This weekend my friend Jennie at Biblio File is inviting everyone to celebrate her blog’s birthday by reading a book for fun for at least 5 hours. This is the kind of celebrating that I can get behind, so yesterday I dedicated myself to it wholeheartedly.

To start off the day, I decided I needed to be prepared for extended reading by first eating waffles and bacon. Sadly, our boxed waffle mix was depleted down to the point where I needed less than 1 egg, and I wasn’t up to figuring out how to use egg fractions that early in the day. Double sadly, we were also out of milk, so I couldn’t even make them from scratch. So, darn, we had to go to IHOP. I ended up getting french toast instead of waffles in the end, but I consider this a fair trade.

Then we went to Costco, since it was right there, and got milk (so I can have waffles now any time I get in the mood again!) and somebody’s Christmas present, because it happened to be on sale. Is it for you? I’m not telling.

Then we came home, full and productive enough for one day, so I dedicated myself to reading for the rest of the afternoon. Since part of the rules are that you must read a book for fun, I picked one of the books I’d most been looking forward to from my last Amazon order, Soulless by Gail Carriger. How could I not want to read it? It’s book one of The Parasol Protectorate! It just sounds awesome, right?

Er, or maybe it sounds more awesome if you have some context. The main character, Miss Alexia Tarabotti, is a young lady in Victorian England whose mother has already put her on the shelf as a spinster due to her deplorably dark complexion, inherited from her late Italian father. Except this is an England where the supernatural peoples have been integrated into society since the Elizabethan era, (this is actually why the Puritans left for America, they objected to the integration policies.) Miss Tarabotti is not supernatural, though. She is the opposite, preternatural, a person born without a soul, who can therefore cancel out supernatural abilities. And she just accidentally (more or less) killed a vampire with her hair stick and parasol. But what was she expected to do? He was trying to take liberties! Without even a proper introduction!

The rest of the story centers around the mystery of where such an uncouth and uneducated vampire might have come from, especially when it turns out there have been others. This part has rather Sherlock Holmes-ian overtones. But the other half of the story, the more fun and gossipy part, channels a bit of Pride & Prejudice (ish) romance. Because, of course, Miss Tarabotti keeps interfering in Lord Conall Maccon’s investigation of the whole vampire incident. They haven’t gotten along ever since that incident with the hedgehog. But they do keep running into each other…

I read this whole book in one afternoon/evening. You don’t get a lot of steampunk-y comedy, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The next book, Changeless, comes out in March. I know what I want for my birthday!

Thanks, Jennie, for having such a great party!

Jennie recently blogged about where she finds recommendations and inspiration to read various books. In the spirit of turning her original post into a sort-of meme, I’ll start my list the same way she did hers.

Here are the books I read so far this month and why I picked them up:

On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen, by David Weber – If you keep up with my “Reading” page, you’ll see that I put a note by them saying that I read them through the Baen Free Library. I heard about the Free Library on the Goodreads Sci-fi/Fantasy book club. When I found myself with some of the copious downtime that tends to occur when my job enters a period of largely waiting for replies to emails I sent to China, I decided to check it out. I’d heard about the Honor Harrington series and thought it sounded interesting, so just my luck the first two books were there to be read online! I liked them both, but unfortunately the covers of the books in that series are so awful, I’d be embarrassed to read them in public.

Bedlam Boyz, by Ellen Guon – Also from the Baen Free Library. I picked this one while browsing the options because I saw that it was in a series co-written by Mercedes Lackey, and I’ll generally give her stuff a chance. It turned out to be pretty good urban fantasy, although I’m not sure I’m going to bother to track down the rest of the series.

Murder is Binding and Bookmarked for Death, by Lorna Barrett – Yes, Amazon’s suggestions of other things I might be interested in do occasionally work for me. This series is about a woman who owns an independent mystery bookstore in a town known for its street of specialty bookstores. This premise was more or less guaranteed to work for me, even though the main character’s sister is extremely annoying. I can’t wait for there to be more of them!

Death’s Half Acre, by Margaret Maron – I got this one off the library’s new book shelf. My mother and I got started on the Deborah Knott series because Maron is a local author and the books are set in NC, but I have since read all of her books, in this series and others. I’m guaranteed to pick up anything by her.

Brothers of Cain, by Miriam Grace Monfredo – I got into rereading this series last year, and then my closest library branch closed for an 18-month renovation project. I really wanted to read the last two books in the series, and was prepared to go buy them just to make it happen, only to discover that all of her books have suddenly gone out of print. Argh! But I finally got to a library again and found this one. Now I just need the last one. If you can find the Seneca Falls mystery series in your library, read it.

Dead Witch Walking, by Kim Harrison – I confess, I was bored in the bookstore and desperate for something new. I believe this was one of the books Amazon suggested I might like as a “vampire romance,” so I was extremely skeptical, but happily it has less romance elements in it than most of the straight up genre fiction I read, and it was pretty entertaining urban fantasy/alternate reality.

No Phule Like an Old Phule and Phule’s Errand, by Robert Asprin, with Peter J. Heck – The theme for next month’s sci-fi selection on the Goodreads book club is spoof. Someone mistakenly suggested Robert Asprin’s Myth series, which is fantasy, so I countered with the first volume of this series, Phule’s Company, since it’s actually legitimately sci-fi. (This is an annoyingly common occurence in the book club suggestion threads.) While in the bookstore, I saw that there were two new ones that I hadn’t read yet, so I got them in anticipation. Of course, my suggestion didn’t win, but I read them anyway.

The Patriot Witch, by CC Finlay – I found the free PDF version of this on the author’s website, via a link from Jeremy. The premise sounded interesting, so I figured I’d check it out. It turns out to be quite good, the story of witches living in the colonies at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. This one combines my enjoyment of historical fiction with my enjoyment of fantasy in a very smooth way. It doesn’t even really have to edge very far into alternative history, since Finlay works his witches into the fabric of our own history very subtley. Incidentally, the print version was released today! Even better, the other two books in what looks to be a trilogy will be released in May and then June, so we won’t have to wait a year to find out what happens next.

So there you go. I’m well on my way to beating 100 books read this year, if I maintain my current pace, so I’ll be on the lookout for more interesting stuff.

For the past two weeks, I have been conducting an experiment with my friend Mike. To give you some background first, this is how it started:

Back in November, Mike asked for some reading suggestions, and I of course jumped in. He immediately rejected one of my favorite authors (Neal Stephenson) as unreadable, however, which led me to start a more philosophical discussion with him about how he felt he read books, since we seemed to have such widely diverging standards. After a bit of back and forth on that subject, he then suggested the following project: that we would each recommend a book for the other person to read, and email our impressions of the book to the recommender as we went along.

Mike’s suggestion for me was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Below are my impressions as I read through it, only slightly edited from the original emails. Note that they do contain spoilers (for those who intend to read the book someday) or references to specific points in the story that won’t make sense (for those who haven’t read the book and don’t intend to).

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Day 0, before starting

I have long had a wary relationship with, ahem, literature. While it’s true that Heidi was the first book I can recall reading on my own because doing it chapter-by-chapter before bed was too slow, it seems that once I discovered series books, I never wanted to go back. I remember having arguments with my mother in the children’s section of the library one summer about her extremely cruel requirement that I read two actually non-series books, rather than loading up with more of the juvenile mysteries I actually wanted. As I recall, I actually ended up thinking that Island of the Blue Dolphins and whatever the other one was weren’t too bad, but darned if I was going to admit it at the time.

It’s still true that I prefer to turn to authors and characters that are tried and true for my pleasure reading. I no longer have quite the tolerance for a played out world that I used to, so I did eventually have to give up on anything new coming out of Pern and Valdemar, though I will still return to my old favorites from those series. But even as I find myself spurred to find new authors, I still love series and genre fiction above all else. I like authors and worlds I know I can trust.

Of course, a great deal of my distrust of non-genre fiction undoubtedly comes from all those middle and high school English classes I took, that sucked all the fun right out of reading whatever was assigned. Even the one time we were finally assigned some fantasy, Le Guin, as I recall, it became dry and dull, and seemed especially bleh once all the students who had never read any fantasy and never intended to again got into the discussion. When I got to college, I didn’t take a single English class at all. In the years since high school, I have been gradually branching out into reading things that might possibly have been school assignments in the past, and I have discovered that they are actually enjoyable if I get to just read them on my own. Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice suddenly make sense. Such books will never take over the majority of my reading, but there is definitely a place for them now.

And so I find myself willing to take on your challenge of reading Lolita. I’m curious what it will be like, because I read, for my Japanese Film & Fiction class at Grinnell, Naomi, the book that is supposedly the Japanese version of the Lolita story. Will my annoyance with the main characters from that book influence my reading of this one? Will I finally come to understand all those cultural references I only half-got before? Will Gothic Lolita fashion trends suddenly seem more witty and less borderline tasteless? (Hmmm, maybe not that last one.) And more importantly, will Nabokov become one of my trusted writers?

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Day 1

Okay, I admit it, I’m just to page 52, but I’ve become fairly convinced so far that this is not a book I would ever choose to read for pleasure. The narrator is such a self-absorbed misogynistic snob, so proud of his own (recognized) perversion. I’m not really sure I care what happens to him, although jail is obvious in the end. I’m also kind of disturbed at how proficient he is at turning all other people, especially women, into objects that happen to walk and talk. His world seems almost nightmarish, for all that I’m apparently supposed to be able to see it as the real one, only twisted. I’m simply not feeling much of a connection here, and I’m wondering what I’m missing.

I have, however, now finished the other book that was distracting me away from this one during my reading hours, so I should make a great deal more progress this evening. Perhaps things will become clearer then.

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Day 2

I made it to page 132 last night, and at least the plot has definitely picked up. As I recall, it was around page 70 that the narrator started thinking of Charlotte as more of a human being, which made him somewhat more tolerable, but the extent to which he used her and didn’t think of her as real, especially when she died and he could recreate her however he wished, remains just plain creepy.

Lolita herself also strikes me as disturbed, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly why (other than her obvious detachment) since she only just reentered the story.

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Day 4 (did not record separate observations on Day 3)

I have now progressed to page 268. It occurred to me that after the point at which Lolita escaped, I should enjoy the story more, because it took on elements of a mystery, which I typically like, and yet, I still didn’t care enough about either the detective (H.H.) or the victim (Lolita.) Neither are particularly sympathetic.

Between where I left off last time and the escape, it also became increasingly clear that H.H. is displaying all the classic signs of a domestic abuser: isolating Lolita, forbidding her to have contact with others outside of his watch, extreme jealousy, efforts to convince her that she has nowhere to turn but to him, increasing violence. One thing that particularly disturbs me about this is that one of the promo quotes on the back of the copy I have is, “The only convincing love story of our century. –Vanity Fair,” which I very much hope was just meant to make the reviewer seem edgy, because there is nothing about this story that I can see that pertains to love at all. Obsession and abuse, yes; love, no.

I do find it kind of interesting that I have so little interest in Lolita herself. It occurred to me that if the book had been written from her perspective and I was still 10-13, I might find it fascinating, because I did go through the typical pre-adolescent girl phase of reading “real life drama” kinds of books, about protagonist girls who had been kidnapped, etc. However, Lolita, as rendered through the narrator’s eyes, is two-dimensional, a detached, bratty, strange sexpot. The only indication we ever get that she might have her own feelings and opinions about this two-year interlude of her life, that it might truly be affecting her, is the narrator’s rather offhand mention that she cried every night. (At which point one asks, “Why did this not concern you, you horrible, selfish man?”) Oh, yes, and of course his several frustrated mentions that she frequently told him to leave her alone, which he saw as merely being contrary. Ugh.

I wonder, do male and female readers of this book have substantially different reactions to it? I never read it for a class, so I don’t have a good impression of this.

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Day 7 (delayed final recording of thoughts upon finishing the book)

Okay, I finished Lolita over the weekend. Alas, I think my final conclusion is that it felt very much like reading something for a school assignment. I didn’t enjoy the story, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out why people seem to have liked it so much for so long. I still don’t get it.

It was a little relieving to find the narrator at least admit that he didn’t ever care about any of Lolita’s thoughts or opinions during their time together. Of course, I didn’t really get the impression that he would have necessarily changed that if he had the chance to do it again. I also found it interesting that his reaction to the grown-up Lolita was not nearly as negative as he had anticipated. I am still confused about why people seem to want to refer to this novel as a great love story, though. It’s entirely one-sided and surface-based.

In the last 50 pages or so, I was starting to feel a little hopeful that I would understand the appeal, but the final murder scene went back to being something out of a surrealist nightmare.

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Conclusions

Given Mike’s preliminary responses to the book I recommended for him when he responded to my final plea to help me understand what the heck it is that people actually like about Lolita (short answer: the prose), one might begin to wonder how we ever manage to communicate with each other at all. We appear to have done spectacularly bad jobs at picking books for the other person that the other person would actually enjoy. However, it was an interesting experiment and has given us a lot of meta-reading topics to talk about. Once I figure out the best way to distill these ideas for the general audience of people who haven’t been reading these two particular books and listening to our conversation, I’ll try to post them. Perhaps Mike will blog his impressions of my book, too.

Thanks to the comment Mike left on my original post, I now understand where the initial list came from (a BBC reader poll to determine Britain’s favorite book.) This explains some of the weird inconsistencies in the list, such as why some single books are listed in addition to a series that includes said single book, etc. However, I also noticed that the list as it shows up on the BBC today (Feb. 20) is rather different that the list that was getting used on Facebook. Primarily because I score a lot higher on the updated list, I’m redoing it below.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE. (I’m also adding ‘-’ to ones I hated now.)
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien – X+ (in Spanish, strangely)
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen – X+
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman – X- (I’m checking this as read now, because I did read the first one, just hated it and refused to go further)
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams – X+
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling – X+
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee – X
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne – X+
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis – X (in English & Spanish)
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë – X+
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë – (x – got halfway and couldn’t take it anymore)
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (? – can’t remember if I actually read it or not)
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott – X+
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres – X
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling – X+
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling – X+
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling – X+
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien – X
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck – X-
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – X+
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez – X (in Spanish)
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert – *
40. Emma, Jane Austen – (x – only halfway)
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery – X++
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald – X-
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell – X
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian – X
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett – X+
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth – * (started it)
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell – X (although I may well have read a children’s version rather than the real one)
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden – X+
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett – X++
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – X++
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett – X+
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding – X–
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett – X+
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist – X+
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel – X
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett – X+
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Total: 33, 3 more only partly

Yes, I confess, I am cross-posting this from a Facebook meme. I have been assimilated. Please stop gloating. Anyway, the BBC at some point put up a list of 100 books (best of all time? that everyone should read? I’m not sure.) Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X (in Spanish, strangely)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible -parts
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (half, and then I got sick of it)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (read the first one, hated it, did not read the other two)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read some of them)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
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
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen (read about half, then decided I had overdosed on Austen in too short a time)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X (English and Spanish)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X+
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X (in Spanish)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert *
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth* (started it)
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X+
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
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
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
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
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
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 (some of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (read part of it in German)
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I’ve read 27, not counting the ones I only read part of (6 more).

Given that 9 of them were for school, I really fail to understand how anyone could have graduated from 12th grade having only read 6. I probably would have read even more of them for school if I hadn’t had a change of English teachers in the middle of 11th grade. I was also having an issue remembering which ones of some of the classics I had actually read vs. having seen the movie version multiple times, and which I had both read and seen. I tried to stay as honest as possible.

Since I don’t actually ever get around to talking about the books I’ve been reading on this blog very often, I figured I’d take a moment to look back over this year in books. For handy reference, note that I do regularly update the Reading page of this site, so if you’re ever curious what I’m reading at the moment, you may click on that stylish and convenient tabby thing up at the top. (My Goodreads account gets updated far less frequently, for those of you there.)

Some quick stats:

• I read exactly 100 books Jan-Dec 2008! Go me. I wasn’t even trying, that’s just how it turned out. I fear this will make me all self-conscious about ending up with a significant number in 2009 as well, but for now I am content with this being an inadvertent cool thing I did.
• 25 of these books were re-reads. I suspect 2009 will have quite a few as well, since my nearest library closed for 18 months of renovation back in November. Fortunately, my standard rule has been to only buy fiction that I think I’ll read again later, so I’ll be able to survive.
• 5 were graphic novels, so you can discount those as “real” books if you want, but I’ll insist that Fables and Strangers in Paradise have both literary and artistic merit, so they’re staying. (The two Iron Empires books that I read I didn’t find that great, but if I’m counting the others, they have to count, too.)
• Only 2 3! (found another one) were nonfiction, because my attention span shrank this year, what with all the house-buying and fixing and wedding-planning and stuff. I have several more nonfiction things that I bought when I was going through an overly optimistic Amazon spree, so maybe this year will see more reading in this category.
• 52 were fantasy, sci-fi, or some other form of speculative fiction.
• 36 were mysteries, most of them from series.
• 3 were “other” fiction, of which two were historical fiction, two dealt were set in Japan, and two had some paranormal elements but not enough to qualify as sci-fi. (Challenge: Draw a Venn diagram to see how these overlap. No one book contained all three elements.)

This was a pretty successful year as far as finding new authors/series to read went. New (to me) ones this year:

• Lisa See’s lesser known 3-book mystery series (Flower Net, The Interior, Dragon Bones) (Technically, I think I first discovered this in 2007, but I read 2/3 of it in 2008, so I’m counting it.)
• Naomi Hirahara’s Mas Arai mysteries, which has a lot of really interesting information and insight into Japanese-American culture in California. (Also, she writes monthly serials, linked on her website.)
• CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series, which I really should have started reading years ago, because it is awesome. It also had the weird side-effect of taking over my brain while I was reading, so I had some interesting dreams. I still have 4 more to go!
• Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series* kept me up late finishing each book, because I always managed to hit the really exciting plot points just before bed. Can’t wait for the next one!
• CE Murphy’s Negotiator trilogy* was not quite as fun as Briggs, but still solid and enjoyable.
• Stephen Woodworth’s Through Violet Eyes* was interesting enough to get me to order the rest of the series from Amazon, so we’ll see if it lives up to its promise.
• The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, was a very engrossing book, which I reviewed over at Geek Buffet, though I feel I should now add the caveat that if you don’t have a lot of time to read it all at once, you might not like it as much, because it’s much easier to keep all the plot threads straight if you read it straight through.
• The Teahouse Fire, by Ellis Avery, was a fascinating piece of historical fiction that worked in details about the beginning of the Meiji period in Japan, tea ceremony, and the main character was a foreigner learning to fit in in Japan, so I was more or less destined to like it. I talked about it in my tea ceremony post.

*All three of the ones with stars I found by trolling the backlog of Charles de Lint’s book reviews from Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. I’ve had pretty good luck with his column so far!

And of course, there were a couple of notable new books from authors I already loved:

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, which is again one of those books you really have to be able to read all the way through, and I found utterly fascinating. It took up 3 whole days of our honeymoon. It ties together a lot of the ideas Stephenson has been exploring in his past books, particularly in the Baroque Cycle, but also a bit in his earlier books, and it made me an enormously happy geek. Also, it has a fun website that even has bits of music that the monk-like characters might have sung. (That will make a lot more sense if you’ve read the book, but if you have read it, it’s a great detail.)
• Sunshine, by Robin McKinley, which wasn’t actually newly published this year, but was new to me this year. Again, I don’t know why I didn’t read it sooner. I seem to like pretty much all of McKinley’s original stuff (as opposed to her fairy tale retellings, which I can take or leave.)

Looking back at the list, I don’t see any books that I didn’t enjoy reading, although in honesty, if I didn’t finish the book, it didn’t make the list. However, there were a couple of books I didn’t like as much as I thought I would.

• Feast of Souls, by CS Friedman. It was a book I picked up on a whim before I went to China, just so I’d have something to read. I like most of Friedman’s stuff, and this one was okay, but it was kind of dark and sometimes depressing, so I’m not sure if I’ll follow up with the next book in the series. That said, it does have an interestingly conflicted system of magic that I suspect they’re going to have to find a way to fix as part of the plot, so… maybe I will.
• Murakami’s After Dark was possibly my least favorite thing by him that I’ve read, in part because it was so light. The whole thing read like it was meant to be directions for a movie shoot, in that there was a lot of scene and soundtrack description, but not a lot of plot. It’s certainly a fast read, though, which turned out not to be what I was looking for at the time.
• An Evil Guest, by Gene Wolfe. I was looking forward to this one a great deal, having read a review that said it was like a noir detective novel set in a Lovecraftian world, but it turned out to have been written from the less interesting character’s point of view, in my opinion, so I ended up being disappointed that it was not nearly as interesting as it could have been.

Here’s to more reading in 2009!

Via k8 at Harmonia’s Necklace, I came upon a meme that, despite my usual apathy toward memes, I simply must participate in. The explanation:

This is a list of the top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Rules: Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

k8 added another rule, wherein she added an asterisk for books she read on her own and then later read for school. We’ll see how often I actually need that one. I’ll probably end up with more combinations of underlined and italicized books that I was supposed to read for school and never actually did beyond the first page.

Find the list below the fold, if you’re coming from the front page, since I’m not sure everyone will be quite as interested in the full list of 100+ as I am.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (In Spanish)
Wuthering Heights (It’s the same book two times, and both of them depressing)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (I think we only read an excerpt in class)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera (I was in middle school; it was boring)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (I really hate the excess punctuation of the writing from this time period)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons (I was extremely bored and trapped in Taiwan)
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (I read this for work, does it get underlined?)
Dune
The Prince (We read an excerpt for class)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (I was evaluating it for using in an ESL class)
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon (I caught the flu while reading this, and it gave me horrible nightmares)
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (In Spanish!)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

This past Saturday, I filled in for one of my coworkers as the narrator (or commentator, as they seem to have listed me in the program) for a tea ceremony demonstration. Our department cosponsors this event with the university gardens every year in honor of the height of cherry blossom season. The ladies from the Triangle Chanoyu society did the demonstration and prepared the tea for tasting afterward.

Because I hadn’t really seen a tea ceremony with an explanation of what I was seeing before, I was given a script written by the person who normally does the commentary for the group. Since she does it a lot, the script was full of options and suggestions for what to say, but no exact directions. Fortunately, my coworker and I were able to go to another demonstration the week before for another college’s culture class. After that, I was able to rewrite the script with precise instructions to myself about what to say when. (The tea ladies later told me that they’re going to keep it for next time, too.)

The demonstration went very well. Despite the rainy weather, there was good attendance, and even the microphone I had to use worked on the first try! First, the ladies of the chanoyu society did a demonstration of the thin tea, the final portion of a full tea ceremony, for which a sweet and whisked matcha is served. One person was designated as the host, to prepare the tea. Two others were acting as guests, and as I said in my narration, they also have an important part of the ceremony, in that they must express the proper appreciation of the host’s efforts in choosing the art or flower in the tokonoma (presentation alcove), the tea bowl, tea container, and tea scoop. After the tea has been drunk, it is the first guest’s role to ask about the tea container and tea scoop, which have usually been made by descendants of very old tea artisan families. The tea scoop in particular is given a poetic name by a tea master, and it can be revealed at this point.

The second part of the demonstration was when volunteers were called up to be guests. As a special treat for this occasion, a visiting chanoyu student from Japan acted as the host this time, and it turns out that she studies a different school’s style. There truly were a great many differences in the movements that she made, such as the way she folded her tea cloth to clean the implements, and the way she used the dipper to pour water into the bowl. At the very end, all the ladies came out together to be recognized and answer audience questions.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to be quite so nervous about feeling unprepared. In one of those strange twists of synchronicity, I’d recently read two books about tea ceremony culture and history.

The first one was given to me by a teacher I worked with in Japan, but I didn’t pick it up again and read it all the way through until this January. The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura, was originally written in 1906. Interestingly, it was originally written in English while Okakura was living in Boston, specifically as an effort to help Westerners understand Japanese culture. This remains an interesting perspective for such a book today, but it was pretty much unheard of in that time. Okakura’s writing is excellent and clear, and while he doesn’t delve too incredibly deeply into the history and philosophy of tea, nor really describe all the aspects of the tea ceremony itself, he does provide an overview to whet the appetite. Instead, he spends most of his time trying to give his unfamiliar readers the beginnings of an understanding of the cultural aspects of tea ceremony, including the architecture of the tea house and the particular style of ikebana flower arranging used to decorate the tokonoma.

The second book I read I found incidentally in the bookstore the day before I went to see the first demonstration. The Teahouse Fire, by Ellis Avery, is a fictional story set at the turn of the Meiji Era in the city that would soon become known as Kyoto. The narrator, Aurelia, is a young girl at the beginning of the book, recently orphaned and sent to Japan with her missionary uncle as a servant. On their first night in Miyako (Kyoto), the mission house catches fire. Aurelia runs away, and eventually falls asleep in a small building in someone’s back yard. It turns out to be the tea house of one of Kyoto’s preeminent tea families, the Shins. Aurelia is found by the daughter of the house, who convinces her father to take Aurelia in as a maid. (Strangely, because no foreigners were technically allowed in Miyako at this point in history, and because Aurelia had pale skin, black hair, and dark eyes, everyone assumes that she is actually Japanese, but somewhat stupid, because she doesn’t speak properly.)

In this manner, Aurelia grows up with an inside view into the life of a tea family at a very precarious point in their history. The new emperor is determined to make Japan more modern, so he cuts nearly all funding for the traditional arts that had previously relied on imperial and noble patronage. From the author’s essay about the writing of the book, I now know that the other heroine of the book, Aurelia’s mistress, Yukako Shin, was a real historical figure, who did indeed rescue the art of tea from fading into obscurity by convincing the new emperor’s ministers to include tea ceremony lessons in girls’ newly mandated education. (And this is how I knew how to answer the audience question at the end about why tea used to only be practiced by men, but is now almost always practiced by women. There’s also a lot of incidental knowledge to be picked up about the different parts of the tea ceremony itself.) Besides the desire to follow Aurelia and Yukako’s story, I was fascinated to read something set in this part of Meiji society. So much of what I knew of previously was from the perspective of Westerners wishing to take advantage of the opening of Japan, or more related to military and political implications of the societal changes (ex: The Last Samurai, etc.) Having Aurelia narrate allows the reader to see events from the perspective of a person with an outsider’s understanding of what’s going on, but with an insider’s privileged point of view.

Both books are highly recommended, and if you ever have a chance to participate in a tea ceremony, you should!

Synchronicity can be so weird. Less than a day after discussing how different the experiences of foreign men in Japan are from those of foreign women, I came across this passage in Kickboxing Geishas:

The truth is that in many ways, it was my own loneliness that drove me to write this book. Before I went to Japan, I heard a million stories about how every night my Japanese colleagues would take me out drinking, how I would be forced to drink whisky after whisky, and how they would try to test my mettle by having me eat blowfish (a fatally poisonous dish, if not prepared correctly). It never occurred to me that these stories were told to me by men. A sign, I guess, to how equal I feel in my American workplace. But when I got to Japan, I discovered that the Japanese men I met during the course of my workday did not invite me drinking, to hostess clubs, out for blowfish. I spent each night alone.

-Chambers, 267

And this is true, even if you aren’t in the business/journalism world that she was in. Even in education, which at the upper levels, especially senior high, where I was teaching, is hugely dominated by male teachers, female ALTs (Asst. Language Teachers) end up having very different experiences than male ALTs. I personally didn’t mind all that much, being an introvert who needs her downtime, but it can be very isolating. The male teachers don’t know what to talk to you about outside of work; the few female teachers there are need to go home to their families.

What’s more, there is an assumption that foreign males arrive in Japan without many basic living skills, such as how to do laundry or cook. They are often painstakingly instructed in these things, sometimes taken under the wing of a female teacher or someone’s wife for cooking lessons. Foreign women conversely are expected to know how to do these things on their own. The women I did know who ended up with Japanese women friends usually got there through private language partners found outside of school entirely.

I’m not saying that we were excluded on purpose. If anything, I was treated like a Japanese woman in the workplace, in that it was expected I would have things to do outside of work, and I was grateful for it. One of my friends there was working for an architecture firm in Tokyo, and his life completely revolved around work, to the point that the only reason he was allowed to leave the office before midnight was because he lived on a train line that shut down for the night at a certain time, and he had to catch it. But foreign women working in Japan rarely get the same entrée into what is considered the typical Japanese working world, complete with required nightlife. Chambers’ point that she had never considered that the stories told to her beforehand were all from men is quite telling and very accurate.

I think it’s a point that is so often overlooked, even by ex-pats who are living there. Certainly amongst JETs, there is a mantra of, “Everyone’s situation is different,” meant to remind us all that there’s not much point being jealous or pitying when we hear about other JETs’ schools and co-teachers, because the JET experience varies so much. (There’s even an online comic called “esid” about this, but it’s on such a hideous page, I’m not linking to it.) Because I expected the differences, I didn’t really think too much about how, for example, my friend Richard’s experiences may have been different from mine, not just because he was at a different school, but because he was male.

I started thinking about it just a couple of months ago, though, after reading Bruce Feiler’s Learning to Bow (1992), which recounts his experiences teaching in Japan, probably with the JET program, although he never names it. Given that he was there more than 10 years before I was, one of my initial impressions was that some of the things he talked about were a little dated, but overall, his portrayal of life as a teacher in a Japanese school was pretty good. But as I read and thought about it more, I also saw distinct differences in his experience that I knew were due to his being male. (As an immediate and obvious example, the book opens with him getting naked with his colleagues at an onsen and then bonding over all the ensuing comments and getting drunk. I went to an onsen about mid-way through my time there, but all my female colleagues, none of whom were English teachers, did what all Japanese woman at onsen do, and basically ignored the fact that we were naked. Nor did we get drunk.)

I think this is why, in many ways, I felt like Kickboxing Geishas was telling my story. It was talking more about the side of Japan that I had experienced, despite the fact that it concentrated on the business community rather than education (and referred to Sendai as a small rice-farming community, despite the fact that it’s the largest city between Tokyo and Sapporo.) I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Read more of the musings reading this book inspired in these posts:

On the Pervasiveness of Sumimasen
What makes a role model?
On the Opinions of Celebrities

I just came across another bit in Kickboxing Geishas that caught my attention. In a later conversation with a Japanese woman about women in the modern workplace, the subject circles back around to what appears to be one of Chambers’ favored topics: role models. The woman she is talking to expresses some dissatisfaction with the famous Japanese female celebrities available.

I ask Kay about her role models. She says that while she finds the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Crown Princess Masako to be an intriguing figure, ultimately, “Masako is too high. Her starting point is too different from mine for me to admire her.” … She also mentions two Japanese actresses: Nanoko Hitoshima and Hitomi Korker. Both women are married with children, and as such, they are seen as examples of how you can balance motherhood and a career. “They are beautiful, even moments after labor,” Kay says, mimicking the media’s breathless reportage of these actresses’ lives. “The mass media wants to establish their status as the role models. And they are nice, but they are not my role models.” She says, in general, she is disappointed by Japanese celebrities. “When they are young, they express strong opinions about many things,” she says. “Suddenly, when they get popular and are being handled by producers and agents and marketers, they have nothing to say.”

-Chambers, 205 (emphasis mine)

The thing that struck me about that last bit was the way it contrasts so much with what one of my Japanese students at MSU once said on his blog, in a review of Green Day’s CD American Idiot:

My favorite musician is greenday,and I like “American idiot”, but I could’nt understand why they criticize for their country. Though I dont grasp all meanings of word, they sing ○○○○ America. In Japan they don’t use phrases like that despite they don’t have patriotism to their coutry.

I think the reason why they criticize their country is they have been fond of irony recentry. The very popular documetary movie “bowring for columbine” effected on their recent irony. At the case of Greenday’s song, it’s not serious, but it’s kidding. It is similar to black joke, but is it allowed to all American people? I don’t think so, because some of them must feel uncomfortable. At the case of Japan, one musician arranged our national anthem, but his CD does’nt appear CD shop, because it’s a not good things.Goverment avoided that its tiny problem become a big one in my opinion.I think if you want to occor revolution, become a politician!

I think it’s not good things to criticize his country by music, because it can’t raise something. It’s just kidding. The music like “American idiot” can gather everyone’s interest, but o the other hand it makes some people uncomfortable.

Takashi was such a good student. I wonder what he’s doing now.