The not-few, the not-proud, the abandoned ...

[quietprofanity]

This might seem like an attempt to amuse you guys, but it's actually for me. I realized that when I wrote up why I wasn't watching my DVDs (see here), it was actually encouragement to watch a great deal of them. Now all that's unwatched includes R.O.D. the TV, Kimagure Orange Road and the freebies. (I decided I'm going to find a way to get rid of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I know it stinks. I already have a small collection of "Movies safe to show to any female friends from past eras of my life without any nerd in them," so all is well.) So I'll do this with my "partially read" books tag on LibraryThing: the unloved, bastard child of my unread tag.

To get it out of the way, the book I'm reading now is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell. This book seems to have suffered something of a backlash. According to Librarything, 8,161 people own this book. About 200 something haven't read it, and more than a few gave up half-way in disgust. I actually had never heard of it until LibraryThing. But apparently people drooled over it because 1.) A bunch of reviewers going for buzzwords over accuracy called it "Harry Potter for Adults" (prompting Stephen King to quip, "Harry Potter is Harry Potter for adults, you dweebs.") 2.) Neil Gaiman has been a champion of author Susanna Clarke for sometime. Now, most of the time I really, really like Neil Gaiman. Sandman is awesome, his readings are so good my Mom likes him and he's not an egotistical maniac. But other people seem convinced the guy is some sort of demi-God and I just can't get behind that. (I mean, what the FUCK was up with that "My STD gave me a personality transplant!" shit in Smoke and Mirrors? Also, Mirrormask was lame and whoever said Pan's Labyrinth is just Mirrormask in World War II, we're all entitled to your opinions and your opinion is stupid. :-P) So I think when many of them found, "Oh ... an 800-page slow-moving book written in faux 18th-century language isn't quite to my taste even though I really like Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter" a lot of them were kind of pissed off. But luckily for me, I like all three. So I'm in 100 pages and I'm really enjoying it.

Phew! That was way too many words to say "This is the book I'm considered actively reading now and I really like it." Oh well. I really wanted to share my thoughts on the whole backlash, I guess.

Okay, books on the partially read pile.

A couple of them I consider "active" books. I'm not exactly reading them from one cover to another, but they're short stories, and I want to be more versed in short stories, so I'll pick them up when I just need something quick. These include The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Best American Short Stories 2002, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, The Sonnets of William Shakespeare and The Complete Poems of John Keats.

Of these I'm probably enjoying Parker the most, as she's extremely funny when she's not depressing me. (Poor old girl reminds me too much of me, I swear.) If I had to guess I'm about three fourths done with the book. Mostly reviews and old odds and ends are left, a couple of stories. Poetry I'm all done with.

The Best Stories 2002 I'm almost half-way done. But I'm not that happy about it. I'm not sure if the current standard for good short stories is "Vaguely insignificant event happens which actually reveals a deep meaning and turning point in the characters' psyche that you can only see if you squint very hard" and I'm just a plebeian who's missed the boat or it's just Sue Miller's taste that I don't like or ... whatever. Anyway, it's sort of lame. I like about half of the stories so far, but others are like, "Am I missing something or do you suck? I can't tell." (Also, can the absolutely distasteful "13-year-old boy learns how to be a man by losing his virginity a.k.a. BEING USED by a 40-year-old married woman" plotline die a horrible death? PLEASE?) I still want to start buying this series, though. King did the series this year; I hope his taste matches up better with mine.

Poe and Lovecraft I haven't read much of. Okay, Lovecraft I've only read the one story, but I plan to do better soon no rly! Poe I would read more if it weren't for the 40 pagers and the book being this totally huge thing I bought on the discount rack. Oh well. Bettery try harder.

Keats (which I bought while a teenager and picked up again) I was slowly reading until I hit the part of the book where I got to "Endymion" and said, "Hmmm ... maybe I need a clean plate" because a 100+ page epic by Keats worries me a bit, especially in the early stage of his work where he hasn't quite reached the clarity of something like "La Belle Dame sans Merci." I feel a bit torn over Keats. I really liked him in high school. For some reason my British Literature class was obsessed with DOOM! GLOOM! EVIL will ALWAYS TRIUMPH!!!! Because reading Macbeth, Brave New World and Lord of the Flies back-to-back with more "your pitiful life is short" poems as the meat in the Doom Club sandwich will do that to a bunch of teenagers. But Keats had the good sense to die of tuberculosis in his twenties before he turned into a cynical fucker, and I really appreciated that. But now as I read his early stuff ... man, he turns going on and on about flowers into ... okay, well, into an art. :-P He's extremely pretty. For awhile he was my favorite poet for this stuff, but it may be changing and I'm not sure I can take 100 pages of him. Oh well, maybe it'll be better than I expected. It starts off with a famous quote that he invented, so that's a good start, right? Means someone was reading it. Of course, people read Bulwer-Lytton (is he really as bad as people say?).

The Sonnets is a recent pickup again that I don't know why I haven't gotten to it earlier ... especially REALLY earlier when I was a psychotic slashgirl with a superiority complex who would have been really into this sort of thing. Now I'm more interested in the beauty of the language instead of the hidden penis jokes. What a drag. :-P

Oh, there's also the other stories in my copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I'm not really excited about them, but I'll read them anyway. Why not?

I've got two back-in-New-Jersey books that I read while visiting my Mom: Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize (an ex-Dad present I didn't read when I initially got it), which is good - especially to figure out which poets I like BenJonsonYou'reABeautifulMan!!!! - but I'm not memorizing shit. I'm also reading the ex-textbook Points of View, which is made up of short stories. It's OK and has some essentials in it "The Lottery", "A Telephone Call", "Here I Stand Ironing" ... and some stuff some famous men wrote too. ;-D (Baldwin is awesome ... Capote not so much.) Although I resent how much I HAVE to read of PoV. My teacher (who sucked, by the way) had us read maybe about eight stories in that freaking book and the book has FORTY-FOUR. At least with 30/30, another ex-textbook of short stories that I since finished, we already read a third! But EIGHT! That is the suck. :-( As of this writing I've only read 13. Well, some should be pretty good, at least.

Other things I'm reading include The Tanakh a.k.a. the Jewish Bible. But other than my binge when I read all of Samuel on Yom Kippur I haven't gotten much farther. I also bought a King James Bible before when I thought I was going to read it to be all literary and stuff back when I was 13 ... wait, I still think that, nevermind. I don't think I'm going to re-read the "Old Testament" in it but I'll read the Christian part of the book after I've finished mine. At this rate that should be sometime in 2015. :-P Also in the wee religious pile is Where Judaism Differs, which is basically a Rabbi explaining in an enlightening, nonthreatening manner the unique aspects of the Jewish faith, or a self-congratulatory preening, depending on what kind of person you are. I kid, I kid. I actually was reading this book after high school and enjoying it but it begged for a lot of deep thought and then COLLEGE HAPPENED and I haven't gotten to read the book since. Bummer. :-( I still love it; it was a personal present from my old Rabbi and I very much mean to finish it ... this year, in fact. It's been far too long. Oh, and there's also The Source by James Michener, something my parents thought I should read ages ago that I've still held onto, but fuck that noise ... if I'm going to read a doorstop on Biblical times I should probably read the Bible first. That doesn't mean I'm not interested; but I doubt I'll pick the book up again anytime soon. 2018?

A couple books I have on hold: my omnibuses of The Chronicles of Narnia (yeah, that's also a lot of words when I could get the original source but ... don't most kids read this first, anyway?) and The Oz Chronicles. I liked the books I read in them but ... eh, reading them all at once is a bit overkill, you know? I should probably get to Prince Caspian before the movie comes out, though ... is it still coming out? Oh, and this is the same with The Riverside Shakespeare. I'd love to read A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I'd rather let King Lear (which I recently finished) set in ... and we don't need crossover.(No, I don't know why I'm cool with the sonnets ... look, it's different!)

There's a couple of books I tried, said "Fuck it" but now what to pick up again and finish just to say I did. One is Mrs. Dalloway, which I tried once, told myself I needed greater concentration than I was currently willing to give it, and am still waiting for that one magic weekend when I'll read it straight through. (I swear it's coming!) The other is Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes. I bought this book as a "OMG! I need something!" at a Kevin Smith signing before realizing this book was actually really, really, really, really boring and I've tried to read it twice to no avail but Kevin Smith has a PERSONALIZED NOTE to me there. I can't just bookmooch this thing. :-( So I'm determined. Spike Lee and Michael Moore are colorful characters so it has to get better - right? ;_; Other tried-and-faileds include Our Mutual Friend, which is strange because I normally love Charles Dickens -- but okay because I plan to read all of his books in publishing order in an attempt to drive myself insane at one point so there you go. I also tried to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame soon after the Disney movie came out and failed, but I was also, like, 12 or something so I cut myself some slack.

Other ex-textbooks include The Federalist Papers, which reading for pleasure is a sign of insanity but one day I WILL DO IT!!! Although I have no idea when ... (2020?). There's also Strange Defeat, which is a classic historical text from a French Jew after his country fell in World War II. I'm hoping to read that this year, too. And the Middle-English version of The Canterbury Tales. A bit of an odd choice for a re-read ... we did read at least all the important stuff in the college Chaucer class, but I'm a thorough geek. I thought of buying a Modern English version to supplement it. But as hard as the original is, I get the same feeling when I see those "Shakespeare-side-by-side-with-stupid-version" by this point. "Bah! That's for babies! I can be smart!" and then I go back to struggling with the text forever and missing a good chunk of it. But I feel better about myself. :-P

There's a couple of comics on this list. I recently finished my Essentials of Spider-Man Vol. 6 (which was good, but I miss Stan), and Marvel Team-Up (which was pretty stupid, but entertaining in that it made me stop thinking about what a dick Peter was being to Gwen near her death. If he kept picking on her for hanging out with Flash when he clearly didn't have any time to give the poor girl who was obviously throwing herself at him the time of day, she deserved to keep the Goblin babies from him, in my totally right opinion :-P.) So now Essential Spider-Man Vol. 7 is left, of which I think I've only read the Clone Saga (heck, I bought it for the originally Clone Saga). I'm on a Spidey break now, though. I also have Universe X Vol. 1. I bought this when I considered that I just wanted to read the Earth X: Spidey issue (which was very good), but figured the actual issue would be hard tracking down and buying the whole series was more economical. I haven't read the rest of it because ... well, I haven't read Earth X. And I haven't read Earth X because I haven't bought it. And I haven't bought it because while the monkey tricks are clever (okay, the monkey tricks are the whole reason anyone buys the book ... nobody wants to actually read the story, they just want to see fat Spidey, chick!Thor and Namor on fire) whenever I read the synopsis of what happened in the grand story, my brain gets the urge to eat itself. But I will buy it one day. Because ... hey, fat Spidey, chick!Thor and Namor on fire. ... I'm rather simple. I also have How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. I was ready to tell myself, "Honey, give it up. You can only draw vaguely anime pin-ups of your favorite characters." and give it away. But Chris said to keep it, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, and I have my parents' old Signed English Starter because I know the sign language alphabet so why can't I learn the rest of the language? :-D Y'know ... like in 2050.

Heh. Okay, that's the list. See you later.

Comments

[rabican.livejournal.com]

the current standard for good short stories is "Vaguely insignificant event happens which actually reveals a deep meaning and turning point in the characters' psyche that you can only see if you squint very hard"

You forgot that said insignificant event usually has something to do with trendily unsatisfactory sex.

[quietprofanity.livejournal.com]

I haven't had much of that in said collection, actually. (Other than said-distasteful 13-year-old boy/40-year-old woman.) Bad marriages in general are more of the culprit.