I am reading The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco, right now. That’s why I have that quote:
Sun of my shadows, light of my darkness.
— Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
What can I say? It is the most (hyperbole) pretentious book I have ever read. The term that a review from The Guardian used was “built-in sopor”, which I think is quite apt. I don’t feel so critical of it to say that it puts me to sleep, exactly, but perhaps this will take a long time to read.
It’s still less dull than Middlemarch, at least! (That name, why did I even pick it up!)
On another note, I changed the theme, once again. Feeling like I liked the last one more, but this is the 2015 WordPress theme, so I feel obliged to try it out for a while.
I just wanted to make a post addressing something that I’ve noticed for a long time. Blogging is supposed to be organic, natural. To me, it’s an accumulation of thoughts and a release. My blog is supposed to be a place for my emotional catharsis. But really, and I’m ashamed to say this, I’m self-censoring and filtering my words before they even come out.
Instead of talking about interesting things that I want to talk about, I’m restricting myself to a few topics, or otherwise making this a boring exercise.
So my resolution this year is to give this a serious go again. Hopefully my courage will carry me through and I will be less reticent through 2015.
Apparently I’m not very good at writing poems about things.
Where is the little corporal
— Who bound in law the West?
Where is the Wonder Horse,
— Australia’s Big Red?
Where is the Guangxu emperor,
— Who died before the last?
Along with Toffana’s men,
And those of Spara’s followers,
They drank the gift of Lucretia
And now lie cold and dead.
Where am I now?
In the gardens of yesteryear,
Where the walls are covered in flowers
And the snow’s a silky smear
How can I help it?
Life’s wine is just inferior.
I read the Divergent series in the last 2 days, and it was as bad as I expected. Confirmation bias? Maybe.
SPOILER ALERT
Anyway, here are my thoughts.
Tris reminded me of a line in the Scottish play, said by Malcolm after the death of the traitorous previous Thane of Cawdor:
“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”
Unfortunately, her death was stupid because there was no purpose to it. It was incredibly contrived, and did not provide any meaning to the ending of the series. If I think hard enough, it’s possible that Veronica Roth had set it up so a super Type A character could not survive, and she was actually trying to tell us that redemption for the narrowminded only comes after death.
She was also kind of a nasty person in general, who expected other people to forgive her all the time, when she obviously would not forgive them in the same situation.
Four was a little better, but he got weird after Insurgent.
Every character other than the ones Tris liked were automatically “evil” or misguided, and they always ended up on her side if they had a decent motive.
I hate to say this, because The Hunger Games was a blatant and inferior ripoff of Battle Royale and every other dystopian novel out there, but HG is still better than Divergent.
Also, putting milk in peppermint tea is apparently “sickening”.
This month really went by fast. I actually had a different post planned today, but I also wanted to talk about NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo, so here it goes.
NaNoWriMo:
Unfortunately, the group NaNoWriMo I did this year was not a success. Lesson learned? If you’re writing with other people, you need to plan in advance. At least a month in advance, work out characters, plot, etc.
Two shocking discoveries are:
I can write a lot faster than I thought I could.
I really do suck at dialogue. Compared to other people who also write.
NaBloPoMo:
NaBloPoMo was a success! Time made me pretty nervous, because I always procrastinated and ended up doing it in the middle of the night (the next day), but eventually I just allowed myself that freedom. I probably should have followed my posting plan though, because I did way more haikus (haha cheating) than I wanted to. Below are all of my posts from this month:
Note: This was supposed to be a poem. Somehow it came down on paper as prose, but I still split it by line. As you may be able to tell, these were the words that accompanied my sketch of Tadzio.
Youth lives before humor
Before cowardice
Before contempt who kills
reality.
Amongst boys who play
Over wanderings
And over streams
With shaded faces
Etched in river mud
And all of life’s seriousness.
Something that I drew yesterday (well, by my standards, yesterday), but forgot to post.
This is the original bishie, Björn Andrésen, playing his most famous role as Tadzio in Death in Venice. Explains why many of those old anime bishonen characters have stylized flaxen curls and that fluttery long-lashed look.
It’s been almost a month since the end of October, but I didn’t want to post this list too early because I knew that I wouldn’t get a chance to read during NaNoWriMo. I’ve gone through 10 books in the past two months, and some I liked, some I didn’t.
1/10/14 Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. I started out with this very interesting book by a Mexican author, which I would recommend if you like fantasy realism. Like Water for Chocolate, from a Spanish phrase, “como agua para chocolate”, can be interpreted to mean that one is very angry, or in a state of passion or sexual arousal, like the near-boiling water used to make hot chocolate.
Like Water for Chocolate
The main character, a young woman who is cowed by her mother, cooks as an outlet for her own passions, as she is forbidden from marrying by a family tradition. The feeling of this book is somewhat similar to The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel García Márquez, or Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan. While I personally don’t like fantasy/magical realism, I still thought that this was a great read. An added plus: as one friend put it, “The sex scenes are fascinating.”
This Locus Award winning novel originally caught my attention with its bright and modern cover.
The titular character is the princess of Laurentum in the Aeneid. In Vergil’s epic, she plays a minor role as Aeneas’ third and final wife, and the only noteworthy thing that happens to her is her hair catching on fire. Le Guin writes from her point of view to show the vulnerability, troubled independence, suitors, and ritual paganism that controlled her life, as a female character.
In a sense, it is a feminist novel, definitely more than The Left Hand of Darkness, because it is an adaptation from a female point of view, but not nearly so much as The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, another adaptation of a Classical epic. Although Le Guin reworks the story with the poet Vergil as a character, equal to, or arguably, greater than Aeneas himself, it doesn’t seem contrived when he laments that he had imagined her incorrectly, as just a blonde girl who’s only noteworthy for her hair catching on fire.
15/10/14 Never Cry Wolfby Farley Mowat. Very amusing depiction of Canadian bureaucrats, and the author’s experiences on observing wolves. Sad to say, but I probably would never have read this if he didn’t die this year. Anyway, this is a must read! It was incredibly entertaining, although not as relevant now as it was in the past.
Never Cry Wolf
17/10/14 Eye of the Needleby Ken Follett. I was inspired, in September, to take up reading mystery again, and somehow this book, a World War II thriller, jumped out at me. Also, my librarian insisted that Ken Follett was amazing. So I read it. This actually caused me a lot of grief, because obviously the Germans didn’t win the war, so “die Nadal”, our somewhat swashbuckling male hero, is either going to betray his country, which would be out of character, or die. Halfway through, I put the book down and I couldn’t continue for a couple hours.
Eye of the Needle
He ends up doing a bit of both by falling in love with the female heroine and not killing her, resulting in his own death and the failure of his mission. It’s predictable, and Lucy is a well-developed character in her own right, but it’s hard to like her because he was a great spy!
21/10/14 The Beach House by James Patterson and Peter de Jonge. This falls under what I would call the “bathroom read”. The plot is pretty flimsy, the characters are pretty flat, and it has a vigilante feel to it that doesn’t completely agree with me. Nevertheless, if you don’t take it too seriously, it’s still a fun read, and the premise is interesting enough. Basically, male protag’s younger brother who is some kind of boy toy for the rich ends up dead. Injustice after injustice follows. Male protag eventually avenges his death. Very illegally.
26/10/14 Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days by Michael Jackson’s bodyguards. As someone who previously had no interest in MJ or his music, I read Randy Taraborrelli’s biography on him, and I was pretty disgusted. This was the updated version, Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story, and while I enjoyed reading it, I felt bad for a dead man afterward. Some parts seem exploitative. The author claims to be “the foremost authority” on Michael Jackson but he snatches pieces from poorly written articles that I can find on the Internet, and from MJ’s autobiography, Moonwalk (which I can hardly call a book – pity for Jackie O who had to edit that thing). Anyway, afterward, I felt obliged to read some different opinions on his life, and I liked My Friend Michael: An Ordinary Friendship with an Extraordinary Man by Frank Cascio a lot. On the other hand, Remember the Time seems a little weird…I guess the consensus is that MJ was pretty weird by then?
RIP, King of Pop.
29/10/14 De Niro’s Gameby Rawi Hage. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” This was the first sentence of the blurb on the back. One man chooses a life of crime, while the other tries to run from Lebanon’s civil war. Interested? I’m not going to ruin this for anyone. It was actually a very shocking ending. All the clues were there, but I just didn’t see it.
De Niro’s Game
10/11/14 The Lover by David Lance Goines. Not much to say about this. It’s a series of articles on how to be the perfect (male) lover.
24/11/14 The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick. Yeahhh don’t read this. It was stupid. I thought it would be something like Fallen London (the game) but the City isn’t interesting at all, and the ending was so deus ex machina. The blurb oversold. Like Inheritance (cough cough what torture scenes). Try the Emperor’s Edge series if you like fantasy with a touch of steampunk. (Okay, maybe EE isn’t “a touch”, but still…)
I must be morbid.
The seams in the sky are falling apart.
I’m ready to die and I can’t think of any death poems.
Only dead poets.
There are plenty of those.
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