Janet Fitch’s Paint It Black is proving harder to read than anticipated. Stories involving suicide are always incredibly difficult to stomach.
not counting short story collections (and books not published in english outside japan):
Remnant books of author’s back catalogues are:
Ian McEwan:
- Rose Blanche (children’s book) (1985)
- The Child in Time (1987)
- The Innocent (1990)
- Saturday (2005)
Murakami Haruki:
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World (1985)
- South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992)
- Kafka on the Shore (2002)
- After Dark (2004)
- 1Q84 (2009)*
* This is obviously through no fault of mine; the projected English release date for the first two volumes is unfortunately in September 2011 by Knopf (both volumes in one) & Vintage (paperback editions). 1Q84 is easily the book I anticipate the most, and I can’t wait to have it in my hands and to devour it whole.
you know those "30 days" memes that are going around? well, here's one for "30 days of books," except i've no patience to answer one a day.
01: best book you read last year:
Ian McEwan, Enduring Love.
02: a book you’ve read more than three times:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre.
03: your favourite series:
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, Scott Westerfield’s Uglies books, & L.M. Montgomery’s Emily novels.
04: favourite book of your favourite series:
The Girl Who Played With Fire, Uglies, & Emily Climbs.
05: a book that makes you happy:
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America.
06: a book that makes you sad:
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.
07: most underrated book:
I can’t think of any. I think there are many books that aren’t massively popular on a mainstream scale (and, in some ways, thank God for it), but I can’t think of anything I would consider underrated.
08: most overrated book:
Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice.
09: a book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving:
Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
10: favourite classic book:
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin.
11: a book you hated:
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead.
12: a book you used to love but don’t anymore:
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha [I loved this when I first read it in high school, and I picked it up some time during university thinking I’d revisit something from those awful years, read a few pages, and thought, What the hell was wrong with me in high school???]
13: your favourite writer:
Leo Tolstoy.
14: favourite book of your favourite writer:
Anna Karenin.
15: favourite male character:
You know, I don’t know. I think one would be Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
16: favourite female character:
I don’t know this, either; one might be Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.
17: favourite a quote from your a favourite book:
[Because “favourite quote” is an impossibility; I collect quotes like some people collect stamps.]
"I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."
- Catherine in Wuthering Heights
18: a book that disappointed you:
Here are two: Sheila Kohler, Cracks, and Marcus Zuzak, The Book Thief.
19: favourite book turned into a movie:
[Thus far,] Ian McEwan, Atonement.
20: favourite romance book:
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca.
[… did I just label this a “romance book?”]
21: favourite book from your childhood:
[Honestly and not in an attempt to sound priggish,] Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
22: favourite book you own:
This is a ridiculous question to ask a book lover.
23: a book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t:
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore[, because, once I read it, I’m out of Murakami until 1Q84].
24: a book you wish more people would’ve read:
You know what? I don’t know. A lot!
25: a character who you can relate to the most:
Here’s a cheat of an answer: Sylvia Plath.
26: a book that changed your opinion about something:
… none?
27: the most surprising plot twist or ending:
Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love.
28: favourite title:
[Off the top of my head, without second thought,] Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Invisible Cities.
29: a book everyone hated but you liked:
I can think of plenty going the other way but not this particular way …
30: your favourite book of all time:
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin.
i've got my itunes on shuffle, & i'm thinking it's time for an itunes purge and this meme on reading habits.
[How would you define a meme other than as “a questionnaire used to spin away time”?]
01: do you snack while reading?
It depends but not usually. I like nibbling on something once in a while, and I do read while I’m eating lunch every day.
02: what is your favourite drink while reading?
The usual suspects: coffee, water, brown rice green tea.
03: do you tend to mark your books while you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
For fiction, the latter — and vehemently at that. I do very lightly pencil mark passages to copy down later, then go back and erase them after copying them into a notebook, and, if I have a book I love and want to mark up, I’ll get a second copy. I’m shamelessly OCD about my books and won’t lend them out anymore because of it.
Nonfiction, however, is prone to clean highlighting.
04: how do you keep your place? bookmark? dog-ears? laying the book open flat?
Dog-ears and laying the book open flat are huge NO-NOs in my world. I use anything as pseudo-bookmarks — receipts, note cards, clean napkins, price tags from clothing — and I like big Post-its.
05: fiction, non-fiction, or both?
Both. I generally say no to autobiographies and memoirs, though.
06: do you tend to read to the end of a chapter, or can you stop anywhere?
Can stop anywhere.
07: are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?
I got through The Fountainhead without any sort of violence on my part, so this answer is safely, “no.”
08: if you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?
No. This is where a Post-it bookmark comes in handy.
09: what are you currently reading?
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Koushun Takami, Battle Royale; Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
10: what is the last book you bought?
Dave Eggers, The Wild Things (it was on sale for $3), and the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (on sale for $10), both courtesy of the McSweeney’s Store.
11: do you have a favourite time/place to read?
In my car, during lunch hour, with the windows rolled down, and in bed before sleeping.
12: do you prefer series books or stand-alones?
Stand-alones.
13: is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?
Here are seven: The Fall, Anna Karenin, Jane Eyre, Atonement, Never Let Me Go, Dracula, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.e
14: how do you organise your books (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)?
Fiction: by publisher then author’s last name.
Nonfiction: by topic then book dimensions.
15: background noise or silence?
Music — always music.
(Unfortunately, I don’t keep track of where I find these memes. Every once in a while, I stumble upon a meme I’d like to fill out at one point and copy-paste it onto TextEdit and, of course, forget to note the source …)
a tour de force
Never Let Me Go is a book you read with your stomach done up in knots, with a stone pitching your heart downwards, with tears weighing heavily behind your eyes until they free themselves and fall, uninhibited, during the last fifty pages. Ishiguro is sparse with his words and guarded with emotion, both factors that feed into the weighty heaviness of the novel, the punch in your gut when the premise of the story is laid out in stark black and white before you and you have to stop pretending that these characters might chance upon happy endings. Much like Ruth and Tommy and Kathy are, at the end, you’re resigned, not in the bitter, unsatisfied way but in the calm and peaceful way, with their fate and with yours as a reader who turns the last page and inhales sharply, wishing there was more, that the blank space beneath the final sentence was like the other blank spaces at the end of the other chapters — but what more Ishiguro could give can’t be known because Never Let Me Go is a book you read and realise its completion and wish, I wish I’d never read this, so I could experience it again for the very first time. [01]
The second read is no less powerful than the first, however, but the above sentiments about knots and stones and tears are heavier the second time around because you know the novel, the characters, the way the story unravels. You know exactly what it is that Ruth and Tommy and Kathy were created for, and you know how their lives spin, what tugs at their hearts, how their friendship winds, so there’s no mystery about the facts, no denial about what Never Let Me Go is about. The punch in your gut, however, isn’t any less softened; you don’t feel any less for Ruth or Tommy or Kathy than you did the first time around; and you don’t wish any less that things could be different for them and for you because the second read brings you closer to them, leads you to details you missed before, makes you stand even more in praise of Ishiguro and his spare storytelling that doesn’t miss a heartbeat.
And, now, with the adaptation just over three months away (and your faith restored somewhat in adaptations [02]), you can’t help but state flatly to yourself, I’m going to weep my way through this film.
[01] Similar sentiments expressed by Carey Mulligan.
[02] Admittedly, this is also more of a faith in the cast and the films they choose — Keira Knightley, particularly, because she was in both Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, both of which I loved, although I can’t vouch for the faithfulness of Pride and Prejudice because I never got over my loathing to finish that book. Three attempts, and I’m fine with never having read it. But, back to Never Let Me Go, the trailer has me convinced that this will be good.