On Books (Part Four)

I've decided that this semester shall be devoted to reading the Classics—Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Dante, Plato, etc.

It started out pretty well, I thought, with a dive into the Divine Comedy. But less than halfway through Inferno, I got horribly, sickeningly bored. To put it mildly, I find Dante's religious misconceptions very depressing. Usually something like that isn't enough to keep me from reading just to experience the foreignness of thought and world-view. I like to compare and contrast my own outlook with those of other people, particularly as I read. There was something about it, though. I don't feel comfortable with the consignation of all his enemies to the inner circles of hell; even less do I feel comfortable with the eternal torment of unbaptized babies.

I admit, I gave up. I gave up in favor of Virgil, and I'm glad I did. I've just finished Book I of the Aeneid, and I love it. It's a slightly sad fact that I don't remember if I've read it before or not. But even if I did, it was in my History of Civilization, Humanities class, which covered everything from the beginning up until the 1500s, so there was so much material that whatever we did read was skimmed, discussed in a cursory way in class, then conveniently forgotten. I should remember, but I don't. Oh, well.

Perhaps when I finish with Virgil and some of the others, I'll find a translation of Dante that has kept the verse and still sounds decent. The one I was reading was prose, which I mistakenly thought a good thing at the time—I figured there's no way to successfully imitate the terza rima in English, so why attempt a verse translation at all? Well, any verses must be better than the prose I waded through 26 plodding pages of.

This doesn't exactly bring me back to the original reason I started this post, but I'll have to get to it sooner or later. I titled them "On Books" in imitation of Michel de Montaigne, whom I love. His essay "On Books" was what made me a fan of ancient literature in the first place. I can't wait to read more of his stuff soon.

Ice Cream (and a book about it)

I read a book while taking my graduate level Children's Literature class; the book was titled Ice Cream: the Full Scoop. Well, I thought it was cute—an illustrated history of ice cream with a pun for a title.

Think about it, though. Before electric freezers, no-one could have a carton of ice cream in their house. What a tragedy. And I think also about fictional Anne Shirley, who was just dying to go to her Sunday school picnic so she could have a taste of it, a treat so rare you were lucky if you had it once your entire childhood.

When I was little, I remember having homemade peach ice cream made with one of those huge, old-fashioned ice cream churners. The ice cream was good, but a little lacking in the frozen department—quite soupy, actually. Every time I remember having homemade ice cream that was the case. Then, we made it for a "lab" in my 9th grade science class, using two ziplock bags, lots of ice, and rock salt. It was pretty good. I was about to say something snide about the lack of educational value, but now I do seem to remember learning something about salt and the freezing temperature.

Modern conveniences are wonderful, really. My mom has an ice cream maker, all electric. You can make your own ice cream, free from preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, ready to eat, in about half an hour. Granted, that's if you discount the trip to Wal-mart to get the supplies, where everyone gets distracted by the sports equipment aisle and you end up waiting in line a lot longer than you expected, because who ever expects to have to wait in line anymore. At any rate, this evening was delightful for many reasons, not the least of which was the homemade Chocolate Almond Ice Cream.

On Books (Part Three)

I think my lifestyle is too media saturated. This afternoon I caught myself thinking what a shame it was that the book I read yesterday will probably never be made into a movie, because it would be wonderful.

But why isn't it good enough for it to just be a wonderful book?

My answer is that it is good enough. Shouldn't the two art forms be allowed to stay separate? I'm a huge fan of book-to-movie adaptations, but why? A book is a book and a movie is a movie. Completely different.

I wonder if the real reason I like movie adaptations is that it deepens my fan status. You've had this experience right? The one where you read a book you love, and then you go on a binge, trying to track down every other word the author wrote. When you've read everything, the only course left to satiate your appetite for your author-love is to watch a movie adaptation.

But if Charles Dickens were still alive, I think the honest truth is that I would probably rather go hear him do a public reading than go see a film adaptation of one of his books.

On Books (Part Two)

My sister lamented the other day that it's hard to consider oneself well read when one has moral scruples that render at least half the books out there unreadable. Sad, but true.

Most of the books I read come highly recommended by family members and friends, and the rest come from lists of the acknowledged classic literary endeavors—you know, 100 Books You Should Read Before You Go to College, Top 100 Books of All Time, etc. I have only made a few exceptions to these trends by picking some random book off a shelf when I knew little or nothing about it. One of them was Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, and another was Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. Both of them turned out to be smashing hits for different reasons, but they could both be classified as "coming of age" stories.

"Coming of Age" used to be considered its own genre, it seems. Most of the books for teens and young adults prior to, and even after, the publication of the Harry Potter series, would fall into that category. The designation itself is almost derogatory. A middle school librarian friend of mine told me that when kids come to her for book recommendations, she always wanders the shelves with them and gives them lots of options. She's really good at that. But she told me that any time she mentioned a book as a "coming of age" story, it was sure to be left on the shelf rather than checked out.

There are so many factors that go into deciding to read or not to read. I almost never go by the summary on the back. I don't know who writes those things, and even if they've gotten a little better in recent years, they need to seek other jobs because they're botching the job they currently have. If anything, the summaries are what kill my enthusiasm after being drawn to a particular book due to pretty cover art, an intriguing title, or any of those other immediate recommendations.

Why does it take so much persuasion to get someone to read a book? Orson Scott Card wrote several books on writing, and I'm going to slightly modify one of his comparisons to state that reading a book you don't like could easily compare to going on a road trip with someone you don't like. The average book takes about ten hours to read, and who wants to spend ten whole hours with someone or something they just don't care about? And after you've been on two or even three road trips with really annoying people, wouldn't you start to hate road trips? Just like if you've read two or three stupid books before you've read many good ones, you'd start to hate reading.

Sometimes I am surprised at the number of kids and adults who still do like to read, all things considered—including those ridiculously saccharine and badly-written stories we were all tortured with as children. Fortunately for me, the first book I can remember having been read to me as a child (in kindergarten) was about Darby O'Gill stealing gold from the leprechauns and getting home to realize it had all fallen out through a hole in his pocket. If Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is the only thing standing in the way between a kid and the recess playground, it's no wonder some kids hate books. I guess it made a difference to me that in kindergarten, I didn't like being in unleashed, unstructured times and places with lots of other kids. Even then, I preferred books to people.

It's easy to know where you stand with a good book. Reading books came easily to me; reading people didn't. First grade was fabulous (that was back when we didn't learn to read until first grade). I remember learning how to read, and feeling like I was finally good at something and that school might actually be worth it after all. Seriously, I wonder if that wasn't one of the best years of my life. But that was the same year I figured out I didn't understand other kids. I thought I was playing a game with a girl in my class during recess when she suddenly asked me why I was following her. This is undoubtedly very silly of me, but starting at that moment, I lost all confidence that other people wanted me around, and the only friends I've had have been the ones who have been very obvious about initiating a friendship.

I wonder if it's only in books that people are brought together by mutual love of books. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which sounds utterly inane when you just consider the title but is actually one of the more delightful novels I've read recently, has a character who is not very educated but who has developed a taste for Jane Austen. In correspondence, she writes that "reading good books spoils you for reading bad ones."

Books are like everything else, I suppose. I forget whose law it is who said that 95% of everything is crap. But I don't feel very secure in saying that, because I have attempted to write several books myself, and I would hate for them to turn out crap. We can take inspiration from the statement of Anton Ego in Pixar's Ratatouille when he says that "the average piece of junk is worth far more than our criticism designating it so." He also says that "the work of a critic is easy." I used to take issue with that, because I spent a good part of four years learning to be an intelligent critic. Now, I'm not so sure. There is a place for intelligent criticism, just as there is a place for flawed, or even failed, attempts at creation.

Because that is what a book is: a very lovely form of creation.

On Books (Part One)

I love to read books, and I love to read about books. Some of my favorite fictional characters are bibliophiles, and some of my favorite essays are about the joy and utility of reading. I am embarking on this meandering commentary, inspired by a book recommended by Heather, entitled Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman. My thoughts are by no means exhaustive.

Last night I re-read a book that had a huge impact on me when I was a child. I think I was in sixth grade when I read it, only because I associate it with the library at my middle school rather than my elementary school, though the reading level is low and the complexity of the story is minimal. It's called The Girl With the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, who was, apparently, in her heyday in the late 1980s. What I hadn't realized until re-reading it now, nearly 2 decades later, is that this book shaped me not only as a reader, but as a writer. I unconsciously used the basic framework of this story for a novel I completed in 2005. Not that there weren't huge differences, of course, and it could not be considered plagiarism in any way, but what's interesting is that I had no idea that this little book had influenced me so much. It's a good book, to be sure, but not revolutionary or mind-blowing--nothing more than a simple story about a little girl with paranormal powers who only wants to belong to something.

The thing is, this little girl was a reader. She taught herself to read at the age of three, and she swallowed books whole from then on, allowing herself to become so engrossed that she forgot reality entirely, for hours at a time. It is a little cliché, but without that trait, I probably would have stopped reading. Telekinesis is a cool ability, but the fact that she loved books, well, that's what made me like her.

C.S. Lewis stated that "literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality." I'll have to go back and edit the wording of that quote, but it is one of my favorite concepts of all time—that all of us who love to read have at one time felt. I know some people read to escape. I don't. I read to connect. It expands your soul in a way that few other endeavors can, and at comparatively little cost. Lewis compares individuality to a wound. Everyone at some time or another has felt alone, abandoned, neglected, an outsider. When you read, you can share experiences with other people, lose the aloneness, without anything or anyone encroaching on your sense of self. You become immersed in someone else's identity without surrendering any of your own. It's beautiful.

Books as physical objects are probably going to, within the next 10 or 20 years, not necessarily disappear, but become less and less common. When that idea was first put about, I scoffed at it. Who could actually come up with any kind of substitution for a book? Why would anyone want to read a novel on a computer screen? Isn't the whole point of reading inextricably intertwined with the fact that you can do something very productive while lying in bed on your stomach? Then Amazon convinced me that it was not only possible to create an acceptable digital book, but that it was a good idea. I still worried about the future of print books, though.

Then, the further I got into library school, the more I became convinced that this direction was good. Furthermore, Apple launched the iPad, which has an e-reading application that works with multiple platforms of e-books. Print books would become a thing of the past, and good riddance—those bulky, incommodious things that make relocating so difficult and make packing for a week-long trip such a hassle, having to choose, choose, choose.

But honestly, I'm beginning to revert back to my old opinion. No substitution for a print book is going to be satisfactory. Period. Why? Because books are friends. I don't care how many bells and whistles e-books have; you might be able to e-highlight and e-annotate and e-mark for weeks, but it's not the same as touching the pages and writing notes in your own hand. You might be able to carry a thousand books on one device, but doesn't a good novel deserve its own physical space, disassociated with all the others? Where is the justice in forcing The Complete Works of Shakespeare to share dominion with XHTML for Dummies?

Simplify. Standardize. Water down. Invalidate. It starts with noble intentions, but where does it stop?

And on to another issue. Book abuse. Anne Fadiman considers the "misuse" of books to be a form of love and esteem. She shared a killingly funny story about her brother, who left a book open, face down, on his bedside table, and was rebuked by the maid, who chided him for treating the book with so little respect. I understand Fadiman's sentiment here, but I can't quite agree. I take the centrist view, though slightly leaning on the side of the maid. Do what you want with your own books, but I like mine to be well-kept and pretty, even if I have read them seven or eight times. Underlining and annotating don't count as abuse for me, but leaving it open face down will break the spine and make the pages start falling out. And then you have to make a difficult choice: replace it, or allow it to become a thing of the past? And why would I want to put myself in a position to have to replace a book when there are so many other books I could buy instead—books I might not have read yet and which might further alter the course of my life?

If it's library bound, there isn't much you can do to destroy it unless you plan ahead, but as most of us do not own library bound books, I feel I need to care for them as well as I can. The only exception I have made to this is in mutilating my combined copy of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, because I needed to tear it apart in a unique way in order to use it as source material for a novel I started writing a few years ago. And anyway, that edition was a gift which, while I appreciated it, was not one I would have chosen for myself, being ridden with typographical errors and bad illustrations in addition to having an even more than usual unwieldy shape and size.

One of my 8th grade students' favorite days in the classroom (aside from the day I slipped on a posterboard and nearly kissed the chalkboard) was the day I did the demo on BOOK ABUSE. The school dictionaries were absolute crap, and I mean absolute crap as in none of the definitions made any sense and most of them were circular, as well as being a horrid shade of red that clashed wonderfully with our orange desks, orange carpets, and orange cabinet doors; so I could easily justify using them as guinea pigs for how not to treat a book. This included tossing it behind me, dropping it, knocking it off the desk, breaking the spine so it would lay flat without my hands holding it open, sitting on it, and other sorts of atrocities.

And when I first began thinking of my personal book collection as a personal library, I used to threaten my siblings with all sorts of ultimatums if they abused my books. Mostly the ultimatum was that if you don't treat it by my own personal standards, you will lose your borrowing privileges, which they mostly recognized as an empty threat, because I loved getting other people to read the books I liked. Still do. But some of my personal standards included: do not eat while reading my books, do not leave my books open face down, and most importantly, do not leave my books on the floor, even if it's not in a general walking path. I think my sisters have always considered me a little despotic about my things. But what would you do, growing up in a house full of five children, where personal possessions of any lasting nature were somewhat rare, and the only things you actually wanted to own (ruling out, of course, the horrible clothes procured from who knows where that you wore because you had to but wished you could die rather than appear in them in public) were the things you spent your own, hard-earned money on? A shelf full of books was something to be proud of. It's true I almost always had more stuff (books and music) than my sisters did, but that's because I worked hard to make money to buy them.

What lovely memories those trips to Bookstop are: finding yet another L.M. Montgomery novel to add to my bookshelf, using Dad's discount and spending my three dollars to go home and transcend myself. Never mind that the only reason I had that three dollars was because I babysat a troupe of little girls who never stopped talking and were constantly trying to look down the back of my shirt to see my bra. Or another troupe of little girls, of which the eldest tied me to a chair, locked me out of the house, and flooded the bathroom.

My library was bought with a price, and I was going to keep it pretty.

So, in writing this, I have come to the conclusion that while I am definitely not as erudite as Anne Fadiman (in spite of the fact that I'm a reader and a writer, I think my vocabulary sadly underdeveloped, and I hate word games and only know a few answers on Jeopardy), and I don't view the organization and care of books in exactly the same light, I don't love books any less than she does.

I told you this post was going to meander.

Calories

I have a goal to lose x number of pounds by a certain generalized date. I think it's a very do-able goal, actually, and I feel good about it. The theory is that if you multiply your weight by 11, you get the number of calories you need to consume every day in order to maintain your current weight. Subtract 500 from that, and you get the number of calories you need to consume every day in order to lose one pound a week. This goes fabulously well with my goal.

However, it must also be mentioned that if a woman wants to succeed with those numbers, she also needs to exercise about 90 minutes a day at least 5 days a week. Who has the time for that? Well, actually, I do, because I'm currently unemployed. And so far, I'm succeeding--mostly because I am learning to consider it success to be merely meeting expectations and not outstripping them.

But I just realized that the less you weigh, the less you're allowed to eat. Oh, snap.

Beautiful Tragedy

There was a summer (well, actually the more part of a year) that I had an unhealthy obsession for deep depressing literature. I must have read every sad book I saw. It was the year of My Name is Asher Lev, the year of The House of Mirth and The Children, of Lord Jim, Beowulf, Frankenstein, Howard's End, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Most of all, that was the year of Thomas Hardy.

While I can't claim to have read everything Thomas Hardy wrote, I believe I have read more than pretty much any other person who counts (meaning I am still sane, but barely). This is because I had the brilliant idea to sign up for the Senior Course--that capstone of the BYU English Major--entitled Thomas Hardy and the Landscape of the Imagination. In my own defense, none of the others sounded all that good, and I really wanted to take a class from Bennion; he was a creative writing prof. Furthermore, at that point I had already read two of the books on the course listing ... although those two books happened to be the happiest ones, so I was misled. Or so I can claim.

To this day I maintain that nothing, absolutely nothing could have prepared me, or anyone, for the sort of experience we were in for in reading, all in a matter of about three weeks, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Woodlanders, and Jude the Obscure. It was bad enough that we had just read Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and The Return of the Native. And along with that, for one of my essays I did some additional research on the form and substance of ancient Greek tragedy and how it played in to late Victorian/early Modern British lit. I read Medea and Oedipus. Such cheerful stuff.

Did I mention that in my other class, I was reading James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, along with two other Pollyannas by the names of Katherine Mansfield and Ford Maddox Ford (who subtitled his great novel The Saddest Story--I hated that book)?

Jude the Obscure was hands down the most depressing book I have ever read. Nor can I even come close to imagining a book more depressing. It was so downright hopeless I feel physically ill even remembering it. And Tess isn't even that far behind. Yet, as soon as the semester was over, what did I do? I went to the local library, of course, and checked out the film adaptation--all because it starred Justine Waddell, who was my absolute favorite actress at the time. She sort of has this thing for playing tragic characters. Not only did I watch the entire four hours of misery, I watched it all by myself, in the middle of the night, so that when I woke up from the story there was no person, and no sunshine, to offer the least bit of comfort.

I am very blessed today to have survived that glut of hopelessness and self-inflicted punishment, but every so often I find myself drawn back to Tess--scenes of it on YouTube, little bits of the soundtrack sitting unchecked in my iTunes library, and the yellowing book on my bookshelf, deliberately buried in with all the other literature that I would consider Great, but not The Greatest.

It's a good thing they haven't enabled it on Netflix Instantview.

50 Great Curries from India

You know how excited I was about this cookbook. Absolutely. Well, my dreams of making wonderful, yummy Indian dinners are dashed to pieces. Being a former teacher and having been trained in the necessity of grade-giving, I give this book a FAIL. Okay, I cheated, because I didn't give the author and publisher a rubric ahead of time, and I never sufficiently explained objectives and how to achieve mastery of such, but still, the book does not pass muster.

First it was Cauliflower and Potato Curry. I knew something was amiss when it had me grinding and sautéing three different blends of spices, only to throw them all together into a mixture of ... well, it claimed to be coconut milk, but it was just soaked coconut shreds in water. Ew. I tried to blame the not-so-yummyness of that one on the fact that I had run out of olive oil--because as you know, olive oil is a necessity for a successful kitchen.

But today, it was Goa Beef Vindaloo, which I know is good, because I have had it at restaurants. I had plenty of olive oil, plenty of "plump cloves of garlic" and I even bought a weird-looking plastic can of tamarind. I ground up and blended my spices exactly as directed, coated the meat, sautéed the onions, and tossed it all together with 4 cups of water. 4 cups? What are we making here? Soup?

It turns out it was a good thing it called for so much water, because as it was, I had to add some flour paste to thicken it, which in turn toned down the fire. We do happen to be lovers of wasabi and peppers, so I mean it when I say that if it's too hot for my dad, it shouldn't be attempted. Oh, sad.

On a happy note, dropping a cinnamon stick into your jasmine rice is a nice touch. And I got to wash down the spicy failure with a spoonful of loveliness called "Dark Chocolate Almond Butter."

Virginia Woolf

I love to read literature with a pen in hand--you know, to take notes in the margins and underline striking passages. But I had to hide my pen as I began reading The Waves, because I think I might have tried to underline the entire book. No other author writes prose equal to Virginia Woolf; none of them come close. It's so fluid it's not prose, it's not poetry ... it just is. More like reading a piece of music or an Impressionist painting.

Delightful

I recently read Winnie the Pooh--yes, for the first time. I did not read it as a child, and in fact was not overly fond of any of the Pooh franchise then. Well, unless you count the Disney audiobook Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too.

Yet, as much as the animations and spin-offs have convoluted it, the original stories are adorable. It's quite possible to read them as allegory, what with Owl's obsession with sounding smart and getting a reputation for being wise when really he's just as clueless as the rest of them; and poor little Piglet's amiable cowardice; Pooh and his Very Small Brain and thinly veiled habits of mooching off of anyone who will or won't let him; Kanga, the over-protective mother; Roo, the rambunctious child; Rabbit, the stick in the mud; and finally, the famous Eeyore, who is a determined pessimist.

And then, there is Christopher Robin, bless him, who loves his Bear so very much, in spite of a full knowledge of all of his shortcomings. He reminds me of my oldest nephew, who loves to sleep with a stuffed Anaconda, who can read books with his mom by the hour, and whose worst possible punishment is having his Lightning McQueen and/or Doc put on top of the refrigerator for time out. Little children are delightful, aren't they?

On My Mind ...

I bought some fleece pants at a Gap outlet last October. Normally, I wouldn't have looked at them at all, but I was wearing a pair of jeans that were completely soaked--the result of my having fallen into the river not long before. It's an interesting experience going to lunch and then outlet shopping wearing soaking wet jeans that totally sag. I don't recommend. But I do recommend the fleece pants. They are my favorite, though I think it is a little disturbing that I can wear them so comfortably during August in Texas.

Pants have been on my mind lately, because most of mine are now too big.

This brings to mind the wonderful Wallace and Gromit short--The Wrong Trousers. I do love Wallace and Gromit.

I also love asparagus.

Belated Inception

I purposely didn't write about Inception before, because I can't really add anything to Janeheiress' review, except that I saw it and I liked it.

But I just went to see it again yesterday, and now I really want to talk to someone about it. It doesn't often happen that I don't understand a movie. I think I understand Inception; I'm pretty sure I understand it--yet there's something confusing about it that I am not quite willing to attribute to its having holes in the plot. So here are some of my random thoughts:

I bought the soundtrack because I need new running music, and it will work quite nicely. Nice intensity. Nice integration of plot and theme into the sound. Cool instrumentation ... well, Hans Zimmer's instrumentation is all very similar, but I can't fault him too much for that, because I still believe that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." You can always count on Zimmer to have a fun mix of modern and classical sounds. Once I would have thought it too synthesized, but he achieves the right kind of power with that without overdoing it with the high brass that some composers have.

Just a really quick, stupid thing to say: I'm still reeling from pleasant surprise at how much I liked Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in this movie. In spite of being dubbed the character with no imagination (that's the character I usually can't like), he was really cool. Mostly, I think, because of how sharp he looked in that suit. There's something about a dark-haired man in a suit. I mean, you could practically smell his cologne.

I liked Ellen Page as well. I've heard good things about her but never seen her in anything before. Whoever did her costumes was cool. It makes sense for an architectural student genius to wear scarves all the time. Not sure why, but it worked.

I don't remember his name, but the guy who supplied the sedatives and drove the van. He was good--especially at that part where he did some daring driving moves, then smiled and accidentally asked the back seat full of sleeping people if they had seen that.

The first time I saw the movie, I didn't get what was going on with the forger. As soon as I did, I liked him quite a bit, and one of the scenes in the hotel made so much more sense.

On the contrary, as much as I want to, I can't say a lot about DiCaprio's acting ability. He's always going to be Baz Luhrman's Romeo to me, no matter how many "serious" directors love him. He's not bad, but he's still not great. I want to be fair here. I think some of that has to be attributed to the repetitious, unoriginal nature of the dialogue. I liked the ideas they were expressing, but he, as well as Ellen Page, had some very bad lines that I didn't notice the first time around because I was so engrossed in the action. Bad dialogue rarely gets past me, so it's a big compliment to say that even though some of it is bad, I was completely unaware of it until I saw the movie again. I wonder how much the actors have to say in the course of the filming--regarding their lines, I mean. Surely those two noticed that by the last 20 or so minutes, they were simply repeating everything they had already said? And last about him as an actor--I think it has more to do with his voice than anything else. Even though he's probably in his late 30s now, and he plays these serious characters with serious issues, he still sounds like a young boy. It's very touching.

Now to business. What was going on at the end? Did he go into "limbo" to save Saito, and get stuck there? Why was there absolutely no explanation of what was happening? They showed the scene twice, so it had to mean something. When they woke up on the plane, was it still Dom's dream? The top never stopped spinning, and they left it that way on purpose, obviously, but why? Why do that? Was Nolan just trying to say that what Dom and his projection of Mal were endlessly arguing about has no answer--that you can choose your own reality? In that case, why would he choose his children over his wife? Not that I think that's a bad choice, but is that really what he was doing? And if he really did wake up and go home, why did the kids sound so much older over the telephone? Why was everything about that house so surreal? But then again, there was a beginning to it--and one of the first things he told Ariadne was that your subconscious always jumps into the middle of a dream.

I'm sorry. I love the movie and think it's wonderful, but the ending doesn't work for me. I see holes. Anyone else's opinions are most welcome. I never intended to get so worked up about a movie like this; writing a blog post tends to do that to me.

Okay, I only have 8% of my laptop battery left, so I have to stop writing. Maybe I will amend or delete this post later, I haven't decided.

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

I caved to peer pressure and decided to re-read Mansfield Park as part of a friend's challenge to read the complete works of Jane Austen in a year. I wasn't particularly excited about reading it again, but that is mostly due to the fact that I have so many other things I want to read during the course of this year. If you don't count re-reads, I'm ridiculously far behind myself in terms of the number of books read in a given year. This is what happens, I guess, when one realizes that it has been nearly a decade since reading some of the greatest books of all time. This year's other re-reads include Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Count Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Jane Austen's Persuasion, and huge chunks of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I don't count re-reads in my reading spreadsheet, so these feats will remain undocumented for the time being.

What clinched my decision to go for Mansfield Park was Janeheiress' reminder that the first third of the book is rather boring. When reading it, it seems as if it could go on in that insipid way all the way to the end, and while I don't find Fanny Price an insipid heroine at all, I definitely think the first part of the book is.

And now, my opinion of Fanny. I am convinced that Fanny Price, more than almost any other heroine of great literature, was a daring feat on the part of her author. For someone to succeed so well in writing about someone who lived through so little action or adventure, who had little wit (or none), and whose character was defined by her refusal to fight against anyone who railroaded her, is a mark of genius. Fanny is the quintessential anti-heroine, because her one great heroic act is in remaining consistent to her principles when everyone around her tries to coerce, manipulate, and guilt her into doing things she knows are not right when she has no fair way of explaining herself.

I think that an anti-heroine (or anti-hero) might generally be considered someone like Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Lily Bart in The House of Mirth--people whose lives are defined by the flaws in their characters that make destruction impossible to avoid. In other words, the very opposite of a hero--because a hero is usually someone who learns and triumphs over their own character flaws and misfortunes. Fanny isn't like that. She reminds me a lot of the lovely character Farmer Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd. Both of them, in spite of their misfortunes, their unpopular steadiness of character and affection, their awkward status in their social circles, demand the affection of any honest reader because even though what is right isn't popular, and everyone tends to wish for adventure over moral uprightness, they triumph because they have so little to be ashamed of and so few regrets. And all this in spite of, not because of, the fact that they have not created their own difficulties. Fanny's difficulties are never vanquished; they don't even really disappear. The ending of the book, while satisfactory in every sense, really only confirms that her life was never meant to be remarkable, and that she would probably always suffer being overlooked and undervalued.

In our present-day mindset, we usually think that the only way to conquer difficulty is to either destroy circumstances or change them to our liking. We look for that in stories, because in spite of all the motivational speakers and motivational posters we are raised with, most of us know that in most situations, the only thing that will give us a victory is enduring a torturous event, or a torturous situation, as positively and proactively as possible. People who live in a fictional world often spend their entire lives dissatisfied with their lot, constantly on a quest for a cure or a quickfix or a life-altering miracle; mistakenly believing that persistence in dissatisfaction alone will change things. Single girls who wait around for Captain Moroni to ride up in shining armor on a white horse, sweeping them up in his saddle and riding off with her into the sunset; overweight people always latching on to the newest fad diet, or waiting for a pill that will get rid of all their excesses; low-level employees watching their superiors with jealousy, waiting for the next opportunity to make the boss see they're worth a promotion and a raise; poor people spending too much percentage of their salary on lottery tickets. We don't think in terms of the reality that some things just need to be suffered through, and sometimes that miracle fix will never come.

This is what makes Fanny Price remarkable. She recognized that even though she might not particularly relish her lot in life, she had to do her best to be reconciled to it. She didn't waste her energy on things she had no power to change; she never blamed anyone for the discomfort of her circumstances. She didn't conquer--she endured. And in doing so, she did come to a happy end, but it was a happy end consistent with the self-denying desires she had perfected by refusing to become bitter when people, or chance, did not distinguish her as anything special.

More Cooking Experience

Mom makes these heavenly delicious Greek meatballs with cinnamon and mint. I had some mint, so I decided to give them a shot. But I'm trying to cut us back on our consumption of meat--particularly beef, which we had in the form of hamburgers on Sunday. Instead of beef, I used ground turkey. My suspicion is that's why they fell apart so badly. That, and I'm almost out of olive oil. If you want to be a good cook, olive oil is an absolute necessity. As is garlic. The meatballs did taste rather wonderful--they just weren't very pretty. First things first, though. Master good tastes, then move on to aesthetics.

I also tried my hand at glazed carrots, and those turned out excellent in both taste and appearance. I used real carrots rather than the pitiful excuses for baby carrots the supermarkets are pushing. Real carrots are kind of pretty, I think.

And finally, I made a really interesting "salad" that got its start from Tosca Reno's book, The Eat Clean Cookbook. She is rather fond of tomatoes, I've noticed. We do not have that preference in common. So I started with her basic cous-cous thrown into hot chicken broth and orange juice, added the green onions, substituted red pepper in the place of the tomatoes, left out the cucumber completely, and drizzled the dressing (olive oil and lime juice) like she said, then sprinkled feta on top. She was right! It just took a few minutes to throw together, and it was so, so good.

Cooking is very rewarding, I find. What's up for tomorrow? Cauliflower and potato curry! And my stomach is already anticipating that one with pleasure.