Living in a Book

One of the blurbs on the back of Stephenie Meyer's book The Chemist says in part that "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there."

Well, I for one would not enjoy that at all. First she gave us the Twilight books. Vampires, shape-shifters, and werewolves. All of them get their lives pretty disrupted. Okay, maybe life as one of the background characters would be alright, but I don't see how their lives would be any better than my own.

Then we've got the post-apocalyptic world in The Host. I have yet to find any post-apocalyptic world more appealing than my current reality.

And next comes The Chemist. The characters in this book have a kill-or-be-killed existence for the majority of the story, with a touch of living in hiding, constantly looking over their shoulders. Still not something I'd choose.

If I did have to climb inside a book and live there, I think I'd have to go with a straight romance genre. Their misfortunes tend to be along the lines of lost jobs, minor accidents, and miscommunication. I'm not really eager to experience such things, but at least I'm not highly likely to die from them. Plus, I have a pretty good chance of finding true love in the bargain.

Love Hierarchy

When great love is rejected, Rosalee, something inside a man dies, so all he can do is run away. And he can meet the girl he'll love second most.

-Angelica, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton

I don't think I could ever marry the man I loved second most. Suppose my great love rejected me. After that, I just wouldn't get married if I couldn't find somebody I believed I loved more than I had loved him. To do otherwise would feel fundamentally dishonest.

Actually, I couldn't even seriously date someone after that if I still wanted the first guy more than the new one.

Beautiful Beast

Earlier this summer, I read a new (to me) retelling of Beauty and the Beast. As usual, at the end of the story the Beast turns human because Beauty confesses her love for and to him. Although this version didn't say much about the Prince's human appearance, he typically is depicted as being very handsome. And for probably the first time, I wondered how Beauty felt about that.

Generally in the story, it is a good thing - she is able to see past his exterior and love him for who he is, so she is rewarded with a handsome exterior that she can be actually attracted to. But she learned to love the Beast for who he was. And who you are does include, to some extent, your physical body.

She probably does eventually get used to and appreciate his new form. But how long does it take for her to look at him and see her Beast?

Applied Scripture Study

For some reason, I've been thinking lately about an LDS romance novel I read years ago. I can't remember the title or author and can't find that information online. I do remember the plot, including many minor details. But most of that doesn't really matter.

What does matter for my purposes, and what I've mainly thought about it (besides trying to remember the title and author because it bothers me that I can't), is that the main character, Sydney, is reading through the Book of Mormon, one chapter a day. And every day, she tries to apply what she reads into her life. When she comes across a chapter and can't quite embrace the message she is getting from it, she rereads that chapter the next day. And the next. And the next. She does not move on to the next chapter until she feels that she is really improving in that area (I feel like it had something to do with hope, but I'm not 100% on that).

As I remember her pattern of scripture study, I wonder how following a similar program would work with me. Would it help me focus more on self-improvement? Would I get overwhelmed by the constant addition of new attributes to focus on? Or would I get stuck on one chapter for so long that I would get sick of it and move on to some other system?

They Are Also Sayd to Love

I don't really believe in love at first sight.

As I said on here before, the word love can actually be a bit unspecific. So, to clarify, it is possible to care about somebody the first time you see them. It is even possible to care deeply about someone early on.

But when it comes to being actually in love with somebody, it takes more time. In Win a Date With Tad Hamilton, after Tad tells Rosie that he loves her, she says, "You maybe wanna love me, but I think what you love right now is the idea of me. You can't love someone for what they stand for or what they seem to be. You have to love them for their details; for the little things that are true for them and only them." And I'm not sure how exactly I share that feeling, but I do know that for certain types of love, including what I tend to think of in association with the phrase "love at first sight", you need to know somebody well.

This past spring, I was really bothered by how often in literature characters are depicted as being 'in love' with someone they barely know. The offender I remember most clearly is The Three Musketeers, probably because of a combination of it being what I was reading when I got really irritated and because it is particularly bad in this regard. As I remember it, d'Artagnan, the protagonist, falls in love with two different women he knows absolutely nothing about. The first woman he finds out is really bad news, and he falls out of love with her fairly quickly - more quickly than I think would be possible for anything I would consider more than a crush. If it had come out that he had just thought himself to be in love, that would be one thing. But no, it is referred to as though he really had been in love and just got over it. I sometimes thought that maybe it was a problem with the translation; that the French had different words that more exactly expressed the nature of the feelings. But I wasn't completely convinced. Partly because I had noticed similar issues in books I read in their original language - English.

Last Wednesday I was reading Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. In Chapter VI, Hobbes defines a number of the terms he will be using throughout the book. About love, he says, "That which men Desire, they are also sayd to LOVE: and to HATE those things, for which they have Aversion. So that Desire, and Love, are the same thing..."

As I read that, I thought that reading 'love' to mean 'desire' would work really well for me in books such as The Three Musketeers.

A Literary Name Nerd

I was reading Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey and found this passage:

Though my father and I never discussed names again, that afternoon marked the beginning of my fascination with them. I began to make a study of names, collecting them much like other children collected coins or stamps or dolls.

It wasn't simply the sound of a name that appealed to me, though I did enjoy this: the way a name felt inside your mouth as you formed its syllables, the space it occupied in the air when you pronounced it. But there was also the way a name and the person who bore it got along together. For this, or so it always seemed to me, was the heart of what a name is all about.

It really tickled me to find this. It's the first time I ever saw name love come up in a novel.

Loverly

The first time I watched My Fair Lady, I was a teenager with dreams of perfect romance and I thought Eliza should end up with Freddy. After all, he was the young, attractive boy who was so smitten with her that he was happy just to wait around outside her door, then followed her to the bad part of town because he was concerned for her safety before escorting her home again.

Several years went by and I watched it again. My ideas of romance had changed somewhat since then, and this time I saw Freddy as a foolish boy with too few responsibilities and who was infatuated with Eliza because she was different than the girls he was used to. But I still don't like her going back to Professor Higgins. He treats her like an object. And the revelation that he treats her the same as everybody else, which was supposed to be a good thing, is the biggest turn-off of all. I'd rather a man treat me poorly because of some personal bias than because he just doesn't have any respect for people in general.

So I think the best ending for Eliza would be to be set up in a flower shop, like she had wanted at the beginning. Sure, it would be hard at first. But she'd adjust. And it'd be better than being married off to a man who has no concern for anybody other than himself or to a man who could never understand where she came from.

Adjusting

One day last week when I was in a hurry to get to my bus on time, I grabbed the first book I saw with an interesting cover, skimming the blurb on the dust jacket to make sure it was fiction. (Yes, I judge books by the cover. So do you.) This book turned out to be LEFT Neglected by Lisa Genova, a story about a woman who develops left neglect after being in a car crash.

Left neglect is a rather fascinating disorder. When I read the dust jacket properly after leaving the house, I was actually a bit excited to realize it played a major role in the story. Basically, left neglect is your brain neglecting the left side, like you forget it's there. Everything physically works. You can see everything in front of you, but you aren't aware of anything to the left. Your limbs send sensation information. But your brain just ignores all that information. You can't consciously move your left arm or left leg, because your brain won't send them signals.

Anyway, when this lady's insurance won't pay for any more time in the rehabilitation center, she goes home. But while she was gone, her family made some changes. Because she didn't process what she saw on the left side, and she couldn't always move her left leg when walking or use her left arm to catch her, tripping became a real issue. So all the area rugs were removed from the house. Railings and grab bars were installed on the stairs and in the shower. They put brightly colored tape on the left sides of the door-frames in an attempt to get her attention, so she'd know they were there. And her mother moved in with them to help out. There were other changes, too, but you get the idea.

So I wondered what it would be like to come home and realize that your family has rearranged their home or their lives for you. Then I realized that my own family did to a certain extent when I was diagnosed with diabetes years ago. But at the time, I was just a little kid and didn't think much about how other people were affected, and now, everything just feels normal.

I also wondered how it would be to rearrange your home or life to accommodate new limitations for a loved one.

In my English class when I was a senior in high school, we once got into an argument about who had it harder during war - the boys, who were out fighting, or the girls at home, not knowing whether their men were alive or dead and not able to do anything about it. Well, while reading this book, I started wondering whether it would be harder to be the person who is living with the injuries and the knowledge of what her family is sacrificing for her or to be the family making the sacrifices and watching their daughter, wife, or mother suffer. Upon realizing that the men at war are actually seeing their friends die, I decided they have it harder. But I still don't know about this scenario.

Reading Responses

When your typical day involves spending between 4 and 5 hours riding or waiting for buses and trains, it's pretty easy to find time to read. So I've done a lot of reading since this April. And a couple of books that I read last month have been demanding that I make mention of them on here.

The first is a book that I've been trying to read since I bought it as a recommended book for a class I took Fall of 2006. It normally doesn't take me anywhere near 4 years to read a book, especially of this length - it's only about 160 pages. But this one, Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition by Barbara J. Risman, was tough because it is based on an assumption that I just cannot get behind. In fact, it goes completely against what I believe to be true. The underlying belief of this book is that we, as a society, need to move beyond gender - that any difference between the sexes beyond basic anatomy is something that we need to get rid of. And it is hard work to read something that directly challenges deeply held convictions, such as that gender is good, right, necessary, and eternal.

There is a lot I could talk about here. She does include some pretty interesting studies, mostly with very solid methodology, and I could discuss what I think of her measures and results. Or I could try to evaluate what exactly I think gender is, because most of her measures I don't really consider accurate reflections of the real differences between masculinity and femininity. But I also can't figure out, if those measures aren't the difference, what is.

But what struck me most is her reasoning behind wanting a post-gendered society. In her introduction, she says, "Although some foraging societies may have had both a gender-based division of labor and near equality of men and women, such a scenario is unlikely in a post-industrial society, where ideology dictates that social position be based on achievement." She herself acknowledges that it is, or has been, possible to have gender divisions and at least near-equality. But there has never been a time in human history where gender was not an important structure in organizing society. So why this insistence on moving beyond gender? Wouldn't it be at least as easy to change society's view to see an equal value in "women's work"? After all, she herself says in the forward "The most important lesson I have learned, and from my mother, is that our post-gender families must elevate the traditionally female values of nurturing and homemaking above all else - for it is this work, what women have always done, that turns isolated individuals into families and communities, brick and mortar in hearth and home, and gives meaning to our lives." When she argues that the work traditionally done by men has greater prestige than that done by women, then says that the traditional women's contributions should be elevated above men's, I see the possibility of making them equal.

The other book I need to talk about is Lost Horizon by James Hilton. I actually did read this before but, oddly for me, remembered nothing other than the most basic ideas behind it. So it was a lot like reading it for the first time.

Before moving on, I must warn you that there may be spoilers coming.

From everything I've heard and read, Shangri-La is supposed to be a utopia. But in reading this book, I found it to be really disturbing. The main reason is probably that nobody is allowed to leave. It doesn't matter how nice the place is - if you can't leave, it is more prison than paradise. And that's the way things are in Shangri-La. And to add to it, they bring people in without warning them of this condition beforehand. Maybe it wasn't quite so bad when they were dealing with lost mountaineers who would have died anyway, but Conway's group was kidnapped for the very purpose of forcing them to come and stay.

Then the knowledge that when someone leaves the mountain they age drastically to where they would have been without the life-preserving properties of the mountain adds a little more creepiness to the situation.

I can see some of the appeal in the place, don't get me wrong. To have so much time to devote to little studies and hobbies and projects that you couldn't do in the regular world does have its draw. But I would still rather live a short life, maybe even in as confined an area, just to have the knowledge that I chose it.

Gratitude

In the fourth book of The Work and the Glory, a newly married couple are living in a sod hut that leaks mud when it rains. The wife suggests that they have a contest to see who can come up with more to be grateful for. They have fun with it, mentioning things like the fact that grass only grows up so they don't have to cut the grass on the ceiling. And at the end, they are both in a much better mood.

I think this is something everybody should probably do more often- look for the good and find the humor in the bad.

Dixie

A long time ago I read a book called The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It was an interesting read about the development of the English language.

But at one point, he mentions the Dixie accent in Utah. And he says nobody knows why it is called that. And that causes me to wonder how extensively he researched. Because I would think that if he actually talked to a few people who spoke with that accent, he would be able to learn about Utah's Dixie region. And I would have thought that if he planned to talk about the characteristics of a particular accent, he would want to hear it spoken.

But maybe that's just me.

Loosely Linked Thoughts on Names and Identity

If you want to know absolutely nothing about what happens to Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables before reading it in the novels and have not made it though the third volume then do not read this post.

Living Forever

Speaking of books, last December I read The Declaration by Gemma Malley. It was a decent enough book, but not one I would recommend or consider buying. It did, however, get me thinking a bit.

The concept is that a wonderdrug has been developed that stops aging and death. Most of the world's population takes it. And because the older generation is not dying off, there are not enough resources to support new children. So it is now illegal to reproduce unless you agree as a young adult not to take the drug.

So, after reading this book, I got to thinking- what would you do if you lived forever? One minor character did a lot of traveling. She has now been everywhere countless times. And as I see it, a large part of the fun of traveling is to experience new things. After a very long while, you would run out of things to experience. So, maybe just interacting with your friends. I do enjoy conversations with friends. But how long can you think of new topics? Could you really do that for an eternity without a changing world to bring up new inspiration? I really don't know about that one.

Then I thought, what will we do for eternity after we die? Heavenly Father's work is about his children. But will that work eventually change, or will he need to help us forever, or does he have an infinite number of children to send to earths? The idea of his having an infinite number of children is mind-boggling- but then, so is the idea of eternity. I have been known to attempt to ponder that when I feel the need to confront an idea I can't comprehend in order to create a pleasant brain ache. But the idea that He will later help us help our children as he helps us now is an interesting one that I will ponder further.

Marginalia

Towards the end of February, I posted in response to a book that I was reading at the time. Now I want to follow up with some other thoughts I had while reading the same section.

I may have mentioned that various people study the books that famous writers and scholars read, trying to understand how they thought. Well, one thing they study is their marginalia- the notes written in margins. Or commonplace books where others wrote their thoughts all together, combining the notes from their different readings in one convenient location. It mentioned the disappointment felt when some figure was found not to have notated their books in any noticeable way.

Well, that got me to thinking about my own habits. I never write in any books besides my scriptures. I have heard that it can help in studying- that the writing helps you retain information and then you are better able to return to significant sections for later study. But I never really took to it.

In high school, I had a few teachers who required me to write as I read. I had one English teacher who had us make notes as we read on post-it notes and stick them in the pages of our books. I mostly wrote them after finishing, and usually did not have as many notes as the other students. A history teacher made us outline the chapters of our textbook and turn them in as a regular assignment. And a different English teacher required us to in our notebooks write down the questions we had while reading on one side of a page and our insights and other non-question thoughts on the other.

Well, after doing these assignments, I found that I only found it all annoying. When I had to write down my thoughts as I read, it slowed me down, and the constant interruption disrupted the flow- of the story or narrative and of my thoughts. And after I finish reading something, I generally do remember the major insights I had. And I can come up with better ones with a better flowing story. And not making notes on a story never hurt my ability to write an essay about it. I could always think of plenty of points to defend my thesis. The only way notes could have made it easier would have been to help me find the relevant passages for quoting- which wasn't a big problem. I rarely use bookmarks, so am perfectly used to trying to find the right part of the book just by remembering what happens when and about how far into it I am. Since I do not find note taking helpful, I don't do it.

Well, that and the fact that I've read books with notations in them before, and they are as distracting as taking the notes myself- I am compelled to stop and read them, which disrupts the flow, and they rarely add to my comprehension or enjoyment. Plus, I have never read a book that I did not plan to let someone else read later on. Books are communal property in my family. Yes, they have an owner in name, but we all read everybody else's libraries, too. So in consideration to others, I leave my books blank.

Sorry, future researchers who desire to peer into my soul. You'll have to find some other way to figure me out. Good luck.

Are You What You Read?

My brother gave me a book for Christmas. This is not unusual- it is an off year when I don't get a few books. The title of this book is Every Book Its Reader, and it was written by Nicholas A. Basbanes.

The focus of this book is to look at the influence books have on individuals and the world. And while reading it, I keep trying to apply what it says to myself. When you read author interviews, one question that often comes up is "What authors influenced you?" And they usually manage to come up with at least a couple, sometimes citing a long list. But looking at my life and thoughts, the only books I can say for sure have influenced me are the scriptures. I can, of course, name authors that I read a lot and like the work of- David Lubar, Orson Scott Card, Shannon Hale, and Cynthia Voigt come to mind. And there are many others. But how much does what they write influence my thinking or my writing?

At one point in the book, Basbanes mentions the books that one writer cites or alludes to in his work. And I definitely allude to books and movies. Just on this blog, I've mentioned The Giver by Lois Lowry, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling, and the movies Guys and Dolls, In The Good Old Summertime, and Kiss Me, Kate. And I remember using a quote from Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine in my journal once as a teenager, and I use references in conversation to books and movies that I am reminded of, or that make good examples of what I am trying to express. But when I use a book to illustrate a thought I have, does it mean that I got the thought from that book, or is it something that I would have thought anyway? I think most of the time, I just like the way they expressed the thought I would have had. And I am now reminded of a quote from You've Got Mail. And now I realize that I have quoted the very next line to express why I write this blog. Anyway, the first quote- "So much of what I say reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" I wonder about that sometimes. And I think it doesn't really matter. At least when real life reminds you of a book, you know that somebody succeeded in representing reality in some way. And it means that at least I am experiencing life. Plus, having read about it before, I can have a better idea of how to best respond. Sort of like why they say we study history- to learn from other people's experiences. Right?

All that said, I really do believe that the things you read impact who you become. I just don't know how to measure that influence.

And in case you were curious, the other quote from You've Got Mail is, "I don't really want an answer. I just wanna send this cosmic question out into the void. So, goodnight, dear void."

Pure Disbelief

This post contains major spoilers for the musical Kiss Me, Kate.

Dead Dreams

Spoiler alert for In The Good Old Summertime.

O Be Wise

I want to be May Parker.

I got the Spiderman 3 DVD for Christmas, and after watching it, I realized some greatness about her. At least, the movie version of her.

(Spoiler Alert)