Currently reading: “Far Afield” by Susanna Kaysen

Far Afield by Susanna Kaysen is a great example of the kinds of book I was hoping my 2010 literary resolution would allow me to read. I owned this book since my second year in college but I am only now reading it as my current portable book to read on the public transit. This is also my fourth and favorite anthropological novel I’ve read so far.

I did twice before try reading this book but I found it impossible to get past the dreary and slow beginning.  There was also the issue of wrong expectations. The first time I tried reading the book was immediately after I bought it. And the sole reason for buying this book was that it was a Susanna Kaysen novel, the author of Girl, Interrupted. Since I loved her memoir, I somehow expected, despite the blurb in the back, that it’d be another coming of age book portraying psychological angst. Reading the first 20 pages or so not about that, therefore, has been disappointing. All I felt reading the beginning was an overwhelming sense of grayness coming off the pages and permeating reality. So I don’t really blame my younger self for not reading on to find out that this book was precisely about coming of age and psychological angst of the (usually intelligent) young people.

I couldn’t penetrate the grayness of the beginning on my second try either. But now I see that the beginning was so difficult because it was so compelling: I was transplanted into Faroe Islands feeling trapped by its coldness and humidity. Reality seemed to takes on different hues like their “unnatural” sun. Susanna Kaysen’s writing is so effective that I found myself travelling with Jonathan, the main character. I felt the ennui and the dread that Jonathan felt about his year ahead. All of this made me want to close the book only if to escape this world, and so I did not succeed finishing the book on my second try either.

Oh but on my third try, I kept reading, perhaps because I started this time with an adjusted set of expectations, but more likely because I was stuck on the train with only this book and I didn’t want to make eye contact with the other New Yorkers. And at this moment, I empathized with Jonathan, although he was a little arrogant in his youth and also a bit spoiled, because I, like him, wanted to avoid the very people I was sharing a city with. And so I was hooked.

This story is unlike the other three anthropological novels I’ve read so far. Instead of meeting a young protagonist anthropologist thirsty for knowledge and (more or less) eager to go native, Jonathan, our thesis researching novice anthropologist, feels more ambivalent about becoming a participant observer. Yet he gets sucked in and even in the thickness of his involvement with the culture, Jonathan has doubts, fears, and still continuing and consuming ambivalence about the whole anthropological enterprise. It was refreshing to finally meet a more believable grad student who seems too well read, too neurotic, and too young.

And Susanna Kaysen doesn’t disappoint in writing another psychological story. The acute observations I loved in Girl, Interrupted are what made me feel a connection with Jonathan. I especially loved the inner dialogues Jonathan had with his overly academic self, overly critical self, overly untrusting self, and finally a self that resigns himself to the conditions, both glorious and pathetic, of life itself. I ended up rooting for him but found the book too depressing at times since Jonathan’s problems can so easily be generalized to the human condition I am trying to ignore in my youth.

Jonathan’s way of making all the concerns of the twenties abstract and academic especially rings true with me since I as well as a few close friends of mine have a tendency to trap ourselves that way. Is making everything abstract our way of avoiding life itself? Well then, perhaps we need an awakening similar to Jonathan’s filled with poop, blood, and animal slaughter, essentially a confrontation with the realities of living outside our books. 

A snowy day bookmark knitting.

I am back from my weeklong blogging and people break. This day has already become fuzzy in our memory but let’s recall a fantastic snowstorm we had in NYC a couple of weeks ago. I thoroughly enjoyed it because I knew there are not that many snow days left of this winter. Also, I never got tired of watching the snow dance outside. Inside, safe from the mad white swirls, I read and knit a bookmark.

I have been collecting bookmarks (and have been losing many of them as the blog title suggests). My collection dates back to 1994. Many of those skinny and sturdy pieces of paper carry personal memories and invoke a great deal of nostalgia which I fully indulge in as I read a book. Still, there is a special place in my heart for the knitted kind, a relatively recent addition to my collection since I did not start knitting in earnest until 2007.

I am always searching for bookmark patterns which usually leads to disappointment because there aren’t that many out there. That’s why I was ecstatic to find a lovely bookmark pattern by Kiersten Brandt. It was so beautiful and perfect for a snowy day knitting project. I really appreciate Kiersten Brandt for posting her bookmark pattern in her neat blog linked below:

http://knitoneblogtwo.wordpress.com/

(if you want the pattern, click on “free patterns” at the top of the blog. The pattern is called “Backbone Bookmark”).

The snowy day bookmark knitting didn’t progress very far though, probably because I was completely mesmerized by the swirling snow:

I took a couple more days to knit and block the bookmark. I finished by making the long beady strand that sticks out of the bookmark (is there a technical name for that??). I made it extra long because I love to hold on to that strand as I read or behold the book that helps me feel safe(r) in a public place filled with people (a book is an escape from the world).

 

A beautiful bookmark has to find the right book and vice versa. Some books I know I will like a lot better if I had the right bookmark. flanking the experience. This union between a book and a bookmark really makes or breaks the reading experience for me, and I’d like to think that a good pairing makes the bookmark and the beloved book happy as well in their literary marriage. 

This vital task, however, is not an easy one. There is, of course, an art to matching up a bookmark to a book.  The bookmark must match not only the content and the tone of the writing but also the physical dimensions of the book. 

My snowy day bookmark first lived briefly and temporarily in a book of poems by Billy Collins called Questions About Angels. I love that little volume of poetry loaned to me by Al, but the pairing of the book to the bookmark was not a great one. My choice was a haphazard one: I immediately found I really liked the book and while gulping down its content, I grabbed the nearest bookmark which happened to be the snowy day bookmark. The book, however, is too thin for this thick and elaborate bookmark. and the long strand hangs awkwardly over a floppy cover. Though I loved the poems, I should’ve chosen a more fitting bookmark.

This will be my snowy day bookmark’s first true home: Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a book I got at a great price on Christmas eve and a book I plan on reading next week. Oh, I think this is a perfect pairing! The book has a nice hardcover and thick papers suitable for a bookmark like this. I especially like how the long beady strand thingy sticks out of this book.

A couple more examples of where my other knitted bookmarks live (I am using my knitted bookmarks as examples because those are the ones I have pictures of). The green bookmark shown below is my first knitted bookmark. The bookmark is designed by Nancy Miller and is published as “Lace Bookmark” in One-skein wonders: 101 Yarn Shop Favorites, a lovely volume edited by Judith Durant. By the way, Judith Durant edited a couple more “one skein” series after this book and both of them are great as well (that is a recommendation Alice!). Anyway, this bookmark is now happily living in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a book I am hoping to finish via my 2010 literary resolution.

 

I knit a few more using the same pattern for myself and a couple of literary friends. The white one below, which I kept, is perfect for any Jane Austen novel, don’t you think? Unfortunately, my Jane Austen novels, with the exception of Northanger Abbey are bound together in a gigantic tome that comes with its own ribbon bookmark. So for now, my lacy white one below is homeless. I am thinking I’ll place her in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion edited by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A LeVine but the cover for this book is the same white as the bookmark. I have to give this some more thought. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

By the way: I do very much like to knit bookmarks for friends as a way of wishing them great reading. Let me know if you would like a bookmark.

An addition to my library: “The Knitter’s Book of Yarn: the ultimate guide to choosing, using, and enjoying yarn” by Clara Parkes

A very exciting addition to my library, with the help of lovely Alice, is a very pretty book about yarns I’ve been coveting for many months. No I did not break my 2010 literary resolution—this book was acquired back in Dec. I, however, have only now started to read the book.

In The Knitter’s Book of Yarn: the ultimate guide to choosing, using, and enjoying yarn, Clara Parkes patiently teaches the reader about yarns handknitters would encounter from the fibers themselves to the end product in skeins. The book contains a lot of useful, but not an overwhelming dose of, information about yarn fibers, production, and quality. I especially appreciate her explanations on how to match the fiber content and the weight of a yarn with a specific pattern (design), a task that is both exciting and daunting for a novice knitter. The book makes me a more knowledgeable matchmaker for my next project. This, I think, explains and excuses the fact that the patterns in the book aren’t super exciting or novel. If you read the pattern notes, you can learn a lot about how to pair a pattern to a yarn.

Oh and of course, I enjoy this book a lot because I love the construction of the book itself: a delightful cover (featuring yarn flowers!); a bright orange inside cover; thick papers inside that are perfect for underlining and note taking. I did, however, wish there were more photos of the yarns/fibers themselves and illustrations of some of the concepts mentioned, for example, showing the difference between a woolen vs. worsted spun yarns.

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This is the second book I own that I would consider domestic, containing knowledge that every girl even a few generations would consider common knowledge but completely mysterious to me and my peers. My other domestic book is a comprehensive guide on how to keep house: Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson.

I am not required to keep house obsessively or to knit. And I do wonder if I get excited about yarns because it’s a hobby and not an obligation. If the many years I logged in the classroom involved learning practical things, would these mundane knowledge about keeping house and fiber choosing be horribly boring to me? Well, the only way to find out is to make math optional and see if kids clamor to buy up calculus books and have integral sessions at Starbucks.

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This yarn book is also one of those books that can only be appreciated by readers with a certain amount of experience. While reading this book, I frequently told myself how wonderful it would’ve been if I had read this book back when I first started knitting. This book could’ve saved me from some bad yarn purchases or inappropriate yarn pairing to a pattern. Oh but I should not kid myself, for no, I would not have been able to understand this book if it weren’t for my awful mistakes with yarns. If I had no experience touching different fibers and puzzling over them, the discussion on fibers would be meaningless. And if it weren’t for all the disastrous yarn/pattern pairings, I would not appreciate the knowledge imparted to me.

I just have to realize that certain books can only be appreciated after accumulating mistakes. For example, I read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White back in the eighth grade and found the book awfully boring and full of information no one can possibly find helpful. I again read the book a couple of years back after I had given myself enough time to make oh-so-many writing mistakes (probably all the most egregious ones in the book). And this time I truly appreciated the advice and saw that the book was a gem. Yes, when I look at the little volume, it does sparkle happily on my bookshelf.

So mistakes are not to be feared because they make knowledge more yummy. I guess mistakes makes us more teachable too. So I am not afraid to knit or write badly. I am, however, terrified of technology. It made me feel perplexed and profoundly uncomfortable to buy a new lappy or try a USB drive for the first time. Technology is so super scary that I still have the impulse to do all my writing on my Moleskines instead of this electronic typewriter that connects to the internet. The issue is intuition. I don’t know when things go wrong and I have no gut feeling about how to fix the problems. I also don’t know how things work so everything is a profound mystery. That’s why even though I have recently started to covet an E-book reader (okay, I’ll say it—a “Kindle”), I will never be able to think of a book having a flat screen. Something about that makes me feel uneasy.

Ah, so I shall end this entry about everything and nothing. This is the result of a wicked headache that I hope will go away soon.

A (short) review: “How I got published: Famous Authors Tell You in Their Own Words” Edited by Ray White & Duane Lindsay.

I recently read How I Got Published: Famous Authors Tell you in Their Own Words edited by Ray White and Duane Lindsay. Even though I wasn’t familiar with the writers (a lot of them seem to be mystery/thriller writers and I don’t read that genre very much), I enjoyed the book. It gives a realistic yet inspirational glimpse into what writers do after they toil away and have typed up a manuscript.

The book is essentially a collection of advice for new/unpublished writers. The sage voices vary in style/tone and the authors have had different degrees of luck. Still the advice consistently boils down to: you’re a writer if you are compelled to write and actually write; don’t give up; however, don’t quit your day job (yet).

I think it’s courageous that these writers produce manuscripts and keep plugging along rejection after rejection with absolutely no guarantee of success. Even though the advice is specifically about writing, the suggestion is generally helpful to all young people: there are no guarantees so do what you love, don’t give up, but (of course) have a backup plan (i.e. a job).

The advice aside, I loved reading about what is a completely mysterious process behind the writing and the publication of books.

Going native: reading “Fieldwork” by Mischa Berlinski

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski depicts the variations in the attempts to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Most of us don’t do this: we’re born into a culture and learn to consider the world through its point of view for the rest of our lives. A few of us, however, venture out. There’s always a primary aim: religion, journalism, anthropology. Oh but whatever the motivation for donning a different set of lens, Berlinski shows us that leaving one’s rock solid point of view invariably is dizzying for the soul. The characters in the novel then discover the absolutely additive and all consuming nature of trying to escape one’s assumptions to see the world anew.

The anthropologist, the missionary, and the journalist in the novel enter the expedition without realizing that once started, there is no going back. Seeing the characters warped into their obsessions is fascinating. You want to tell them to go back to their ordinary, content lives. But a part of you hope they don’t for this is a chance for the you to live vicariously through the characters’ ever precarious psyches.

Well, I liked the book a lot. The story was quite clever, in my opinion. The only part that I found completely incredulous were not the spirits and the souls, but the very last paragraph: I don’t think academics get paid (well) to publish their papers in journals! Clearly that’s a minor point, but it still annoyed me. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this unique and exciting story.

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This is the third anthropological fiction I read. The other two were Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen and The innocent anthropologist by Nigel Barley. When there is a career that interests me, I obsessively read about the experience. I also like to read about intense and obsessive characters and anthropological novels have not failed to give me those compelling characters.

Not surprising then, I suppose, that my next portable-reading-in-the-public-book is another anthropological novel: Far Afield by Susanna Kaysen. I bought the book back in my second year in college, not because of the ethnographic theme, but more in spite of it (anthropology wasn’t terribly interesting to me then). I liked Girl, Interrupted, written also by Susanna Kaysen, so I figured I may like Far Afield. Well, von voyage to me as I head over to the Faroe Islands with the book via the NYC subway.

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Is it possible to understand a fiction written by someone from a different culture when we are all so entrenched in our own? Of course we can read Tolstoy and Borges and be moved for there is more the humanity shares than not (otherwise anthropology would be impossible). But still, we must be seeing everything we read from where we are in history, culture, and point of development. What would it be like to understand fiction as the author saw it? For me, Latin American literature tastes different when I read it in Spanish. It’s not an issue of translation so  much as the fact that each language has its own pulse. And when you read in a different language, doesn’t the fabric of consciousness feels a bit unfamiliar and the world look a shade different?

It’s ultimately impossible to see the world from another’s point of view because it’s impossible to (completely) shed the self. But reading novels, and consequently accumulating them in our minds must help us get a glimpse of what it’s like to see everything from a different cosmic point of view. That is the power of the novels and if you think about it, it’s pretty scary. Clearly we should be more circumspect about encouraging kids to read or recommending books to friends.

2010 Literary Resolution!

Although I’ve made several hopeful new years resolutions (including one about this blog), I did not make one related to reading. Jan 1 is already a fading memory, but I am only now ready to make my 2010 literary resolution. I’d like to argue that the beginning of Feb, when the new year is still minty fresh but not shiny new, is the best time to make a new year’s resolution. A brand new year, unsullied by the marks inevitably made by living through it, inspires us to turn a bunch of unrealistic hopes into resolutions. We now, in the midst of February concerns, have the ability to make more sensible resolutions when 2010 has become a dreary winter reality.

And here is a dreadful and embarrassing reality I need to come clean about: my literary backlog is so bad that it’s even worse than my email backlog.

I am simply drowning in printed pages. I have way too many books I am a partially through and many I want to begin but don’t get around to starting because I am constantly buying more books. I have erected many piles of books: there is one on my bedside table, one on the floor by my bed, another on my desk, and another one, two, three on my coffee table. Books stay on the shelves for me. The ones that became members of these nonfunctional pillars represent my delusion: they are the books I am “currently reading” or books I think I will get to soon.

So, I must put a stop to this nonsense of accumulating printed pages at an ungodly rate. Two Saturday ago, I bought my last book for awhile for my secret project no. iv. And here is my literary resolution in three parts:

1. I will read what I want to and not feel guilty about what I am reading because of what I am not reading.
2. I will not buy any more books until mid-May.
3. I will read books I own, books I borrow, and books I am given.

I hope this will help me get rid of my literary backlog by finally reading the books I’ve acquired. I am actually quite excited to finally read the books I have been wanting to read for years (for example: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, The Savage Mind by Claude Levi-Strauss). An added benefit, of course, is that I’ll save some money. But most importantly, I think it’d be nice to look at my shelves instead of turning my back on them constantly trying to build my library.

So the resolution is, more than anything else, a training for an attitude change. My reading pattern of constantly starting new books and being afraid of running out of pages when clearly I am not finishing all the books I own already is a manifestation of a deeper issue. I am terribly afraid of commitment. I am constantly fretting over getting stuck. These pathological attitudes keep me from being a productive and non-neurotic human being. I hope that by changing my reading pattern for a while (oh and yes, it’s temporary—you are not trapped) and committing to my current library, I will learn how to be committed to this life and myself.

Now I am not terribly worried about running out of things to read. In fact, I am pretty confident (according to my rough estimate) that I will not run out even if no one ever lends me a book. But please, I’d appreciate it if you do for that will add an element of exciting experimentation to my reading this year.

If you see me reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, then be happy for me because I am making a dent in my literary backlog. However, if you see me reading my organic chemistry textbook, please please have pity on me and lend me a book.