Still managing, mostly, to hold onto my happiness from the weekend. It’s been snowing here since yesterday afternoon and is supposed to continue to snow until Tuesday afternoon leaving us with a total of ten inches. I know it could be worse, I could be in DC right now. The difference though is that we’ve had snow on the ground here since November and it will be hanging around until April. In spite of that I love Minnesota. Yeah, maybe I’m crazy.

Anywhoo, school this quarter is on its sixth of ten weeks. My how time flies. Things have settled down and my initial worries about being in a class of mostly computer engineers are all gone. It’s a really interesting class and the class discussions are the best I’ve had in any of my classes. There are 24 people in the class and regularly over 200 postings each week. There aren’t huge amounts of assigned reading, usually around 50 pages a week, so keeping up with the discussion isn’t that hard. The week’s readings aren’t post until Monday morning though which means my Monday and Tuesday nights are spent frantically reading and then making sense of the discussion questions. But it’s all good.

As for reading that is not school related, I finally finished reading The Tyranny of E-mail and will get a proper review up about it tomorrow. As a teaser, I had issues with the book.

I’m still chugging away through Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton biography and have some interesting Wharton / Proust tidbits to tell you about. It’s been an eye opener reading about Wharton within her historical milieu and realizing who else was writing at the same time (Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf just to name two). What a fertile period for literature. I wonder if in twenty years we will be able to look back at the early 2000s and say the same?

For my train commute/ work lunch break book I am reading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. It is not easy reading because of the slang and pidgin, but I am enjoying it and the pages are going by faster that I realized.

Last night I began reading Sophocles’ play Elektra. Hers is one of the largest female roles in all of Greek tragedy. I’m about halfway through and it is quite good.

I’ve been reading some Rumi poetry a poem or two at a time. Rumi is always a pleasure. His poems can frequently be read as religious and secular at the same time.

and in perusing the latest Bookforum I have discovered there is a new book on Emerson coming out called On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson by Branka Arsic. It doesn’t come out until April 1st just before my birthday. That hasn’t stopped me from suggesting to my Bookman that is sure would make a fine present.

Time to get to the reading for class this week. I know I’m behind on comments and I’ll try to catch up in the next day or two as school reading allows.

My Bookman and I have been suffering from the winter blahs so he and I made it a point to do a few things this weekend to lift our blues. Friday night we thought we had a ballroom dance lesson and appeared promptly for it, wondering why there didn’t seem to be as many people at the studio as there usually are, in fact, the place was practically empty. When we got inside we were asked if we had come for salsa. Uh, no, we came for our usual lesson. At which point apologies began flying. Our teacher is currently in Cancun on the studio’s annual dance cruise. They had told us about it back in early January but we had completely forgotten. What creatures of habit we are.

Conveniently, our favorite Half Price Books store is nearby and we had put a bag of books to sell in the car on the off chance we felt like stopping after our dance lesson. There being no dance lesson at all, it was a no brainer that the evening was to be spent at HPB. They gave us a good price for our books this time and a 10% off our next purchase coupon. Bookman and I went off in different directions to begin the browsing. Inevitably we meet up downstairs in the fiction where we yell across the shelves at each other, “Hey did you see this one?” or “Do we have this already?”

After we are browsed out we spread our books out to see what we have. Sometimes we’ll grab a book that looks interesting and that we want if nothing else better is found. So we look the books over and decide which ones we want to take home. Then we add up the total. We always try to stay within the amount that we got as a credit for selling books we didn’t want so depending on the total we may decide a book or two doesn’t make the cut after all. Finally, we head to the cash register and depending on our success we either complain as we walk out to the car or chatter excitedly. This time we got to chatter excitedly. Here’s what I brought home:

• Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis. The back cover describes the book as “Fifty-seven rule-breaking short stories, in which Lydia Davis proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, gets lost in a foreign city, and addresses common anxieties regarding etiquette, work, taste, the fourth grade, death, and conversation.” When I opened the book up, this is the story I read called “Tropical Storm” : “Like a tropical storm,/ I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.’ ” How could I resist this book?
• The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt. I’ve never read her but she appears with general good reviews on blogs and Verbivore recently read and loved this book so when I saw a like-new copy I couldn’t resist.
• After Dark by Haruki Murakami. The back of the book says it is “a gripping novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the hours between midnight and dawn.” I prefer to be asleep during those hours and can’t imagine why anyone would be awake if they didn’t have to be. And because it is Murakami it will probably be delightfully surreal too.
• The Wise Virgins by Leonard Wolf. I always forget that Leonard was a writer too. I’ve never read anything of his. This is his second novel and it was published two years after he married Virginia. There are some rather autobiographical elements in it that distressed the Woolf family. Virginia also had her worst breakdown two weeks after reading it (there is probably no connection making that just a bit of salacious gossip). Hopefully my curiosity will keep this one from disappearing into the unread books piles.
• My Bookman scored some books too but one he and I will both enjoy is a QPB 3-in-one Angela Carter containing The Magic Toyshop, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Wise Children. I think I have read Wise Children before but I know I haven’t read the other two so this should be fun.

That was our book shopping. Saturday night we watched the newest movie incarnation of Hairspray. It is so relentlessly chipper that you can’t help but feel better afterwards.

Today, ah today, we treated ourselves to a delicious breakfast at our favorite veg restaurant. Afterwards we went to Como Park Conservatory for some green therapy. The temperature outside was about 23 degrees F and inside a humid 72. It was heavenly. We’d walk a little, look a little, and sit down on a bench and sigh in happiness. At one point we were sitting on a bench by a little fountain and both of us wished we could curl up and take a nap. We satisfied ourselves by leaning against each other and drowsily watching the amateur photographers take pictures of the fountain. It was just the thing to help our winter blues.

For the rest of the day we have both felt really good and happy. And even when it started snowing we weren’t bothered. Now if we can only hold onto that until about the middle of April!

I have the pleasure of offering up choices for the next Slaves of Golconda discussion. Maybe it is a symptom of cabin fever due to the winter doldrums that have descended, but all the books up for vote have some sort of journey at their center. It was hard to come up with a list of books that probably most haven’t read yet. One thing I can say though, there is a good diversity of style to choose from. I gleaned these titles from searching The Globe Corner Bookstore website a fantastic site if there ever was one and a bookstore I would love to visit should I ever find myself wandering around Harvard Square. Unfortunately their book descriptions aren’t always the best, so those I got from Amazon (click the title links for more complete book descriptions). Here’s the list:

• Vertigo by W.G. Sebald. “This exquisitely composed work also undertakes a disorienting, if less somber, journey through historical and personal memory. The first-person narrator travels through Europe during the 1980s, spurred on by history’s ghosts and his own melancholic yearning for adventure. Having left his base in England to explore Vienna, Venice and Verona, he concludes with a bittersweet pilgrimage to his hometown in southwestern Germany”
• The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. “Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Then a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother’s birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal that he is not quite spectator enough.”
• The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic. “This novel poses some interesting philosophical questions–who are you, what are you, and what are your memories when your country has disintegrated and even your language has been politicized out of existence? That’s what has happened to the narrator and protagonist, Tanja Lucic, ethnically a Croatian, formerly a Yugoslav. Exiled by the Yugoslav ethnic wars of the 1990s and then abandoned by her husband in Berlin, Tanja lands a one-year post at the University of Amsterdam. Her students, with one exception, are fellow exiles enrolled to maintain their refugee status.”
• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. “Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, A Bend in the River chronicles both an internal journey and a physical trek into the heart of Africa as it explores the themes of personal exile and political and individual corruption.”
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. ” ‘Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’ So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images.”

If you are not currently a Slave but would like to become one, we’d be glad to have you. Visit the blog to find out more and cast your vote if you want to participate. Discussion of the “winning” book will start March 31st.

It seems like a good day for a meme. I scooped this one up from Ella and Dorothy.

Here is what my bookcases say about me:

• “I’m immortal!” I must be, right? Because why else would I own what might be more books than can be read in a normal human lifetime? And not only that, but I keep adding to them!
• “I need help choosing books to read!” At least that’s what someone might think looking at the entire shelf I have dedicated to books like Book Lust by Nancy Pearl, 1001 Books to Read Before you Die and The New Lifetime Reading Plan. In reality I have no trouble finding books to read but this one ties in to the fact that I am immortal so really, all I want to do is make sure I never run out of ideas.
• “I’m self-centered!” This one was suggested by my Bookman due to the quantity of books I own about journal keeping. These fill a portion of a shelf and above that shelf are close to 30 journals that I have filled over the years. Does that make me self-centered or just an adherent to the ancient Greek aphorism to “know thyself?”
• “I’m pretentious!” That’s the only reason to have three bookcases in the living room filled only with poetry and classics. That’s not the only reason but someone who didn’t know me well might think that. When our basement library shelves were full to bursting and we bought three bookcases to fit into the living room, given our organizational scheme, it only made sense to move all our poetry and most of our classics to these shelves since they are the smallest distinct “collections” in our library. The good thing about this move was that we now read more poetry, both Bookman and I will pull a book from the shelf to regale the other with a poem or two. And our classics are no longer lost amongst the rest of the fiction so we can be frequently reminded by seeing the books, “oh yes I should get around to reading that one!”
• “I like poetry by 20th century women!” A good deal of the poetry on the shelves in the living room is by women authors from the 20th century. This is probably a result of my taking several graduate school classes on both poetry and women writers. Adrienne Rich is best represented since I wrote my thesis on her work and have all her books. There is also H.D., Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Anna Ahkmatova, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Edna St. Vincent Millay and many others.
• “I have a secret desire to be a scientist!” When I was a mere college freshman my declared major was biology. I was going to be a vet. Then I was going to be a biology teacher. Then when the full impact of the animals that I could look forward to dissecting hit me, I changed my mind and my major to English. Dissecting texts was much less disturbing than dissecting cats and piglets. I flirted briefly with trying botany but my allergies told me it wasn’t a good idea. So now I just like to read books about neuroscience and quantum physics and animals.
• “I’m also a wanna be philosopher!” I’ve not read a lot of philosophy but that hasn’t stopped me from accumulating philosophy books. Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Plato, Foucault, Nietzsche, several “history of” survey-type books. Oh, and of course there was my wonderful tour through all of Emerson. I’ve read enough philosophy to find it fascinating and challenging and always thought provoking and I think even though philosophy has been shuffled to the sidelines in our current culture, it is just as relevant, maybe more so, than ever.
• “I’m a witch!” Not really, but I have a little more than a shelf of history and psychology books on the European witchcraft craze, specifically in Germany. I’ve read almost all of them and have taken copious notes. You see, one day I plan on writing a novel. There is a small village near Trier (I have yet to discover the name of the village in spite of numerous references to it) that after a year of the witch craze had only one surviving woman in it. Don’t you think her story would be an interesting one?

Anyone else want to play?

What a beautiful book Blankets by Craig Thompson turned out to be! I’ve read his first graphic novel, Good-Bye Chunky Rice and liked it so I was expecting I would like Blankets too but I didn’t expect so much complexity in the story. I should have known better.

The cover of Blankets calls it an illustrated novel but the main character’s name is Craig and he looks a little like the author so it was hard to think of this as a novel instead of autobiography.

The story: Craig lives in a small Wisconsin town with his parents and younger brother. Craig’s family is poor and he gets picked on a lot at school. His only escape is his love of drawing and church. Craig’s parents are devout Christians and Craig wraps himself up in Christianity in an attempt to keep the ugliness of the world away. But as Craig gets older he begins to have doubts. The people who pick on him at school also attend church and call themselves Christians, how can that be? Even the kids at church camp don’t behave very Christianly.

Then he meets Raina at camp. She is the first girl he has ever liked and who liked him back. They become friends. After camp they write each other letters (Raina lives in Michigan). Finally both sets of parents agree to allow Craig to visit Raina for two weeks. There is much more but I don’t want to give anything away.

Blankets is both title and theme. There are many blankets in the book both real and metaphorical and all of them serve different purposes. We think of a blanket as comfort but sometimes a blanket is a way to hide from or cover up the things we don’t want to face. Then there is the blanket of snow that pretty much covers the entire story and it too, serves a purpose.

Not only did I love the complex story but the art is fantastic too. The whole book is composed of black and white drawings that carry and support the story. They are marvelously expressive and interact with the text so well I often forgot I was reading both words and pictures.

Whether you are already a reader of graphic novels or are thinking about trying one, I highly recommend giving Blankets a go. I got my copy from Emily who chose it for me after she drew my name in a giveaway a year or so ago. And let me just say, if you ever have the opportunity for Emily to choose a book for you, let her. She’s very good at it!