Edgar Allan Poe

The Pit and the Pendulum definitely has that iconic Poe voice.  Very dark and anxious with a lot left for interpretation.  It's a nice little climactic scene with even a bit of fantasy to it that touches on psychological workings.  I think that the shortness of the story really works well for it and that the quick ending lends a lot of power to the buildup.

The Fall of the House of Usher is similar in these characteristics, but is haunting in a much more usual way (ghosts and mansions and the like).  It reminded me of Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables in its gothic style, though perhaps a lot of that also has to do with the fact that the titles to these stories are attributed to the houses.  I'm not really sure what the point of this story was beside the fact that it was a mere form of entertainment, but I think I got more thrills from the former rather than The Fall even though it was more fitting to settings and topics that I usually prefer.

The Purloined Letter differs from these other two stories as it lacks the gloom that is so characteristic of Poe.  In fact, it's got an excessive amount of "intelligent" ramble that just seems like showing off.  It is, as a whole, a bit more lighthearted and comical but I don't think it engages as grippingly as the others do.  There is an air of cockiness that doesn't fit the author well, and I don't think that the detective genre fits him well.

I think, in general, I'm just glad all of these stories were short.

The Nose

Read Nikolai Gogol's The Nose yesterday on some stolen time.  It read very much like The Third Policeman and I just envisioned my old Scottish co-worker friend chuckling to himself as he read this.  It's kind of just a nonsensical three-part short story.  Literally, a nose leaves its owner's face, turns up in a bread roll, then is somehow human-size and is wearing fancy attire as it trots away in a carriage.  After all that, it miraculously appears back on its homestead face.  I'm not even sure that there is any point at all.  I looked it up thinking that perhaps it was a satirical commentary about society or the upper class but it doesn't really seem to be the case.  There was something about masculinity and shallowness/materialism that seemed probable but in the end it might just be that Gogol was just being silly and getting paid to do it.

Outside of that, I have been trying to read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union for the past few weeks but quite frankly, it's boring.  BY GOD, it's so boring.  I even looked it up on Wikipedia to see if I'm missing something and the only thing that I found helpful is that supposedly the Coen brothers were going to make a movie based on this book but then scrapped the script they had initially written.  EVEN THE COEN BROTHERS CAN'T MAKE THIS BOOK WORTH WATCHING.  If such talented gods can't even save it, it's hopeless I say!  I'll probably just keep trucking at it out of sheer stubbornness until I die of boredom.  Then I will rue this day.

Watchmen

Up to 95/1001 now!  Wooooooo.

So...I guess I like this? I really don't know what to say.  For some reason I like Rorschach the most and I feel like that makes me fucked up. 

For the pace that it started off with, the ending seemed abrupt to me.  I was kind of left thinking "...oh, is that the end?".  For the majority of the book, it was at a really nice tempo with layered plots and character development, but once Veidt's plan was uncovered it seemed like it was kind of like "and he killed everyone and now the story is over and there is nothing else to explain or talk about, and everyone is just going to go their separate ways with little explanation".  It kind of felt like a letdown.

There's a lot of violence, but it wasn't all that disturbing to me.  The images were often gruesome and all but it somehow fit the grittiness so that you were never really shocked, which I kind of think is nice.  There was also a lot of silhouettes of couples making out or having sex but I feel like with that part I was missing something.  Maybe he just wanted NYC to be a city full of vices?  Still, that seems too simple. Also, the smiley face.  Was I just not paying attention, or was that never explained?  Maybe I didn't have enough patience for all of these details...maybe I should go back and re-read.  I'd kind of rather someone just tell me.

So anyway, I assume those movies/comics like Kick-Ass and Super and other lives-of-superheroes as real people type stories are all probably somewhat influenced by this.  It's an interesting concept, and if Alan Moore was the first to think of it, that's pretty cool.  I know that comic people love him and think he's a genius so I wouldn't put it past giving him that credit.

On an unrelated topic I went to Barnes and Noble to try to find some books and that store is SO FREAKING USELESS.  I had about 10 titles to try to find, expecting that I wouldn't be able to find the majority of them but I could literally only find ONE.  What the heck!?  I guess I'm just going the Amazon route from now on.

A Fine Balance

What a miserable place India was in the '70s.  Even before reading this book I never had a desire to go to said country, but now I'm sure that if I ever did happen to be there I would constantly be getting depressed thinking about this book.  Maybe though, it would give me a sense of how much progress the country has made when before this read, I would have just been disgusted with the lack of sanitation and poverty.

I suppose this story is about friendship and love through hardship, but what's coming in loud and clear is that life is hopeless so you should just give up.  This is hard to grasp as an entitled asian girl in America who's family always had money and therefore had the means to keep working at getting what she wants with certainty that someday it could be attained, but as a poor person in 1975 India, I'd say that motto of "just stop trying" is pretty accurate and that basically dying was a better alternative to trying to climb the social ladder, or even to keep on living.  This was supported by insane amounts of violence between religious groups and poor people, government officials and poor people, and then some weird tensions between student activists and some entity I didn't quite understand (potentially more government assholes).

If there is a movie of this book, I never want to see it because I would have nightmares forever.

Also, there is a person who is basically a pimp for beggars who's name is Beggarmaster.  He keeps all of the money he collects in a suitcase that is chained to his wrist.  This is not a joke and no one seems to find this strangely hilarious.  He also happens to be one of the nicest characters in this book so seriously, what I'm getting at here, is India was pretty fucked up.

This was the last book I had left from Colleen's generous gift.  This means I need new books.  My birthday happens to be two weeks away.  Wink wink.

Call It Sleep

Bluntly speaking, I do not like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth.  It is, to be fair, very skilled in conveying a very true adolescent, but this perhaps reveals that I do not like real children (which really is no surprise).  I found David Schearl to be whiney, spineless, and overly attached to his mother, which really bothers and freaks me out.  I do not understand or handle well people who have strange obsessions with their parents, and it makes me very uncomfortable.

I suppose it would seem that I am being unfair by identifying a 6-9 year old boy as being annoyingly dependent, but in comparison to the other boys that surround him, Davy has been guarded from maturity because of his mother's affection.  There must be a point in a child's life where he realizes he wants to be a part of others his age, I think, but it never really seems to happen with this main character.  Case in point, this kid creeps me out.

Roth also does some stylistically out-of-the-box things like characterizing accents through phonetic spelling, capturing David's internal thought process through jumbled, fast moving nonsense, as well as a scene toward the end where two separate situations are woven between themselves in abrupt cuts until they collide at the climax.  However avant-garde this may be (I'm blindly assuming that to be true), it was for me, very annoying and I often found myself scanning and skipping these sections because they were so hard to read, confusing, and ultimately unimportant to the bigger picture (forgettable, for lack of a better word).

The only part of the book that I found interesting was the first section, which I found to be very pretty and emotional.  Not so coincidentally, this is the only section that is not written from the child's point of view.  When the father tosses the child's hat overboard, it is an immensely weighted moment, and I commend Roth for such a well played choice of action for Albert Schearl to do to his newly reunited family.  Props.

What I do like more than this scene, is when people share their love for a book in a very convincing manner.  There is an afterword by Walter Allen in my copy that was so well-written that I started to appreciate some of his points, though not to the point that it would make me forget all of the unpleasantness I felt throughout my read.

Also, as a side-note, my copy is from 1971 and the pages look ribbed/textured when held up to the light.  I am incredibly fascinated by this -- there is a sense of corrosion as well as a very handmade feel to it that I am drawn to.  Also, I really like the cover image of clothes drying on a line.

The Golden Notebook

If anyone is surprised to find that I would enjoy reading a truly feminist book, it is myself.  I hate "proud" feminists who rant about the power of the vagina and empowerment within the sisterhood and all that nonsense.  I think if you're a strong lady, it isn't so difficult to be taken seriously and respected, and there are plenty of women who are cases of that.  I myself have never been treated unfairly in the workplace or otherwise due to my sex and whether it's because I'm not "hot" enough or not, I am also not an idiot, nor am I so sensitive to feel victimized at regular human interaction.

Anyway, to move away from my bitching about feminism and onto the actual point of this blog...

I very much enjoyed The Golden Notebook, as usual, not so much based on the content of the book, but the voice behind it.  I think I am in love with Ms. Doris Lessing.  She mentioned a lot of things in the introductions that I simply adore.  She's like a wise grandmother talking to you in complete honesty about her life experiences, and as a woman who has never had the kind of relationship or capabilities to speak in such an intimate way with her familial superiors, it was very refreshing and strange at the same time.  It was kind of like talking to the me of the future, as so much of what Lessing wrote related to my own ideas.  She does mention that she had received countless letters from fans of both sexes thanking her for this very notion, and I think that's very impressive in and of itself.  I like this advice:

"Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.  Don't read a book out of its right time for you."

The book was sometimes hard to follow because of the way it was split up.  The format was an overarching story titled "Free Women" divided up into 5 parts, as well as four separate notebooks written by the protagonist on different subjects.  I think I will go back and read the "Free Women" segments together as one immediately after I write this post, but otherwise I can generally say that I liked the black notebook best (about young English do-gooders in Africa), followed by the yellow one (a reflection of the Free Women parts).  I like them best because they are the ones that are narrative and tell a story, whereas the red notebook was hard to understand for me because I know little about communism and the political values that were discussed there.  The blue notebook's (a personal diary) purpose seemed to recount the process in which Anna started going mad, and I am slightly turned off by the topic of a character going mad at this point, since by now it is starting to be somewhat of a recycled theme.

Lessing is a very good writer.  She seems to know exactly what she's doing, and takes a pretty no-bullshit approach without being annoying which I respect.  It's truly the only book I've ever read that speaks in a frank way from the point of view of a woman that doesn't seem outwardly fictitious or sugary with female propaganda -- but again, I emphasize that I say this having avoided feminist writing in the past. 

I should mention I moved to Ohio a little over a month ago to follow a dream.  I got a job at a fashion retailer as a copywriter and although it has left me in solitude for now, I stand my ground about doing my best at being a "strong" woman and doing what it takes to reach what I want.  This is not feminism, this is just being a person with conviction.  It has nothing to do with sex.  Being realistic about my life is something I try to maintain, and luckily I am doing better these days at having more hope so maybe it will translate in real life.

            "'We've got to remember that people with our kind of experience are bound to be depressed and unhopeful.'
              'Or perhaps it's precisely people with our kind of experience who are most likely to know the truth, because we know what we've been capable of ourselves?'"

Hopefully my path leads me to greater things.  I suppose the core theme of this storyline is the fear of being alone and I can definitely relate to that.  I am not quite happy yet, but I am trying to get there:

"I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness."

A Passage to India

With all this unemployed time on my hands, I have taken to re-watching a ridiculous amount of Gilmore Girls (do not judge me).  Lucky for me there are a crap ton of seasons and episodes within seasons, so I have been quite the bum on my couch lazing about with pretty skinny girls who eat an unrealistic amount of greasy foods while making fast, witty banter.

There is a point to me mentioning that, I swear.  E.M. Forster's A Passage to India reads like something rich white people would read in the twenties...namely someone like Emily Gilmore, the old-money mother/grandmother of my beloved show.  Granted, this may just be influenced by the fact that the plot and characters in this book revolve around rich British people, but I still hold this notion.  F. Scott Fitzgerald would probably love it.

This one is only comme ci comme ça; it moves at an agreeable pace and the main characters are all good and likeable.  Aziz is a bit of a pansy which gets annoying because his jealousies are a little bit like Harry's teenage angst phase in the J.K. Rowling series, but it's not so bad that it makes me want to stop reading or have any strong emotions.

If anything, it's a good look at friendship and the way relationships are altered by doubt.  I don't think I liked anything in the entire book as much as I liked the end (the words, not the context in relation to the story or whatever political statement it may be trying to make), and I am going to go ahead and just copy them here to spoil it all for you.  My apologies.

     '"Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately.  "It's what I want.  It's what you want."
     But the horses didn't want it -- they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."'

Keep in mind those are two dudes so the weird sexual tension between two straight friends is something to look forward to if you do want to read this.
I got hired for a job today that will be taking me to Columbus, Ohio, and I feel that last bit echoing around in me a little bit like the "boum" in Mrs. Moore's head.