life in the subjunctive mode

I was in Barnes & Nobles today while my dad got books and I poured longingly over everything, and I found the Jack Kerouac section. His books all look so good, and I want to read them all, and it made me sad that I probably won't read everything of his that I want to because I spend so little time actually reading shit these days.

This is because I spend so much time on the computer.

Then I thought: I can change that!

A little, anyway. I spend a tremendous amount of time on the computer writing, and I don't think that's a bad thing. The noodling around is out of control, though. Not as bad as it used to be, but still too much for comfort.

The point of all this being a week without the computer.

That's it. I don't know when I will do this thing, not yet. Ideally over spring break, because then I'd just have to leave my laptop at school and boom, temptation gone. I anticipate having a lot of work to do over spring break so it might not happen until May. But when it does!

1. Get Big Sur, Desolation Angels, On the Road, and And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks (because it is not like the others but it looks interesting and how could I not read a book with a title like that?) out of the library
2. Print out whatever story I'm working on at the time
3. Shut off computer
4. Read for seven days

Alternatively, I could do this at any point during the semester. I wouldn't be able to just shut off the computer entirely, of course, because school and email and things that are necessary, but I've got LeechBlock. I don't actually go on that many different sites, and I have most of them lined up and ready to be blacklisted for a week if need be. I could make my way through the books like that, and I'd also be able to avoid the part where I stop being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality that happens when I do nothing but read or watch the same thing for days on end.

This is going to happen. It'll be cool.

Stories that I can never not love, because they have had such an influence on the way I write and the way I see the world.

Wizards At War by Diane Duane — this whole series, really, but this was the book that made me think, “Wow, I want to write books like that.” Not exactly like that, obviously, but the complicated relationships that the characters have with each other, and the balance between character and plot, is fantastic. There is something very satisfying and substantial about the Young Wizards books, and they always had a shade of immediacy to them that I try to emulate.

Ironside by Holly Black — formative because it is, to date, the only book I have ever read with a gay main character whose sexuality is (a) secondary to his importance to the story (b) treated exactly the same as the straight main characters. The storyline with Corny and Luis is my favorite thing about the book. I hate reading books about relationships and the acquiring thereof, but until Ironside those were the only types of books where I could find characters like me.

Gifts by Ursula K LeGuin — I haven’t read this book in years and years and years, and I barely remember anything from it. There are two stories that I remember very clearly: one about a wereman, and one about a girl who lived in a village where the people were also animals. They taught me how utterly delightful it is to take the reader’s expectations of status quo and not so much subvert them as sidestep them entirely, which is something I still enjoy today. I suspect that the village story is at least partially responsible for so many of my dreams being populated by humans who are also simultaneously animals.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett — this is the story that taught me about humor in fiction, what I find funny, and how to poke fun at characters’ pathetic attributes. Aziraphale, Crowley, Adam, and Pepper are still some of my favorite characters.

Abarat by Clive Barker — the book that showed me how to make stories bright, colorful, nonsensical and glorious in their sheer randomness. I’m not quite as fond of the second and third books, partially because the writing quality declines drastically, but also because they actually had a plot. They weren’t as truly bizarre.

These are in no particular order, and there is at least one of them that I am missing. I'll come back later if I remember it.

Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read

Howl’s Moving Castle. Most people don’t even know it’s a book, much less one that’s really clever and totally different from the movie. I enjoyed the movie, but it's very distinctly Studio Ghibli with regards to the way the characters interact and their eventual fates: the villains, rather than being defeated, are made harmless and incorporated into the Moving Castle Family. Calcifer is this cute little blobby thing, and the romance between Sophie and Howl is developed ... um ... very differently, as is Sophie's curse. And that's not even touching the whole 'war in steampunkland' thing they did. I loathed the movie the first time I saw it because I'd read the book first, everyone told me it was really awesome, and none of them appreciated that I thought the characterizations of my beloved characters were really bizarre. (Except for the temper-tantrum-goo scene. That was the best part of the movie.) While I have learned to appreciate the movie for its own merits, I really wish that more people read the book: it has a totally different, Diana Wynne Jones feel to it, not a Studio Ghibli feel.

Day 22 – Favourite book you own

I own all of my favorite books, but the one I’m happiest that I own is Abarat. It's more of a talisman at this point than a book, to me. Sometimes I just like to go through the pictures and look at them for a while, and I've read it so many times that right now I'm just letting it sit so that I can forget enough to make it worth reading again. I have a very good memory for things I've read ...


( Peanuts comics, Dog Sees God, and navel-gazing )

Day 20 – Favourite romance book

Shakespeare's Sonnets. They are adorable and weirdly obsessive, and also some of the only poetry I really like. I know it's cliche, that everyone loves Shakespeare, can't you be more original, I'll bet your favorite sonnet is Sonnet 18, too (no, it's not, it's 71). Whatever. I honestly enjoy the sonnets and I think that they are beautiful and tell a story about a complicated, human relationship. I am of the opinion that, whether they were based on real life? Whether Shakespeare even wrote Shakespeare's works, including the sonnets? Is irrelevant. I choose to read them as being based on a real-life love triangle, and as long as I don't claim this idea to be The Truth, then I see no harm in wanting things to work out nicely. I like the story that they tell.

(I was going to be snarky and say The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for this one, but I won't go there right now)

Day 18 – A book that disappointed you

I’ve already mentioned Swordspoint, so I’m not going to go over that again. But even that had its good points. The one book that disappointed me immensely was Twilight. I read it just before it got really, really popular, so the only thing I knew about it going in was that it was a book about a vampire who falls in love with a human, and these two girls I really respected loved it. (Okay, confession: I may have thought they were two of the coolest people ever, of the Hot Topic, MCR and System of A Down variety. I heard them talking about how cool it was one day, and I thought, well, I've heard of this book before, and I was in my wannabe-goth phase then, so I decided I would read this book about vampires. I went in expecting blood and darkness and gore, and it was just … not there. At all. I didn't even have any standards for writing style, so that didn't bother me until Meyer mentioned his breath smelling good, at which point alarm bells started to go off.

It was distressing. I wanted blood and tragedy, and I got teen angst instead.

I could also mention the awful epilogue to the Deathly Hallows, but the Battle of Hogwarts was the greatest thing ever, so I won't.

Day 16 – Favourite female character

Another difficult question. I have three for this one: Nita Callahan from Young Wizards, Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter, and Tazendra from the Khaavren Romances. Nita because she is human! She's bookish and afraid to fight back, and then she finds a book that lets her fight back, and she does! And the victory is hollow, so she tries to befriend the bully, and it doesn't work, but she knows that she did the best she could. That really stuck out to me at the end of the first book, as something that I didn't fully appreciate until a few years after I'd read it. Nita is another character who, like Corny, strikes me as a very ordinary human being, with the same mundane afflictions as everyone else, even with all of the extraordinary things going on around her: she has a normal sibling relationship with Dairine, which is spectacularly exemplified in A Wizard Alone when she forcibly drags her sister out of bed for school - normal - by teleporting her bed to Pluto - magical. She has to figure out the real-life aspects of losing her mother, like learning how to shop for groceries, and making her dad coffee in the mornings. And then she does things that are completely awesome, which makes me very happy, like basically the end of every book she's in. I am always won over by a good combination of character-based awesomeness.

Luna! Everyone loves Luna, am I right? Probably. I don't need to talk about that. I'm tired. I have better things to do with my time, I need to write my own things, not talk about everyone else's things! I will leave off by saying that Ella of Frell is also up there.

Day 14 – Favourite book of your favourite writer

Well, I’ve talked about Wizards at War before this, so I’m going to go with my other favorite author, Dianna Wynne Jones, and my favorite book by her is Howl’s Moving Castle. I knew about the book long before the movie was ever on my radar ... it seems that I am the only one. And while the movie is weird and wonderful in its own way, I really wish that more people would give the book a chance, rather than just say 'well, the movie is based off of the book, therefore I do not need to read the book.' Because the book is absolutely fantastic. I wanted to be Sophie so badly when I read it: as an unambitious, very shy elder child, I could sympathize. And then she gets turned into an old woman, and suddenly, all of this personality comes out. Sophie is such a strong character in several ways: strong-minded, even if she doesn't know it; she has a strong personality; and she's a tough old biddy/young woman. She's also hilarious.

Howl's Moving Castle is also a great example of my favorite two things about Diana Wynne Jones' books: the way she foreshadows, and the disconnect between how the main character perceives things and how things actually are. There are three times in the book that she does this.
1. Sophie's magic. The montage where she is making hats, talking to the hats, and then Jones describes the fortunes of the people who bought those hats. I enjoy her writing regardless, so I thought it was amusing; then the Witch came in, and started ranting at Sophie for the hats, and I was fairly confused. And so on, and so forth: the scarecrow, for instance. Little things, fairly easy (for me, anyway) to overlook, so that the reveal of Sophie's magic was surprising, but it made sense. It makes for a delightful reread, because then you can point out those passages and say, 'A-ha! There it is!'
2. Howl actually being a decent person. Throughout the novel, Sophie is so completely convinced that he's an evil, selfish man, until there comes a point when she realizes that he's never actually done anything evil. Weird, yes, bratty, yes, but not mean. To diverge for a moment, the opposite occurs in The Lives of Christopher Chant, where the main character realizes that the reason no one likes him isn't because they're all awful people, it's because he's a snobby, condescending jerk. Up until that point, he thinks of himself as a nice boy, and the reader gets to see what goes on in his head, so they think of him as being sympathetic as well, but once you stop to consider the way his behavior looks to outsiders, that expectation gets turned on its head.
3. The contract between Howl and Calcifer. The foreshadowing for the eventual reveal is clever for that part, too.

I think that the relationship between Sophie and Howl is also worth commenting on because it remains, to date, one of the best romantic plots/subplots that I've read. It's never shoved down your throat; there are no 'fluttery feelings' or whatnot, and neither of them loses any of their personality to the other, they gain instead: Sophie is still strident and intelligent and doesn't take Howl's crap, but she adds self-esteem to the mix, and Howl is still flamboyant and cheerfully obnoxious, but adds a note of maturity. It is delightful and the first romantic relationship that I remember being happy about besides Ella Enchanted.

Holy shit suddenly it's tomorrow! Yikes! Oh well.

Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore

The Sight. I had lower standards for quality of writing back when I first read it in middle school, and now even though I remember the story being really cool and well-researched, I just can’t get past the writing.

Of course, at the same time I realized that I could no longer love The Sight, after having pined for it from afar for several years, I picked up A Game of Thrones, and it was like finding the adult version of that book. They are in no way comparable, but in my mental-picture-impressions they both have similar looks/feels, that's what I mean. Both books set in cold places with wolves and politics, basically.

I could also say most of Tamora Pierce's books, because I loved them when I was younger but now, objectively, I can see that they weren't the greatest books ever. I cherish the memories, but I'm afraid to read them again in case they actually are unbearable like The Sight. (Okay, I hate Alanna's books a little, because it is not that fucking easy to hide your sex. It just fucking isn't and I am bitter about this.)

Day 10 – Favourite classic book

HAMLET. I love Hamlet beyond all reason. I love the language, and the passage about worms, and the way that there are so many ways to interpret everything. Polonius: he's a doddering old man, he's a long-winded purveyor of common sense! Gertrude: unhealthily attached to her son, loves Ophelia and is distressed by her death, murders Ophelia, doesn't murder her but lets her drown herself, loves Claudius, doesn't love Claudius (I'm not a Gertrude fan in any of these scenarios, btw). Claudius: did he kill his brother for loves of Gertrude, did he kill his brother for love of power? And, of course, Hamlet: is he insane? Is he justified? Is he a quivering little brat, or a morally upright asshat, or a vindictive bastard, or all of the above? Is he sixteen years old or thirty? SO MANY QUESTIONS! And of course I have my own answers to them, because one of the things I like about the fact that certain aspects are so open to interpretation is that when someone is like 'ewwww why do you like this part/character/play?' then I can give them lots of different answers.

I'm more than a little in love with the version where David Tennant plays Hamlet, for several reasons. Mostly because Tennant's Hamlet is the sort of Hamlet I read: clever and funny, but also a self-indulgent, indecisive brat, who starts off purely behaving like he's gone mad and using it as an opportunity to make fun of everyone else, but then devolving. I love love love the part where he's talking to the players, and he starts trying to declaim at them, and the head player is just like '... Leave this to the professionals, kiddo.' But! Moreso than David Tennant, because the dude who played him at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival was even better, I am a fan of these Rosencratz and Guildensterns. I think it is great that, without changing any lines, the two actors managed to portray two different characters, instead of the interchangeable 'best friends' originally intended. (Guildenstern is the mercenary friend, and Rosencrantz appears to be bitter that his crush on Hamlet was never returned.) I enjoyed Horatio as well; when I read the book, and when my class watched the version where Helena Bonham Carter played Ophelia, I didn't understand Horatio, I thought he was a little bland. I liked this version of him; the part where he started playing the recorder with Hamlet was particularly good.

In conclusion: pretty much everything that comes out of Hamlet's mouth that is not the part where he's talking to himself while Claudius is 'praying' is great, and I love it.