Stolen Meme

1. The Book I’m Currently Reading

Number9Dream by David Mitchell.  Eiji Miyake has come to Tokyo to find his father but becomes embroiled in impossibly twisted complications including, yes, mobsters.

2. The Last Book I Finished

The last book I didn’t finish was The Scroll of the Dead by David Stuart Davies, a “Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” book.  And before that, I read a magazine, which isn’t properly a book.  So the answer to this one is Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood, a collection of seven lectures/essays about writing and writing theory.

3. The Next Book I Want to Read

This is always the hardest question.  I’m considering reading my most recent acquisition (see below), or else rereading the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin, or else rereading the Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner.  Or I’m also considering changing my mind several times before I choose.

4. The Last Book I Bought

“Bought” here reads more like “acquired,” since I obtained When the King Comes Home by Carolyn Stevermer by trading in other books and receiving store credit.  It’s fantasy, I’d enjoyed the Wrede & Stevermer books, and the first page caught my interest well enough.

5. The Last Book I Was Given

You’d think that my imminent graduation would have produced more books for this category, ahem, but the last book I received as a gift came from my mother: A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley, the third in the delightful Flavia de Luce series.

January 18

1.  First Day of School.  This morning I got my new parking sticker and last textbook, so I’m all prepared for my first class of the semester tonight.  I’m definitely not prepared for getting back to teaching tomorrow, but there’s time yet.

2.  The Crying of Lot 49.  I read the first three chapters, then skimmed the rest, because I just didn’t get it.  I do get that it’s supposed to be a satire, but I suspect I was born in the wrong decade to truly appreciate it.  Thomas Pynchon must be something one studies rather than reads for enjoyment.

3.  Jingo.  Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, is something one reads for a lot of enjoyment indeed.  I love the books about Sam Vimes and the City Watch best.

4.  Word Count.  I should be writing my novel right now.  I should be reaching 30,000 words.  Instead, I’m thinking about making cookies and reading more about the pending war between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch.  And instead of actually doing any of these things, I’m blogging about them.  Blogging: Procrastination Has Never Been So Meta.

January 2

Fine.  I give in.

My Year in Brief

January.  Chera comes to visit, and I read a lot of books.  My second semester in graduate school starts up, and I vanish into the Vortex of Busyness, but not before I manage to write the story that will become “The Mind’s Eye.”

February.  I am still in school, reading modernist fiction for class and being the TA for three classes.  I write a story composed of a series of vignettes and based on Katherine Mansfield’s short story “At the Bay,” because one of my classmates implied that not everyone was good at writing vignettes.

March.  Is it bad that I can’t remember what I did for Spring Break?  I probably caught up on reading and grading.  Anyway, the most important thing that happened this month was that A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner came out and that I read it and loved it.

April.  I work on my final projects all month.  This is actually my best reading month of the year, in appearance, anyway, because I read a bunch of short books.  I also begin my addiction to the Amelia Peabody mystery series by Elizabeth Peters; I will eventually read twelve or thirteen of them.

May.  My first year of grad school is done!  To my surprise, but apparently to no one else’s, I got all As.  After everything is finished, I lay on the couch for a couple of weeks, recovering.

June.  I can’t really remember what I did in June, either.  I am out of school–oh yes, I am writing.  I begin working on “WHATSIT,” a sequel to “THING,” and I pack up for the month of July.

July.  Not only do we make the annual Fourth of July trip to Arkansas, but we also house-sit for my parents in Oklahoma for the whole month.  I write a third or fourth version of my novel “Names of Water,” as well as a humorous short story called “Planet B,” and I do a lot of visiting of friends and reading in the recliner.

August.  Class resumes, this time with me at the front of a classroom, to my horror.  I almost hyperventilate on the first day of class before I begin teaching College Writing I.  They did give me a cubicle, however, for which I am still grateful.  I write “She Who Has No Earth” in the space of a single day.

September.  This month is lost in the morass of the Grad School Schedule.  Somewhere in there, I turn twenty-three.  Plus, I learn to hate Cormac McCarthy.  This is the worst month for reading and for writing–I do little of either.

October.  After passing my German exam, I travel to Colorado with Chera to give a presentation at the Sirens Conference.  It is a good trip, but altitude sickness is a wicked thing.  I don’t think I wrote anything significant this month either.  Or maybe I did: “The Conquest of the World” may have been written toward the end of the month.

November.  Wishing I were able to write a NaNoWriMo novel, I write a paper about Russell Banks instead.  I am able to take off briefly for Thanksgiving, but may have been too dazed to enjoy it.  Sorry, everyone.

December.  I finish up my three final projects for the semester, including final grades for my students, and at once we are off for a two-week, two-state road trip, to Oklahoma and Arkansas and back.  After a marvelous New Year’s Eve dinner with friends, I stay up for ten minutes past midnight to farewell the old year.

I sense that 2011 will be the Year of the Thesis, at least at the beginning, and the Year of Taking It Easy and Enjoying My Master’s Degree at the end.  At least, that’s what I hope.  School made me pretty ragged, and I’m aware that I need a break.

Do I have one or more resolutions?  Not really.  To read and write and try to get things published.  I’m definitely expecting to graduate, but beyond that, anything goes.  I’m happy to entertain suggestions…

September 16

It happened.  I’m finally busy again.

It’s the kind of busy where every hour of every day must be scrutinized and accounted for.  The line between work and school has all but disappeared, and I have lost the meaning of free time.

This to say: Don’t feel neglected, blog, if I neglect you.

I just think we need to spend some time apart for a while.

It isn’t you, it’s me.

June 21

I’ve been reading and writing, and I haven’t gone away yet, though I will, shortly, to Oklahoma for a while.  Until August.  But I’ll still blog.  Maybe.

I’m about ready to give up the Amelia Peabody series, which I’ve been reading for two months, but which has gone drastically downhill.  It’s such a shame!  I enjoyed the hilarity for the first few, but the three most recent have been decidedly lacking in quality.  Maybe I’ll give it one more book.  Because I’m generous like that.  But just in case, do you have any ideas for an alternate default series?  Light, easy, and fun, with plenty of books in the series already, and possibly a mystery?  (Don’t say Agatha Christie.  I’ve already been there.  Twice.)

I’m also working on a guest post for the American Literary Review blog, to which I’ll post a link when it goes up on Wednesday.  It’s about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth.  It’s a good book, far better than my post about it.

I read somewhere that you should avoid beginning most of your sentences or paragraphs with “I,” because that’s egotistical and, ultimately, uninteresting.

I guess I’m egotistical.  Which I wouldn’t mind, if I could be this guy.

Anton Ego

March 10

I should be a more faithful blogger, so in an effort to return to my previous state of posting a few times a week rather than a few times a month, I will write more casually about daily events.  Some of my blogging lethargy was a resistance to writing book reviews, which feels a bit like schoolwork.  Nevertheless, I still expect books to feature heavily on my blog, because, well, books are what I do.

1. Complaints.  I shall start off with a complaint about canceled classes.  While I, like any other student, pray to the god of the clock to be let out of class early, some part of me resents the wasted time and especially the wasted money.  No more evident was that than today, when a class that I assist, and for which I come to campus expressly on Wednesdays, was canceled without explanation.  I cooled my temper by reminding myself that I get paid the same whether I sit through the professor’s lecture or not, but if I’d known about the cancellation, I wouldn’t have even left the house.

2.  Books.  I am turning into a multiple-book reader.  Previously, in those glorious undergraduate days, when I had all the time I could ever want, I would read one book at a time, cover to cover, one after another.  Now I read in snatches, and several books at a time.  Right now I’m muddling through a biography of Katherine Mansfield and a 900-page mammoth by M.M. Kaye called The Far Pavilions.  I started it three days ago and haven’t even made it a third of the way through.

3.  Tea.  I’m a bit sad that whatever the Texan equivalent of winter is, is departing.  I’d been drinking two or three cups of tea a day, and now that it’s getting much warmer, I don’t always feel like sitting down with a steaming cup.  I remember vaguely a snippet from Andre Dubus III’s novel The House of Sand and Fog, which I read furtively in a bookstore, about how drinking hot drinks year-round helps you regulate your body temperature better, or something along those lines.  To me, though, the loss of afternoon tea is also the loss of the cookies or chocolates to accompany the PG Tips or Earl Grey.  Sugar and spice and everything nice.

4.  Capricious Washing Machine.  My washing machine is broken.  Sometimes.  Half the time, the basin doesn’t fill up initially; half the time, it doesn’t advance through the cycles properly; and the other half of the time (Can you count? I can’t.), it will work with no problems.  The broken times have apparently no logic or pattern to them.  Today it worked, tomorrow it may not.  But then again it might.  If not for these domestic imponderables, I fear my life would have no meaning.

Changes

You will, of course, notice some changes.  I hope you will find them agreeable.

If you should want me, I’ll be watching Alternate Realities nonstop for the next few days.