Plans

Santa’s not the only one making a list this December.  I’m the sort of person who likes planning things, even if I don’t actually end up doing them.  I make New Year’s resolutions every January, even though some of them are invariably discarded within a few weeks.  I write out schedules under the assumption that it’s better to have a plan and then deviate from it when necessary than to not have a plan at all.  That said, here’s the scheme to get the most out of Winter Break:

8-8:30 Ease self out of warm bed with cozy slippers, hot tea, and the Variety section of the newspaper.

8:30-9:00 Force self to pedal vigorously on the exercise bike, despite the damp nastiness of its basement surroundings, for the purpose of preventing muscle atrophy and creating body heat to combat the inevitable chill of the frugally-heated parental dwelling.

9:00-10:00 Practice basic hygiene rituals, eat breakfast, etc.

10:00-11:00 Review Latin.

11:00-1:00  Research and read for honors project on 21st c. Jane Austen adaptations.

1:00-10:00 Eat lunch.  Have social life.  Help cook and eat dinner and spend time with family.  Read for fun.  Do whatever the heck sounds appealing.

10:00-Sleep  Quiet time (a.k.a more reading time) so as not to incur the wrath of sleeping parents.

Now that it’s written down I actually have to follow it, right?  (and if anyone’s thinking I’m a little compulsive in my desire to schedule my time…you aren’t wrong)  And now, for the most exciting part of the Winter Break Plan: Books I Intend to Read for Fun!

1)Vanity Fair (Thackeray)

2) The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd)

3) A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

4) Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)

5) The Bluest Eye (Morrison)

And if I finish all those in addition to the books I’m reading for my Jane Austen project, I’ll be a superhero.  My copy of Vanity Fair, incidentally, is one of the loveliest soft-covers I own.  It is off-white, simply designed, and filled with thin, smooth paper of incredible density.  Holding it feels like holding a big, heavy chunk of knowledge in your hands.

Capital R

Lately I’ve encountered a lot of capitalization distinctions–realist and Realist, deaf and Deaf, romantic and Romantic.  Generally it seems that such variation is intended to distinguish between simple description and self-consciousness.  So, for instance, deaf is a physical condition and Deaf is a cultural movement.  If this is the case, then it seems to me that a distinction between reading and Reading might be appropriate.  The act of interpreting collections of written words, reading with a lower-case r, involves road signs and menus, dull essays and romance novels.  Anything can be read, and all literate people read.  On the other hand, I suppose some people can go their whole lives without Reading.  Reading, at least in my estimation, involves a conscious settling of oneself with a book and a focusing of the whole attention on the song of its language and pulse of its narrative.  It’s about the way the volume smells and feels in your hands–the reason I am so picky about the physical characteristics of my books.  The same novel that I might read in the noisy breakroom at work I would Read later that same night with a blanket and a glass of wine in a quiet room.  It’s as close to a religious sort of experience as I get these days.

I began to think of all this an hour ago when I went to brush my teeth because I could not settle down to Read with hints of cheesecake lingering in my mouth.  I realized that when I’m angry at myself for something–when I’ve been lazy or self-indulgent or childish–I never feel like Reading.  While Reading helps to cope with a lot of external things, like stress or loneliness or disappointment, I don’t turn to books when I’m disappointed in myself.  It’s almost like I have to be pure to be worthy of the experience.  It’s all a bit ridiculous, but then, religious-type things usually are.  Anyway, I’m glad I learned to Read when I learned to read, and I’m glad that unlike the child-arts of makebelieve and self-confidence, Reading is a skill for which I haven’t lost my edge.

Booksbooksbooksbooksbooks!

I slipped on the rain-slick wooden stairs this morning in my haste to retrieve money for the annual library book sale.  With soft covers at fifty cents and hardcovers one dollar, it’s worth running to get there early before others snap up all of the delicious texts.  While the pickings seemed a little slimmer than usual (or rather, I already owned most of the amazing books I saw) I managed to procure The Professor by Charlotte Bronte, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Jazz by Toni Morrison, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a little book of poetry by the chief Romantics.  While Madame Bovary and The Professor are rather ugly-ish editions, and Jazz is of low-average attractiveness, the poetry is a pleasing little volume hardbound in red cloth with a 1909 copyright.  It is in remarkably good shape and includes little biographies of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Browning (I’m assuming they mean the male Browning…it being 1909 and all).  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, too, is a treasure.  It has seen significantly more wear than the poetry volume, but has the remains of faded beauty.  The green cloth cover sports a half-worn-away image of two young woman who appear to be either sewing or looking at jewelry, surrounded by a border of oak foliage and acorns.  It was owned at one time by Harold Hinds (a UMM professor of history) and also by a young man named John B. who contributed pencil scribbles and a sloppy signature to the front and back flyleaves.  A woman named Helena, presumably the first owner, received the book as a gift for Christmas 1904.

I fall for books as I fall for men–generally and ultimately, it’s what is inside that counts, but an aesthetically pleasing exterior makes my hands long to reach out and touch.  I admit freely to my superficiality–I will read Uncle Tom’s Cabin before I do Madame Bovary, despite the fact that I think I will prefer the content of the later.  I love my books.    They’re so much more to me than paper and cardboard, ink and glue–my collection? My menagerie? My treasures, certainly.  Some with their histories–Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or my century old copy of Daniel Deronda I picked up at last year’s sale– and some that have belonged to my hands and my eyes and my mind alone.  Some I have read, some I have read many times, and some waiting still to be opened.  I love them all, for what they contain and what they are and what they represent.  And I’m greedy for them.  I want more and more and more.  There can be too many books to read in a lifetime, but there can never be too many books.

Blood, Guts, and the Consumption of Literature

The road trip back to Morris to acquire my academic bling and remove large pieces of furniture from my apartment afforded me plenty of time to work on Othello. Reading Shakespeare in the car is less enjoyable than one might at first believe…early modern English is more apt to lead to carsickness than contemporary modern English. However, I am happily ready to move on to a book that I can actually hold up while I read it. Othello was good, but I was a little disappointed in the half-assed bloodbath at the end. Two of the principle characters–Iago and Cassio–fail to die on stage. Roderigo, Desdemona, Emilia, and Othello himself all come through with acceptably dramatic death scenes, some including the classic “I am slain!” but after reading Hamlet, in which Horatio is truly the only survivor, this ending seemed just a little light on the blood. It is a tragedy, after all.

On to more exciting things; I opened the first shipment of new books for this summer today. I must say, I’m getting pretty good at selecting pretty editions from online booksellers without being able to touch or see the books myself in advance. All of the editions in this shipment were extremely aesthetically pleasing. My favorites are the Modern Library Classics and the Vintage edition of Song of Solomon that matches my well-loved copy of Beloved. Modern Library Classics, like Barns and Noble Classics, are scrumptious trade paperback editions featuring tasteful art and beautifully textured softcover bindings that sell for extremely affordable prices. For the moment I’m enjoying just touching and smelling them, but I can’t wait to devour their innards as well. If books were people, I’d be a cannibalistic serial killer who preys on the good looking/smelling/feeling. Ew.

Signet Classics

It has been known to happen that Rhetoric and Narration seminar gets off track, and so it was that while we were supposed to be discussing What Maisie Knew by Henry James, we got to talking about Signet Classics. I’m not alone in that class in appreciating a book for its book-ness–that is, the way it falls open in your hands, the texture of the paper, the delicate scent of the pages. Signet Classics, according to a professor who knows, are perhaps the most disgusting available classics in terms of book-ness. I’m familiar with Signet Classics, and hate the way the ink smears and the paper sucks the natural oils out of your fingers like a leech. Their website, however, is worth sharing. “Welcome to the Signet Classics website,” it reads. “If you’re looking for a good time, you’ve come to the right place!” I can only imagine the impoverished literary geeks who would flock to the Signet Classics website, looking for a “good time.” While I love literature, as I do most of my passions, immoderately, I can think of places more conducive to a “good time” than the website of a publisher of cheap paperbacks. I applaud Signet for their attempt to bring sexy back to the classics. Or, at the very least, I applaud them for giving me a good belly-laugh in the middle of a rather stilted couple of hours of Henry James discussion.