Top Ten Tuesday, The Mean Girls of Literature

I was going to do this last night when I was kind of buzzed, but alas, that did not happen. So now you have to deal with my completely sober commentary on the women I have chosen for my top ten mean girls of literature. I'm sure I've read books with way meaner ladies, but this is what I came up with after very little thought. I don't have time to contemplate these things, people. I have other, more important things to devote My Brain to. Like focusing on the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler Baby Mama DVD commentary, which is really just okay at best, but now I know, don't I?

Dolores Umbridge, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
AGGGGHHHH THIS WOMAN. OotP is my favorite because hating her is so cathartic. She fills me with impotent rage and she's just awesomely done. JK Rowling, you're such a badass writer.

Rosalie Murray, Agnes Grey
I've written about this horrible girl before. If I could punch ANYONE in literature, it'd probably be her. She sucks.

Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair
She's kind of sympathetic? I guess? But she's a lady mercenary, and she's willing to use pretty much anyone.

Lucy Steele, Sense and Sensibility
Stupid Lucy and her stupid handkerchief of Edward's. Although again, you have to kind of feel sorry for her since she has to make her own way, not having a mother. It's slightly admirable that she DOES it, but of course it's very bad indeed that she uses people. Yes.

Sarah Reed, Jane Eyre
She was my favorite part of the new JE movie, but that's mainly because the actress playing her (Sally Hawkins) is so damn good. But yes, she's very mean. (my gosh what would you all do without my literary analyses?)

Esmé Squalor, Series of Unfortunate Events
This lady's one of my favorite villainesses. Named after the JD Salinger story For Esme — With Love and Squalor. She's introduced in my favorite of the series, The Ersatz Elevator, and she is defined as someone who's obsessed with what is "in." I love her. At one point she wears stiletto heels, with the heels being real stilettos. And she's the city's sixth most important financial advisor.

Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind
Yeah, she's admirable. She's also crazy-mean.

Cathy Trask, East of Eden
"It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we say why." I love Cathy. As a character. As a person she's terrible. But basically, East of Eden is one of the greatest books of all time and everyone should read it.

Mrs. X, The Nanny Diaries
Okay, I have to admit that when I think of The Nanny Diaries, I think of the movie and Laura Linney's multifaceted (yeah, I said it) performance as Mrs. X, because I read the book like six years ago when I was nannying. I think they make her more sympathetic in the movie than the book. In the book, she's mainly just a horrible Upper East Side mother who doesn't pay her kid any attention and is awful to the nanny.

Miss Minchin, A Little Princess
OH MISS MINCHIN. Again, she's been made more sympathetic for me by the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful 1995 movie version, which everyone should see (available on Netflix Instant). She's not quite mean enough in the book to be a caricature, which is good, but she's just such an excellent example of a person with a small amount of power misusing it to make people's lives miserable. Lesson: Do not do this.

In Which We Learn Why I Will One Day Be Crushed to Death by Old Newspapers

I looked at my bookshelves over the weekend and thought ‘…I can’t get rid of any of these.’

I’m something of a minor hoarder. On the few occasions I’ve seen one of those shows (I have Netflix Instant and refuse to pay for cable), when I hear the ever-ready “No, I might need that someday,” issuing forth from one of the deranged people who apparently thinks she might “need” a ceramic statue of a basset hound some day in the future, well, it sounds familiar. Because yes, my shelves are rapidly filling up with more unread than read books, so it’s somewhat justifiable not to throw out the unread ones, but the read books I own I like! You know, at least kind of. And what if one day I’m feeling particularly in the mood for a few pages of one of those books, but – ! I remember that I’ve given it away, and therefore that itch shall remain unscratched!

Okay, when it’s written out, I guess that would just be a minor inconvenience and not that big a deal, but it still remains nigh impossible for me to get rid of any books.

I blame my mother for this. A few years back, she and her friend, who did interior design and was as impressive a personality as my mother, decided to clear some things out from the house. On one memorable occasion, the friend held up some item that had no clear use, to which my mother shouted “No! I need that! I—“ only to have the pitiless friend drop it on the floor and break it, rendering the argument pointless.

I probably need someone like this. Only they’d swiftly shuttle the books to an undisclosed location rather than tear them apart, as the latter would be distressing.

This is all the more reason to try to get through more of the books on my shelves. Then I can maybe get rid of some. This weekend in my Easter basket I received Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, and my mother lent me her copy of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, as we’re reading it in my church’s small group. So that’s two more right there. I need to place some kind of moratorium on books. I did this with DVDs one year and lasted until August (I also have a DVD-buying compulsion). The best thing, as far as I can figure it, is to just add things to your Amazon wishlist, and keep checking it every so often. You’ll slowly delete things that would have been impulse purchases, and finally whittle it down to the ones you actually still want after however many months.

Of course, my birthday’s next month (COUGH COUGH) and I tend to be rather generous towards myself at that time. So this might not work so well.

But no matter! Ever onward! This shall be conquered and I shall end up with a reasonable number of books that will not be the slightest pain to pack up in boxes and move! This is the goal and it shall come to pass. And if it doesn’t, I’m paying someone else to move my stuff, because I’m not carrying those boxes again.

In Which Kindles, Pandas and Libraries Are Discussed

I have a lot of downtime at work, and not to sound all creepy and stalkerish or anything, but today I’ve been using that to read basically all of Karen’s past entries at Books and Chocolate. She’s awesome and you should follow her. Being somewhat new to the book blogging world, I have not struck up any firm friendships with other book bloggers, and therefore I do not know the people whose entries I read, BUT, after weeks of wading through crap after crap blog, I have found a small number of them I like greatly, and hers is one.

Anyway, so she discusses in some entry how she’s trying to get through only TBR books this year, i.e. the books we all buy and then just kind of leave on a shelf because something new and shiny catches our eye. I decided to go through my goodreads list for last year and see how many of the books on it were library books. The answer was almost all of them.  I've already discussed how for me the library is essentially a house of prostitution which causes me to leave the faithful little books quietly waiting for me on my shelves for its exotic allures.

The number of unread books I have is shameful. I got a Kindle so they would no longer clutter up my shelves. What I need is some sort of strategy to cease using that cheap (okay, free) harlot known as the Harold Washington Public Library, and instead spend some quality time with lovely books like Alison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, Edith Wharton’s The Reef, and Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!.

And Lord God, please don’t let me get sucked into George R.R. Martin’s nerdy little world and get Game of Thrones from the library. Because the last damn thing I want is to sincerely belong to the Brotherhood Without Banners club.

I found a picture of an actual sad panda. This is what I would be if I took Martin really seriously.

The Book of Deuteronomy Always Gets That Song from 'Cats' Stuck in My Head

I just looked up "thunder bible" in google image search, looking for...I don't know, some kind of picture of God with impressive looking storm stuff around him, but instead I got this picture of Zeus, so that's what you're getting:

I'm an iconoclast, but I'm not one of those nasty iconoclasts who breaks into your 14th century home with a mallet and starts smashing up all your lovely pictures of the Virgin Mary. I am just personally not into having images of God around. Except obviously in blog posts.

I had a purpose to this post, but got distracted by Zeus's weird, kind of elfin headpiece. And I mean a real elfin headpiece, not the kind this dude over to the right's wearing. Because that's just for silly Christmas elves, not badass Tolkien ones. 

So I'm trying to read through the Bible in a year. Other people have done it, so why can't I? Turns out because other people obviously had a longer attention span and a greater endurance for Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The first time I tried this, I made it to the first chapters of Exodus (the second out of 66 books in the Bible, for any pagans out there) and then gave up. This time, I was determined to make it through. It is, however, now April and I am on the 5th book of the Bible. Dividing it up purely by books and not total number of chapters, by 1/3 of the way through the year, I should now be reading Song of Songs, aka The Sexy Book. But instead I'm reading about why the Israelites need to give stuff to the Levites and when it's proper to stone people.

For a modern day Christian, the Old Testament's really discouraging. God seems almost unrecognizable compared to what some call "the God of the New Testament," and it's really, really, really difficult to understand why the Israelites are being commanded to do things like stone the people in the community who start to worship others gods in order to "purge the evil from among you." Maybe our generation has just heard way too many dictators talking about purging and cleansing, which just amounts to heaps of dead men, women and children. But I feel like it's probably a good thing to be uncomfortable with people using blunt force trauma to kill others, right? Or really any means, come to think of it.

As a Christian, you tend to give the benefit of the doubt to God. I mean, He's God. I think I do this, but when you read these 4000 year old documents, translated by some 20th century Christian guys (I read the Right and Proper NIV translation and shall read no other, no matter how accurate it is), with little-to-no historical or cultural background or context as to what was going on around the Israelites at the time, it can just look awful.

The essence of this is: it's really hard to read the Old Testament and not feel all squirmy inside when reading about what was considered holy and right. But 1) I don't think it matters much anymore, and 2) There's probably no way I can ever really understand it. Which I'm okay with. But understand it or not, I'm gonna read all of it. And then I'll be able to check it off on that obnoxious showoff list of How Many Books You've Read. Which is second on my list of benefits from it right after Spiritual Edification.

Top Ten Tuesday: Rewind Edition, aka Alice Gets to Choose from Past Topics

Broke and Bookish

So of course I picked Favorite Fictional Couples. There're probably spoilers in here. But whatever, I don't think they're a big deal in this case.

Will Ladislaw/Dorothea Brooke - Middlemarch

I was 19 when I read this and basically freaked out about Will and Dorothea. Why? Because Dorothea’s the most admirable character ever (I mean, you could say that like Beth in Little Women is, but Dorothea’s not a milksop) and you think she’s all impenetrable, but then she loves him and it is sooooooo wonderful. Reading this bolstered my conviction that, if alive today, George Eliot would do things like write West Wing fanfic. Only she wouldn’t ship Josh/Donna, because she’d know they’re not equals. JOSH/AMY FOREVER.

Ethan Frome/Mattie Silver - Ethan Frome

DOOMED ROMANCE. I’ve heard people make fun of this book, and they suck. It is amazing and cathartic and kickass. Ethan and Mattie are awesome for trying to do the right thing.

Nan King/Florence Banner - Tipping the Velvet

I didn’t think I’d like Flo. But then it turned out she’s all into the labor movement and makes Nan a better person, whereas Kitty’s just an energy sucker. A really hot energy sucker, but an energy sucker nonetheless. And whatever, people who only ship Nan/Kitty, Nan and Flo make out in a closet. That was the height of sexuality to my 14-year-old imagination, which I will now revert to for the purposes of this post (erm, not that I was 14 when I read Tipping the Velvet).

Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane - Peter Wimsey series

Best ship ever. Hands down. They’re smart, they’re funny, they’re brave, they’re not hot 20somethings, they’re independent, and they love Bunter the manservant. If I had to give up all ships but one, I would keep Peter/Harriet, even if Dorothy L. Sayers refused to write scenes of unbridled sexual tension and instead chose to mock the reader for wanting them. I can just see her now, staring down at her manuscipt, sniggering behind her hand. But damnit, I still love the woman.

Percy Jackson/Annabeth Chase - Percy Jackson series

I suppose I should be ashamed of this. I teach at a Sunday school type thing at my church for the older kids about once a month, and we wrap up each session talking about Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. I know most people forgive Harry Potter, but I will stubbornly cling to/defend Percy Jackson. And while I normally shrink from shipping teenagers (or people under 35), Percy and Annabeth become really good friends and you get to see their relationship evolve until they’re an acceptable age (which is like 17? I guess?). And she’s a daughter of Athena and full of wisdom and whatnot, whereas he’s a son of Poseidon and…like…good with water. So that pairing makes sense.

Adam Bede/Dinah Morris - Adam Bede

Okay, George Eliot is, again, Queen of 19^th Century Fanfic. The main problem I had with Adam Bede is that Dinah disappears for a huge portion of it and it instead focuses on Hetty the Harlot. Who teaches us all a little something about not having sex with the upper class. But Georgey (as I call her in my head) pulls through in true fanfic style, which makes me love her.

Sir Leicester/Lady Dedlock - Bleak House

THE DEDLOCKS WILL BE HAPPY. I have a picture I’m totally sharing, because it’s adorable.

I mean, this is absolutely not indicative of their relationship in the book, but WHATEVS

Alfred/Sophronia Lammle - Our Mutual Friend

I'm almost positive Dickens doesn't want these two shipped, but I'm doing it anyway. They're minor characters in a book that causes great anger to rise in me when discussing it for too long, but I like them. Did I ever think they'd make my top ten list of booky couples? Not until now.



See how happy they look?

Anne Shirley/Gilbert Blythe - Anne of Green Gables series

I read the Anne series when I was 13. Anne and Gilbert are awesome and I shall brook no opposition (although really, who’s gonna be like ‘Anne and Gilbert SUCK, as do you’? although I might find it funny if they did).

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Most of my shipping happened in my teens, and during that time I mainly read Victorian lit. So these’re almost all from that time period. The few “romantic” books I’ve read that were written lately (ex: The Time Traveler’s Wife) have been shit. Listen well, all ye.

Another Review! Wherein We Discover Why I Don't Get Paid for This

Water for Elephants

Ok, so I started loving this more than basically anything else, but at about the halfway point my rating went down from 5/5 to 4/5 because:

1. Jacob is emo ALL THE TIME. It was the Great Depression, but it was also the time of the musical 42nd Street, which features songs like 'Young and Healthy.' Which he is. But he's always enraged or crying or being smacked around by someone, which causes him to get mad and cry some more.

2. Variations on a theme: IT IS SO DEPRESSING. Like, even ignoring EmoJacob, it reminds me of short stories I wrote in middle school after my English teacher told the class that happy endings were "unrealistic," so at the end of all my stories, everyone was dead.

But the first half is amazingly awesome. I also could've done with some more in-depth stuff about Marlena, but the book IS from Jacob's perspective, and I liked it even without a super-present female character, so it pretty much has to be good in that case. 'Cause I don't like me the books without the strong female character. Except the long opening of East of Eden before Cathy shows up, because that book's fricking poetry in prose.

I'm totally gonna enjoy that monkey book.

Readathon! Kind of!

That's it. I missed the Read-a-thon last weekend, so I'm doing my own sad...alone...not actually 24 hour long...readathon. It's going to be more like "What happens when I DON'T sit in my apartment, eating hummus and watching tv on netflix instant?"

I'm totally going to write updates which will be either utterly hilarious, or deathly boring. I haven't decided yet if I'm bringing my laptop, as I am bringing way, way more books than I will be reading, as I cannot handle limiting my options.

Where are you reading from today?

My apartment. It’s like 50 degrees and rainy out. Then I shall be moving to my parents' club in the afternoon, where I've gotten permission to sit in their kickass library, which has big comfy leather armchairs and a fireplace and is usually pretty uninhabited, as I guess Big Chicago Businessmen don't like to read.

3 facts about me … 
1.  The giant ground sloth is my favorite animal.
2.  I eat hummus almost every day and have for about two years. If not longer.
3.  When I was 11, my life revolved around John and Marlena on Days of Our Lives. Yeah, I said it.

How many books do you have in your TBR pile for the next 24 hours?

Twelve. I’d be pretty jazzed if I could get through three since at least two of them are things I’ve already started but left alone for a long time.

Do you have any goals for the read-a-thon (i.e. number of books, number of pages, number of hours, or number of comments on blogs)?

If I don’t get through two, I will consider myself to have failed.

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9:07 a.m. I have started the day by watching Black Books, which, ok, is me sitting in my apartment watching tv on DVD, but it's kind of about books? Kind of? Whatever, it should count.

 1:58 p.m. Settled in. See picture on left.

3:04 p.m. Ponder the miraculous nature of the written word.

4:21 p.m. Bucket drummer takes up residence on the street below.

4:38 p.m. I hate bucket drummers.

6:04 p.m. Done with Water for Elephants.

7:32 p.m. Hands freezing off. Leave club library for warmth and hummus.

8:04 p.m. Eat large amount of hummus and watch NBC comedies while thinking I should feel bad about not reading.


9:51 p.m. Watching Black Books and checking facebook. Thinking about reading but also kind of sleepy.

Next day, 12:08 p.m. Feeling kind of bad, I finish Shit My Dad Says so I can say I read two in kind of 24 hours. Kind of. Only I'd already gotten through a lot of Water for Elephants when I started. But whatever, there, two. Also Shit My Dad Says is hilarious and everyone should read it.

View from the club. That's the Art Institute on the right.

I feel like perhaps I have failed at this readathon, but I still had an awesome time, so BAM. Also, I ate part of a hamburger in that library, which is the sneakiest thing I have done in recent memory.

Book Blog Hop! And Way Awesome Plans.

 "Pick a character from a book you are currently reading or have just finished and tell us about him/her."

Since I spent most of last weekend reading Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw, I’m gonna talk about Jesse Austin.

Jesse starts the novel just having come in second in some Olympic ladies’ swimming event. I never watch the Olympics, so I have no idea what it is. The one where you swim to the end of one side of the pool, then swim back. I’m not gonna get into my feelings about how this seems kind of stupid, but okay. I like Jesse enough to be happy she’s really good at something.

So, the novel flashes “forward” to 1990, which is like 20 years later, and shows where she would’ve ended up by choosing something different three times in the same situation. Her sense of self and calm varies, but overall she stays a pretty strong person who’s kind of lost and has a horrible relationship with her mother. She never gets really dependent in a relationship, which I like, and stays an individual throughout.

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Otherly, I'm about halfway through Water for Elephants and still kind of embarrassingly into it. I have Big Plans for tomorrow, which mainly involve reading at an awesome location that will hopefully cure my internet-wrought ADD (thanks, Procrastinating I Did in College) for at least an afternoon. If all pans out I shall post pictures. Pictures that it is probably frowned upon to take, but oh well. I fear nothing! Aside from a harsh scolding, so maybe I'll wait until everyone's out of the room.

In Which I Bought Another Book, But It's Probably Gonna Be Way Awesome

In what could very well have been a financial misstep, when browsing at Books-a-Million with my very awesome friend Katie (whose anecdotal, hilarious blog you can find here), I decided to purchase Sara Gruen’s next book after Water for Elephants, Ape House.

I have no interest in people who study monkeys. Well. Aside from Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. So maybe I do have an interest in people who study monkeys. But it’s not something I would seek out information on like Liz Lemon.

“Oh, I was just reading about gorilla researchers for a sketch we're doing making fun of them. For devoting their lives to the jungle and its noble inhabitants.”

But I bought her next book, because I am experiencing an overwhelming love for her first book, which I’m not very far into at all. If Sara Gruen were right here, in the corporate office in which I work all day long every day, I would kneel at her feet and say “TEACH ME YOUR WAYS, WORDSMITH.”

Only maybe not, because I’m one of those lazy people who doesn’t believe writing can be taught except it totally can and maybe if I went to a writing class once in my life I wouldn’t have huge sentences with almost no helpful commas and other grammatically incorrect things I’ve chosen not to care about.

But for realsies, unless Water for Elephants does some big hideous turnaround and everything goes down the toilet, writing-wise, I love it like it’s a problem. The only thing I’m worried about is whenever the elephant shows up, because for right now, I have no interest in elephants. Like, less so than in apes. But I trust that I will continue to love the main character Jacob, and ignore the fact that though Marlena is platinum blonde in the movie, the book has her hair as ‘just dark enough to disqualify as blonde.’ A small matter, but one which is currently annoying me since the poster for the movie is so very, very shiny, which I enjoy.

I demand that the book be changed so that Marlena has shiny blonde hair. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Floridian Reading Time

I have not been lazy about updating this. Rather I have been in Florida, absorbing vitamin D, which will hopefully help my hypochondriacal self to believe all my hair is not, in fact, falling out.

 I optimistically brought a stack of books with me, despite knowing that I was going in order to visit my best friend who, in all likelihood, would rather drink than sit down and do some side-by-side reading. She plays in an orchestra down there, and so I had some time on my own while she did some concerts, and that was my main reading time.

The main reading focus was Aquamarine, by Carol Anshaw. I had never heard of this book, and how it came into my possession was thusly: my church, which is the best church of ever, has a large GLBT population since it falls under the "More Light" category (translation: we're way into gays). There are two older women in the congregation named Gail and Gerri who I like to refer to as our flagship lesbian couple. They've been together since the '90s and you can't really think about one without the other.

Anyway, so our pastor is leaving. I'm an elder (yes, I'm 25) and so I had to attend a three hour Tuesday night meeting the other week which was an information session on the steps we take to get a new pastor (my church is Presbyterian, and we like meetings). We finished around 10 p.m. and so Gail and Gerri were nice enough to give me a ride home. The first topic that came to my mind in the car was the lesbian lit I'd been reading, so we talked about that, they dropped me off, and I forgot about it. Until the next Sunday when Gail came up to me with a large paper bag and said, in a slightly conspiratorial tone, "These are concerning what we talked about."

 The bag contained four or five lesbian novels, most of them seemingly dated, but I'm kind of a fan of dated lesbian novels. Or at least I enjoyed An Emergence of Green, which is really, really '80s.

 So that's how, despite my mountains of unread books, I spent most of my Florida vacation reading time immersed in a book about an Olympic lady swimmer and the three paths her life could have taken. It was really good, or at least really interesting. She ends up with a lady in only one of them, but I would argue that that one has the happiest ending. When someone lends you a large number of books, solicited or otherwise, you have to read at least one fairly quickly. I don't know if that rule's written down somewhere, but I do have a gut feeling that not to would be rude.

 Now I'm back and working on Water for Elephants before the movie comes out, even though time and experience have taught me that to read the book right before you see the movie almost guarantees you will hate the movie. What adds to this possibility is that I, despite my own inclinations, really like this book. They sell it at TARGET and I really like it. How embarrassing. I'm going to have to read some kind of 'I'm not like all of you, masses!' book after this, like...like something by Trollope or maybe I'll finally finish Notre Dame de Paris, which I keep telling myself will happen someday.

 I have a fun reading adventure planned, the main point of which will be to prove to myself how stupid I am regarding Complex Ideas Thought of By Very Very Smart People.

Unfamiliar Fishes - A Thoughtful and Awesome Review

I’ve never cared about Hawaii. Like…ever. They were the 50^th state brought into the Union, that’s all I knew. And a Brady Bunch movie had been set there. And its people liked to surf. Oh! and Dog the Bounty Hunter lives there, which is awesome.

I was vaguely aware that we’d overthrown their queen, Liliuokalani, but I never really thought about it, or about what the people of Hawaii felt about that.

I was a bit uncertain as to how I felt about this book until the end. I’m generally a big fan of tangents, but Sarah Vowell seems to go off on so many that I was struggling with the chronology of events (I’m big on chronology). Somehow, though, in the last few pages, she pulls it together and I felt like it had been a truly worthwhile reading experience.

That’s the brief summary. Now for some specific thoughts.

The nice thing about really liking a certain author and being willing to read whatever she writes is that you can be exposed to things you wouldn’t have searched out on your own. So when I found out Sarah Vowell was writing a book on Hawaii I thought ‘Oh. Okay. I’ll read that, and I’m sure it’ll be at least kind of funny.’ Which it was, with lines like “Expecting capitalists to refrain from gobbling up the earth is like blaming Pac-Man for gulping down pac-dots.”

She covers the history of the missionaries coming from Boston in 1820, to annexation in 1898 under that bastard McKinley. Captain Cooke is covered a little, since his initial trip to Hawaii in 1778 is what eventually led to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (the ABCFM, which gets referenced a lot in the book) sending its missionaries there.

What I found most surprising is how quickly Hawaii changed in 78 years. In 1820, Kamehameha I had just died, leaving his son in charge, who radically changed the system of laws before the missionaries even got there. Then, due to the missionaries, Hawaiian became a written language, and the majority of the country learned to read it. Then they changed from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. And then the grandchildren of the original missionaries had a coup d’etat and overthrew the monarch, installing themselves as the heads of the new government. These grandchildren, by the way, included Sanford Dole, who I realized partway through the book is probably the pineapple dude. Boo.

Basically, our country sucks.

New opinions I have garnered from this book: McKinley was a douchebag, Roosevelt was maybe not as wonderful as I have thought, Grover Cleveland was surprisingly cool, mayyybe Hawaii shouldn’t be a state since we pretty much stole it, and Sarah Vowell isn’t always antagonistic towards Christianity (although I learned that in The Wordy Shipmates). She was generally okay about the way the missionaries handled things, or at least appreciative of some of the contributions they made. It was their children and grandchildren who mucked up everything.

McKinley didn’t have the votes to pass a treaty of annexation, so instead, in the month that all the major battles were happening in the Spanish-American War, he had Congress pass a joint resolution to annex Hawaii. As a dude in the book says, “A joint resolution is normally what the Congress of the United States does to say, ‘We recognize this day is Joe Blow Day.’” But that time they decided to use it to annex a nation and its people (and its sugar! its wonderful, wonderful sugar). You suck, McKinley.

Grover Cleveland was awesome, by the way, because after President Harrison put forward the treaty of annexation in the Senate, when Cleveland became president he withdrew it. And after McKinley used his lame, shady tactics to annex it anyway, he said “as I contemplate the means used to complete this outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”

Tangents aside, I learned a lot about Hawaii’s 19^th century history in 233 pages, which is pretty good. I developed some interest in it, which is better than no interest at all, and I want to try poi, despite being informed it’s “pretty much just paste.” Good job, Sarah Vowell.

Sarah Vowell, Pt I (i.e. pre-finishing Unfamiliar Fishes)

I have a strong affection for Sarah Vowell, stemming from a five week stint in France at the age of 21. I had had four non-consecutive semesters of French prior to going (my high school offered Spanish) and was promptly placed with a host family that did not speak any English beyond the 17-year-old Jean Pierre being able to inquire “Do Ah ‘ave an accehnt?” and the mother proudly proclaiming “Apple pie!”

Missing my family, my friends (the kids in my program were goobers), a steady internet connection, DVDs and an American keyboard (my first e-mails had no apostrophes, as I could not find that key), I sank into a week-long depression which involved me crying every day, usually on the steps of, or inside, something grand and historic.

Back in America I had optimistically opted to only pack two English books. “I want to IMMERSE myself,” I told my parents. Little was I to know that soon, the sound of someone speaking English would cause me immediate happiness and joy, and a desire to hug them to oblivion. Thus, when I got to my room at my host parents’ and unpacked, I saw the two Sarah Vowell books I had brought, The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Assassination Vacation, and teared up. I zoomed through Patriot and realized I would have to ration Assassination Vacation (I also had a brief affair with Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, but suffice it to say that book sucks and I didn’t finish because I hated it).

One of the best parts of my day was climbing into bed at oh, say 9 (I was not a participant in Avignon’s semi-active nightlife), grabbing Assassination Vacation, and reading about crazy men assassinating presidents in the 19^th century. The important part was that they were doing it in America. America, the place I had lived my entire life and always taken for granted, but now thought of as being a giant land mass that was much too far from where I was. I had to think of my parents as being across an ocean, and of me being in a place where it’s almost impossible to find a chicken sandwich. Sarah Vowell understood and spoke of her love for America, without making it seem dumb. Reading her books made me proud to be the nationality I was, instead of feeling crappy that my country had never done cool things like kidnap a pope (ok, that’s not technically what happened, but whatever).

The most connected I ever felt to her was when she discussed living abroad: “Once, when I was living in Holland, I went to the movies, and when a Marlboro Man ad came on the screen, I started bawling with homesickness.”

Something similar happened to me upon seeing a poster for Ice Age 2 (or “L'Âge de glace 2”). I didn’t see Ice Age, and had no interest in seeing its sequel, but it was from my country, it had jokes I would probably find dumb but would ‘get’, and my family would be able to see it, unlike most of the other movies playing, all of which seemed to feature a zany-looking balding man.

That small bit of understanding endeared Sarah Vowell to me forever. So what if at the end of Assassination Vacation she goes off on a huge diatribe against Christianity? So what if I haven’t really liked her last two books? I am going to buy and read whatever she has published until I die because her books sustained me in what has so far been one of the crappiest periods of my life: being 4000 miles from almost everything and everyone I cared about, and feeling totally alone, except for Sarah Vowell and her books.

Oh, also except for No Doubt’s “The Climb,” but that’s a different story.

Years Ago, in a Bookstore With My Brother

Me: *picking up Atlas Shrugged and reading aloud* "Who is John Galt?"
Brother: Who cares?
Me: Right then.
*puts book back down*


There seems to be an Ayn Rand hate train running through the book blog world lately and I didn't want to be the last one to hop on.

Of Manatees and Book Reviews

So twice a year, apparently, there's this thing called Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon. It's what it sounds like -- you try to read for 24 hours (although plenty seem to break for sleeping/showering/whathaveyou). As I am into things that have rules, I would be all for it, BUT the first one of this year is taking place on the very weekend I am visiting my totes bff Audrey in Florida, and I feel like she might be insulted if I say "I know I flew all this way to spend time with you and that you're being awesome by letting me stay in your house, but I can't talk to you for 24 hours as I have to participate in this online challenge I read about last week."

So. That will not be happening. Instead I shall be gazing with delight upon the majestic manatee and his fellow denizens of the sparkling waters of the Gulf.

I am ALMOST done with Sarah Vowell's newest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, and just in time, too, as she's speaking in Oak Park in two days and I would like to finish it before then. It might be my first actual review on here. I thought book reviews were inherently boring, but Amanda over at Dead White Guys has proven this not to be the case. So, my zeal renewed, I shall give this 'reviewing' a try. Fair warning, it will probably consist of something along the lines of "This part sucked and this part was awesome," for that is how I roll.

A doorway!

I have found a meme that seems to be a doorway to truly awesome blogs, for which I am extremely thankful. It is this:








Do you find yourself predisposed to like (or dislike) books that are generally accepted as great books and have been incorporated into the literary canon? Discuss the effect you believe a book’s “status” has on your opinion of it.


I’m definitely predisposed to like them, and I’ll tell you why, meme. It’s because every century churns out an almost infinite amount of crap literature, and then a tiny bit of good. Undoubtedly, some of the good stuff gets left out of the canon, and some of the bad stuff inexplicably worms its way in, but overall if something is canon I tend to assume it’s there because it’s timeless (er, to a certain degree) and has a piece of human truth in it. This has led to me reading the amazingness that is Middlemarch, and the death knell that is Romola (really, George Eliot? really?). It led to Ethan Frome, which made me sob at 2 in the morning for the fates of its characters, and Summer, which just flat-out sucks.


As I discussed in a previous post on contemporary lit, my reliance on canon lit crippled me to a certain extent for some years, as I did not trust any novels that did not have a 100-year-old stamp of approval. Fortunately, that has changed, but I do look with much more suspicion upon modern works than I do upon, say, anything written by Thackeray. No, that’s actually not true. I distrust anything by Thackeray that isn’t Vanity Fair. So let’s say anything written by Dickens, trite as that may be.


Hurrah for canon!

Challengey Things!

I've been reading a lot for the GLBT challenge, which has been enlightening, to say the least. Also I've discovered that I love Emma Donoghue a lot and a lot. And I'm rather 'meh' on Jeanette Winterson. Her writing is extreeeemely devoid of detail (can something be extremely devoid? whatever, it can now) and I am not a fan of such things. But I'm not gonna call her bad, as she's one of those authors where one is perfectly aware that they're good, but they might not appeal to everyone. Example: I also do not like Hemingway, for a similar reason. I remember feeling super-clever in 6th grade, because my hippie English teacher Larry said Hemingway was great because "he only used the number of words he needed" and I replied "No, he only used the number of words he THOUGHT he needed." Because really, I could use a lot more in his books.

Ok, to be fair to Hemingway, I haven't even glanced at his works in years and I'm only 25, but I prefer to bask in my teenage habit of thinking he sucks.

So yes, Emma Donoghue is great, Jeanette Winterson is, y'know, okay, and Sarah Waters is, of course, fantastic. What's up with all the prominent lesbian authors being from the British Isles? I mean, who do we have here? Frickin' Patricia Cornwell. Boo. Emma Donoghue's work seems more imbued with smartitude in an academic sense. She can rewrite fairytales because she's studied them, knows the themes and knows therefore how to subvert them. Winterson is, I am sure, super-smart, but she presents it in a different way that doesn't quite jive with what I like.

Other than stuff for the GLBT challenge, I've been trying to make myself read some sci-fi. My dad's an aerospace engineer and one of my brothers is a biochemist, so I've been around enough sci-fi to the extent that I now consider myself a heritage speaker of it. I might not know the grammar, but I can be understood to a pretty decent extent when surrounded by true speakers. Example: I know the names of all the STNG cast members, as well as the basic qualities of each of the characters they play, but if someone referred to a specific plotline involving Counselor Troi, I would have no idea what they were talking about.

So. I like sci-fi, but I've never really gone in search of it. My voice teacher had a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I have borrowed, and I recently bought a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer. The only sci-fi books I've previously read are almost all of the Ender Wiggin/Bean series by Orson Scott Card, and I, Robot. If 1984 and Brave New World count, then those too, but I don't think they do. Oh, and Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books ever. Probably should mention that.

My main problem with the genre is that the characters aren't usually too developed since the focus tends to be on society/some futuristic dystopia. I'm way into characters over setting. Plus they tend to be about dudes. I don't know if this is because primarily dudes write them, but in any case, it can get a little overwhelmingly male as a genre. BUT I shall press on, and a friend of mine is making me read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, so maybe that'll break the trend.

Anyone read any good GLBT or sci-fi? Or hey -- GLBT sci-fi?