A quiz via Waterfall:
| What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Literate Good Citizen
You read to inform or entertain yourself, but you’re not nerdy about it. You’ve read most major classics (in school) and you have a favorite genre or two. |
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| Dedicated Reader |
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| Book Snob |
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| Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm |
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| Fad Reader |
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| Non-Reader |
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| What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz |
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That’s probably pretty accurate, but I take issue with the notion that I’m not nerdy about it.
I don’t know if I like my book idea anymore. I think this is a stage reached by most authors at some point. As I am writing, I keep asking if I have enough for a book here or if it wouldn’t be a better short story. I don’t know. I am going to plug away, though. I wrote a little today, despite not feeling like it. I’m done for now. I get so frustrated. I really want to write like some of these good books I’ve read lately, especially The Thirteenth Tale and The Ghost Writer, but I’m not happy with what I’m producing at the moment. On the positive side, I have exceeded 10% of my word count goal. I am hoping I will feel better next weekend and be able to write more. I think part of my problem right now is I just don’t feel well enough to write. Maybe what I need to do is lay lie down and read.
One more day until NaNoWriMo begins. I feel pretty good about my idea, and I have some scenes sketched out in my head. You know, there might be something to waiting until November 1, even if there are ideas brewing. I don’t think it would be good if, say, the ideas started brewing around about December 1, but I started thinking about this book mid-October.
Am I wrong to be annoyed by NaNoWriMo forum posters who drop their publication credits or mention in some fake blasé way that an editor is already interested? It reminds me of namedroppers somehow. Yes, we’re excited for you. Go pretend you’re not gloating somewhere else.
I am *almost* caught up with grading. Everything that was handed in by Friday has now been graded, but I collected one-paragraph essays from 9th graders today and will collect more tomorrow. On Wednesday, I collect two sets of vocabulary cards. My 10th grade Writing class will have to turn in another essay this week. I never stay caught up for long.
Well, I retire to what feels like a well-earned session with a book.
OK, time to fess up. I haven’t read Jane Eyre yet. However, I did purchase it years ago, probably when I was going through Jane Austen’s books. I remember it well. I was my first year as a teacher, a very rough year I might add, and I read both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility with so much pleasure. I began Persuasion, but wasn’t able to finish — I know longer remember why. I purchased Emma, but haven’t read that yet, either. Actually, I think I loaned it to a student and never got it back. Never did get around to contemplating Northanger Abbey or Mansfield Park. And I call myself a Friend of Jane? Yes, I do. In fact, I’d have to say she’s one of my favorites. Anyway, I imagine I picked up a copy of Jane Eyre about that time, thinking that the Brontë sisters were close enough to Austen, if only in slightly similar time periods. Yes, I know the Brontës are much more gothic. I did enjoy Wuthering Heights in high school. I don’t remember finishing the book — not because I didn’t like it, but because I was reading so slowly and couldn’t keep up with the reading assignments in class. I still read fairly slowly, but I have come to terms with that and decided it is because I savor what I read.
Finishing The Thirteenth Tale decided it for me. I had to take that copy of Jane Eyre off the shelf (where it sat nestled between copies of Sense and Sensibility and The Turn of the Screw). It must have been in my classroom library at some point, because it has my former married name “Cooke” printed across the top of the pages in bold, black letters.
So I am about to take a sojourn to the moors, to Thornfield, to meet Jane Eyre at last. It seems to be a long book, and I don’t have much time for pleasure reading, but the end of October/beginning of November seems to me to be the perfect time to undertake this gothic classic.
Cheers to Ms. Setterfield for the inspiration.
On another note, if you are participating in NaNoWriMo, please let me know so I can make you a writing buddy. I am fairly excited about my book. I have written the opening scene in my head, but I’m being a good girl and waiting until November 1 to start.
Diane Setterfield’s debut novel The Thirteenth Tale has generated quite a buzz in literary circles. I first heard about the book while browsing Barnes and Nobel’s website, shopping for birthday books with the gift certificate my parents had sent me. One has to admit the cover itself is gorgeous, and despite the old axiom, readers often do judge books by their covers. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been tricked into buying a book I ultimately didn’t like because it had a gorgeous cover (one example that comes to mind is Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman).
The Thirteenth Tale, however, is not such a book. Its gorgeous cover contains a true reader’s book. Setterfield’s own love for books is conveyed through her characters Margaret Lea and the mysterious writer, Vida Winter. Simon and Shuster’s website notes the novel “is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children.” Ultimately, one of the book’s messages is that we all have our stories, and we find joy in other stories because they touch that which is familiar in our own stories.
The strangeness of the story immediately draws the reader in. There is an element of the great gothic Victorian in Setterfield’s story. She carefully lays the groundwork for her mystery, deliberately leaving gaps, until the ending ties together all the loose ends and reader says, “Of course! Why didn’t I see that?” Yet, there is never the idea that Setterfield somehow cheated. She gives the reader enough material to solve the mystery — if the reader will only pay attention.
The characters are well-drawn. I effortlessly called forth images of Vida Winter, Margaret, and the others. In a few lines, Setterfield can create real people on the page and convince you that you know exactly what they look like and how they move. It is a rare gift. In fact, the mark of a good book for me lately seems to be how much I wish I had written it — sort of a strange feeling to have, I suppose, but I won’t apologize. And I desperately wish I had written this.
One of my favorite passages is something of a tangent from the story Vida Winter is telling Margaret, but by the end of the novel, the reader comes to understand it was no tangent at all — if Margaret had only realized, she might have uncovered Vida Winter’s secret at that moment:
“Picture a conveyor belt, a huge conveyor belt, and at the end of it a massive furnace. And on the conveyor belt are books. Every copy in the world of every book you’ve ever loved. All lined up. Jane Eyre, Villette, The Woman in White.”
“Middlemarch,” I supplied.
“Thank you. Middlemarch. And imagine a lever with two labels, On and Off. At the moment the lever is off. And next to it is a human being, with his hand on the lever. About to turn it on. And you can stop it. You have a gun to your hand. All you have to do is pull the trigger. What do you do?”
“No, that’s silly.”
“He turns the lever to On. The conveyor belt has started.”
“But it’s too extreme, it’s hypthetical.”
“First of all, Shirley goes over the edge.”
“I don’t like games like this.”
“Now George Sand starts to go up in flames.”
I sighed and closed my eyes.
“Wuthering Heights coming up. Going to let that burn, are you?”
I couldn’t help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady process to the mouth of the furnace, and flinched.
“Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre?”
Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.
“All you have to do is shoot. I won’t tell. No one ever need know.” She waited. “They’ve started to fall. Just the first few. But there are a lot of copies. You have a moment to make up your mind.”
I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my middle finger.
“They’re falling faster now.”
She did not remove her gaze from me.
“Half of them gone. Think, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon have disappeared forever. Think.”
Miss Winter blinked.
“Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just one tiny, insignificant little person.”
I blinked.
“Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?”
Blink. Blink.
“Last chance.”
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Jane Eyre was no more.
“Margaret!” Miss Winter’s face twisted in vexation as she spoke. (240-241)
As I read this passage, I too could not help but be caught up in Vida Winter’s “game.” I saw the books, too. I wanted it to stop. I asked myself which title would it be, Dana, that would make you shoot the man with his hand on that lever?
What about you?
I had forgotton how much I enjoy creating fiction.
I have been doing research for my NaNoWriMo project, and I am excited about a direction in which I’m taking it. You can read up on the wiki if you feel like it, but I don’t advise you to if you don’t want to be spoiled. Anyway, things are kind of up in the air right now, and I’m not sure about some of the directions I plan to go. I think I’ve settled on a title, which makes me nervous. Ordinarily, I’m inclined to save that sort of speculation for much later, but I liked the ring of this. In scouting around for a title (I admit I was at least doing that much), I decided to pull one from a Victorian poem. Elizabeth Barrett Browning leapt to mind, so I checked out a few of her sonnets. I liked the first like from Sonnet VII in Sonnets from the Portuguese: “The face of all the world is changed, I think.” The sonnet is about how Barrett’s world had utterly changed now that she has found true love with Browning. The part of the line I like for my title is “The Face of All the World.” I told Steve I was speculating on a title, and he agreed with me that it was too early until I told him what I was thinking of. He sort of paused, and said it was a really good title. I told him the gist of the poem, as I have told you, but I think my interpretation will be a bit more twisted in the end, and I do plan to use the poem at the beginning of the book.
So that’s my working title anyway.
It’s been years since I really sat down and wrote like this. Well, technically I haven’t started yet, since I’m not supposed to start until November, but I have begun the process of sketching ideas in my head and even bits on the wiki (I suppose those are my notes).
I am finding the research interesting. I have always loved to read about Victorian England, whether it’s Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I was looking at Anne Perry’s website, and she was explaining that one reason she likes to write about the Victorian era is she likes “the contrast between glamour and squalor.”
That’s a woman with a story, eh?
Anyway, I think I agree with her on this. I think there is an interesting juxtaposition of in this industrial era that is fascinating. You have such class distinctions, but at the same time, to paraphrase Barrett Browning, the face of all the world was changing. In some ways, we were losing our innocence. In others, one wonders if we ever had it to begin with.
Well, I finally did it. After years of hearing about it (and even, I’ll admit, scoffing about it), I registered for NaNoWriMo. I first heard of this annual event from Diarylander whose diary I used to read.
Do I think I can finish a novel in a month? I don’t know. But I do know that perhaps the support of a community of other writers all trying to do the same will probably help. At any rate, I can’t say I have even started a novel since the first time I heard about NaNoWriMo about five years ago, much less finished one, so I guess joining up certainly can’t hurt.
If you are participating, and I know some of you are, please let me know what your username is so I can add you as a Writing Buddy. Here is my NaNoWriMo profile. Meanwhile, you can see this thing in progress (of a sort). On the top, you will see my navigation bar now includes a link to my NaNoWriMo Wiki. At this point it is pretty bare (as it should be, since I just started thinking today). I am not supposed to start writing until November, and I won’t, but nothing I could find said I shouldn’t start thinking and planning, so I’m doing that. When I wrote my first novel, I don’t think wikis were around. I think it will be a sort of online notebook I can use to keep my files together. I had a big, blue notebook for my last book, and I used it all the time. My last novel is currently languishing on an old computer we longer use. Some time I need to hook it up and at least retrieve the novel off it. I will fully admit I don’t know the first thing about marketing a novel, and I haven’t had the fire in my belly to search out appropriate resources. Some day, though. I keep saying that!
Why did I decide to do this? Well, this has been the first really cold morning of the fall. I can admit finally that fall is here. Fall feeds my creative juices. It is my favorite season. Fall makes me happy to be alive. I suppose there is too much of the Old Celt in me somewhere deep, and I recognize it as the New Year much more than January 1. I have been thinking about NaNoWriMo for several days. Sort of a nagging inside somewhere. I read someone else’s blog, and the writer said they had registered. Ever since, the notion wouldn’t leave. I can’t even remember where I read it now, which makes me feel really bad. This morning, I was cuddled up in under the covers with The Thirteenth Tale. I’m only a few chapters in, but this is already so obviously a book-lover’s book. The urge to create a book welled up inside, and I said, “All right! I’ll register already!”
Of course, I thought that would give me some peace, but I should have known then that the urge to get started would be too much too fight, so I did a little bit of planning.
Who was my protagonist? The name Charlotte Penny came to me out of nowhere. She sort of sat down on the edge of my bed and said “Now what?” She’s sitting there, blinking at me. She has Victorian dress and a British accent, so I suppose she must be from Victorian England. She is clutching a handkerchief. I have no idea why. She has red-gold hair like Maggie and stormy gray eyes. She might be Jewish or have a Jewish background, but if so, she is most likely crypto-Jewish and doesn’t know all the practices; this is a secret she hides.
Aside from that, I don’t know much about her, aside from the fact that her staring at me a blinking like that is making me want to figure out more.
Of course, Maggie isn’t having any of that, and I have an egregious headache brought on by my loud, stubbon, exuberant five-year-old. She is going to be my biggest obstacle to getting any writing done. I can feel it already.
I don’t read much nonfiction, but I decided to check out David Sedaris on the advice of a colleage, and I’m really glad I did. I chose Me Talk Pretty One Day because some of the essays focused on language, and frankly, I wondered if there might not be fodder for my classroom. I don’t think I’ll use any of the essays for my students, but I sincerely enjoyed them, nonetheless. In an early essay, Sedaris waxes humorous about childhood speech therapy for a lisp. He went to great lengths to avoid making “s” sounds, including avoiding plurals. Later, as a student of the French language, confused about gendered nouns, he decides that pluralizing everything makes it much easier. I think my favorite essays involved stories about his sister, Amy Sedaris. I have seen Strangers With Candy a few times, but I will admit I’ve never gone out of my way to catch Amy Sedaris on anything. It isn’t that I don’t like her — I was just ambivalent. However, she sounds like a real stitch, as we say in this neck of the woods. I loved David’s description of a joke Amy played on their father involving half a fat suit. She seems like the kind of person who will say or do just about anything if it will get a laugh, and David’s affection for this trait of hers was obvious in his various essays.
Parts of the book were so funny, I found myself laughing out loud, insisting upon reading aloud to my husband. Sedaris is truly funny, and I can’t wait to read more. Meanwhile, here is a clip of Sedaris reading an essay from another of his books on David Letterman’s show:
Tomorrow is my birthday. I am going to be 35, which will put me in a new demographic group of undesirables known as 35-49…ish. It means advertisers will no longer be as interested in what I want. It means movies, music, and television are no longer going to be targeted toward me. I am resisting the urge to quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail — “I’m not dead yet!”
I have a daughter who is in seventh grade. I am dangerously close to becoming the person who shoos the kids off her lawn; I already complain about their music and their clothes. I probably have more gray hair than not. I have a few wrinkles trying to start.
My mom and dad sent me an online gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. I did very well, coming in just 12¢ over the certificate limit. I decided on the following purchases:
Update: While browsing Barnes and Noble, I saw The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield prominently featured. I read some reviews and put it on my Wish List. It looks really good — and perfect for fall reading. Anyone want to online-book-club this one? Or maybe I should propose it to my student Book Club? Their first selection was — of all things — Lolita. It’s cute how they think they’re being bad by reading it.
On a more serious note, I want to thank all of you who came by and commented on my tribute to Eric Lehrfeld. Being a small part of 2,996 was one of the most amazing experiences I think I have had. I was extremely touched to be contacted by Eric’s sister, Elyse. I made some new friends and found some new blogs to read. But most of all, whenever I think of that horrible day from now on, I will always think of Eric and the family and friends who miss him.
I found Madame Bovary’s Ovaries, which I finished last night, to be a very entertaining and enlightening read. I will be the first one to admit that I never saw much of a connection between science and literature. Yes, I had often spun that yarn about how literature is essentially about the human condition, and how better to learn about ourselves than to study our literature, but I always saw this statement in terms of psychology, not biology. What David and Nanelle Barash accomplish is showing the reader how to look at literature through the lens of Darwinism. While I think the actions of some characters do fit patterns, there are others that seem to go against their evolutionary nature, and the Barashes are quick to note in their epilogue that this method of interpreting literature is but one of many.
In this book, the Barashes break down their dissection of literature into categories:
I do think that the authors make a convincing argument that long before Darwin even cooked up his Theory of Evolution, writers were creating characters that obeyed Darwin’s biological observations.
Of the chapters, I found the one on Reciprocity and Friendship the most difficult. I felt that it was in this chapter that the writers strained themselves the most to make what I felt were tenuous connections to biological instincts toward reciprocity. However, I found the chapters on adultery and what men and women want very enlightening. The chapter on stepchildren was also very interesting (and mentioned my favorite boy wizard).
In all, I would recommend this book highly to folks interested in either literature or science (or both), especially if they don’t see a connection between the two. I found the writers’ style engaging and very easy to follow, so those of us who haven’t been in a biology classroom in 20 years or so need not be intimidated by the prospect of scientific jargon. Cleary the writers’ goal was to bring an understanding of biology to the layman.
As much as I have become used to the notion of studying literature in order to understand the human condition, I found it interesting in this instance to study the human condition in order to understand literature.
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