The pages accumulate and you reach the end of a book…

… or so I think. That must be true, right? A book is finite, I know.

But these days, “the ends” are quite scarce. It could be that I am reading too many books at once. It’s also my allergy fogginess. It’s become really difficult to follow a string of words. I hate it when reading becomes difficult, but this too will pass.

 

Why do I feel so great when I finish a book? A book is a terribly fickle unit anyway, one that could be any number of pages. I mean isn’t it enough to just enjoy the process of reading?? Of course reading is more essential than finishing a book. Still, getting to the last page is an affirmation that I can, not only start, but also finish something. Publishing an entry is like that too… and perhaps that is one of the main reasons why I blog and post these inane comments.

How Does a Neurotic Person Recommend a Book?: a case study.

A good friend left me with a weighty task: I was to lend him a book or two to take with him on a cruise. I can sort of fathom how this could be a simple task to some people. Why, however, pass over an opportunity to fret endlessly over the choice of books? Here is a chronicle of how I selected the books for my friend:

The number of books, above all else, must be decided on. I was very tempted to hand over a very large and onerous bundle of books containing every single book I’ve ever wanted to make him read. I mean what a great opportunity to make a friend guilty for not reading the books you loan him?? But I didn’t want to be so cruel when he was heading off to vacation. I’ve decided to be a good friend and not defer the task of narrowing down the number of books to him. I realized I couldn’t make him take more than 2 books for there are other things and people on the boat. Now to the subject matter:

I also realized I must lend him only fiction because the point of a cruise, like the point of reading (some) fiction was to escape reality. And so I eliminated, though entertaining, any Malcolm Gladwell books as well as the, not as entertaining, Rollo May books.

Of course the fiction I choose has to both be interesting and novel for him. Of course I wand to find a book or two that he would enjoy, but it also has to be a book he has not read yet. I mean the whole point of borrowing books is to read someone you wouldn’t pluck off the book shelves on your own. Furthermore, I want to seem, through my choice in books, like someone with a sophisticated taste in books. Oh the literary vanities!

Now this means I have to make quite a few tricky assumptions about what he would find to be an interesting and fun read but has not yet read yet. I understand the assumptions I make at this stage, which will become manifest in the books I loan him, can make or break a friendship. Succeed at this and you show the deep connection and mutual understand in the relationship, but fail at this and then you open up the gaps in the understanding of each other. What potential disappointment! Oh the burden! My anxiety increases with the knowledge that I now only have a couple of days to finish this task.

Some of the books I was seriously considering were: Far Afield (by Susanna Kaysen), Housekeeping (by Marilynne Robinson), and The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath). I, however, eliminated them all because I realized: the books can’t simply be interesting; they must be happy. After all, these were books for the freakin cruise. A depressing book just won’t do. One problem: I don’t own that many happy books. Or could it be that the interesting novels are not happy? But that’s something to fret over on a different day; I still face an unfinished task!

I almost settled on a fun, psychological thriller by Agatha Christie titled Curtain. But then I came across yet another factor I had not considered before: portability. And of course my copy of this book is a hard cover. Argh! How could I have not considered this when I daily obsess over having enough portable books to sustain me on my commute??

Long at last, I decided on my two books: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I had to assume, though I really didn’t want to, that boys don’t really read Jane Austen. I also figured: even if my very literary friend had read an Austen novel, it’d be Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. I was pretty confident that Northanger Abbey would be super novel and super fun. The Little Prince, however, I had to directly ask about. Thankfully, he hasn’t read it yet (at least in English). Isn’t The Little Prince a perfect book for travelling? I did well, didn’t I?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite done yet. The Little Prince was presentable, but Northanger Abbey wasn’t. The Austen novel was seriously girly looking with its varying shades of pink on the cover. So I had to cover the book with a nice piece of art paper to make it look more manly. After all, you meet people (i.e. girls) at a cruise and I wouldn’t want the book I loan him to be a girl-repellent.

 

***

 

Whew! I feel I’ve done an adequate job at this crucial test of friendship… but oh, guess what happened? We had a glorious snowstorm in NYC and I never did get a chance to loan him the two books for his trip. Well, should I lend them to him anyway??

My speech to the shelves.

Today I am your commander: you have to station yourselves in the shelves assigned by me. I choose your mates according to my whimsy. Today you will stand next to a book written about the same topic. Then you will have lots to talk, or perhaps argue, about. But then I’ll notice that the shades of purple on your spines do not quite match. It’ll bug me quite a bit to watch you standing next to each other and well, a quick swap or two, and you’ll find yourself partnered with someone else. You may not get along but you have no choice. You faithfully stand guard to make me feel safe in my fortress of bound words.

At least that’s what I’d like to think.

But of course it’s entirely possible you are inwardly seething and patiently waiting… for you know you will one day outlive your commander. I will be gone and everything about me will be in the past. You, however, will march on to the future, holding tightly to the strings of words formulated long ago. Perhaps then you will meet a kinder commander, or a more indifferent one.

Still, I am sorry to say I’d rather be an ephemeral reader than an eternal book.

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.

*

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.

*

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.