comp lit and mediaphilia
Books Bought This Month
Books Borrowed This Month Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber The Future of Us by Carolyn Mackler and Jay Asher Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer by Alloy Entertainment ghostwriters Continue reading →
Posted in books
Tagged books , fiftyfiftyme , monthly roundup , procrastinating , reading , sick
Feb · 29
I haven’t been able to journal from all this stress, because I hate it when my journal reads like my childhood diaries, with lists of “today I did this and then this and was told this and then finished that and ate this with so-and-so.” I’m desperate to write, because these are times when I need to be doing something creative to get me out of my head, which is filled with biopsies and ultrasounds and bloodwork. The moleskine in my purse is finally not filled with shopping lists and phone numbers but with quick letters to myself about things I need to think about when I have time to think. But it’s so hard to start your journal again when you’ve been out of it for more than a week. And I have no time. This is piano week. If you are not made of black and white keys and three pedals, I will not hang out with you until after Sunday’s master class. I should be practicing right now instead of writing here.
I’m also reluctant to go back to my paper journal because a) my tennis elbow is finally going away and I don’t want my hands to start cramping again just when they’ve stopped, and b) I’m starting to feel as if I can write anything I want to here. Part of that is because so few people read this, so I’m essentially just writing to myself on a computer instead of on paper. But I’m also trying to decide where this blog is headed, because I’m finding so many blogs and webmags and zines and things that I want to be involved in, and I’ve been reading so much and writing (at least in my head) and I’ve been inspired by so many things. Is it silly to want to be cutting off my real life in favor of an Internet one? Is it silly to plan to become an Internet personality? I dunno.
Posted in rambling
Tagged blogging , journaling , kvetching , nothing , piano , procrastinating , sick , writing
Mar · 24
I love English classes because they’re interesting, but also because they trigger interesting thinking that has almost nothing to do with what is being talked about in class. Often I wonder and think about how it feels like I’m the only person in the world capable of thinking. Isn’t it weird to think that people other than yourself are capable of thinking and also being actors in the play of your life, just like you are to them? It blows my mind. I was sitting in class today and thinking about how I want to reconcile all these battling personalities in my head, because I am a different person on paper and in life and on a computer. The computer and the paper people are more similar, but the loud, real-life person gets in their way, and they’re all so different, and each one of those people has a million characters for fiction projects rolling around in their heads. Is this a bipolar thing or a writer thing or a human thing? I don’t know, but I love English classes, and I’m so happy I’m changing my major. But I’m also so happy for choir, which I was starting to hate but which today was the second-best part of the day after English. And yesterday I elliptical’ed for forty-five minutes with my new favorite friend and when I came home I was completely happy about everything, even though really my life is falling spectacularly to pieces and I don’t know what I’m doing with it. Thank G-d for English and exercise. Oh, life.
Posted in the diet
Tagged angst , happy , identity , life , music , other people , procrastinating , school , sick , the diet , writing
Mar · 23
Spring break’s plans were to do a few chores like my taxes, read a lot, and relax. Instead, my couple of routine doctor’s visits have turned into referrals for more, and with all the possibilities for sickness I have, I feel like I’m knocking on death’s door. I’ve decided I want to live with my parents next year, change my major, and graduate a semester early. Let’s just hope the department lets me. U of A is way too expensive to stay the whole year, and damned if I’m going to start paying for my education now. If I have to take out loans or pay real money, it has to be for a Master’s degree.
Tagged school , sick , spring break
Mar · 18
Since I’m stuck in my hotel room with the flu, I figured it was time to update. Unfortunately I do not have enough of the books on my reading list with me, so I’ve had to resort to reading books that I borrow from others (the horror!). But as I haven’t updated in awhile, here are the books I’ve read since my last summer reading entry:
1. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I read the title story in high school, and I read The Namesake soon after it came out, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading this entire collection. It was good to read, because I should definitely be reading more short fiction, and New Yorker “short” fiction starts to piss me off after awhile. This was a pretty good collection, though occasionally it got a bit boring. I suppose it’s something all authors have to do–spend a couple hundred pages in one of their first major works writing thinly veiled autobiographical things (ahem, The Kite Runner ) or otherwise similar-to-life stories, and there’s nothing really wrong with knowing something very well and writing about it. But after awhile, I was a bit bored with already knowing the setting (East Coast), characters (Indian immigrants to the US), etc. Still, really great stories, easy to read but not in an over-simplified sort of way, and largely enjoyable.
2. Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne. This was totally not what I was expecting. Well, it sort of was, because it was definitely really funny teen angst, but I was not quite ready for the really, really ridiculous talk about sex and erections, nor was I prepared for the absurdist tone of it all. It’s definitely a good 500-page read, though. I love it when teenagers in novels have preposterously good vocabularies but still find themselves obsessing over crushes. Good stuff.
3. Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger. I will be the first to admit that I own a copy of her first novel, The Devil Wears Prada , and I have read it multiple times. I have also seen the movie twice. It’s perfectly fun, and this book and books by Sophie Kinsella/Madeleine Wickham are probably the only chick lit books that I feel happy reading, because they’re not completely WASPy (read: annoying, predictable, full of harping ladies a la “The View” and “Sex and the City” who hate their parents for no real reason, obsess about what they’re eating and whether they’ve farted in front of their partners, and don’t ever go to work) and they at least read like they’re written by someone who has read good books and has a good vocabulary. But this book, though kind of fun, ultimately fails because the only way it is fun is the exact same way that her first novel is fun, because it is exactly the same as The Devil Wears Prada , just with different names and a different job. Even The Babysitters’ Club was not this formulaic.
4. The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll. This beautiful, large edition of the book comprises both novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There , which together are usually adapted to make the movies that we know as “Alice in Wonderland.” Reading the annotated version was fabulous, because they just allow you to understand so much more. The “absurd” parts aren’t really that absurd, there are tons of math games, and the poems are often based on popular songs and poems of Carroll’s day. The annotations also explain his “pedophilia” in detail. AND the second Alice book, which is a lot more fun than the first, is actually very cleverly modeled after a chess game. Do children’s books do all that anymore? I think not. Awesome. Read it.
Tagged authors , books , criticism , sick , summer reading
Jun · 24
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