40 years old, and I still get homework

Look at Vee, such the little joiner.

In 2006, Matthew Baldwin of defectiveyeti put his own little spin on NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo, and decided to start NaNoReMo -- National Novel Reading Month. He was going to read Moby Dick all month, and post his progress on his blog. I sat back and watched the fun. It reinforced my lack of desire ever to read that book. I'm not sure, but I don't think he finished it. It's 500+ pages, in that dense, wordy style I find particularly off-putting. Like Henry James, only worse.

In 2007, he asked readers to join him, and to pick which book to read. Votes were cast and tallied, and in the end they chose Catch 22. I'd read that for a class in college, I don't remember which one. I didn't join in, mainly out of laziness. I did follow the blog, though, and bits of the book came back to me as I read his comments.

This year the group chose Lolita. I managed to make it through a college career as an English major without having to read that book. I don't know how. I picked it up on my own about ten or fifteen years ago, and every once in a while I go back and read it again. I'd like to hear what other people have to say about it. I think I keep going back because I'm puzzled about why it's considered "great." All I see is a pedophile, crying over his lost prey. There has to be more to it than that, and I'm just missing it. I am famous for letting symbolism go flying over my head. Occasionally I'll look up distractedly and ask, "What was that whooshing noise?"

So I'm joining in. According to the syllabus, I need to have Part 1, chapters 1-13 read by tomorrow. Fortunately, this is one of the books I've already unpacked and put on my bookshelf. And today, I managed to remember to take it off of the shelf and put it in my purse. If I'd been thinking, I could have brought it with me to read while I was waiting to vote on Tuesday. Instead, I was reading They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie.

Off to lunch, and to read.

Signs you're approaching Harry Potter overload...

1. While explaining the layout of her garden, your mother points out that the romaine has been placed within a small circle of snap peas so it won't get too much sun and bolt. Your immediate mental image is of lettuces lifting themselves out of the ground and running full-tilt for the edge of the forest. Warning.
2. Because the weather is absolutely gorgeous today, you decide to take stroll through campus over your lunch break. In your travels, you notice one particular area where it seems to be raining quite heavily. You look up for the teeny raincloud that must be making this happen instead of down for the half-hidden sprinkler in the ivy that actually is causing it. Danger.
3. You knock a plate off a table. It breaks in two. You have to fight the urge to grab a pencil, tap the pieces, and say, "Reparo!" Seek help now.

BookCrossing's latest acquisition

Heading out for an evening in town, first to dinner then to dance class, I grab a book I bought years ago and have been meaning to read: God-Shaped Hole. I start into it as I'm waiting for the bus. About twenty pages in, I'm getting a bad feeling. By the time I get to town, I'm sure that I'm not going to like this book.

It's a first-person story. I don't like the main character. That isn't necessarily the end of the world. Have you ever read a first-person narrative where the character sets him/herself up as the protagonist, but the author gives you some sort of signal not to believe what you're being told? A turn of phrase, a skewed point of view, a fact dropped into the story that the narrator doesn't realize the significance of--it's a literary throat-clearing, a broad wink. I keep waiting for that signal. I'm not getting it. Oh, dear Lord. The author likes this woman. I'm expected to like her as well, and by extension I'm supposed to care about this idiot she's just met and fallen in love with.

I do not want to have dinner with these people. I have no other book with me, and the public library closes at 5 on Sunday. Ten minutes ago.

Thank goodness for Webster's, our local second-hand book store! For two dollars and tax, I buy an Agatha Christie murder mystery I've never heard of before (Towards Zero) and use it to replace the bunch of pretentious, angst-ridden, pseudo-intellectual twerps I was stuck with.

Now I'm starting to feel bad. Maybe I didn't give these people enough of a chance. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for this book. Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few weeks.

Maybe I'll enter it in BookCrossing and leave the book out somewhere in the hope that whoever stumbles upon it will appreciate it in ways that obviously I cannot.

Bee Season

I bought this book a while ago, and found it last Thursday during the whole cleaning thing. It's called Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg. It's about a little girl from whom great things are not expected, until she amazes everyone and wins a school spelling bee, then the district spelling bee, and then the state one. Suddenly she's attracted her scholarly father's attention, and I just got to the part where he's invited her into his study and given her a brand new 3-volume dictionary. He is now helping her prepare for the national bee:

They study for five hours each weekday and seven hours on weekends. It is not about rote memorization. Saul wants Elly to understand these words: their origins, their roots, their prefixes and suffixes. He presents the dictionary as a book worthy of commentary and discussion, a Torah of language.

When Eliza studies, she travels through space and time. In COUSCOUS, she can sense desert and sand-smoothed stone. In CYPRESS, she tastes salt and wind. She visits Africa, Greece, and France. Each word has a story: a Viking birth, a journey across the sea, the exchange from mouth to mouth, from border to border, until æpli is apfel is appel is APPLE, crisp and sweet on Eliza's tongue. When it is night and their studying complete, these are the words she rides into sleep. The voice of the dictionary is the voice of her dreams.

They're turning this into a movie, and I hope they do it justice.