October 16, 2011

Small Haul

Posted by mayiwrite under advice, friends, links, lists, writing | Tags: , , , , , |
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The public library sale was fun. Today, hardbacks were $1.00, and paperbacks were $0.50. Pretty cool, eh?

Here’s what I got:

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
- We’ve been reading a lot of Baudelaire in one of my classes, so when I saw this, I got really excited.

Germaine Bree, Great French Short Stories
- These are in English, and they’re most of the famous ones.

Geoffrey Brereton, A Short History of French Literature
- I bought this one for pretense. Of course.

Annie Ernaux, La Place
- This looked interesting. And it’s short, which means it’s more likely that I’ll finish it.

Other Random French Short Stories
- These are in French. I like short stories. I like French. It only makes sense.

***

T.C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done
- I hear he’s good.

Don DeLillo, Underworld
- This guy is supposed to be great, too.

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
- I haven’t read a lot of her fiction; I’m looking forward to this.

Louise Erdrich, Four Souls
- This is supposed to be awesome.

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
- I think I have a copy of this in New York City. Oh, well.

Hemingway, Short Stories
- Short stories is pretty much the only way I like Hemingway.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
- I’d read this before.

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- I hope this one is okay, too.

Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Mules and Men; Their Eyes Were Watching God
- I remember that a friend was reading Their Eyes her junior year while I was a senior in high school. I’ve been wanting to read Hurston ever since.

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
- I read this the summer before my junior year of school for an AP English class. It’s time to read it again.

W.S. Merwin, The Lost Upland
- I like Merwin. I like France. Enough said.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- I put off getting this for a long time.

Chaim Potok, Davita’s Harp
- I love the Chosen, hopefully this one will be great, too.

Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
- Proulx seems pretty important, but I’ve read very little of her.

Thomas Pynchon, V
- Same thing with Pynchon.

Betty Smith, Joy in the Morning
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was pretty amazing. Fingers crossed for this one.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
- The Red Pony, The Pearl, Of Mice and Men; it’s time for a big Steinbeck book.

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, pocket size
- I think I will always carry this one with me.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- I’d read excerpts of both of these for a class, and that was enough to decide that I really, really like Virginia Woolf. I hope she likes me, too.

Definitely, I got my $16 worth today. I know I’m good for the year, at least.

If you want to borrow these or any of my books, let me know. If you’ve borrowed books and haven’t returned them, I’m gently reminding you that you still have them.

And that’s okay. Take your time.

 

August 16, 2011

Some Randoms

Posted by mayiwrite under advice, athletics, environment, friends, government, health, miscellany, nature, nostalgia, observations, relationships | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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The whiplash is mostly gone, but new and weird pain has shown up in my knees. And my scabs are starting to itch, which in some ways, is so much worse than the pain.

–

After we came out at the end of the trail on Saturday, we loaded our bikes onto the doctor’s truck, and we headed back up to the trailhead where the other car was parked. People started transferring bikes from the car to the SUV. It was barely a 10-minute ride and I thought it was funny how we spent three hours on a trail for such a short return. It was definitely worth it.

People were chatting, and all of a sudden I felt dizzy. And the back of my head tingled. And everything was washed out in white light. And I thought, [bleep], I’m about to pass out.

I didn’t faint, though, but instead squatted where I stood and lowered my head and closed my eyes. I began to wonder if this was a result of the fall, if hitting my head had to do with the dizziness. It scared me a bit.

People kept on chatting, and I stayed seated. Then someone might have looked at me–he must have–and then he asked if I was okay. And I told him that I was dizzy. And the other stuff I was feeling. And he said that I had altitude sickness and that I should take two aspirin and drink a lot of water. That the aspirin would thin my blood and allow oxygen to travel more easily through my body blah blah blah fishcakes.

Someone gave me two ibuprofen and said it would do the same thing as aspirin. I dropped the pills from my palm into my mouth and drew some water from my Camelbak.

We boarded the white SUV and the driver blasted the air conditioning and I positioned the vent next to me to blow on my head. Someone told me how to recline my seat, so I leaned back and closed my eyes for a bit.

Within the first five minutes of the drive back to Duck Creek Village, some nausea sneaked up on me. I began to think how I would tell the people in the car how I was going to throw up at any second: could we pull over please, I’m about to vomit. Or that I’d just roll down the window and blow chunks and hope not to ruin the paint on the car. But, I continued to lay back and focus on the conversation around me, and soon the nausea subsided.

The sensation of the entire experience came back only one more time, and I worried that I would have to drive for four hours to Provo in this condition. Yet, my body adjusted to the altitude, and once I drank more water and had something to eat, it wasn’t so bad.

The drive to Provo was great. Thunderstorms booming and tumbleweed rolling across the interstate. Playlists and Radiolab podcasts. Mountain biking that morning and 8 hours of hiking the day before worked me hard, but maybe adrenaline kept me alert. And pain rode with me the whole time. Soreness had begun to settle into my joints and muscles. Mostly my shoulders.

–

I didn’t interact with very many people today. Maybe a total of two lines in Google Chat, and one response in facebook. All this morning.

–

I began rereading Atlas Shrugged. When I opened to the first page of Ms. Rand’s tome this morning, a familiar-weird-bad taste returned to my mouth. I was 18 or 19 when I read it the first time. I was only 17 when I read the Fountainhead. It’ll be interesting to see if my opinions have changed over the years. Writing: fine. Story: fine. Propaganda: whatever. I mean, it’s hard for me to understand how this woman could hate women so much; how her philosophy was JUST SO COOL once upon a time. If I take everything she says with a grain of salt, then I will also need a good prescription for high blood pressure. Or I won’t have to wonder why I’m retaining so much water.

–

I want scones. Real scones from England.

 

April 17, 2011

Gearing up

Posted by mayiwrite under government, travel | Tags: , , , , , , |
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I like my little stack of French books. As I read them, I come across a lot of words I don’t know, but that’s okay. That still happens to me when I read English, too.

Le Livre de Mormon/Les Doctrine et Alliances/La Perle de Grand Prix.  Can I just say right off how literary tenses are just weird? I actually ordered this triple combination for an upcoming trip, where our little branch of 20 people will meet every Sunday for church, probably in the hotel lobby. I needed a complete set of scriptures. So, I also ordered La Sainte Bible, though it isn’t an LDS edition.

L’enfant noir by Camera Laye. Autobiographical; tells of a boy’s life between the village and the city. Going to the Koran school, going to the university and leaving his family and missing his mother.

Bescherelle’s Complete Guide to Conjugating 12,000 French Verbs. This reference book will teach you how to conjugate a bunch of verbs (12,000) based on 82 verb conjugating patterns. Super useful. I use it a lot, and it’s great for learning verb vocabulary. Verbcabulary.

La Château de Ma Mère by Marcel Pagnol. Autobiographical, nostalgic. It’s beautifully written. There’s a lot of childhood joy of the French countryside mixed in with sorrow and sadness that’s so typical of the French.

Antigone by Jean Anouilh. Oh, you know the story. Antigone’s brothers kill themselves over throne succession. One’s buried, the other’s left for the vultures. Antigone pushes for the birdfood brother to be buried, but Creon won’t have it, because he needs to teach the kingdom a lesson. This is a tragedy, and the Chorus has sung from the beginning that Antigone dies at the end. It’s her destiny, so she and some other people die. Resistance/Compliance, tragedy/drama, DeGaulle/Pétain.

Une si longue lettre by Mariama Bâ. Semi-autobiographical. Talks about the heartache of polygamy in African villages. A woman’s husband decides to take another wife after 30 years. Tradition doesn’t mean there won’t be resentment and pain.

Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A really special story. Popular. Read it.

I also have a book of fairy tales, and I ordered another book that I hope will arrive before my trip. I need to read it.

 

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