Thor's backlog

Having been recently reprimanded by my fellow blogger, I hereby list what is left to be read. This excludes the sorry pile of (5) books I'm currently struggling with for various reasons. The most glorious of the five is Dubliners, which I actually quite enjoyed, but have not touched for three years and counting. The most notorious is Firmin, which has a great premise in line with Ratatouille, but requires advanced knowledge of English literature, making it less appropriate for someone who stuck to Tolkien in high school.

The pile pictured, however, is equally promising and depressing. I do not intend to open The Interpretation of Murder again, having found the first two pages needlessly graphic. Mind you, I managed to sit through the whole of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, so am not squeamish to the obsessive extent, I merely found the opening of this book sensationalist of the Daily Mail extent.

Both The Covenant and The Grass is Singing were bought with intent of mood-setting for a holiday in South Africa. Both come with good credentials and some promise - I even started the Grass, but cannot remember much of it to warrant addition to the sorry pile.

The Alchemist came upon recommendation of a former flame, with calls of soul mates emanating from it, but warnings from a closer friend, who in my mind found it too wishy-washy and perfumed in good intentions. It still sounds like a cheap version of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which still leaves me with the intention to read it. On a beach, slowly working with the sun to increase entropy.

The remainder of the pile, save from Tess, were acquired in a long-lost time of hausse, in 3-for-2 offers and lack of self-control. Engleby is the only one that appeals, although I do not recall any poor reviews of any of the others. Still, the world may be a better place if I offer them to Oxfam rather than waste the few hours I do spend reading on something unwanted.

The David Mitchell is the most promising, not merely because of its stunning cover (which happens to match my flat's interior colour scheme), but with the promise of Dutch seafaring adventure. The sole reason for its grouping with this pile, is to save it from ending up on the sorry pile. I want to give it the full attention it (potentially) deserves. Starting in 2011!

It was on Christmas Eve

After I arrived into Reading, I walked straight to Waterstones to pick up a copy of Keith Richards' Life for my dad.
Worryingly, they had run out, so I took the ace from under my sleeve and asked them to look for my order, as I had asked for this book to be delivered into the store, but had never been given a delivery notice.
Waiting for the elves to find me my book, I was approached by Stephen Benatar, who was there to promote one of his books - he was particularly keen for me to read his book there and then, but I was simply a missile, not about to be distracted or re-directed by other potential Christmas gifts.
I did apologise, even saying "Sir", as he seemed particularly distraught by the lack of Christmas spirit.
The store however rewarded me with my own ordered copy of Life, as well as a book on Orchids I'd ordered that I didn't expect to see this year still.
Now that I'm at my desk, I looked up the sociable writer, and realise it wasn't a (platonic) meet-cute, but simply his (rather admirable and successful) way of self-promotion.
I really ought to get myself a hat, so that I could take it off for him.

Happy 235th Birthday, Jane! :)

" 'Symmetries"

It was, of course, a good choice. 

I'm reading every evening before falling asleep until I recognise I'm no longer taking in the words from the page & draw to a close. 

I'm reading every morning after my alarm goes off; just another page or two before I get up & face the world. 

I don't do that often: it's usually a snatched moment or away from the demands of the day in some enclosed vacuum of time, on a bus or a train journey when it's possible to do very little else. 

But Winterson invites the luxury of the moment, the prioritising of that particular time spent on that activity as opposed to any other. She draws in her reader, establishes an intimate confidence and in doing so, maintains their interest in plot development. 

 It took me a good chapter or so to find my stride & settle into the story. I recognised some of the conscious rhetoric also deployed in The Passion & wasn't sure if I would take to it. 

    The Passion is deemed so unique and elevated amongst her works that I didn't want to risk a repeat encounter; I wanted something new. It's Winterson's lyricism & metaphor which I love. The post-modernism and meta-narrative is fun & can be cleverly deployed but in terms of defining character, it now belongs in my head to Villanelle who assumes it like a second skin. 

  In the chapter of The Fool, I was struggling to establish which voice out of the two women, Stella & Alice, was speaking. But once into The Tower & the finding of the affair and from then onwards into the three chapters of childhood, the novel just flowed. Beautiful words and fully eloquent passages. 

   I've been passing them across the ocean, borrowing from their nuances & metaphor to lend weight to other words. To try & articulate emotional experiences, which would otherwise be struggling into sense or remain mute, entirely wordless.

 ___

Walk with me ... Walk the seen and the unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.

The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of matter. The difficulty is that every firm step I win out of chaos is a firm step towards . . . more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself across the gap, and huddled on a little outcrop, safe for now, observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of water. (102)

___

.. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since. 

Anyone to whom this happens clings faithfully to the clock; the hour will pass, we will certainly move on. Then we find the clock is neither raft nor lifebelt. The horological illusion of progress sinks. The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotion, time's inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by. .. The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occassionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are. If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water. (104-5)

____

Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the splintered planks, chaos on both sides, walk the discovered and what cannot be discovered. Walk the uneasy peace we share. Walk with me, through the night, the night air, the breathing particles of other lives. Breathe in, breathe out, steady now, not too fast on gassed lungs. I did not mean my words to poison you. Walk with me, walk it off, the excess fat of misery and fear. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free. (117-8)

____

I want to feel but with feeling comes pain. I could advise myself to keep out complications and I won't pretend that I have no choice in any of this. I have noticed that the choices seem to be made in advance of what is chosen. The time gap in between the determining will and the determined event is a handy excuse to deny causality. In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response.., sometimes of seconds, sometimes of years, but we programme events far more than we like to think. (120)

____

'Do you fall in love often?'

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

'I'm not in love with you.'

What would it be to love? Would it be the field under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? .. Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure of sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or the song I sing? If I am a wound would love be my salve? If I am speechless would love be a mouth? I do not want to declare love on you as of midnight yesterday. I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. (126-7)

Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. Granta Books: London, 1997

Meanwhile,

the bedside table stack grows ever taller... The Eyre Affair was presented to me last weekend by a friend with the command of "you must read this"; 'Jane Austen Adventures' was a birthday present :) But with it being creative has the requirement of pen & paper to mark a score so I shall need my wits about be for that one if I am to marry Fitzwilliam by the end. The Woolf was an entirely new & exciting find from last weekend. Stylist ran this wee advert for it (left) as published by Virago (Vintage Classics) & thus I went straight forth to Amazon & ordered it. I'd never known of its existence until now. Thankfully it is referred to as a forgotten classic so I might just be forgiven. .... Ah, I do love Virago's cover art. The Wiersbe study is an ongoing journey, shared with a friend. A blooming well-written study too. We thought we'd get through 14 questions a week & be done by Christmas. Hm. Not so fast. My Patten collection would normally inhabit a place on my bookshelf but at the moment, is living in an arm's reach from my bed. I'm needing his words and all of their gritty poetic realistic punch right now. That's to say nothing of the Other pile, the not-quite-ready-for but not-wholly-forgotten: Agnes Grey came to me from London for my birthday, as did Fanny Hill (apparently it's where all the best M&Bs originated from). Quite glad to have a new Bronte passed my way. I was thinking only recently as a friend sang its praises that I should go back & revisit Tenant. The next three are also gifts-in-waiting (soon, Zusak, soon!) Brideshead (DVD) was swapped with a friend: I lent her my novel; she provided me with Jeremy Irons. I read the novel in '08 as the new film adaptation hit the screens but - as ever - I can't see the film until I read the book and it's only right that once I've read the book that I should first pay homage to the tv series before becoming seduced by the film... :) Also on loan is the second of Niffenegger's novels. I admit to being slightly scared of starting that one. I've read the blurb on occassion, read the reviews, am fully armed with the knowledge that it is not & so will not be another TTTW and yet.... Please don't diminish the dream! TTTW first held me captive way back in '05 whilst I re-emerging from the dusty tomes of degree. Reading! For pleasure?! Send me to a desert island by all means, just be sure to pack that, Jane Eyre, Oranges, The Hours, The Visitation, my Bible & at least a few volumes of Duffy & Patten. (See my problem? Pedestals. Elevated. Dangerous - especially when following on from a debut novel.)

Reading from 'Symmetries...

... But for now, the missing link will have to wait. I needed a Winterson fix badly last night. Gut Symmetries (1997) filled the want perfectly. I only got a chapter in; already I was reaching for paper & pen as she so aptly & succinctly hit the nail right bang on the head again. Myth. Oh my goodness, yes.

an end in itself | Atonement

So I cheated. 

I started reading Atonement & got almost to the end but it became late & one of those situations in which you know you'll still be reading to see who makes it by 5am. I skipped through a good chunk of Briony's nursing career, only to slow down once her encounter with Cecilia began & from then, finished it. 

So now I need to go back & re-cap. 

Brilliant though. 

 A friend said recently she found McEwan too wordy, too descriptive. I think for me, that's part of the power of his writing & the allure: how he can create suspense & keep the reader guessing, waiting to see & wanting to know how the resolution will be reached. And even with Atonement, he undercuts the more comfortable ending as it all gets a bit meta & rather tragic.

Procurement || & Dorian Gray

A friend of a friend who is Phdding in Publishing put out a questionnaire the other day. Amongst the range of questions asked was,

Where do you tend to purchase fiction titles?

• I don't
• Local independent bookshops
• Publisher's website
• Amazon
• Large national bookstore outlets
• Supermarkets
• Airports
• Elsewhere online

which worked fine as a compiled list but I fell into that black hole of "Other _______ " as my mainstay in book supplies comes out of the hordes of Edinburgh's charity shops. We're lucky to have them exist in packs up here with the useful addition of a few dedicated charity bookshops - Oxfam, in particular, excels in this field.
So the other day as I took a turn out of the office, I went past Shelter (temptingly two down from Work) & made my way down the hill in search of Oxfam and Atonement. Because it's not just the orphaned dross which ends up on the shelves, the familiar covers of the 'once read, now abandoned' authors. (Heh.) You can actually count on certain recent books to be there. Lo & behold, not one but two copies to choose from. Sorted.

I wanted Atonement specifically as Filmhouse are screening the film again this month (the wider 'burgh public get to benefit from 'The Film of the Book' course) & as I never caught it the last time round, I'm giving myself the next sixteen to complete it & fulfil the Golden Rule. Book first; film second. Why I want to see it: Romola Garai has an early turn as Briony & I love her acting; James McAvoy also features as the hero, likewise and Keira Knightley, well, she's not all bad. Plus, an epic element with landscape of war serving as a backdrop & repercussions of a single decisive life-changing event echoing down the ages. As I write, I still don't know what Briony actually sees between Cecilia & Robbie nor how she reports it so fatefully - that's all still to come; no spoilers, please!

From just looking at the shelves, I'd already spent £18. Line of sight included:

• Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
• Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns; Kite Runner
• Love in a Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez (I was informed over the summer that I absolutely should read this, causing it to move higher up the ranks; as well as Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. All in good time...)

I managed to make mental notes & step away until the next pay day. But as Atonement left the shop with me so did a newly discovered McGregor title, So Many Ways to Begin :)
 I also picked up one called, The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips. I had to just nip back to my bookshelf as the title itself (although I was remembering along the lines of Whitman) is not memorable. I knew if I did not pick it up then, I'd probably never seek it out again.
The latter interested me and my choice of the latter had me intrigued. Often a book's title has been recommended, memorised, stored up to find sometime later so if I chance across it, I might purchase. This one however had only a cover & a blurb to go by. So what helped it out of the door in my hands? A few things. In the blurb, there's both a cliché and an unconventional aspect,

- a shock of dark red hair sings with a voice that demands his attention.
- Though they do not meet, a strange and unlikely love affair is ignited.

Music also plays a strong part & I like that. It's a vital contributor to the richness of life. It weaves itself in in the smallest of ways and so significantly enhances the whole experience. A book which can tell of its story, High Fidelity as case in point here, has my vote.

A uniquely heart-breaking dark comedy about obsession and loss ?

Well, we shall see... Book Thief back on hold for Christmastime & travels then. (I'm almost tempted to also chuck War & Peace in there as well as I'll be abroad from home for some time then.) As it happened, The Picture of Dorian Gray ended up jumping the queue into my suitcase that day. I also had Distant Star with me as planned but that one requires a whole blog-post unto itself. Mixed opinions lie there.

DG offered a shorter read & a quicker route in as befitted evening trainhours escapism. I did uncover a whole stockpile of Wilde's epigrams within its pages & it felt sometimes as though they were coming in so thick & fast, the characters lacked depth, serving instead as merely witty mouthpieces on occasion.
Yet it was still a good read. Lord Heny Wooton was in particular, very powerfully and darkly drawn and so beyond the realm of conscience, " .. I feel not / This deity in my bosom."

There were other areas too which I appreciated:
- the dual nature of Dorian as he descended to the depths of gutter life whilst still maintaining the public appearance;
- numerous comical exchanges, and impending tragedy;
- interest in Wilde's handling of male friendship-cum-attraction and the social abuse of opium;
- Wilde's infinitely good reflections upon relationships between the sexes and shrewd epigrammatic remarks which did prompt a wry smile.

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history.

... I can now also watch the film with a clear conscience & a proper understanding too. ;)

The Song Of Lunch

I got around to The Song Of Lunch this evening, some sixteen days after the nation watched it, thanks to wondrous i-player. Ah, it was a sumptuous treat with the fabulous pairing of Rickman & Thompson, slipping easily into the required roles: old flames, out for lunch.

Greg Wise (Producer) commented that,

..we, as the audience, should forget that this is a poem, until a rhyming couplet suddenly jumps out at us - above all, we should be taken on a wonderful journey, surrounded by words: words seamlessly moving from voice-over narration into dialogue, back into narration.

We should wallow in a sea of words: hear them, taste them, smell them.

And so we do. There was some beautiful phrasing & imagery in Reid's poem which prompted me to smile. Makes me partly want to go off & explore the text and yet the dramatisation of the poem, Rickman's voiceover brought the poem to life so beautifully, restoring written word to spoken song. Maybe if we shout loud enough, there'll be a DVD to follow suit, although there are fragments on youtube for now.

A Very M&Bs Moment.

Edinburgh Lyceum Store

Train journey time!

Time to pick up The Book Thief, methinks...

Bring it! Also accompanying me on the journey:
Distant Star (Roberto Bolaño);
Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates);
plus a re-reading of Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd in potential readiness for a viewing of Tamara Drewe.
We'll see. 

Still undecided in how I'll feel about "a new genre: the contemporary pastoral comedy." 

*Edit: I omitted reference to the middle-lady before as TD: Film being linked first & foremost to stemming forth first from TD: Comic Strip. Posy Simmonds of the Guardian being the original re-worker of Hardy's novel.

"Do your research!"

These two make me want to quit my late-night, lately developed habit of fighting insomnia by junking out on Mills & Boons. 
(July alone managed to cover To Catch A Thief; The Rancher Next Door; More Than A Memory; Marriage: To Claim His Twins; A Father For Her Son; Bedside Manner; The Italian's One-Night Love Child... )

The reworking of Conan Doyle's infamous literary hero into the BBC's Sherlock allows for some excellent escapism. And thanks to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss being such fans of Conan Doyle's work, the reworking is carried out cleverly and humorously whilst staying loyal to the text. So there's no need to be shouting 'Treachery!' at the tv screen.

AWESOME

(Plus a few stills from Den of Geek ;
... & a ridiculously cute bit of lj fandom art. :D )

If I wanted to, I could probably find some minor aspect to grumble over but I won't because Cumberbatch and Freeman breathe exactly the right kind of life into the characters of Holmes and Watson.

Den of Geek: 

Were you fans of the book before you landed the roles in Sherlock? Did you go back to the books to prepare, or did you avoid that?

Benedict Cumberbatch:  No, very much I've been reading the books. It's the origination, it's the primary source. You should always go back to the books. I don't think what we're doing requires that, in particular, because it's a modern interpretation. But, you have to bring what is unique about his character to a modern context, and to do that you have to understand his original self.

So no sudden shock departure from Holmes as we have known him and for once, a reworking that does the book complete justice.
I'm happy. It's definitely time for an overdue revisit for my ongoing romance with Arthur Conan Doyle and his canon.

CB. | Word.

 

daydreaming...

Thanks to Carl's latest creation, Fitzwilliam Darcy & all those about him are pretty topical right now. 

Which is why when Alison referred me to this, I thought it only fair to share :)

Why I love "Rapture":

Carol Ann Duffy — mother, daughter, sister, friend, lover and now poet laureate to more than 60m of us — is good with words. You could say they hang around her unadorned throat like pearls. She wouldn’t, because she’s as unpretentious as her verse. But those simple lines of hers contain whole universes, and we are talking about love.

~ Extract from this Times article

Silver's Story | Lighthousekeeping

I had a train journey to Royston & back last weekend. Lighthousekeeping accompanied me, as did Their Eyes Were Watching God and both of which I managed to finish.

Lighthousekeeping was as good as it first promised to be.
It made me laugh:

After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
_________________

'Was there no human being you could have talked to instead?'
'I wasn't talking to the bird. The bird was talking to me.'

There was a long pause. There are some things that shouldn't be said in company. See above.

and it prompted me to delight in her use of language and power of expression:

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Plus more on that favourite of themes, with echoes reaching back to Oranges:

... it matched a moment in me that was waiting for someone to call my name. Names are still magic: even Sharon, Karen, Darren and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In the fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

There were other elements of classic Winterson in Lighthousekeeping, which I enjoyed:

the quirky heroine overcoming the odds pitched against her and journeying through life; affirmative first-person narrative; her episodic style, interspersed by myth & tales: Babel Dark's history
as recounted by Pew,Tristan & Isolde making an appearance;
Silver's refrain; story-telling; love-making; a nod to the multiplicity of female identity:

There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or as one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good.
Is that the complete list?
Then there's the woman you love.

Babel Dark's character was somewhat beguiling in its duality. The journals serving as a brilliant example of this, strengthened later by Stevenson's inclusion in the novel along with his text of Jekyll & Hyde.

He kept two journals; the first, a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman's life in Scotland. The second, a wild and torn folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his nib had bitten the paper.

Babel as the minister with its social standing in Salts, a role that grants authority but also serves to hem him in, curtailing his freedom. Acting as a man of faith whilst being confronted by Darwinism. Challenged by his duty to God to the extent that he betrays himself & his real love: I stood firm, I stood firm, I stood firm.
The complexity of his feelings towards Molly. You could just about forgive his infidelity, his bi-annual escape to Bristol as Mr. Lux, were it not for the dark human aspect of his character: his jealousy breaking out in violence, the harsh treatment of his wife where his frustration manifests itself through abuse.

I enjoyed the introduction to Silver and the surreal state of her childhood but I was increasingly charmed by her upon her relocation to Bristol & the lengths to which she went in overcoming library bureaucracy so as to complete Death in Venice.

I liked "The Hut " episode within the novel but this also created a questionable flaw for me, within the novel. There was something in the handling of Silver's romance with the girl from the convent which seemed to disrupt the flow of her story. 

Almost like the novel tripped itself up in its eagerness to pull in a love interest to aid Silver's journey to self-fulfillment & understanding. Something too conventional in how the inclusion of a romance was equated towards the completion of Silver's journey. 

I'm still trying to work through whether Winterson really intended it as thus: the love interest serving as an end in itself, rather than the means to her eventual end. 

I had been rooting for Silver to find that sense of understanding & her path through life and to find it from within herself, not simply due to finding love with someone else.

Winterson uses the metaphor of the open door:

I fell asleep, and dreamed of a door opening.
Doors opening into rooms that opened into doors that opened into rooms. We burst through, panelled, baize, flushed, glazed, steel, reinforced, safe doors, secret doors, double doors, trap doors. The forbidden door that can only be opened with a small silver key.
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines upon it.. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.

- which could just be a metaphor for an awakening through finding a connection through love, sex and conversation - but then again,

Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This me. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Does the girl from the convent resolve one aspect of Silver's search or is she, like Pew, DogJim & Babel Dark, an equal contributor towards Silver's journey's end?
 Because the novel does reach completion with her homecoming - regaining the haven of her lighthouse:

I took out my little silver key and opened the door into our kitchen [..] Finally, not knowing what I did, I had come back ... I got up, opened the drawer.. took out the key and wound the spring. Tick, tick, tick. Better - much better. Time had begun again.
... I had often seen this light. Inland, land-locked, sailing my years, uncertain of my position, the light had been what Pew had promised - marker, guide, comfort and warning.
Then I saw him. Pew in the blue boat.

~ Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Perennial: London, 2004.

____________

Plot: ****
Fun: ****
Novelty: ****
Overall: ****