Meme

I normally don' t like memes but I needed something to kick up my mind. I saw this on A Work in Progress and Book Girl's sites.

LIFE ACCORDING TO LITERATURE

Using only books you have read this year (2009), answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. It’s a lot harder than you think!

Describe yourself: Amerika: The Missing Person - Franz Kafka
How do you feel? Inverted World - Christopher Priest
Describe where you currently live: Gone with the Wind - Martha Mitchell

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley
Your favorite form of transportation: Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden

Your best friend is Escher on Escher - Exploring the Infinite
You and your friends are Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria Julia Gelardi

What's the weather like: Sunstroke and Other Stories - Tessa Hadley (Actually a 2008 reading)
You fear: The Lost Planet - Angus Macviar

What is the best advice you have to give: How to Be Good - Nick Hornby
Thought for the day: Unimagined - Imran Ahmad

How I would like to die: The Ten-Year Nap - Meg Wolitzer
My soul's present condition: Breath - Tim Winton

Book News

Someone nice (who are you?) nominated my challenge for for the 2009 Book Blogger Appreciation Week Award in the category Best Challenge. The shortlist will be selected on September 7th, but even if I don't make the list, I am still honored to reach this point!

More 9 for '09 news! Read FIVE books and go on the site to state that you have finished them. There will be a drawing on 8/29, to make the KatrinaVersary bearable.

On the 31st, Junot Diaz will be in town to discuss The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. I hope that I will be able to ask my question about race relations in the Domincan Republic. No review that I've read so far (both in English and Spanish) don't mention this aspect of the novel.

I am making progress in my Daily Lit reading of Moby Dick. I even play a song by Melville's great, great ... nephew Moby to insprire me.

I have also started War and Peace. Last time, I gave up last year, because I got lost with all the characters. Now, I write down a person's name and a short relationship to another character. Hope it helps!

Happy Reading, everyone.

Books- Book Review - The Pilgrims - Mary Shelley

This is my second-to-last book for the What's in A Name Reading Challenge. Pilgrims counts as a profession. In the olden days, people used to go on pilgrimages all the time; praying and confessing was like a job.

This books is from Hesperus Press. It has a great introduction by Kamila Shamsie, which helped to understand Shelley more as a writer. Before this, I just knew that Shelley wrote Frankenstein during one of the coldest summers in Europe.

Most of the stories take place in Shelley's past and involve royalty. Pilgrims, is similar to a combination of Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, in that a good father loses his daughter to his enemy's son. The noble knight tells his story to two Pilgrims who stop in his castle to rest.

The Mourner is set in contemporary times. A man recounts his horrible times at Eton and tells a young lady who made his time there bearable. And the young lady turns out to be someone else..

It takes awhile to get used to Shelley's language, but I enjoyed reading these short stories about other times and places.

I hope you can find this book to enjoy the stories.

Books - Book Review - Down to a Sunless Sea - Mathias Freese

I received this collection of short stories by Mathias Freese from the publisher. It counts as my third book in the 2009 TBR Lite Challenge.

Freese has a background in psychotherapy and most of the stories have a sense of examining the mind as a central theme. I didn't understand some of the themes of the story, because psychotherapy is not one of my strong points.

However, in Echo, I did understand the plot. Two men are friends. But, only one is keeping up with the friendship: calling the other, making plans, etc.L

Jonathan finally confesses why he is like he is. When he was a child, he saw a movie that affected him greatly. He finds it hard to love other people.

David finally understands a bit of what's going on with his friend, but in the end, the friendship just can't endure.

This is a collection that I need to re-read. The stories reflect real life, so it can be difficult.

Books - Book Review - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

I resisted reading this novel. I didn't even finish it for book club, hoping to hear what the other members said. And it was admired for all.

After complaining about some relatives to some Hispanic friends, I finally realized why I didn't want to read it: Latin Americans are supposed to have nice families who care about each other; this novel broke the myth. In real life, some Latinos can treat their children as miserably as other people in other countries. We just don't want to admit it.

Once that was out of the way, I went through with the novel.

Yunior,the narrator and a boyfriend of Lola (Oscar's sister), becomes a college roommate of Oscar, a socially inept guy of Dominican descent. Yunior tells a multi-generational story of Oscar's grandparents, mother and aunts in the Dominican Republic, the role of the dictator Trujillo on the family, and the move of Beli (Oscar's mom) to New Jersey. The diffiuculties of Oscar and Lola of trying to fit in in New Jersey without losing their Dominican pride is also examined.

However, the story wasn't told linearly. Yunior kept going back and forth in time, between characters, between countries. So that was the challenge in reading this novel, keeping the storyline straight, especially since it was told a piece here and a piece there. But, I did enjoy this literary technique. But, you must know, the novel doesn't center on Oscar, and I would have liked to have read more about him.

Yunior is well spoken narrator. He uses big words, makes literary references (some of which I had to look up), but he also annoys me. He uses too many curse words in Spanish and he switches to Spanish a lot in the middle of a sentence. I do a lot of switching back and forth between English and Spanish when I am thinking, but when it's forced on me in the reading of the novel, it grates on my mind. I feel sorry for those people who had to read it with a dictionary; you lose the train of thought that way. I lost the process a few times.

I read many reviews to see whether this topic is discussed, but I can't find it in neither Spanish nor English reviews: the role of race.

There is too much prejudice and self-hate here. If you have any African blood that is visible, the other Dominicans didn't treat you well. Beli, Oscar, and Lola suffered from discrimination from other Dominicans. I was surprised by this. I know that in Central America, this problem exist. Some multi-racial people try to pass for white and really can't and try to marry white people to whiten the family. In Argentina, the descendants of Nazis and Facists try to make the darker skinned people feel bad about their skin color.

I spoke to a friend from another island country in the area, and she told me that most Dominicans have African blood, since it's small and there was a lot of marriages/relationships between people of different races in the 18th and 19th centuries, so she is a bit shocked by the prejudice also.

I guess there wasn't enough time to cover the topic of being black and Latino in this novel. I would have loved to read about it. Does one become African-American? Or is one Hispanic first?

I hope that I am able to ask Diaz about the race issue. If it's not raining (the streets still flood badly and {I don't want my car to float away} or if there is no manditory evacuation, I hope to hear him at a lecture in town on August 31st.

I'll keep you posted on this lecture, if I do attend.

Books - Book Review - The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

This is my 8th book for my challenge. This novel is under the category for Prize Winner. Doris Lessing won the Noble Prize in Literature in 2007.

This novel also counts as my August challenge for the 2009 Mini-Challenge: Read a Classic.

If you decide to read this great work, I would suggest that you do it when you hibernate. For most of you, it would be winter. I stay inside during the summer, because the heat is unbearable to me.

I tried reading it in late winter and was not successful. I was always going out after work and on weekends, and I could not keep up with the thread of the novel. I kept having to go back to earlier pages to remember what happened. But, this time, it was no problem, since I read about 50-80 pages / night.

The novel is centered on Anna Wulf, a writer of a best-selling novel. She lives in 1950s London with a daughter. Her ex-husband is in the US and is absent. She seems live to live her royalties from the novel. The public wants her to write anther one.

Anna has one really good friend, Molly, who is also divorced, has a son, and has alimony from her ex-husband, and is active in the arts. Molly's life spills into Ana's later in the novel.

I don't know whether divorce was more common in upper middle class circles in the UK. I know that the US at this time, it was less common. The way Lessing describes their concerns and lives, it felt very modern. It's the same problems women now feel about the path their lives are going if they are divorced.

Anna doesn't feel that she deserves her success. She felt a fraud, because her novel was not a true recollection of how she spent her time in Africa during WWII. She and Molly are also Communists, when it starting to be dangerous to have such thoughts in the US (McCarthy, Rosenberg trial, etc) but the British seemed to have been more tolerant on this matter. Ana is also feeling the Communism may not be the answer to the world's problems.

Anna decides to bring some control of the chaos of her thoughts through her journals. She has 4 different ones, to keep her thoughts separate. I had to keep flipping to the back cover to keep each one in place. Lessing inserts a short sentence to switch from one journal to the next, and I kept forgetting which journal had which purpose.

Each journal changes in voice and purpose, and it was a welcome challenge for me to keep it straight.

In the black (political thoughts) journal, Anna writes, "The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, as becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desparately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means of toward it."

This sentence really blew me away. Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook in 1962, before TV was really wide-spread, before the invention of the internet, and IPods, which is sub-dividing the society even more. I've never thought of novels as having such a function, but the more I think about it, the more it may be true.

In the blue notebook(Ana's diary), the descriptions of dreams are fabulous. "I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibily beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures"...(the red fabric)"was shaped like the map of the Soviet Union. It began to grow: it spread out, lapped outwards like a soft glittering sea."

I could gone on with more quotations, but I will stop here for now.

It might be one of the longest novels you will read, but I hope that you give it a try, when it's the right time for you to read it.

Books - Book Review - Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

This novel was a selection for July’s book club selection. All entire members loved it.

Besides the smooth writing and interesting plot, I was amazed by two aspects of the novel: a vibrant Detroit and the examination of ancient Greek beliefs in the 20th century.

The descriptions of Detroit at the height of its glory are fabulous. I’ve always had the image of Detroit as a dumpy city. And, a recent episode of one of those shows that explains what happens or could happen to a city when its citizens desert it and no one maintains any buildings, shows an ugly-looking Motor City.

The descriptions of this city in this novel present a lively center of business with a lot of optimism, and it covers the beginning of the end.

Middlesex is also a retelling of the Greek tragedy in a new continent and century. The ideas of fate, hubris, and self-determination are examined.

Cal’s grandparents, who lived in Turkey, but the part of the country that was where Helen of Troy took place, decide to fall in love with each other. That was self-determination. But, the consequences of their actions lead to the birth of Cal/Callie; a genetic confusion, which could not be avoided by any means. The Greek gods were displeased, and thus, fate takes a role in this strange birth.

Cal/Callie’s father decides not to believe in the old ways. He embraces the American ideal of being a self-made man. All that happens in life is a consequence of your actions and decisions. When his world starts to fall apart, due to the change in Detroit and the discovery that his daughter is really a son, he doesn’t know how to deal with so many changes at once.

The novel jumps back and forth in time and place a lot, but it didn’t annoy me, because Eugenides made it seamless. The reason for this is: “All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the store that I have to tell. In any genetic history, I am first clause in periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get the end, which is my arrival. “

The novel is long, but every word was needed to tell the story. However, I felt that I could have read more. I would have liked to know about the year or two, when Callie becomes Cal. What school did he attend? Were the school records changed? Did Cal go to a boarding school or stay in the area? How did Cal feel about the transition? How hard was it to learn masculine behaviors? I wouldn’t have minded an extra 300 pages to learn about this time.

The book is not all serious. It has funny moments. A relative, who doesn’t really like to work, becomes one of the founders of the Nation of Islam. Some relatives are bootleggers. Cal gives nicknames to some of the people that she knows, that prove prophetic .

Even though I loved this novel, it took me a long time to get started with it. On my third try, I just couldn’t put it down and even considered calling in sick to stay home to read. So, if you haven’t read this work, I highly recommend it.

Books - Book Review - Down and Out in Paris and London

With the current recession, I find myself reading information about the Great Depression. This novel is a great example of this genre.

Orwell did spend some time living in poverty in both London and Paris in the 1930s. This novel reads more like a memoir, so I am not sure when fiction starts and reality ends.

Our narrator starts working as a plonguer in Paris. It's a dishwasher, but he does more than wash dishes. At a fancy restaurant, he has to make sure that the waiters also eat and do other tasks. His days last anywhere from 12 to 18 hours. The rooms where he works is always hot, he has a short break to eat lunch, and never sees the sun.

As backbreaking and tedious as this life is, it's worse when you don't have a job. He quits to start working in another restaurant that takes forever to open. His mindset changes. "When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent. for three francs will feed you till to-morrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, "I shall be starving in a day or two - shocking, isn't it?" And then the mid wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent provide its own anodyne."

After starving some more, pawning clothes, and living in bug-infested places, he decides to go home to England and work with another friend in London. However, after arriving there, he finds out that the work won't start for awhile. Now, he is worse off than ever. He has no where to live and becomes a bum. He goes to shelters every night or overnight lodging, which are worse than the nasty apartments in Paris.

He makes friends, who show him the ropes of surviving in England.

Despite all the grim atmosphere, the narrator does feel that once he gets his job, he will be living better.

I was so surprised to see how cruel London and Paris were to the poor people. The government did absolutely nothing to help them. Which is surprising, considering how much these governments assist people now and that no one in Paris would work 18 hours / day, especially in August.