mid-year review

I thought I'd do a little mid-year review of the books I've read to date.

Amazing: 2666 (Bolaño), Ghosts (Cesar Aira), Last Evenings on Earth (Bolaño), La casa verde (Mario Vargas Llosa), El juguete rabioso (Roberto Arlt), A Mercy (Toni Morisson), The Seven Madmen (Roberto Arlt), Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates), Los Rios Profundos (José Maria Arguedas), The Ministry of Special Cases (Nathan Englander)

Good: Distant Star (Bolaño), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Anne Tyler), The Wild Palms (William Faulkner), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell), By Night in Chile (Bolaño), Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, The Easter Parade (Richard Yates), Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño)

Trippy, Need to Reread: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became a Nun (Cesar Aira), The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), Los adioses (Onetti), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)

Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

Good Non-fiction: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Drew Gilpin Faust), True Crime: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics (Michael McCaughan), When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron), Deep Economy (Bill McKibben), The Meaning of Life (Terry Eagleton), Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Jon Lee Anderson), Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin), First Stop in the New World (David Lida)

Comics: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Alan Moore), The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller), Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (Scott McCloud), Fables Volume 1: Legends in Exile (Bill Willingham)

Ultimate Comfort Food: Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Comfort Food (Sort of Bad But You Enjoy it Tremendously Despite Yourself): Deaf Sentence (David Lodge), Pilgrims (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Okay, I Guess... Sort of Boring, Actually: Banker to the Poor (Muhammed Yunus), Home Truths (David Lodge), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)

Just plain bad: Thirteen Moons (Charles Frazier), Dry (Augusten Burroughs), The Price of Fire (Benjamin Dangl), The Last Full Measure (Jeff Shaara)

Re-read: Siddhartha (Herman Hesse), The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe (Anne Tyler), Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)

I Can't Believe It Took Me This Long to Re-read This After 6th Grade When I Obviously Didn't Get It. Amazing Read: Lolita (Nabokov)

Read in English after having first read it in Spanish. Amazing Read: Artificial Respiration (Ricardo Piglia), Don Quixote (Cervantes, Edith Grossman translation)

Read in the Boys & Girls Club during brief, rare intervals of desperately snatched peace: The Tales of Beedle the Bard (J.K. Rowling)

Couldn't/Didn't Finish: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Barefoot Gen (Keiji Nakazawa), Dreams from my Father (Barack Obama), The Means of Reproduction (Michelle Goldberg)

Yeesh.

More Island Time

You're packing your bag for that other desert island—the one with no electricity—what 5 books do you take with you?

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner -- it's hard to imagine myself going somewhere long term without taking this book with me. I've read it so many times though, that I'm tempted to just take Absalom, Absalom! instead.
Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth -- I could reread this book again and again and always discover something new. Extraordinarily powerful re: the truth of human nature. Great historical fiction. Bonus points for being long.
Therapy by David Lodge -- the ultimate comfort food, the book I can reread again and again and again and it will still make me laugh. Melissa Banks' The Wonder Spot is a very close second.
Ulysses by James Joyce -- a desert island would be the perfect chance to actually finish this thing.
Hamlet -- to read aloud to myself.

I really really wanna put Cien Años de Soledad but again, read it so many times... and what about Onetti? Most of his stuff is so short though. OH OH a desert island would be the perfect opportunity to read *every* piece in the *complete* works of Borges! (poetry, essays, letters... everything. And, and, and--and Orwell! And Kafka! Oh, books.

Too many books...

It's reached the point where I now feel just plain overwhelmed. I went on a holds-placing frenzy, and now as a result I have so many books littered in the hallway of our just moved-into house that I feel overwhelmed and at a loss of where to start. I've reacted by smuggling home children's books from the Learning Center at the B&G Club, the Domain of which I count myself as Master and Overlord (today one of the other part-time staff said that the chick who previously had my job lasted a week, before leaving in tears... it made me feel pleased as punch, there on my knees, picking up the scattered Uno cards). This week I've devoured many childhood favorites: "The Boxcar Children," "By the Shores of Silver Lake," "Ramona the Pest," "Anastasia's Chosen Career," "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil something-or-other," 'Bridge to Terabithia," "Bunnicula" (a brilliant novel--I read this in 1st grade, apparently it's 6th grade reading level... daymn, was I smart stuff--I feel like Greg in Tori's "Pretty Good Year" just thinking about it, they say you were something in those formative years, hold onto noting as fast as you can.

Despite this impressive-sounding list, sadly enough, everything else sits untouched and unread. The enormous Salman Rushdie book I already know I should return, because there's no way I'm ever going to read it. "Lolita" and "Ulysses," the two main competetiors for the Why Haven't You Read This In Full Yet?! Feel Ashamed category (these two are the others on this shameful list. To be fair, I read "Lolita" in sixth grade, it made a nice wooshing sound as most of its literary value and merit flew straight over my head). Faulkner's "The Wild Palms." A big pile of other random books I'm not even going to list because I know there's no way I'm going to have time for them so they're just going to end up getting returned. And god knows what other holds-arrival notification e-mails will be sitting in my inbox tomorrow.

It's not that I haven't been reading, though. I read Onetti's "Los adioses" in English (Balderston translation), a weird and truly wonderful novella about a basketball player with tuberculosis. My goodreads account claims I'm reading "Pride & Prejudice", which I did, for about ten minutes, back wen I was sick as a dog on its deathbed over the weekend with a flu so bad that even my eyes hurt, making even reading difficult (the ultimate sickbed activity). "P&P" is one of those books I've started 10 times but have never made it past the 50-page mark... now that I've seen the wonderful TV series, I'm wondering if it may be time to just give up the ghost, say "I Do Not Care for Jane Austen" (as opposed to what I really think, which is that Jane Austen really does just sucks).

So basically I think I'm going to tackle "Rios profundos" next, another book recommended to me back in the day by my advisor, mostly because I really miss reading in Spanish, and because I was helping Corey with his Spanish homework the other day, and was annoyed by how many times I had to confess that I wasn't exactly sure of the words for "blender" or "walnut" and had to shamefully retreat to an online dictionary. I have the Spanish version, checked out very kindly by Corey from the PSU library (the absence of Summit in my life has by far been the only sad thing about not being a student anymore).

And then what? I had an epic plan there for a while to read "Ulysses" and Homer's "Odyssey" (the Fagles translation) at the same time, alternating between chapters. I don't know how into that plan I am anymore; it feels a little gimmicky--plus those are damn heavy books, and it'd be super lame to carry them around in my everything-but-the-kitchen-sink backpack all day). Who know? I'll worry about it then, I guess!

One small yet significant (to me at least!) success story is that the books I own are proudly stacked and shelved. Nothing makes me feel more at peace or at home than a shelf full of books. It's the very first thing I did when we moved in, even before putting away my clothes. Here is the first shelf:
The Corrections
Sacred Hunger
Fight Club
Staying ALive- Real Poems for Unreal Times
The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (huge green Bible-sized compilation from CTY days)
The Art of the Tale
Life of Pi
Respiracion artificial (stolen from Argentinian in Ecuador--I have officially become a person who borrowed a book and never returned it)
The Ruins
The Duchess (Mom's)
La muerte de Artemio Cruz
El Matadero
The Safety of Objects
Cien Anos de Soledad (Corey reading this one right now and greatly enjoying it!)
Asi que pasen cinco anos
Ariel
The years of Rice and Salt (I had two copies of this--why?)
The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
Sophie's World
The Woman Warrior (taken from free box at Wesleyan)
Se's Come Undone
How Far Can You Go? (<3 David Lodge)
Neverwhere
Kafka's Complete Short Stories (the typeface in this book is so bad that a ton of periods are missing... so in sixth grade or something I went through and replaced a lot of them with a pen. It makes reading the stories so annoying and distracting that I think I am just going to have to buy a new copy)
Extremely Loud and Everything Close
Everything is Illuminated

There is definitely a story behind every book purchased, about the time in your life when you read it, and so on...

LAST DAY IN QUITO!

I just printed out 984389238402 maps in order to help myself figure out how to navigate around my strange new neighborhood of Milwaukie, especially to and from interview sites.

To-do today: turn in mushroom info poster/sheet to Jungal Tours, trip to market to pick up last minute gifts, and then maybe if we´re ambitious (probably not) a trip to the dentist. Home to pack up the stray things lying around the house, such as toothbrush, pajama pants, etc. Then we need to set the alarm for 4AM in order to be at the airport two hours in advance for our flight (6.45 AM = FAIL)

I´m afraid of going back to the States. I´m afraid of having no health care and media saturation. Well, we have a return ticket in January, I guess.

The thunderous African music orchestra playing on the screen behind me has had the extra effect of making me especially jumpy and jittery.

I had a really good night tonight!

I think the whole feeling-kind-of-down after graduation thing has a lot to do with just learning how to manage a lot of free time, something I've never been very good at. It's important to remember that this is my Vacation! and my Time Off! and lord knows when I'll have this kind of free time just to read and loaf around again. Here are some things that have made me very happy in the past week since I've returned from Connecticut:

- First Thursday with Tanya (graduate student from Corey's lab) and her husband, this amazing incredibly funny guy from Turkey who works as a professional photographer. Dinner with them at the Virginia Cafe and walking around visiting the different art galleries was really fun. It was really nice to be out and social with so-called "grown-up" people as opposed to just other college students, i.e. Reedies.
- checking out books about liberation theology from the county library and writing down graduate schools. Today, Comparative Literature, tomorrow, Creative Writing! (hey, I've only been out of school for three weeks, a girl can dream...)
- finished and submitted application for Americorps position with SE Works for the hoo-hah of it. I was upset about all the typos in my outgoing e-mail but got a very friendly-souding follow-up from them so I don't think that's a problem.
- Reading Down and Out in Paris and London and a collection of interviews with Portland's homeless in preparation for the Plunge. Very interesting. Oh, that Orwell.
- Lauren's birthday party on Friday! She's basically my primary friend left in the Portland area now, besides Eira... Also going to the coast this Saturday this Corey: one of the professors from the biology department at PSU has a house there and is going to host a huge clam bake. We're bringing our tent and sleeping bags and plan to camp out on the sand. I also want to watch at least one NBA playoff game with my brother, who is normally so busy with classes, hopefully Sunday...
- Long walk with Corey on Tuesday down Springwater trail, looking for mushrooms, finding mainly LBMs (little brown mushrooms) on people's lawns. The crazy-looking petal-shaped mushroom I found a couple of days ago which I got really excited about because Corey couldn't identify it turned out of to be a lichen. Oh, well. We wandered for ages and ended up on Milwaukee and at sushi at that place on Bybee that always has a really long line. BEST SUSHI I've ever had in my life. I'll definitely have to take my parents there, if/when/who knows they move here.

Corey just drank just gin by accident instead of water. "It kind of tasted like a pop tart," he says. I really want to go to bed...
Trying to keep in mind main message of book "Man's Search For Meaning," or at least the main message I remember from the concentration camp bits (I didn't really read the logotherapy bits, wasn't interested): we can't choose what happens to us, but we can always choose what attitude we want to adopt in face of what happens to us...

monkey

I turned in my thesis around noon-thirty last Friday. Much Renn Fayre ridiculousness ensued.


At Thesis Parade, at which I was congratulated via being showered by champagne. I was also frequently asked by people with brows furrowed by concern how I was doing. I hadn't slept in two days, hence the pale, waifish complexion.

Standing in line at The Feast on Saturday afternoon.


Eating delicious meat, smoked by men who also took a picture of Corey's Epic Mushroom shirt, fellow mushroom hunters and lovers themselves.





Now it's a matter of finishing three papers, editing the typos and getting the thesis printed and bound. Then it'll be the end of thesis-tagged posts. Some days I feel like my thesis turned out particularly well, other days I feel like there are definitely some parts I wish I had more time to work on and flesh out. I think this is best exemplified by the nightmare I had two days before my orals, in which the corpse from "A Rose For Emily" came back to life and was chasing me. Oh, well. What work is ever truly finished, anyway? I don't know what I'm going to have anxiety-related dreams about once I graduate (as in "oh no my paper was acutally due today!" horror). Everyone has assured me that I will think of something.

Here is a list of books I want to read:
The Botany of Desire (Michael Pollan) (in the middle of this right now. Very interesting. One of the earlier books by the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma)
The Mapmaker's Wife (Robert Whitaker) (recommended to me by my mom. A based-on-history novel about Ecuador. Ecaudor! Must read so many books between now and later about Ecuador!)
Mycelium Running (Paul Stamets) (highly recommended by Corey. The subtitle basically says it all: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Mushrooms! Must read so many books between now and later about mushrooms!)

I might as well start with those and move on from there. Now if only I could summon up the willpower and energy to get those papers finished and officially bring my Reed career to a close......

things that I like, and that I may be able to do with my life

- freelance journalism in Latin America
- creative writing MFA at U of O, University of East Anglia or another university
- getting a TEFL certificate
- teaching literature at a high school or university leavel
- teaching English
- teaching Spanish
- leading groups of teenagers around on service project trips a la Los Embajadores
- coordinationg service project experiences
- illigal immigration and border issuess
- learning more about microfinance and fieldwork a la Kiva
- studying more Onetti in Uruguay or Argentina
- School For International Training Social Justice masters in Vermont
- Peace Corps (blech)
- AmeriCorps
- Teach for America
- New Orleans
- Teaching fellowship in Spain
- apply for a Fullbright
- write a novel!