i'm a very very complex person

Cool and damp today, the weather feels like true spring after the run of early summer days with which we began the week. I have had a type of quiet morning that I really enjoy: puttering around the house by myself, straightening and setting things right as I go, doing some light chores, folding a basket of laundry, refilling the bird feeder... And now I am about to go have a type of afternoon that I don't enjoy: working my way through the pile of grading that must get done before spring break. But before I consign myself to that fate, a couple of photos:


An incredibly mild winter and an early spring mean that my camellia is in bloom about three weeks earlier than it was last year.


Of course I could not resist bringing a blossom inside. I love having flowers in the house and this is the first one this year.

One of the many new things that I gained when we bought our house was a pair of window boxes. Despite nearly ten years of apartment living, none of my apartments in either Philadelphia or State College ever had window boxes. I've always thought that they were cute, though, so I'm excited to have them.



Right now, they don't look very different than they did when we bought the house: both the little round shrub and the pale green foliage plant (anyone know what it is?) were planted by the previous owners. The arrangement is a bit stiff and formal for my taste--I'm fond of sprawling, messy gardens--but everything about the previous owners' style was stiffer and more formal than ours. I stuck some pansies in for color and to loosen things up a bit, but I haven't quite been able to bring myself to pull out perfectly healthy plants and do away with them! I guess they may not change much for a while, then.

Nevertheless, I brought the camera with me while out walking through our neighborhood today, and took some photos of some of my favorite window boxes. I'm always interested in what other gardeners do in this highly urban environment, and often impressed by the creativity I see when I pay attention.

( Philadelphia window boxes )

Do you have window boxes? If so, show me!

I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go recently, but I can't quite figure out my feelings about it. It was a quick read (or would have been, if I hadn't gotten interrupted halfway through by Ms. E's getting burned and my suddenly having to become her nursemaid), but I kept feeling like there was some key element missing from the book yet was never able to put my finger on what. Perhaps it was just because my expectations were very high based on my love of The Remains of the Day, and there are few books indeed that can stand up to that one, but I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed in this book.

It's funny, but many of the characteristics that made The Remains of the Day so brilliant are also present in Never Let Me Go--I can't figure out why the same things that came together so perfectly in one book would fall so flat in another. Both books are told through reminiscence, both feature pinpoint control of tone and voice, both are narrated by characters who are careful observers of other people...the list could probably go on. Perhaps the thing that Remains of the Day has that this book lacks is intensity. That's an odd thing to think because Never Let Me Go has much more drama in its plot than a butler going for a drive, but the drama didn't seem to penetrate--it's like the two books are mirror images of each other: Remains of the Day still and quiet on the surface but smoldering below, and Never Let Me Go full of much more intensity on the surface and empty underneath.

But I shouldn't just compare this book to Remains of the Day; I should think about it as its own thing. My favorite character was Tommy--I liked the teenaged Tommy so much that I was disappointed that the adult version of Tommy wasn't developed more fully. I must confess, though, that it was a little strange to read the book because the character Tommy reminded me so strongly of my cat Tommy. And not just because of their names! Like my cat, the character seems developmentally behind his peers, slow to catch on to things, easy to laugh at... The book opens with a storyline about Tommy being mildly bullied at school, and I found it very hard to read because I kept thinking that those mean children were teasing my poor helpless kitty.

Kathy, the narrator, is a strange character. There's something about her that doesn't click, something artificial about her. Several times I found myself responding to her recollections by thinking that people just don't act like that. It reminded me of a friend I had in high school who, I learned, had a very different perspective from mine. Whenever he and I would talk about something that had occurred among our group of friends, our perceptions were so far removed from each other that I would find myself wondering if we were talking about the same people and the same event. Ishiguro does acknowledge this sort of subjectivity in his narrative--Kathy is forever mentioning that one of her friends had a different interpretation of a particular instance, or that someone else remembered a story in a different way than she did--but this acknowledgment doesn't seem to amount to much.

I think the thing that disappointed me most was the ending of the book. The conclusion is a bit foregone--we know the characters can't get the thing they want--but even so it seems to happen rather abruptly, with a great deal of mystery and suspense all dispelled at a stroke. I guess in the end my problem is that I can't seem to figure out why Ishiguro wrote this particular book. The book has some science fiction-ish elements, and some coming of age elements, and a great deal of interpersonal drama elements, but all of these various elements don't seem to gel with each other, and I'm left wondering what exactly he was trying to accomplish.

Sigh. I feel like I might be being a bit too harsh here. It's an engaging enough book, and there were a few moments of nicely managed tension. I don't know. Has anyone else read this one? I would very much like to hear others' thoughts.




In totally unrelated news, I harvested my first zucchini today! And when I say first, I mean that these are the first zucchini I've grown EVER, as in my whole life. Very exciting! Now I've just got to figure out how I'm going to use them.