 Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle is our bookclub’s pick for May. I had already finished out April
selection (Lolita) so I figured I might as well get started on it.
The book took me three days to read. It’s the memoir of Jeannette’s
unbelievable childhood. Parts of it made me want to cry, parts of it
made me cringe. I was amazed at how intelligent both her parents
seemed and yet how little they cared about the welfare and health of
their children. The obviously did love their kids but it’s amazing
that children can be brought up this way in the US and nothing is
done about it. It’s a well-written memoir and will make you thankful
for your childhood and family.
It’s a good read for when you need to keep your life in perspective.
 Elizabeth Gilbert’s
fantastic memoir was exactly what I needed to read. Eat,
Pray, Love : One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India
and Indonesia is a very quick read, but don’t let it’s humorous
tone fool you. It’s a book that makes you look into your own soul and
think about the life you’re living. At least, it did for me. I loved
her writing. It never got in the way of the story. I loved the way
she told her very sad story with great humor so that you never felt
sorry for her. I felt like the author was instantly likable. I loved
all three sections and all the characters in the book. I’ve never had
an interest in traveling to India or Indonesia (I wasn’t against the
idea just never felt compelled to go) but now I would love to. I am
hoping to go back to practicing yoga and I truly think that sitting
quietly and smiling for an hour each day may change my life for the
better. Looking deep into myself is something I should do regularly.
But now I am just blabbing.
There are many articles about this book all over the net. I had never
heard of it until my friend Nicole read it and recommended it. I read
it in a few days and loved every single moment of it. It’s not for
everyone (especially if you’re not spiritual at all) but it’s quite a
marvelous book for some people. Including me.
With this little entry, we finally catch up to all the books I’ve
read this year so far. I’m currently reading another memoir “The
Glass Castle” which, so far, is great. With the exception of Lolita,
this has so far been a year of great books. I hope to keep it up.
 After finishing the
dreadful Lolita, I had to cleanse myself with a different book
immediately. Two of the women in my reading club had just finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and
they both loved it. I borrowed it from my friend Nicole and started
reading it Sunday morning. My day was relatively full. I had a shoot
at 7:15am and had to process all the photos, feed David’s meals,
nurse him for his naps, play with him, work on the site and respond to the tons of emails
sitting in my inbox. I started the novel and ended up doing nothing
but reading. By, 10:30pm, I had finished the novel (and done all the
necessary tasks of the day including processing my photos.)
This novel was wonderful. Light but not trivial read. Three-
dimensional characters and a completely character-driven story. I
learned a lot about Chinese culture I didn’t know and confirmed some
of the sad things I did know. I enjoyed every page of it and it was
exactly what I needed after Lolita.
 I have met many book-lovers
over the years. Several of them, upon learning of my passion about
books, have recommended that I read Lolita.
I knew the premise of the book and refused to read it out of
principle. “But it’s literature, it’s Nabokov.” I heard so many
arguments, but I still refused to read it.
A few weeks ago, my bookclub met and we were told that the Mark Twain
book we’d picked for April was dreadful and decided to switch it. I
recommended we read Lolita. None of us were too thrilled about the
prospect but we all felt that it was a book we had to read before we
died. And now that were were in our 30s, and “mature,” we might as
well get to it. Semi-reluctantly, we all agreed to pick it as our
April book.
Knowing it would be a form of torture, I bought and started the book
immediately. The text was much less dense than I had imagined and the
story moved relatively quickly. There were some interesting bits here
and there and the writing was quite impeccable. But that’s it.
I wish I could say all those people were right and I was wrong. I
wish I could say I totally changed my mind on it and it was
phenomenal. The truth is, I could never get past the child-
molestation. I could never get past what a disgusting (and I find
that to be the very perfect fit adjective in this case) man he was.
There was no second in which I could relate to him or empathize.
Thank God I don’t have a daughter, I might have hated it even more.
There was no room for my pity in the character. No explanation why he
might have become such a despicable person. Nothing that spoke to me
in a way that allowed me to enjoy the book, the story and the people.
I ask you, if you’re one of those “Lolita is amazing” people:
please tell me what I missed? Why is this book such a must-read?
 When I was telling my friend
Michelle that most of the books I read last year sucked, she
recommended The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson
McCullers. For some reason, I let the book sit for weeks before I
picked it up. I would look at the cover and keep putting off reading
it. I thought it was going to be really depressing and I wasn’t in
the mood. Once I did pick it up, I couldn’t put it down. I loved
every minute of it. I loved the characters, I loved how intricately
their lives were intertwined yet so very isolated. I loved how they
all felt close to Singer and yet they knew nothing about him. It was
a really enjoyable read and I am glad I finally did actually pick it
up. Both this one and The Solace of Leaving early were Michelle’s
recommendations. Now I’m going to have to beg for more.
 I can’t decide how I feel
about Yukio Mishima’s Temple
of the Golden Pavillion. Similar to the other two Japanese novels
I read in the last few weeks, it’s mostly about the main character’s
inner life. His thoughts, his ideas. The main character is a young
adult and is quite resentful of life. It’s a slow-paced novel full of
wisdom and thought-provoking writing. Here are a few sections that
spoke to me:
Perhaps a lyrical port lucked within that huge
body of his, but I felt that there was cruelty in his clear, blue
eyes. The Western nursery-rhyme “Mother Goose” refers to black eyes
as being cruel and malicious; the fact is that when people imagine
cruelty, they normally assign some foreign character to it.
and another
Cripples and lovely women are both tired of
being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves
constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and they return the
gaze by means of that very existence itself. The one who really looks
is the one who wins.
one final one
I just wanted to make you understand. What
transforms this world is – knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing
else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of
transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as
it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that
things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being
transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let’s put it this way
– human being possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life
bearable. For animals such things aren’t necessary. Animals don’t
need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But
human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the
very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the sam time that
intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That’s all there is
to it.
 Recommended as one of two
self-help books that gives practical, usable advice, I picked up How to be an Adult from the library.
It was an extremely quick and very useful read. So much so that I
will write excerpts from it for the next few weeks probably. Many of
the ideas were reinforcements of prior courses I took of beliefs I
already had. These are the sort of ideas that need constant reminders
so that I get used to thinking that way. His writings on
relationships were also very practical, very sensible and very much
along the lines of what I hope to accomplish. This little book made
me think a lot and I will be referring back to it in the next few
weeks over and over again.
 A
Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe is one of two Japanese books I
checked out after I read Kokoro. This story is about a man named Bird
who is the father to a newborn baby who has a major birth defect. The
story is about the father’s reaction and dealing (or not dealing)
with the issue. To be honest, about thirty pages into the story, I
hated the main character and wanted to put the book down immediately.
It depressed me so much that I didn’t even want to pick up another book.
For some inexplicable reason, I decided to stick with it and I am
glad I did. While this book was much more modern than Kokoro, it also
was character based and full of ideas, morals and issues surrounding
making difficult and immoral decisions. The book finally redeemed
itself to me in its final pages and at the end I felt better about
reading it.
 After the mistake with The
Cloud Atlas, I put the correct book on hold at the library and picked
it up last week. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell came
highly recommended by several members of AskMe. I made an effort to
spend my week with it and so read large chunks of it at a time. The
book has six stories. The first halves of five stories are told in
the first part, then the sixth story, and then each story is finished
going in the reverse order. The first story takes place on a ship
around 1850s and it’s the journal of a notary traveling in the
Pacific. This was the hardest story for me to get through. I had a
hard time with the language and the character. It got a bit better
towards the end of the first half but I knew the book would get
better so I kept going.
The second story takes place in 1930’s and it’s about a musician
exchanging letters with a scientist friend of his while he works with
a maestro. I enjoyed this story very much and found it easy to read
with entertaining characters. The third story is about a newspaper
journalist who discovers a plot to a corporate coverup that could
cause a disaster and it involves the scientist from the second story.
The fourth story is about a book publisher who gets signed into a
retirement institution against his will. The fifth one is a sci-fi
story about a cloned human who is part of a scientific project. And
the final story takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. I wasn’t
crazy about the last story either but loved the other four. Each
story briefly mentions the previous one and there are tones of
reincarnation and strong moral lessons in each story. The writing is
forced in some parts but great in others. Overall, I found it to be a
fascinating book and I want to read more of his work.
Here’s what one reviewer says about the book, “Here is not only the
academic pessimism of Marx, Hobbes and Nietzsche but also the
frightening portents of Aldous Huxley and the linguistic daring of
Anthony Burgess. Here, too, are Melville’s maritime tableaux, the
mordant satire of Kingsley Amis and, in the voice of Robert Frobisher
— Mitchell’s most poignant and fully realized character — the
unmistakable ghost of Paul Bowles. Here is a veritable film festival
of unembarrassed cinematic references and inspirations, from “Soylent
Green” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “The Graduate” to the
postwar comedies of England’s Ealing Studios. Here is an obviously
sincere affection for the oft-maligned genres of mystery, science
fiction and fantasy.”
 My second short story collection of the
year was another AskMe recommendation. You
Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett is a fantastic, fantastic
collection of magnificently well-written stories. This author is a
fantastic, published writer and a law student at Yale. A major
loser :). Each story involves some aspect of sorrow, depression,
sadness, disappointment, family, friendship. The stories are simple
and elegant. The characters are very relatable and memorable, even in
the short space of a little story. I got attached to each and every
one of them.
After Kissing in Manhattan and this book, I might have to start
reading more short story collections. Either these two are major
exceptions, or I am finally beginning to gain the maturity to enjoy
short stories. Either way, I am delighted to have discovered Haslett.
 I first read Philip Roth last year when I
read The Human Stain and enjoyed it very much. I liked the writing. I
liked the story. I liked the pace. Since then, I made two separate
attempts to read him, both of which failed. Both of the other books I
tried were too “dirty-old-man” for me. When The
Plot Against America came out, I knew I wanted to read it.
Especially since it was political and there were many reviews that
equated it to the current administration. I asked for the book and
received it as a Christmas gift in 2004. It sat on my shelf for a
year and I knew I would never pick it up unless I forced myself so I
asked my reading group if they were interested in reading it.
Everyone agreed so we picked it and I finally got around to reading it.
The book is a what if story about Lindbergh winning the 1940
presidency instead of FDR, written from the perspective of a Jewish
family living in New York. The main character is a little boy named
Philip Roth. It was very well written and a relatively quick read.
For people, like me, who don’t know a lot about the correct political
history of the time, it’s a bit confusing to keep track of what
really happened and what’s made up. I am usually determined to avoid
any form of fiction or non-fiction that is set during the second
World War but I knew this book would be worthwhile. And it was. It
was also very disturbing and there was an engulfing sense of fear and
panic throughout the entire novel, making me thankful for the
thousandth time that I wasn’t alive during that particular time in
history even though this particular story was fictional.
As much as I despise the current administration, I would have to say
that the horrific tale of the book is not nearly as parallel to the
current times as the media made it out to be. If it really were, I do
think we’d see thousands flocking to Canada weekly. May it never ever
get to be an issue.
 The
Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan was a mistake. The AskMe
recommendation was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell but I didn’t make
the distinction in the title until long after I’d started reading the
novel. Since I was already over 100 pages into the novel and enjoying
it, I decided to keep reading despite the confusion. The Cloud Atlas
is about a bomb diffuser in the army during second world war who is
sent to Alaska to dismantle the bombs the Japanese sent to the United
States inside air balloons. These balloons, of which there were over
nine thousand, fell all over Alaska and West Coast of Northern United
States. The balloons were rigged with explosives and are one of the
best kept secrets of the war. A completely fictional story based on a
true-world event.
The three main characters are all interesting, each a bit too extreme
in their flaws. But I got attached to the main character and to the
story in general. I cared about what happened and enjoyed reading it
from the first page to the very last. Especially since I had no idea
about the balloons and was quite amazed it was a true story.
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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