I get way too excited about school sometimes, huh....

I registered for my first quarter of classes at UW today! I can still go back and change them if I want to, and who knows what bright idea I'll suddenly have about something I want to take, but for the moment I think I know what I'm doing.

I'm taking Sex, Gender, and Representation in Greek and Roman Literature; German 101; and Writing in Comparative Literature. Every semester/quarter, I do this thing where I angst about my schedule and what classes I should take, and then once I pick them I get ridiculously pleased over it. I'm looking forward to all of these classes enormously. The first two most of all. The first one is an Honors class, and discussion-based, I believe, and involves Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Odyssey, and some Euripides, among other things, if the textbook list is to be believed. I'm terribly excited to have that excuse to read Greek literature that I've been wanting, and I think it'll be a really interesting class in general.

German I'm looking forward to just because I always look forward to taking new languages. I chose German largely because I know I'm going to like it (some languages I find boring and/or aesthetically displeasing, and it would be annoying to realize this once I was already committed to finishing out the class). Also, I have a disproportionate number of German friends. I would be taking French 201 (either in place of German or in addition to it), but the class was full.

Writing in Comparative Literature mostly just fulfills an English Composition requirement, but it sounds interesting because the readings one is comparing are in translation and there's an option to read them in the original, if possible.

No doubt I'll be doing much less random fun reading this fall, what with all this, but it's sure to be interesting.

So many books

New books to read! Oh, it's so exciting.

I went to the library yesterday and came back with two books I've very much been looking forward to--The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, first book of The Cazalet Chronicle, and Bloodhound, by Tamora Pierce. I watched the miniseries The Cazalets quite some time ago, and have been meaning to read the books since. It's one of those "sprawling family dramas" and starts in 1937 and goes, I think, through the war. I quite liked the miniseries, though it was occasionally a tad melodramatic (I don't know whether because of the story, which would be still true of the book, or something about the production). Anyway, it's always nice to have another World War II novel to read, especially after reading The Mitfords, which of course spanned the entire 20th century but World War II does always seem to be a focal point. Some day I suppose I ought to read one that's actually about the war, and not just the people at home during it.

Bloodhound is the sequel to Terrier (and second in a supposed trilogy), and written in journal format with, says a blurb on the back, "homage to the police procedural genre." It's set in Tamora Pierce's by now very well-developed world of Tortall, and like 200 years before the first books she ever wrote about that world. It's always kind of interesting to compare those books with these, because her writing has improved vastly. It is still, of course, young adult fiction (and fantasy to boot), which is certainly not great literature but inevitably very satisfying.

I would be tempted to put off The Dud Avocado again and start in one of these (oh no, more choices as to which one), but I am determined not to, and so now I have motivation to whizz through that and get it finished so I can read these. Nothing against The Dud Avocado, mind you, I'm actually really liking it and might have made the great push to finish it anyway.

It's been such a long time since I checked out any books from the library. Before these I didn't have anything checked out at all, even movies or cds. I really quite missed it; I used to love the library, I still do though I don't make it there quite so often.

Penelope Fitzgeraldish musings

And to end the suspense about which book I chose to read... it was The Bookshop. Though The Dud Avocado was close on its heels, The Bookshop being a very short 123 pages.

I find I'm of two minds about Penelope Fitzgerald. I like her and always pick up her books expecting to love them, but somehow I find myself ultimately unsatisfied. I like her writing style, and I always very much like her premises or her settings--a bookshop in a tiny seaside town, a tiny college of Oxford, both show lots of promise for my enjoying them. I often like her characters, too. I think it's just what she does with the characters and the settings that I find unsatisfying. These books are rather too short to have exactly what I'd call a plot, it's more an extended premise or even a series of (relatively mundane) events. It's not the lack of plot I mind, I suppose, just the outcomes. I think the settings of her books give me an expectation of what the book is going to be like, and that's never what it is, so I am unsatisfied because what I expect is exactly what I want. In a way, I guess, Penelope Fitzgerald's eluding of my expectations is a point for her skills as a writer. Her books are never what it says on the tin. They're very good, and I will probably keep reading them, even though on some level I find them disappointing.

Short books fascinate me, in a way. They're longer than a short story, quite long enough to get to know the characters, but too short to have a really involved plot. In a way, this makes them sort of like a slice of the life of a person you know really well, except that it's not someone you know so you've got a fresh view. And of course, there's always the joy of being able to finish them quickly so you can get on to something new.

Now I am on to The Dud Avocado. I started it ages ago and got distracted, but now I'm back to it and more into it that I was before, so hopefully I will finish it this time.

Bookish indecision

I finished reading The Mitford Girls yesterday as expected, and now I'm experiencing my usual inability to chose a new book after finishing such a good one. We've rented a car for 4th of July weekend and drove around to various shops today, so I wound up with I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, which I've already read, and The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald, which I haven't. I did read another book by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels, which I talked about here.

So now I'm torn between reading The Bookshop, The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, or Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson. Or maybe even a reread of I Capture the Castle, which I loved a great deal when I read it a few years ago. Decisions, decisions, I think I just need to pick one and sit down with it.

Happy 4th of July, to those in the right country for it!

The Marvelous Mitfords

I've had the most splendid day, doing absolutely nothing but sitting in my back yard in the sun and reading, and getting very tan. My book of choice is The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell, which I talked about vaguely here, back when I bought it in December. I am absolutely loving it. I started it Saturday night or maybe Sunday, the thing is 529 pages, and I expect to finish it tomorrow. It's lovely having time to read, but if I were reading a different book I doubt I'd have gotten through so much of it. I always forget how much I like reading biography.

For the few readers of book blogs who have not yet heard, the Mitfords were (and are, I suppose) a family of British aristocrats made famous mostly by Nancy Mitford's semi-autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. They were at the height of their notoriety (I think I can pretty safely call it that) in the 1930s and '40s. Lord and Lady Redesdale, David and Sydney Mitford had six daughters and a son, born between 1902 and 1920. Each of them is a fascinating and often strikingly different person in their own right, and on top of this they lived in one of the most interesting times in history. Not only that but they were also a notable part of this history. The book suggests, for example, that it is possible that Diana Mitford (third eldest daughter) was the only person to be personally well-acquainted with both Churchill and Hitler.

I enjoyed the stories of their childhood and their early adulthood, especially the various eccentricities of the family, and also the various associations they had--suddenly reading a name of some close acquaintance or other and realizing that it was some famous person. Evelyn Waugh, for example, based his novel Vile Bodies off Diana Mitford and her first husband and their friends. Nancy Mitford especially knew numerous famous members of England's literary world.

What I've found most fascinating about this book, though, is the politics, and the family's place within political history. Diana and Unity Mitford were both devoted Fascists, while Decca Mitford was a Communist, and David and Sydney Mitford's inability to agree on Hitler, Fascism, and the war fractured their marriage. The family was related to Winston Churchill. Diana's second husband, Oswald Mosley, was leader of the British Fascist party. Unity spent most of the 1930s living in Germany, and for quite a long time sat in restaurants she knew Hitler frequented, waiting to see him. Eventually, he noticed her. They got to know each other very well; he gave her presents, found her apartments, paid medical bills, got her tickets to the opera. She was so torn between Britain and Germany that she decided she would have to commit suicide if they went to war with each other.

The story of Unity Mitford's relationship with Hitler and Germany is, I think, the most interesting part of this book for me. I've never read anything about Germany in the years before World War II, and it's especially interesting to do so now, having innocently read The Pursuit of Love a year ago, and now being able to connect its author to such a subject.

I definitely recommend this book, whether you already know anything about the Mitfords or not. The writing is very fluid, and I think does a good job of capturing the world these people lived in, and their extremely unique and forceful personalities.

Summer reading

Summer has begun in earnest, and while there are many things I dislike about summer, I do like having the time to read and sew, and update this blog.

And I have been using my time, even! I made myself a pair of shorts, navy blue with red apple-shaped buttons, which are pleasingly picturesque. I'm plotting all sorts of other sewing projects, like a lemon-print cotton dress, and various skirts and shirts and whatnot. I have also been reading, and catching up on everyone else's book blogs, which I am sadly behind on (I have 30 or 40 entries to read for at least four different blogs). Reading all these bookish thoughts are making me contemplate doing JulNoWriMo again, which I hadn't planned on (last year I started it half way through the month and still managed to finish in time--there are a couple of blog entries in which I mention it).

I finished reading The Hero and the Crown, yesterday, by Robin McKinley. It's a bit of a classic, I guess. It certainly has numerous elements of classic fantasy, though it's so good these don't really bother at all. I loved the style of the writing, although the style sort of changes part way through, and then changes slightly again. The middle section moved the slowest, and then toward the end it picked up and I fairly raced through.

It's the story of Aerin, daughter of the king by his second wife, who was never very well-accepted, and whose daughter is now a bit of a stranger in her own home. Of course, Aerin is not entirely who she thinks she is.

The book was often rather surprising. It doesn't follow quite the expected pattern, but I think this is a side effect of the way the style changes. In the beginning I expected it to be a conventional fantasy and follow conventional fantasy plotlines, what with dragons and swords and princesses, but then it changed and fell more into the pattern of authors such as Patricia McKillip or John Dickinson, a silvery, dreamlike sort of writing and action. And then it changed again and became sort of a cross between the two. It is a very satisfying book in that it wraps things up very nicely for Aerin, though it's almost too nicely, but there's enough that goes wrong along the way that this ending isn't really a problem.

It was given to me as the favourite book of the giver, so I'm glad I enjoyed it.

It's an apt title even if I don't quite remember what the title came from...

Some time last week I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, which I got for my birthday in May. It's translated from French, and now I've read it in English I kind of want to read the French.

There is a certain quality particular to a lot of French literature, which I once failed utterly at explaining, but which I really enjoy. It's a clarity, an ability to be profound without being frilly and using too many words or too obscure words. I wonder if it's got to do with French having much less vocabulary than English, so there's no need to use excessive quantities of synonyms. Anyway, this quality works especially well for this book, which talks a lot about Japanese culture and art and whatnot, and there's a certain similarity between simplicity in Japanese art and this slightly indefinable quality of French writing.

The book is about people who hide what they are--Renee, a concierge in a posh apartment building who is really very intellectual but puts on a front of being a typical dull concierge, and an inhabitant of the apartment building, Paloma, an extremely intelligent twelve-year-old who pretends to be merely average, and who is so fed up with what she sees as the meaninglessness of life that she's decided to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. The book is told by these two characters, alternating between Renee's chapters, and Paloma's Profound Thoughts and Journals of the Movement of the World. Eventually, someone new moves into the building...

This is a terribly well put together book. Some books I like because they are sort of dumbly satisfying, with happy endings and whatnot, but this I like because it is very true, and it doesn't all go the way you want it to but that's what life is like. All together, I liked it a great deal.

Dropping by for a chat...

I'm still here, really! Just incredibly busy. Tech rehearsal for my play and my graduation are both on Thursday, and then the play is going on all weekend. We're doing The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. If by some chance you're in Seattle, come see it at West Seattle High School (not actually my school), 3000 California Ave SW, Friday at 7:30, and Saturday at 2:00 and 7:30.

I'm not even here just to advertise! After ages and ages and various interludes of reading other things, I've finally finished Wuthering Heights. I've been reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, but I needed a lightweight book to bring with me at the last minute as I was heading out the door so I grabbed Wuthering Heights, and then I got back into it and finished it all in one go this morning. I guess I just needed a break from it.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's far too dreary to become a favourite; my favourite books are exclusively happy, or at least hopeful. Of the three Bronte's I've read, this is certainly my least favourite, but it's also the only unhappy one. It's very compelling, anyway, and everyone in it has such a forceful personality. It's also nearly impossible to understand most of the characters, they're all so exaggeratedly passionate. But not, I think, unrealistically so. It's an interesting combination. I sort of wonder if the environment of the Heights and the moors surrounding is what promotes such extremes of feeling.

Anyway, I'm glad to have read Wuthering Heights, though I don't think I'll read it again. I'll be back soon to talk about The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I've almost finished that.

Happy Easter!

I'm not Christian, so really I only celebrate the pagan bits, but I've always been fond of Easter. I plan to spend it sewing and reading Wuthering Heights.

Bronte one, Bronte two, Bronte three.

I'm definitely going to be posting here less often until the end of June, because this is my busiest time of the year, and I have ridiculous amounts of things going on. I have to graduate, put on a play, go to classes, and help Nova move out of the Mann building. I suspect my reading time will be rather cut short as well, but I am working on some things.

I started reading Wuthering Heights on Saturday, and am already well into it. Now that I can say I've read all three Bronte sisters, it's rather interesting to compare them. It was easy for me to get into Wuthering Heights, the story really jumps in quickly and it's put together in such an interesting way, with different people telling the story, even people who are totally tangential to the story. On the other hand, I have a really difficult time getting into Charlotte Bronte's novels, though Jane Eyre is one of my very favourite books. Of the Bronte's novels, I have read Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and now a good chunk of Wuthering Heights. I started Villette, but did not get very far. I think Jane Eyre is the most conventionally structured of these, in that it retains the first person narrative throughout the whole book, without changing narrators or throwing in diaries or letters. Nineteenth century first person novels still seem strange to me, though I'm not sure why.

I loved Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and I am fully expecting to love Wuthering Heights too, though I suspect it will be less satisfying.