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2009-06-27, 2:53 a.m.:
Vicodin, Prednisone and champagne. Mmmm, happy Friday night. And my long-lost, far-flung brother is visiting ... for a whole week! All we do is sit and talk and talk. And visit Whole Foods (food for the soul for one who lives in Seoul) and cruise slowly through Eldora and gawk at the charming cabins and picture-perfect scenery and huge open-sky cloud formations constantly reforming themselves. And that is good. He explained Eneagrams to me for, like, two whole hours. And said he could teach me physics without the need to actually know math. And reported that he had our mitochondrial DNA scanned and that I am a 'daughter of Katrine.' No surprise there. 1 comments
2009-06-23, 1:31 a.m.:
The reading list has gotten shorter by necessity as time passes. I'm still in the middle of Le Morte Darther and Clarissa (mainly, for the latter, because I have laid it down for now). I just finished The Historian in the wake of another and/or continued vampire spate: Let the Right One In, and then the new Sookie Stackhouse novel, which I began in the bathtub at 5:30 p.m. and had finished by 11:30 p.m. the same night. Then, while staying at Molu & Jeff's in North Carolina, I finished The Historian and also fit The Unthinkable in ... because that nonfiction book of how we as humans react in terrible crisis was absolutely gripping and so anecdotal. I thrive on the anecdotal. Obviously. With my small brain and lack of patience for the abstract, the abstruse. I am just about to start Dracula again, but may fit in The Wild Geese first (better to intersperse short with long, I am thinking). So here the short short shortest list I can come up with right now: Dracula
Frankenstein
Le Morte Darther
Dombey and Son (this is for one of my classes this fall, and the other long book is MIddlemarch, which I've already read, so I'm thinking I should get this under my belt now)
The Moonstone (same as above - we are going to be reading The Lady in White for my Victorian course, and so I would like to have the *other* big Wilkie Collins book in my arsenal before that)
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Little Dorrit since I'm already 100 pages in and it's Dickens and we're reading Dickens again for the fall. Thus far I've read: David Copperfield 3 times, Great Expectations 2 times, Bleak House once, Nickolaus Nickelby, and the other one I can't remember right now ... oh, you know it)
The Golden Bough
Whitman (mainly Leaves of Grass and the big stuff) I'll try to finish Clarissa, maybe read Villette, my bio of Charles I, The Diamond Age (for fun!). I will work on my Old English and my Middle English and my Spanish, and maybe maybe maybe I will take the Latin Advanced Intensive Class at CU for grad students. Problem is, I will miss an entire week of classes because we are, ahem, going on the Nickelodeon Cruise at the end of July, where there will be Mexico and Spongebob Squarepants and loads and loads of green slime (this also explains my motivation for Spanish). If one is going to miss a whole week of class by necessity but still truly loves and is devoted to the class, should one take the class Pass/Fail or should one take the class No Credit? I don't get the distinction, and I dearly need some guidance here. I just want to learn as much Latin as I can, in order to decipher better early Medieval manuscripts and understand the culture. I am obsessed with Latin, and with knowing it. But it's Spanish, obviously, that I want to be able to speak. I also have a list of books on the Middle Ages, and on Old English, and I must buck up my Anglo-Saxon and get a passing acquaintance with Middle English, I think, before the semester starts. If only my French weren't so dormant. And for fun, I also want to read No Country For Old Men, Blood Meridian, some Olaf Stapleton and A Canticle For Leibowitz. And The Return of the Native. I am working hard to fit all this in. My 6-session Spanish conversation class was canceled due to low enrollment, which makes me both elated and very, very sad. This means I must be a self-starter. And I want very badly now to have read The Chalice and the Blade as well as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. As well as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam and also the complete Arabian Nights. There is so much to do. If only I could keep taking the Prednisone, which I am sure is the only thing that had me up and awake and alert and alive and even LIVELY at 7:30 a.m. this morning with the boys after we arrived home from the airport from North Carolina at 2 a.m. and I was so wired that I could not lie down till after 4:30 a.m., but I still got up, dealt and was good and drank just one cup of coffee, then cleaned and washed and sorted and was cheerful and did laundry and emptied suitcases and put things away and then later weeded a little, read books to boys, helped them ride bikes, and cleaned off the entire balcony and set up a new, improved, pollen-free sand-and-water table on the balcony ... It was the last day of glorious Prednisone, and tomorrow I must begin again with the dreaded antimalarial, which leaves me headachy and spent and miserable and in pain. I will get through, I will get through. Tomorrow I have the whole day to clean the house and read. And read and read and read and learn. Paul Bowles, the short story: Learning All The Time. I think of this constantly. All else is good. I was five days in North Carolina and North Carolina was glorious and Molly and Jeff and brethren are glorious and I returned a different person, a person excited to be waking up in the morning and person determined to enjoy the good things in this life and to make all other life-things better. I know I can do this. I know this right now.
P.S. I also want to finish, finally and for all, The Tale of Genji this summer. Reading it in three translations, bolstered by the Companion Guide to Genji, is taking far too long and so I think I will have to choose just one translation to stick with now. Otherwise this could become too much like Ulysses or even Finnagan's Wake ... interminable and far too complicated.
P.P.S. I also want to have fun with reading this summer. If only A Dance With Dragons would come out earlier and then I wouldn't be tempted to drop all else and read it when it's allegedly going to be dumped on the market this fall, right when I'm in the middle of classes and coursework and motherhood and all else ... 0 comments
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