Books

The paradox of having been an English major (for me at least), is that one ends up reading a whole lot of books because you have to, and not enough of those you want to. Being a product of the Singapore education system, I read my assigned readings slavishly and thoroughly, forsaking the allure of more attractive alternatives in the name of The Exam. I really don't think my life would have been very different had I not read Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (God bless the Marlon Brando of American literature, but bull-fighting and ennui just do not figure together in my literary psyche), or Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds. I constantly appall myself (and am sure outrage the literary snobs of the world) that I've not read Ulysees (although I did read Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist), I don't remember enough of Moby Dick to claim to have read it (*gasp*), and no, I haven't read (nor do I want to) Julius Caesar (double *gasp*). I did go through the mandatory Sylvia Plath Ariel/ Bell Jar phase that descends upon all literary-leaning young women who yearn to be the melancholic beauty that was she. I devised a whole theory about the difference between male and female suicide just from reading The Bell Jar. For women, it's all about the beautiful death- nothing must happen to your face. That's why women drown, slit their wrists, and stuff their heads in ovens. Men shoot themselves, jump off buildings, and stand in front of moving vehicles. Not pretty. Women are from Venus, and men from Mars.

Anyways, this wasn't meant to be a post about killing myself. I wanted to talk about books. So ironically, I only managed to start reading for leisure when I started teaching, and now during summer and Christmas breaks. I like it alot better this way actually- less pressure to deconstruct and analyze, and more about enjoying the prose and poetry for itself. Just finished The Time Traveler's Wife (see sidebar) and it was wonderful. I might just have to read the last twenty pages again since things were basically a blur of tears between pg. 517 and pg. 537. The fact that it was 5.07 in the morning when I was done might partially explain the haze I was in (you try putting it down after pg. 452...). At 5.10, I recovered suitably from the post-narrative stupor, washed my face, went downstairs, gave Jude a hug (who was still slaving away for his statistics finals tommorrow) and asked him never to leave me. That's what the book does.

Books like these make me wish I were a writer. I guess that's the measure of a good book for me, books that make me fall in love with reading and writing, and thinking about reading and writing all over again. I've read many books in my lifetime, and I've loved many of them; but only a handful fall in this category. Few of the ones I read in university actually come to mind (largely because I had to analyze them to death, and was completely numb to them afterwards- oh the irony...)- ok, there was Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (my all time favorite Shakespeare play- not a conventional choice I know, but not enough people have read it nor know it for this brilliant little play to be conventionally appreciated see...), The Four Quartets, Rushdie's Shame, Middlemarch maybe. But the first time I was literally floored by a book that wasn't on a reading list was Dec 2000 when I read A.S. Byatt's Possession. I refused to believe it was over after the last page. It left me breathless. It's a hefty book and slow-going for the first couple of hundred pages (I know people who are at the same page they were two years ago...), but it rewards you handsomely and lovingly if you persevere and invest yourself in it. It remains remarkable to me how Byatt juggles the multiple narrative and stylistic voices, the layering of time periods, the loving, hating, yearning, coveting characters of such sublime depth you think they would die from feeling and being so much. This book reached into my guts and touched my soul.

possess, v
a. Of a person or body of persons: To hold, occupy (a place or territory); to reside or be stationed in; to inhabit (with or without ownership)
b. To take up the attention or thoughts of; to occupy, engross.
c. To hold as property; to have belonging to one, as wealth or material objects; to own.
d. To have possession of, as distinct from ownership.
e. With with: To cause to be possessed by (a feeling, idea, or the like; to imbue, inspire, permeate, affect strongly or permanently with; to cause to feel or entertain.