Happy Autumnal Equinox!

I think it was returned to the library, but the other day I read the beginning of A Nation of Farmers and it seemed really interesting. What I loved though, was the introduction. I am going to refrain from typing it all here, but what I will quote the full first paragraph.... But first, what I like the best is the way that "The Big Lie" is something very specific in this text, but most of the discussion could be discussing any number of "Big Lies" in our society.

"From the first, let us dispense with the Big Lie. You know the one we refer to: the eternally repeated claim that we cannot make real and deep and radical change in our way of living, even if it is the right thing to do. The Big Lie narrows both our perspective and our perception of our alternatives, while making our failures seem natural and inevitable. The Big Lie claims that we are cowards, that we are weak, that we are no longer the inheritors of our revolutionary past and that we lack moral integrity. It is a slander, and yet we believe it. And until we stop believing it, we cannot lift our hands, our voices or our hoes and get on with the work of change."

It continues on, expounding a bit, but that first paragraph is just awesome. I also realize, as I bring this quote in, part of my old issues with putting quotes into papers--it is connected to other thoughts I've been having lately. But I have always had good reading comprehension and so I never understood why I had to explain the quote because it just said what needed to be said for itself--or so I thought. Since then, of course, I have realized the value of restating and investigating alternative words to get at the deeper points or to illustrate different meanings for different readers.

Returning to the passage, what I like about it is how it emphasizes that not only is our view of reality that is skewed by the Lie, but our view of what is possible. The Lie keeps us complacent about our world so we don't shake the standing power structure. We don't believe we can change--so we don't try too hard; we don't expect too much. We believe we are less than we are because it is easier. And since, as a species, we tend to dislike being made to change so our lives become harder....

Two Books, One Night

Absolutely, Positively Not... by David Larochelle

and

Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez

The Larochelle's book is very light-hearted. Steven is a sophomore in high school, struggling to get his driver's license, and determined to prove that he is absolutely, positively not gay. It doesn't quite work out the way he planned. Steven takes on some of the most intimate issues there are: identity, sexuality, family, and friendships, but he book never loses its wit.

Sanchez's book is more serious; the three boys are seniors in high school. I think I like this one more because of its complexity. This book deals with the ugly side of ignorance and homophobia as well as the tangled heartstrings of complicated relationships and family issues. I like how gayness/the reactions people have to it wasn't the only issue in the book. It made it much more realistic and heart-wrenching because being secretive about your identity is the straw on the camels back and something no one should have to do.

party of one

party of one: the loners' manifesto

by: anneli rufus

Something in this business makes sense.

Though it highlights how I feel as though I contain a little bit of everything within me.

I have felt a little lost because I haven't been able to confidently determine my exact level of need for others.

I am no longer shy. But I am often very private.

I know how to make friends. I get along with most people. I am very easy-going.

But I am rarely satisfied. I always need to be able to get away.

At the same time I also need connections. Sometimes I just need someone to talk to--to hold--to simply be with.

It feels sort of like being bisexual; neither gay nor straight while sharing qualities with both. I am neither a loner nor a nonloner but pieces of both.

It makes sense with my clothes, with my behavior, with my constantly changing being...

Does everyone feel this dynamic?

Travels

I almost don't remember all the moving and traveling and driving I've done the last several weeks. Memory is so odd. Sometimes I feel like it is a haphazard collection of moments, though I am lucky to have a good memory when I need it. If I'm just existing in life though--when I think about what I've done recently, I remember moments.

Walking slowly into Lake Michigan on a wavy, windy day, feeling the denim of my loose-fitting jeans swirling away from my legs, I remember the joy. Waist-deep and watching the waves coming in, I felt my breath taken away in sudden bursts as a wave reached me--hitting my chest and occasionally splashing my face.

Right as my friend and I reached the point of exhaustion--carrying boxes, bags, furniture a block and up an extra-tall flight of stairs to her new apartment in humid 80-something weather--the two parking spots directly in front of her door were simultaneously free and I experienced such a rush that my body forgot all about the previous hour. I ran to get the truck while she stood in the parking spots so no one could take them. I ran up and down the stairs with the next several loads of boxes etc. I puzzled at the energy and insane enthusiasm, but I didn't look the gift horse in the mouth.

I rarely dream, but the day after carrying basically all of my friend's worldly possessions up stairs and into her new apartment (including the brilliant decision I made to carry the wicker loveseat up by myself...) I was so exhausted (with good reason since I'd only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before we arrived at the new place and had been on the road camping out for several days before that) that I basically slept the majority of the day away. And I remember my friends face when I woke up and looked at her asking if I'd told her about my dream yet. And the change over her face when I told her that I knew it was a dream because she was really excited about the alcoholic bread I was baking just for her (she never drinks).

I remember laughing hysterically as I drove down the road, finally on my way home and high on the caffeine in my green tea.

I can still feel the movement of my skin as it is being pushed around by probably close to 70 or 80 mph winds as I stood at the front of a high-speed ferry going directly into the wind.

For the first time in several months, I was able to easily fly through a book--a memoir all about traveling :) Tales of a Female Nomad. It was amazingly awesome. Even though Rita was getting divorced and letting go of her college-aged children the year I was born, I felt connected to her experiences--the lessons she learned about the world and herself .

I was surprised for the first time in a long time by the end of a novel: Hesse's The Journey to the East. Even as I closed the back cover, I felt excited about rereading it. I will, soon.

My first morning home I spent almost an hour weeding in the garden in the rain--the water rolling over me, the plants in my hands, and the mud everywhere.

Brain Rules

I am enjoying this book. It is well-written and entertaining. Plus is informed me that I am destined to become a teacher, as most people who know me already knew...

After some conversations with a friend of mine we were able to determine that she is much better at the whole self-knowledge thing than I am. Using Gardner's terms, she excels in intrapersonal intellegence and I have always been more of an interpersonal intelligence sort of girl. In Brain Rules, John Medina looks at the Theory of the Mind (the ability humans develop in effort to understand what is going on inside of other humans: basically, our mind reading abilities) and suggests that what may be a strong determining factor for good teachers is an advanced Theory of the Mind and the circumstances (ie. small classes) that allow for them to put it to good use. In other words, as annoyed as I can be with myself and how poorly I seem to know myself, at least I am going to be a good teacher because I have found yet another strength to match my chosen career.

On a slightly related note--

I was gone for a long weekend on a road trip to Colorado. I visited my oldest friend and her husband, driving with a guy I've known for a couple years, but only became actual friends with recently. It was a little awkward for a good number of reasons, one being the husband is not shy about the fact he wants to get me in bed (with his wife there, of course) and another that everyone just assumed that this guy and I were an official item. It didn't quite seem worth it to explain that as soon as we got back from the trip we wouldn't even be talking all that much--we're going to stay in touch as random friends, but regular texting conversations are pretty much at an end because we are at completely different places (abstractly in life and geographically on a map).

But the main thing is that there were a ton of things I didn't tell him even though there were a surprising number of fairly personal stories we talked about. See, this was the first time that I had anything close to a summer fling. The first time I let anyone get at all close to me without knowing practically everything about them in a really long time (for all intents and purposes, the first). And I realized how far I sometimes go in order to accommodate other people. I haven't really felt like I was changing who I was, or creating some sort of facade, or anything like how you feel in high school because part of me was like whoever I was behaving like. But what I realized is that, while part of me is like that, if that is the part that tends to be let out while I'm with other people most of the time, that means I spend more time with just that part than the rest of my parts. And therefore the slightly flaky, non-opinionated part of my personality is slowly taking over. The part that just laughs and tries not to ignore all the guys staring at me. The part that has to dress so guys stare at me in order to feel pretty. The part that just goes with the flow, even if that means drinking a little and accepting plastic bags at the store. The part of me that just stands around watching people play poker instead of leaving them all behind to enjoy myself on the dance floor.

I realized when I got home that, yeah, that is a part of me, but it sure isn't much--and I'm letting it run the show? How ridiculous is this? So I'm trying to get to know myself a bit better--I want to ground myself in the values that I actually find important and not just getting along with people. My ability to get along with practically anyone (my oldest brother is a notable exception) is important to me, but I need to focus a little more on creating myself as who I wish to be more consciously so I don't feel I lose my center when I hang out with people on a more superficial level.

I'm going on another trip, this time to Buffalo, NY for about 2.5 weeks. I'm going with a roommate from college, someone who shares more of my values than the people I've been hanging out with lately and with whom I can talk about this stuff. I'm thinking it is going to be a good trip.

Plus, I should have time for lots of reading!!

The Infamous BBC Book List

A friend of mine posted this up on facebook. I had to paste it into here...

The BBC believes most people will have only read six of the 100 books in this list (mixture of popular books, kids books, and "literature"). How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'X' by those you have read. Tag other" Book Nerds".

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X (I have read everything by her, I'm obsessed)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible - Anonymous <---only parts

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X (like, three times--UGG)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell <-- tried to read it, but I was a little young at the time

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Only Dickens I've read is Tale of Two Cities)

Total: 7

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (I read LIttle Men....)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Mayor of Casterbridge count?)

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare < --- 14 plays and a handful of sonnets

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (the only book assigned in school I didn't quite finish).

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (not really a fan)

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (Silas Marner is much shorter...only Eliot I've read)

Total: 2

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (the first half)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total:4

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (only LWW)

34 Emma - Jane Austen X

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 4

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 3

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafo

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon X

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 5

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebol

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (I have a frightening obsession with this book)

Total: 2

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce X

76 The Inferno - Dante X

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (half way through I just couldn't take the satire anymore...)

Total: 3

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 3

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 2

Grand total : 35, if you count halves about 37

The Name of the Wind

Everyone has to read this book. I am beside myself impressed with it. It is possibly the first book ever that I wanted to read a second time immediately after closing the back cover. Normally if I really like a book, I look forward to reading it again at some undisclosed date in the future. However. This book. Well, the only reason why I am not reading it again right now is because it is a library book and I need to return it.

I have been putting off writing this entry, because I haven't had the time or coherence to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. However, a few highlights:

He uses the narrative within a narrative structure with amazing skill--it makes sense within the novel and he neither over- nor under-uses it.

The main character is amazing and brilliant and haunted...I am obsessed.

He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of storytelling (related to the narrative-in-narrative structure, but worth mentioning as it's own point) without letting the telling get in the way of the story.

His use of language--I swear he had the exactly perfect amount of description and dialogue and detail... You hear the character's voices very distinctly...

The tone was just, dreamy. (I'm trying not to say amazing, brilliant, or perfect...)

Lastly, partly due to the structure and partly due to the quality of his character and language... there were pithy, wise statements, but they did not feel stuck in by the author, but natural parts of the story.

Needless to say, I'm vaguely in love. So. Go to the library, or the book store.

The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss.

Go Now!