“Your task, should you choose to accept it…”

OK, so taking a leaf out of LizSara’s book, I have made a list of books I *have* to read this year.

I *have* to read them because they are, and have been for a while in the most part, gathering dust on our shelves and taking up precious room on our bookcase.

That’s not to say I will immediately get rid of them once read, but some of them are ex-library books, and not really ones to keep.

The table below is a little bit convoluted, mainly because I like making things complicated, but also because I currently have books on the go that I would like to finish before getting this project ‘properly’ underway.

It is also a fairly small list, compared to LizSara’s anyway, and this is because I shall undoubtedly come across books along the way that I will also *have* to read there and then.

If you could see my library account history, you’d understand what I mean…It’s an obsession.

I’ve put the year published, because I might read them in that order, or maybe in alphabetical by author.  But at the moment, I need to finish the first four.  Then I’ll see how I feel.  I mean it’s no good reading Wilkie Collins if I fancy a bit of hard-hitting modern crime, is it?

One book that I’ve had for a few years and really want to read, but am too scared to start, lest I never finish it, is ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ by Alexandre Dumas.  It’s enormous. So I’ve left it off the list for now…

But, if I get through the list with time to spare, that shall be my indulgence.  Or punishment…depending on whether I like it…

Incidentally, Bren knows a guy called Robin Dumas through the horsy world.  Yes.  He is related.

Oh, and there are a couple of self-help ones in there.  The ‘I Can Make You Thin’ one is an ongoing thing.  Obviously.  So I’ll just try to keep plodding on with that.  The ‘Depressive Illness’ one is a really interesting book.  I’ve kind of started that one too, but it’s another ‘dip-in’ and ‘make-notes’ kind of book, so I’ll keep it nearby at all times…

You never know, I might be supermodel-thin and annoyingly cheerful by the end of the year!

A Small Rant

I’m reading another book I don’t like. It’s something I do; it annoys the Man, he can’t understand why, when we’ve got so much high quality literature at our fingertips, I would deliberately choose to plough my way through something that makes me visibly angry. But a part of me likes the sensation; I’m an arguer, and a reader, and if I can combine the two, I see it as an effective use of time.

So this time it’s Saturday by Ian McEwan. The critically acclaimed account of a wanky neurosurgeon in the throes of some sort of middle-class crisis. The objection I have is simple enough: that the book makes me feel stifled, that Perowne, the protagonist, and his lawyer wife, his successful poet daughter, his groovy blues-playing rebel son, are suffocating in their perfection, their carefully measured angst. They slouch through their expensive London house like a parody of the perfectly imperfect family, just off-beat enough. It makes a fallacy of the ordinary struggles of everyday life. These people, they don’t struggle. They glide. Everything has propelled them toward this life, towards the ownership of modestly luxurious things, towards the London life, the clean, comfortable London life. Not a manor house, or a vintage car, or even an esoteric loft apartment, but the old house that overlooks a tree-lined square. It’s all so ordinary, so alarmingly propagandistic–this is what happy people look like, this is what ordinary, talented, beautiful people do. They flirt with unhappiness, but it’s never a personal unhappiness. They gaze out windows and consider the state of the world with the same glib resignation that most of us reserve for a consideration of our outdated hairstyles or strained bank balances. It’s as if all the life has been sucked from them, replaced by a distinctly urbane imitation of the stuff.

So why read it? Because after all that, I’m impressed with the language. The precision of it. A quasi-imitation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway suits McEwan’s ability to describe a thing–a feeling, usually–specifically. Each moment of Perowne’s morning is outlined, amplified, enhanced by the way it is written. A dull man’s dull activities, explained beautifully. That’s worth something.

(Plus, I like a good rant, and reading something that agitates me allows me to do it on my blog. Win!)

The Books On Our Shelves…

The books on our shelves arrange themselves. A visitor to our house might wonder what perverted system of order we’re using, what method of organization. It’s not like a library; there are no numbers on the spines, no categories. Nothing is arranged alphabetically, by genre or by import. We’ve lived together for two years now, but from the moment I moved in our books have co-mingled, kept each other company. There was never any question of separating our collections. It would be futile at best, disastrous at worst; we both saw this (contrast with the experiences of other book lovers, for whom a marriage of libraries is a Major Event–I start to think the Man and I are stranger than anyone thought possible). A separation of books would be like a separation of selves; it would be akin to sleeping in separate beds. A false intimacy.

Two years later the books have shifted, as books tend to. Very few are still where they started out on the shelves; and some don’t make it on to the shelves at all, but lie in piles by the side of the bed or on the desk. We have many books. This haphazard system ought to perplex us; but the funny thing is this: mid-sentence, sometimes, one of us will need a very specific book, maybe one we haven’t looked at properly in years, and we always know where it is. We know exactly what books we have and don’t have and could, if pressed, probably tell the story of every single volume in this house (that one bought second-hand in Boston, that one stolen from an ex-girlfriend, that one borrowed and never returned to a friend, that one purchased from an anonymous Waterstones somewhere). It’s as if we both have this massive, mental catalog, shared, full of shifting information.

But this is why I think there is an order, after all; this is why I think the books arrange themselves. Because the way they are means that whatever you are looking for, whatever you need most to read at any moment, will suddenly pop out at you. In any room of the house you will find yourself looking at a wall of books, or at least a pile, and if you’re desperate enough, one of them will start to shimmer, or to call to you, will demand all of your attention, and when you pick it up you will realize that yes, of course, this is what you were looking for–even if you hadn’t known you were looking for anything at all. Maybe it’s because of this, which I found in the book I hadn’t realized I desperately needed until I slid it from the shelf last night: “the meaning of things lies not in things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.”*

*Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as quoted at the start of A.C. Grayling’s The Meaning of Things

I’m a Cool Girl Now

Not often, but sometimes, it occurs to me that I am very, incredibly, out of touch with the rest of the world.  It has always been thus, but living in Oxford makes it easy to forget that once I was a geeky Converse-clad girl with a bad hairdo. (I am now a geeky Converse-clad girl with a better hairdo. And sometimes I wear boots.)  My life has become something completely ridiculous, in a rather wonderful way.  Take this, for instance: one of the highlights of my existence is the rush I get when I swipe my card at the Bodleian and open my bag so that they can check to make sure that I’m not trying to smuggle a bottle of water in and walk up the stairs and smell the books.  And there are all these other people there! Doing the same thing! Loving the books! And outside (this is the best bit) there are a bunch of tourists who can’t come inside.  It’s a perverse (and very British) revenge of the nerds; and I’M PART OF THE CLUB!  I actually have a special walking to-and-from the library swagger.  Just so that everyone will know that I belong. (Sometimes, but not often, I even manage to swagger without tripping over my own feet.)

Coraline (2009) – ickleReview (in-flight movie)

Clever animated adaptation of a novel by Neil Gaiman, aimed at kids but also appropriate for adults. I don’t agree with some critics who claim it’s “too scary for kids”. I agree with Mark Kermode that’s it’s good to be scared.

Coraline (not Caroline) moves with her parents to a big old house in Michigan. They are too busy to give her any attention, so she explores the house and its surroundings by herself, discovering a tiny door which leads to another world in which her parents appear to treat her better but have buttons for eyes.

The story cleverly avoids the old it’s-just-a-dream cliché, although it does threaten to play with it at some stage. The visuals are delightful, but I’m not sure it would be all that much better in the 3-D version. Some of the scenes seem to be contrived specifically for 3-D e.g. the removal men unloading the lorry towards the camera at the beginning.

Nugget: reminiscent of Tim Burton’s visual style in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which makes sense because Henry Selick directed both movies (duh!). Voice artists include Teri Hatcher as the mother, Dakota Fanning as Coraline, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, Ian McShane, and Robert Bailey Jr. as the local weird boy, Wybie Lovat (short for Wyborn i.e. “why was he born?”). Interesting to note that Robert Bailey Jr. is a black actor playing a white kid: how often does that happen?

He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) – ickleReview (in-flight movie)

Tame, generic romcom with an all-star cast including Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Connelly, Busy Philipps, Kris Kristofferson, and Luis Guzmán. It brings nothing new to the table but instead peddles the same old bullshit about the game men and women are supposed to play in dating, relationships, and marriage.

The film is structured with inter-titles like “…if he’s not calling you”, “…if he’s having sex with someone else”, and “…if he doesn’t want to marry you” (lifted straight from the book), and “real-life” documentary-style interviews, which is an idea stolen from Nora Ephron’s infinitely superior When Harry Met Sally… (1989), which remains by far the best film in this genre.

As Roger Ebert pointed out, there is at least one good line from Drew Barrymore’s character:

I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies.

Nugget: I only watched this because I was on a transatlantic flight and because it had Scarlett Johansson in it. She plays a similar role to her Woody Allen characters in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008): naïve, voluptuous, a siren of adultery. It passed the time, but I wouldn’t pay to see it. The flight-edited version contained some amusingly obvious over-dubbed swearing e.g. Aniston saying “bullcrap” instead of “bullshit”. Based on the self-help book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, which sounds like one to avoid.

Everything in This Country Must (2004) – ickleReview (cinema)

Short film based on the short story by Irish writer Colum McCann, another one of those token Irish writers which many United Statian universities feel they must have on their faculties. A brilliantly controlled piece of filmmaking about the occupation of British soldiers in the North of Ireland during the Troubles and their uneasy relationship with the locals. To say any more would spoil it.

Nugget: a clever piece of adaptation whose only weakness was the use of a brief voice-over to preserve some of the short story’s prose and narrative voice. One United Statian member of the audience I saw this with at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo unbelievably didn’t get the frying pan of how the two halves of the film were related. There’s always someone…

Following James Joyce, Dublin to Buffalo (2004) – ickleReview (cinema)

An enjoyable documentary about the life of the twentieth-century Irish writer James Joyce, tracing the path of his biography from Dublin to Trieste, Zurich, Paris, and ending in Buffalo, where the bulk of his manuscripts are held. Directed by Stacey Herbert and Patrick Martin, the film features talking heads of Joyceans and academics talking about yer man (90% of whom I’ve met on the Joyce conference circuit). A joy to watch.

Nugget: suitable for the novice with still enough to interest the expert (mainly the curiosity of seeing familiar faces on the big screen).