Spring/Transitions

This weekend, the weather has been bizarre. Woke up to bright sun - an hour later, it was blizzarding outside my window - the clouds cleared and it sunny again - I glanced back at the window and saw snow - currently we're back to blue sky. I guess the only constant is that it's cold.

Even the temperature, though, has been swinging back and forth over the last week. After endless snowy, cold, grey weather, the sun came out, and I walked to school without a coat on for the first time in months. Everyone rushed outside to eat their lunch, and sitting inside at our computers felt ridiculous when it was so nice outside (p.s. the high was only 54 degrees, but it felt like 70 to me).

Alas, it was not to last. Now it's snowing again. In March.

That taste of spring, though, reminded me that the semester is almost over. Once again, after winter hibernation, I'm moving into a period of transitions. I'm not particularly good at transitions - I'm a creature of habits and comforts - but I also feel a great attraction to them. I love to look forward to things, whether it's a new book, an upcoming trip, or just breakfast tomorrow morning. The thing is, of course, things usually don't turn out exactly how you imagine them, and whether the reality is better or worse than anticipated, it always takes a bit of adjustment. You go to sleep, already savoring the taste of pancakes, only to wake up and find your milk has gone sour. Maybe you dissolve in a heap of tears, or maybe you end up eating some scrambled eggs that taste just as good. Or maybe someone surprises you with some fresh croissants they just brought back from the bakery, and you decide to postpone pancakes until tomorrow. There's just always that moment of recalibration that's sometimes joyful and sometimes hard.

There's a lot of patience involved in transitions. I've been listening to music on Spotify recently, which is great because I was really missing Pandora. On the radio function, you never know what song is coming next, and in the moment that the last song ends, I always start conjecturing about the next one, and it's usually not what I expect (except that this morning, I was hoping they would play something by A Fine Frenzy, and they miraculously did). Sometimes it'll be one of my favorite bands, and sometimes I'll reach immediately to click the thumbs down button. But sometimes I just don't know if I like the song yet or not, so I just sit there and listen and wait to see how I feel about it. And since the best thing about this radio function is discovering new favorite bands, that minute or two of patience and listening can really pay off.

So here I go transitioning from my last semester of classes into my first summer of truly independent writing work. Yes, I'm writing to a deadline, but the restrictions on the what, how, and why of my dissertation are pretty minimal. For someone who wants to write books, this will be good training in making my way through a big writing project without much outside structure.

I'm not saying that writing a dissertation is like listening to music or eating pancakes, but the fact is that I'll be doing a lot of those latter two things while attempting to do the former, and I like the way the micro mirrors the macro sometimes (often). I will also be living for about 5 more months in a country where the weather changes all the time. Then I'll move back across an ocean and a continent and start looking for a job. So my life will be full of transitions. I guess I better just keep listening and get ready to recalibrate.

Review: Number9Dream

And once again my love for David Mitchell is renewed. Kind of like with Virginia Woolf, I forget how great he is, and then I pick up another of his books and it overwhelms me all over again. Initially (having read Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green), I admired him for his versatility and how well he handled such diverse stories, settings, characters, genres. Now (having added The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Number9Dream), I'm starting to get really interested in the recurrences in his writing rather than the divergences. Anyway, there's plenty to like in each individual book, too, and this one is no exception. Number9Dream is Mitchell's second of five novels, and I'll be reading his first, Ghostwritten, next, but for now, I'm going to try to explain my reaction to this crazy, crazy, charming book.

At its core, this is a very simple quest story about how 20-year-old Eiji Miyake goes to Tokyo to find his father. He's been brought up on a rural island, estranged from his mother and without ever knowing his father, so he sets out to discover this mysterious man. The only problem is, he doesn't even know his father's name, and Tokyo is a big place.

Actually, as Eiji pursues various schemes to find his father, it doesn't seem like such a big place after all. Almost everyone he meets seems to be connected in some way or another, and false trails lead him in an intricate but tightly woven network of people and organizations. One great thing about this book is how it portrays the city and the daily realities of city living - the extraordinary chance encounters, the deep sense of alienation, the changing rhythms, the peculiar mix of anonymity and total lack of privacy. By taking Eiji back to the same places throughout the book, Mitchell helps you really visualize Tokyo (even if, like me, you've never even been to Japan), and you really feel you're accompanying Eiji in discovering the place's secrets.

Some of these secrets are very nasty and quite incredible. But the entire book lingers on the edge between the mundane and the absurd - sort of like in a dream. The book opens with Eiji indulging in daydreams about reuniting with his father and ends with a thoroughly dreamy sequence where all of his experiences blend and transform themselves whenever he closes his eyes. Each of the eight long chapters, in fact, has a theme and a particular structure, and Mitchell is brilliant at weaving different sorts of narration, different times, different versions of reality together.

But - and this is what I love about Mitchell's novels - stringing all the dreamy, literary tricks together is a real, strong, human story. At one point in the book, when Eiji following up one of the many trails that seem to lead toward his father, I noticed that my heart was literally pounding, I was so caught up in his quest. Eiji tells his story in first-person, with a lot of honesty and charm, so that I completely identified with him from the first chapter to the last. He's like the best kind of hero in young adult novels (although I wouldn't categorize this as one, because it gets incredibly and disturbingly violent in a few places), who struggles with very human, ordinary problems like an inaccessible crush and the annoyances of a boring job between bouts of tracking down mysterious persons and escaping death. A bit like a non-spider-powered Peter Parker, Eiji alternates between normal life and crazy adventures and does it with both the flair we wish we had and the real emotional and physical vulnerability that we all do have.

This book makes you feel and think in equal measure, and, best of all, the two feel totally integrated. The literary experiments don't feel tacked on to the story at all. Mitchell is, as usual, completely in control of everything he does, knowing just how much your nerves can stretch, just how much you need to hear of a certain conversation, or just how much you need to jog your memory of a plot point from five chapters ago. It's a bit of a crazy ride, but he's got it under just the right amount of control. I had so much fun reading this book, and it's a definite five star recommendation.

February

Entertainment:

This month, one of my favorite things to chill out after a long day of schoolwork was the BBC miniseries Dancing on the Edge. If you're in the UK, you can probably still catch it on iPlayer, and I definitely recommend it! It's about a black jazz band that rises to fame in 1920s London and the various people - patrons, journalists, etc. - who help and hinder them along the way. So it has 1) great music, 2) a good ensemble cast, and 3) an interesting perspective on society at the time. As a bonus, there is also a murder mystery and several romantic plots, of course. All the relationships and characters feel very realistic and multi-layered, and the whole thing was very smart and satisfying.

 Fashion:

The most exciting fashion moment for me this past month was the Oscars, which I didn't even get to watch because of the time difference. But I checked out the dresses the day after and saw a lot of beautiful fabric floating around the red carpet. I really liked Jennifer Lawrence's dress, and especially her backwards pearl necklace - really interesting - and was happy to see such a down-to-earth star who picks such interesting movies win for a film I really liked. I also loved Nicole Kidman's dress, very snazzy. Anyway, I'm looking forward to next year, when I can watch the whole ceremony and indulge in proper gown envy.

Games:

When it's cold and dreary outside, I obviously tend to stay inside as much as possible, but there's only so much time you can spend reading, watching movies, and eating comfort food. I found one great option for something more active than reading but not requiring going outside is games. Pool, scrabble, cards, and crossword puzzles are all such good ways of getting together with friends to do more than eat and drink and chat. Plus they exercise your brain in ways that counterbalance the monotony of intellectual work nicely.

Miscellaneous Stuff:

Staying healthy! February seemed kinda lousy at times this year, with a combination of grey weather and intense schoolwork. The absolute best thing to combat the end-of-winter blues for me is making my body happy - doing some gentle yoga as a study break, going for a walk in the park as soon as I caught a glimpse of blue sky, and eating right. With the latter in mind, I signed up for a fresh veggie box to be delivered every week, and I'm hoping it'll be filled with lots of yummy seasonal goodies that expand my diet from the minimal fruits and vegetables that I can find at the local shops (I had to go to 4 different stores yesterday just to find a bag of spinach!!!).

Review: An Instance of the Fingerpost

Drumroll please.....it's my 100th post on this blog! And in honor of that, I'm going to do something totally ordinary and write you a review of what I've been reading. Sorry, I really couldn't think of anything exciting this early in the morning. However, this is a really good book, so I guess that makes up for it.

Let me qualify: this is a great book for people who are both patient and curious. The former because it's 700 pages long and written in a the long-winded style of the 17th century. The latter because it's a murder mystery that not only reveals who did it, but also an amazing wealth of information about life and thought in Oxford in the 1660s.

This is a truly dynamic setting, because the place was crawling with now-famous scientists and philosophers - although, as Iain Pears shows brilliantly, the two were one-and-the-same back then. The characters who are interested in experimenting in science are also wedded to religious doctrine and manage to mix the two in really astounding ways. Instead of just telling us what people ate or how they dressed, Pears reveals how they thought, and how different their assumptions were to ours. There is one scene in particular of a chemistry experiment which shows how rudimentary the scientific method was and how exciting it was for people steeped in both Christian and ancient Greek dogma to discover these new ways of thinking.

The theme of scientific inquiry and truth (which fits so nicely into a mystery novel) intersects with a political strain. The book is set just a few years after the end of the Cromwellian era in England, a time when religious and political tensions were running very very high. Pears gives us four different first-person narrators, whose perspectives highlight different aspects of the era: Marco da Cola, a gentleman physician from Italy, Jack Prescott, a young man trying to prove his father was not a traitor to the newly restored king, Dr. Wallis, a very paranoid cryptographer who's enmeshed in both the old and the new regime, and Anthony Wood, an antiquary and historian who claims to be impartial in his writing of the events of the books.

As it turns out, none of them are totally impartial, and they all have different reasons for writing their versions of the murder and its solution. As I said, it takes a lot of patience to get through the same narrative four times and have the answer to the who-done-it question delayed for about 600 pages. But it's really such a rewarding read, because the four stories turn out to be very different versions, and Pears does a masterful job layering perspectives and timing revelations so that you are always on the brink of finding out another crucial bit of information.

The writing is old-fashioned, of course because it's written in first-person, but once you let yourself sink into it, it's very easy to read. I recommend this for a long week in winter with many cups of tea. Reading it in one weekend was like running a long-distance race (luckily one I've been training for the last six months), but I still appreciated this book immensely for what it taught me about the era, for giving me another amazing example of historical fiction, and for telling a good story that left me really satisfied.

Books for the semester

I'm about half-way through the semester now, and I finally have all the books I need for my spring classes. So I thought I'd do another little book photoshoot, because I love my books.

Well, not all of these books. I've already explained why Sacred Hearts disappointed me, and Sharpe's Tiger was so lame that I'm not even going to review it. Everything else has been great so far, though. I'm currently 200 pages into the 700-page An Instance of the Fingerpost....many, many pages, and, so far, an awful lot of history and plot to keep track of (it's a historical murder mystery), but it promises to get better and better. While you're waiting for my review of it, here are some pretty book covers.

In which cold and hot are opposites and going to the movies solves everything

Since I've been in England, I think about the weather a lot, check the forecast a lot, complain, predict, stare out the window, calculate the relative merits of different keep-warm outfits. And today I was thinking about how differently people respond to different climates. It's not just that the weather changes your mood or your habits. It also changes your attitude toward weather itself - or at least this seems to be true for me.

For the last four years, I lived in a very hot place, basically the desert. Now I live in a very cold place. Both kinds of climate can be really unpleasant of course, but in really different ways. There's something about cold weather that makes people complain about it. Even when I'm happy that it's raining or snowing, I kind of feel the need to gripe. I also fill a lot of conversations with speculations about the chance of precipitation tomorrow, the next day, over the weekend, next week....The international student handbooks weren't kidding when they said that the English love to talk about the weather.

What's ironic is that no matter how much you check the forecast or exchange predictions, it will always surprise you. The forecast changes daily. A rainy day will clear up unexpectedly, leaving you looking silly in your rain boots. And a dry day turns out to have such a thick mist that it's practically raining.

And then there's the actual cold. I really don't mind rain, but I do mind the freezing cold air that blows that rain into my face and makes my lips numb on the walk to school. Who decided it would be a good idea to settle on this island in the first place? Couldn't we just leave it to some other animals who are better adapted to the cold? And why do so many English people insist on wearing the lightest of jackets, or even no jacket at all, when it's below freezing? And then complain about how cold it is!

So that's the dynamic around cold, wet, grey weather - you talk about it endlessly, you try to predict it, you gripe and gripe, but in the end it eludes your predictions and you never do anything to make it better, never try to find the silver linings, like the fresh smell of rain or the fact that your country doesn't have a drought problem, or the fun of cozying up when it's snowing outside and drinking hot chocolate.

Hot weather is a totally different thing. I just don't remember talking about the heat so much when I was living in southern California. I suffered in it, definitely. There were days when wearing any clothes at all seemed unbearable, when working was out of the question. But when the sun is beating down, people seem to expect to feel happy, to revel in the heat - the opposite of the assumption that cold weather is always miserable and we must complain about it. Hot weather isn't an excuse to complain, it's an excuse to put on your bikini and sun bathe or buy yourself a refreshing drink.

I think part of this is that, when it is truly and really hot, silence and stillness are your best friends. Heat melts your energy away, and no one wants to waste the precious energy they have left by talking about how low-energy they are. Better to summon up some last strength and drift through the heat waves toward an air-conditioned place or a glass of cold water.

There is one constant in both extremes of climates. Going to the movies is always good. In cold places, it's a warm place to curl up for a few hours. In hot places, it's a haven of cool darkness. So yesterday I went to see a remastered print of Roman Holiday and accompanied Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck to beautiful, summery Rome, where people roll up their sleeves and eat gelato. That's the other thing about weather - it always makes you wish for its opposite - and I was really jealous of Audrey and Gregory as I stood waiting for the bus after the movie, freezing my face off.

But jealousy aside, it was a great way to spend a Sunday evening. It's such an adorable movie, with jokes that don't get old and great side characters - little sketches perfectly realized in a few moments as the journalist and the princess zoom through Rome on their Vespa. No matter what you're needing an escape from - the heat or the cold or school work or work work - it's great to watch Audrey Hepburn's princess escape her duties and responsibilities and jaunt around a beautiful city, basking in the heat, beautifully captured in the cool tones of classic black-and-white film.

Review: Sacred Hearts

This is another book from my historical novel syllabus, and the first I've been disappointed in. The story is set entirely in a Benedictine convent in 16th century Italy, and the main narrator is the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, but her voice is interspersed with the voice of Serafina, the newest arrival at the convent, who has been put there against her will. According to the author's note, this was a common practice at the time - women from various social strata and with different problematic backgrounds were forced into convent life. That's one of the novels historical revelations. The other is that these convents were not the stark, spartan cells one might imagine, but could be places for women to practice art - singing or composing in particular, for religious music - or, as in Zuana's case, to pursue the study of medicine.

Dunant sets her story at a time when that way of life - the relative freedom allowed to nuns within convent walls - is in danger of being destroyed by fiercer regulations and more of an emphasis on religious devotion. Moments of transition in history are always interesting, but Dunant actually places much more weight on the plot surrounding Serafina's resistance to convent life and Zuana's spritual/moral doubts about how to help Serafina.


It wasn't enough of a story to maintain my interest through three or four hundred pages, especially because Dunant never allows us to leave the convent or the women's minds. This really gives the novel a sense of claustrophobia and repression, because the nuns are cut off from the outside world and from their own impulses and desires and thoughts. They can never talk honestly to each other because there are so many rules about which thoughts are pious and which require penance. And even Serafina, whose rebelliousness at first brings some variety and relief, eventually starts to succumb to the influence of some of the most violently pious nuns.

This device - the closed world, the women sharing this intense relationship with each other and with their god - could have made a really interesting book, but Dunant doesn't take it far enough. She never really gets into her characters' minds enough to convince you of what it would really be like to live in a convent, or even in an era when religion was such an important part of life, a given, whether you were in a convent or not. Instead of real psychological study, we get a lot of repetitive reflections on god, regularly interrupted with sensational plot twists. These really undercut the effect of the claustrophobia, because while we're supposed to be sympathizing with the women's self-denial and suffering, Dunant gives us everything we want - a love story, an escape attempt, tense politics, a mystical nun, even a kind of chase scene through the convent at night.

It's funny, I thought I was going to really enjoy this as an easy read after so many bizarre, experimental novels, but I got really frustrated because when I indulge in an easy read, I want it to be a really good easy read. If for some reason, you can't get enough of renaissance novels or love reading about religious life, I guess you might enjoy this (quite a few people in my class loved it). Otherwise, I advise you choose a different book.