Action in the Regency Period + Woman in White Readalong

First of all, HOW AMAZING IS THE INTERNET?

I was reading The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, which sounds like...well, not what it is, because it IS, in fact, excerpts from a REAL LADY'S DIARIES from about 1817-1826, i.e. Austenian times, only this Real Lady (Anne Lister in case you hadn't figured it out) was all up in other ladies' bizniz. Which is my hip way of saying she was a lesbian. She also lived about ten miles from the Bronte sisters. Meaning they were all alive at the same time and the Brontes had probably at least heard of her because she was known as something of a weirdo. AHHHH.

In fact there was a one year period where Austen, C. Bronte and Anne Lister were all alive, albeit one was an infant. ANYWAY. The super-gay parts of the diaries were written in an algebraic...Greek...code thing, and one scholar has basically dedicated her life to translating them and getting them out to the public, and that is Helena Whitbread. WHO IS NOW FOLLOWING ME ON TWITTER. Amazing. I love everything. There's a documentary on youtube called Revealing Anne Lister, which is of course narrated by Sue Perkins. It is excellent. You should watch it.

Secondly, IT IS RED FROM WHAT RED READ'S BIRTHDAY!!

Enjoy today, Red. Or else.

And finally! Woman in White readalong schedule!

We'll be "officially" starting April 2nd (so we're posting every Monday), which will be the lovely introductory posts: what you think of Wilkie Collins, have you read any of his other works, how giant his forehead is and how that makes you feel, etc.

April 9th - Preface through Chapter XV, The End of Hartright's Narrative

April 16th - Beginning of Vincent Gilmore's Narrative through Chapter IX in The Second Epoch

April 23rd - Chapter X, Second Epoch through Chapter X, Third Epoch

April 30th - Finish

Rainbow Rowell Interview of General Awesomeness

So, you guys remember when I dorked out over Attachments, right? Yeah. So the author, Rainbow Rowell, is stunningly nice to her readers and allows them to ask her questions via email or twitter that are, at best, distantly related to her books (have we discussed fanfic? yes, we have). This is especially exciting if most of the authors you read have been dead for some time (I would totally ask George Eliot about fanfic, because SHE WOULD READ IT DO NOT EVEN ARGUE).

Attachments, book of amazingness and fluff and hilarity, came out in paperback this past Tuesday (at a store near you!) and I was kindly allowed to do an interview. Now HOLD ON WAIT A SECOND. Because I tend to skip author interview blog posts. But trust that this is not sucky and you should read it and then love Rainbow's book more and then buy it in paperback. Mmm paperback. It fits so nicely into purses.

You live in Nebraska. What is particularly appealing to you about this state? As I’m sure you’re aware, it doesn’t have a reputation for thrilling escapades or shenanigans.

What is particularly appealing about Nebraska is that my entire codependent family lives here. I was born here, and my husband was born here, and we both went to school here, and then we had children -- so, yeah, we're never leaving.

But what Nebraska lacks in thrills, it makes up for in ... my whole family living here.

(It's a perfectly good place. Omaha is a lovely, friendly city. The food is excellent. The scenery is not distracting.)

How much does your state love Willa Cather?

Ha! One things about being from Nebraska is that you don't take anyone else from Nebraska very seriously. You hear, "Nebraska's greatest author," and think, "Pfft. Tough competition." So I've never read Willa Cather (or listened to Bright Eyes!) -- but I have friends from other places who are obsessed with her. I must feel bad about this because the main character of my third book (the book I'm writing right now) is named Cather.

Continuing with the Nebraska theme, I got a distinct impression in Attachments that there was something uniquely “Nebraskanian” (if you will) about it. How did you create this?

Really? Tell me more about this. What gave you that impression?

I didn't do it intentionally -- but I have heard from other readers that the characters "sound Nebraskan." There's a specific way of starting a conversation here; you start really general -- talk about food, family, the weather -- then eventually get to your point. The conversations in Attachments take up a lot of space. The characters don't rush each other. They avoid confrontation. Lincoln's whole "let's just wait this intolerable situation out" attitude is VERY Nebraskan.

For me, it was more a spatial thing than about dialogue (possibly because we speak the same way in Illinois? I don't know). The distances between things and the way you described the apartments and streets and the movie theater made it feel like Nebraska to me, despite never having been there.

Ahhhh ... That makes sense to me. 

Yeah, it's a very sprawled out city. Everything has plenty of personal space.

Other Omaha things that ended up in the book: all the food and sharing of food, we're very potlucky; all the driving; the politeness and helpfulness, Lincoln's cross-generational friendship with Doris ...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

For those of you for whom this is too much text, HERE'S A BABY IN A BEE COSTUME:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please inform me and my Blog People (as they obviously like to be called) where you got your stellar sense of humor.

When I started Attachments, I was going through this thing at work (I'm a newspaper columnist) where my editors didn't think my jokes were funny. Or maybe it was more that they didn't think our readers would think my jokes were funny. Anyway, it was really soul-shrinking.

So I started writing the book initially to give myself a place where I could say whatever I wanted. Make any joke I wanted. It didn't matter if anyone else got it or even if it made sense -- as long as it cracked me up. And then my sister started reading my manuscript, and my goal became to crack her up.

This was a HUGE LIFE LESSON for me. I deliberately shut off all my internal "you suck and no one thinks you're funny" voices -- and the result was people saying, "This is the funniest thing you've ever written."

Do you have a favorite line in Attachments?

My favorite lines? I don't think I'm good at writing lines. I think I'm good at writing exchanges. (Which is probably why I wrote a book that's half email.)

I like the line about Lincoln "crying into the sleeves of his plaid flannel shirt like the world's saddest lumberjack."

Is there a particular online location where you would prefer readers to buy Attachments, the Generally Fantastic Book?

There is not. I always encourage people to buy local if they can -- and you can do that online at indiebound.org.

Would you care to explain why Eleanor & Park, your next novel, is going to be kickass?

Well, there's a lot of taekwando in it. (Not kidding! There is a scene where someone gets his ass fantastically kicked!)

Other reasons:

1. It takes place in 1986. So it's a period piece.

2. There is 3,000 percent more kissing than in Attachments.

3. Eleanor is cynical and mouthy, and Park just wants to wear eyeliner to school without getting beaten up; and when they fall in love, I want it to make your stomach hurt. (You, the reader.) I wanted to write a book that felt like falling in love for the first time. That miserable. And that transcendent. I'm sure I didn't completely succeed -- but that's what I was shooting for. 

And lastly, a topic of extreme importance to my readers, do you have a favorite gif or LOLcat?

-------------------------------

So there you have it. She is fantastic and hilarious. Read her book.

I HAVE BEEN PLACES AND DONE THINGS

I HAVE RETURNED. With more books. And having learned a little something about this crazy mess some people call "life."

If you'd seen my face there it would've been a lot funnier.

OKAY. What happened? I went to New York City and

1. Saw an opera at the Met for the second time. The Met is amazing and beautiful and the best opera house in the world. I don't care about ancient European theatres with their incredible ornateness. I love the Met more than all of them.

I saw Elixir of Love, which is incredibly silly and fun and starred a German soprano, singing Italian with a Peruvian tenor in America. Did I mention I love opera? I love opera.

2. Saw all the history. I decided to walk around the Battery, and I basically went to every historical thing ever. Meaning the Elizabeth Ann Seton house, the Fraunces Tavern, the Custom House, Federal Hall, Trinity Church, Wall Street, the Bowling Green, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Cannon's Walk. This was the day where I had nothing but half a bottle of ginger ale and 15 gummi bears as of 5 pm. "She says she is an adult, but she is not."

3. Participated in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire remembrance. I can't even try to be funny about this, because there's nothing funny about it. In 1911, 146 people, mostly immigrant women between the ages of 14 and 25, died in a fire on the eighth and ninth floors of a building a block east of Washington Square Park. You know Washington Square. The place Henry James set one of his novels; the place Edith Wharton was intimately familiar with.

This place

The fire broke out on the eighth floor. There were essentially no fire codes at the time, meaning no sprinklers (which had been newly invented), the staircases were too narrow; one of the exits was kept locked; the sewing machines were crammed together, preventing escape; and when some girls found the fire escape and crowded onto it, it collapsed. Many ended up jumping from the ninth floor windows, which is what put this tragedy so much in the public eye and ended up leading to massive labor reforms in New York.

I read about this last year to an almost obsessive degree (I recommend Leon Stein's The Triangle Fire). Walking up to the Asch Building for the first time ever last Friday morning, the main thing that struck me was How Close it was. The ninth floor was so close to the street. I hadn't been right in my guesses from looking at buildings in Chicago. It was horrifying, but I realized you would have been able to see the faces of the girls from the street. There were details from eyewitness accounts that had puzzled me, but when I saw the building in person, I understood.

The bottom floor you see is the 2nd

Being there was important to me, and I met some wonderful people, all of whom are still fighting for better conditions for workers. Along with the 146 white carnations laid down for the Triangle Factory victims, a bundle of red carnations was placed to honor the memory of the workers killed in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh last year. The factory, owned by The Gap, had similarly horrible conditions to those in New York a hundred years ago.

----------------------

There was a lot of crying on the trip. I cried at the Triangle remembrance. I cried at The Hunger Games. And I cried when I went to the Fraunces Tavern and saw some floorboards George Washington might've stepped on.

I saw some plays. I went to a few awesome bookstores, which I'll talk about in another post. And I thoroughly exhausted myself, falling asleep with my contacts in three nights in a row. Chicago, I love you and I will stay with you until I go drinking in Canada this May.

Star Wars and Catharsis

I'M NOT GONE YET. Meaning here's another post.

Forgotten Bookmarks' post for today made me remember a couple years ago when I visited my brother in NYC and we saw Wishful Drinking, and when Carrie Fisher started her final monologue with "General Kenobi, years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars--" my brother and I freaked out and had internal flail attacks. BECAUSE SHE WAS SAYING IT. Lesson: Star Wars is the best of all best things.

You know how sometimes you read a part of a book and it makes you go

And you're like, THESE PEOPLE ARE FICTIONAL I SHOULD NOT BE FEELING ALL THE FEELS.
So, one of the cool things about fiction is that lovely Greek concept of catharsis (or "katharsis" if you're a tool). Unfortunately, Aristotle is the one who first articulated this in reference to an emotional experience. You know, Aristotle -- the guy who said that women were just flawed men because they couldn't produce semen and believed that emotional hysteria in women was the result of a "wandering womb."
Anyway. The point is that Aristotle sucks, but catharsis was a damn good idea. Ok, so how that works today is we watch a play or a movie or a tv show, or we read a novel, and we feel for those characters, and experience -- sometimes -- extreme emotions, and this "cleanses" us and provides a healthy outlet for our emotions. 
Not to quote Wikipedia, but I'm going to quote Wikipedia:

Some modern interpreters of the work infer that catharsis is pleasurable, because audience members experience ekstasis (literally: astonishment, meaning: trance) or, in other words, "relief," ensuing from an awareness that, compared with what they have just seen portrayed, their own life is less tragic 

So when we read things like Ethan Frome (a book enjoyed by people with souls) and afterwards feel perhaps decimated, we still can hold on to that book as having been a good experience, partially because we are at least subconsciously reminded that our lives are not like Ethan's and Mattie's.

I wrote recently about Millennials not liking to be genuine, because it opens us up to being made fun of. Completely true. If I'm sincere, I'm almost always wary about it. And being emotional? Bah! BUT. For some reason, we've chosen to consider it ok to be extremely invested in fiction. Which means I can watch the series 4 finale of Doctor Who and yell at the tv while crying violently "DONNA NOOOOOOOO!" And you just feel better after something like that.
What's cool about catharsis in today's world is, of course, the internet. Because you can share your feelings-inspired-by-fiction with strangers from practically anywhere, giving those feelings added validation AND giving you a deeper sense of global community. The most you could get from that in previous decades was the  shared release of teenage sexual angst at an Elvis concert.
I would probably say Ethan Frome actually was one of the most cathartic books I've read. Others that spring to mind are Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, East of Eden, and Bleak House. Any book where you become heavily invested in the characters has the possibility of giving you that experience. And this is of course where I ask if you have any particular books that have elicited a cleansing emotional reaction from you. Because I want to know, people. I want to know.

Readalongs, Labor Rights and Skylarkings

Damnit, Dewey's Readathon! Stop happening on days I am otherwise engaged! It's April 21st this year, which is when I go to Milwaukee to see Rachel Maddow be smart and awesome. I'm not giving that up, people. I'm not giving that up.

Today's probably a catch-up day, as my other entries lately have been weird things like book reviews, so let's do this:

1) WOMAN IN WHITE READALONG. Do not forget. We're starting April 2nd, first reading is the preface to page 126, and I will have chapter numbers for you instead of page numbers when I have my copy of the book with me. Which is not right now. We're gonna finish this and we're gonna finish it good (you heard me).

2) I have been collecting ALL SORTS of gifs and haven't been using them.

3) I'm going to be in NYC Friday to Wednesday. Doing crazy hedonistic things like marching in the 101st Remembrance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and visiting the site of Emma Goldman's apartment. So I don't know how much updating there'll be. Of course, I say that and then watch me update twice a day, but I'm hoping that won't be the case, because vacations, we all need them.

4) I will never not like the song Livin' la Vida Loca.

I started reading Portnoy's Complaint because of What the Dickens? (which I fully expect you all to at least try, because otherwise how are we supposed to say things to each other like 'ha-hah! Sandi Toksvig and her lack of understanding regarding football jokes! what fun!') and I'm enjoying it thus far. Do you know how many Male American Authors I've read? Yeah. That'd be basically none. With the exception of Steinbeck, whose writing I would wed and have five children with, two of whom would do well, whereas the other three would become farmers and somehow end up getting their heads blown off by shotguns after delivering touching monologues about Man's Place in the Universe. Mmm Steinbeck.

You all behave over the next few days.

Book Review! Emotions! Familial Relationships!

Guess what today is? REVIEW day. Of an honest to goodness ARC.

So this is about M. Dickson's book, Dear Dad: It's Over (released this May, but available for pre-order). 

Before reviewing this, I should state that the author and I are twitter friends (based on our mutual love of reading about serial killers and watching Designing Women), and that she is hilarious. I would say this makes me biased about her book, but this book is not about being hilarious. It's about opening herself up emotionally and discussing her tempestuous relationship with her father.

At first glance, it seems like a girl just telling stories about how her father was a pretty shitty dad, but it is one of, in my own experience anyway, the most obvious picks for the You Shape What You Get Out of Your Own Life genre. Because this is about her stopping an extremely painful cycle and taking control of the level of horribleness she'll allow into her life.

I  grew up in a somewhat churchy environment, which was enhanced when I went to a Christian high school. I didn't know anyone whose parents were divorced. No one. 

It was only when I got to college that I started meeting people who had grown up with a single parent, usually a mom, and for most of them the dad was no longer in the picture, and therefore couldn't be an active force for good or evil. Since I was, by then, out of the childhood phase where you could just kind of blatantly ask your friends 'HEY, what's up with you having divorced parents?', I've never really seen what that life is like. So for me, part of this was an educational experience.

The writing's a little rough in places, but considering her age (*cough*whichismyage*cough), that takes a backseat to the messages conveyed and the way she decides to lay herself open and show a tremendous amount of vulnerability. I find this almost astounding for someone in the Millennial generation, because sincerity: it is not our forte. It's much easier to hide behind humor or use hyperbole than to be genuine (truest statement of EVER). 

It's written in a series of essays, each highlighting a particular incident with her father. And yes, this kind of one-sided presentation can lead one to be a little 'But what would HE have said about that situation?', only it's less about what he did and more about her interiority in the wake of those incidents. Meaning yes, he did this terrible thing and maybe he has some excuse for it, but at some point excuses don't cover how you make another person feel and you just need to bite the bullet and say you're sorry, no matter how justified you feel in your actions.

It's a quick read and what you get is a deep look into someone dealing with the horrible situation that is one parent effectively cutting off their child. I liked it if only because by reading these sorts of things, it helps us understand others better and gives us more compassion. Which, y'know, I hesitate to say we can ever have too much of. Unless it's like, for Hitler. Maybe Stalin. And George Lucas if he continues to refuse to release the original un-enhanced Star Wars trilogy.

In conclusion, read it if you're interested in new perspectives on life. And if you have a similar background, it will probably help instill a sense of camaraderie. And finally, here are some polite bears again:

"Piratical Scottish fiction is my absolute weak spot"

Hello to you all! And a happy Monday indeed.

The weather in Chicago has been SO fantastic that one had to get out this weekend. Especially since I live on a block with an Irish pub, and I don't know if you know what Chicago's like on St. Patrick's Day, but basically, avoid any thoroughfares and all people. So I went to the Garfield Park Conservatory (built in 1907) and sat around underneath some truly ENORMOUS ferns or palms or something while reading Perfume (which, you're right, ends very oddly).

Then my roommate and I watched Shallow Hal and The Brothers Bloom, both of which I LOVE, so NO DISPARAGING THEM. Especially not the latter, which I'm convinced is close to perfect.

I skipped church (boooo me) and later went on one of those 30 minute 'let's go in a big circle on the water' boat tours around Navy Pier with my roommate. The embarrassing thing (and it's supposed to be embarrassing if you LIVE in Chicago as opposed to visiting) is I really love Navy Pier. It's the most touristy thing in the city, and I'm immensely fond of it. It's the kind of place that houses every loved-by-tourists chain, including Build-a-Bear, but WHERE else downtown am I supposed to find those things? Someday I could need a stuffed moose with a recorded message. You don't know.

Anyway. While there, I made my roommate pose like a 1950s author:

This turned out QUITE splendidly

The rest of the time I watched What the Dickens?, which is a British literary quiz show. I know, why aren't you watching it? It's on youtube, and one of the team captains is none other than my pretend Other Half, Sue Perkins. One of the segments involves bringing on a person with the same name as a character from literature, film or music, and the teams have to guess who they are with yes or no questions. I put this two minute clip online ESPECIALLY for you all:

"Long John Silver AND...the boy!"

I must say, though, this show makes me feel like an idiot about books. Complete moron. Almost all the team members are brilliant. One thing about English comedians is they seem to have all been over-educated. I just looked up Katherine Parkinson from The IT Crowd, and she read Classics at Oxford. What? Of course she did. That makes sense.

So I've been making a list of books I should be reading based on the books these people seem to assume everyone's read. I bought Portnoy's Complaint because of it, and I WILL read Our Man in Havana. Anyway, the whole series in on youtube and should be watched. Because hilarious/informative/etc.

My Forthcoming Nuptials and That Book About That Guy Who Smells Things

This week's been rather busy, between learning arias and planning my wedding to British tv presenter (and narrator of that Dickens documentary you of course all watched) Sue Perkins:

I'm splashing this about wherever I can

BUT I have still been reading things. Mostly yesterday, as I was stuck without my phone for 12 hours (HORROR OF HORRORS) and had to resort to the book in my bag (Perfume) while on two long El rides.

Unless something truly terrible is coming up in Perfume, I feel like maybe the movie was just really gross and people cannot get over this, so they've connected it to the book. Because nothing in the book has been particularly disgusting, and yet that's the only thing I hear about it. I do really like the writing, despite it being a translation, although it has made me realize how extremely little I know about scents, as I am limited to "This smells nice" or "ewwwww."

For those unaware of the plot: It's 18th century Paris, and a baby is born in one of the ghetto areas and his mom is hanged for various crimes and he's brought up by a wetnurse but HE DOES NOT SMELL LIKE ANYTHING. And this is a Thing. Because babies smell like stuff. And then he grows up and is treated like shit because it's 18th century Paris, but he's Mega-Weird, and deals with life in his own weird way, and oh, he has the most highly developed sense of smell of anyone anywhere ever. And at one point he kills someone. Which would be a spoiler, only it's called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, so NO IT IS NOT A SPOILER.

I just like Authors Who Use Lots of Words. And Books Set in Ye Olden Days. And this involves both those things WHILE not being too long (255 pages). There's a bit of a rough patch when he goes all solitary, because I prefer seeing him be weird around other people, but now he's BACK to being weird around people, so I'm very happy.

Is the weather ridiculously amazing in other parts of the country? I'm wearing a sleeveless dress today. It is MARCH. 

Chime Is Not Very Great

So I finished Chime. And it was kind of lame. It got a lot better from the South Park Goth Girl beginning, but since that was the most amusing part for me, here're some quotes that I could only hear in Goth Girl's voice (whose monologue is below, in the stellar SP episode 'Raisins'):

Raisins

He was more at home with the villagers than we were, even though he’d arrived from London only six months back. Perhaps it was because he was such a big, comfortable sort of man, while we Larkins are rarely comfortable, especially with ourselves. - AGH TOO MUCH OBVIOUS. SO MUCH OBVIOUS.

“Another few minutes won’t hurt,” said Father in his sermon voice, which is his favorite voice, the one he starches and irons every morning. 

Have you become a doctor, Father? How do you know it won’t hurt? Or did you hear it from God? You don’t talk to anyone else. - now just hear that in Goth Girl's voice. It's not hard.

People always say one thing and mean something else beneath. I’m the worst of all, but at least I don’t lie to myself about it. - SHE IS SO GOTH AND TERRIBLE

Eldric wasn’t handsome, not in a Greek statue kind of way, not like Cecil Trumpington, who wants to marry me. Well, Cecil actually wants to marry the idea of me. - NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME THEY JUST SEE WHAT THEY WANT TO SEE

And then there's my minor complaint, which is that the time period was fricking confusing. Because she mentions Queen Anne at first, so I was like "Oh, it's around 1700," and then she's like "Motorcars! Electricity!" And I know you're like "Well maybe there was a later Anne who was the king's wife or something," but no! The last one died in 1714.

Some of the plot twists were surprising -- a lot of them were not. You're just sitting, waiting for the main character to figure it out, feeling like she's kiiiind of dumb not to.

There is some occasional hilarity, which was nice, and a couple of good phrases:

“I’m hungry for funeral biscuits,” said Rose. 

“Funeral biscuits?” said Eldric. “Shall I hunt them down? Are they dangerous?” 

“You’re mad!” said Cecil, but he rose to accompany Eldric. Two boy-men, stalking the wild funeral biscuit.

Anyway. Too much goth. Too much time period confusion. But as the book went on, I went from notes like "CAN WE LEAVE VAMPIRES OUT OF THINGS FOR ONCE" to "That's actually quite nice." Oh, except for the Ferngullyesque little treatise at the end. If I want that, I will WATCH Ferngully. And enjoy it, because man, childhood, amirite?

(p.s. RED, you won the book, according to a random name picker, so you better have read this far in the post. also, everyone's answers were hilarious, but a disquieting number of you were all 'I am not surprised by this question because of whose blog it's on.' I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO FEEL ABOUT THIS)

Sit Through a Story and Then I'm Giving Away Something

I HAVE A STORY. Prepare yourselves.

Yesterday I decided to go to Target. This is a bit of a complicated process when you live in a city and don't have a car, as Targets are rarely downtown, so I walked a mile to the red line and took it to the nearest Target, which is in a not-particularly-savory part of town.

After purchasing important items like bergamot body wash and corkboard (bless the superstore), I left, deciding to walk home because it was such a very lovely day outside. But I needed ice cream first. So I betook myself to Baskin Robbins, where I purchased a 3-point chocolate/rainbow sherbet cone (I would not recommend this combination, as caramel does not mix with rainbow sherbet, but peanut butter & chocolate totally does).

I left, walked another half mile, whereupon I discovered that my CTA card was missing. CTA is Chicago Transit Authority, and I have a monthly pass. I'm normally extremely paranoid about where my keys/CTA card/phone/wallet are at all times, as I'm convinced everyone is a highly-trained pickpocket, but I was carrying too much stuff and I had a sneaking suspicion my attempts to be dude-like and put my card in the back pocket of my jeans had not served me well.

So I backtracked, asked the Baskin Robbins man (who had previously informed me that the flavor he sells the most of is vanilla -- I AM ASHAMED OF YOU, CITIZENS), but he hadn't seen it. I called Target and it wasn't in their lost and found. So I walked back up the -- well, it's essentially an overpass that looks like it belongs in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome -- and I scanned the sidewalk intently, which yielded nothing but stray garbage. Alas. BUT I STAYED POSITIVE. "I will find it; I will," said I.

And there, 20 feet from Target, in the middle of the sidewalk, was my CTA card still in its protective holder, given to me by Julie when she came back from England, which was the real reason I was fairly bummed about having lost it.

I'm convinced no one stole it because it had books on it

So books protected my transit card. Thanks, books. I knew you'd be useful one day.

OTHERLY, I am giving away this kickass copy of Hound of the Baskervilles. IT IS SO PRETTY. And if I hadn't read it during my Sherlock Holmes phase, I would totally keep it for myself. But no. And bonus, when whoever wins it wins it, I will send Red her book that she won a billion years ago (Red, you are totes allowed to enter this). And I owe Nahree one too, actually. Hm. ALL WILL GET BOOKS.

Look at that awesome cover

Oh yeah, I guess this ends March 13th at noon CST.

Wherein We Discover That Dickens Sucked at Self-Given Pseudonyms

It's the weekend, and this is both eye-opening, amusing and highly informative. So sometime Saturday or Sunday, grab an hour, grab some popcorn, and sit down in front of the friendly glow of your computer and watch Sue Perkins talk about Mrs. Dickens and how horrible her husband was.

I still love Dickens's novels. I do. Like, huggable amounts. But I cannot stand him as a person.

Ranting About Unimportant Things (Again)...and Then It Became a Tour Guide Post

Are we aware that Nathaniel Hawthorne's women characters are named Hester, Zenobia and Hepzibah? I thought maybe this was him coming from a weirdo family, but his wife's name was Sophia. Totally normal. His mother's name was Elizabeth and his grandmother was Miriam. "Ah, but what about his OTHER grandmother?" you ask. "Surely she had some highly unusual name." HER NAME WAS RACHEL. RACHEL.

I refuse to research things beyond Wikipedia and the facts I learned ages ago that MIGHT be correct but who really knows? I certainly don't. But I'm gonna go ahead and blame his weirdo names on Transcendentalism. DAMN YOU, TRANSCENDENTALISM.

Speaking of Hawthorne, did you know that in Salem, MA you can visit the house that The House of Seven Gables was based on? Kind of? He stayed in it with his sister or aunt or cousin or something, whose husband owned it, and it was pretty fancy, but completely disappointing after reading the book. Yeah, I went on the tour. And while there were some entertaining moments, like when the Very Tall People on the tour could not navigate the hidden staircase without bumping their heads, for people in Ye Olden Days were short, the house is very much not like it is in the book. And for disappointed tourists comme moi, they added on a cent shop in like the '20s or '30s or something, which was, sadly, my favorite part.

The best part of the tour, which can only
be seen on the outside of the house after
the tour is over

Salem is actually a general Nathaniel Hawthorne disappointment, because the OTHER place you can tour (which they moved to be right next to the House of the Seven Gables) is his "childhood home" only by childhood they mean until he was five years old. I moved from my original home in Virginia when I was four, and I can tell you, that place means jack to me. 

There IS a statue of him on the walk from the witch museum (shut up, you know you'd go to it too) to his home. So that's kind of neat. There's also an excellent seafood restaurant named Finz, where the waitress will not make fun of you for being in your 20s and ordering a Shirley Temple.

And since this is turning into a Tour of Salem, here's a tip about the witch museum: It is not worth going. TRUE it is built on the site of the Reverend Parris's home (i.e. the location of the first incident with the girls), and that's vaguely cool, but you go in and an animatronic show happens, and then there's some sort of lecture about the history of the word 'witch.' I don't know for sure, because my friend and I ducked out after I asked the usher if the lecture was worth going to. "No" was the answer.

The town also has this, which was sadly closed when we were there.

"Noooooo!" Alice wept, beating her fists on the closed glass door.

The location of the Lizzie Borden happening is an hour and a half away, but I'm assuming the proprietors of the museum said "Fuck it, let's make Salem a one-stop shop."

Salem is actually pretty awesome, regardless of everything I just said. And the people in the creepy wiccan shops are EXTREMELY nice, even when you tell them you're just looking for a place that sells sweatshirts.

Jean-Claude Van Damme and Other Important Issues Affecting Our Society

I haven't done the Literary Blog Hop in forevers, because it usually wants me to, y'know, Think About Things, and when I write this blog, I pretty much do it in a stream of conscious style. In case you couldn't tell.

BUT. Before we get to the thrilling question for the week/month, I have to tell you about this movie I saw last night starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. My co-worker Doug (whom I quote often on twitter) lent it to me; it's called Knock Off and this is the plot as given by Netflix (no, you want to read this):

After learning Russian mafia terrorists are plotting to implant thousands of "microbombs" in knockoff jeans and ship them around the globe, Hong Kong-based fashion rep Marcus Ray (Jean-Claude Van Damme) races to stop them alongside undercover CIA agent Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider).

RIGHT? That movie was amazing. Ok, Blog Hop time:

How do you find time to read, what's your reading style and where do you think reading literature should rank in society's priorities? 

Ah. Those are a lot of questions, but again, as they're easier than usual, I shall bear onward.

I actually kind of suck at reading. When I get home from work, I need to practice opera things, and I also enjoy things like "eating" and "watching Parks and Recreation" so those take up a lot of my post-work time. So weirdly, most of my reading happens at work. I receptionize, and in downtime, there're lovely books online. This is how I got through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Tenant, I love you, but your middle section is terrible). 

I also pretty much always read through lunch, because it's a good way of being by myself. Which is funny, come to think of it, as in her entry on this Emily quoted Shadowlands, saying "we read to know we're not alone." Which I totally agree with, but if you sit in the lunchroom with your back turned to everyone and a book out, it's a pretty damn nice way to be left alone.

My reading style is also pretty sucky. Comparative Literature thrives on the explication de texte, which is where you examine one paragraph (appx) in an entire work and analyze the shit out of it, i.e. Every Word Is Important. When your brain goes that way, it's nigh impossible to switch it back, so my reading speed slowed immeasurably (well, probably measurably) from high school to college, and has stayed stuck in Extreme Slow Mode, meaning I do not get through books quickly, but I also get bored with things if I stay with them for too long, so then I keep starting new books and not finishing any and it's one of those vicious cycle things you hear about.

Where should reading rank in society's priorities...I have split feelings on this. Because I have friends who are BRILLIANT and awesome and just don't read. And I know some real assholes who love to read. But generally speaking, if I see someone reading, I trust them more. Unless they're reading Infinite Jest on the El train. Remember that guy? What a tool.

I tend to summarily dismiss quotes about books, but when I actually read them, they make me feel squishy. The Chicago Public Library has this in big block letters on one of its walls: "The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man. - T.S. Eliot" And yes. That.

I want to just be easy about it all and say "Well, whoever wants to read can read," but then when 50% of the people the mayor lays off during budgets cuts are library workers, and the library takes up only 3% of the city's budget, I get irritated as hell (after protests, this number was lessened). Our library commissioner, Mary Dempsey, has resigned in the wake of this. She was AMAZING. Amazing. 

If you get absolutely anything out of this post -- and I am going to be sincere for once, people, I hope you read her letter to FOX News Chicago in response to an article of theirs that asked "with the internet and e-books, do we really need millions for libraries?" Her description of what the library's budget is used for makes me so, so proud of our library system.

So I guess my answer is that I think reading should rank high enough not to be the first and biggest thing cut in a budget. I think it should be acknowledged as important to our growth as human beings and as a society. And I think we should all read Television by Roald Dahl and take our kids away from the damn tv set. 

The End.

50 Classics...Here We Go

All right. It's late, hopefully no one's looking at Google Reader, so here's A List of Books with which to delight the senses. I stole my format from Adam at Roof Beam Reader, because he's spiffy and does things like this well. As for what I say in this post, well...again, it's late.

50 Classics I Plan to Read in the Next 5 Years

Hosted by Jillian at A Room of One’s Own

Pre-1700

Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan

AND THAT IS ALL, BECAUSE BOOKS PRE-1700 SUCK. It was too long ago.

1700s

Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
The Monk, M.G. Lewis - AKA The Best Book Ever Written. Demon nuns! Elopements! Perfidious monks! 

1800s
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Villette, Charlotte Brontë
Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell
The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Unlike the Emperor with Anakin Skywalker, I do not watch Hawthorne's later career with great interest.
Barnaby Rudge, Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens
Dombey and Son, Dickens - You might think I'm reading a bunch of the unimportant Dickens books in a row, but really I'm reading them chronologically, and this was apparently his Sucky Period.
The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe
Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo
Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Yeah, I know, everyone's read it. And I tried. But it's fricking boring. Damn Romantics with their "thoughts."

1900s 
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
The March, E.L. Doctorow - What can I say? Ragtime was way awesome.
Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow
The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy
The Pigeon, Patrick Suskind
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams - LOOK. I got these from the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list, and if you have an issue with any of them, you take it up with the editor.
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, Douglas Adams - HOW DO YOU NOT READ THIS BASED ON THE TITLE
Contact, Carl Sagan 
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Lanark: A Life in Four Books, Alasdair Gray - This is supposed to be a weirdass book
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov - Or 'Булгаков' for those of us who're feeling fancy
The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Graduate, Charles Webb
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole - YES. COME TO ME, YOU IRRITATING AND HORRIBLE MAN, IGNATIUS J. REILLY
O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
The Collector, John Fowles
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck - Anyone else get that Veggietales song stuck in their head? "We are the grapes of wrath/So stay out of our path"
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Winifred Watson - I hope to one day have a friend named Winifred. And I shall call her "Winnie" and we shall laugh and drink tea and there will be doilies.
Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes - ALL THE SAD LESBIAN BOOKS (they're pretty much all sad)
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser 

2000s
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen 

Do I think I'll actually get to all these in the next five years? Ehhhhhhhhhhh who can say. But I like lists, so there we have it.

Self-Control What?

I just laughed for about five straight minutes when I saw this rabbit:

I WANT TO SMOOSH IT

So, IntenseDebate, my irritating but loved comment system, decided to squirrel itself away on my last post and revert to Blogger comments. I hate Blogger comments. HAAAATE. IntenseDebate emails you when people reply, and has threaded comments and this is more akin to what I'm used to from Livejournal (yeah. I still have a livejournal. NOT ASHAMED), so I'm keeping it, but hopefully it won't freak out again.

I bought three books Monday. I know. I KNOW. But they were all really, really awesome. 

Ok, so Perfume by Patrick Suskind I wasn't going to get because I heard it's gross, BUT it's published by Vintage AND the cover's awesome AND I read the first couple pages and went "Shit, this is well-written." And it was $5, so that's purchase 1. Purchase 2 is Him Her Him Again the End of Him, which was recommended by the now-absent Megs (*stifles sob at her departure for Florida*), because it looks hilarious, and purchase 3 is a seriously, SERIOUSLY kickass copy of Moll Flanders that I got for $7.

No, I know I said I was going to get rid of half of my books by the end of the year, but I totally needed these.

I have a thing about fonts. I don't care in terms of signage, etc, but in books, the font has a serious impact on how I judge what I'm reading. And there's a certain font that was in use during the '30s and '40s that automatically makes me give a book more respect.

This font

Otherly, I finished The Fault in Our Stars and it was ok-not-the-best-thing-ever. Meaning yeah, it's really good, but I'm kind of done with Junoesque teenagers and their quips. I never connected with the characters and I'm really happy to be moving on to Perfume. Yes.