From the stacks...September edition

I'm beginning to think my new neighborhood neighbor, Carls, and I are clones.

The other day, post hair appointment date with Ams, I ran into Carls randomly on the street.

Last night, I went to forage at the library and who did I find filling out a card application...but Carls.

This means she witnessed me at the library. Which means she saw me filling my arms with books on CD for nighttime listening, on hold books, and our state-certified-people-who-aren't-doing-what-they're-certified-in-not-by-choice book club selection (The House of the Scorpion...ooo), and then attempting to cram them all in my purse...

Since we are clones it means she won't judge, right?

Anyways, remember how I was all excited to read The Passage (vampire sci-fi, not sea voyage)? Well, the madre read it (first, like usual) and while she was pumped at the beginning, with 200 pages left it became underwhelming.

I feel her pain because that is how I'm feeling about The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. At first I was on the fence because I didn't like any of the characters and some of them gave me misogynistic Rabbit, Run flashbacks. But then the realness (if dislike) of the characters kept me reading. But now, with 100 pages left, I find myself skimming and only really reading what interests me every so often. And I find that I'm not missing much. This might mean that I won't read Freedom.

However, I have different criteria for books on CD (mainly that the voice lulls me to sleep), so I picked up The Passage on CD...29 CD's to be precise.

No worries on the massive book front as I still picked up a gigantic book: a collection of one of Doris Lessing's science fiction series. I am usually anti giant collection tomes that will take me months to get through when I could simply get the separate books, but the dangerous pull of having everything in one place was so tempting...so we will see how it goes.

"We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth."
John Lubbock

Booky booky book book(s)

Lately my book reading has consisted of two categories: books I read for me, and books I read to prepare for teaching. This week it was The Group and Brave New World, respectively.

Mary McCarthy's The Group
A novel about a group of Vassar women? Sign me up. After reading The Group, I am officially a Mary McCarthy fan. This novel reads like an instruction manual for being a woman. It discusses everything from contraception, breastfeeding and family relations to marriage, abuse, lesbianism and the paradox of being highly educated and at the same time expected to fit a subservient role. Whew! And yet, it is also a well arcing story of a group of women who meander back and forth to each other while trying to forge their own way in the world. Not to mention the ending, oh the ending! Bittersweet indeed.

And now, for my favorite quote:

"She had discovered a sad little law: a man never called when you needed him but only when you didn't. If you really got absorbed in your ironing or in doing your bureau drawers, to the point where you did not want to be interrupted, that was the moment the phone decided to ring. You had to mean it: you had to forget about him honestly and enjoy your own society before it worked. You got what you wanted, in other words, as soon as you saw you could do without it, which meant, if Polly reasoned right, that you never got what you wanted."

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
Well well well. In all my English class time I somehow have missed reading Brave New World. Last year I read 1984 for the first time. Apparently I put off reading dystopian literature. I decided to finally undergo Brave New World because at some point I will teach it and OMG there is s-e-x in it. The uncomfortableness created at the extensive talk of the genetic and chemical conditioning and accepted social strata thoroughly pleased me. It made me think, about how we are conditioned now...dun dun dunnn. Huxley surprised me in going the whole savage in a civilized world route with heavy religious overtones. And I must say, this week's reading is 2 for 2 on legit endings.

"The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich."
Carlos Ruiz Zafon