february update

well i've read 7 books so far this year. my goal of reading 50 in 2008 is still far off but i am making progress. the only thing is i have read a couple books not on my 50 books to read list. i am more interested in reading any 50 books this year but hope to read all on the list, eventually.

so while i'll still be knocking off books from the list, i will also be reading others as i come across them. certainly more anthony bourdain books, as kitchen confidential was so interesting. i have read a few that i really liked and others that weren't very interesting to me. overall i'm finding this goal to be very satisfying. if only there were more time to enjoy reading. right now i'm in maui doing nothing so i have much time to read. once i get back to portland in a few days it's back to work and my busy schedule.

dracula

bram stoker (1897)

i could really honestly say i LOVED this book! it was like reading a grown up harry potter. i just could not put the damn thing down. when i think about dracula, all i can say is "i vant to suck yo blooood". everyone around me was like "YIKES isn't that a scary book?" well it was and it wasn't. it was good though.

the book is composed of a series of diary/journal entries, letters and memos. there are many characters in the book, starting with jonathan harker who goes to transylvania to meet with count dracula. at the count's castle he experiences many strange things. the count is most noticeably nocturnal, doesn't eat anything and is described as such:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

mr harker realizes that he is a prisoner in this castle without a way out. meanwhile, his fiancee mina murray and her friend lucy westerna spend time together. mina is worried when she doesn't hear about jonathan for awhile. lucy meanwhile had 3 marriage proposals in one day: arthur holmwood (later lord godalming) who she marries, quincey morris and dr john seward (a psychiarist in an insane asylum with an interesting patient renfield, who eats flies and spiders).

i sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats. -seward

lucy becomes sick, weak and pale without any reason. dr seward calls on his friend professor van helsing to check her out. he is immediately suspicious (especially since she has two little holes in her neck) but does not tell anyone of what, at first. they resort to giving lucy blood transfusions, which works for awhile by giving her strength. then next thing they know she is weak again. eventually she dies from a wolf bite and is buried. not soon after there are stories of attacks on children who are found to have holes in their necks. van helsing, along with dr seward & co figure out lucy's become a vampire by visiting her grave at night and day. they drive a stake through her heart and behead her to release her soul.

jonathan made it out of the castle, only to end up crazy. he is recovering and mina gets words eventually that he is in budapest. she goes to him, they marry and return, only to join forces with the rest. they all realize that his stories from the castle and all the going-ons in london were related. so together they seek out to destroy dracula.

i don't know why reading about wolves, vampires and bats did not scare me. neither did the awesome manga-style pictures by jae lee. it was suspenseful but somehow i knew how it would end up. i kept waiting to see who would turn into vampires and how they would figure out where dracula was, since he could take the form of animals and fog. it was pretty cool.

For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

beloved

toni morrison (1987)

this is a story about sethe, a runaway slave. she ran to her mother-in-law baby suggs in ohio, sending first her three children. on her way a whitewoman named amy denver helps her deliver the baby and shows her the way to ohio. she names her baby denver and arrives at baby suggs. they live there for a month before something bad happened. you are never quite sure what happened till later in the book. it is not presented or told in chronological order so it's a little confusing but towards the end you find out more through flashbacks.

a man named paul D shows up on sethe's doorstep, this is after her two sons run away, her unnamed daughter and baby suggs dies. paul D is one of the "last men of sweet home" where they were slaves to mr. and mrs. garner. the garners were decent towards their slaves and treated them ok. halle (sethe's husband) bought his mother's freedom by working. he was supposed to escape with sethe but never made it. he is presumed dead. life is not good for sethe, just her and denver there with a ghost of the baby daughter they call beloved.

beloved is so called because at her funeral the preacher said "dearly beloved" and so on her tombstone, sethe got the word "beloved" engraved.

it's a story about slave life and freedom, love for your children and making tough choices. paul D came and gave sethe a little bit of light in a dark world. despite her having "freedom" she was not totally free, with her daughter's death haunting her deeply. he had his emotions "locked in a tin can" where his heart was supposed to be, but upon arriving at 124, found some love to share. sethe and paul D went way back to the days when they were slaves together, 18 years previous but she was "halle's girl" back then.

sethe, if i'm here with you, with denver, you can go anywhere you want. jump, if you want to, 'cause i'll catch you, girl. i'll catch you 'fore you fall.

she is a friend of my mind. she gather me, man. the pieces i am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. it's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. we need some kind of tomorrow.

i had not read many stories about slavery before but this one is loosely based on a true story about a slave who killed a child so it would not have to live the life of slavery. anything would be better than that, even death. it's hard to imagine a life in those days, especially as a slave. to think that it was considered okay is just crazy. they were not people.

to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, that was freedom.

what do i know about freedom? that i take it for granted everyday. unless you've lived this sort of life or had to really struggle in growing up, you cannot imagine anything close to this hard life.

kitchen confidential

anthony bourdain (2001)

okay, so this book isn't on my list of 50. i cheated. i had a book that i was reading (beloved) but was at powell's at the airport waiting for my flight. it's so hard to get out of there without buying a book! so this is what i picked up and read it on my 6 hour flight, only stopping for about an hour to sleep a bit. it was a great read, very interesting and exciting. it was about food, cooking, kitchens, and lots of insight into that world which i really had little idea about.

if you don't know who this guy is, he is a chef in new york and also has a tv show called "no reservations" on the travel channel. he gets to travel the world and eat, MY DREAM JOB!!! too bad that job is taken. he tries all kinds of foods from faraway places. good stuff.

in the book he talks about his workers and what he's experienced and so what he expects. different parts of the kitchen, the craziness behind it all.

send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. i can teach him to cook. i can't teach character. show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemongrass. until then, i have four words for you: "shut the fuck up."

and little tidbits about what to eat and what not to eat at restaurants. for example:

you walk into a nice two-star place in tribeca on a sleepy monday evening and you see they're running a delicious-sounding special of yellowfin tuna, braised fennel, confit tomatoes and a saffron sauce. why not go for it? here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: "monday" and "special."

and of course his opinions on vegetarians, which i just found hilarious, even being a former vegetarian myself.

vegetarians, and their hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. to me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all i stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

eating out is so exciting and you wonder what happens behind those doors. well what you don't know, may be better.

any magic i'd imagined about a big-time fancy new york kitchen was replaced by a grim pride in creative expediency and the technical satisfaction of being fast enough to keep up, getting away with trickery, deception and disguise. "an ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins," as we used to say.

so i finished the book in a day, it was great, kept me interested. had lots of crude humor and stories of sex and drugs. whenever i'm hungry i tend to read about and think about food. go figure.

ficciones

jorge luis borges (1962)

this is a collection of short stories by the argentine author. it contains two parts -
part one: the garden of forking paths
part two: artifices

i will be reviewing a couple stories without regard to the reader's having read this book. so if you want to read it and don't want to know how these stories end...don't read on. it is a good collection though, very different from anything i've read. the stories are so short they have to be rich with imagination and description. they are.

each story is quite different, some non-fiction-type, comedy, adventure and others more fantasy. the stories are pretty short. in tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius the writer talks of a country called uqbar. it is an entirely mysterious country as it is included in a certain volume of the encyclopedia but not others.

one of the heresiarchs of uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.

while not entirely important to the story i thought it was a funny and true statement. a quote found in the article on uqbar of course.

in pierre menard, author of the quixote, the author writes a critique of a made up author by the name of pierre menard, who is writing a book to

produce pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line - with those of miguel de cervantes.

i find this very amusing. especially since it was his aim "never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original" but merely coincide with the story. it would be the perfect book to re-write without changing. don quixote is definitely a great book, very entertaining to say the least!

the circular ruins was one of my favorite stories in this collection. it is basically about a wizard who dreams into being another person. it is in these dreams that he creates this being. at first he dreamt a heart.

every night he perceived it more clearly. he did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance

slowly, every night of dreaming he did more work on his "son". it took years to painstakingly imagine every little detail. sometimes he had to re-dream a part. finally he was ready to be introduced in the world, but was forced to send him off to a faraway temple. curious, the wizard seeks to find his creation, only to find the sanctuary up in flames. he walked into the flames but they did not hurt him.

they did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. with relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

i've always felt that maybe i was a part of someone's dream. or that all my life was me dreaming and that when i was sleeping, it was my real life.

the secret miracle was about a writer named hladik during the war who is arrested for being jewish and sentenced to death. he is working through his unfinished book, writing and rewriting parts of it.

hladik had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was preposterous or admirable, deliberate or casual.

he then asks god for a year to finish his book. he wakes the next morning and is taken out to the firing squad. shots are about to be fired when all stops. everyone and everything freezes, including hladik. he is conscious and is granted his year but cannot move. he meticulously goes through each and ever part of the book, editing and writing. he is finished except for one part, which he finally figures out then time starts again. he is killed by the firing squad.

wuthering heights

emily brontë (1847) under pen-name ellis bell

it took awhile to get into this book for me, the language being old and so many people with similar names. it was an interesting love story though. the main character is heathcliff. while i was reading this heath ledger died, which was weird because his full name was heathcliff. his mother loved the book and named him after the main character. how strange to be named after a man who basically goes crazy. the plot is so complicated and intertwined that i don't even want to get into it. go read the book. i need to read it again someday for sure. i will try to be simple. there are two different narrators to the story: lockwood (who is renting from heathcliff) and nelly dean (housekeeper). basically lockwood meets heathcliff and makes nelly tell him the whole story behind the family.

nelly grew up as a servant for mr earnshaw and is about the same age as his children, hindley and catherine. one day mr earnshaw comes home from a trip with the orphan heathcliff and the children despise him. eventually catherine and heathcliff become inseparable playmates and mr earnshaw takes to him, so hindley becomes extremely jealous. mr earnshaw then dies, leaving hindley to resent heathcliff and treat him with disdain. he treats him very badly and as a servant. catherine goes to the linton house for 5 weeks to heal after getting bit by their dog. she becomes smitten with edgar linton and he asks her to marry him. she says yes.

it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, nelly, but because he’s more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

at that point heathcliff hears her and leaves. he is of a lower social standing than linton and so by marrying linton, catherine would become "the greatest woman of the neighborhood". she then goes on to explain more to nelly but heathcliff has already made his mind to leave.

my love for linton is like the foliage in the woods. time will change it, i'm well aware, as winter changes the trees - my love for heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary. nelly, i am heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than i am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being - so, don't talk of our separation again.

catherine goes on and marries linton and heathcliff leaves. somehow he becomes wealthy and comes back to inherit the place when hindley dies following years of drinking. he comes back a brute man looking to exact revenge. eventually hareton (hindley's son) and linton (heathcliff's son) come to live with him. he treats them horribly. catherine and edgar have a daughter (cathy) and catherine dies in childbirth. years later cathy meets linton while playing and heathcliff devises a plan in which linton will marry cathy and heathcliff will get his revenge on edgar by inheriting his land. heathcliff treats sickly linton and all around him badly and cathy tells him:

mr. heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery! you are miserable, are you not? lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you, when you die! i wouldn't be you!

eventually heathcliff goes mad. he speaks to the ghost of the elder catherine all the time and eventually stops eating, and dies. heathcliff was in love, treated badly, left for a man of higher class, returned for revenge, treated his own badly and never found love again. only hatred and madness.