Long-term planning

For the record: today I planted shallots, broccoli, beets and snow peas. (This is less about writing an informative blog post than it is about reminding me what I planted.) Having pulled up all the beets for pickling, it seemed logical to invest in the future. Abundance this year was generous and fun: abundance down the line has to be prepared for.

And then this baby rolled down the driveway:

BOMB. Of happiness.

For the baffled: that’s a feijoa. A frickin’ big one. Apart half the size of my hand. The neighbours’ bush is awe-inspiring, with massive pedunculated fruits, the stuff of dreams. When I realised one had dropped into my lap driveway, I pounced. It’s now buried in the back yard veggie patch, along with my hopes, dreams and reason for being. If it grows and makes me a feijoa of my very own, I’ll be damn pleased. And astonished. Feijoas don’t usually grow true to type from seed, I’m told, which means if it does sprout and make baby feijoas, there’s no guarantee they’ll be as plump and seductive as this blighter. They could be tiny, tasteless, annoying, or absent: but feijoas are damn pretty and even if it brings me no fruit, it will be an awesome and welcome shrubbery.

While we’re on the topic of abundance (however tangentially), I’ve just discovered punkdomestics.com, which is an awesome site of preserving, canning, pickling, foraging, and general off-the-griddery. Love this stuff! How did I overlook such an awesome site for so long?

One last thing: my tiny habaneros are fruiting!

PS?

Each has loads of green fruit and one orange fruit each — will we get a flush of red fruit before the cold season clamps down like an icy bear trap of futility? Will there be heat in winter? Will there be habaneros for bethini? Only time will tell. THE EXCITEMENT GRIPS ME AND ALSO YOU PROBABLY!

This book of short fiction is another of my Library discoveries: I’ve heard Helen Garner’s name a lot — she’s pretty big in Australian literature — so I grabbed this book of short fiction to gain a taste of her work. It’s pretty awesome; the stories focus on the dynamics between people in short episodes. Some of the stories are longer and more involved, and others are only a page or two. She uses different styles of voice and flow, all convincingly. Garner’s writing is really sparse, not a word wasted, but there is so much conveyed, the priorities and attitudes that make up a person’s whole personality are immediately real. Their lives, with all the pain, tedium, joy and humour that make up normal lives, feel clear and believable. The actions and dialogue of the characters are similarly thoughtful and perfectly paced, and the settings are flawless. The precision of Garner’s writing is awesome; this book was a very good introduction to her voice.

(Oooh, and I found some more: some of her articles for The Monthly. Fantastic stuff.)

The White Album– Joan Didion

A random book! I grabbed this one off the sorting shelves at the library because…well, because I had a bunch of others and her blurb looked interesting. And damn if it wasn’t interesting! The White Album is a collection of essays by US journo Joan Didion, reflecting on a few different aspects of American culture at the close of the 60s. As someone who doesn’t have any experience with US culture in the 60s (apart from general cultural understanding and references to it in the Simpsons), it was eye-opening to read about it from the perspective of someone watching its close. Didion’s disillusionment with the way the ideals of the 60s played out is worth chewing over. The emotive power behind the push for revolution that fascinated a lot of people in the 60s seems betrayed or washed over by the influence of media, adopted by many as a social trend rather than a true commitment to change. The essays in The White Album pull apart social meaning as embodied in US institutions like Hollywood, Ronald Reagan’s house, and assorted major social/political figures from the 60s and 70s, and I loved it. Not due to schadenfreude (WHERE ARE YOUR GODS NOW?) but because as you strip away false icons, you create room to find true ones. Didion looks at icons of powerful personal significance to her — unexpected ones like the Hoover Dam and an orchid breeder in Malibu — and from there finds meaning and relevance in a period of cultural chaos. This is the most potent thing the book gave me, I think: a challenge to accepted cultural elements that are supposed to be embraced, the freedom to express disappointment or regret when those cultural elements don’t deliver on their promises, and an example of finding meaning and truth outside those elements.

In Defence of Food — Michael Pollan
I heard an interview with Michael Pollan in 2008 where he discussed the opening line to In Defence of Food and the principles by which to eat that he reaches over the course of the book. The opening line “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”, when discussed in a bit more detail, was seriously eye-opening for me and triggered a way of thinking and perceiving the standard Western food culture. Over the following years, I changed a lot. I already thought of myself as a healthy eater, but as read more — food and cooking blogs especially — I realised how many little fibs I’d bought into in my food purchases. Gradually, most of the processed stuff we bought disappeared from our pantry, as M and I got better at making our own stuff. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan’s first book, which examined the way food gets to our tables — looking at agriculture, abbatoirs, hunting, growing, etc. It was awesome and really set the path of growth for the way I now look at food. So it was a bit of a surprise to remember that I never got around to reading In Defence of Food until now. It was fantastic. I spent a bit of time nodding in agreement — “Ah yes, Michael, well put. I would have said the same myself.” — but nipped that in the bud. It’s short, arresting and well-written. It’s divided into three parts: the first is an explanation and history of nutritionism and a discussion of the problems that have emerged as a result. The second is a history of the Western diet (changes in agriculture and industrialised food processing, for example) and how our diet got to the state it’s in. The third is the “now what” bit: an explanation of how to break free of a lot of the problems inherent in our food culture and how to find out what to eat. It’s a fantastic book: it’s clear, short, gripping, interesting, logical, and enthusiastic. While I admit it matched the way I feel about food and eating already, so I’m a bit biased: I loved it. It’s exciting and positive and liberating.

Under the croft.

After a long, stubborn while, it clicked: running was awesome, bounding away like a bike someone’s ghostied down a hill. And then pain in my leg that, mid-run, had me blubbing by the creek and pretending I wasn’t. That right there was a stress fracture in the femural neck of my right leg. I’ve got Addison’s Disease and after about two years of massively overtreating with cortisone, my bones were like brittle meringue. Hence: stress fracture. (Science: sometimes it’s mean.)

Over the croft.

After the hip-pin operation last year, no walking for six weeks. After twelve weeks, my ankle swelled up and I was confined to barracks once again. My last run was in the last week of July last year.

Fittin'

It’s taken my ankle ages: I mend slow and there’s still some clickety-stiff in there. I’ll wait a bit more, but I tried on my new runners last week and hot dog, I can’t wait. They’re so light and comfortable…I’m infatuated with them. It’s so close I can taste it.

Light and sprightly.

Things I learned from all this:

• If it hurts, see your doctor. Don’t keep waddling about like a fat gouty swan for a month.
• If you try and run when your body isn’t ready, it’s gonna smack you down and rightly so.
• If you go for a run too early, it’s not going to be the springy, bounding high you remember. It’s going to be waddly and sore, it’ll set you back and make you cry. Don’t bother and just go for another walk.

In a couple of weeks’ time, if you see something red and hunched heaving along in pretty shoes, that might be me. Don’t make eye contact.

Sweet sauerkraut stockings I like Mr Pratchett’s writing. After a fairly long-term dalliance with the audiobooks of the Discworld series (as read by the totes awesome Tony Robinson), I got into reading the books proper comparatively late in life. I have a clear memory of a schoolmate cackling uncontrollably reading Pratchett’s Bromeliad Trilogy in primary school. She read bits out to me and I cackled similarly and thought this Pratchett cove would be well worth investigating further. Being swift of mind and action, I got into reading my first Pratchett novel some 19 years later. Anyway, here we are: the first two of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch series, starring the fine Sam Vines, Carrot Ironfounderson, Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobby Nobs (and others). The City Watch series is set in the Discworld’s capital city, Ankh-Morpork and the books lightly parody motifs from cop movies/tv shows/books. They’re fast, funny, clever, and the characters are likeable, believable and good to be around. In short, they’re on par with most of Pratchett’s excellent Discworld books. (High five, Terry!)

Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl

I have had Special Topics in Calamity Physics on my shelf since — err, umm — 2007? A damned long time. I don’t know why, but I’ve started it three or four times and then stopped or been distracted or whatever. And then the other day I figured I’d give it another go and bowled it over in a weekend. Far out, brussels sprout! So it’s about Blue van Meer and her father Gareth van Meer: her mother died when she was a little girl, and her father is a wandering academic whose career shifts from academic post to academic post, leading them all over the country. For her final year of high school, he decides to settle in one town for the full twelve months: she becomes involved with a standoffish, talented clique under the friendship/mentorship of teacher Hannah Schneider. They’re a mysterious group, and Blue isn’t entirely sure why she’s been accepted so easily, but after a death at a party they shouldn’t have been at, followed by more frightening events, Blue is forced to start investigating some fundamental assumptions she’s always held about her life. The book turns from a slightly sinister high-school-brilliant-young-things vibe to a murder mystery/investigation of grief and meaning to an international thriller in fairly short order, and it kinda threw me when it happened. My expectations were pretty roundly shaken. But the writing style is a hoot: a result of her father’s approach to parenting, Blue’s narrative is rich with references, commentary, identification of types, and comparative analysis. It’s fun and engaging to read, although it gets a little thin during Blue’s deepest moments of crisis. Not a bad book at all, but God knows why I left it so long to get to.

Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis

Back on the Bret. Glamorama is Ellis’ 1998 black comedy thriller which is so crammed full of awesome there’s no wonder it clocks in at over 500 pages. You could have an eye out with this book. The characters follow on from The Rules of Attraction, but the plots of the two books aren’t really related (Patrick Bateman, the American Pyscho, also makes an appearance). Told by Victor Ward — model, club wheeler-dealer-type, glamourite and all-round fancypants — the book plays heavily on the celebrity-obsessed atmosphere of 1990′s New York clubland/fashion world. There are whole sentences that are nothing but strings of Names; Victor sometimes speaks in just song lines; the books groans with references. The sophisticated, sociopathic, internationally-influencing world of the supermodels, actors and musicians that Victor twirls through blends persuasively into the sophisticated, sociopathic, internationally-influencing world of terrorists and sadists that Victor finds himself tangled in. There’s issues of identity, value and image, and questions about reality, perception and control. The violence and sex scenes are classic Ellis, straight-up American Pyscho standard, which would probably be a bit rough if you weren’t used to it. I found Victor aggravatingly dumb and unobservant for the first part of the book: anything outside his sphere of modelling/clubland/etc. obviously baffles him. But once I accepted that, his narrative voice worked really well. As a reader, you’re sporadically thrown into the role of audience or viewer, music clues included, and then partway through the book, Victor starts dropping references to “the script”, “Makeup and Wardrobe” and talks openly with “the director” about “the set”. More film crews are introduced, until there’s conflict between the crews filming Victor’s actions, and Victor’s sense of reality seems anchored on the presence of these crews. As he undergoes crisis, the roles of the film crews change, and they gradually retreat. It’s exciting, bleak, funny and I liked it. Next up: Imperial Bedrooms.

Don't be fooled: that is a razor-sharp nose.

And then last night one of the neighbours had some friends over for dinner: their departure, after this dog’s bedtime, outraged her so that she barked every thirty minutes or so all night. Not a long spree of barking, just an offended “brouf, brff, brff”, so that M and I were regularly updated on her annoyance level.

So: slightly sleep-deprived and in the company of an indignant hound, today I’ve been doing small things. Sometimes food bloggers go all out and make seven-layer meringue tarts with whipped beet filling, presented as a dinky little image of a recipe card and pictures that would make you weep with the futility of your own pathetic attempts. Not me. I made a salad.

Aforementioned salad.

I bought some pretty chillies and then tooled around with the macro setting:

The hotter the chilli, the closer to God.

I put all my weekend things on the couch and took a photo of them:

My life is so awesome.

And then I chilled. I hate being tired: it makes me cranky and sad. Yesterday (while very tired) I tried to figure out why, but didn’t really get anywhere. I did nudge up against the frightening thought that maybe the world is a crueller, colder place than I think, and I exert a lot of energy to keep up the facade so when I’m tired it crumbles CRUMBLES and I see the horror of the world for all it truly is. Totally bogus: my life rocks. But cut my sleep into a smattering of 20-minute chunks and suddenly it’s tears in the supermarket because I don’t know what flaxseeds are, not really. In light of this shift towards the “incredibly poor” end of the judgment spectrum, I’m slowly learning that tired days are days for cutting myself some slack: instead of trying to function normally, or even normal-ish, I give up and sit down. No shame there. You want shame? I got yer shame RIGHT HERE (by which I mean elsewhere).

There’s ratatouille in the oven, slowly baking in anticipation of hungry workers needing nourishment all week. (Me and M, that is, we’re the workers around here, not that bourgeois brown hound you see above.) Not pictured; mug of tea and five crackers with peanut butter and apple slices. There’s knitting and a Helen Garner book and a sooky brown dog. Look upon my couch, ye mighty, and despair.

See, here’s why I love libraries. Book shops you gots to spend coin, so you get a bit risk-averse and you’re more likely to go with what you know. Second hand book shops, less so (less coin, so less risk) so that’s a bit better. Libraries: zilch. And if you work at a uni and have a brace of libraries at your whim, well, you’re laughing. So I picked up Sontag’s The Volcano Lover at random. I didn’t read the back because it was all quotes from other people (“slippery, intelligent, provocative” and “a banquet of a book”) and I don’t get much out of such blurb-substitutes; I liked the cover, and the font, and the whole book had a nice, well-thumbed feel to it. Plus: library means free. So I borrowed it and damned good it was too. Thing is, if I’d read a blurb, I probably wouldn’t have bothered it, because it’s not at all the kind of book I normally read, and therefore I would have missed out. I like that. Low entry cost = more likely to take a gamble on not liking it = a chance to explore new stuff. It’s good for the brain, that kind of gamble. So, The Volcano Lover is an historical novel, about the lives and loves of Sir William Hamilton (an English diplomat stationed in Naples). But that is too brief an explanation: it is also about the love between he and his second wife, Lady Emma Hamilton; and the love between him and Admiral Horatio Nelson (in a strictly platonic sense); and the love between Lady Emma Hamilton and Admiral Horatio Nelson. But then that description excludes his passion for collecting, his elevating taste, his beloved Vesuvius, his first wife Catherine, the French revolution, the occupation and briefly Republican state of Naples — there is a lot going on in this book. But it’s only now when I think about it I realise how much: what a broad, tumultuous, ongoing world this book shows. The people are astonishingly vivid: you feel like there aren’t really any baddies in the book, just people who do questionable things for understandable reasons (understandable in the context of their personalities and circumstances, I mean). There’s empathy and compassion for the humans crowding this book: it’s exciting and engaging, challenging, sad and really, really interesting. I really enjoyed the introspective parts of the book, where the perspective of the collector or lover were reflected on. One of the back cover not-blurbs says the author has “produced something lovely and substantial, and shown us how we might free ourselves”. I liked that. It was beautiful, entertaining and dramatic; it was insightful, intelligent, provoking and gave me a lot to think about.

Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

In finishing this book, I’ve finished my more-than-a-year-long Eco binge. This is the last one I’ve got on the shelf, and I’ve been in Eco-land for quite some time now. This is a pretty intense book, but like all of Eco’s stuff, it’s tremendously rich and deep and satisfying. So there are three editors at a publishing house, who are a little bored with all the occult stuff they’re working with, so they start feeding scraps of the occult manuscripts and scraps of mass culture and established facts into a program which begins randomly linking things together. From these random associations, the trio develop a plan that spans centuries and empires and has a centuries-long goal of domination and power. And then people start getting killed, and they realise the plan might have struck a little closer to truth than they intended. It’s pretty exciting and full of lush, diverse, interesting language, moods and settings. But it is also long and that’s what I had a bit of trouble with. About two-thirds of the way through I started feeling bogged down, having trouble keeping track of all the details of the plan they had developed. I had a break and then had a bit of trouble getting back into it: then I set my jaw, narrowed my eyes, brushed my hair and decided to finish it. I went back a little and found the thread again, then charged ahead. And it was totally worth it. It’s such a rich book. There’s a lot to chew on: themes of finding or making meaning in a potentially random world; finding meaning in life; history and heroics, both personal and global; and making connections to people, making connections between events and changes in the world. See? Lots going on in there. A really good book, but a long one and one that needs you to pay attention.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer
So on a recent flying visit to the library — I was there for a meeting that wasn’t held there and was on a different day altogether, talk about a planning fail — I paused by the sorting shelves and scooped up a bunch of books to take home with me. One was The Volcano Lover (see above), another was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I like the way books arrive in my reading line of sight: in this case, I liked the cover and remembered an interview with Jonathan Safran Foer I liked (about another of his books, Eating Animals), and figured these were as good reasons as any to borrow it. Dudes, it totally rocks! What a great book. So the narrator is nine-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father was killed in the September 11 attacks. As the book unfolds and he pursues a mysterious key he finds in his father’s possessions, you get to experience Oskar’s grief, confusion, and fascinating and clever mind as he comes to terms with what happened and why. It’s beautiful. The story of the family grows and blooms, and you’re experiencing these revelations with Oskar, and you’re feeling his confusion and frustration and fear as he goes. Never — not even once, not even just a little — does Foer allow the narrative voice to stray into twee, patronising territory; not once does Oskar feel like a narrative tool or plot device. I loved it. I had to really tear through it, too: a day or so after I started reading, I got an email from the library that another user had requested it, so I had to get it back sooner than anticipated. I roared through it in about three days, and I can testify that it is totally readable and digestible in such a short period.

Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis

I finished American Pyschoa while back and it was so great it left me hankering for more of Ellis’ slightly bleak, sharp, fascinating voice. Less Than Zero is all about rich teenagers in LA, in the Christmas break between college terms; they’re bitter and bored, already hollow and dry from an overdose of advantage and privilege. There weren’t many people in this book I liked, but it totally worked. It’s gripping, interesting and clever. It nudges themes of purposes, indulgence, and affluent atrophy but never imposes them on you. There’s one or two unsettling scenes, which I found harder to read than American Pyscho, since I didn’t have the option of attributing the horror to an unreliable narrator’s fevered imagination. Having said that, those scenes contribute a lot to the book and the characters, so the book would be worse without them.

Rules of Attraction – Bret Easton Ellis

Since I can’t get enough Ellis at the moment: Rules of Attraction is another fantastic one. This time it’s a group of students at uni, and the dynamics of their sexual relationships is the focus. The narrative voice shifts between the three main characters, and it’s really interesting to see the different perspectives on the same scene or conversation. One of the characters is Sean Bateman, brother to Patrick Bateman, the psycho of American Psycho. That was pretty cool: the events of the two books don’t coincide, but there’s an overlap. I liked that. Since American Psycho came next, I wonder if Ellis was already thinking about Patrick as psychopath when he brought him into this one? The environment is really immersive and the characters, though flawed and frustrating, are real and convincing, and ultimately you (well, I) end up caring about them. Another thing I really, really liked about this book: the way it starts and ends mid-sentence. I love that because it extends the scope of the story, making it feel like a much broader world than what you could otherwise find confined to those pages. Good stuff. Now reading: Glamorama, the next Ellis book after American Pyscho.

The Art of Disappearing: The Buddha’s Path to Lasting Joy – Ajahn Brahm

And now for something completely different. Stepping aside from devolution, overindulgence, and drug and sexual debauchery, here’s a book about Buddhist meditation. And a damn good read it is, too. Clear, easy language, interesting ideas and a good construction: this is great reading. I am pretty ignorant about a lot of Buddhism, especially the meditation practices, so this has been a teaching book. I worried it would be too advanced for me, since there’s a fair bit of assumed prior knowledge, but nothing you can’t figure out after five minutes with the Googles. The simplicity and clarity of the language have struck me, again and again: it’s a really easy and lovely book to read, breaking down some fairly complex ideas and encouragements to practice that could be quite challenging. Having said that, it’s worth taking your time to stop and think about what you read. It’s taught me a lot and given me a lot to chew on, regarding mindfulness, calmness, stillness and peace. Definitely worth reading.

What she gave me:

• Knitting. Man, that first scarf: she showed me how to cast on, and then I would work a row of K1, P1 rib. She spotted mistakes, unpicked for me, and encouraged me to try again. Soon I was doing whole rows without mistakes; then blocks; finally the whole scarf was mine. I made every stitch. (Some of them more than once.) If I couldn’t knit now…jebus, I’d be on methadone or probation or something.
• Humour. Holy crap can she laugh. If there’s one thing we share — and there isn’t, there’s loads — it’s the ability to laugh in the face of craptitude. (She’s better at it than me: I take a bit to remember how, but she’s a pro.)
• Plants. Got a few hours? I’ll talk veggies until the carrots come home. Got a few more? She’ll talk flowers.
• Books. Ohh boy, there’s another few hours gone. Will talk words until interrupted by another round of tea.
• Tea. Black no sugar, for two, thanks.
• Love of animals. Fluffybums galore at Mumini’s house.
• Ability to disperse at least half of one’s meal over one’s self during the first ten minutes of eating.
• Petite stature.
• A liberal approach to instructions: I don’t think I’ve followed a recipe, knitting pattern or set of instructions ever, because I was reared on the attitude of “when they say [x], you’ll find it easier to do [y], and the results are better.”

What I kinda missed:

• Persistence: She will spend hours painstakingly hand-embroidering the bride and groom’s initials on the hem of the wedding dress she just spent six weeks making, because she know when things should be perfect. (True story.)
• Guts: Two bulky men are outside the childcare centre she runs, taking photos of the street. Mumini walks over: “Excuse me, would you mind explaining to me why you are photographing my childcare centre?” Man 1: “Quite right, madam.” and shows his police badge. I’d be timidly trying to shoo them with a newspaper: my Mumini gets down to business.
• Sewing: that embroidery on the six-week wedding dress I just mentioned? Tip of the iceberg. She sewed the whole wedding party. (I mean, just the clothes: they weren’t dolly bridesmaids or anything.) Toys, clothes, furnishings: she even reupholstered a set of couches once (but only once). If you can make it with a needle and fabric, she’s already made it and found a better way.

What I figured out myself:
How awesome she is. Funny, clever, resilient. Inclined to snore on the couch, also inclined to meet people with happy openness, animals with adoration, children with outright delight, and gadgets with eye-popping enthusiasm. She’s the cat’s pyjamas.

Happy birthday Mumini! Without you I wouldn’t be the jaw-droppingly cool chicka I am today. I’m grateful for everything.

PS: I scheduled this blog post so you could see it before work.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail – Bill Bryson

More than anything in the world right now I want to go bushwalking. I have a fruity French dessert cooling on the bench; a cup of tea beside me; an awesome job and a shitload of books and knitting to play with, and I want to chuck it all in and go bushwalking. That’s what this book does (although I admit the urge is never far from the surface with me). I think this is one of Bryson’s best books. He combines his excellent sense of humour with involved research and human study. The relationship between him and his hiking companion, an old friend who, in intervening years has developed and recovered from alcoholism and gained a lot of weight, is really interesting and touching — the characterisation of his friend is fantastic. There’s introspection and analysis, as Bryson looks at why he — or indeed anybody — would find the hike so appealing and satisfying; and this is woven around a history of the trail, travel observations and commentary on the natural and man-made surroundings. It blends together really well.

Coraline – Neil Gaiman

What an awesome book. Short and juicy, with not one excess word or scene. It’s creepy, exciting and fun and it rocks. Coraline and her parents move into a new flat with a mysterious door that opens on to a brick wall. One night, Coraline hears the door swing open and discovers a passageway leading to a parallel world, where bizarre caricatures of her parents (and the other people in her world) live. They encourage her to stay, but she returns home: shortly after this, her parents disappear and Coraline has to go back through the door to rescue them. Totally cool and exciting.

American Pyscho – Bret Easton Ellis

I did a teensy bit of work experience in a bookshop in 2000, when American Pyscho was first blowing everybody’s mind, and it had to be shrink-wrapped on the shelf, lest some innocent browser missed the title, cover art, blurb and back-cover reviews and didn’t realise the book was moderately confrontational in its psychopathic violence and was accidentally traumatised while flicking through the pages. There are some startlingly violent chapters in here (pardon me while I clutch my pearls) and some pretty mean sex violence as well, but frankly, it works. The narrator is a classic rich yuppie riding the high that 80′s New York promised to that lot: I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for certainty it’s an accurate portrayal, but it feels very authentic. The obsessive fixation of the author with his daily routine, his clothes, his life, his coworkers’ and friends’ appearance; the details are overwhelming, suffocating. The lifestyle he leads feels hectic, desperate, shallow and occasionally terrifying. If I tried to live the way he does, well, I’d probably end up a bit odd too, but mine would manifest in obsessive cake stomping or something, not brutalising people. The question that hangs over you the whole time you read is “did he or didn’t he?” And there’s a lot to throw doubt on everything he claims to have done. Something I found really interesting is that I desperately wanted him to be an unreliable narrator. Even though I knew he was fictional, all his victims were fictional, I was already so emotionally attached that I really, really wanted him to be all fantasy. As a reader, that’s a testament to Ellis: he created characters so real and believable as to evoke understanding, if not outright sympathy, so that I wanted the horrific things to be fantasies. To summarise: violent, yes, but compelling, clever, interesting, and really thought-provoking. The themes of materialism and the lies of success really echoed and left me churning them over and over well after I finished. Pretty awesome.

Interesting (or not) (possibly not) (probably not) side note: the last Bill Bryson book I read was also about discovering America, small town America, called The Lost Continent. I read it immediately adjacent to Kerouac’s On the Road, which is also about discovering America; and as some sort of complement, read Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, an intensely English-flavoured book. This time around, I’m matching Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods with Bret Easton Ellis’ American Pyscho and contrasting it with Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. An interesting blend, fer sher.

On Ravelry, folks talk of going cold sheep, committing to no-yarn-buying until a certain target is reached, usually a destash goal or a time limit. I’m starting to think I need to go cold  sheep on my books, which would be cold tree or something. Only some of them are ebooks, so that would be cold…mobi?  Got a few off my list lately:

The Female Eunuch – Germaine Greer

Fascinating, stirring, occasionally annoying, and crowded with fictitious characters. This was a pretty cool book, altogether:. Took me a long time to read, because there’s a lot to get through. In case you’ve had your head stuffed under the carpet for the past billion years, this book is widely regarded as the one that set off the whole pesky feminist movement (well, that’s how it’s seen in some quarters, anyway). At its core, it argues that a patriarchal society fundamentally dehumanises women by sexually neutering them; in taking away their sexuality (defused through various bewildering methods of repression, judgment, criticism and threat), the culture takes away women’s personhood. They become objects — mother, wife, mistress — rather than people. The book explores this theory in range of life contexts, looking at attitudes towards women’s bodies, education, careers, motherhood, relationships and so on. And overall, it’s pretty compelling: while this is an older text now (first edition: 1970), we haven’t progressed so far as a culture that these scenarios are laughable or antiquated. There’s a lot to like in this book:  there’s a lot of agitation, frustration and anger, as if we needed reminding why the feminist movement needs to keep barrelling along. It’s also funny, sharp and really readable. But at the same time, there are a arguments that seem a bit strawman-ish: depictions of fictitious scenarios that are then challenged and criticised. But on the other hand, these arguments portray undeniably familiar tropes that deserve to be challenged. At times the book charged way ahead of me and I had trouble keeping up with where the arguments were going; when Greer started describing her vision for communal childrearing I was surprised and had to backtrack to find out how we got there. But ultimately, this is the kind of text that makes you open  your eyes and look around and start questioning some of those familiar tropes I mentioned — questioning leads to challenge and thinking, at least some of the time, so that alone is a damn good thing.

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl (Volumes 1 and 2)

While working my way through The Female Eunuch, I was, on the side, dabbling in some dear old Dahl. Ever read the short stories? No? Just the kids’ books, huh? Well, I’ll wait — chase up…hmm,  which first…how about Kiss Kiss? Have a look. Yeah. Creepy as fuck, eh? I loved Roald Dahl’s books as a kid, not least of all because some had the thread of macabre running through them — the cruelty in Matilda, the gross aggression of the Twits, and the sinister Witches and giants (from The BFG) — and in the short stories, he really pumps it up. They’re fantastic. Many of them are creepy and clever and cunning; they’re weird and fast-moving and gripping and they are great. This collection included Kiss Kiss, Over to You (all stories about war pilots and flying: creepy, clever, thoughtful and interesting), Switch Bitch,  Someone Like You and Eight Further Tales of the Unexpected. Particularly satisfying stories: “The Way Up to Heaven”, “The Visitor”, “The Old Switcheroo”, “Lamb to the Slaughter”, “Neck”, “Mr Botibol” and “The Bookseller”. Oh, and “Skin”. And — oh look, just read them. They’re gripping and interesting and have a very vivid, Dahl-esque, English flavour.  Enormously good.

Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories - Angela Carter

Whiplash! Going from Dahl’s short stories to Carter’s gave me serious author whiplash. So completely different in tone and themes. Angela Carter’s stuff is terrific: I love Nights at the Circus, and The Magic Toyshop was a corker too. Burning Your Boats is a complete anthology, containing the books Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Black Venus and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, and six other stories that were never collected (three early stories at the beginning off the book and three misc at the end). Carter tends towards the lush and detailed, and it’s interesting to read the stories in chronological order like this, because that lushness and detail is at its heaviest in her early stories, gradually thinning as her career progressed. So while I found the first three early stories a little unpromising — not bad, but not quite my cup of tea — by the time I had reached halfway through Fireworks I was pretty interested. And then The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories – a collection of retelling of fairytales — had me completely hooked. Favourites from Burning Your Boats: “The Bloody Chamber”, “Puss-in-Boots”, “The Kitchen Child”, “John Ford’s ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore’” and “Gun for the Devil”. Really juicy stories, ripe with action, sex, laughter and conflict, as with the best of Carter’s stuff.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

I started reading Lot 49 in uni but never finished it. (True story.) Found it in my collection the other day and read it, cover-to-cover, in one sitting (more or less — there were toilet breaks). Oh wow, man, far out, awesome. Oedipa Maas is summoned as the executrix of an ex-lover’s will and finds herself nudged all around by hints of a conspiracy: but you can never be sure if it’s in her head or if it’s an external force she’s stumbled on. This kind of book is perfectly suited to a single-sitting reading, because the story builds momentum and you end up sustaining the perfect headspace for the creeping feeling of paranoia that Oedipa develops. Pynchon’s got a reputation for being twisty and involved and complex, but Lot 49 is readable and interesting, with plenty of motion and dialogue and interesting characters. I think it’s a good intro to his stuff — I hope so, because I’ve got V and Gravity’s Rainbow lined up next.

In a misguided moment of honesty, I decided to have a squiz at how many books I’ve got on the go at the moment: if I only count the ones I’m earnestly reading and can confidently explain what plot point I’m up to, it’s still too many. Good problem to have.