Immersed in good prose

While away from the blogging, I have been reading quite a bit. I have three completely different books to recommend. (I never did like getting stuck in a rut as far as genre...)

First, I picked up the book The Fall of a Sparrow by Robert Hellenga from a pile of books at the top of my bookshelf. I had received this book (an autographed hardback copy!) as a gift several years ago, and hadn't picked it up because I tend to like to read paperbacks so I can carry them anywhere.

I wish I would've picked it up sooner.

The novel is about a classics professor at a small midwest college whose eldest daughter is killed in a terrorist attack in Italy in 1980. The story is about how he, his wife, and his surviving daughters cope with the tragedy. The book immersed me in the very believable lives of the characters and in the rich settings of rural Illinois and modern Italy. I loved being amongst the academia where people quote classics in everyday speech, switch languages with ease, and are comfortable with their extensive vocabularies. It made me stop on occasion and wonder where I could surround myself with this sort of crowd. Highly recommended book for those in love with the language and in need of an escape.

A dear friend recommended How to Be Good when I asked him if I should read any Nick Hornby. And I am really glad I read it.

It's a fast and funny read, but not always a light read. Kate is a GP living in suburban England and married to a sarcastic, often bitter man. The novel is told from Kate's point of view and is a sad and funny picture of a marriage going sour. Just when Kate is ready to leave the marriage, her husband meets a healer who calls himself DJ Goodnews, and he undergoes a spiritual transformation. The rest of the book is a funny look at Kate's (and her family's) attempts at being "good". It is a thoughtful novel about moral and ethical decisions while poking fun at modern suburban life and what it means to be good.

I can't say the book made me want to run out and read more of Nick Hornby's books, but I was told that this one isn't representative of Hornby's prose, so I may try another. A bittersweet book, but not one the best.

Finally, I read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I hope it doesn't sound like a bad advertisement when I say that this has to be one of the best novels I've ever read.

I was a bit put off when I kept hearing the word "atmospheric" used in reviews of this book, but after reading it, I can see where the adjective is spot on.

The book begins rather innocently with the narrator, Kathy, describing her years growing up in an exclusive boarding school called Hailsham. As you read, you begin to notice subtle differences in the world Kathy describes. Ishiguro sets the story in England in the "late 1990's", but as the narrative continues, one begins to realize that this is not the world we live in.

I won't go into much of the plot, but I want to state that this is one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever had the pleasure to read. Highly highly recommended.

Happy Birthday, Will

I decided that April 23rd would be a good time to break my hiatus and start blogging again.

Today is William Shakespeare's 442nd birthday and I'm celebrating in my own quiet way (reading some of the plays). I wish I could celebrate in other ways, but alas...

I've been slowly making my way through Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. I don't usually like to read biographies in general and I really don't much like reading about Shakespeare as much I like reading his actual works. But this is a very readable book with a lot of great insights. I love how Greenblatt takes the simple facts about Shakespeare's everyday life and childhood and links them to the content of his writing. It's fascinating and well-written and I would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in Shakespeare or Elizabethan times.

Read Poetry!

I read poetry. Let me repeat myself: I read poetry.

I keep a shelf of poetry publications right behind my desk (see proof).

I mention this because I've been reading an awful lot of really bad poetry lately. All the poems were written by people who: (1) claim to write poetry "for themselves", (2) use poetry as therapy, (3) never read poetry regularly, and (4) want to be published.

If one wants to publish poems, one should read what is being published.

Having said all that, I am discovering that I am finding out what I like to read in poems. I am also discovering that I use that knowledge to steer the way I write. (I think I may explore this in another post. Stay tuned.)

And on a lighter note: How can serious literature compete??

What makes a poem a great poem?

I finally finished reading Break, Blow, Burn : Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems . I'm sure everyone who's ever reviewed this book disagrees with some or all of the poems Ms. Paglia chose as 43 of the best poems. I will also disagree with most of her choices, but it was interesting to read her evaluation of each poem. It was an education to discover what someone considers when judging a poem. (And, yes, I mean judge a poem. Paglia did this as soon as she placed the word "Best" in the book title.)

Paglia does, however, give a great course in Poetry Appreciation 101, though one taught by an over-enthusiastic grad student with way too much knowledge and a need to let you know how much knowledge she has.

She starts the book with a very apt introduction. By this I mean she trots out a lot of erudite ways you can approach critical reading of a poem, then proceeds to tell you that you should "...make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak." She drops words like "poststructuralism" and "neo-Romanticism" into the introduction and it hit me two ways: first it annoyed me that she was sounding as pretentious as the critics she was dismissing; second, it was flattering that she should assume her audience intelligent enough to ascertain the meaning from context or, at the very least, look it up. This was a perfect set-up to her way of approaching the poems.

I am not going to go into my opinions of her choices of poems because I think she justifies the choices well. I am, however, going to say that while I think she reads a whole lot into most of these poems, it's almost as though she's trying too hard.

But above all, her love of poetry and these poems is evident. Some of the poems I didn't like upon first reading (such as those by George Herbert) became transformed with her comments. I went back and read them with a new appreciation. Some others I have always loved (such as some of Shakespeare's sonnets) were enhanced by the commentary. Still others (such as William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow) were merely confused. A sixteen-word poem followed by three pages of evaluation is a bit much.

I don't normally like to read about poems as much as I love to read the poems themselves, but this was a worthwhile journey with an author whose love of poems is as strong and feels it is "...akin to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love."

A few morsels

January is definitely my busiest time of the year. After work, I just want to stay away from computers. So here are a few things I stumbled upon during my hiatus that I wanted to share:

• Hamlet by P.G. Wodehouse.
• And in the ever-lengthening list of books I want to read: Umberto Eco has a collection of essays - On Literature.
• Technology is amazing. Now you can download your own personal PDA. Okay... so it's a piece of paper. But it's a very cool piece of paper!

Have a good January. I hope to post before the month ends, but don't hold your breath.

It was only a matter of time...

My friend Jack turned me on to the Best Blonde Joke Ever...

Really funny in a Phillip Glass/ M.C. Escher sort of way.

Any thoughts?

If anyone has any input on the following book, please let me know. I am interested in reading it, but I want more feedback from general folk.

The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by Sheridan Prasso

Have a Happy New Year, anyhow...

For those of you who know how much I disliked The Da Vinci Code, you'll also know that this scares me.

Let's just hope the writing is at least good. Note to Dan Brown: it takes more than a little research and a lot of made-for-TV plot twists to make a good book. Please learn how to write.

the spaces in between

A few things that keep me amused in between my busy times (kinda like grout... it keeps the gaps filled and things from falling apart):

• My favorite American zen master, Drew, knows how my son would react to "intelligent design" teachings...
• And some cool rare erotica... you know: really old dirty pictures. Heh.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Still Not Dead (They’re Just Playing Hide and Seek)
• No wonder I love Umberto Eco. Quote: "The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code. "

more ponderable particles

• Yay! A good source of reading recommendations. The Guardian has its critics and guest authors tell us their best books of the year. Now, if I could just get together a lot of time to read... I'm amazed at how few of these books I've heard of, much less read.
• I just finished reading Audrey Niffenegger's first novel The Time Traveler's Wife. I really liked this book. I assumed it'd be either bad science fiction or a sappy romance novel. It was neither. It was an amazing charater study wrapped in a touching story with some really interesting speculative fiction tossed in. I highly recommend this book. (And if you want to buy it from Amazon, please purchase it through my links on this page... Heh.)
• In the "you have got to be kidding" department: Meeting Tom Cruise Helps Chinese Writer Fulfill her American Dream

Since I seem to have a theme going

Anne Ishii has posted her Finger in the Throat Report #7.

Come one, come all, down to my digestive system, as I consume this very lovely work of asianica, which I am using to coin a new genre of fiction: Phonetic Asianica, or Phonetica for short.

Phonetica is self-explanatory. It's when a writer chooses to represent his/her characters phonetically. When Yummee from Fan Tan says she likes being pushed around, it reads "I rike-ee beeng pushed alound." When the complimentary hooker in Lost in Translation visits Bill Murray's hotel room, and wants to convey a desire to have her pantyhose ripped off her legs, it reads: "Lip it! Lip my hose!"

Funny? Yes. Relatable? oh, I'm sorry, rerataber? iyessss. Always applopliate? Possibry not.

I was laughing so hard by the end of this article, I had people peering into my office wondering if I was okay.

Maybe white men shouldn't write about Asia.

(via Bookslut)

miscellany

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Told Entirely in Emoticons

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And, for my amusement: Me. As rendered by Googlism.

mona is a fine person
mona island/planeta
mona is mocking me
mona island
mona is an ideal retreat for student travelers and groups
mona is not "busty" exactly
mona is practically flat top
mona is situated in a pleasant area of douglas just 40 yards from the promenade
mona is a truly unlikable and selfish character
mona is a murder mystery parody that doesn't have the gumption to go for the jugular
mona is the ultimate in luxury accommodation
mona is often compared to galápagos
mona is made into a useful object
mona is
mona is shown
mona is a logic
mona is located in downtown los angeles
mona is not confined to any particular project type
mona is seventeen and has nine brothers and sisters
mona is ambitious because she is smart enough to start a small delivery business to finance her pageant dues
mona is now played by minnie driver
mona is a well
mona is the most important technology in the book
mona is 5 percent
mona is a dancer and prostitute
mona is a pointless and horrific dark comedy
mona is rarely by herself
mona is dead in the water
mona is so relentlessly obnoxious she makes roseanne look like mary poppins
mona is approximately 742
mona is going to be one year old
mona is on the air
mona is going headfirst over a cliff
mona is fashion company
mona is largely due to ms
mona is no exception
mona is a solid
mona is never outrageous enough to make you fall into the sort of silly mood a film like this needs to
mona is only about 8
mona is at deirdre?s funeral
mona is the
mona is a substantial woman with an effervescent personality that pops out in loud bursts of joviality
mona is this
mona is drawn to the "glamorous" world of "little miss" beauty pageants
mona is posing near a former slaveholding fortress in west africa for a photo shoot
mona is my sister
mona is retiring and all the nannies are celebrating with her
mona is the only museum anywhere devoted exclusively to northwest art
mona is a pubescent kali on roller blades
mona is a deeply bad comedy
mona is temporarily replacing our secretary
mona is as pretty as a picture
mona is made up of 3 bunnies
mona is tickling herself" by lisa
mona is forced to run several odd jobs to pay off the fees for the pageant entries
mona is an active file system that cooperates with user processes to accomplish tasks
mona is singing and composing better than ever
mona is recognized as an ice environment and information technology specialist
mona is a woman of power
mona is a lot like watching an episode of wheel of fortune
mona is a team player
mona is a trojan horse which deletes files on drive a
mona is now shipping with drivers for windows 95/98/2000/xp/mac/wdm/asio/gsif
mona is somewhat troubled
mona is a divisive hierarchical clustering method
mona is a dark comedy parody of a whodunit
mona is the best tv sitcom i've ever paid seven bucks to see
mona is an adult shepherd mix
mona is merely a registered narcissist
mona is a faculty member at marywood university in scranton
mona is home to giant lizards that can be seen sunning themselves along the 200
mona is foremost the brainchild of bourgeau
mona is basically a very powerful add on similar to a very high end sound card that adds a whole load of flexibility to your studio
mona is the norse goddess of the moon after which monday was named
mona is that the midler character really doesn't act all that differently or all that more outrageously than anyone
mona is a novel approach to file system extensibility that provides heretofore unseen flexibility
mona is presented in a 1
mona is a detector array specialized to detect neutrons
mona is asking for help
mona is certainly self confident and is very much the terrier in personality
mona is a funny and entertaining

Some Shakespearean particles

Some tidbits on Shakespeare:

• Seems they want to dig up Will's body to see if he may have been murdered by his son-in-law.
• And there is yet another candidate in the "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays" debate. Frankly, I am in the "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" camp, but the debate is sometimes amusing, and there's one pretty good novel that came of it.
• And if anyone wants to get me a nice Christmas present...

Just when I think maybe we've grown up a bit...

Geez.

Now Dean Koontz is getting called to the carpet for racism. Seems he's been telling a story about letters he wrote to a Japanese businessman that included a lot of racist-sounding remarks. What really annoys me is his assertion that, "there's some political incorrectness in it, but nothing mean". Sheesh. And apparently, he's been telling this story for years!

You'd think a best-selling author would know that there are so many less controversial ways of being funny. Or maybe not.

more thought particles

A few rants, chuckles and a farewell:

• I have a few grammatical pet peeves that cause me to grind my teeth. The laziness of people to not figure out the difference between "lay" and "lie," for instance. Whenever I hear my co-worker tell her dog to "Lay down!" I have to bite my tongue. (It reminds me of the comic strip where the man tells his dog, "lay down" and the dog rolls onto its back. The man tells the dog, "speak" and the dog looks up at him and says, "that's lie down.") So when I listen to the radio, I expect a certain amount of proper word usage. I listened to Ed Gordon (an experienced interviewer and journalist) on NPR interviewing a woman about adoption, and imagine my gnashing of teeth when I hear him mis-use the word "reticent" in the phrase, "...people aren't as reticent to take in kids..." Reticent means "inclined to keep silent or uncommunicative. What he really means is reluctant, which means "struggling against; resisting." Ack.
• A chuckle from my favorite comic site: Shakespeare...
• The worst phrasebook ever written.
• And a farewell to John Fowles, dead at age 79. His book, The Magus, is still one of my all-time favorites, and I still get chills if I think about it too much.

Trying to look smart?

It turns out that one in three consumers polled in London admit that they bought books "to look intelligent." And that few actually read the books they buy.

When did reading become a matter of social appearance rather than a wonderfully enjoyable escape?

And what does it say about me that I was seen by dozens of people yesterday when I was reading Poetry Magazine?

Jessa Crispin uses this information to give guys advice on what to be seen reading. Funny stuff.

a little bit of a rant

I did hope not to use this blog as a forum for ranting, but sometimes you just have to let it out.


As an Asian-American, I'm subjected to a lot of stereotypes. Now, while the actual number of comments has diminished through the years, the fact that I still hear them remains a source of a lot of incredulity. Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks this. James Yeh has this hilarious little commentary on stupid things people say to Asian-looking folks. And while you're at it, check out his blog. Good stuff.

I have had three proposals from complete strangers. Hello!? We aren't all mail-order brides looking for a way to stay in the country. Some of us were born here and actually speak without accents. Imagine that.

Advice: We (Asian-Americans) know that we look "exotic" and sometimes your curiousity is ovewhelming. Go ahead and ask what our background is, but please don't ask, "What are you?" My standard reply is "Human," or "Female."

Literature for the mind

A friend (whose opinion means a lot to me) recently recommended I read The Brothers Karamazov. I was never that interested in Russian literature and maybe slogging my way through War and Peace didn't help.

I stumbled across this marvelous article about Apostolos Gerasoulis, the mathematician behind the search engine "Ask Jeeves." It tells a great deal about the creation of and ideas behind the search engine, but the one part that stood out for me was the following quote:

"At first, he was a pretty bad student, until he discovered the principle of abstraction in the stories by Dostoyevsky."

A nice thing to hear about for those of us with a mathematical and literary bent.

New gadget!

I'm not usually much for gadgets, but I recently received an iPod nano for my birthday. (Yes, it wasn't long ago.)

Heh. No wonder the Apple users are such fanatics. This gadget is easy to use and great for my walks and workouts. Plus, I get the added benefit of seeing people eye it with envy. (I want an Apple computer, too, but that will be years away...)

I've already loaded 117 songs on the thing, and am deciding what part of my large CD collection I want to add. Heh. It seems I can never have too much Steely Dan.

Fun.

We pause for this baseball note...

It's not easy being a National League fan. Neal Pollack thinks so, too.

"I'm an old-fashioned National League purist. I stand firmly against the designated hitter and believe that NL games are more sophisticated and interesting. Even during the prime juice years of McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds, there was still a pitcher hitting ninth; baseball isn't baseball without the double switch."