New Address

Hello! If you’re reading this then you found my new blog address. Everything will be posted here from now on so if you could all update your links or bookmarks, that’d be most wonderful. Thanks!

8 Random Things

 I’ve been tagged for this meme by Biblioaddict.

 The rules -1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2: People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3: At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4: Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are my 8 random facts: (you can just read the first sentence – it is a summary)

1. I have an incredible innate ability to get very lost absolutely anywhere. My mother always marvels that not only do I have no sense of direction, but that I seem to have the opposite of a sense of direction. Case in point: I was staying in Shanghai with two friends. There was an underground stop two minutes walk from our hotel and all three of us walked there every day to use the trains and got off there again each evening to return to the hotel. As soon as I was left to my own devices however, I managed to exit the underground station through a tunnel that led me into an underground shopping city I never knew existed and eventually popped up 15 minutes walk away from my hotel. Then there was the time my travelling companion and I lost each other while on the same platform and took over 20 minutes to find each other again…

2. I am fascinated by what I call ‘old lady magazines’. Not the ones with knitting patterns and five uses for an empty washing-up liquid bottle in, but the ones with the gruesome real life stories in – My Jealous Lover Cut Off My Nose, My Husband Wears My Underwear or My Sister Married My Son. I don’t know about other cultures, but we seem to have a proliferation of this type of magazine in the UK. Maybe it replaces Jerry Springer or something. Anyway I can’t help it, I love them!

3. I am a sucker for movies that make me cry. My favourite movies include The Land Before Time (I watched my copy so many times the video got all stretched and wouldn’t play anymore), The Notebook, The Neverending Story and Legend of The Falls. The Notebook especially has me howling every time I see it, and I’ve seen it several times. I even cry in anticipation of what I know is coming!

4. When I was a child my greatest ambition was to be a majorette. In case you don’t know, that is one of those little girls who march with a band and throw their little twirling sticks up in the air and do lots of flashy manoevers while marching along in little skirts and white socks. Every time I saw the majorettes at local carnivals and heard the drums, my heart would pound and I would long to be out there twirling a baton. For some reason, my mother hated the majorettes and never let me join.

5. I thoroughly believe in ghosts and an afterlife and desperately wish I was psychic (or at least had the ability to astral travel). I don’t know why – I’ve never seen a ghost – but I cannot accept that a person ends when they die. Something more has to happen.

6. I can sleep absolutely anywhere and can also fall asleep incredibly fast. Has to be witnessed to be believed. I can go from upright and functional to flat out and snoring in under 60 seconds.

7. I teach Chinese to Chinese kids but I’m white British. I studied Chinese at University and wanted a way to keep up my language skills after I left and teaching sounded great. I will never forget the look on those kids faces when I walked in on the first day and started talking Chinese to their Chinese teacher.

8. I am addicted to vanilla perfume and a cocktail called a Grasshopper. Grasshoppers are mint liquor, chocolate liquor and milk. They are, admittedly, a slightly suspicious shade of green and a few of my friends claim they taste like mouthwash but I love them and drink them anywhere I go. It is something of a standing joke among my friends now as a lot of bars have to make them up specially for me after I’ve explained what is in them. I’ll still be sitting in coktail bars with a glass of green minty stuff in front of me in 60 years time.

I’m a bit late with this one, so I’m not tagging anyone specifically. If you read this and have not done it, consider yourself tagged!

Books from another continent

I just finished two Asian novels – one from Japan and one from Vietnam. I can’t recall who recommended Shipwrecks, but I reserved it from the library the day I read the recommendation and I was not disappointed. Shipwrecks (by Akira Yoshimura) is absolutely spellbinding. Somewhere on the Japanese coast, a small village of fishing families try to eke out a living from the sea. The village is virtually untouched by modern civilisation and society is deeply rooted in traditional practices. The lives of the villagers revolve solely around food and meals are dictated by the seasons; jellyfish in the spring, fish in the summer, whatever they have managed to store in the winter. Each winter, the village lights fires on the beach to attract O-fune-sama, the merchant ships that carry cargo, onto the rocks where they founder. The villagers murder surviving crew members and take whatever the ship is carrying and either use it to live on or sell it to buy food. If no O-fune-sama come for a few years, family members are sold into bondage for periods of up to ten years so their families can survive. The book focuses on 14 year old Isaku who is the man of his household following his father’s departure on a three year bondage contract. In his father’s absence, Isaku, his family and the entire village are changed by the devastating consequences of a wrecked ship. Besides being a refreshing change from the usual setting of civilisation and material concerns, this novel was free from stereotypical characters and clichéd expressions. As far as I can remember, this is the first non-happy ending I have savoured in a while; the whole things was so simple, so subtle, so poignant.

I followed up Shipwrecks with another novel ending in ruined lives. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh is a novel about a soldier’s participation in the Vietnamese-American war and the profound effect it had on everything in his life that followed. I don’t usually like what I call ‘gritty realism’, preferring novels that end optimistically with promise for future happiness, but these two have caused me to rethink. Prior to reading The Sorrow of War, I never really thought much about war; I associate it with history, and history for me has strong connotations of boredom (and my history teacher who never shaved her legs). War is one of those things you can’t comprehend properly unless you have directly experienced it or been affected by it somehow. This novel succeeds in bringing home what war can do to a person and contains some horrifying accounts I assume are drawn from the author’s own experiences. Definitely difficult to read but compelling at the same time. I would never have picked it up if I hadn’t seen it and realised I hadn’t read anything from Vietnam yet – once again I am left wondering at the things I manage to read. What would I be reading if I wasn’t looking for books from a range of countries and cultures? The best thing about these two is that they fulfil something I had hoped to get out of reading literature from around the world – new cultures, new perspectives on life and what it means, a different outlook on the world. Like all exceptional books they made me question how I live, how I think, what I prioritise.

Musings…

I cannot imagine what possessed me, when I was still a student, to think that what I told myself was full time study would be anything like full time work. From my new vantage point, I can see that I was even lazier than I admitted to myself previously (and I was quite frank with myself over the actual amount of work I did as opposed to the amount I should have been doing). In comparison to students on other courses perhaps, I did work hard, but in relation to those on my own course I certainly did not. I’ve always done the absolute minimum work possible to acheive the grades I wanted to acheive and have ended up cutting it pretty close at times. I don’t think I especially regret not working harder at university, but I do sometimes wish a couple of my marks had been higher! Then again, I did pass a paper that I had neglected to attend any classes for, ever.

This has turned into a slightly nostalgic recollection of lazy Sundays and miscellaneous afternoons devoted to reading for pleasure when I should really have been writing essays in any one of three languages, which it was not supposed to be. I had intended to briefly complain about how little time I have at the moment, but while I get annoyed at my lack of reading time I know I had better get used to it. It isn’t likely to improve much in the near future.

I haven’t blogged for about a fortnight (where did the time go?) but I have at least managed to get some reading done in that time; Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura (Japan) and The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (Vietnam) and am close to completing The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa (Angola). I’ve discovered a new website, Poetry International Web and been impressed by David Cameron’s plans to create more interest in reading for leisure among boys in their early teens. It distresses me to think it, but he got one over on Labout there. I’ve also been ‘detoxing’ which in my case really just means eating more fresh fruit and veg and scoffing less chocolate and nutty popcorn. I now have a new-found mania for noodles in spiced coconut milk – sounds dubious I know, but I am addicted. And it is good for me!

I promise I’ll post more reading-relevant things later in the week; I’m looking forward to doing the 8 random things meme among other things, and I found some new poems (new to me) I’m going to post because I love them so much.

Culture Clash

The two books I read over the weekend both deal with clashing cultures – basically, racism (and England is the bad guy in both cases). Nehanda by Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe) is about the white invasion of Africa, and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Trinidad) is the story ofWest Indian immigrants in the 1950s. I hadn’t intended on reading these two together, by good chance they just happened to come off my library pile that way.

While searching for an image of the novel Nehanda, I accidentally discovered Nehanda herself was a real woman and is still revered as the most important person in Zimbabwe’s history. During her lifetime (c1840-1898) she was a spirit medium of the Shona people. As one of the spiritual leaders of the Shona, she provided inspiration for their revolt against the Rhodesian colonization of Zimbabwe. The British spent some time hunting her down and when they eventually captured her they executed her as a warning to all those who refused to accept and embrace the supposedly superior English culture and religion.

Sam Selvon’s novel is also a history of experience and Selvon himself was also a leader of a kind. Before he died, he was already being hailed as the ‘father of black writing in Britain’. Although Selvon’s situation is the inverse of Nehanda’s – he chose to come and make a life in Britain – he didn’t have an easy time in London. Londoners were racist and expected the West Indians to behave as though they were British while still assuming an inferior status. There was no mass persecution or executions, but it is still not exactly a comfortable read. Selvon’s writing is incredibly atmospheric; he is one of those authors who can put you inside a character’s head so that you absorb their feelings or personality traits while you are reading and it only occurs to you to think objectively about what just happened when you put the book down for a break and realise your feelings are something quite different to the main character’s.

The themes of these two novels are themes that will never get tired and will never be resolved. Culture and society are like religion; almost everyone thinks theirs is best.

New Notions

There’s a great new challenge up at Grasping For The Wind. It’s called New Notions 5 Reading Challenge, and the requirements for books (you only have to read one a month) is that they have to challenge your thinking on any given topic. That’s the kind of challenge I love!

I haven’t had much time to think about what I might pick, but Wikipedia does have a list of controversial books and there is a long list of banned books here, and a list of the most harmful books here.

Some of the issues I’d be interested in reading around would include:

- Climate change theory; I’m in the camp that does not believe global warming is due to carbon emissions, but I’m always interested in reading about different theories)

- White supremacy; I’ve been fascinated by the supposed allure of blonde hair and the status accorded those who have blonde hair for a long time and want to look at the darker side of the Aryan ideal and its supporters

- Conservative politics; I’m pretty left wing and want to know how these people think!

- Che Guevara; I loved the film The Motorcycle Diaries, but I get the feeling it isn’t a very objective interpretation of Guevara’s life

- Cloning; I am very against cloning in theory, but perhaps if I knew more about how it can change people’s lives and how it actually works, I might change my mind

I can’t wait to start finding books that will count toward this challenge, and I also can’t wait to see the selections other participants make. Half the point of reading books is to increase knowledge and stretch the mind, but that sometimes gets neglected.

Speedy Reading

I’m powering through my library stack – two more books down! After a reader commented that I had to read Pedro Páramo because ‘providence, not the librarian, had placed it on top of my pile’, it had to be next on my list.

Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo when he was into his fifties and it was hailed as an instant masterpiece. It was his first and only novel. Garcia Márquez claimed that this novel along with Kafka’s Metamorphosis (also on my reading list – thanks for the recommendation nyssaneala!) was the most influential work in his early reading, and could recite whole passages of it from memory. The novel follows a man who returns to his mother’s birthplace to find his father, in accordance with his mother’s dying wish. He finds a ghost town; the whole place appears abandoned, but wandering among the deseted buildings he encounters some former residents. The ghosts carry him back in time through their memories and help him gradually reveal the truth about his father and how the ghost town died. Rulfo said of the way the novel is written: “There is a structure in Pedro Páramo, but it is a structure made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no time.” The translation I read was beautiful; I couldn’t put the book down. It reminded me in some ways of The Obscene Bird of Night which was my read for Chile; many of the same themes, although Pedro Páramo is far shorter and more accessible.

From a Mexican ghost town, I travelled to Kenya and read my first play of the journey! Mugasha is a play derived from an oral legend of the East African region and narrates the birth of one of the most revered deities in that area. Mugasha is a miracle birth to the barren wife of the former king and once born, returns to reclaim his father’s kingdom from the usurpers. He commands the weather, the lakes and the animals, all of whom help him in hs mission. He also takes the opportunity to teach a stuck up princess a good lesson about snobbishness and the duties of a ruler along the way, like all good leaders should. The only complaint I have is that none of the references to aspects of African culture were explained in the volume, especially when the original African words were used. Although this is an old story and I don’t wish to grossly generalise African culture, I did feel some of my impressions garnered from earlier reading were reinforced; the importance of rituals surrounding births and deaths, the relative status and roles of men and women, the strict ethical codes governing life.

Finally, on the way home today (as it was payday!) I stopped at virtually every book shop I came across and ended up with a vintage secondhand edition of A Concise History of Romanian Literature and also To Bury Our Fathers, a Nicaraguan novel. The only book I bought new – very proud of the restraint I exercised – was a memoir by a Vietnamese man whose job during the war was dragging Vietnamese bodies from the jungle. The memoir is called The Sorrow of War – it sounds like an interesting if harrowing read.

Weekend Reading

Following my trip to the library, from whence I hauled home 11 new books, this weekend has proved to be a veritable reading retreat. I finished off one book I had already started and devoured a further two.

First up was The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble. I read this one for a number of reasons, but it isn’t something I would usually have picked up. Way back in January, when I signed up for the Winter Classics Challenge, one of the books I wanted to read was The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, the diaries of an eighteenth century Korean princess. I never got around to reading it for a number of reasons, but it was suggested to me that I might enjoy Drabble’s fiction novel, inspired by the same diaries. I did not. In short, I found the novel full of trite, irritating asides, and it never really went anywhere. I can see that the idea behind the novel was interesting, but Drabble’s realisation of that idea left a lot to be desired.

Thirteen Cents, by South African author K. Sello Duiker was a far more engaging read. Drawn from the author’s own experiences, the novel is a brief snapshot of a few months in the life of a street orphan in Cape Town. Having lost both parents, 13 year old Azure with his blue eyes and black skin is left to survive alone. He sleeps on the beach and makes his living by prostituting himself to men.

“A boy? I’m not a boy. I’ve seen a woman being raped by policemen at night near the station. I’ve seen w hite man let a [11 year old] boy get into his car. I’ve seen a couple drive over a street child and they still kept going. I’ve seen a woman give birth at the beach and throw it into the sea.”

Not exactly enjoyable, but certainly gripping. Although this is a gritty read, the narrator’s strong tone and refusal to be a victim holds it up. I thoroughly recommend this for an eye opening read – think City of Men (I’ve only seen the film, but I remember being horrified – very naively). I couldn’t have got further from magical realism if I’d tried!

Finally, yesterday’s read was The Fatal Eggs by Bulgakov. Who could resist a book with such a tempting title? It actually turned out to be a sci-fi dystopian vision of possible future scientific discoveries. A (somewhat) mad scientist in Russia discovers something in a strand of DNA that causes all organisms exposed to it to grow to gigantic proportions extremely quickly. Before he has had time to experiement with anything more significant than amoebas, Russia is struck by some form of poultry flu which wipes out their entire chicken population. The state initiates a project to use the new technology to grow more chickens in a short period of time, but everything goes wrong when instead of chicken eggs, they are sent the eggs of another type of animal. The consequences are disastrous. Not the type of thing I usually read, but I enjoyed it.

New Books/Countries!

Following yesterday’s panic-inducing realisation, I took a trip to my local library to see what I could see and have returned joyously with 11 books from 11 new countries! All relatively short at around 200 pages and hopefully quick to read. I’d forgotten how much I relish browsing the shelves of the library and searching for new books – the satisfaction of coming away with a new stash is almost unbeatable. Inevitably there is also the regret of passing over several books I would have liked to pick up and bring home – I think the library must have gone on a Persephone spree, because there seemed to be an inordinate number of those elegant grey spines adorning the shelves. Also – and it is funny how these things seem to come in groups – I kept coming across books from Nigeria and Iran/Persia. I’ve never managed to find anything from Iran/Persia before and I discovered three books from there today (bear in mind that my local library is very small and has large collections of Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins et al). I wanted to read all three, but have come away with Layla and Majnun by Nizami, which claims to be the classic love story of Persian literature. I must confess that despite stating yesterday that I would not read Pedro Paramo which I had reserved at the library, I might have to. The woman at the checking out desk just put it on my pile, how could I say I no longer wanted it after they’d sent it down from another library? And it is so little, I’m sure it wouldn’t take too long to read. Excuses, excuses!

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions for new books I could read – I’m grateful for the help, and have a new list of books to look out. I can’t wait! (Suggestions are always welcome, so if anyone has anything they’d like to add, please feel free.)

Anyone have a time machine going spare?

I’ve just checked my first post and discovered I wrote it on July 20th 2006. Horror of all horrors! I wanted to read 100 books from 100 different countries in a year…which means I now have 3 months to read around 75 books. But all is not lost – today is April 19th, so I have 62 days left to complete my challenge which means all I have to do is read 1.2 books a day and I’ll make it! All I have to do now is build my time machine and I’ll be well away.

Now onto the serious stuff – how, HOW, have I only read 25 books from 25 countries so far? I know I doubled up on some of the countries, and I also know that some books were so monstrously large and took so long to read that I fell behind. I suspect the real reason is all those books I don’t tell you about on here, or the ones that I do write about on here but don’t count towards my reading challenge. Last week for example, I was so enchanted with Little Boy Lost, I ran straight out and got another Persephone book – Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day – from the library and devoured that. I will concede it was enjoyable, not as much so as I had hoped, but if I want to meet my own challenge, I may have been better off reading something else. Over Christmas I read several Chinese books I didn’t mention on here, and now I come to think of it, reading books that do not count towards my challenge has been something of a theme lately. Oops.

So – dear, dear readers – I need your help. You can find a list of the countries I have read books from here. I would love your suggestions for any short books you know from any countries I have not yet visited (if I can read them in one day so much the better). I’m going to stop reading books that will not count towards my challenge. Although…Pedro Paramo is waiting for me in the library and I really really want to read it – but I already read Carlos Fuentes who can count towards Mexico, and I also have Octavio Paz on my shelf who is Mexican. I must be strong! I will send it back unread. I will read it after July 20th!

Anyway, all suggestions welcome. Even if you don’t know any books that I can read quickly from other countries, send me good luck wishes! I’m going to need them…