The Favourite Game-->Leonard Cohen

Oh, I love Canadian literature. There have really been some extraordinary Canadian authors out there.

I for one, have never been one to love Leonard Cohen's deep, frightening tones backed by feeble, trapped female singers BUT I do love the way he writes. This was my first venture into his literary world, I have not read his poetry, but this was a very good read.

First of all, I loved the subject matter. I have been reading a lot of Montreal Canadian writing this year, seeing as I will be living there next year, and knowing Montreal as a place made the story so much more visual.

Leonard Cohen writes in a very thoughtful way and I feel that the way he described people says a lot about how he looks a people. The transition the main character goes through from childhood to adulthood (said to be semi-autobiographical) is just so smooth yet interrupted by small dramatic hiccups. The personalities were very strong in this book and easy to envision.

Even though this was a novel, there is something noticeably lyrical and poetic about the writing.

"Friendship? A friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism. When I see a woman's face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we've met. Anything else is fiction. That's the vocabulary we speak today. It's the only language left."

"It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were made of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood."

"When they were awake there were too many possibilities, egos to encounter, faces to interpret, worlds to enter. The variety was confusing. It was hard enough to meet one other person. A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love."

"Mozart came loud over the PA, sewing together everything that Breavman observed. It wore, it married the two figures bending over the records, whatever the music touched, child trapped in London Bridge, mountain-top dissolving in mist, empty swing tocking like a pendulum, the row of glistening red canoes, the players clustered underneath the basket, leaping for the ball like a stroboscopic photo of a splashing drop of water- whatever it touched was frozen in an immense tapestry. He was in it, a figure by a railing."

"After a heavy snow we would to into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems."

The Bell Jar--> Sylvia Plath

i had been meaning to read The Bell Jar for sometime. it was offered to me by one of my teachers the other day, and i gratefully accepted. right now, i have no traveling, but lots of school work. this book acted as my recess from countless essay preparations i have had to work on this week. i also read it while walking down the sidewalk to the train station in the morning.

i am not quite certain exactly what my expectations were when i finally came upon the opportunity to read it, but i feel that anything i was hoping for was fulfilled. the way Sylvia Plath wrote in this novel was flawless. she used so many descriptive phrases that were so fitting and that provoked such strong imagery- exactly what i look for in literature. i have heard this book described as 'depressing' before, but i found it to be the exact opposite. at no point while reading it was i brought down by its content. in fact, i thought the way in which the plot functioned and was illustrated was quite unique.

the only other works of Sylvia Plath that i had read were a few of her poems, including Mirror. i noticed some similarities in the mysterious yet undemanding nature of her poetry and her literature.

the work is said to be semi-autobiographical, and this was very intriguing. so many aspects of her personality and life that are projected through this book leave me wondering what she was really like, and noticing parallels between her thought process and my own. the way that she went about describing her situation (the main character, Esther's) showed a magnificent and smooth evolution both in reason and individual.

my most-liked quotes:

"Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again."

"...I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until i was nine years old. After that - in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-colour lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and black-bottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day- I have never been really happy again."

"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose."

"All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap."

"At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. They I realized it was because there were no windows."

"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow."

"The air of the bell jar wadded around me and I couldn't sit."

"Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them."

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."

Into the Wild--> Jon Krakauer

while traveling in Nepal and trekking the Himalayans, i had planned on reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, but i never got ahold of a copy (a.k.a. there wasn't one in our school library). with some leftover rupees that i had to spend, i purchased Into the Wild at the Kathmandu airport and finished it within two days.

i did see the movie when it came out (i think about a year ago) and i really enjoyed that, and i always meant to read the book, but it didn't occur to me, really, before i saw it in the airport for 300 rupees.

Into the Wild is a true story of a young man who decides to abandon the restraints of society to make his way to 'rough it' in Alaska. though it was a true story, the material wasn't dry and hard to read. the book is relatively short and written very well. it follows Chris McCandless on his journey with excerpts from various diaries he kept along the way and testimonials from people he met along the way. something i also liked about the book was the fact that Krakauer weaved in his own experiences. there were noticeable parallels between he and Chris and his writing displayed the fact that he was relating to the experiences of this boy.

the concept of the drive behind the desire for escape is something we all dream about. i felt that i could relate to Chris McCandless's opinions on the world and how society has turned into such a disposable, mechanical and counterfeit environment. the idea of abandoning all that and living so organically looks so tempting. at the beginning of each chapter, there are notable quotes that were indicated by McCandless that have a clear correlation to what he was thinking and feeling during his escapades.

the book made me dream of doing just what he did and how freeing it would be.

the other great thing about Into the Wild was that it acts as a guidebook to reading if you relate to the story. some of the books McCandless had read sounded pretty heavy (Thoreau, Boris Pasternak and the like) but definitely worth looking into to get a true sense of his passionate escapades.

i believe this is a passage from Doctor Zhivago, a book he was reading, and this was one of the paragraphs he underlined. it really speaks to the theme of the book, and though this is not FROM the book, i thought it described the thread running through the story. at the top of the page he wrote NATURE/PURITY:

"Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!"

The Naked and the Dead--> Norman Mailer

this year, i have read a lot of war literature. i have always loved the collision of the literary world and historical fact, and this book was the perfect combination, just that.

though people can sometimes be skeptical about reading fictional war literature, i urge you to try this one. it gives a splendid visual account of the conditions and situation of WWII and i trust Norman Mailer on this one- he was drafted in 1943 and served in the Philippines during WWII.

the book follows a band of men situated on the island of Anopopei, and island occupied by the Japanese. each character has very distinct qualities, and though there are quite a few of them, it is easy to distinguish. (i found that very difficult in Catch 22 for example. almost like i wanted to make a list of every character and draw little illustrations of them.)

as i mentioned before, this book is outstanding with its visual descriptions. it gives you a plain sense of the environment and a graphic account of the events.

here are a few quotes i found to be exceptionally good:

"It still looked untenanted from three miles out but the ornament of battle was there- a thin foggy smoke drifted along the water. Occasionally a flight of three dive bombers would buzz overhead and lance toward shore, the sound of their motors filtering back in a subdued, gentle rumble. When they dove on the beach it was difficult to follow them, for they were almost invisible, appearing as flecks of pure brilliant sunlight. The puff their bombs threw up looked small and harmless and the planes would be almost out of sight when the noise of the explosions came back over the water."

"He brought his spoon up, chomped at the remote sweet pulp of the canned peach which mingled so imperfectly with the nervous bile in his throat, the hot, sour turmoil of his stomach."

"And then the sounds seemed to vanish. Or rather, his ear could hear only the silence; for several minutes there was a continued alteration between the sounds and the quiet, as if they were distinct and yet related, like a drawing of some cubes which perpetually turn inside-out and back again."

"It came from the books they had never read, and the movies they shouldn't have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren, eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless, they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them."

these are few of many examples in this book where the wording is just impeccable, explicative, and so unbelievably illustrative. it gives a clear picture of the 'horrors of war', while also embellishing the parts without action- the life of men aside from their fighting.

welcome

reading is of the essence for me. it is the one thing i will be happy doing anytime, anywhere. i guzzle words.

i adore recommending books to people, talking about them, and getting suggestions.

here i review.

Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and
a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know. -John Keats