A family friend visited us earlier in December and she left a book of poetry by Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2011. Anyone who knows me will know that the way to my heart is lofty literature or poetry.
But, the thing is, I have a love/hate relationship with poetry. Growing up, my English literature education was made up of the standard British and American lit, with zero poetry. None. This means that despite my voracious reading, I still have no idea how to fully appreciate/ analyze poetry. Consequently, the majority of the poetry that I like is devoid of frills and literary devices. While I like to read poetry, I have very little patience for poetry I can’t understand. I sometimes feel guilty about this, but each person is moved by different words and styles. When my dad perused the Tranströmer book he casually made the remark, “It’s just a bunch of words.” After trying to get through some of his poetry, I was inclined to agree. I was struck by the fact that this Nobel prize winning poet had zero effect on me. Yet, he obviously moved someone or else he would still be writing in his own diary.
I write simple free verse, no themes, no big words, no rhymes, nothing. I call it poetry, but perhaps it is little more than prose. Does it move anyone? I’ll never know, partly because I rarely share what I write and partly because everyone has different tastes. I don’t always reread what I write, and most of it never comes out the way I want it to, but on occasion I find piece that I do like, one that moves me, because I can relieve that experience just by reading “a bunch of words,” to use my dad’s description.
For a very long time I felt incredibly guilty about writing poetry. At one point, I even believed that I was simply wasting paper by writing poems that essentially sounded the same. And so one late summer night I burned the last few poems I had written and resolved to stop writing ‘bad poetry.’ It was time to grow up. And for a while I did. But writing poetry is a crucial part of my existence, and so the writing fast didn’t last long. Ultimately, I realized that I needed to write. Poetry, lists, diary entries, papers, anything, it’s who I am.
I was going to start off this post with a definition of poetry, but I think what counts as poetry is more subjective than a definition. Most people would agree that poetry encompasses everything from ballads and sonnets to free verse and songs, maybe even (dare I say it?) rap. No matter what the form is, for me, poetry is a piece that moves me, a piece I read so often I end up memorizing it without trying, a piece I put up on my dorm wall because it never gets old, a piece that makes me think differently. My poems might fall under the ‘bad poetry’ category to the more literary inclined, but I don’t care, to me, all of what I write, even the bad stuff, is poetry, and that’s all that matters.
Filed under: Book Review | Tags: action, adventure, book review, Carson Ellis, Colin Meloy, The Decemberists, Wildwood, young adult
The answer is yes, if you’re Colin Meloy, the frontsman of the indie band The Decemberists and your have a talented wife who illustrates the book.
Yup. I went from reading Wuthering Heights to Wildwood, by Colin Meloy (a book my mother purchased for my kid brother to read in August. Wishful thinking on her part…).
I wouldn’t normally read, much less review, a book that is aimed at a nine and above audience, but I think this one is worth the read whether you’re nine or fifty nine (I just picked a random old age, you know what I mean…). For starters, Meloy is an excellent writer and has a superb command over language (how many children’s books do you know that use the words like behemoth and a murder of crows?). This isn’t surprising coming from a creative song writer. Meloy’s songs, the ones that I like in any case, are often ballads, with dark undertones, catchy and original.
[For more on the Decemberists, check out my blog entries on them:
http://apricklyrussianpear.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/a-sort-of-special-day/
and
http://apricklyrussianpear.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/the-prickly-pear-goes-to-a-concert/ ]
But onto the book, itself. You know how I’m always writing in my reviews that I can deal with books with no plot? I say this to myself so often that I forget how great it is when a story actually does have a plot. Maybe Wildwood has a plot because children have no patience for slow moving books. Let’s be honest – literature can get away with anything. Even so, I wish all literature was as fast paced as Meloy’s first novel. The story is set in Portland, Oregon and begins when a murder of crows steals Prue McKeel’s baby brother and takes him into the Impassible Wilderness, an undeveloped and forbidden forest on the edge of the town. With her friend Curtis, Prue embarks on a journey to save her brother and discovers Wildwood, a place where animals talk and strange magic abounds. Before they know it, Prue and Curtis find themselves in the middle of a war to stop the exiled regent governess from controlling the entire forest. The plot has as many twists and turns as the ivy in the forest. According to the title page, Wildwood is book one of the Wildwood Chronicles. While the first book ends happily, I sincerely hope that Meloy writes another book.
So if your sibling is supposed to read this steal it from him or her and read it for yourself. Or just go out and buy it. I promise it’s worth it.
Filed under: Book Review | Tags: classics, Emily Bronte, literature, Wuthering Heights
This winter break started off with second chances in the realm of literature. My first ‘pleasure’ read was To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, an author I felt I should like, but whom I didn’t have much of an opinion of after I read Jacob’s Room. After finishing this novel, deeming it “good once you get used to the no plot thing,” I had a choice between a light book and a copy of Wuthering Heights with ten point font that I bought when I was ten from the school book catalogue. You can probably guess what I picked.
My experience with the Brontë sisters has been pretty limited. I’ve never read any of Anne’s poetry, or any of Charlotte Bronte’s other works (maybe one day?), but I read Jane Eyre over one of my summer breaks in high school and practically memorized the book. I even go so far as to judge every movie adaptation based on how many of my favorite quotes are in the movie.
Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, did not fare as well. I attempted to read it some time in high school, but threw it aside, complaining that it was too dramatic.
Years later, here I was, attempting to read Wuthering Heights again. It couldn’t truly be as bad as I thought it was, right?
Maybe it’s because I’m more pessimistic now than I was in high school, but I managed to read the whole novel relatively quickly and kind of liked it. It probably helped that I had forgotten the story and it moved along relatively quickly, but spoiler alert, it’s really miserable. I mean, I’m the queen of miserable novels, but parts of Wuthering Heights, just made me cringe.
I have mixed feelings about Wuthering Heights. On the one hand, it’s really dramatic, and the love between Heathcliff and Catherine seems pretty underdeveloped. One day it’s “oh let’s be playmates” the next day is “we’re in love, but oops, too late, Catherine’s about to die in childbirth, it’s all Catherine’s fault for marrying someone else.” On the other hand, there’s something very real about it. What I mean is even though none of the main characters really have winning personalities (forget swooning over Heathcliff, unless barbaric, violent, crazy man is your kind of thing. I get the whole mistreated orphan thing, but boy is he a brute), they have their good points every once in a while. They’re imperfect, just like we are, falling victim to passion and whims. After reading Wuthering Heights, I thought about Jane Eyre, and realized that Jane Eyre didn’t have any defects in temperament or character. Sure she’s plain and quiet, but she always ends up doing the right thing. And Mr. Rochester has some issues, but once you get to know him he’s a great guy. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jane Eyre, but it’s a little too perfect. Or maybe I’ve become too cynical to believe/read about happy endings. Probably the latter.
Regardless, Wuthering Heights ended up being a better read than I expected. It won’t be my favorite but I can respect it. It’s worth a first, or in my case, second, chance.
P.S.
Happy new year and all that. I promise I’ll write more in the near time future - I already have a few literary entries planned (of course)…
Filed under: Uncategorized
For those who don’t know I go to Smith College, a liberal-arts all women’s college in Northampton, MA (about 2 hours west of Boston). Northampton, shortened to NoHo because it’s that chic, is a cute little college town walking distance from campus. As we were driving into town in our environmentally unfriendly car (what? It’s the only one that fits all my stuff?) it didn’t take me long to remember how different it was from my hometown, a suburb called Elkridge, which is closer to Baltimore than to DC. Here are some key differences I’ve compiled.
In Northampton there are…
Vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options.
Bumper stickers relating to peace, tolerance, college (example – “Smith college is a women’s college not a girl’s school.” n.b. never say girl’s school unless you want your head bitten off), hiking, national parks, the Democratic Party, atheism etc…
Rainbows everywhere. Flags, The Rainbow Times, articles of clothing. So. Much. Gay.
Second-hand bookstores, coffee shops, a wealth of restaurants. All within walking distance. What a concept…
Bikers who strap their small children into the back seat, confident in their ability to not get hit by cars turning in every direction imaginable.
Cheap or free buses that go to actual places.
Street performers, who play their instruments whether they are geniuses or can’t hold a tune.
Joggers in the early morning who take their well-behaved, fairly attractive, non-yapping dogs for walks.
Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s as if I blinked and the summer ended. By this weekend I’ll be back at college, sorting out my screwed up schedule, and maybe (maybe) making new friends in my new house. Or I’ll just spend the free time I have before classes in my room reading The Idiot (which against my better judgment I started this week, and which I’ll probably not review).
For the most part it’s been a good summer. I went places, saw friends, had a successful internship that I actually enjoyed (even if it was unpaid), and, most importantly, caught up on guilt-free reading. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten about that reading list I posted in the beginning of the summer. Well, it’s probably a good thing, because I ended up deleting a few books from it. Barring those, I think I’ve done pretty well. I’m putting it here again to show you how well I’ve done.
Summer Reading List 2011
Women in love-DH Lawrence
V for Vendetta- Alan Moore
The Loved One-Evelyn Waugh
Decline and Fall- Evelyn Waugh
Petersburg-Andrei Bely
Who Is to Blame?- Herzen
The Prince-Machiavelli
Naked Lunch- William S. Burroughs
On the Road- Jack Kerouac
The Wind up Bird Chronicle-Haruki Murakami
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World-Haruki Murakami
Ghost World-Daniel Clowes
The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories-Nicolai Gogol
The Idiot- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Faust-Goethe
The Unbearable Lightness of Being- Milan Kundera
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks-Rebecca Skloot
Waiting for Godot- Samuel Beckett
Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe
The Myth of Sysyphus – Albert Camus
Poets to read
Charles Bukowski (Pulp, Ham on Rye, Post Office)
e.e. Cummings
Ranier Maria Rilke
T.S. Eliot
I never ended up blogging about every book I read this summer, which is laziness for the most part. But I also tried to pick books people would maybe want to read, as opposed to the books that ordinary people would find pure torture. (For example, no one in their right mind would read The Prince, which, once I got into it, was kind of interesting. And hey when I’ll have some good tips for when I need to take over a country or two.) There are a few books and authors that I did want to mention briefly
Evelyn Waugh.
I’ve read four books by Waugh this summer in preparation for a class I’m hopefully taking this fall (Decline and Fall, The Loved One, Brideshead Revisited and Scoop). I’ve liked every book I’ve read by him so far (though probably Brideshead Revisited the most). His satire and sense of humor are unmistakable, at many parts I actually chuckled aloud. I found his books lively and hard to put down, and recommend trying him out.
Alan Moore/ V for Vendetta
I’ve already written about Alan Moore, so I’ll spare you author information. V for Vendetta turned out to be just as dark and complex as Watchmen. I think I ended up liking both the novel and the movie adaptation (which I saw first) just as much, which is very rare. This is one that I think I’ll definitely reread when I have the time.
Milan Kundera/The Unbearable Lightness of Being
This is one of those classic books for a good reason. I’m a big fan of reading philosophy, but it’s often incomprehensible. This novel was steeped in philosophy without being bitter and undigestible. If Kundera writes this comprehensibly I’ll have to look out for his other books, maybe The Joke. Truly a beautiful book.
Albert Camus
This summer I bought this nice anthology of Camus with most of his famous works (except The Stranger). I’d already read The Stranger and The Plague so I decided this summer to read some of his essays. The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay on suicide (I know, not very cheery, sorry), while interesting and bringing up Dostoevsky, was also very difficult for me to understand. OK, so it could be because I was reading multiple books at the time or that I was reading too fast, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it if you don’t have a lot of time on your time to digest it. But I haven’t forsaken Camus, I really liked his fiction and am packing the anthology with me to read the remaining fiction in it, in my infinite spare time.
Poetry
Bukowksi, T.S. Elliot and Rilke didn’t disappoint. Never got around to a lot of e.e. cummings, but there isn’t any hurry. To be frank, I think I like Bukowski’s poetry more than his fiction. He managed to write on every emotion possible so you can read a different poem depending on your mood. I found Rilke harder to understand but he is also an excellent poet who wrote on a variety of emotions. T.S. Eliot is even more incomprehensible, but I keep coming back for more, his words are a thing of beauty.
If you’re still reading, I’m sorry for practically writing a novel, but it’s probably the last well-written blog you’ll get for a while. I like to convince my self that I have time to read in college. I don’t. Not the way I’d like to. However, I like writing and reading too much to stop for the semester. Maybe this will become a music blog once again. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll find things to write about other than books no one has time to read. College life is interesting, right? Right?
Let me preface this post by mentioning that I listen to a lot of soft acoustic music. I also play guitar and violin, so I can appreciate good finger-picking and instrumental accompaniment. I’ve been discovering more indie-folksy-acoustic music lately and it’s been nice to stray off the beaten path of my own music once in a while. This leads me to my problem with it.
It isn’t the lyrics, which are often beautiful and meaningful. It isn’t the music quality, or the singers’ voices, which are excellent. The problem I’ve been finding with acoustic music is that it all sounds the same to me. I can listen to one song after the other at least five times and still not remember how any of them sound the next day. If the music isn’t catchy enough to begin with, if it doesn’t pull me in, there’s a very good chance that I’ll forget about it. I’ll give it a chance for a while, and then I’ll stop completely and go back to the safety of my own music. It’s a shame because I’ve passed up many groups that are supposed to be very good (a few examples – Bon Iver, Andrew Bird, the Mountain Goats, etc…), because I don’t care about them enough to keep trying to remember what the last song sounded like.
I don’t think that it’s necessary to instantly remember every song you’ve listened to by a band you’ve just discovered. Most of the music groups that I now like have taken some time for me to fully appreciate, and even then I can often only say that I like a handful of songs by that group. (I found this to be the case this summer with Elliott Smith, whose songs I had to listen to non-stop for a few days before I could actually distinguish one from another.) However, I do think that a band’s songs have to be significantly different from each other for them to stick. It’s possible to do this with acoustic music – just take a look at Simon and Garfunkel, a band that has wonderful harmonies, poetic lyrics and distinguishable songs, or the Decemberists, a group that has very different songs from album to album. A different beat, change in tempo, instruments other than guitar every so often – that’s all it takes to hook me. I will always give an acoustic band more than one chance, because chances are that I still like it. However, I still think that it shouldn’t be hard for talented musicians to vary their music. They would get at least one more fan, and in the music business one more fan can make all the difference between obscurity and recognition that they deserve.
Filed under: Book Review | Tags: HeLa, non-fiction, Rebecca Skloot, science, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
In general, 99.5% of the books (yes, that’s an accurate statistic) that I read are fiction, more specifically old classics, that I’ve been rightly told no one will actually read, no matter how much I blog about them or try to defend them. I understand – they’re old, mostly tragic, often incomprehensible. Who has time for that, except people who have no job, or aspire to have no job in the future?
But that 0.5% of books makes up the non-fiction I read. The percentage is so low because most of the non-fiction I’ve read hasn’t exactly been page-turning, and often, I can’t force myself to be interested in it, like I can with fiction sometimes (though that’s probably because I’m not a history buff.) Science non-fiction has been the exception. It has both a story line and understandable science and the combination keeps me going until the end.
If you don’t read any of the books I write about then at least try this one. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot begins in the early 50s in small-town Clover, Virginia with Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cancerous cells would later become immortalized as HeLa, a cell line still used today. Readers travel through time, through scientific and ethical breakthroughs with Skloot as she unravels the mystery of the origin of HeLa cells. We meet, and come to love, Henrietta’s descendants, who were kept in the dark about the cells for decades and, in the end, take the news with remarkable grace. It isn’t often that I can say that I couldn’t put a piece of non-fiction down, but I found this to be the case for this book. Skloot writes lucidly for the common reader without scientific training. The end result it that scientists and non-scientists alike are not bogged down by the scientific jargon. There’s nothing to analyze, it isn’t angsty and it isn’t time consuming. So now you really have no excuse to not read it, do you?
Filed under: Book Review | Tags: J.D. Salinger, literature, opinion, The Catcher in the Rye
Everybody has had to read The Catcher in the Rye at some point in their life, probably as a fifteen year old in English class. Some of these teens don’t like it from the start, but a lot will think it’s the greatest thing written, compared to all of the other required school reading.
And then they grow up. Once you pass your teenage years you’re supposed to stabilize and move on with your life, which, as it happens, isn’t as miserable and awful as you once thought it was. Meanwhile, on the pages of Salinger’s 1951 book, Holden Caulfield is still the same ‘whiny’ sixteen year old and wouldn’t he be ok if he got laid, got a life, and applied himself, like you managed to do?
I admit, I was one of those fifteen year old die-hard fans. The difference is that five years later, in a time when nobody has time to reread old books, much less ‘depressing’ ones, I still love and reread the book.
That doesn’t mean that I felt exactly the same after each reread. In the beginning I could follow Holden through New York and still get him, but later on the book just got me down, put me in a bad mood, though I’d return to it anyway. On a recent reread I even got sick of Holden, wondering if he was, like everyone always said, whiny, and even worse – a phony. However, I don’t think this range of emotions is a bad thing. Each time I read The Catcher in the Rye I go through different thought processes, which is what you should do with any book you care enough to reread. The words are the same, but the meaning is different every time, depending on my mood.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of sorts at various points during the summer, but last night when I reread The Catcher in the Rye, I got it. I was fifteen year old me again (which, I admit, is not much different from young-adult me) and I understood Holden.
The thing is, in a lot of ways, I’m just like him. Somewhat of a coward at heart, idealistic, and thinks too much about everything. And when you think too much, it’s easy to always feel depressed and alone. It sounds cliché from a twenty year old who should have everything together by now, but there aren’t many people who get what you feel and why you are the way are. Or they don’t want to get it because they have other things to do that are more important than understanding what a teenager feels. For those who think Holden is whiny, I say cut him some slack. If you do another reading of the book you loved at fifteen without your grown-up analysis you’ll see Holden the way I still see him – a sixteen year old kid wandering the streets of New York alone, a kid who has good and noble intentions for all his horsing around. He isn’t perfect, he isn’t some one to strive to be, but nobody is perfect, not even in literature.
So here’s to you Holden, wherever you are. I hope you’ve figured out where the geese go in the winter and have become what you always wanted to be – the catcher in the rye.
Filed under: Book Review | Tags: Bukowski, literature, Post Office, summer reading list
Remember how I told you about my lack of self control when it came to books? Yup, you guessed it – I had to buy Post Office, Bukowski’s first novel at the College Park bookstore (my justification is that it was on my reading list, and yesterday was Bukowski’s birthday-I had to pay tribute to him in some way other than getting drunk).
I think the best way to describe Post Office is to quote a stanza of “Time,” a fantastic Pink Floyd song.
“And then one day you find
Ten years has got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun.”
Poor Henry Chinaski. All he wants is good-looking women and booze, is that too much to ask? Instead, we follow Chinaski through eleven years of losing his mind and dignity working at the post office. Like Ham on Rye, Post Office is more of a snapshot of Chinaski’s life than a real story. And like Ham on Rye, Bukowski manages to reveal a lot about humanity by channeling these observations through Chinaski, his snide and snarky alter ego.
While Ham on Rye was distressing because of its violence, Post Office was distressing because as a reader you have no choice but to watch Chinaski’s life pass him by. In Post Office, the angst is never, ever self pitying, and never explicit like in most of the angst-ridden novels I usually read. This makes the book a really good read, in my opinion. (Though, I should really stop this habit of finishing books in a day flat. A minor point that threw me off was the order of the books and the lack of continuity. While Ham on Rye was written after Post Office, the former covers Chinaski’s younger years, and from one book to another the personality of Chinaski seems different. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for the discrepancy, but this is what I get for reading each book in a day.)
Here’s a quote that I really liked:
“‘The ocean,’ I said, ‘look at it out there, battering, crawling up and down. And underneath all that, the fish, the poor fish fighting each other, eating each other. We’re like those fish, only we’re up here. One bad move and you’re finished. It’s nice to be a champion. It’s nice to know your moves.’”
