Book Challenge: Day 3

Day three, you ask? Here's the thing. Day 2 asked about my least favorite book. What's the point of blasting Twilight again and again? And books put breath into me; I dislike having to come up with reasons to dislike and discourage reading. I think there is enough of that. Furthermore, I think the Twilight series was addicting, much as I call it my least favorite. I just found absolutely no literary merit to it. Which is fine for people who want a teen romance. I half-heartedly expected more, and it didn't deliver.

Day Three of the challenge asked about a book that surprised me, good or bad. And here is where I feel I commit a cardinal literary sin. There's also a good chance I'll go to English Library American Literature Writer hell for this. I didn't like Gatsby. Cat's out of the bag.

It simply has never been a book that held such wonder for me as I know it has for many of my contemporaries.

I've never found myself fully engaged with the story for some reason. I revere it as a literary work because I feel it should be respected as a great American classic... but can't give myself any good reasons why it *is* an American classic.

I have a sneaking suspicion that part of this is because I was never required to read this in high school. I had fantastic teachers who made me love a lot of books that I might otherwise have skipped (hello, Lonesome Dove, Les Miserables, Once and Future King), but The Great Gatsby never made the list, so I've never attempted to read it while really looking for literary devices and themes, only for my own enjoyment.


I love the cover art, I love the 8 bit computer game, I love the idea of it, and I love the party scenes. I just could never sink into the story, either bit by bit or headfirst immersion(two main tacks when reading- the author either engrosses you a bit at a time, so you love a character's personality or sensibility, or actions and words, one after another like dominos some portion of the book wins you over until you realize you're thoroughly engrossed and in love; OR from the very first sentence, you are completely ready to buy into whatever the author tells you and absolutely in love and invested in the characters, world, and literary tone you are plunked down into). 


It always felt like a shortcoming, a failure to me as a reader and even as a writer, to admit this(even to myself). I have a very close friend who LOVES Gatsby, and I think a good portion of that is because she teaches it. When she speaks about it, I get insanely jealous. She has a handle on something I can't comprehend. She has a deep, passionate literary love for a book I can't get 50 pages into without losing the thread of the story and feeling lost.


Gatsby is a book where I feel downright DUMB as a reader because I never get the magic out of it that everyone else seems to. Part of me should relish that, challenge it, and overcome it. I've been reading at a college level since middle school. Books have been my life. 


In seventh grade, I would read at the lunch table, and the girls I sat with would pilfer pieces of my lunch from under the book I had my nose in to see if I'd notice. It became a party trick of mine, peripheral vision. I can still see the Ziploc baggie of carrots sliding out of my field of vision as I tried to concentrate on whatever Mary Higgins Clark's protagonist was figuring out in the murder of her husband. I will never forget the last few Chips Ahoy cookies from the package, still on the plastic sleeve of the container, slowly being helped from my brown lunch bag to the other side of the table while I tried to get a grasp on The Color Purple, which my librarian mother had to sign a permission slip to allow me to read. As if anyone could have stopped me.  


So while I have spent plenty of time feeling isolated from my peers socially, I have never felt an outsider in the classroom (unless you count calculus. Ugh). I have never failed to grasp the wonder that was either dangled in front of me or spoon-fed to me as a student or an independent reader. Until Gatsby. Only Gatsby. And I don't have a solution for this one. Unless my favorite high school English teachers who love Fitzgerald and Gatsby's world want to sit me down and spoon-feed me themes and give me homework until it clicks and I understand.


Talk about white whales...

Book Challenge: Day 1

I neglected blogging. Since SEPTEMBER. I need to remember that I started this to get back into writing and that I owe it to myself. 


I owe at least the act of sitting and writing  and doing nothing else but thinking and calming myself and feeding the writer who wants to evolve, feeding the narrator in my head who is begging to be let out and play. So here's my new plan. 


I unofficially stared posting a book a day on my facebook account, and I figured what better way to produce content for my blog? Ugh, a blogger talking about her blog. BORING. Books, please!


Day 1: Favorite book: This is hard for me. You see, books consume a LARGE portion of who I am. Reading is who I am. It's the one sure-fire proven, tried and true way to calm my jangled nerves and make me focus. I take a lunch break every day at work so I can go for a short walk and sit and read in the sunshine.


If I had to pick a favorite book of the moment (because I maybe read close to a hundred a year- I must start keeping track), it would probably be Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente. 


Here's the thing. Deathless is everything I loved in Candide and The Alchemist, but based on a Russian folktale, where the girls are always named Yelena, Death and Life are always in a war, and a girl named Marya Morevna, who sees men as birds before they change into men, will break tradition, live amongst fantastic creatures, experience love and loss in a changing Russia.


I am not good at summarizing, but reading Deathless- the love story within the complicated sentence structure and beautiful language, with Russian folklore folded in so carefully with a heavy hand- it reminded me of the great love stories of my own life. It awakened my own imagination, and was the most unique book that I read last year. Hands down.


So Deathless is my favorite book of the moment. It has everything I subconsciously look for in a modern classic, with a touch of the magic that my inner child is sure exists.


So a few days behind my Facebook journey, I will start my blog again. Because I am worth it. And I have to make myself believe it before anyone else will.

Well, That About Negates Post 1

Definitely not getting easier. I am sitting on approximately four posts right now. No, you can't see them. Yet.

Staring at the blank white screen, cursor bar blink-blinking, keys click-clacking. This is music and a beat I usually can work myself into, finding a rhythm in my inconstant key-tapping. Sometimes my middle finger hits the "t" key, sometimes a pointer finger. It all depends on which is closest. Which is faster. My fingers dance, crab-walk, now quickly, now slowly, sometimes careful, sometimes in a blinding flurry- don't blink. But sometimes I falter, and once off a beat, I am lagging, behind, trying to catch up to the whriling dervish in my brain. Yes, that has a beautiful ring, no, those words don't flow. Flow, I need something something better, something worthy. Every day, I try to read something of merit. How very subjective that statement is. That I could be accountable to anything daily when I cannot even account for my own body, my pain level. Now, on a scale of one to ten- who's to say? What if my four is your ten? What if my blinding headache is your moment of relief?

I fold into myself, falling softly into shavasana. Think of nothing. Move nothing. Only my fingers click-clacking, tip-tapping a rhythm, a beat, unsteady, uncertain, a pitter patter of words. Words are clutter, suffocating, strip them away. Where is the heart what is the soft, gooey center what is holding it together. What is holding ME together? Last week, I went to the park almost every day. I saw no one I knew. But every time, I see someone I almost recognize. It's like in a dream, when you're with a group of your friends. You don't know who they are really, and your conscious mind doesn't recognize them, but in your dream, they are your friends and you know it. The contstruct is built.

I have nothing and everything to write about. I am waiting for the spark to light the fire of my creativity, but I am missing steel from my kit. Of flint, I have no end. I am bad kindling, too damp, to weak to catch fire. I once burned with everything unsaid in my head. Now it is all smoke and mirrors, inspiration fleeing before I can quite put words to it. Whirling dervish, spinning top, slow your rattle. Let oxygen come to fan the flames. I am singly-suited in cards, too much clinging to one straight and narrow path to open myself to anything else, too open to mixing metaphors into an incomprehensible soup that spills from my spoon. I have begun and scratched, sunk the eight ball on the break.

 I am in the midst of Pride and Prejudice. Yes, again. It strikes me how apt my reading choices are. How much pride can stand in the way of a good relationship, friendly or otherwise. How a preconceived notion or strongly held belief can keep people apart, no matter how well-intended or misguided.

I was once told my words were beautiful and I strive to get back to that place, that frame of mind, to snap the picture of it, capture the essence on filmy paper and secure it in an album to go back to when I need it. Here I was, and here, and here. Here, I felt, really felt. But the film seems overexposed, the focus blurry, the image grainy when washed in chemicals by hand. Wash, revise, edit as I go. Staged. Forced. Just relax. Sift the photos in my hands until I find the moment that defines me. Can there be just one moment to capture the breadth of a being? My clawing at jagged shards of instinct leads me to believe that I want to believe this. But does that mean I do? I grasp at straws until, hands gouged and bleeding, mind sore, I sink back into myself, my keyboard, music and rhythm, reconstructing my walls higher, better, designing the resevoir, diggin the well from which I will next draw water.