Forgive me for I shall document

Aside from movies, books are my favorite things to snack on. In between my Oscars craze (3 titles left to watch: "Nebraska", "Philomena", and "Gravity"); a Woody Allen binge (close to half a dozen movies in the past couple of weeks--my favorite of the lot being the hilarious "Love and Death"); and hunting for Joaquin Phoenix movies (I had "Walk The Mile" for lunch yesterday), I also read.

These are the books I've read these past few weeks:

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto
Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut
The King of Nothing to Do by Luis Katigbak (all in all, I've read this collection three times)

I tried to restrain myself from listing down the books I read during the final months of 2013, but I lost. So, off the top of my head, here:

In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon
Poems (1962 - 2012) by Louise Gluck
The Double by Jose Saramago
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Here by Wislawa Szymborska

Right now, I'm reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods and 158 pages into the novel, I still can't decide if I like it, or not. Excepting Smoke and Mirrors, my feelings for Neil Gaiman's writing tend to be ambivalent. It took me a while to get the hang of Neverwhere, and it's taking me forever to finish this one.

As it is, I'm itching to move on to either Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Decisions have to be made.

Meanwhile, I shall nap.

Because this miss is on my list (ugh)

I have decided to give up on the book I've been reading. I seldom ever go this far into one (3/4) and not finish it, living by the belief that if the first few pages of a book doesn't appeal to me, the only recourse should be to put it down and move on to the next. One of the very few exceptions was Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which somehow proved my judgement on its beginning chapters wrong, and it was, perhaps, the memory of this experience that was one of the reasons why I stuck to Kundera's Life is Elsewhere; the other being that of reading his The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and liking both.

The book has its merits, but the current mood I'm in has been unable to find a juncture to settle in, so for now, I'm putting it back on the shelf. I could probably pull it out it at a later time, though judging from the list of books I still want to read (not counting the ones that are yet to be added), I'm predicting the chances to be very, very low.

Meanwhile, I'll be having this for breakfast, lunch and dinner:

Last book I read:

What I'm reading now:

Happy Birthday, Jay

87 years ago, The Great Gatsby was published.

.

"With every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7

Coolio!

from this site

Lit Geek update:

What I'm reading now:

John Fowles, A Maggot, 1985
his last work of fiction

Lit Geek update:

Last book I read:

What I'm reading right now:

Lit geek update: What I'm reading right now

Lit Geek Update: What I'm Reading Right Now

"He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight." 

from the weekend couch:

Revisited

Sophia Coppola, 1999

From this book:

Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993

"From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows..."

Lit Geek Update: What I'm Reading Right Now:

Lit Geek Update: What I'm Reading Right Now:

The House Gun, Nadine Gordimer

PHP20 lang yan!
=)

Lit Geek update---

What I'm reading right now:

"...the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things--"

Lit Geek update #... er, I've lost track

What I'm reading right now:

"There's nothing that could convince someone  who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to."

My dirt-cheap, priceless finds from this week's Booksale hop:

Yeah, life is good.

Mais, c'est La Vie en Rose!

Last night, I fell asleep to the soundtrack of "Amelie". Watching "An Education" has definitely put me into a spin of everything French. I love things that have something French in them. In "An Education", Jenny, the main character, had a fondness for things French, saying things in French, falling in love in France, singing along to French songs. And she was an English Major who loved reading and writing, her room filled with books, her life filled with books. I love movies with books in them, where the characters are writers, or write every once in a while, or read tons, or fall in love with writers, or write papers about Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. (insert sigh here)

Which led me to a good quarter of an hour of musing about my life, and how I'm alone right now and how I came to the point where I realized that being on one's own can be a beautiful thing. You know, you do what you want, you eat what you want, you watch movies which have the things you like in them and there'd be no one to laugh at you, movies like "You've Got Mail" where Kathleen,  the heroine (oh, how old-fashioned, but I love it!) owns a bookstore and knows and loves the books she sells and talks about them with affection as if they were people dear to her.

Knowing what the things are that are dear to you, it is a wonderful feeling. Having them surround you, as if they were well-loved flowers in your very own garden, is priceless. For what price can you put to that warm, indescribable feeling that sweeps over you when you wake up and see the sunlight inching its fingers into the cover of your favorite book, which you left lying on your bed when you fell asleep the night before?

And, oh, Edith Piaf's "Milord" is simply a delight!

Goal for today: finish reading Elphie's tale

Loot bag! =)

A visit here (some time last week)

and a twenty-something-minute wait among these beautiful greens

yielded these:

My (fairly) new friends

What's yours?

"As though the very act of unbosoming one's secret self were simply another way of affirming it."
-J. Neil C. Garcia, Myths and Metaphors-

It's funny how we eventually find ourselves looking for the things we love, even as they intermittently blur themselves from our immediate surroundings, even as we find ourselves losing them in the course of the day-to-day, because the drone of the quotidian is a plane that's easy to disappear into.

The pull soon comes and we give in, only too willingly.

I experienced such a relinquishment--consciously, at that--when I came across where Garcia described how "lingering in it can induce in you such feelings of sharp melancholy", pertaining to "one's solitude as a poet".

I make no claims, at all, of being one, oh no, that would be a sacrilege.

I meant that I realized how I would always have that hunger for words and the many designs I could make of them and out of them--no matter that they are clumsy, at best and feeble, at worst.

There would always be that desire to design some imagined tapestry, because I know that I have my own loom on which to weave--my years and the gaps in between, for even in those gaps, there is, and there will always be, something to create something with.

As, of course, there would always be that struggle with the self over what is real and what is imagined, over the self and the desired, that all too consuming desperation which can only find rest in line, in stanza.

Arrgh. Total lack of understatement up there.

Convoluted, convoluted, convoluted.

I need another cup of coffee.