I have always felt that when I get to the last page of a book, it is like arriving at a destination of sorts. From that very first sentence to that very last, there is a kind of movement, a kind of journeying and when reading a very good book, I feel that I've travelled somewhere, that I've been changed somehow.
That said, sometimes, a book that I've enjoyed all the way through just disappoints at the end. I have to say, I was sorely disappointed when I got to the end of
Travels with my Aunt. Something rang false in that ending for me. I didn't trust the point of view of the character by the end.
Sometimes, the contrary is true for me. A classmate of mine in a writing class whose work I admire wrote an article on a book he liked,
Desperate Characters, that I happened to read. I hated the book he recommended from the first awkward sentence. The only reason I kept reading it was because my classmate's admiration of the book was so passionate and because I trust his taste (not that I actually know the guy that well, but I like his writing, and I trust that his has informed taste). There were so many moments when I wanted to throw my hands up in exasperation. I didn't like the way the writer wrote. Clumsily formal in my opinion, and at times the dialogues were so awkward that I felt as if I was in the hands of someone who didn't know how to speak like a regular person. And yet, by the very end, I was blown away. That is always the best experience for me. Arriving at the last page to find that I have arrived somewhere completely unexpected, but that feels so so right. I find myself re-reading the book to find out how that can happen. How is it possible that I hate a book for the blocks that make it up (awkward clumsy prose in my opinion that makes me think that the writer must most certainly be constipated when writing) and yet love the place it brings me to by the end. It is like being on a reluctant trip and hating every moment of it, until one realizes in a strange illuminating moment that it has been a good trip after all, and one has arrived at a good place.
That is why I love books and why I love reading. Sometimes, it is just pure magic.
By: Nippy | Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 3:40 AM | | 
Because my friend from Singapore sent me a Joao Gilberto Youtube video, I've been listening to bossa novas.
Bossa Novas make me feel rich. Don't ask me why.
I feel like I'm sitting in a little roadside cafe with the summer sun on my skin, sipping from a small cup of coffee, with a bubbly glass of champagne gathering dew on the table where a cigar sits on top of a porcelain ashtray, and I'm waiting for someone to turn up, as I watching Mopeds sputter by on cobblestoned pavements.
Crazy, I know, but this is the place bossa novas bring me to.
By: Nippy | Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 2:58 PM | |
Got another rejection letter. Sometimes, I wonder if I'm just wasting my time.
By: Nippy | Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 6:36 AM | |
Reading Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene. Greene is fuckin' brilliant. I swear. I'm reading his stuff on the train and I find myself dog earring every other page. Some of the stuff is some good, I want to slap myself on the knee and jump up and down and grab the person next to me and say "Can you believe this? You've got to read what this guys wrote here. Incredible."
This was one of my favorites:
pg 52: "One of the few remarks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another. Her conversation was rather like an American magazine where you have to pursue a story, skipping from page twenty to page ninety-eight and turning over all kinds of subjects in between: childhood delinquency, some novel cocktail recipes, the love life of a film star, and even quite a different fiction to the one so abruptly interrupted."
Fucking brilliant!
Then there's this:
pg 97: "When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded for the closing moments of an overture. All rural and urban themes of our long journey were picked up again: a factory was followed by a meadow, a patch of autostrada by a country road, a gas-works by a modern church:the houses began to tread on each other's heels, advertisements for Fiat cars swarmed closer together, the conductor who had brought breakfast passed, working intensely down the corridor to rouse some important passenger, the last fields were squeezed out and at last there were only houses, houses, houses, and Milano, flashed the signs, Milano."
Oh God! Oh God! How awesome to read this. I will follow Greene anywhere with writing like that, he'll make even journeying into the pits of hell a god-damn song, tralalala-ing on his way down.
By: Nippy | Monday, August 15, 2011 at 12:55 PM | |
I think there is something really wonderful and romantic about the idea of learning about artic ice movement through studying ancient driftwood.Extract from: Arctic 'tipping point' may not be reachedBy Matt McGrath, Science reporter, BBC World Service
Dr Svend Funder from the Natural History Museum of Denmark led several expeditions to inhospitable regions of Northern Greenland. On these frozen shores the Danish team noticed several pieces of ancient driftwood. They concluded that it could be an important method of unlocking the secrets of the ancient ice.
"Driftwood cannot float across the water, it has to be ferried across the ocean on ice, and this voyage takes several years, which means that driftwood is actually a signal of multi-year sea ice in the ocean and it is this ice that is at risk at the moment" said Dr Funder.
Carbon dating was used to determine the age of the wood. And figuring out its origins also yielded important information.
"It's so lovely that drift wood from Siberia is mainly larch and from North America is mainly spruce. So if we see there was more larch or spruce we can see that the wind system had changed and in some periods there was little spruce and in other periods there was lots," he said.
By: Nippy | Friday, August 05, 2011 at 8:11 AM | |
"The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true."
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/08/110808crat_atlarge_ross#ixzz1To9jys9F
By: Nippy | Tuesday, August 02, 2011 at 3:41 AM | |
