Current Distractions, October 2011 Edition

So I survived the illness and the mysterious allergic reaction that resulted in a full-body rash, and the various drugs that various doctors gave me to deal with all of it. But that actually took most of this month, and I've only really gotten back to normal over the last week or so. I've concluded that my number one issue healthwise was that I wasn't getting enough sleep. So my new bedtime is 9 p.m., with very few exceptions outside of the weekends. Which, yeah, sucks.

Other than sickness, the backlog of reviews that I'm supposed to be writing for books that I finished a long time ago, and guilt about overdue library books, my number one distraction this month has been NaNoWriMo.

!!!!!

NaNoWriMo stands for "National Novel Writing Month," and you may recall me writing about it last year.  Last year I attempted to write my own Harlequin romance novel, and wrote about it, and failed oh so miserably, although I did manage to hit the 50 000 word goal due to a clever framing device.

This year, I have no idea what I'm going to write about.  Usually October is a rush of ideas for me, but I've been completely uninspired lately.  So November 1st should be a very interesting day, and I'll be sure to keep you all posted while I'm procrastinating or puzzling things out.

And instead of brainstorming, I've basically been writing extremely long, overly detailed responses to people's engineering-related questions in the Reference Desk forum.

Anyway.

I won't be able to read Kim until after November, thanks to NaNoWriMo, but I will have at least one other review ready to post sometime in the very near future. I also attempted to make a sidebar with the "random" books on it, but I was only partially successful. I'm going to try my best to get it working soon, so maybe by the time you read this, it will be. (I'm trying to cobble it together out of the code for the other sidebar, haha.)

79. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: Beethoven and an anonymous Italian's murder provide the impetus for a love story.

Year Published: 1908
Pages: 246
First Sentence: "The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all."
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
I very nearly gave this book a 2, but the more I've thought about it while getting ready to write this review (while procrastinating on writing this review, actually), the more I realize I really liked the book, and it's sticking with me, especially the very last scene, which I won't tell you about.

Lucy Honeychurch is a young woman travelling in Italy with her cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, who is an old maid (probably around 35 years old or so), as chaperone. The book opens with them lamenting the fact that the rooms they've been given in Florence have no view of the city. A horrendously uncouth old man gallantly offers up the rooms he and his son occupy to the two ladies, which sparks discussion among all the guests at the pension, Miss Bartlett's great dismay, and Lucy's bewilderment. Because, you see, Lucy is basically an innocent country girl and also somewhat strange, still trying to figure out how to deal with the world on her own terms and those of her crazy, repressed society.  (A lady can't say the word "stomach" in a man's presence, for example.)

But my tone is too sarcastic, and my summary is too detailed so far.

The horrendous (actually very sweet) old man is named Mr. Emerson, and his young, sad son is George. The two of them seem to live outside of the social norms, and because the pension is so small, and tourists have such a limited territory, Lucy and her cousin are unable to avoid them after the room debacle (Charlotte is convinced to allow the switching of rooms, somehow). Eventually, Lucy goes out alone on a whim, and ends up witnessing a murder of some random Italian. George happens to be in the vicinity, and escorts Lucy back to the pension. During this walk, they experience a strange sort of tacit bonding, which will bring both of them no end of trouble. Later, on an excursion out of town, George HORROR OF HORRORS kisses Lucy. She and Charlotte flee Florence and go to Rome the next morning.

Back in England several weeks later, Lucy ends up engaged to some terrible dude whose name I haven't bothered to remember. He is clearly the worst possible match for her. And then the Emersons show up again, and...

You can read it to find out how it ends.

(George and Lucy are the names of a couple we met before in The Magnificent Ambersons. That book was written about ten years after this one, though, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be some sort of weird literary reference or if it's just a coincidence because there were only five names to choose from at the time.)

Lucy is this great mercurial sort of character, who has a tremendous amount of passion and good sense. I think she'd actually make a good friend; I can imagine having really great hangouts with her and Jane Eyre. The Emersons are also really fascinating. As I mentioned before, they're a bit out of step with their time, apostate proto-feminists with socialist tendencies. I'll admit I have a bit of a crush on George.

I think by far the most interesting character, though, is Reverend Beebe. He shows up first at the pension in Florence. He's a youngish Anglican priest who originally met Lucy when she was at school, and who is in Italy for short time before moving to Lucy's, err, area to take up duties there. So he appears again in the English countryside along with the Emersons, as both an ally and antagonist to Lucy. He's portrayed as being a lot more jolly than most priestly types, more open-minded and generally an all-around cool guy. However, as the book progresses, you see that he actually has these really conservative beliefs surrounding vocations and celibacy. (As an aside, I'm not sure if the Church of England has the same notions about vocations as the Catholic Church, but basically Catholics talk about "vocations" as callings to different paths in life, e.g. marriage, the priesthood, religious orders, etc. and that's what I'm talking about here.) Basically, he believes that celibacy is the highest calling, and that nothing else is as good. This reminded me a lot of The Song of Bernadette, where the future St. Bernadette just wants to get married and have babies, and everyone around her says GOOD GOD NO A VISIONARY CANNOT BE DEFILED YOU HAVE TO BECOME A NUN. P.S. read The Song of Bernadette. In Catholicism, all vocations are technically created equal, and as long as you're not doing something evil like fornicating, then you're ok. Supposedly. But essentially what I'm trying to say is that while Rev. Beebe seems really progressive, he's actually just like the rest of the repressed society around him.

The style of the book is very deceptive in that it feels extremely modern. The Emersons seem like the product of a mind from the 70s or 80s, not 1908. So I'm really looking forward to the upcoming books by this author. And actually, before I realized that the book was so old, I was kind of annoyed by yet another modern author putting the spin of modern attitudes onto the past. Oops! There's a lot of hilarity in the book, too, by the way, especially in the descriptions of tourists (who apparently haven't changed at all in a hundred years) and the pretense of the "English colonists" in Florence.

In closing, this book wasn't earth-shattering, but it was beautiful and funny and thought-provoking. It didn't punch me in the gut, but it made me smile. If I initially mistook that reaction for something less than stellar, I've changed my mind now.

Quotations:
Chapter 6: The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them (Yes, this is pretty much the best chapter title ever. -M.R.)

How often Lucy had rehearsed this bow, this interview! But she had always rehearsed them indoors, and with certain accessories, which surely we have a right to assume. Who could foretell that she and George would meet in the rout of a civilization, amidst an army of coats and collars and boots that lay wounded over the sunlit earth? She had imagined a young Mr. Emerson, who might be shy or morbid or indifferent or furtively impudent. She was prepared for all of these. But she had never imagined one who would be happy and greet her with the shout of the morning star.
     Indoors herself, partaking of tea with old Mrs. Butterworth, she reflected that it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much. "I will bow," she had thought. "I will not shake hands with him. That will be just the proper thing." She had bowed--but to whom? To gods, to heroes, to the nonsense of schoolgirls! She had bowed across the rubbish that cumbers the world.

R21. Persuasion by Jane Austen

(Have I really not posted a review since July?! I AM VERY SORRY, YOU GUYS. -M.R.)

Year Published: 1818
Pages: 240
First Sentence: Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt.

Review:
This may come as a bit of a shock, but I’ve never read a Jane Austen novel before this one. In fact, I’ve somehow managed to pretty much completely avoid all of her work and the numerous film adaptations of it. I like my 19th century female authors Brontë-flavoured, basically, and until I can find out for myself whether Frankenstein lives up to its hype, things are going to stay that way.

So, that means that while I have the vaguest possible notion of what happens in Pride and Prejudice, I went into Persuasion almost completely blind about Jane Austen and the kinds of books that she wrote, her style, and so on.

The story is about Anne Elliot, a quiet sort of young woman (about 25 years old), sole sane member of a family of fools (her anomalous, much-beloved mother is something like ten years dead at the opening of the novel). Her entire family is portrayed hilariously, if somewhat one-dimensionally, as being generally vain and concerned with their status and wealth. However, at the beginning of the novel, the family is somewhat hurting for said wealth due to Anne’s father’s expensive lifestyle, and so they end up having to rent out their house. The house is rented by an admiral and his wife, who happens to be the sister of the young Captain Frederick Wentworth, a past suitor of Anne’s.

Thus, after a separation of something like eight years, Anne and Captain Wentworth come together again for the first time, and LOL AWKWARD it’s left to Anne to navigate the situation with her typical poise and quiet charms. Will her feminine wiles attract Captain Wentworth a second time? Because p.s. she totally still has the hots for him after all these years. I think the answer is obvious, although Austen does throw a bit of a curve ball over the course of a few chapters, in the form of Anne’s cousin William Elliot, who is the heir to her father’s title and very interested in Anne.

The book was good and the heroine somewhat atypical (in that she was pretty much completely conventional, not at all rebellious or stubborn or anything like that), but I found it extremely short and rushed. There was a lot more room to ratchet up the tension, and the book suffers from not taking advantage of that. But I ended up checking Wikipedia before writing this review to make sure that this book (published after Austen died) was a legit novel of hers and not one of these “lost” novels that are in horrible draft form but get published regardless, and it turns out that the reason the book is so short is that Austen was literally hurrying to finish it before she died.

So that makes things just a little more macabre.

One thing that I really find interesting is how a novel like this one is completely opposite from a modern romnov in terms of the sex content. And actually, I think that both suffer because of it.

There is tension and “heat” in Persuasion, but there’s also an underlying stuffiness that really threw me off. The novel basically culminates in this conversation that Anne and Wentworth have over the course of a stroll through some park in Bath, where they talk to each other about their “characters.” As far as I’m concerned, “character” isn’t even really a thing anymore, and I know that the book is a product of its time, but the whole conversation just crushes any previous subtext about these two basically just wanting to tear each other’s clothes off.

On the other hand, the modern romnov immediately pours on the sex and never really stops, and that’s really distracting, as well. In fact in many cases it seems like everything that isn’t sex is just a struggle to convey some sort of normalcy to the situations described.

In real life, sometimes you want to tear a person’s clothes off, and sometimes you want to look at them across a table over mugs of hot chocolate, and sometimes you have errands to run, and sometimes you don’t want to see them at all because you’re spending the evening with your respective friends. While Austen neglects the sexual aspect of the relationship, she does capture some of that sense of normalcy. (And I hope that it doesn’t seem like I’m conflating sex and love too much. Mostly I’m just trying to say that both are a part of the vast majority of long term relationships in very important ways.)

Tangents about doin’ it aside, I’ll definitely be reading more Austen in the future. No matter how much I love the Brontës, I’ll be the first to admit that they don’t really have a sense of humour, whereas Austen does, and I’m interested to see what its powers are when not (possibly) somewhat dimmed by impending death.

Quotations:
Mr. Shepherd was eloquent on the subject, pointing out all the circumstances of the admiral's family, which made him peculiarly desirable as a tenant. He was a married man, and without children; the very state to be wished for. A house was never taken good care of, Mr. Shepherd observed, without a lady: he did not know, whether furniture might not be in danger of suffering as much where there was no lady, as where there were many children. A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.

"--Well, Miss Elliot" (lowering his voice), "as I was saying, we shall never agree I suppose upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"Perhaps I shall.--Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to example in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."

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Current Distractions, Belated September 2011 Edition

September was... an interesting month. I switched work locations again, and then within a week I contracted a mysterious plague that basically knocked me on my ass for the next two weeks. (Seeing as this plague hit me the week after I started going to the pool to do laps, I can only surmise that the exercise was what made me sick.)

Needless to say, I didn't get as much blogging done as I would've liked.

However, it's worth noting that although I'm a bit behind on reviews, I'm at least reading again, and enjoying it. It's nice to be working my way through the unread books on my bookshelf, because it kills me to have unread books on my bookshelf. That, and when I think of a book that I absolutely must read, I don't have to put it off for five years from now when I finally finish the project.

There are reviews coming for all (two) of the other books I read, but I'd like to also mention the graphic novel Logicomix. I picked it up at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal this summer, because I'm trying really hard to get the hang of graphic novels (I struggle a lot with the visual aspect of them, but I feel like I'm missing out on good stuff by not reading them). It's sort of the story of Bertrand Russell, but I suppose moreso the struggle to develop logical foundations for mathematics. As I said, I have a really hard time with graphic novels because I don't look at the pictures unless I'm making a conscious effort to do so, but this one was alright. It reminded me of the book A Brief History of Infinity, in that it had interesting bits about crazy mathematicians, and also really dry bits about crazy mathematics.

Speaking of A Brief History of Infinity, I lent it to someone to read for my book club and now I don't know where it is! Serves me right for breaking my strict policy of not lending books to people. (NB this is totally my own fault, because I don't even remember who I lent it to in the first place.)

Anyway, hope you're all healthier than I am. NaNoWriMo is less than three weeks away!