Seasonal Plume

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield’s evocative novel on the connection and bond between siblings, revolves around two sets of twins: Margaret Lea and her deceased twin Moira, and tragedy-born twins Emmeline and Adeline March. The story is two-fold, one story in another story: you have Margaret while she goes about her task to write the life story of reclusive, mysterious author Vida Winter… and then you have Vida Winter narrating her story; Vida, the successful writer who’s never told the truth about who she is and where she came from. She’s finally coming clean.

I will admit that I picked up this novel purely on reading that it was a “spellbinding, lyrical debut” as I’ve always been drawn to rather lyrical, lush stories–and always felt disconnected with rather terse ones. I raved about it some time ago when I started reading it, and I’ve since finished it. It was definitely a good read.

There are three things that I want to highlight about this book, which might very well be the deciding point if this book interests you:

1. I’m usually a quick reader, always wanting to devour each book. But with this book (along with a few others) was worded so wonderfully that I took my time, savoring each word, each phrase. I’m not one for something overly drawn out, because that makes me read even quicker, skip some phrases. Setterfield hit a good balance between lush prose and story speed, which is important. Something too lush will drown me; something too terse isn’t personal to me.
2. The story revolved around family, bonds, and love. There’s a lot of tragedy, and a lot of abandonment, with dysfunctional people and people who think they know better. But they all served to highlight the (often almost otherworldly) connections between siblings, between twins, to be precise. There wasn’t an extraneous story, a useless thread: I was easily sucked into the story, my full concentration on it.
3. Vida Winter’s past is a mystery, and because of that, the book itself is a big mystery that keeps one guessing. And guessing. And guessing. It’s so finely weaved together that once you reach the end of Vida’s personal story (“…my story–my own personal story–ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.”) you might say, as I did, “why didn’t I see that before?”

Other things that was of interest in me is that there are two writers in this book. Novels about writers are quite interesting for me; now I have two: one a biographer and another a fiction writer. Love of reading and Jane Eyre was another. That’s not to say that the book is perfect: precious few are. The final ending of the book felt a bit too drawn-out, a little contrived: there was such a lot of wrapping up to do that it seemed there were endless epilogues. It was not a slow landing, but one that happened in rather swift gradations.

All in all, though, it was definitely a good book, one of those that I can easily call an escape into another world, another time, another place. One that transforms, and one that speaks of more than just the surface.

I finished Janet Fitch’s Paint It Black just a few minutes ago: a darkly beautiful, haunting tale about model/actress Josie Tyrell and living through the tragedy that is her boyfriend’s suicide. Dealing with questions such as, do we really kill that which we love? and whose fault is it, really?, Paint It Black is a glimpse into the soul of one who has gone through love and loss and is struggling to find the way back.

I had my misgivings about the book: I loved Fitch’s White Oleander and while I had high hopes for this book, I was worried about expecting too much. I’m happy to say it didn’t disappoint, but I did approach with caution. Fitch’s lyrical style works best with the first person perspective of her first novel, but it still lent a haunting, heavy tone to Paint It Black which suited the book. It both drew you closer than a run-of-the-mill third person perspective could, but also kept you at a distance, the same distance that Josie wraps around herself and fuels the mysterious air around her (like her movie character Elena, “mysterious and haunted”).

The book delves into the mind and emotions of not just Josie, but the grief-stricken mother, Meredith, domineering and always striving for perfection before her son’s death tears apart her quasi-perfect world. It explores into the emotions going through Michael, when he was alive and seemingly destroying the very thing he stormed the Bastille for.

“To be or not to be… It’s the only question, really. Zero or one. Accept or reject.”

But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn’t have to be a genius. You didn’t even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. And changed zero to one.

It’s a depressing tale (I cried I don’t know how many times), hanging heavy and clawing right at your heart. Fitch has a way with words, a way of making you think without throwing everything at you, of creating both a bridge and a wall between you and grieving Josie, grasping Meredith, and troubled Michael. The book is like a black painting, seemingly dark and heavy, but if you look closer, let yourself see, there’s this silvery white paint shining from underneath: the True World, its beauty never entirely gone, if we only know where and how to look.

For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling with one of the books I’m currently reading, specifically Amy Tan’s Saving Fish From Drowning. I did desperately want to like it (the premise of the book intrigued me right off the bat) but now I’m having difficulty trying to wade through it, so this morning when I again put it down, I decided to move on to other books.

I’ve only done this with one other book (Jostein Gaarder’s Maya) and I honestly thought that it wouldn’t happen again anytime soon (I’d only started really getting back into reading this year!) but it did. I feel a certain kind of sadness at the thought of finally setting aside a book as “unreadable” on a personal level, since you’re pretty much giving up on the book.

Personally, I put down a book for good when it’s the middle of the book already and I can’t connect with the characters, and when I’ve started to feel that the sole reason why I’m still reading is that I must finish it since it’s started already. I’ve gone through lots of books with parts that I always find hard to go through (be it because it’s long and dragging, or because it’s emotionally draining) but when this is typical of a whole half of the book… I should be spending my time better.

Saving Fish From Drowning basically was both for me. It had its moments, but on the whole I felt that it moved all over the place at an inconsistent pace. I couldn’t connect to any of the characters (except maybe Bibi herself and Esme) and there was almost nothing happening. There’s a certain sense of voyeurism in following everything (and I mean everything) about a group of people as they trek through their itinerary but it soon felt like a blog that was far too meandering. :P

Should I give Saving Fish From Drowning a second chance? Why? What would make you put down a book you’ve started?

I was reorganizing my bookmarks a few days ago and came upon quite a few interesting literary/reading/writing websites that I had previously bookmarked, some of them for checking out at a later date. One of these is DailyLit, a service that brings books to you via email on a daily basis.

We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but could not find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved.

Subscribers can choose books to read, schedule when they receive each book’s installment (daily, on weekdays, or only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays? at what time?) and choose if they’d like to receive it via email or RSS. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has 149 parts, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—which I chose to receive—has 430 parts, and another one of my choices, the first part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Agamemnon just has 24 parts. There are over 250 books served by DailyLit, all of them in the public domain (sorry, no Harry Potter here).

It’s a nifty idea, and one I always meant to try out. So when I came across the website just recently, I decided that while I usually prefer not having to spend such a long period of time over anything (for example, I hardly watch TV; I prefer buying whole seasons of TV shows just so that I don’t get the cliffhanger episode endings!), right now it was probably best for me to read books in short, manageable chunks. Personally, I haven’t been able to do a lot of reading lately, especially new books; recently, when I gravitate towards books, it’s always been towards books I have already read in the past, such as Catherine Marshall’s Julie, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It’s not a lack of new books that’s the problem (I actually bought two last week: Amy Tan’s Saving Fish From Drowning and Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale) but I realized that I was drawn towards previously-read books because they were comforting, like old friends you can stay quiet with, ones where you need no words to fill the spaces between you (which doesn’t look like a very good metaphor, as friendships between books and people are based on words themselves). They’re not very demanding of your “love”. Since the prospect of picking up a semi-thick/thick book to read while I’m resting was making me tired, small light chunks while I’m going through my email should be great, right?

So far, as previously mentioned, I’d picked up Anna Karenina and Oresteia: Agamemnon, on the third part for both. I’m liking how the reading is going so far: it’s not demanding, each part’s length isn’t daunting, and I’ll admit it, the nifty-ness of the whole thing hasn’t worn off. I’ve never been the sort to read e-books, preferring good ol’ paper when it comes to reading text; but since DailyLit gives me these books in readable, light chunks, it’s actually enjoyable to have a dose of the classics amidst the hitting of the delete button for spam. ;)

So what’s great about DailyLit?

1. Too busy for books? Each part sent to you are just the right length, so it doesn’t take up too much of your time.
2. It’s free! Since all the books are in the public domain and you don’t pay a thing to get it via email/RSS, you’re reading books for free and without stepping on anyone’s toes.
3. A dose of the classics in between stressful emails is great for slowing down and relaxing.
4. You can schedule when you receive each part, so that it follows your preferred habits as much as possible.
5. This is a great way to “test read” books before buying them.

What’s not so hot:

1. I imagine that when the book starts getting really good, it will get annoying to have to stop reading. But that’s what the bookstore is for: like it so much that you can’t put it down? Buy the book!
2. The plain text formatting of the books sent can take a little getting used to, if you’re not used to reading things from places like Project Gutenberg. Tip: words between underscores (_) are italics. I have yet to see it, but words between asterisks (*) are in heavy type.

All in all, I’d recommend this website to anyone who’s been itching to read a few classics and older work but haven’t the time or feel quite clueless as to where to start. It’s free and it’s friendly, so start subscribing. :)

I finally read and finished The Bartimaeus Trilogy a few weeks back, due to recommendations of friends. The trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud, is made up of the books The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, and Ptolemy’s Gate; it follows three principal characters, all of them coming from different backgrounds in life: Nathanial (also known as John Mandrake), blessed to be raised as a ruling-class wizard; Bartimaeus, a long-lived djinn of the fourth level; and Kitty, a magic-immune commoner girl chafing under the highfalutin wizards. They way these three characters interact and affect each other’s lives (and the world they live in) is both real and otherworldly: they draw you in even if they exasperate you plenty of times.

I can’t rightfully say which character is the best for me; they’re all portrayed with wonderful depth, drawing you in with their (usually suppressed) emotions. The book jumps from the perspective of one major character to the next, the narrator focusing on him; the difference is that when we’re seeing events through Bartimaeus’ point of view, the book shifts to a first-person POV. I feel that this is an ingenious way of differentiating Bartimaeus from the human characters; the book also makes use of footnotes to implicitly express the nature of Bartimaeus: in Stroud’s world, the djinn (and other beings) are able to see other planes of reality, while humans can only see one plane. In the same way, djinnn can think different thoughts at a single point in time, while humans, the oh so sluggish humans, can only think one thought at a time. The Bartimaeus chapters are then peppered with footnotes whenever Bartimaeus thinks of a rather interesting quip or trivia that he wishes to express.

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