'11 reviews: in which I finally figure out how to use my Kindle

Note: Copy-pasted from Word. Any formatting issues are not my fault, they are Blogger's. 

8. A Simple Soul, Gustave Flaubert

Story time: my uncle is obsessed with electronics, so when I got into his alma mater, he was so proud that the most logical thing to do in his mind was to buy me a Kindle! So this novelette has the honor of being the first thing I read off my Kindle. All classics are free (!), so reading books just got a whole lot more convenient.

Flaubert has the honor of being one of my favorite (classics) authors. I found a beautiful old copy of Madame Bovary at the local library, hardbound and everything, last year, and it was a great read, though very sad. No surprise, A Simple Soul is also extremely depressing. It follows the life of a servant named Felicitee who, for most of her life, serves a widow with one son and one daughter. She pours her life into successively loving one being after another: first a young man, then her patroness’s daughter and son, then her own nephew, then a parrot. One after another, these beings die and leave her behind. Throughout, she keeps a love of God in her heart, but even he seems to desert her at the end, when she is left to die a pauper, deaf, blinded—agonizingly slowly. Yeah, I know, SPOILERS. The story’s really not about the plot, though, as Felicitee’s life is not very interesting and verges on the pathetic; it’s more about the meaninglessness of always living your life for others and never for yourself.

I much preferred Madame Bovary because…well, it had more plot. I liked this short piece, and it’s very self-contained, but I’d recommend Madame Bovary as a more interesting read.

9. The Professor, Charlotte Bronte

Remember for later: this was another book I read on my Kindle.

I love Jane Eyre. It’s my favorite (classic) book ever, and I want to watch the new movie! As in, REALLY badly!!! Anyway, The Professor, in my opinion, is not as good as Jane Eyre. This can’t be helped, as this was the novel Charlotte was working on when she died, so it’s not really complete; it shows, too, as the story kind of gets bogged down in preaching at some points, and it carries on too far past the wedding (SPOILER :P) at the end. It also has some annoying bits that would definitely not be considered PC today. For example, the narrator occasionally implies that only Protestants can be good and moral, and that anyone who is Catholic is sly and deceitful and sinful and all that. Um, yeah....

But what is the book about? Essentially, it follows a man named William Crimsworth, who after leaving college breaks his connections with his condescending richer relatives (class conflict commentary FTW) and makes up his mind to make his own way in the world, first turning to his long-lost brother to give him a start in trade. Obviously, given the title, that doesn’t work out, but he manages to get a position teaching at a school in Brussels, where he becomes a professor (essentially, a teacher of Latin and English). There, we follow his path towards becoming successful by hard work, both financially and in love.

If you look at it in the way you would a first draft, then it’s an amazing book; every plot twist is brilliant, and if you’re like me, you find yourself wholeheartedly shipping the main couple by the end. I would recommend if you read this and don’t know French, though, that you not get the Kindle free version, and that you not get a crappy edition without notes. It was assumed at the time that educated people all knew French, so when William gets to Brussels, basically every few lines, Charlotte will randomly switch to people talking in French in the book WITH NO TRANSLATION PROVIDED. You seriously don’t want to end up chained to Google Translate while reading like I was. -_-

Otherwise, I quite enjoyed The Professor, though not as much as I expected to. I do still recommend it.

'11 reviews: 5 quickies ;)

Note: any formatting problems, please, blame Blogger. Also, please note these were cross-posted, so some of what I say may be kind of outdated at this point.

3. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

This was a book I had to read for school; I was set to hate it for various silly reasons: this book was a substitution that only my teacher made for Tale of Two Cities (the traditional senior book at my school), we were supposed to read it and understand all its nuances after one weekend, etc. A lot of whiny reasons on my part, let’s just leave it at that.

However, I ended up really liking this book. Essentially, the novel is framed around a woman named Janie telling her friend, Phoebe, about her life. I loved following the epic journey she made through her experiences with love and life in her three marriages, ultimately coming into her own as an independent, strong woman whom you could really sympathize with.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, though I thought some of the symbolism completely beat you over the head. It was my first experience with a novel from the Harlem Renaissance period—definitely unique stylistically. It’s a bit of a surprise, but I recommend it very highly.

4. Master Harold…and the Boys, Athol Fugard

This was a play I had to read for school. It might be a little cheap for me to be counting all four plays we read, but they’re all separate works, so *shrug*.

The play looks at race relations in South Africa during the apartheid period and how lingering racism negatively affects the chances for a more equal future relationship. It’s a pretty heavy piece; the ending left me crying—but, then again, books make me cry often enough that that means very little. :P I’d probably recommend it if you’re feeling in a serious turn of mind, but personally, I would never have read it on my own. It just strikes me as the kind of play that’s more interesting in an academic context.

5. Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello

The second in the four play sequence I had to read for school. Stupid IB kids. *shakes fist*

Anyway, the title is fairly self-explanatory as to what the play is about: six characters in an unfinished play show up at a theater and ask the director to write their story and perform it. It’s in the same line as Camus and Beckett and that whole “existentialist/absurdist/whatever-ist” in-crowd.

I did not like this play, partly because absurdism ticks me off. I’ve never really cared for it because, while absurdism has its appeal, it’s always struck me as the easy way out to say that we’ll never reach the green light, but we keep rowing towards it regardless—blah blah blah, life is pointless, yeah, we get it. But I like to think there’s more purpose in the world than that.

Of course, I also might not have liked it because I had no clue what was going on for most of the play…nah, that can’t be it. Anyway, sorry, but I don’t recommend this play at all.

6. True West, Sam Shepard

The third in the four play sequence I had to read for school.

This play follows the relationship between two brothers, Lee and Austin, who gradually drive one another to insanity through their interactions. The premise of the play has Austin, your conventional preppy Ivy League stereotype, housesitting for their mother while she visits Alaska, in order that he may write an important screenplay for Hollywood in peace; Lee is your typical “desert rat”, who makes his living through stealing and other illegal ventures, drops in on his brother, ostensibly with the intention of robbing the suburban neighborhood on the sly. Everything is turned on its head, though, when the producer Austin is writing for loses a gamble to Lee at golf and promises the commission for a screenplay to Lee instead of Austin; crazy hijinks ensue as the two brothers try to fulfill one another’s roles and, essentially, become one another.

I highly recommend this play. It’s brilliant and funny and insightful, and the film version with John Malkovich is made of win! Seriously, if you haven’t read this before, go now.  :D

7. Translations, Brian Friel

The fourth (and final!) play in the four play sequence I had to read for school.

This play revolves around a hedge school in a small town in Ireland and the people who attend it regularly. The most notable of them: Hugh, the drunken schoolmaster; Manus, the lame son of the schoolmaster who helps out with teaching; Maire, the milkmaid and primary love interest of Manus; and Sarah, the sort of mute girl with a schoolgirl crush on Manus. The regular dynamic of the school is shook up, however, when Hugh’s long lost son Owen comes back to town as a translator for a regiment of English soldiers who are there to anglicize the names of Irish towns and geographical stuff for British maps. Of course, as in every story about Irish-English relations, ~drama ensues.

I liked this play, but as I don’t take Latin or Greek, many of the references in that language went over my head; Friel understands this, though, and tends to make it clear what he means even if you don’t know either language. It’s a little disconcerting, also, to have everyone in the play speaking English, even though ostensibly, you have your Irish people speaking Gaelic, your English people speaking English, and a select few (Hugh, Manus, and Owen) able to speak/understand both. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to send a message about how we’re “all human” and that “fundamentally, we all speak the language of humanity” or whatever, but it’s still hard to suspend belief. I think it’s an interesting read, but also fairly predictable and absurd in terms of how it ends; the ending is supposed to be parallel to the beginning and all that, but I don’t know, I guess it just left me a little unsatisfied.

'11 reviews: 2-in-1 deal, with a free play thrown in!

These are cross-posted, hence the copy-paste feel. Mostly included for completion purposes.

1. Agnes Gray, Anne Bronte

I’m fairly conventional about what I read, to be frank. I loved Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, but they were the only things I’d read by the Bronte sisters, and those are the best known among everything they wrote. Well, it’s justified for Emily, because that’s all she wrote, but that’s a whole ‘nother ballpark. Recently, I was told I was a bit of a book snob, so I thought I’d branch out a bit on my snobby-book-ness.

Now, Anne Bronte…let’s just say there’s a reason she’s the most overlooked of the sisters. Her prose style is pedantic, verging on the preachy, which irked me as I read; her plot and characters are dry, stale, and thoroughly unsympathetic. For the first half of the book, she explores some interesting social issues about how much was expected of governesses versus how little power they actually had, as well as, to some degree, class conflict and how little respect servants actually got at the time; some of the parallels to the modern day were very creepy. If she had stuck to that, I would have liked the book in the same way I like history, but it almost seems like she was obliged to stick in a romance that just bogged everything down. I wonder what made her feel the pressure to do that...

A study. The walls are lined by shelves, which are filled with books, set up in neat rows. ANNE is hunched over a writing desk, which is lit by sunlight steaming in from the nearby window; the desk is bare except for a neat stack of papers, the pages of a half-finished manuscript. CHARLOTTE watches her sister write in silence, nodding to herself as she reads along.

CHARLOTTE: pointedly, as though lecturing a child You know that you’re never gonna be able to actually sell copies of that social commentary crap, right?

Anne looks up from her work. She seems confused and turns to face her sister.

ANNE: But…. She pauses. But I’m giving insightful social commentary!

CHARLOTTE: So? NO ONE CARES. Trust me, I’m an expert. Unlike you, I’ve actually sold something. Anne looks hurt, and Charlotte hastily backtracks. Hey, now, don’t take that the wrong way. Just take this as good sisterly advice. Put a romance in, and then people might actually take a look at it.

ANNE: quietly B-but I’m a shy recluse, and I don’t know anything about that.

CHARLOTTE: Too bad. Make something up.

ANNE: Make…?

CHARLOTTE: She makes an impatient hand gesture. It’s fiction, not real life, dumbass.

ANNE: …okay, if you think so.

She takes one last look at the partly written on page in front of her and, sighing, crumples it up, tossing it over her shoulder. The ball of paper falls to the ground.

CHARLOTTE: There, see? We’ll make a real author of you yet!

*cough* Anyway, so Anne Agnes ends up spending the latter half of the novel mostly moping around about how she can’t get the guy she wants because she has no backbone and how pious and good he is and how she will never have a chance with him because…blah blah blah, I don’t care, wimp. Ugh. My biggest problem with the latter half is that the guy she falls for is a complete spineless wimp, too. I guess they deserve each other. Overall, I thought it was okay, but it definitely deteriorates in the second half.

2. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

I found this book on my dad’s shelf and had vaguely heard of it, so I gave it a read. It became obvious pretty quickly that this was the kind of book you either love or hate with a passion. The best way to describe this book is as a sort of modern day Gulliver’s Travels, except with a thoroughly annoying, irredeemable protagonist.

Allow me to introduce Ignatius J. Reilly: a lazy, whiny self-professed philosopher obsessed with the writings of Boethius, deeply moralistic and worshipper of the goddess Fortuna, a frequent movie-goer and fat slob—a man of infinite contradictions. Despite his ~superior intellect, he has no practical skills, so he continues to mooch off his mom while “working” on a book on Boethius. When she gets drunk one night, however, and crashes the family car into a building, she finds her dead husband’s life insurance isn’t enough to pay for the damages, so she forces Ignatius to go out and find a job. That’s just an excuse, though, for the many misadventures that we find our anti-hero Ignatius being entangled in throughout the rest of the novel, all against the backdrop of the crazy city of New Orleans, where insane subplots abound and no one ever behaves quite how you’d expect. By the end, all the characters have forgotten about their original motivations, so don’t worry if you do, too.

I liked the book, but I thought a lot of the humor was either dated or fell flat. When it was funny, though, it was very funny, as in hilariously, absurdly laugh-out-loud funny. Despite never liking Ignatius, I did root for him by the end, and the ending, though not happy per se, was imminently satisfying. I do recommend giving the book a try, but I can also see it not being to everyone’s tastes.

Internet, meet your newest blogger!

Welcome to my first post here! It's one of many blogs I've started and tried to keep up with, so let's see if I can keep this one better updated. I'll start with a quote, since I do need a better place than my Facebook page to keep track of all the quotes I like.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read the entirety of Self-Reliance here.

I can remember reading Thoreau's Walden in tenth grade English class and spending all year on it. I hated that book. But it's a little weird, because I do like some Transcendentalist ideas, and I freaking love Emerson. I'd expound on that, but I think I'll save it for a future post.

The reason for this particular quote is, of course, the blog's title. I personally believe in consistency; I try my damnedest in life to be a consistent person in what I do, in how I deal with people, in everything I can. Like everyone else, of course, I can be a hypocrite--it's human nature--but I try not to be. Perhaps it is a foolish consistency, but if I do not hold on to that, how is anything that I do more than just the erratic workings of the universe? Shouldn't I be more purposeful and thus...consistent?

I know, I know, that's not exactly what Emerson was talking about here; I got onto my own little tangent. Regardless, I revel in the idea of being consistent. And that is why this blog is called what it is. (:

Some things to expect in future from this blog:

1. Song analysis! I listen to my iPod too much for my own good, so I read too much into my music. I've never been particularly musically astute, but the words? Heck yeah, you're gonna be ripped apart when I listen to you!
2. Book reviews! I'm working on a 100 book meme that I started for another blog that's kind of inactive at the moment, so I might cross-post that.
3. School stuff! Next year, I won't have my parents for that kind of ranty goodness at all hours, so it will probably go here next year instead.
4. Weird ramblings! See the above post.
5. Science! There's so much cool stuff that's going on out there, it just needs to be talked about sometimes.
6. Writing! Because I still do this, and I plan on doing JulNo again this summer. I'm working on fanfic again, and I have a brand spankin' new idea for something to write. Entirely new, no longer about the "Clare Arbor" 'verse. It's gonna be awesome!
7. And hopefully much, much more!

I hope to post again tomorrow. I have something...special in mind that is the perfect note to end the week on. Heh. Pun.

Until then, good night.