a woman much inferior?

This book has the only happy ending I have read yet in George Eliot. Oh, I suppose it is not very happy: Hetty and Arthur are both punished, Arthur most of all I think, while Adam is rewarded with love and success because he was honorable. Very idealistic - and dull. I prefer the note of tragedy and unwittingly hurtful character interactions in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. Those characters are so much more truthful and larger-than-life. Adam and Arthur and Hetty are too unrealistically good-hearted, despite their actions.

A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This book is horrible. Nothing good ever happens in it. The story is captivatingly told (who knew that so much drama could be told so that it's plausible?) but every time you begin to like or be hopeful for a character, nothing good comes to them. If there had been one moment of triumph and not just that abject oblivion we're plunged into at the end!

I read it in one sitting, and the theme and suspense is fantastic - but it's hard to read a book where you can't like any of the characters! The only one I could relate to and really liked, and believed in, was Ursula. I can't see how Rebeca had any of Ursula's spirit at all, and when Amaranta Ursula returned I had so much hope for the Buendias family. I hate that they came to such an end, and I hate unhappy endings, and Garcia Marquez is especially talented at describing scenes of fetid horror.

I recognize the story's merit (and am charmed by GGM's talent), but UGH. "Pine woods are as real as pig sties, and a darn sight pleasanter to be in."

The Tin Flute, by Gabrielle Roy

I have always loved Gabrielle Roy's writings. Her short story "The Move" was in my grade 11 reader, and I have read nearly every one of her novels since. I found that her voice was so akin to mine, that she had put into words just how I see the world.

But I had not read her most famous book, The Tin Flute, until now.

I was surprised not to find the innocent optimism, the "enchantment and sorrow" that had breathed from her other novels, at first. The conditions of St. Henri were very harsh. I did not warm to Jean Levesque or Florentine very much, nor their cruel game of love. But I was intrigued - the plot itself was already very impelling, with Florentine placing her fate in the biting Jean Levesque's hands. I was annoyed, therefore, when the focus shifted to Manuel and then to Rose-Anna -- I do not like novels with multiple narrators and main characters, because then your sympathy for the protagonist is divided.

I did not understand Florentine - who is brazen and shallow - or Manuel, who is a little like Walter Blythe of Rilla of Ingleside in that he believes in a greater good to come from the war. I could understand cynical Jean Levesque, but it was impossible to like him because he was willfully brutal. But I did sympathize with every one of them, and Rose-Anna most of all - Rose-Anna, who must be like Gabrielle Roy's mother whom her other stories focus on, like my mother who is weighed by a tendency to see tragedy everywhere. I read on, only wanting the love story of Jean and Florentine, but every chapter was a blow. I began to despair of a happy ending, and found this story of the slums of St. Henri very cruel. I was revolted that things could be so dire.

But in true Gabrielle Roy fashion, there is "borrowed happiness" (Bonheur d'Occasion) at the end.

This book made me want to write. I dreamed a whole caste of personnages representative of the society I knew. I wrote last year that I should like to write like Pasternak - but I should like even more to have a voice like Gabrielle Roy's. There are stories I know, from all my life, clamouring to be written.

Fanfiction

I can't get into books lately but I'm addicted to fanfiction.

The Legacy of Terabithia by Wordsmith
Great premise, Leslie Aaron - 10-year-old daughter of Jess Aaron, famous author of Bridge to Terabithia - is sent to Lark Creek for the summer. She befriends Jamie Byrne, an imaginative, geeky boy. This story is so well written (great characterization, great plot, great descriptions (i.e. "showing not telling") and dialogue that's both natural and funny.) Leslie and Jamie's friendship fits so well. Their tweenage romance is *squeals* SO cute, and sends butterflies through my stomach - makes me relive my ten-year-old crushes and first kiss all over again. I love this and I'm already rereading chapters three hours after I read it through for the first time!

Ancient History Comes with a Helmet, Right? by orchidvines
Persuasion isn't my favourite Austen book, but I love its modernizations. I don't know who copied who, but all over fandom Anne Elliot is the jobless college graduate who doesn't know what to do with her life, and gawd I can relate to that so completely. I know people who are just as passive and nice as Anne, and this version partly convinces me how realistic Persuasion is. This version has great (if, yes, mature) language, and the story flows. I don't usually like lighthearted romance novels, but the writing style is clever, humourous and relaxing. There's a lot of character - Mary, and the younger Musgrove sister, are much more well-drawn out than in JA's version, and I love the personality she gave Sophie Croft. Karen Harville is a sweetie and just the friend Anne needs, and I would love to hang out on a beach with this crowd - bashing Danielle Steele and observing Fred / Anne tension, etc.

TOMORROW
I read rubygillis's TOMORROW in one sitting - all 50 odd chapters. It is so perfect a sequel to Gone With the Wind. She captured the spirit, the dialogue and atmosphere, and the southern belle dilemma perfectly. The pairings are perfectly satisfying for the demands of a fanfiction fan. And the plot is original and gripping, fresh, inspired, complex. She is an excellent plot-artist.

Snape Split
Completely original, and simply hilarious. This author's White Out and its sequel are also easily the best HP fanfiction I've read. Her writing style is impeccable, characters spot-on, and there's depth and thought in the plot.

Survival, Margaret Atwood

This book depressed me in its beginning- like the narrator, I was embarrassed by her trip and the shallow lives of the company she kept. As the story progressed I saw themes common to all Margaret Atwood's books. But the daring and controversial plot was absent, this was only rural Quebec and the maudlin problems of two couples.

Fasut, Goethe

What a fantastic world I have been thrown into in this play - all the tiers of hells, all the mythological creatures. I should love to see it performed.

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

I have been reading Mansfield Park and it is so delightful. It has given me more pleasure than anything else in my past weeks. Fanny Price is the character I should have written for my Dora - half caricature, but so well developed and so convincing in her emotions that I do not know if I want her feelings, or Edmund's, to prevail. She is the only Austen heroine we meet as a child, and it is easier to form an attachment to a younger heroine. I can hear her, as I can hear Mary Crawford's banter off the pages - though I do wonder at how the people of the Regency amused themselves, pacing idly about drawing rooms hours on end, and how Jane Austen is so decided in her judgement of characters as "ill" or "selfish." Is there no room for redemption, do people never change?

I finished it in a sitting, thrilled that every time I turned the page the story had not ended yet. My only regret is that the denouement happened too quickly. I would like to know "just when, and not a week earlier or later" Edmund finally made his professions of love to Fanny.

The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway

read it today and "liked" it... liked the loose, abstract writing style and the questions of morality raised, i guess. arrow is the most fascinating character in the story by far; not sure if i really "get" the point of dragan and kenan. actually, i tended to mix them up. i thought dragan's encounter with his wife's friend, was very well done; and the pessimist/optimist joke stands out: "a pessimist believes things can't get any worse, an optimist believes things can always get worst."

Looking for Anne, Irene Gammel

I read this today, and it's very good, well-researched, fascinating. It pieces together bits of LMM's life from her journals and letters, the books she read and the magazines published around the time Green Gables was being written, searching for clues of what inspired Anne. I like how there are no direct implications that any character was based on a specific person, or that any incident was actually drawn from life - but rather an amalgamation of people and events in LMM's life, and there is a lot to do with the subconscious; for instance, names in the Anne books suggest other literary works. Green Gables suggests Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (which LMM read), and a short story in a contemporary magazine (which LMM might or might not have read) where the heroine goes to live at "Gray Gables." It's not that LMM was directly inspired by these books, but their influence may have filtered into the fabric of the novel. Two magazine stories published a few years before Anne featured orphans named "Ann" who are similar to Anne Shirley, one with a knack for taking care of babies, the other with red hair and freckles.

I also find myself a lot like LMM as Irene Gammel describes her. Shy, soft-spoken, and self-critical - LMM is not at all like chatterbox Anne, neither in appearance nor personality, and Anne perhaps resembles some of her enemies (a redheaded boy) and ex-lovers(a very talkative man)! LMM has a photographic memory, is proud and snobby, isn't always "nice" despite her petite and feminine aspect. She reconstructs and manipulates her relationships and memories. This book is a fascinating psychological portrait (of a fascinating subject).

The Leaving, Budge Wilson

i read the first story, "The Metaphor" today and it's very well written. The writing style is precise, the characters intriguing, and there is just the right amount of pathos. The story is complex, "deep", and engaging. Every paragraph was significant and an integral part of the plot. The story was very charged; it did not lag for a minute. I really loved it.

All the same, I wonder why Wilson was asked to do the Anne prequel. Her world-view and themes aren't really LMM-like. I can see how her style translates into Before Green Gables - there are well-described but not particularly loveable characters like the narrator's mom; and even Ms. Hancock is exaggerated. I thought the narrator's remark that her father "was not a very original man" was pretty harsh for a 13 year old. It reminded me of when Mrs. Thomas's parents said she wasn't very pretty and needed to be married off soon. I've just never found sentiments like that, written so bluntly, in LMM.

"The Diary" seems more LMM-ish... the diary format and the meek wife who's always lived under her father/husband's thumb shows up in LMM stories. Allison's finally standing up for herself is LMM-like, too.

"Mr. Manuel Jenkins" is a good story, and Mr. Jenkins reminded me a little of Mr. Tillytuck in Mistress Pat. A good story, although LMM stories are again open-ended.

"Lysandra's Poem" starts with an evocation of the sea... which is sort of LMM-ish, because it shows that the climate is a large part of maritime life, but the description is in no way as beautiful as LMM's. This story is the first one that doesn't deal with mother-daughter relationships; instead, it's a very realistic story of a best-friendship gone sour, and it's something so morbid you'd probably read it in LMM's later works, like The Blythes are Quoted/The Road to Yesterday. I could also see Margaret Atwood taking on a similar plotline.

"My Mother and Father" - I rather really like this story. The mother in this story is the most motherly of all the mothers described so far, and it's not as harsh as all the other stories where there is anger directed towards someone, usually the cold/uncaring mother. The only person at fault in this story is the narrator herself, and there is a happy ending.

I just finished it, and I really liked every story.

"The Leaving" is good, abstract, and unexpected.

"My Cousin Clarette" reminds me a little of Gwendolyn Lesley in Magic for Marigold. I understand completely what Victoria is going through, and have felt that way about visitors in my adolescence. The ending is morbid, though: but I can see a teen "liking" the depth and melancholia of it

"The Reunion" is one of my favourite stories in this volume. Once again, it has the atmosphere of something I might read in "The Road to Yesterday/ The Blythes are Quoted," only it's far more well-written than LMM's later work. I like this story because it makes me think of Love in the Time of Cholera, and it has a sweet, triumphant ending.

"Waiting" has very realistic characters. In this story, Juliette is an overachiever (whom I can especially relate to) and her twin sister is very meek. I have seen twins and best-friendships where one leads and the other submits. I thought Juliette's scorn was a little overdrawn, though: I can't imagine anyone being so harsh about someone they love. And so callow and self-righteous about their own cruelty and hypocrisy. Here is a quote, italics mine.

(Juliette is the lead actress, director of their play, and Henrietta helps out backstage)

"She did a truly good job, and if it weren't for the fact that I can't stand conceited people, I probably would even have told her so... I didn't want her strutting around looking proud of herself and putting on airs. One time one fo the kids said, "Hey, Henrietta, that's a really great royal bedroom you made,".... I hate that kind of thing, and I knew the others wouldn't like it either. So I said, "Oh, sure! And the king must have just lost his kingdom in the wars. Who ever head of a king sleeping on a pile of branches or having an old torn distowel at the window? Some king!" And everyone laughed. I always think that laughter is very important. It makes everyone happy right away, and is a good way to ease tensions"

I feel like the irony's too obvious and Juliette's self-assuredness was exaggerated.

"Be-ers and Do-ers" once again deal with a demanding mother and a peaceful father, who love each other very much although the mother nags relentlessly. This family dynamic reminds me of ones I know in real-life.

"The Pen-Pal" has a very humourous twist ending; I love the diary/correspondence format, the small teenage problems are very LMM, and I can relate to the narrator completely. The twist ending is the best display of humour I've seen in the whole volume, which deals with rather serious, troubling issues (and has a sombre tone). I wish there were more stories like this one - which talk about growing up, but are lighthearted and comical (in the sense that the narrator laughs at herself, and without bitterness.)

Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine

I was a little ashamed when I picked up this book - anticipating something cheesy and popularized. The quote from Sharon Creech on the back of the book bolstered my faith a little. I started reading and was completely engrossed. I didn't even realize it was a fairytale of Cinderella until the second chapter. The characters are so aptly named, names I've always disliked for evil characters and ones that sound beautiful for the good. There is just the right mixture of romance, adventure, and plot twists. The castle/glass slipper scene makes me sigh. I love Ella, I love Mandy, and Ella's self-conflicts are just right for a teenage novel. Ella is your classic natural-witty-human-princess (Princess Diana-ish) heroine. I wasn't too satisfied with the description of how Ella overcame her curse. All in all it's a lovely little story.

Mama's Going to Buy You a Mockingbird

Jeremy Talbot is an amazingly sensitive and perceptive sixth-grade boys. I'm not sure why they seem to exist in fiction and rarely in real life.

Jean Little's tone is very different from C. S. Lewis - of course. But it's another very well written book! This one plunges right into sadness and never truly lifts from it... the ending is almost too altruistic.

But Jeremy's relationship with his sister is a very convincing one for a boy of his age. The Talbot family's relationships are very well rendered. Tess 'the outsider' is stereotypical of the ... Newberry award fiction of the 90s. seriously! I appreciated the reference to Gilly Hopkins. I didn't know Mockingbird was published after that.

And I have no idea why it's entitled "Mockingbird."

The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis

I like this story - it's very well told. C. S. Lewis's writing isn't lyrical, but very narrative - I think it's best read aloud. Shasta and Aravis (and Bree and Hwin) are lovable creatures who change and grow within a story. Lewis conveys Christianity very well - Shasta's moment in the mountains, with the voice of the lion is a powerful scene. And the way Aslan talks - never does he really speak in a Biblical way, but the reverence and awe is achieved nonetheless. I wonder what Aravis's father ever did about her. The invovlement of Lucy et. co. was very satisfactory - neither too much nor too little. and I wonder if all children become royalty in the Narnia books.

Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson

Disclaimer: I'm prejudiced against the premise of this story. I don't think an "official prequel" should have been sanctioned and I tremble lest people will henceforth consider it part of the LMM canon.

But I read Wilson's book as judiciously as I could. I believe she writes well - her sentences are well formed. I write rather like her - precise, piercing. I agree that it's not necessary to imitate Montgomery. And yet her writing reads rather dry. I should never want to write like that.

Wilson's caste of characters add dramatic interest, but I find them very two-dimensional. Do good, well-meaning, semi-genteel parents ever sum up their only daughter as Mrs. Thomas's did? "With her looks, she won't last, let's marry her off." Mr. Thomas, Eliza, Jessie, The Egg Man are all archetypes - they each have their own plotline but there's little insight into how they change and grow, and little divine justice for their actions.

Montgomery writing is replete with mathematical errors, but I have a harder time condoning Wilson's logical inconsistencies. Why didn't Mrs. Thomas give Anne to Jessie when her husband died? Why didn't the Egg Man and Miss Henderson adopt her? Why does Anne hate her hair if Mrs. Archibald praised her for her beautiful red hair? If Anne was so loved by Eliza, why did she never talk about her to Marilla?

Overall, I had a hard time holding my interest in this book. It was too long and too consistently doleful. I cannot imagine myself reading it if it weren't for the Anne connection. I especially wouldn't have enjoyed it as a young adult.

Persepolis, Marijane Satrapi

i love Marijane - the vividness of her childhood memories make me want to tap into my own. I was a child like her, blunt, imaginative, inquisitive. The book awakes that old desire to rewrite my memoirs, childhood memories remembered photographically, with poignant social-political implications.

yeah.

The ending - I want to know what next in Marijane's life. I like that the return wasn't the answer, as I don't believe it always was... but there are idealisitc overtones in Marijane's mother's prediction that she won't be back. Did she ever go back?

Once Upon a Time in the North

I love Lee Scoresby - how much like Lyra he is! and York Burningson! fantastic.

But I daresay Pullman has stopped writing books. This is a commercial product, with its antique cover, pictures, and a pull-out board game.

And of course, spread out your short stories in separate collector's volumes. Why make an anthology?

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

what i loved:> the history; i didn't know much about what life was like under the Soviet Rule and/or prior to the Taliban; i've only ever been exposed to post 9-11 war-on-terrorism Taliban outrage. all very interesting because it's current history; titanic from a different perspective, etc.

what i disliked:

the hollywood ending. GRRR. did they really have to find a bag of money?

plus the implications that - what - reconstruction is only possible if you have a pile of gold stashed away for your somewhere? i'm sure the overthrow of the taliban doesn't mean a happily-ever-after ending, and not that i want to read anymore hardships, i'm glad the love story of laila and taliq worked out, but this just seems too easy.

Jalil and Rajeed are both very 2-dimensional characters; Jalil especially - his repentence at the end just doesn't sound very convincing and sounds very soap-opera-sy. Rajeed is too consistently cruel.

I don't get Aziza's stutter and "t"'s - what is that about?

it's moving alright but rather gruelling to read.

Mistress Pat

"I know." Rae squeezed Pat's hand. "And I know it must all seem like indecent haste to you. But if you count time by heart-throbs as somebody says you should, it's been a century since I met him. He isn't a stranger. He's one of our kind . . . like Hilary . . . knows all our quacks, really he does. You'll understand when you meet him, Pat."

Pat did understand. She couldn't find a single fault with Brook Hamilton. As a brother-in-law he was everything that could be desired. Tall, lean, with intensely blue eyes and straight black brows. Certainly he and Rae made a wonderful-looking young pair in spite of his "rather ugly" face. She couldn't hate him as she had hated Frank, even if he were going to take her sister away. But, mercifully, not for a long time yet. And there was no doubt that Rae loved him.

---

It is true - there are certain types of people you can feel irritated by, despite the fact the they're nice people. There are others whom you know from sight, that they are "your kind."

Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell

I am enamoured by writers on writing.

Maybe this explains

pg. 4

(George Orwell's four great motives for writing)

1) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after your death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition - in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sens of being individuals at all - and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong to this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.


pg. 149

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look back things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present lacks.

pg. 241

Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London... There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mie radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a half-penny of rent.

... But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the sqaure the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, htet daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their frist since last September.

pg. 346

I have not enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the sotry of the school being burnt down was true.

----

Orwell is a very - opionated man, mured in his belief that people (he himself included) are hypocrites. Age certainly did not mellw his bitterness with humanity. He must have been trying - unpleasant - conflicted to live with. Extremely interesting to converse with.

Maybe his most successful story deals with animals in allegory, because his political views and cynicism is so - witty and unpalatable.

The Alchemist, Paolo Coello

I can't help but think how ordinary and captivating this story is. Am I on my personal quest? Am I on the verge of giving up? Will I find love, unexpectedly, love that will then wait for me?

Delta of Venus, Anais Nin

"And you can be Henry Miller, and I'll be, Anais Nin
But this time it'll be even better we'll stay together in the end
Come on darling, let's go back to bed."

Jewel's Pieces of You was my first CD, and still an enduring favourite. I've wanted to read Anais Nin, because of her ringing name, her cameo in my favourite song, and the imminent separation.

Erotica aside, Anais Nin writes with such clarity. Her sentences are precise. Nin speaks of creating a "female sexual language," whatever the stereotypes, her language is scientific, psychologic, more than flourid or sensual. Fetishes are the main subject matter: but there is a plot to the stories that is not merely coincidential to lucid details. Events progress because of someone's sexual desires.

What marked my own maturity this year was the awareness, by hearsay, of people's sex lives. My desire to be a write had for a long time been accompanied by some vague notion that it required a bohemian lifestyle, a familiarity with the nuances of casual sex, the intimate knowledge of an enigmatic other? I think Anais Nin illustrates that casual sex is not merely a lifestyle imbued with glamour. I think her characters' sexual fantasies are a... key to their character. One's sexual comportment has so much to do with how s/he perceives him/herself.

how true this is of first loves:

When she first met him they were mere children ... Miguel had been drawn to Elena magnetically, following her like a shadow, listening to her every word, owrds no one could hear, her voice so small and transparent. ... a romantic attachment, in which each one used the other as the embodiment of the legend or story or novel they had read. Elena was every heroine; Miguel was every hero.

When they met, they were enveloped in so much unreality that they could not touch each other. They did not even hold hands. They were exalted in each other's presence, they soared together, they were moved by the same sensations. - pg. 81

Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

It is just by accident that I'm reading this simultaneously with Anais Nin. Anais Nin has great veneration for Lawrence, and of course we have the inevitable comparison between male/female depictions of sexuality. But all I can draw is that Lawrence uses mythic language like "loins."

Otherwise Lawrence's novel... is exactly the sort of psychoanalytical, philosophical treatise (where characters converse in grand discussions) that I'm wont to write, but is fairly dry to read. I'm confused on his whole take on bisexuality. I may research it. I'm also surprised at the choice of female names - are Gudrun, Ursula, and Hermione typical midland English?

The Silmarillion, Tolkien

I think I like this book more than LOTR. I don't think its appeal is as wide as the trilogy, which has both comic appeal (hobbits) and epic language (men, elves). As I wrapped up RoTK over Christmas, pouring delightedly over the appendices, my dad asked " so where did sauron come from?" Of course - the question had never crossed my mind - in novels, as in our very existence in this world, we inherit a given world full of mythology, traditions with forgotten origins, a history grander than ourselves. It was AAragorn's veneration for the mysterious traditions, and his equally... intuitive?... knowledge of them that made half the magic of the book. As for the rest, my perspective was as limited as the hobbits.

I read that Tolkien crafted the myths of the Silmarillion, working prior to and simultaneously on the other Middle Earth stories, partly because so many questions were left unanswered by LOTR. The Silmarillon (which I understand were later compiled by his son) begins with a Biblical creation story, told with artistic license; and an imminent Paradise Lost. That and the hubris of all creation sets a thread of good vs. evil, inescapable curses, that bind all the stories of Tolkienverse history. The language is archaic, "biblical," regurgitative, the place and character names sonorous. (There are also more females in these stories than in LOTR!) Somehow - I would rather not write like Tolkien; I can mimic it almost addictively but it MUST be an art that takes only a genius to master - only be appropriate to original subject matter - anyway its mimicry is a dangerous art.

And then to compare Tolkien's view of history to Tolstoy!

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier

My first book of the year - and a friend's favourite novel. "Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are." Knowing that a book is beloved by someone makes every page of it sear with their personality.

Griet is a well-illustrated, believable character: her methodology in all her tasks and in dealign with people, and process of mind makes her so. The girls she associates with, especially Tanneke, are also vivid. But static. Villains are villains, the virulent is inexorable, Maria Thins is a fairy god mother. I think this is where the discord lies between my writing style and my friend's - her attention to detail lies in the human, mine in some sense of larger cosmic meaning. My favourite authors (Dickens, Eliot, Gabrielle Roy), no matter their realistic subject matter, bring their psychoanalysis to a revelation of human life and history. For me anyways, "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" is just a good story.

Booklist 2008

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
Puck of Pook's Hill, Rudyard Kipling
Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way, Marcel Proust
Invisible Man, Ralph Elliot
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
*The Story Girl, L. M. Montgomery
*Magic for Marigold, L. M. Montgomery
*The Blue Castle, L. M. Montgomery
Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell
Remembrance of Things Past, Book 2, Marcel Proust
Demian, Herman Hesse
*Mistress Pat, L. M. Montgomery
*Rilla of Ingleside, L. M. Montgomery
Le temps , ce grand sculpteur, Marguerite Yourcenar
*A Tangled Web, L. M. Montgomery
*Anne of Ingleside, L. M. Montgomery
Utopia, Thomas Moore
The Duel, Anton Chekhov
The Parasites, Daphne du Maurier
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
Once Upon a Time in the North, Philip Pullman
Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson
The Flight of the Falcon, Daphne du Maurier
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Othello, William Shakespeare
The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis
Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
The Magicians Nephew, C. S. Lewis
All that is Solid Turns Into Air, Marshall Berman
The Leaving, Budge Wilson
The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway
Looking for Anne, Irene Gammel
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Faust, Goethe
Kamera Oskura, Nabokov
Purgatorio, Dante
Six Memos for the Millennium, Italo Calvino
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
Heroides, Ovid
How to Travel with a Salmon, Umberto Eco
Fire, Anais Nin
* Anne's House of Dreams, Montgomery
* The Story Girl, Montgomery
* The Golden Road, Montgomery
* Rainbow Valley, Montgomery
Magic Island, Elizabeth Waterston
Survival, Margaret Atwood
The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy
The Gift of Wings, Mary Henley Rubio
The Cashier/Alexandre Chenevert, Gabrielle Roy
Adam Bede, George Eliot
A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* HP7, JK Rowling

* signifies reread
italics signify non-fiction

Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak

If there was a writing style I should like to emulate, it is Pasternak's. I don't know what it takes to be a writer like him - political strife, disillusion, poverty, sexual passion - but I admire his writing style exceedingly.

The intro by John Bayley of Oxford notes the unconventional form, and poetry, of Pasternak. The poetry refers to the material richness of the descriptions, the mesmerizing everyday details. "This is Pasternak's remarkable power of conveying the wonderful oddity of objects which is the life force of his poems..." The unconventional form is the somewhat chaotic rythmn of the novel, the fairy-tale abruptness with which events occur and people appear.

The lyricism of the prose, and the zeitgeist (the temporality but richness of life?) resonates with Michael Ondaatje's The Skin of a Lion.

When I read Lord of the Rings a week ago, I loved the epic form, the archaic turn of phrase, and how multiple characters and viewpoints are handled. It struck me how personal an epic can be - the greatest events are handled from the viewpoint of a bystander, recounted by someone, instead of being narrated directly. But sometimes Tolkien delved into the personal emotions of a hero, as well as of a more common (but nonetheless heroic) character.

All the same, in the grandeur of the world the narrative voice seems removed in an epic as such.

I read somewhere C. S. Lewis conceived of his stories in terms of plot, and the characters were mere pawns by means to achieve this end. I tend to generalize that to the fantasy genre in general. In a bildungsroman, however, I've often felt that the plot is only occasion for a character to breathe and have their being in; it's the character that matters.

I like the epic scale of Dr. Zhivago - it assumes "the dimensions of a national myth" , has that wonderful coincidential cast of characters- but it remains Zhivago's story.

---

As for Zhivago himself - have I ever met anyone like him? Intelligent, introspective, with a circle of friendly acquaintances despite his ineptitude for common life - he is idealistic and perhaps he is so absorbed in his ideals that he deteriorates. What makes him attractive to Lara, to Marina? What makes him love Lara with no wholehearted contrition, or dimunition of love for Tonia? Women are attracted to that introspective type - perhaps with a maternal desire for someone to care for, perhaps their unkemptness is coloured with romance.

And is sexual passion essential to intelligentsia?

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisnero

I found the novella in my mother's laundry room and fell to reading it, more shamelessly to fulfill my "read 52 books a year" quota than anything else. But I picked it up because I've heard the title long ago, and was intrigued.

It's a candid telling of childhood poverty, coming of age, tragic and comic characters, in the same era and social setting of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (So much of it must resonate with my mom's childhood.) The chapters pages are brief as poems, each a tribute to a character or incident.

The author is of course hispanic, and falls into the category of "writing what we know." Will I, too, write what I know? Will my stories (which lately have been developing along the lines of character sketches, of tragic and the burden of parentage and immigraion) be a social product too?

Kilmeny of the Orchard, L. M. Montgomery

Upon re-reading (I love my LMM's so well, that most of her novels I have reread countless times) I find that Kilmeny is underrated. The characters are original: they vary from the LMM formula. Robert Williamson, the gossip of Lindsay, for example, is a man, a rare choice for Montgomery; and a defiance against stereotypes. His wife, on the contrary, holds her counsel. Thomas Gordon is reserved, stoic, but intellectual- he can be fired up by discussion. There's a very conventional but colourful flavour to teh way Eric's father talks. Eric is a good depiction of a charming young man. I know (or holds someone on a pedestal by fancy, esteems) people like that: genuine, truly charismatic.

The plot holds, and it's a story well-told.

Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

The flyleaf bookcover writes that Edgar Allan Poe is the father of short stories. The tales, though I have long known and thrilled to some of their very names - the Tell-Tale Heart, the Masque of the Red Death, the Cask of Amontillado - aren't as delightfully engaging as classics sometimes are. The turn of phrase sometimes chimes with my very soul in Dickens or Tolkien.

Poe's stories make me wonder if a short story isn't really an essay, illustrated with a fictional incident. There is a thesis on human psychology preambling every tale.

The prose - constant prose, verging towards stream of consciousness, little dialogue - gets very tedious at times.

I thought I would delight in a good volume of ghost stories, but I struggled to stay focused on them.

Middlemarch, George Eliot

I finished Middlemarch awhile ago. It affected me so much that I have not been able to accurately review it. I have thought about it much, and dreamed of discussing it with my mom. It is one of the most accurate and incredible portrayals of human life I have read; like many classics, I find it to be true.

to quote more of its genius:

Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy. 570

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. Miss brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in the utteranace: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must kept the germinating grain away from the light. 17

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retinaed very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted... any of those great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty - how could he affect her as a lover? -5

Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions? 10

There are characters who are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in drams which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilitis will clash against objcets that remain innocently quiet. 200

Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbour's lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of the unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness. 342

our good depends on the quality and breath of our emotion; and toWill, a creature who cared little for what are caleld hte solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune. What others might have called the futility of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was concsious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.

I like Mary best out of all the characters, for her imperfectness of character (upon meeting her, don't we know she is surly because of her plainness, but compensatingly endowed with a clever tongue and good humour?) in her fidelity are traces of my heart:

It has taken such deep root in me - my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding so much if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little. I cannot imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker. 550


If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions ,partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

I could never relate truly to Dorothea's passion for Will, though, who seems lacklustre, mediocre, what our society calls a "loser" and theirs a "vagabond."

I like Mary's father Caleb, too, who is generously good, who manages to convince others of their folly in a simple, logical way. (re: Railroad fight scene.)

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. and we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

I find Lydgate and Rosamond's marriage very tragic and realistic. In the young and charismatic doctor Lydgate's sacrifice of anything, even manlly pride, and ambition, for domestic comfort, I understand how some men are unerringly tender towards their wives. The inevitable softening comes because it must.

His marraige would be a mere piece of bitter irony if they could not go on loving eachother. ... His wife had a hold on his heart, and it was his intense desire that the hold should remain strong. In marriage, the certainty, 'She will never love me much' is easier to bear than the fear, 'I shall love her no more.' Hence, after that outburst, his inward effort was entirely to excuse her, and to blame the hard cicumstances which were partly his fault. He tried that evening, by petting her, to heal the wound he had made in the morning, and it was not in Rosamond's nature to be repellent or sulky; indeed, she welcomed the signs that her husbnad loved her and was under control. But this was something quite distinct from loving him.

Rosamond's depiction is very accurate too - there are women like her, whose smallest words and expressions bring others to blame and make them yield to her. In a thought-out, but not malicious way.

It is a terrible moment in young lives when the closeness of love's bond has turned into this power of galling.

He had begun to have an alarmed foresight of her irevocable loss of love for him, nad he consquent drearines of their life. The ready fullness of his emotions made this dread alternate quickly with the first violent mvements of his anger.

His mariage... if it were not to be a yoked loneliness, must be a state of effort to go on loving without too much care about being loved...

The affair of Raggles' sinister information, which brings about the catastrophe of the novel is a little overblown and unrealistic. But its effects are accurately drawn enough.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it, for conjecture soon became more confident than knwoledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

Dorothea's impetuous generosity is made of this:
Some of her intensest experience in the last tow years had set her mind strongly in oppostition to any unfavourable constructions of others... she disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.

more of Tertius (what a horrible name) and Rosamond:

"Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed to regard as if it were hers alone. He was always to her a being aprt, doing what she objected to.... For he had almost learned the lesson that he must bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in her sympathy, he must give the more."

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the greif of one who falls from that serene activity into absorbing soulwasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech - one does not at least hear how inadequate the words are."

I liked the ending about Mary and Fred's successes, each being attributed to the other.

There is really an odd reversal of foturnes in this story - Fred irresponsible, finally successful, Lydgate having always seen himself as sold out. I liked the portrait of how the Bulstrode dealt with their tragedy, too, but neither acknowledging the crime. That is how soem people work.

He burst out crying and they cried together... his confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Openminded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "how much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent.

I think it is one of my favourite books.

Vanity Fair, William Thackeray

I just finished "Thackeray's masterpiece." - and liked it. I tried to read it years ago and ran short of time. I don't think I would have liked it at seventeen... like Middlemarch, it is a "classic for adults."

I would have thought Becky evil incarnate years ago, perhaps. But I admire her Becky and almost wish for her success. We wish for Dobbin's success, too, we want a happy ending and are satisfied! Becky is not subdued but remains as intriguing as she ever was. Sometimes you are inclined to pity her for being an orphan. You wonder in what way of life can she otherwise find happiness. I find that in her I get a glimpse of people who are "too pretty and clever for their own good" - people who strive to please, and succeed.

quotes:
The best of women are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidentaial, how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm - I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models ,and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman dhide the dulness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it: we call this pretty treachery truth. 137

By humbly and frankly acknowledging yourself to be in the wrong, there is no knowing, my son, what good you may do. I knew once a gentleman and very worthy practitioner in vanity fair, who used to do little wrongs to his heighbours on prupose, and in order ot apologise for them in an open and manly way afterwrads - and what ensued? My friend Crocky Doyle was like everywhere, andd eemed to be rather impetuous but the honestest fellow. 179

As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist generally drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then: the doubts and struggles of life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and pleasant there: and wife and husbnad had nothing but to link each other's arms together, and wander gently downwards towards old age in happy and perfect frution. (But our little Amelia was just on the bank of her new country, and was already looking anxioulsy back towards the sad friendly figures waving farewell to her across the stream, from teh other distant shore. 216

I really like the picture (how sad, stirring, bitter) of Rawdon's departure to battle:

Faithful to his old plan of economy, the Captain dressed himself in his oldest and shabbiest of uniform and epaulets, leaving the newest behind his wife's 9or it might be his widow's) guardinaship. And this famous dandy of Windsor and hyped Park went off on his campaign with a kit as modest as that of a sergeant, and with something like a prayer on his lips for the woman he was leaving. He took her up from the ground, and held her in his arms for a minute, tight pressed aginast his strong-beating heart. his face was purple and his eyes dim, as he put her down and left her.


concerning Geroge's burial:
Which of us can tell how much vanity lurks in our warmest regard for others, and how selfish our love is?

I think the tale is a very clever one of reversals and opposites. Rebecca goes from poverty to wealth by din of her wits, Amelia from wealth to poverty for too gentle affection. Rebecca does not love her husband, who is devoted to her; Amelia adores her too much for her own good. Ditto for the sons. Amelia ruins her husband, but Becky makes hers' fortune.

I think Dobbin's move at the end was very wise. Even though I am a patron of fidelity and tragic love, I wanted Amelia to be happy, I wanted Dobbin (who is endeared to me by his awkwardness) to finally gain his long endeavoured prize.

And how like Rebecca to be involved in the blackest, most intriguing scandal! She triumphs to the end.

It's a jolly comedy.

My Name is Anne, she said, Anne Frank by Jacqueline van Maarsen

The memoir lay on a display table at Waterstones and I don't know I picked it up merely because it was simple to read. No - although it was a short book that I knew I would champion in the course of a few stolen evening's peaking - it was the fly-leaf synopsis describing Jacqueline van Maarsen's survival because her french mother managed to unlist her from being a jew, that intrigued me.

I have never read Anne Frank's diary, though I have read fragments. Jacqueline's memoirs were fascinating. I liked from the beginning the descriptions of Jacqueline's mother Eline and her triumphs in the fashion industry. I liked the explanations given for everything, like Eline's decision to pursue fashion in defiance of her unfaithful father, or her desire to have children to console her parents for a lost grandchild.

I liked Jacqueline because she was artistic, and often her descriptions diverted to descriptions of art nouveau art and architecture. I liked that they lived on a street of flourishing new young families, involved in art and music.

When Anne entered the scene, her friendship immediately reminded me of my friends CE's. How friendships where the best friends are utter opposites have always bewildered me! Jacqueline writes: " We were complete opposites, but we were kindred souls." Jacqueline admired Anne for being bubbly, spirited, extraverted and full of zest for life. On the contrary, I sympathized and felt for Jacqueline who suffered under Anne's tyrrany. Anne was jealous of Jacque's other friends, writing slanderingly of them in her diary. Anne seemed very possessive and "full of herself" to me. Just the other day, though, my roommate mentioned how she liked a certain bold coworker of hers "because I'm not like that." And Jacque suffered from loneliness at her new school, withdrawn because after her intimacy with Anne other friendships were hard to come by.

I even mourned for her how she would never have suffered if her mother had had her unlisted as a jew from the beginning of the war. I mourned the secret correspondence Anne proposed, that was never realized.

It surprised me how short the period of their friendship was - only a year in their 12th or 13th spring. And yet its poignancy endured for a lifetime, Jacque is an old woman now. I wonder who she finally married. I liked that the theme of the book was really her parents marriage, the mariage of the french lady and her dutch jewish husband, and that the memoir primarily pays tribute to Jacque's family. Her sister, I suppose, is mentioned only in passing for privacy reasons.

The book affected me, and I already like Anne's friend better than Anne herself.

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

I hadn't known that Margaret Atwood had a "new" book.

So I walked to the next nearest library (it was signed out at the nearest) to fetch it. The cover illustrations by nina chakrabarti really half enticed me to hold a copy of the novel.

It was an enjoyable read. Typical Margaret Atwood witticism and subversive feminine perspective of a male world. Penelope was a believable character whose logic and "unprettiness" I could relate to. But she was a bit of a wimp... you wonder if the maids' farcical version didn't have some truth in it. After all, Penelope does claim to be a liar.

The mock anthropology at the end (also very typical Margaret Atwood) made me laugh.

The real problem with the novel is that it doesn't have "enough meat". We fly through years of Penelope's life and nothing remarkable happens... but more importantly, we learn nothing more of her. She is an unchanging creature. At thirty-five is she less impressionable, less weepy, more guile-ful as she was at fifteen? I wish we saw more of her personal growth, palace strife in the intervening twenty years. Her conversations with her maids and the blarney of her suitors, and the slander of the minstrels. I read the book in two hours: it felt rushed, Margaret Atwood could have elaborated.

Not that I'm not glad to have another book done and listed on the record!

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

Of late I have loved, loved Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. I love writing translated from french - it resonates with my own "writing style." It is so easy to read. I love the complexity and grace of her writing. I finished it right away because it was so hard to put down. Even without a word of dialogue the memoirs read.... never fail to hold my interest for a moment, never lack for fascinating detail which I wish I knew more about. If I could write a book like that....

the most secret aspirations of a young man impatient of the present, uncertain as to the future, and thereby open to the gods. 56

The condition of women is fixed by strange customs: the yare at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of osciety are superimposed upon the facts of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish betwen the two. THis confused state of things is in every respect more stable than might appear: on the whole, women want to be just as they are; they resist change, or they utilize it for their one nad only aim. The freedom of the women of today, which is greater, or at least more visible, than that of earlier times is but an aspect of the easier life of a prosperous period; the principles and even prejudices of the old laws have not been seriously disturbed.... The weakenss of women, like that of slaves, lies in their legal status; thye take their revenge by their strength in little things, where the power which they wield is almost unlimited. I have rarely seen a household where women do not rule; ... In financial matters they remain legally subject to some form of guardianship, but in practice it is otherwise. In each small shop of hte Suburra it is ordinarily the .. wife who sits firmly ensconced in command of hte counter. 105

His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)

Despite having heard about it for all of my childhood, I only recently read this novel, and I believe it's one of my favourite fantasies thus far. I'm currenlty reading the last book of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass.

I love the premise of Pullman's fictional universe - namely that growing up, is about gaining consciousness. I admire how he explains this (and many other philosophical matters) in such a simple and appealing way to children by creating a world where each child has a daemon, that is a symbolic animal. It's extremely well written, complex, and controversial - rebelling against ideas of the church, family, dealing with mental illness etc. VERY interesting material, especially for "just a children's book."

finally finished it some weeks ago... i drew it out, reluctant for the story to end, knowing it wouldn't end happily.... which at the same time makes me think of anne shirley's dictum "only a genius should try to write an unhappy ending." beautiful... and torturous! when will and lyra are so perfect for each other. i am haunted by the story.

i read lyra's oxford immediately after to squelch my cravings... and i don't know if i am happy with the lyra in it. has she lost her spunk?

speaking of which, what on earth is a pine marten? i very well expected pan to become a wildcat.

and while pullman wrote "more lyra"... what about more will? i can't help thinking will will have a much harder time adjusting to his world than lyra. a much harder time "creating more dust." lyra is naturally friendly and it's no surprise that she will make friends at st. sophia's, patiently and cheerfully... but will isn't really a people person. he is earnest, honest, but oh god... the burden on him is SO much harder.

i can't say i'm too happy with the ending. what temptation did mary malone offer... and wasn't it both will and lyra's choice, not just lyra's? WHAT is this means of travelling between worlds without windows, and who is the friend who knows it? serafina? mary? what does it mean, that lyra's oxford and will's oxford will one day overlap but never touch?

arghhhh... i'm so unsated.

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Marcia Marquez

There are several quotations in Love in the Time of Cholera that I love so far.

"in the solitude of his soul"
"Little by little he idealized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her."
"a vocation for complicity"
"... after having renounced not onlly their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling himm, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return.
"to cry with her in rage at the loss of paradise"

I just finished Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. So well written - original in thought, in conclusion, convincing in description and metaphor. I love the writing style; I love it a lot. Stunning, joyous ending.

It is really a "life story."

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