decemberthirty: (Default)
This question comes at the end of the proem to the Aeneid, and Vergil spends the next twelve books of his poem demonstrating that yes, there can be such bitterness in the hearts of gods as to force Aeneas, a man of piety, through all the many trials he endures.

I read the Aeneid during my senior year in high school, and at times it seemed as though Vergil had written it just so the gods could create trials for me—I am not nearly so pious as Aeneas, but reading it was hard! I was the only fool in my school (even among the students in the advanced Latin class) who wanted to read it, so I met privately with my Latin teacher three times a week after school, and we worked our way line by line through Vergil’s tremendous poem. It took the whole year. I loved Vergil’s mastery of meter from the beginning—ah, those great ringing spondees that take your breath away!—but it took longer for me to appreciate the other aspects of those afternoons: the deeper rhythms of the story, the empty quiet classroom, Mr. Cusick’s stiff formality and occasional bursts of impish humor, the seriousness with which he took our work (and which, in time, I came to share).

In high school, I was a Dido partisan. I loved the romance and the high drama of Aeneas’s affair with her. Love at first sight! Sex in a cave! Betrayal! Suicide! It had all the melodrama my little seventeen-year-old heart desired, and I had no interest left for Lavinia, the meek young thing that Aeneas marries at the end of poem. After proud, passionate Dido, she seemed to have no personality; Lavinia simply existed so that Aeneas could fulfill the prophecies that included marrying her, settling in Italy, and building Lavinium.

Ursula K. Le Guin also noticed the thinness of Lavinia’s character; she saw it not as a flaw in the poem but as an opening, a place where there was room for more creative work to be done. And she does it in her book Lavinia. The novel is narrated in the first-person from Lavinia’s perspective, and it tells the story of her life from her days as a princess of Latium before Aeneas and the other Trojans arrive in Italy, through her brief marriage to Aeneas, to the troubled years between Aeneas’s death and the true beginnings of Rome. Given my long attachment to both the Aeneid and Ursula K. Le Guin, I was afraid that I might end up hating the book, but although it’s not perfect I enjoyed it a lot. It is evident that Le Guin has thought seriously about Vergil’s poem, and, in some ways, that’s enough.

There is some postmodern musing at the beginning of the book about Lavinia as a character in Vergil’s epic—how the “real” Lavinia is semi-mythical and lost so far back in time that it’s impossible for even this Lavinia (the one who is narrating to us) to know anything about her. Our narrator is, instead, Vergil’s character. But not entirely, because Vergil’s portrait of Lavinia was so scanty. I was prepared to hate this stuff (“No, no!” I wanted to shout, “just tell the story!”), especially when Vergil himself began appearing to Lavinia as a vision in the sacred grove of Albunea. But to my surprise, it worked! Le Guin does a wonderful job with those quiet conversations between the elderly male poet from the future and his young female creation in the distant past. She captures each of their surprise at being confronted with the other, and creates a perfectly thoughtful, rueful tone for Vergil’s voice.

I also loved the way Le Guin handled the transformation of this story from an epic poem to a novel. In essence this involves bringing humanity and nuance to the aspects of the epic that are formal and stylized. Take, for example, the role of oracle and prophecy in the story. In Vergil (and all ancient narrative) oracles are absolute, but Le Guin renders them human. Prophecies, omens, and oracles all exist in the world of her novel, but there is tension between them and the actions and desires of the humans in the story. The main source of tension in the first half of the book stems from Lavinia’s desire to obey the oracle that told her she must marry a foreigner—she must resist the many forces that try to impel her into marriage with a neighboring king. Le Guin also humanizes Aeneas’s overwhelming pietas, his only real personality trait in the Aeneid. (Note: pietas is a difficult word to translate. The fact that it has a cognate in “piety” makes it tempting to think that they are equivalent but they aren’t, quite. The Latin pietas means more than just religious faith, and encompasses all forms of duty and rightness.) Anyhow, where Vergil describes Aeneas as pious over and over again, Le Guin shows us a thoughtful, careful man, considerate, reflective, and sometimes over-moral.

Le Guin’s book lost momentum for me in the second half, after the death of Aeneas. I’m not sure yet how I feel about her portrait of Aeneas’s son Ascanius, and I was less interested in the problems that came with his attempts to rule his father’s kingdom. Silvius, the son of Lavinia and Aeneas, falls victim to some of the same scanty characterization by Le Guin that Lavinia received from Vergil: he seems less like a real person than like a pawn designed to fill a role. He is the perfect heir that Ascanius is not; he will go on to build the civilization that will one day be Rome; he will take up Aeneas’s great shield. Yes, he will, and that’s all fine, but in the meantime he is a child about whom there is nothing childish.

So the book has its flaws, but it was so very worth reading. Even just for Le Guin's magnificent imagining of life in Italy during the Bronze Age, halfway between barbaric and civilized, in a wooded, half-wild land that would be unrecognizable as the Italy of today. The customs, the warfare, the household religions—all are brought vividly to life.

I thought so much about Mr. Cusick, my old Latin teacher, while reading this book that I thought I might try to contact him. It might be good, I thought, to write him a letter and tell him what I’m doing now, and that I’m glad for all he taught me. But even with the whole big internet at my disposal, I couldn’t find him. Alas.
decemberthirty: (starfruit)
1. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: Early in this book there is a passage in which a butler named Stevens, after looking out on gently rolling fields broken by hedges and dotted with sheep, muses thus:

I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest—such as I saw it this morning—possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term 'greatness'.

Although these remarks relate to rural England, they are also an apt description of the book itself. The Remains of the Day is an extremely quiet book in which almost nothing happens (the only possible plot summary is "A butler reminisces about his career while on a driving tour through the south of England.") yet it has a greatness that many flashier stories fail to attain. It's a masterpiece of nuance and impeccably controlled tone; Ishiguro's prose style is as restrained as Stevens himself. I was most impressed by the way Ishiguro conveys Stevens's emotional repression and the insularity of his existence from within the first-person perspective—definitely one of the most successful uses of first-person that I've ever read. I also appreciated the compassion with which Ishiguro treats Stevens. It would be so easy to make him a figure of fun, what with his pompous habits, his preoccupation with 'dignity', his stiffness and inability to take or make jokes, but Ishiguro never makes fun of him. It is only with the greatest gentleness that he suggests that Stevens may be wrong about dignity being the most important quality for a person to possess, that perhaps warmth and human feeling are just as important.

This is a beautiful book, the best thing I've read in months, and you should all go out and read it right now.

2. Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin: Not a bad book, certainly, but not a great one either. A young adult novel about tribes of people who are genetically disposed to have superhuman powers, Gifts is beautifully written, as is everything by LeGuin, and her tremendous talent at building societies and detailing complex relationship structures is in evidence. Nonetheless, the story never quite comes to life. The world of the book is vivid—violent, dark, isolated, and sinister—but the characters are flat. It was a quick read and the plot was engaging enough to keep me going, but this is not the sort of book that lingers in the mind after you finish it. Disappointing, considering the way LeGuin's best YA writing does just that.

3. Strange Motion by Jonathan Franzen: Perhaps it's cheating to count this among my vacation reads, since I only read about 2/3 of it while I was away, but I think that's enough to give a preliminary review…

Like The Corrections, Strange Motion is a book that is packed with incident and with social observation. The plot contains a mysterious series of earthquakes in the suburbs of Boston, a dysfunctional family battling over a large sum of money, a love story that goes awry (and may yet right itself), and environmental wrongdoing by a major chemical company. All of these threads tie together neatly, and the story is surprisingly cohesive considering how much is stuffed into it. The prose is as quick and clever as one would expect from Franzen, although it sometimes feels a bit too self-conscious for my taste. I don't find the book to be particularly emotionally engaging thus far, but it's a fun read with a fair amount of intrigue.

4. "My Father's Suitcase" by Orhan Pamuk: I finally got around to reading Pamuk's Nobel Lecture, and I thought it was brilliant. He strikes a perfect balance between the personal and the intellectual, his tone is measured, and his language is precise. There's really nothing I can say that will be better than Pamuk's own writing, so I'll end with this quotation that would make any writer take heart:

When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man--or this woman--may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete--after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
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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.
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I haven't been doing a good job lately of updating about my reading. I have recently finished both The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. Working my way through the series yet again. This time the thing that I'm noticing most is how LeGuin is able to accomplish so much with so little: simple language and straightforward prose, tending slightly at times toward formality, yet the effect is so powerful... Even with all my familiarity with these books, there are still sentences that knock me flat. I find that I have to keep reminding myself that she had to work to make it that way, that it didn't all just flow out of her pen in this perfect state. I tell students all the time that nothing they read--no book, no article in a magazine or newpaper--is in the same form that it was when its author first set it down; it's all be revised and worked over and edited in order to become what you see before you, and therefore you shouldn't be upset about the fact that your own writing is not perfect on the first go. I say it so often that I never would have thought I would have such trouble internalizing that idea. Yet here I am, jealous of what I perceive as LeGuin's perfection. It's because my own writing has been such a struggle lately. I am finally (finally!) back in the habit of working on the book every day, but for the past few weeks I have been unable to produce more than a few sentences a day. I don't know what to do to fix that.
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"At the spring of the River Ar I named you, a stream that falls from the mountain to the sea. A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea."
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I am going to spend a few minutes right now thinking and writing about books, and then I am going to spend time thinking and writing my book.

Okay. I finished Ursula K. LeGuin's The Wave In the Mind this weekend. I enjoyed it, although it seemed to take me rather a long time to get through it. I always seem to lose steam halfway through any nonfiction book I read. I guess I'm just addicted to that narrative drive... Anyhow, the essays were interesting and addressed an impressively varied range of subjects. I was (predictably) most interested in those that dealt with writing, and was disappointed to find that several of them simply repeated ideas and themes that LeGuin discussed in Steering the Craft, her writing guide that I love so much. She did write more directly and openly about her own creative process in this book than in Steering the Craft, and I found that aspect of the book fascinating. No matter what she's talking about, LeGuin is opinionated and straightforward, and has a sharp, self-deprecating humor that I found very appealing.

After finishing The Wave In the Mind, I started reading The Master by Colm Toibin, the last of my Christmas/birthday books. I'm enjoying it very much so far. At first the story seemed somewhat fragmented in a way that made it hard to follow, but now I feel that Toibin (he has accents on his name but I don't know how to make them--anybody know and want to teach me?) has done a wonderful job of enveloping me in Henry James's inner life, and that the fragmentary nature of the narrative actually helps with this process.

And since I am finally on the last of the books I received in December (still reading Christmas books in June? Unheard of!), I allowed myself to go book shopping this weekend. I probably should have saved my money and sent myself to the library, but I got some things that I'm really excited about so I'll forgive myself just this once. I acquired:

The Bone People by Keri Hulme
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (been meaning to read this for ages and ages)
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
And my best find of all: Cormac McCarthy's entire Border Trilogy, in matching, good-condition, hardcover editions. For $24.00! For all three books! I read and loved All the Pretty Horses two or three years ago but I haven't read the other two books yet, and am very excited about this purchase.
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I have finally finished Tehanu, the last of the Earthsea books. It really is an odd book, an odd end to that series. Lovely, but odd. I can remember how much I struggled to make sense of it back when I was twelve or so. I remember writing a long poem to try and help me figure it out, to help me attempt to sort out what I was feeling. So much of what the book is concerned with is aging, the changes that come with age, the way our relationship with the world changes as we get older, and I really knew nothing about that at twelve. (And how much do I know about it at 25? You are not old yet, Katie.)

I was more critical of the book this time than I think I have ever been, and I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps just my frame of mind. I couldn't help but notice a little stridency creeping in around the edges, and places where LeGuin used a hammer when a feather would have sufficed. I've never felt that way before about this book.

I don't know yet what I'll read next, although I feel fairly strongly that I need to go in a different direction. There's a lot of unread material lying around the house, so I should probably find something in one of those piles. But I have the urge to go to the library or the bookstore, to ply myself with something new...

In other news, perhaps novel-writing is not the best pursuit for someone with as strong a tendency to disappear down the rabbit-hole as mine.
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The cabin at Stony Lake has a wide, screened front porch that looks out over the sloping lawn and down the length of the lake. One week ago today I was on that porch, getting ready to go to sleep on the daybed there. Behind my right shoulder were the two big glass windows that looked into the main cabin where my sisters, cousins, mother, and aunt were already asleep. Outside the porch on three sides there was nothing but rain; it had been falling, not hard but steadily, for hours. I was reading in bed with a flashlight, staying awake to finish The Farthest Shore.

All night my sleep was light and fragmentary. I hovered around the border between sleep and waking, where it's difficult to tell the difference between dreams and thoughts, and my dream-thoughts were haunted by the steady sound of the rain and by images of Ged and Arren and their descent into the dry land: the silence, the dust, the two figures walking through the dim grey that washes that entire landscape in my imagination. It was a strange night, and I woke up and watched as the day became light. The light seemed to grow out of the lake, a very soft, watery light that grew slowly until it suffused the sky, the landscape, and my porch.

When Arren stands on the shore of Selidor, he looks around him at the dunes, the sea, the living grasses, and Ged; and he says, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
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I'm still trying to catch up to what I'm currently reading, but I'm almost there. After finishing Written on the Body, I read Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin. I found it to be a bit of a disappointment. The idea of being able to visit different planes of existence while waiting for you plane in an airport is clever, but I didn't find the results to be particularly special. The stories read like little travelogues or anthropologists' reports about the different planes. Much of LeGuin's writing has something of an extraterrestrial anthropological bent to it, but she usually does a better job of mixing that in with an engrossing story. LeGuin is so good at creating characters that I thought it was a shame that almost none of these stories had strong characters to revolve around. It's entirely possible, however, that I wouldn't be nearly so disappointed by this book if I hadn't just read the wonderful Birthday of the World.

And now, without further ado, I will tell you what I am currently reading. It's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. What a fantastic book. If I could make my book half so heartbreaking, I will die happy. I don't think I'm going to be able to very coherent about the book right now, because I'm still in the middle of it, and all I can think is, "Oh, Sammy! Oh, Joe! I love you both so much..." But I am particularly in love with Sammy. His story is just heartbreakingly tender and sweet, and then full of so much painful and unnecessary self-denial. That kind of thing is right up my alley. I will post more once I finish it, but all I can say right now is that the book is amazing!
decemberthirty: (Default)
Another long lapse. Oh well.

Since I last posted, I finished The Birthday of the World, which was absolutely lovely. It was a pleasure to return to some of the worlds on which Ursula LeGuin's other stories and novels have been set. I love the ways in which she manages to use these other worlds to show her readers truths about our own lives and our own world. And of course, her writing is just lovely.

After that, I read another lovely book: The Light of Day by Graham Swift. I like the direction that Swift has gone in with his last few books. He seems to be focusing somewhat less on erudition and more on character and emotion. Both Last Orders and this book are in this trend, and I think that it makes them much more compelling to read than some of his earlier books, such as Out of This World or Waterland. Waterland makes a particularly good example: it has a very touching story embedded in it, but the story is woven through with so much other stuff (the social, political, and environmental history of the fens, for instance) that the reader can get rather far from the original story before being pulled back by the author. The result is a book that is more impressive than moving. So I'm pleased to see that Swift kept to his current direction with this book. I also particularly liked the way he used isolated vignettes, and the stream of memory to tell his story. The story was about the past as much as it was about the present, and his manner of telling the story seemed particularly suited to that aspect of the book.
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I just got back from vacation, and am rather busy catching up on everything I missed at work so this will have to be brief.

Anyhow, I finished the rest of the Earthsea series, and then lent them all to my sister M., who finished them as well. She liked the books a lot, which was very gratifying to me. It was interesting to talk to her about Tehanu. She seemed to find it confusing and difficult in the same ways that I did the first few times I read it. It made me realize again that the book is truly an odd ending to the series, and yet it is also just about the only "right" way to end it.

After finishing those books, I started Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, the book that I'm reading for my little nascent book club. I have to say that I'm not particularly fond of it at this point. I will get into more depth about it soon.
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I've been reading The Tombs of Atuan for the past few days. This morning I read the chapter in which Arha sees Ged for the first time. It ends with her watching through a spyhole as he falls asleep on the floor of the labyrinth. I was reading while I was eating breakfast, and when I got to that part I was just suddenly suffused with emotion. That feeling is why I come back to these books again and again. And the great thing is that I never know where it's going to come from. The Tombs of Atuan is usually the one in the series that has the least affect on me, and then something like this happens.

I just love Ged so much, and this is the book when we get to see him young, powerful, at his peak.
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I just finished A Wizard of Earthsea. I enjoyed reading it, but it took me an awful long time. I really do love the book, but it's difficult for me to push through it when I know exactly what's going to happen at each and every point. I really need that what's-going-to-happen-next impetus to get me to pick up a book. Without that impetus, I still enjoy the book when I sit down to read it, but I sit down with it less frequently, and am less likely to choose it over other activities. Also, particularly with this series that I have read so many times before, I appreciate the books more when I sit down and read them for a significant amount of time, rather than just grabbing a few minutes of reading time here and there. So The Tombs of Atuan is next, and that's the one I usually have the most trouble getting through, so I'm going to have to make the effort this weekend to spend some significant time reading in order to get it done and get the most out of it. After that I've got The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, both are just so incredibly moving that I don't usually get bogged down with them.

I don't like talking about "getting through" these books as though it's some kind of assignment and that's all there is to it, because that's really not the way I feel. There's so much that I love about these books, and they are such a big part of myself. It's interesting, because I really do think that reading the multiple times was formative for me when I was younger, but now that I'm older and not in such need of forming, my response to them has changed. My reaction is not nearly as raw and emotional as it was when I was about fifteen. It's now much more meditative, which gives me the opportunity to think about the profound affect that these books have had on me, and also to step back and appreciate the beauty of LeGuin's writing. She writes with a lovely, simple formality that serves to reflect Ged's character and heighten the emotionality of the story. That simple formality is particularly evident in the dialogue between characters. Lately I've been realizing that those conversations between characters are one of the most appealing aspects of the series, and one of the main things that keep me reading the series over and over again. There are so many significant discussions between the characters of these books that stand out for me--when Ged is talking to Yarrow in the kitchen, Ged and Vetch in the boat, Ged's responses to Arha's questioning in the labyrinth, and later the lovely talk between the two of them in the mountains after she has become Tenar, of course every conversation between Ged and Arren on their long journey, and the intensely touching moment when Ged asks Tenar to confirm all the moments of their shared history... Just thinking about all of those moments makes me realize how important these books are to me.
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I finished Valencia, and I must admit that my opinion of it didn't change. Michelle Tea's style was engaging, and it was interesting to read about this cast of characters who are superficially quite similar to me, but lead lives that are so incredibly different than mine. All in all, however, I stand by the opinion that I expressed in my last post. The book came off as repugnantly self-indulgent.

After finishing Valenica, I didn't get started on my book club reading, primarily because Miss E. bought the book and promptly absconded with it to California. So I won't be able to get going on that until she returns. In the meantime, I decided to begin my annual re-reading of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series. I've been reading the series once a year for quite a few years, and every year the experience is different. For the past few years, I've been less than eager to get started, and consequently really dragged through the first book or two before finding that things picked up considerably in the last two books, making the whole experience worthwhile. This year, however, I actually experienced a strong craving to begin reading A Wizard of Earthsea, something that hasn't happened in years. And I'm loving it. The book is arousing in me the kind of emotions that I used to experience four or five years ago when I read it. I don't really know why this is happening, but I'm very happy about it. This is a book that means so much to me, and I'm glad to feel strongly about it again.
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Finished -Malafrena-. I don't recommend it. I had to force my way through, and it's such a far cry from Ursula K. LeGuin's best writing. It's as though someone else wrote this book for her. It's strange, however, because I remember really liking -Orsinian Tales-, her book of short stories that is set in the same fictional country and deals with some of the same stuff as this book. I'll have to go back and read the stories and figure out why I liked them and didn't like -Malafrena-.

And now I've started -Ever After- by Graham Swift. I'm in the process of deciding that I really really like Swift. I loved -Waterland-, and I'm really enjoying this book as well. I love the way he has of being able to tie so much in with his stories and yet destroying the plot. I just really like the way he writes...
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-Malafrena- is going really slowly. And it's pretty disappointing. Certainly not LeGuin's best. It's an attempt at a historical epic, and I have to give her credit for expanding her talents and trying something different, but it just falls flat in a way that her sci-fi/fantasy and literary stuff does not. Oh well, I'll still probably stick it out and finish it.
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I finished Pat Barker's -Another World- a few days ago. It was a funny book... Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange. Don't get me wrong, I liked it and all, it was just a little strange. The main reason that I found it funny is because I read the first nine-tenths of the book in an absolute lather, turning pages at an incredible rate, sucked in by the immensely suspenseful story, certain that something earth shattering was going to happen very soon. But as I got closer and closer to the end of the book, it became clear that all the suspense and foreboding were for naught, and the events in the book just quietly took care of themselves. I find that a very interesting resolution, because it's much closer to the way things usually resolve in real life. It seemed like a bit of a let down at the time, however, because Barker had gotten me to the point where I was expecting ghosts or fratricide or god-knows-what... However, ghosts and fratricide are fairly uncommon in real life, so the book is probably a better piece of literature because it left them out.

Even if that does make it a better work of literature, however, it's got nothing on the other books of Barker's that I've read. I would say that both -Union Street- and the books of the -Regeneration- trilogy are far better than -Another World-. Oh well.

And now I'm reading more Ursula K. LeGuin. Man. I don't think I've read this many of her books in such a short span of time since I was fifteen or something.... I'm currently about a quarter of the way through -Malafrena-, which is interesting because it's really not sci-fi or fantasy at all. It's about a guy who wants to foment rebellion in an imaginary Eastern European country in the 1820s. Interesting so far. It's also interesting to read after reading -Napolean Symphony-, since it provides another perspective on what Europe looked like in the wake of Napolean's empire.
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"I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"

I have finished -The Farthest Shore-, and remembered why I read these books over and over again. God, the ending of that book is just so powerful. It makes me want so badly... It takes me back to the age I was when I began reading this series, that time in middle school and high school when all I did was want. I wanted so much for my life to start, for my life to larger than it was, for glory and honor, and the opportunity to love and prove my love like Arren does. And reading the book now, when my life has ostensibly started, it still makes me want. Oh, it makes me want more than I can have. It makes me want my life to be bigger than it possibly can be in this world we live in. My life's work is teaching people to read, and in that way I work to better the world, and in that way also I have achieved something that I wanted for a very long time. But my life does not afford me the opportunity for the silence, the brutal wisdom and honesty of Ged, nor the love, strength, and grief of Arren. The world we live in was not made for the grand gestures that this book makes me long to make.
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I continue to wend my way slowly through the Earthsea series. I'm now most of the way through -The Farthest Shore-, which has certainly been my favorite this time around. I'm really enjoying reading it, but I'm also looking forward to being done with the series so I can move on to some new books. It's nice to read things with which I am so familiar, but it gets boring after a while. Also, the fact that I read -The Telling- immediately before starting the Earthsea books means that I've about had my fill of fantasy for a while and am ready to move on to another genre. If only Jane Hamilton had a new book out....
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I finished -The Tombs of Atuan- and am now on to -The Farthest Shore-, and suddenly it all my doubts about continuing to reread this series have vanished. I love this book. I think it's amazing how Ursula LeGuin introduces the character of Arren, because he has the exact same feelings towards Ged as the reader has, and thus she draws the reader even deeper into the story. And once you know the ending, you can pick up on all the wonderful foreshadowing...
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