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:

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." 

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."

Loot bag! =)

A visit here (some time last week)

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

yielded these:

What I'm reading right now:

from chapter 10, p. 497:
And she, Frederica, had had a vision of being able to be all the things she was: language, sex, friendship, thought, just as long as these were kept scrupulously separate, laminated, like geological strata, not seeping and flowing into each other like organic cells boiling to join and divide and join in a seething Oneness. Things were best cool, and clear, and fragmented, if fragmented was what they were.
     "Only connect," the "new paradisal unit" of "Oneness," these were myths of desire, the desire and pursuit of the Whole.
     And if one accepts fragments, layers, tesserae of mosaic, particles.
     There is an art form in that, too. Things juxtaposed but divided, not yearning for fusion.

Here, Now.

The poem indeed is the long lost startle. The moment has passed, it is again lost, but having been lived, it might be imagined, recuperated. And so it is there again, in the poem, for through language a path to it has been found; it is held now and here in the poem's all too human hands--too human, finite, mortal, so that in one or the other reader, it may also be nowhere.

So, Dr. Gemino Abad writes in his introduction to Joel M. Toledo's second book of poetry, The Long Lost Startle. I serendipitously found this book while waiting in a bookstore for a colleague. We were to buy art materials. The wait led me to find poetry. Poetry, which, I realized, I have been gravitating towards more than fiction, lately. The cache of good poetry proves small these days (I mean, what percentage does it represent in this pop-lit-and-bestseller-that-sells-because-it -is-more-sensational-than-literary-dominated culture?), so that discovering a good book of poems is actually tantamount to unearthing a treasure.

Now you want to believe again, as if you've lost/ how it is to find things. (from "What is Required")

Hence, Joel Toledo and his Long Lost Startle. Following suit his Chiaroscuro, it explores the world as it is in the here and the now, where the "here" takes up the smallest fraction of what here means for most of us, and the "now" is the actual second you are in now. The result is, indeed, the startle that we have long since forgotten, that moment of awe which most of us had lost along the way, having gotten entangled in the speed of our own lives, so that there is no more moment to pause, catch our breaths, and just look and see what's before our eyes, and whatever newness there is that we might find, whatever wonder there might be for us to experience.

The clock declaring its singular point, the hour,/ the now again it is midnight, full minute of it,/ fulfilled and finishing./ ("The Long Lost Startle")

With the moment not even seen, the discovering would be totally out of the equation. And so much, too much, would have been lost.

/And, finding nothing to fear, you lean back into/ the silence that comes next: the lack of clock, the rest./ (The Long Lost Startle")

Lit Geek update # 22: recently read books

A Pale View of Hills (Kazuo Ishiguro):
This is a novel that is very quiet on the surface but is extremely disturbing, underneath. Most everything is undertow. It left me thoughtful, piecing things together, dipping my hand in the water and feeling the current draw me in. Masterfully understated. Definitely another Ishiguro coup de maitre.


Bel Canto (Ann Patchett):
The ending was another "The French Lieutenant's Woman" moment for me. I was completely disillusioned by the epilogue, hence, I went back to the paragraphs prior so that the ending that stayed with me was the one that came before the actual one. We always have a choice; and I chose how the story would end for me. Otherwise, I found the novel beautifully written. Another testament to music's power of transcending all the ugliness in the world.

Lit Geek Update/What I'm Reading Now:

Halfway done...
=)

Lit Geek Update # 20: Moving On

(the Suite Francaise manuscript)

Whew. Finally.

A heavy read, this one (probably helps explain the snail's pace with which I read it?). It is a war novel, a big hint that it was to be no light reading fare; and what further padded up the weight were the circumstances around the novel's writing and publication.

Irene Nemirovsky's childhood was not what one would call a happy one. She came from a wealthy family, but her problematic, strained relationship with her mother more than clouded up her early years. I'm thinking this toughened her up and prepared her for the darkness which she was to grope around in during her final years.

Fast forward to her adult years--

An established writer/socialite, she and her husband had to move around a lot to flee persecution during the 2nd World War, them being Jews and their conversion to Catholicism not being enough to save them from certain, imminent death which awaited all the Jews during that dark period.

The novel was written in the middle of the chaos and done secretly, scribbled in handwriting so tiny that Nemirovsky's daughter, Denise, many, many years later, had to use a magnifying glass in order "to decipher the miniscule handwriting" (preface to the French edition, p. 512) and type the manuscript for publishing.

I found it uncanny, reading about how the novel survived and found its way into the world's bookshelves. Nemirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942, and Suite Francaise was published 64 years later. Her two daughters, mere children when their mother died, had instinctively--seeing how painstakingly (and discreetly) their mother had labored over it--kept the manuscript in a suitcase. It became their constant companion in their transit from one place to another in order to escape the fate their parents had met (death in the gas chambers). The manuscript, through the children's loving protection and care--they had meant to keep it as a memento of their mother--miraculously survived the unfriendliness of the era.

The book, though unfinished, has a lot to say about the war (Germany's occupation of France, specifically), and even more about the human tenacity to cling to life in the middle of a death-strewn age, resilience amidst trials, the power of faith, of hope.

I am glad the book found its way into my hands.
Thanks, M--.

Next on my list: E. M. Forster's A Room With A View

Lit Geek Update # 19: Stuck

It's been weeks and I'm still reading the same book. It's not the book that's the problem--both the prose and the exposition are very, very good. It's time, or the lack thereof, that's the culprit.

Excuses, excuses.

It's that damn Facebook that's taking me away from my books. LOL

I'm giving myself until Friday. I should be done by then.

Lit Geek Update #18:

Last book I read: They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades by Barbara Holland--

For the recently emancipated woman, this book further cements her being an offspring of the pains, the struggles, the glories, and the conquests of the women who, before her, had dared to wear a pair of pants and go whistling down the lanes, under the occasionally glaring, often frowning beams of the sun. Read about history's giantesses Amelia Earheart, Bonnie Parker, Joan D'Arc, Cleopatra, Isadora Duncan, Belle Boyd, the Amazons, and more than a handful of lesser known women who trod the narrow path toward the freedom to truly look the world in the face and laugh, wickedly, while doing so.

What I'm reading right now:


The Manikin by Joanna Scott

"The winter of 1846, when half of everything alive succumbed to the cold, has been stored for over eighty years in the mysterious mind common to the species, and though the owl didn't experience that winter, she remembers it--the poisonous smell of the air, the frost that pinned feathers to skin, the famine. She remembers that time the way a woman remembers her great-grandmother's death in childbirth..."

-from the novel's first paragraph, p. 3-

Lit Geek Update #17: What I'm Reading Now

I defined a woman's duty, "To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention."
-Margaret Sanger, 1914

Lit Geek Update #16: Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE

I must confess that it took me a while to sink into the novel's realm. My rule of thumb when it comes to deciding whether to finish a piece of literature or not is that I generally go by how the first few pages make me feel and then decide from there. These initial pages will make--or break--the book for me. If they appeal to me, I go on, and if they don't, back to the shelf the book goes. It was different for Neverwhere.

I gave it a chance. I curbed the urge to slam the book shut, what with the unappealing--almost trite--prose the novel began with. I told myself, hey, this is my first Gaiman novel and maybe his works do take some getting used to. Just because I absolutely adored his Smoke and Mirrors (which is a collection of his short fiction), I plodded on.

And I'm glad I did.

To the Gaiman greenhorn, Gaiman's works, I surmise (I say "surmise" because I have yet to read enough of his works to use any other verb), call for suspension of disbelief to be appreciated. As opposed to the magical realistic work, which assumes the "magic" in the fiction to be part of the "real", Gaiman's kind of fantasy employs "magic" that is more protuberant and intruding, and therefore, more difficult to swallow. I know Gaiman fans will probably protest; and that is why I started this paragraph with "to the Gaiman greenhorn."

It was all just part of the "how d'ya do" stage, though. Or, to be more exact, of the first thirty pages, thereabouts. Eventually, in this case, I gave in to the pull of the succeedingly superb, visual turn the prose took. The descriptions were something else, a quality that is most probably consequential of Gaiman's expertise as a graphic novelist. Needless to say, I found myself engrossed in the sea of words and worlds and possibilities given to me by the author. Richard Mayhew's journey(s) with The Lady Door became journeys that I wanted to follow.

I am in the book's final pages.

I'll be reading American Gods next.