Help

Help!

I’m reading three-going-on-four books at the same time.  This is a most unusual state for me, who prefers to read one book at a time, one after another, over and over and over.

One is Howards End by E. M. Forster, which I have to finish in a week for Modern British Fiction.

Another is Little Kingdoms by Steven Millhauser, which is partly because I’m giving a presentation on him in a week and a half and partly because I really want to read it.

A third is a nonfiction book called Modernist Fiction, for the above class and over which I must write a three-page review in two weeks.

The fourth, which I will pick up soon, is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, a pleasant reread for a third class, which I must review by next Tuesday.

I also have four short stories by classmates and an article on the desk, underneath a mound of grading and various other papers for scholarship applications.

And German lurks in the background.

Graduate school is neither Genius nor Perspiration, but ugly, common Time Management.

The Second Coming

Thus has begun the school reading.  Below are the first two sentences of the four-page response I have written to The Second Coming.  They are really all you really need to know about my opinion.

A late-middle-aged, retired and depressed golfing lawyer falls inexplicably in love with a young woman who has escaped from a mental institution and is living in a greenhouse.  Set in the South and concerned, as the plot would suggest, with the incongruities of life, Walker Percy’s The Second Coming performs varied and skillful technical feats while managing to be a book that I would prefer not to read again.

4.0 / 10.0.

January 2010

Here’s the stuff I’ve been reading this month.

1. Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks (nonfiction)
2. The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (from Chera)
3. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (Christmas book)
4. Favorite Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton (more Chesterton)
5. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (Christmas book)
6. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (Holmes)
7. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (more Holmes)
8. That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis (third in the Space Trilogy)
9. A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges (from Collected Fictions)
10. Morality Play by Barry Unsworth (from Chera)
11. Sabriel by Garth Nix (a reread)
12. The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley (Christmas book)
13. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (this month’s funniest read)
14. The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa (for fun)
15. This Is Not the Way We Came In by Daryl Scroggins (by a professor I know)
16. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (for Modern British Fiction)
17. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (for Form and Theory)

Good heavens, what a month of books!  I read almost a book a day during the first week of the year, but this past week I’ve only been able to finish two, so that will be a measure of how many books I should expect to read in February.  Probably all of them will say “for class” in parentheses after the author.

My favorite book was The Book of Chameleons, followed closely by a tie with A Study in Scarlet and Juliet, Naked, and my least favortites were The Little Disturbances of Man and Lord Jim, the former because for the first half of each story it was unclear who was talking to whom and why, and the latter because of the long sentences which required mental diagramming for comprehension.

As usual, I will write reviews upon request.

Geerbten

What does this word mean?

I encountered it in a sentence around these other words: “The old, [geerbten] and the modern furniture.”  From the surface, I deduced that geerbten is a synonym of old and an antonym of modern, that it is an adjective, and that it can describe furniture.  However, geerbten is not in the dictionary.

Fine, says I.  Disregarding the adjective ending -en, the word geerbt looks like a past participle, which means that I would need to find the root word in order to look it up.  To find the infinitive, if the word follows the regular patterns, I must remove the prefix ge- and the ending -t, and replace the original infinitive ending -en.  Now I have the word erben.

Happily, erben is in the dictionary, and it means “to inherit”; and the noun “Erbe,” I learn, can mean both inheritance and heir.  From here I must reconstruct the word, backwards.  “To inherit” becomes the past participle form of the verb “[have] inherited,” which becomes the adjective “inherited.”  It works logically and etymologically.

The old, inherited and the modern furniture stand together with a feeling for style.

The satisfaction of solving the translation puzzle is not quite enough to counter the loss of ten minutes of my morning.  I will rejoice when I am living on the other side of this exam.

I Want This

The Book of Eli

If you like great acting, great writing, and great cinematography, you need to see The Book of Eli.

It has a twist, it has a tragedy, it has hope.  It’s one of my new favorite movies.

The plot goes like this.  Denzel Washington has a book.  People want it.  He doesn’t want to give it to them.

The Book of Eli also constitutes one of the best treatments of religion I’ve ever seen from a film.

Here’s the official trailer if you need additional persuading.

Are you buying your movie ticket?  Buy your movie ticket.  It’s worth it.

Deutsch

I wish someone had told me, as a second semester sophomore, that I ought to have taken German IV.  Because the graduate school I now attend requires two full years of a college-level foreign language, which I don’t have.  So either I have to take German IV, five years later, or I have to pass a translation exam.

The translation exam is 400-500 words long.  I will have two (or, according to some documents, three) hours.  I may supply my own dictionary or dictionaries.  It is pass/fail.  The test is offered once a semester, in this case on February 25.

So for the next few weeks I will be spending about an hour a day on my German.  I’ve already supplied myself with an easy textbook to bolster my courage, an intermediate textbook to deflate it, and a book on German verbs.  I am about to run by the bookstore for the Oxford German Dictionary, and I have already begun the search for my Langenscheidt dictionary (however, of which I begin to despair).  In addition to translating from my intermediate textbook, I will be working on a children’s novel, German Wikipedia articles, and, perhaps, a bit of Kafka or the Grimm brothers.

Note to self:  I don’t have to be fluent, or even proficient.  I only have to pass.