Whoever says it's life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven't yet had their dose of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn't trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine.

A Fraction of the Whole (Steve Toltz)

The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly—despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public—to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

- Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man)

I want to be able to listen to recordings of piano sonatas and know who's playing. I want to go to classical concerts and know when you're meant to clap. I want to be able to 'get' modern jazz without it all sounding like this terrible mistake, and I want to know who the Velvet Underground are exactly. I want to be fully engaged in the World of Ideas, I want to understand complex economics, and what people see in Bob Dylan. I want to possess radical but humane and well-informed political ideals, and I want to hold passionate but reasoned debates around wooden kitchen tables, saying things like 'define your terms!' and 'your premise is patently specious!' and then suddenly to discover that the sun's come up and we've been talking all night. I want to use words like 'eponymous' and 'solipsistic' and 'utilitarian' with confidence. I want to learn to appreciate fine wines, and exotic liqueurs, and fine single malts, and learn how to drink them without turning into a complete div, and to eat strange and exotic foods, plovers' eggs and lobster thermidor, things that sound barely edible, or that I can't pronounce. I want to make love to beautiful, sophisticated, intimidating women, during daylight or with the light on even, and sober, and without fear, and I want to be able to speak many languages fluently, and maybe even a dead language or two, and to carry a small leather-bound notebook in which I jot incisive thoughts and observations, and the occasional line of verse. Most of all I want to read books; books thick as brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, second-hand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foreign universities.

At some point, I'd like to have an original idea. And I'd like to be fancied, or maybe loved even, but I'll wait and see. And as for a job, I'm not sure exactly what I want yet, but something that I don't despise, and that doesn't make me ill, and that means I don't have to worry about money all the time. And all of these are the things that a university education's going to give me.

- David Nicholls (Starter for 10)

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

One Day/ David Nicholls

Edit: An impulse buy, I didn't expect it to like it so much. Finished it in a day (today, aided by the fact that it was raining and, after a long break, I finally found myself back in a reading phase, which is good, because I have stacks to go through). The end was a punch in the gut, leaving a dull, lingering ache like how Atonement did. But it was necessary, I suppose. The way everything comes to an end.

'Do you really like studying?'

Mattia nodded.

'Why?'

'It's the only thing I know how to do,' he said gently. He wanted to tell her that he liked studying because you can do it on your own, because all the things you study are already dead, cold and chewed-over. He wanted to tell her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they leave you time to choose, that they never hurt you and that you can't hurt them either. But he said nothing.

- The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Paolo Giordano

I couldn't put this book down. This is merely one of the passages that struck me. I like it, I think, because he said it gently.

The twins worried about virginity individually, and they worried about it together. But the most basic problem was one they never talked about: sex was something they couldn't do together. Someone would have to go first, and then the other would be left behind. And they would each have to pick different guys, and these guys, these potential boyfriends, would want to spend time alone with one or the other; they would want to be the most important person in Julia or Valentina's life. Each boyfriend would be a crowbar, and soon there would be a gap; there would be hours in the day when Julia wouldn't even know where Valentina was, or what she was doing, and Valentina would turn to tell Julia something and instead there would only be the boyfriend, waiting to hear what she was about to say, although only Julia would have understood it.

It was a delicate thing, their private world. It required absolute fidelity, and so they remained virgins, and waited.

- Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger

Dear Mom and Dad,
Here's the reason that I pulled the stitching out of my feather pillow and then pulled all of the feathers out of it too: I thought that I was going to find a bird.

- Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball

Jonathan was obsessed by the weather when we were kids, and he once told me that the clouds were his friends and that they had formed to protect him from the sun, which he thought was trying to cook him for dinner. He often talked about the weather trying to kill him, but I never thought it would lead to Jonathan killing himself.

- Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball

You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

It took me to unexpected places.

I can't quote all that I liked from it, because that would be way too much stuff. I don't think anyone would be amused.

Read it, just read it.

Now I need my own copy. Damn.

Ah!!

... that when we read fiction, we pour our own particular store of emotions--say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives--into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophisticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.

-You or Someone Like You, Chandler Burr

Fashion moment

I like reading about fashion. Perhaps more than I like or care about fashion. And these are what I have to pore through currently.

Like I said, I'm developing a reluctant curiosity about the Olsen twins. A random flip through Influence in Kino made me want to see more in greater detail, but I wasn't about to fork out $60+ for it.

That's where the library comes in. Our library is wonderful, do you know? I found four of the titles from my latest must-search-in-library list (stored in my phone).

You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr is one of them. I pick it up every time I walk past that long table in Kino but in a poor effort to save money, I always put it back and tell myself to wait for the paperback. But now I've gone and gotten it from the library and I worry that it may be The Northern Clemency all over again.

You see, I refused to buy it ($40+, it was) and before the paperback arrived, I triumphantly found it in the library. It ended in horror because I really liked it and now each time I walk past it (in paperback, less than $20) I wish I own a copy but I can no longer justify it since I've already read it!

And, the icing on the cake is that after reading this, I think I should have gotten The Perfect Scent, which I also nestled back into its slot on that shelf, after all. Fragrance is something I should learn more about, because I really dislike writing about it. "Exciting and original" metaphors sound good to me.

I think I'm crazy. I certainly sound crazy.

Does book buying get other people in such a tizzy?

(Tomorrow's last day of Kino's 20% for members.)

Mr Darcy

There were zombies.

And now, vampires.

Yes, Darcy makes such a good vampire.

Usually do not like stuff like that. Like my books the way they were meant to be. But I think I need to read this. Cos I love Pride and I love vampires (brooding, good-looking ones).

Two versions. I like the second, but of course.

Another Kindle Tale

Very wordy, very long. Some parts enjoyable, other parts I skipped.

But I love this bit:

“It’s because books are so good,” according to Bezos. And they’re good, he explained, because they disappear when you read them: “You go into this flow state.”

From The New Yorker.

What he took pleasure in - she had never seen this so clearly, and at first she could hardly credit it - was her own constant company, and he hurried to share small things with her, saved stories and cartoons from the newspapers to show her. If he was developing an Arbuthnot-like avidness about the most local and minute events, it was only for her sake. It was exhausting to see how much he lit up when she came through the front door.

- The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

Stuffed

Domestic Trophies is a collection of knit deer heads by Rachel Denny. Cute, huh? frankie featured it both in the mag and on their site.

She also has these aluminium foil creatures. I like aluminium foil very much.



The truth is, I'm intrigued by stuffed animals. Not the cuddly kind, more the taxidermal, stuffed dead animal variety. They're so... creepy, but completely fascinating. Not just the animals, but also the taxidermists who do it, and the motivations of the people who want to collect such items.

I was so enthralled by the movie Taxidermia. The last part, when he attempted to preserve himself, that was awe-inspiring.

It may have all started because of Roald Dahl and his story, The Landlady. That story left such a deep impression on me when I read it as a kid. I love it.

The woman was not having an affair, as she said. But Alice had touched something secret and cherished; she had touched, surely, some characteristic and elaborate pretence. Katherine had lapsed into what, surely, was her usual allusive and interior style where Nick was concerned; she had treasured him up and made a precious mystery out of him before the only audience she had, her husband and children. There was nothing there; Alice could see that. But she'd played it out, and he'd believed what she'd wanted him to believe. The woman sat there in her kitchen, looking firmly ahead, away from Alice. She was smiling tautly, her expression now as she wanted it to be, and that must be bad to live with. An affair would be better; that was something to forgive, to walk away from. To have done nothing wrong, to make a secret of nothing, to coach yourself in the gestures of mystery and deflection, to turn your head away to suppress a manufactured expression of recalled rapture, all that, daily, from that there was no walking away.

- The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

I love that the dress is named after Cecilia Lisbon.

From Vain and Vapid via soon lee.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The lawyer literally hunted this one down. We love Pride so I think it became a must for her to see what the zombies have done to Pemberley and all.

I actually rather like the cover. Plus the paper choices are pretty pleasing.

I wonder if Jane Austen is flipping in her grave.

And lately, when he started coming home with a beaten look and announcing darkly that he doubted if he could hold on much longer, she would enjoin the children not to bother him (Daddy's very tired tonight"), bring him a drink and soothe him with careful wifely reassurance, doing her best to conceal her fear, never guessing, or at least never showing, that she was dealing with a chronic, compulsive failure, a strange little boy in love with the attitudes of collapse.

- Richard Yates, A Glutton for Punishment, from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness