i'm a very very complex person

I was on vacation all of last week in a place with no phone, no television, no internet, no mail or newspaper delivery... While this arrangement gave me the opportunity to do lots of reading, returning to the modern world has been an adjustment, to say the least.

Anyhow, while on vacation I finished Tehanu, the last of the Earthsea books. This book makes such a difficult, complicated end to the series. There are aspects of it that I love as much now as I did when I was a teenager, yet they exist side by side with significant flaws that have only become evident to me in my last few readings. I can see why LeGuin wanted to return to Earthsea, why she took issue with the world that she herself created, and why she felt compelled to address those issues in this book, but I think that in so doing she overcorrects herself; I found myself thinking over and over again, "But it wasn't that bad in the other books! Really, it wasn't!" There's a stridency to the book's feminism that is unbecoming and unnecessary, there's an oversimplification in the book's world-view that detracts from its message.

Despite the oversimplification of the book's political message, the characters are as real and as complex as any LeGuin has ever written. I never fail to be moved by the relationship between Ged and Tenar. The connection that they share feels very real to me. They have gone in different directions since they parted at the end of The Tombs of Atuan, they haven't always been a part of each other's lives, but the intensity of the experiences they shared when they were young forged a bond between them strong enough to negate time and distance. They may not have been a part of each other's lives, but they have always been in each other's thoughts. I love the way they go over their shared history, Ged on his knees in the garden, asking her again and again, "Do you remember?" Looking for her reassurance, wanting to know that the memories are important to her too. And though they haven't seen each other or spoken in years, they are able to talk and to be silent together; it is both easy and hard for them to be with each other. Ah, and when she tells him, "Nothing is wasted. Nothing is ever wasted!" and when he, waking in the morning, looks at her and calls her "Life-giver!" Ah, lovely.

After Tehanu, I read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers. It's a novella and a collection of stories, written, as best I can tell, at widely different points in her career. Nothing that I've read of McCullers's since The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has blown me away the way that book did, and this was no exception. I liked the novella, and was suitably horrified by it's strange ending, but the stories were less than stellar. Not that they were bad stories--they were competent and written with obvious care--but they didn't seem to amount to much. None of them grabbed me, and I'd be surprised if any of them stay with me for any amount of time. Maybe it's just a case of me getting my expectations up too high, but I think it's more than that. It seems like there was something missing from Sad Cafe, the same thing that was missing from Reflections in a Golden Eye, although I can't put my finger on what it is. Perhaps it's the intensity of empathy in Lonely Hunter that these subsequent books lack.

Last but not least, I started reading Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, on loan from N. It's intriguing, although it seems slightly scattered at this point. I'm not very far along yet, though, so I'm hoping that may become less of an issue as I go on. I have a few thoughts at this point, but I think I'll wait until I've read a little bit more of it before sharing them.

I finished The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter over the weekend, and I'm still fascinated by it. As I was reading, I had the feeling that there were vast forces massing beneath the surface of the story. There was an ominous quality to the narration, and I was aware of dark currents of race, sex, and class flowing through the book. I kept expecting these issues to suddenly manifest themselves in a huge, cataclysmic event; I thought that the book was building itself up for major tragedy. And although horrible things did happen in the story, there was no single, massive event like the one I was looking for. Nothing happened that unified all the different narrative threads, or that brought all the half-hidden forces out into the light. In a way it felt a little bit anticlimactic, but I wasn't disappointed because it occurred to me that McCullers's story is much more realistic and true-to-life without such a cataclysmic event. Most of us have felt the effects of race, gender, and sex on our lives, but only rarely do these issues manifest themselves overtly in the form of major happenings in our lives. Instead, we do what McCullers's characters do: we try to be conscious as best we can of our thoughts and feelings and the ideas that shape us, we feel deeply about the people and events in our lives, and we keep on going.

All in all, I thought The Heart Is... was a beautiful book. I was very impressed with the quality of McCullers's writing, and profoundly affected by her story. I am also both impressed and jealous that she was only 23 when she wrote it. Damn! What I wouldn't give to be even half as good as she was! I know I've got to work on my own novel tonight, but I'm not sure I can bear to after reading this.

After finishing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, I started A.S. Byatt's The Game. I read Possession years ago (and again just a few months ago, almost forgot about that), and have not read anything else of Byatt's since then, despite how much I liked it. So when the lovely Ms. E picked up The Game at a used bookstore a week or two ago, I saw my chance to read a little more Byatt and promptly stole it from her. (See, Ms. E, you ought to read this journal; it's the only way you'll know when I steal your books! Heh heh.) Anyhow, I'm not very far along yet, but so far it seems to share many of the qualities I liked about Possession: characterization that is both strong and swift, erudition that is appealing rather than off-putting, and just little hint of creepiness to keep me turning the pages. I'll post more thoughts as I progress.

If I were a professor, I'd be an absent-minded one. The weekend before last, I left All Quiet on the Western Front at my sister's house, and then last weekend, I left The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at my friend's house down in DC! Argh. This annoys me much more because I'm farther along in the book and really want to finish it. This is a sure sign that I'm either losing my mind, or I'm traveling too much. Or both, I suppose.

Anyhow, I have another new trick that I'd like to practice, and that is including an image in my journal entry. This is the best picture of an Adirondack guideboat that I've found, very much like the one that Sheila loves so much in my novel. I want to put the picture here so I can refer back to it and remember where to find it. And also to test whether or not I know how to do this...

Hmmm, let's see...been a bit of a while since I updated. I finished The Accidental Tourist shortly after my last post. It was a fine read I suppose, but certainly nothing earth shattering. In the end, I just didn't really care about the characters. I feel like I had some more thoughts that I wanted to put down, but cannot remember at the moment. Oh well.

After finishing Accidental Tourist, I started All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque. It's one of the books that I really feel I should have read at some point during my education, but since I didn't, I'm now trying to fill in those holes. Unfortunately, I read about 30 pages of it and then left it at my sister's house in Chicago. That was a little frustrating because I was starting to like it, and I was already at the airport when I realized I hadn't packed it. Argh. So once again I found myself at the mercy of the poor selection at the airport bookstore, but I did somewhat better than last time and I have Oprah's book club to thank, believe it or not. I got The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and I really don't think I would have found it at the airport unless Oprah had recently anointed it. Regardless, I've read a little bit of it, and really I really like what I've read so far. It's a little early yet for me to say much about it, but I'm enjoying it so far.