My Words Trickle Down

*deep breath*

I've been putting off writing about this since November, because it's upsetting to me. But I need to get it out (and I think, scary as it is, I need to leave this entry public). So here goes.

( Cowboy capitalist job bullshit under the cut )

Oh right so the Book Meme! Oh man I got so close to finishing and then forgot about it... but I am a very diligent and dedicated blogger (ahem), so I will finish anyway.

Day 28 - Favorite Title

So, um, speaking of being a diligent and dedicated blogger, I'm just gonna refer you to this whole entry here: http://dustcoveredcurios.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/very-old-science-books/

Upcoming Days
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 - Your favorite book of all time

Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something

Um, all of them? In their own small, subtle ways?

I am struggling to call to mind a book that has drastically changed my opinion about anything, major or minor. I suppose there are several examples in philosophy, but that's sort of expected, right? Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding destabilized my naive views on causality, for instance. [insert other examples here]

I suppose the best example I can find flows from these: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I read it just after finishing my degree in Analytic Philosophy, and drank it in like a cool glass of milk after a meal full of chilies. On the one hand, it was though it were giving me permission to question analytic philosophy at its very roots (and not just in its own terms), while on the other it reframed Aristotle's ideas into something not only palatable but eminently useful; overall, a much-needed detox from my degree.

( Upcoming Days )

Edit: Disabled comments on this post, as it was attracting absurd levels of spam for reasons unknown.

Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read

Capital by Karl Marx, of course. Although given its immense density, and the difficulty of actually understanding it on first read-through, without the support of a class or at least a discussion group or something, I'd settle for The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Both of these lay out theories about economics that are desperately important to understand in our current geopolitical climate -- the former broad, the latter, specific.

I, um, include myself in that 'more people' as well, incidentally. Both of these are books that I've started, and read most of, but never quite finished. Then again, they are both also written in the sort of structure that lays out its theories succinctly at the beginning, then spends the rest of the time justifying them from various angles. Though I do intend to finish both eventually... I skimmed to the end of Capital, but without the reading group with whom I'd read the first 2/3, I found it much less edifying.

( Upcoming Days )

For some reason there's a party every night this weekend, and there's some event that means a lot of nerdy-interest buildings are open to the public, and it's been a beautiful day and would have been a great one for going out and looking at buildings and going up to the bike station to figure out what's wrong with my crankset ... but I am just too tired. For no good reason, really, except that I've been staving off a sort of low-level cold all week, and I guess maybe it is stealing all my energy?

I am still trying to figure out whether I'll have enough of said energy to go to the party tonight. I'd thought that by skipping all the daytime fun stuff/bicycle maintenance chores, I might feel rested enough to go out tonight -- and I might yet, but right now I'm still feeling pretty damn groggy. And it's 4.5 miles of all uphill, all busy roads to get there. And it's a joint birthday party for an acquaintance and someone I don't know at all. On the other hand, both of these people are good friends with a lot of people who I am much closer to, and haven't seen nearly enough of all summer.

Day 22 – Favorite book you own

I'm afraid my answer here is unavoidably sappy. In 10th and 11th grades I had an English teacher who I really liked and looked up to, and also a teenagey obsession with Hamlet -- and one year she gave me a book of Hamlet criticism as an out-of-the-blue Christmas gift. Poem Unlimited, by Harold Bloom, inscribed to my "happy future scholarship". Of course, since I didn't actually pursue that line of scholarship, I don't know things like 'where it is situated in the body of criticism', but I enjoyed reading it and have cherished it as a sentimental physical possession, even as I grew out of my Hamlet obsession.

Honorable Mentions go to:

- Another book that I was given as a surprise present, but told not to mention on certain parts of the internet. ;-)

- The Knot-Shop Man by David Whiteland. It came out shortly after Harry and I finished one of his earlier projects, Planetarium (more commonly known in this journal as 'the best thing on the internet'), so despite the expense of being four hardbacks in a small print run, we decided we had to buy it. Then, Harry being who he is and Davide Whiteland being who he is, and they both being in London at the time, Harry arranged to pick up the parcel from him in some elaborate detective-costumed exchange in a museum, rather than getting it posted. Which is just awesome, as is the book.

( Upcoming Days )

Kalea is back in Scotland for like three days, so today we're making a long-planned day-trip to St Andrews, and the weather looks like it's going to be awful. Gusty, cold and drizzly all day long. However, looking at the weather, I was amused to see the temperature forecast jump up a degree for every leap north made on the map. Edinburgh: 11 °C; Leuchars: 12 °C; Dundee: 13 °C.

Day 20 – Favorite romance book

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Not much to say about it that wouldn't spoil it all, but I recommend that everyone read it. It's one of those all-around perfect books.

( Upcoming Days )

Also: it's cold now. So cold, so windy.

Day 18 – A book that disappointed you

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. After all the hype about it, I expected it to be just about unbearably awesome. Or at least pretty awesome. Or at least good.

I suppose my opinion of it wasn't helped by my having listened to an audio version of it read by some guy with a really annoying voice. And I couldn't even get away from it, because I listened to it during K's and my somewhat-ill-advised bus-tour of western Europe, in situations where it was dark or I had already finished my other book and I was tired of all my other music and so I was just trapped with it, it or boredom or having no auditory barrier between me and the other bus passengers and ugh. Ugh.

Anyway, had I not been in that situation, I don't know that I'd have finished it at all. It was just so boring and self-righteous and absurd! Not even the good kind of absurd. It was like a whole book of talking to your boring drug-obsessed friend who doesn't have much of anything to say about anything except drugs. Which, in retrospect, is probably about what I should have expected. After all, it mostly was my boring, drug-obsessed friends who went around calling it so very very awesome.

(I quite liked the film, though!)

( Upcoming Days )

Incidentally, I am also disappointed in my ability to complete a 30-day meme within a month. Shame on me!

Day 16 – Favorite female character

As with male characters, I don't have an overall favourite -- and in this case, I can't even pull an example out of A Clash of Kings, since it has no particular female characters who jump out at me as potential flavourite of the week. Thus, here are a few subcategorized favourites, in no particular order:

Favourite female villain: Cathy from East of Eden. Oh my goodness, she is just so deliciously evil!
Favourite female unreliable narrator: Iris from The Blind Assassin. I was pretty much onto her from about halfway through (and had my suspicions much earlier still), but she is a sneaky one!
Favourite female obvious-author-fetish: Susan Calvin from I, Robot (&pre/sequels)
Favourite Smurfette: Trillian from the Hitchhiker's Guide series.

... And then I got distracted by TV Tropes when I went to get a link for 'Smurfette', and then suddenly it was 2:40 am. Goodnight!

( Upcoming Days )

Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer

Yesterday I had a little blab about how I don't really have a single 'favourite writer', but ended up naming John Steinbeck for reasons of Future Meme Consistency. Today, for the same reason, I'm naming The Grapes of Wrath as my 'favourite' of his novels, even though in reality it's definitely a tie between that and East of Eden (which I counted for a few years as my Favourite Book Ever, until I read others that slotted themselves into joint first, including The Grapes of Wrath).

( Upcoming Days )

Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore

There are surely dozens, if not hundreds of books in this category, including most of the ones I read as a child, and especially as a small child. Were I to re-encounter Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree, I might find it charming, but I doubt I would feel the same love for it that I did as a three-year-old.

However, I think I can answer this most honestly by naming the series that falls most emphatically on both sides of that question -- used to love, don't anymore -- god this is embarrassing -- The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin. I was first given a few of these at the age of six, by the daughter of a family friend who would've been around 11 or 12 at the time, and was thus a Cool Older Girl whose tastes I sought to emulate. The books themselves were also about Cool Older Girls, who did grown-up things like babysit for other children and have weird emotional disagreements that I didn't understand at all. I was addicted immediately. For the next few years I read all of them I could get my hands on, working my way quickly through the stacks inherited from the aforementioned family friend, then plundering our local library for the rest of the series. God help me, I even read some of the Baby-Sitters' Little Sister spin-off series, although with a protagonist who was both my own age and an insufferable prat, they failed to hold my interest.

I read a whole bunch of other trash over the same period (The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley [whatevers], &c.), but my mother seemed to have developed a particular distaste for the Baby-Sitters. I don't know why she picked on them more than the others -- perhaps she sampled one -- but in any case, by the time I was eight she was trying desperately to distract me from them, telling me how awfully badly they were written, trying to get me to read something else, something better for my developing little mind. Which a) seemed a bit unnecessary, since at the same time I was reading all that trash I was also reading every animal book I could get my hands on, as well as various potted children's histories and sanitized biographies of major historical figures, and all sorts of other 'educational' type books (and, yes, even the occasional book from the high canon of children's literature); and b) only served to make me all the more aggressively voracious in reading them. At one point she even drew up a bargain with me whereby I had to read one 'good' book in between each Baby-Sitters book. The deal lasted for all of one book, and totally ruined Sounder for me, since rather than enjoying the story as I might have, I was only dragging myself through it so I could get back to my teen-adulation crack-pipe.

Fortunately, by the time I'd reached the age of the characters themselves, I'd gotten myself a bit of taste, and started seeing the books for the utter garbage they are. I'll never get those hours back, nor clear out the mind-clutter currently and inexorably occupied by the doings of insipid characters I now care little about (tucked away in the same overspilling mental files as 'all the lyrics to involuntarily-memorized pop songs' and 'overheard celebrity factoids'), but I've made a sort of peace with that. What still bothers me a bit, though, is that all of my peers' other childhood vices, with which I had little engagement, seem to have developed a sort of pop-nostalgic caché. Mario, Batman, Pokemon, etc. I played the last a little, but for the rest I've had to learn all the references from the wrong end -- much like how, having been raised on 'The Simpsons', I tend to 'get' a lot of the references therein only years later, when I finally get around to seeing this or that Classic Film. When questioned I usually tell people, as un-haughtily as I can, that I spent my childhood out in the woods catching lizards and playing with actual rather than virtual turtles (which is also true), and carefully neglect to mention The Baby-Sitters Club.

( Upcoming Days )