7/15/2012

I still feel self-conscious about not having anything of substance to say, thus the lack of posts in the last 6 months. Here we go again.

Because the only people (that I know of) that read this are people whose opinions I value, here's a question for all of you.

Friday morning poetry

"A Story About the Body"

"The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity- like music- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio- was full of dead bees.

Robert Hass

(h/t to gye)

Guess who's back

I don't know what to say here, but I'm ready to start trying again. Wish me luck.

It's been one of those years that feels like forever when you live through it, but you look at it through the rear-view mirror and it feels like a blur. Bought a condo, moved into the city, read and purged all my horrible high-school poetry in the process. That was much needed, like shedding a skin - I'd been carrying them around for years for no reason. More thoughts to come - I need to focus, decide where this blog should go, what I care enough to talk about without worrying about the echo chamber.

Update to the book list in the last post:

Wuthering Heights

Life of Pi : a novel

Jane Eyre

Love in the Time of Cholera

106 Books of Pretension

I picked up this meme from Evil Bender. Much like him, I don't think these books are particularly pretentious either - they're a pretty good reading list and I'll be adding quite a few to my to-read list. I didn't do as well as I thought I might, but summer's coming! Also, I want to know how Angels and Demons got on the list. It's not even particularly well written, much less pretentious.
Thanks Bender!

Books I’ve read are in italics, books I began and never finished are struck through:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
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
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The 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
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
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
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The 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 Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Best news in a long time for a bookworm

I found out a couple of weeks ago that my company gives out free bus passes to anyone who wants to use public transportation, and that the bus goes straight from my house to work meaning that it doesn't take any longer than driving.

This means that I have anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, every day, to read! I've finished three books in the last week and a half. (I read not only on the bus, but also walking from the bus stop at work across the parking lot, into the parking garage, and onto the elevator. Miraculously I have yet to run into anything.)

Here's where I need your help... What should I read next? Are you reading anything good right now, or do you have personal favorites that I shouldn't go another week without reading? Tell me!