New Feature - Book Reviews!!

Mere titles are probably not very interesting for those who did not grow up wanting to be a librarian....

I think I'll begin with the books I presume are less read.

Madame Bovary

I found the style of this book a bit stuffy - that could, of course, be the fault of the translator and not the author. There were similarities to George Eliot, particularly in the minor characters. Although it begins like a typical Victorian novel, it becomes much darker, taking on tones of Virginia Woolf and the others who reveal the inner minds of unhappy women.

Only women and sensitive men should read this book. If you are an ordinary man, you will probably think Dr. Bovary is a perfectly decent chap and his wife is a weak strumpet. If you are a woman, you will sympathize with Emma, as I think Flaubert intends. Although she cheats on her husband, throws money away indiscriminately and kills herself, it is her atmosphere that is to blame. Her life has no windows: she tires of novels, her husband's crude attentions are unwelcome and her neighbors bore her. Perhaps her most unlikable traits are her pretentions of sophistication and inability to resign herself to her fate. The moral of the story: unless they have a strong bit of stoicism, moody women should refrain from marrying well-intentioned churls.

Random Survey for YOU

I have three questions I want answered about you (i.e. the people who read my blog, i.e. the people that may have worn berets once upon a time).

1. Do you consider yourself a stoic, a cynic, or an epicure?

2. Did you grow up in a suburban box or other form of plastic house?

3. Do you ever find yourself compelled to laugh at other people's injuries and misfortunes?

The Grandiloquent Dictionary

Ah, my fellow didine nulliparas  and wuntees,  you're going to drintle like a rixatrix over this website.  I was divigating from looking for GRE vocab lists when I found it.  It is a list of words that are in danger of being expunged from the common dictionary.  I think you will agree they are too daedalian to be lost.  I promise, they will so preoccupy you you will be as doytin a droud as I.  Brianna, I think you ought to take up dactyliology and teach Emily not be such as diepnophobiac.  Despite my height, I seem to be a bit of a nanophiliac.  Forgive my witzelsucht - here is the link: http://www.islandnet.com/~egbird/dict/dict.htm

Only Two More Weeks...

And I quit my job - my comfortable, well-paid, excrutiatingly boring job - which is only tolerable because I can lose myself in audiobooks.  But the job is so very necessary.  The older I get, the more money it takes to keep me in comfort and style.  Our society makes it very difficult to step off the treadmill of consumerism.  I suppose I could do it, but not if it meant reverting to denim jumpers and birkenstocks.  I think I would have to move back to the tropics and build myself a palm frond hut on the beach and eat mangos, which I don't even like.  No thank you, I think I'll continue running on the treadmill until I fall off.  Besides, I am rather good at subtle acts of rebellion.

I want to live in Paris and Hong Kong and Africa and Montana and finally die on a fishing boat like Thomas Hudson....

Call Me Irresponsible

I am trying temporarily to escape (look Emily, no split infinitive) from the Greek verb eimi. It calls louder and louder and distracts me.

Do you ever begin to think youself very brave? Very grown-up? Be careful! Suddenly you will be walking down your own tree-lined, safe, sidewalked street and a truck will pass by, a flag pole cable will clink and a dog will bark all at once. Your instincts, which your mature consciousness had thought mastered, will nearly send you scurring under a bush. Primal fear is never very far away. Do sights or sounds frighten you more?

Do you think anyone has ever come up with a good explanation of what creates quality in art? Doestoevsky and Hemingway are so different in style and content, but they are both "good." Is it originality? Is it a distinctive style and mastery of language? Is it the metaphors and philosophical undertones? Is it realism and compelling characters? Is it all of these?

Revised Summer Reading List

Farenheit 451 (Bradbury)

Don Quixote (Cervantes)

Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)

Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)

Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky)

The Robe (Douglas)

The Island of the Day Before (Eco)

The Name of the Rose (Eco)

This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald)

Madame Bovary (Flaubert)

I, Claudius (Graves)

For Whom the Bells Toll (Hemingway)

Islands in the Stream (Hemingway)

Short Stories (Hemingway

Hunchback of Notredame (Hugo)

The Imitation of Christ (a Kempis)

Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)

Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton)

We the Living (Rand)

Our Swift-Passing Luxury of Easy Friendship

...It's almost gone.  No longer shall we sit unconcernedly, back to back, not talking, occasionally laughing.  Now we shall force our friendship to continue after our bodies have been torn hundreds of miles apart.  Now there will be Christmas cards, eventually with just a signature and a photo of a vaguely-remembered face.  Now there will be awkward pauses on that instrument that turns friends, who once enjoyed the easy ambience of being together silently,  into disembodied voices.  Eventually, five, ten, or twenty years hence, those things that hold us together now will disintegrate under the tension of distance.  Here's to delaying the process of decay!