An experiment

I've been trying so hard to like Blogger's interface, but it's an uphill battle. The design clearly doesn't work with small screens and the android app is not my favorite, to be honest. And the nested comments system is inferior to wordpress' threaded comments, in my opinion. So, I'm giving wordpress a chance—again. Really, I'm a compulsive creator of blogs, yet this is the only one in which I've written published more than five posts.

So, if you don't mind, I'll be at this address for awhile, to see how comfortable wordpress is and then we'll see.

In the Mountains, Elizabeth Von Arnim

Elizabeth Von Arnim FTW!
I'm not always this over-enthusiastic. But I took a week off from most internet-related stuff (I still can't get rid of my facebook games addiction, alas!) and read, read, read...

Well, I didn't read that much. First it was my birthday, and then my mother's, and then we had a celebration at my Abuelita's house (Granny, for the Spanish-challenged), and then we went to a fair that sells plants and flowers, so in those busy days I didn't read a thing. But what it matters is that even if I haven't been glued to a book, at least most of the time I've been blissfully lost in five, six different stories, all of them lovely. And today I finished the third.

I don't think the narrator of Elizabeth von Arnim's In the Mountains ever gave her name away. It's written as the diary of an English woman, in her late twenties, early thirties, who's feeling awfully wretched after the war (the WWI) and the lost of some very important people in her life, though we only hear of them in passing, and never in much detail since the memories hurt the narrator so much.

She goes to her summer house in Switzerland, up in the mountains (hence the title), hoping to be healed by the good weather and the scenery. She's alone there, except for the Antoines, a couple that guards the house, but they don't seem to be able to give her much comfort or company:

[Mrs. Antoine] hadn't expected, I suppose, the mistress of the house, when she did at last get back to it, to behave like some strange alien slug, crawled up the mountain only to lie motionless in the sun for the best part of a fortnight. I head her, after the first two days of this conduct, explaining it to Antoine, who however needed no explanation because of his god-like habit of never being surprised, and her explanation was that c'était la guerre,—convenient explanation that has been used to excuse many more unnatural and horrible things during the last five years than somebody's behaving as if she were a slug.

I don't know what I expected from this book, but I certainly wasn't expecting it to be this soothing and funny. I thought it was about grief, nature, healing and goat milk or something—in a very boring way. But it was surprisingly lighthearted. The narrator starts getting better and the entries in her diary get longer each day, as she recovers strength. And the better she feels, the funnier she gets, which only shows how hard was the war on her and how much she lost in it. And the story only gets better when two English widows in severe, old-fashioned clothes, appear at her door bringing with them equal parts of secrets and comedy material.

We live here in an atmosphere of combats de générosité. It is tremendous. Mrs. Barnes and I are always doing things we don't want to do because we suppose it is what is going to make the other one happy. The tyranny of unselfishness! I can hardly breathe.

You can get the ebook for free at girlebooks. And here it's Claire's from The Captive Readers review.

And that's it. Tomorrow, when I feel less buoyant, I'll tackle Nick Hornby's More Baths, Less Talking. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an abandoned Google Reader to catch up with.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The other day, when I said I was reading five books at the same time, The Fault in Our Stars wasn't one of them. It was some sort of dark horse.

I was really proud of myself for achieving such a controlled level of reading, measuring pages, being able to stop reading before I got bored of the topic at hand—I'm reading a lot of non-fiction nowadays. And there's so many kitchen-related essays I can read before becoming increasingly exasperated of (at?) Anthony Bourdain, so I have to pace myself and not read more than twenty pages at a time.

But this wasn't what I wanted to write about. Go back to your kitchen (or airplane, most likely), Anthony Bourdain. We're talking about John Green here.

So! I was reading in a very methodical way and along comes Hazel Grace Lancaster, The Fault in Our Stars' protagonist, all lung cancer, charm and self-awareness, and I know this is a battle I cannot win. I tried not reading it for a couple of days, but this is the kind of book that demands to be read in one sitting, with a pack of kleenex close (just like Meg Ryan's mother in You've Got Mail recommended reading Anne of Green Gables.)

Hazel is not okay with her disease. Or, rather, she's okay with the cancer, but not with the things that surround it. She doesn't like the "Cancer Perks" (things she gets just because people feel bad that she's sick), nor the Support Group she attends, nor her mum's insistence in making her go out and make friends. She just likes to marathon through bad reality television and read for the millionth time a book that finishes mid sentence because the protagonist, an adolescent with cancer, much like her, dies. Presumably. And Hazel's obsessing over it, 'cause she wants to know what happens with the other characters in the story afterwards, since it's not fair that their lives ended mid-sentence too just because the girl died. And the rest of the book happens, but I cannot tell you what happens. Just that this book didn't finish mid-sentence, which was something I dreaded the entire time I was reading it, but was too afraid to find out before time.

I know John Green must be a David Foster Wallace fan (or at least being interested enough in his career to read his biography. I saw it on his tumblr account. I've been stalking John Green for months before trying any of his books, how weird is that?), and I'm very lucky because the only thing I've read by DFW is his commencement speech at Kenyon College, in which he talks about consciousness and going through our lives without being aware of them, without paying attention to what we do out of habit. And I think that speech (that you can read online, or, if you're like me and go around with earphones glued to your face, listen) resonates strongly in this quote:

"You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped mid-sentence and said, 'Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.'
"That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?"

To resume: I loved this book. A lot. And I cried. A whole lot too. But they were good tears, not this-guy-is-awful-and-forcing-me-to-cry-just-for-the-sake-of-his-ego kind of tears. Real tears of understanding, and love. Well played, John Green. I'll continue to stalk you on tumblr. And youtube. And sometimes on twitter too.

How to Be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran

Source

I loved this book when I read it earlier this year, but have since then read so many bad reviews—or, to be fair, reviews that weren't particularly negative, but made me feel inadequate for having liked it so freely without even trying to focus on something other than my enjoyment— that now I feel a tiny bit ashamed for doing so.

I'm very ignorant when it comes to women studies, and used to think feminists were irrational, hairy women that blamed men for being men. I know (now) that that is an awful generalization and caricaturization, but it's just the way I thought things were a couple of years ago. It's what I grew up hearing other people say. I hadn't met anyone who declared themselves to be a feminist, and since didn't have to face any situation in which I felt my rights were threatened just because I was a woman (absent father, no brothers, all-girl school, painfully shy around strangers... didn't have much male influence growing up, to be honest), I wasn't particularly invested in the subject.

So, to me, Moran's book was like a revelation. Feminism, it turns out, is not necessarily an overly serious, academic topic that one can only talk about if one's an angry lesbian. And, the more I read, the more enlightened I felt. Turns out, even  my male-free upbringing was tinted with a machismo I wasn't prepared to notice, 'cause (and I hate to use the third world wild card, 'cause I'm sure that's not the only reason, but I'm just putting together this idea, so bear with me if things get a little sketchy) Chile is an hyper-conservative country in which topics concerning female welfare were not generally discussed until very recently. Parliament recently opted to not discuss abortion, for Christ's sake! Therapeutic abortion!

ANYway, my point is, I can understand if Caitlin Moran's book seems lacking to people with greater knowledge or involvement in the subject. But to me, it was perfect, and exactly the kind of book I needed to read (but didn't know I did.) It was the most hands-on approach to feminism I have ever read about—though, I think I already made this very clear earlier, but it bears repeating: prior to this book, I knew nothing about feminism. My only experiences with feminism were ideas I picked up in the internet and a vague sense of unease when my fellow countrymen dismissed and made fun of our female President because she was overweight. It wasn't a treatise about the high values of a feminist set of mind. It was practical. It was equaling being woman to being a feminist and that made the whole thing so much more approachable, for someone as clueless as me. And it made me interested in learn more and have opinions about it (and when I feel they're wholly shaped and ready to be shared, we will have to talk about (500) Days of Summer, world.)

So, what I'm trying to say is that, to me, it was a really important book. I was elated by it (hey! let's discuss body hair without feeling weird! and how about being interested in fashion doesn't mean one's necessarily a superfluous hedonist! even though fashion is so weird! why stilettos, WHY?!) I felt liberated and ready to discuss issues with other people. Like I'm doing right now. Except I still haven't read more books on feminism, so if you have some to recommend, I'm all ears!

Thoughtful reviews: Iris on Books, Shelf Love.
A couple of interviews (mind you, I disliked most of The New Yorker interview, so I'm not completely partial to every thing Caitlin Moran does): Fresh Air, The New Yorker.

Happy New (reading) Year!

I was going to say that it was just like me to start a blog about books and promptly lose any interest in reading. But I think it was the opposite. I decided to start this blog because I seemed to have lost the motivation to read.

"Are you feeling conflicted?"
(Mafalda, by Quino)

I knew when I made the first post here that this was a poor reading year for me. If we focus only in the numbers (and we shouldn't, but I'm trying to make a point), between 2009 and 2010 I read over 140 books. 2011 was sort of hazy, and I managed to read only fifty books, but it was OK, 'cause they were heavier. This year, though? I'm below 25, with at least ten of them being books I re-read because I couldn't deal with reading something new. Overall, it definitely wasn't my best year. Depression is a bitch, people. 

However, I'm trying to stop thinking in chunks of 12 months, 'cause I want to change now and not wait until January to get better. That's why I'm starting a new year today (actually, it started on Monday, but I forgot to write about it). This new year already started better than the last, 'cause I'm in a reading mood and that's always a good sign. I'm reading slooooowly, though, but that's OK too, 'cause for some reason I feel like reading EVERY BOOK IN THE WORLD. At the same time. And to make space for five books in my daily schedule, I have to read them in small doses, or I'll start mixing them up. It helps that three of those books are compilations (is that the right word?) of essays or columns, so I can read twenty pages of each book without feeling guilty of my slow progress―actually, I don't want to finish Nick Hornby's More Baths, Less Talking, so I'll always have one or two of his articles to read in the morning. 

(I was supposed to write about the books I'm reading. I sat here with that intention. But now I can't, 'cause I fear if I congratulate myself too much for being reading again it would only tempt fate. So, no talk about books until I finish this batch. Just wanted to say that they're great!)

Feria del Libro!

so, every year there's this Book Fair in Santiago to which I go willing to suffer, because books are expensive. But it's a nice experience and sometimes you find good offers and such. This year I went with 3/4 of our book club and spent the entire time thinking we should probably read 50 Shades of Grey just because of its ubiquity (not a chance, though. There's no convincing MJ to go with it, so we're reading Anthony Bourdain's The Nasty Bits instead.)

And then I found this:

Stickers! of famous authors! on bicycles! Most of them reading! There are stickers of Latin American authors, like Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar, but also of the likes of Virginia Woolf and Hemingway (books on the floor, rifle in his hand). And I might be suffering from an attack of consumerism, but I want to buy them all. And then play with them like paper dolls. And invent romances between Cortázar and Borges, and María Luisa Bombal (sadly more famous because of her attempt to kill her husband than because of her literary accomplishments) and Hemingway. And make them new clothes and little stacks of books that I think they'd find interesting ("what do you think of Isabel Allende's last novel, Roberto?" I would ask, innocently.)

Jorge Luis Borges

Virginia Woolf