"Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart."
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Saturday, November 21, 2009

An Update

possession-a-romance

Finally finished Possession (I refuse to include the subtitle "A Romance" because it makes it sound like a trashy B-grade chick story)!!! Not really "finally" since it took me two days, but for the record it is 500 plus pages long with like size 2 font, so it was a harrowing experience no less. Regardless, I'm glad I read the book because it revolves entirely around literary academia so its pretty insightful for my english EE... or maybe I just feel even more inadequate about ever turning in something substantial after reading"...he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it."

Aside from making me feel depressed and inadequate (or even worse, depressingly inadequate), Possession was a little blah for me because it moved at such a slow pace for a "literary detective novel". If you omit all the (fictitious) journal entries, poems, fairytales, research papers etc. the story essentially remains the same. Like it was even draggier than Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and that is one entire book about seven days in the life of a butler.

Going to read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides next! Kind of obligatory reading since I'm doing his only other book for my EE.


Thursday, November 19, 2009

Possession by A.S. Byatt

is a worthwhile read. At least the first 58 pages, which was all I could cover on the bus ride home.

I generally dislike "plot" stories. But we'll see how this one goes.

 


Tuesday, November 17, 2009

1 

"The party was just beginning to get fun when Cecilia slipped off her stool and made her way to her mother. Playing with the bracelets on her left wrist, she asked if she could be excused. It was the only time we ever heard her speak, and we were surprised by the maturity of her voice. More than anything she sounded old and tired. She kept pulling on the bracelets, until Mrs. Lisbon said, "If that's what you want, Cecilia. But we've gone to all this trouble to have a party for you."

Cecilia tugged the bracelets until the tape came unstuck. Then she froze. Mrs Lisbon said, "All right. Go up, then. We'll have fun without you." As soon as she had permission,  Cecilia made for the stairs. She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand. She climbed the steps to the kitchen, closed the door behind her, and proceeded through the upstairs hallway. We could hear her feet right above us. Halfway up the staircase to the second floor her steps made no more noise, but it was only thirty seconds later that we heard the wet sound of her body falling onto the fence that ran alongside the house. First came the sound of wind, a rushing we decided later must have been caused by her wedding dress filling with air. This was brief. A human body falls fast. The main thing was just that: the fact of a person taking on completely physical properties, falling at the speed of a rock. It didn't matter whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she'd done, or if she had time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Her mind on longer existed in any way that mattered. The wind sound huffed, once, and the moist thud jolted us, the sound of a watermelon breaking open, and for that moment everyone remained still and composed, as though listening to an orchestra, heads tilted to allow the ears to work and no belief coming in yet. The Mrs. Lisbon, as though alone, said, "Oh my God."

Mr. Lisbon ran upstairs. Mrs. Lisbon ran to the top and stood holding the banister. In the stairwell we could see her silhouette, the thick legs, the great sloping back, the big head stilled with panic, the eyeglasses jutting into space and filled with light. She took up most of the stairs and we were hesistant to go around her until the Lisbon girls did. Then we squeezed by. We reached the kitchen. Through a side window we could see Mr. Lisbon standing in the shrubbery. When we came out the front door we saw that he was holding Cecilia, one hand under her neck and the other under her knees. He was trying to lift her off the spike that had punctured her left breast, travelled through her inexplicable heart, seperated two vertebrae without shattering either, and come out her back, ripping the dress and finding the air again. The spike had gone through so fast there was no blood on it. It was perfectly clean and Cecilia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a gymnast. The fluttering wedding dress added to this circusy effect. Mr. Lisbon was trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia's open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world."

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides


Saturday, October 31, 2009

This Halloween...

tumblr_ksc9bwyi4p1qze4dho1_500  

Edward Scissorhands


Wednesday, October 28, 2009

With friends like these...

I think it was precisely this conversation I had with sasha during break that made me realise that we were truly destined to be SOULMATES:  

Sasha: (mindless ditzy drivel chatter chatter drivel): I am Artemis the hunter.
Me: And I hunted you.
Sasha and me in unison: Artemis Fowl Book 3!!

Which of course makes me infinitely happy when I find someone that actually reads the same fantasy children's book series child-friendly print as me, causing me to declare "Sasha we have an intrinsic bond!"

And then she proceeded to steal my A Beautiful Mind book while I wasn't looking and hide it in her sweater.



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