here I am!

Here I am.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'm blogging here now. I mean, not exclusively. Just sometimes.

tomorrow!

I read Jon Krakauer's account of a deadly expedition to the top of Mt. Everest in an attempt to calm my nerves about my impending departure for India.

It didn't work.

Not a bad read though, all the same.

my mom's famous friend

Everybody has that cool friend from way back when they brag about knowing, no matter how well they may know that friend now. Elisabeth Bumiller is my mom's that friend. They wrote together for the Walnut Hills' Chatterbox (the name of the newspaper that somehow still lives on today despite its...weirdness) and then Liz went on to work for the Washington Post and the New York Times. Whenever her bylines show up in the Times, my mom gets all excited and starts talking about when they were both writers! It's very cute. In the 80s, Liz's husband, also a writer, was sent to Delhi to be the the South Asian bureau chief for the Washington Post and she came along for the ride, writing the occasional human interest piece about India and researching what would eventually become this book. It's a bit dry and journalist-y, but not enough to detract from how fascinating these stories are.

And not enough to detract me from my sheer and utter panic about leaving on Friday. FRIDAY.

A Proper English Novel

I'm not sure what I expected going into this one. I knew the story dealt with clones, organ harvesting and boarding school, so I suppose I was anticipating more Stephen King than Edith Wharton. What I got was a proper 19th century English novel, a perfect contemporary example of the form. Ishiguro offers up a lot of lessons for writers here about creating and sustaining a believable voice, collating events into a coherent narrative, and using dialogue to establish character development. He also somehow manages to spin a tale about sex, diabolical post-war experimentation, and yes, organ harvesting, without spilling a single drop of blood. James Wood reviews it better than I can here.

Imperial Head Trip

I read Imperial Bedrooms on my Kindle because I liked the idea that I could want something and then have it, immediately, for 9.99. This is a feeling I've addressed here before, the Kindle as one of the few venues in this world that allows for instant gratification. It turned out to be fitting. The characters in BEE's universe exist in a place where impulse is king, the satisfaction of even the most ephemeral whims their sole driving force. Like all Ellis's books, it went down quick and easy, left me feeling vaguely dirty, not least because it's set in a Los Angeles that does not feel altogether fictional. Because I spend a great deal of time in the locations his characters frequent, around people like the ones he writes about, the horror of the story felt more plausible than I perhaps would have liked.

feeling bossy

Jen (1:46pm): Stop what you are doing, go to a bookstore and buy One Day by David Nicholls. I'm only putting it down now to text you and regrettably meet someone for coffee. I can't stop laughing and crying, it's so wonderful. Read it read it read it. Ok, that's all, I have 20 pgs left but had to tell you immediately, couldn't wait to blog it.
Sarah (2:46pm): Haha I have it on reserve at the library!
Sarah (2:46pm): I'm so excited to read it.
Jen (4:09pm): Oh my god you will love it so much.

"'What are you going to do with your life?' In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer. The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before. How would she ever fill them all?
She began walking again, south towards The Mound. 'Live each day as if it's your last,' that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at...something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance."

sarah, read this immediately

Because when I read it, it was a little like when you read this, except instead of being in Koreatown, I was trapped in my very large walk in closet (what I have decided, in the spirit of optimism, to start calling my apartment) waiting for the cable guy to come.

I want to know her and be her friend and say mean things about celebrities with her and talk about how much being an assistant sucks and how dating in new york sucks even more than being an assistant. You should come hang out with us when this happens.

don't fuck it up, brad pitt

The Imperfectionists made me:
1. Wish I had followed that vague in-the-back-of-my-head whim freshman year to switch into the journalism school at Northwestern, even though the whim had more to do with my lack of getting cast in anything worthwhile and less to do with being the next Christiane Amanpour.
2. Wish that if I ever write a novel, my first go is as good as this.
3. Wish that this lovely collection of loosely bound vignettes detailing the lives of various staffers at an international newspaper based in Rome wasn't already being made into a movie. Because it's too much and too good for that.
4. Wish my subway stop was always a little farther away so I didn't have to put this down and get up.

this is hilarious

Every now and then, Nora Ephron is good for something other than raising my romantic expectations.

it's my birthday and I'll blog if I want to

After the Infinite Jest debacle, I needed something readable and The Girl Who Played With Fire fit the bill, even if it contained enough confusing Sweedish names to make me think I was reading something more dense than it actually was.

But The Lovers. Oh, The Lovers. In the form of this short Vendela Vida novel, I got one of my best birthday presents of all this year: a really good cry.

infinite something

I surrender.

Life is too short to read Infinite Jest. Especially on vacation in Istanbul.

but it's such a nice cover

Sometimes there are books you judge by their covers. Or titles. Or attractive 27 year old Italian physicist authors (see here). This was all three. And of course, as I should have known, that turned out to be a bad idea. Attractive 27 year old Italian physicists should stick to physics and not writing. Especially not writing about two broken people whose inability to connect makes me unable to describe them as "a pair." Starting out with the individual incidents that encouraged our two protagonists to go inward, there was so much potential, but by the final pages, it was all I could do to keep from screaming at the book on the subway, "GET OVER IT, YOU PUSSIES. MAN THE FUCK UP AND GREET THE REAL WORLD."

flashbacks

I remember very little about my freshman year of college. I think I've blocked most of it out, especially the awful outdoor production of The Taming of the Shrew (I was Bianca. That's how off the production was.). I hung out with a group of girls from my dorm a lot, my roomie and the girls from the two rooms next to ours. One of those girls went to Columbine, a fact she didn't share verbally but was broadcast by the old high school tshirts she'd wear to bed. One of the few things I do remember is this group of girls went to see "Bowling for Columbine" some night on campus. She insisted she wanted to go, she felt she was up for it. After all, she hadn't even been at Columbine when the massacre happened, she was in the 8th grade. But the movie upset her more than she expected, especially the cavalier reactions of her fellow students. We spent the evening in her room, listening to her rant and cry. I think I remember this moment because it was one of the first times I understood how much growing up sucks. Your friends will be upset about things that are bigger than losing a soccer game or getting an A- on a test and you can't fix these things by treating them to a frappucino. The point of this is, when I saw this book, Columbine, at Jackson McNally, I immediately purchased it, thinking about that past moment. I also was intrigued by the book's style, hearkening back to In Cold Blood. It didn't let me down. I was so drawn into this story about two young men, about a community, about the media, about a police force struggling to handle the unhandleable. Fascinating and moving and somehow, entirely judgment free. Obviously, I'll never understand what my friend was going through that night freshman year, but I appreciate having a better understanding.

eff travel books

When I woke up this morning, noticing the hour was way too early for a day when only the truly unlucky have work (and for that, you can thank my great great great great uncle or something or other, John Logan. Let's hear it for my fancy wasp relatives!), my first thought wasn't, "Balls, when will I learn to sleep in?" or "Sweet, 'Saved by the Bell' reruns start at 7am on tbs" but "oh good, I can finish A Fine Balance." And I did. And it was amazing. The owner of Idlewild Books, the most amazing travel bookstore in NY (and possibly my 2nd favorite bookstore in NY...but god, who are we kidding? that'd be like asking a mother to pick her favorite child!), pointed me towards this book, promising that it would give me an understanding of India no travel guide ever could. It gave me that and so much more. The heartbreaking randomness of events have never been more beautifully drawn than in Mistry's work. The coming together and coming apart of four seemingly random people in an unnamed Indian town in the 70's makes for one of the more compelling books I have read this year, if not in my lifetime. Between that and running into a friend of a friend last night who happens to be Indian and raved about how beautiful (if unbearably hot) Chennai is, I'm feeling a whole lot better about this whole thang.

Paxil for the Soul

Ah, self-pity. The 3rd great American past time, just under self-loathing and buying things on credit. I have a nice enough life and yet I spend a greater portion of my time than I want to admit wondering how things could have been different, and if they were different if maybe they wouldn't be just a tiny bit better? Mostly I do this out loud to my boyfriend while we are both trying to sleep. One night, sick of listening to me go on about what might have been had I not quit ballet lessons when I was 11, he rolled over. "Status Anxiety. Alain de Botton." he said "It's time now." In this book, de Botton briefly sketches out the evolution of status hierarchy across the world, from the Romans to the Amazon to turn-of-the-century France up to now. He explains why we want status (we want to feel loved, cared about, noticed, significant) and compares it to the desire for a lover (whom we seek out for all the same reasons). Modern Western signifiers of status - money made, not inherited, elite jobs, security- are largely arbitrary and entirely meaningless when held up against the only actual truth there is: in 1,000 years no one will know any of us by name. Solutions to status anxiety include realizing the relative insignificance of your own accomplishments, failures and ambitions , reading Gertrude Stein and Tolstoy (in particular the Death of Ivan Ilych) , and the understanding that "success" is a word with no objective meaning, and nobody else's life will make you any happier than your own. These are things we all know, but they sound so much clearer and more believable when explained by an intelligent man with a British accent.

Vampires are so 2009

Edward Cullen? Please. Sexy werewolves? Pah! Gay psychopaths who murder fifteen year old boys so they can turn them into love zombies? Yes please. In Zombie, Oates offers up the tale of a young serial killer, Q___ P___ living in a small college town working as a caretaker for an international students' dorm. In his off hours he fantasizes about anal sex with submissive corpses, and drafts a plan to lure a high school student into the back of his van so that he can lobotomize him. Ultimately, the plan works, minus the lobotomizing part. The cops find the body, Quentin is questioned and- thanks to the influence of his professor father and an expensive lawyer - released. The end. Oates tells the story from the point of view of QP, relating his murders and strategies in the same tone you or I might use to talk about a trip to the grocery store. After about fifty pages his thoughts start to make an odd sort of sense. This is what Oates does best, create characters who claw their way into your head to fatten themselves up on your brain. You realize what's happening to you but you're powerless to stop it, though really you won't even try. Oates is a master hypnotist when she wants to be. Finishing Zombie was like surfacing after being under water for just a minute too long. The world felt newer, shinier somehow, but also more sinister, pregnant now with the promise of eventual death.

hare krishna

Fun fact for the three of you reading this blog who don't me: I'm impulsive. Shocking, I know. Impulsive people tend to be found dancing on bars in the wee hours of the night or, I don't know, hitchhiking places (which I have actually done once but it was with my professor in Turkey and I was panicked the whole time). I don't have the trademarks of an impulsive person and yet, when it comes to big life decisions, I go with my gut. Sometimes this works out and sometimes this does not. My latest impulsive move? Summer plans to volunteer at an orphanage in India. Because, I don't know, the more yoga I do, the more I want to go to India. Because I like working with kids. Because I like good karma. Because I want to be the kind of person who can go volunteer at an orphanage in India (it sounds way better at dinner parties than "um, I dunno, just working and stuff until school starts"). So now that it's official, now that money has exchanged hands, flights have been booked and the game is on, I'm reading up on my summer home. And I'm getting panicky. In Holy Cow, an Australian journalist finds enlightenment when she is forced to move to Delhi to be closer to her husband. She test drives literally every religion and learns a great deal about herself. And on that hand, I'm excited about my upcoming trip. But then there's the other hand, the swelteringly hot polluted hand. That hand has me nervous. But I can't blame MacDonald for not having an enlightenment spiritual or compelling enough to calm my nerves. Even the Dali Lama wouldn't be able to do that.

doing homer proud

The best book makes the world around you disappear. This book made my sister's entire graduation weekend disappear, which I mean as a compliment to Soli and not a disparagement to my sister, of whom I am insanely proud. This book made bickering parents, boring graduation speakers, a 3-hour airport delay, my mother's insistence that you really don't need dessert tonight, do you? and a sunburnt back all disappear. The second I put it down, I wanted to pick it up again and let Soli's Vietnam wash over me. But I was really tired, so I played brickbreaker on my blackberry instead.

Like the Grown-Up Stephen King

That is what everyone says about Joyce Carol Oates and I guess that is true, but grown-up isn't always better, and in this case I would probably have been better off rereading Cujo. I mean, I like JCO but sometimes I wonder if that is because I know I am supposed to like her. She's written more books than anybody, she's probably going to win a Nobel Prize, she discovered Jonathan Safran Foer (who, say what you will, authored Eating Animals which absolves him of all sins in my book) blah blah blah it's like, I KNOW she's great, but still sometimes she just...misses. In this one, a 16-year-old girl from South Jersey finds herself entangled in a warped relationship with a wealthy septuagenarian and...I don't know. You can probably guess what happens if you have ever read anything else by this woman. It's like, FINE, or whatever and the writing is beautiful but she's no Elif Batuman, whose website is here if you want to ogle.