This journal is friends only out of paranoia, but if you'd like to be friends, just comment. I'd like for us to have some things in common, though, and I'd also like to know a little about you. Please tell me where you found me.

1. The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. Pretty good, actually. It made me like Margaret Atwood a lot more, and the science-fiction bits were entertaining, since I don't usually read scifi.
2. The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond. This was okay, I guess, but the ending wasn't very believeable and the writing was... oddly familiar.
3. Uglies, by Scott Westerfield. My rating: I need to stop reading books for friends. Halie wanted me to read this one. It had a few big plot holes; the characterization was meh; things weren't clear enough.
4. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. (for class) The beginning was really good; it's one of those books with layers.
5. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. (for class) It gave me some really intense images.... I got a lot out of it, especially with all the discussions we had in class.
6. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (for class).
7. The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston (for class). All the books I've read by Chinese-American authors are eerily similar....
8. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (for class)
9. The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards.
10. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevky (re-read) (for class)
11. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (10/10) But I'm definitely going to have to read it again.
12. If you want to Write: A book on Art, Independence, and Spirit, by Brenda Ueland (nonfiction)
13. Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus. (More Greek plays!)
14. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson.
15. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (for class)
16. the ground beneath her feet, by Salman Rushdie
17. The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer
18. Exile and the Kingdom, by Albert Camus.
19. East, West, by Salman Rushdie
20. Fury, by Salman Rushdie
21. The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy (I'm getting to love these Russian novelists...)
22. Mind Scan, by Robert J. Sawyer
23. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
24. Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer (all this science fiction I've been reading lately made me realize the genre's not as bad as I'd always thought :))
25. Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (I really liked this)
26. 1984, by George Orwell
27. The Host, by Stephanie Meyers (Lourdes made me read this... somebody stop me.)
28. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
29. The Likeness, by Tara French
30. Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proulx
31. The Trial, by Franz Kafka (he's a crazy man, this Kafka guy....)
32. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
33. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
34. The Wall (Intimate) by Jean-paul Sartre
35. Into the Woods, by Tara French
36. Never Let me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
37. My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
38. Rant, by Chuck Palanhuik
39. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
40. The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
41. The Promise, by Chaim Potok

I am reading: The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (which is shaping up to be excellent)

I’ve been reading the first of two books by Tara French. This one is called In the Woods (published in 2007), and is about a boy who saw something terrible happen to two friends out in the woods one day, had an attack of amnesia and couldn’t remember any of it. When he grew up he became a murder detective for the Irish police force, and has been called back to that same area to deal with the body of a young girl. As I was reading this book, I kept seeing these really bizarre parallels between this book and another, The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (published in 1992). Some of them are too close to be coincidences, and those are the passages that I’ve laid out here, for you to see and decide about for yourself. Aside from these passages, though, there is also something very similar about the language of both books, a similarity of sentence structure, of voice, and of tone. It’s beautiful, wistful, imagery–heavy. Most of that is easier to pick up on when reading the book itself, but you might be able to pick up on some of it just by reading these passages. Again, much of it seems too similar to be just a coincidence, or even unintentional borrowing, but you can see for yourself.

Another (this time definite) senior project story. The title is German for 'substitute' or 'replacement'.

I could put a hand through the world
It seems so thin, so
Surreal. Lights hang like islands, and fog
Obscures the distance.

Narrow streets shrink the city to microcosms.
We walk like strangers, awe-struck;
We wonder at the distance of
Feet from head

But these things too will fade away;
The memory will go
Like all the others:
Quickly.

Here are the best of the Europe pictures. Finally :)

( To London! )

Light splits the hills, and
Colour comes spilling out:
What suddeness!
Riots erupt in the hills;
Insanity sweeps through the trees.
Rooted, helpless,
They resist the slow death,
The months-long death
As they slip, unstoppably,
Into blue chills and ice.

We can only endure,
Slow-stepping down
Sidewalks slicked
With the possibility of accidents.
Melancholy, we wait
For winter to flee this
Sad, silent place, full of crackings.
Black birds clutch at their perches.

(Notes: I'd written a little bit as we were driving home from Oregon the other day, but only a few lines. And then yesterday, as I was reading one of my Plath books (I'm doing my research paper on her from my senior project), I started to work on it again, and the whole thing came out in less than fifteen minutes. :))

I tried to sew myself up today;
Using books and guitar strings
I reached down to fix the wound,
A self-doctoring of
Internal bleeding.

Please sew me up, shut me up,
Stuff me with pills.
Put a stopper in me please, sir undertaker;
For a week I’d like to die.