Observations as I read

As I get further into Women in Love, I am finding that it is truly a book that explores the human soul. We're talking there being not much happening in the sense of actual actions, and a whole lot happening in each character's mind. There's dialogue, but the dialogue is definitely the kind that says one easy-enough-to-understand thing on the surface, but eludes to something much deeper, much more complicated. It's quite the exercise for the reading mind.

There was one chunk of a chapter that I could swear is exactly what my creative writing teacher told us not to do when we're writing, albeit he was talking about short stories.

You see, D.H. Lawrence has this way, as many other authors do from his time, and even today do, of exploring a character's one thought, and pretty much beating it over the head senseless. In turn, it beats the reader over the head senseless, too. He doesn't do it throughout, but there was one particular episode where Ursula was sitting at home waiting one Sunday for her beau to call on her. Her thoughts, as she waits, are centered around the idea that she is going to die, the same way that anyone anxious to hear from their love interest, and unsure when that will be, feels like they're going to die.

It would have sufficed to just say, "Ursula felt like she was going to die, as she waited for Birkin's form to appear." Instead, we are given about five pages talking about how she is better off dead, that there was nothing left in life for her, because she had experienced all that she wanted or could want to experience in life (except of course for Birkin to show up), and therefore, death was only the next step in life.

It's very philosophical and internal a conflict, which although it fits the mood and style of this book, it was just long enough to bore me for a spell, but not long enough to turn me off and away from the entire work.

On a happy endnote: Ursula's beau, Birkin, does finally show up.

Until next time...

Still working on it

Don't worry, this is not a post to tell you that I'm about to drop another book out of boredom. On the contrary. I am loving Women in Love. I'd tell you what page I'm on, but this particular e-book version doesn't have page numbers. I've just reached chapter fourteen, and it's looking like one of the Brangwen sisters has finally connected with her love interest.

This is a really lovely book, and I'm cherishing every moment I'm spending with it. I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but it seems that we are being shown everything, every little detail about a character is shown through their actions, or echoed in their thoughts and lines. It gets meticulous every once in a while, but for the most part, it does what fiction ought to do, which is create action, and through that action create tension. I believe that D.H. Lawrence does just that, and that's what makes him one of the masters, in my humble opinion.

I'd like to add that up until recently, I have been a generally fast reader, mainly because I had the luxury of being able to sit and ignore everything for a whole day, for instance, and just read. I can't do that anymore, so I can only read a little bit at a time, and some days I don't even read at all. It makes me sad, but that's life, I guess.

Well, that's it for now from me. Until next time...

A little off the topic, but not really...

The other day I was stuck somewhere away from home without the book I am currently reading, Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence. It's not that I forgot it, but rather that it was too big and bulky for my bag that day, and besides, I didn't think I'd be in a reading mood.

The thing about moods is that they change, and, more often than not, pop up unexpectedly. That is precisely what happened to me the day I decided to not take my book with me; I felt like reading my book, but it was at home, where I wasn't.

Ever since the idea of e-books was introduced as a serious option, I have had a hostile aversion to it. As I said in a column I wrote recently talking about e-reading, "... the mere mention of e-reading has been something I greet with a big fat X, like the one people make with their fingers to ward off evil." But, like moods change, so do views.

I've been slowly inching toward accepting e-reading as a reading option that exists, not a force that will drive the bound book into extinction. I say option, because the day I was nowhere near the book I was in the mood to read I had my iPod Touch with me. There was also free wifi. So, I went to the apps store and performed a search there for Women in Love. Sure enough, it was available, and for free, no less. So, I downloaded it and passed some time with reading the very thing I wanted to read, in the font I wanted, in the size I wanted.

I can't deny that it was cool to still be able to have something that was nowhere near me, suddenly, with little effort, right at my fingertips. I felt cool, a woman of my time. A woman in love with technology.

After that experience, I decided to just continue reading Women in Love in e-form, because I have yet to read an entire book that way. Also because many believe that this is the way publishers are going, I guess I should get used to it.

Afterall, humans have had to embrace change in order to improve themselves throughout history. Look at it this way: First, it was drawings on cave walls, then it was cuneiform on clay tablets, then it was writing on animal skin, then papyrus... our written mediums have always been changing, and e-reading is just another link in a long chain of innovations for the betterment of how we record and communicate information.

Now I think I'm gonna go e-read. Until next time...

A bad case of "I'm gonna have to let you go..."

It's official that I've abandoned Revolutionary Road. I tried long and hard, but I just couldn't get through it. I couldn't get through a second round of misery, with more details, no less. I finally decided to pull out the fancy bookmark where I had left it a week before and placed it in another book.

Though I feel awful that in this blog's infancy I've already managed to abandon two books, sometimes you have to abandon the book that's stalling your reading list's progress. There's just no other way around it sometimes.

I mentioned in one of my posts that I had read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and found it to be wonderful. As a result I decided to read another one of his books, and I settled on Women in Love.

I've already made it through two chapters of Women in Love, and although it starts off a little awkward by just diving into a scene between Gudrun and Ursula, the two heroines of the novel, I am really enjoying it. I especially can't wait for the story to develop further so that the sisters begin their relationships with the two men we've already been introduced to through Gudrun's and Ursula's eyes. It seems that there will be dramatic, romantic events that only Lawrence can create with raw beauty.

It's amazing to me how a man could write what and how a woman feels as well as Lawrence. Maybe it was just luck on Lawrence's part, or maybe it was knowledge that was passed down to him, or maybe he's just one of those people who understand what other people are feeling, whether he has walked a mile in their shoes or not; whatever is behind this enviable artistic ability, I feel that there is in me a little bit of every woman that Lawrence describes in his novels. It's almost eerie, but definitely refreshing.

On another note, and in honor of Read Across America day I wanted to spread the word that I am very much into keeping a virtual bookshelf to share my reading activity with anyone who's interested. So far, I've found two services to do this through. One is weRead, and although I've kept it for over a year now, and it's where you will find the most up-to-date information and reviews for a huge chunk of the books I've read throughout my life, I only know how to access it through Facebook. The other virtual bookshelf I keep is through goodreads.com, which I downloaded as an app for my iPod Touch.

I just started using goodreads the other day, so it's a little sparse at the moment, but I am going to try to at least copy and paste my reviews from weRead when I have time, so that both bookshelves are up-to-date. You can find me at Goodreads under the username Reemawi, in the meantime.

I guess that's it for now. Until next time...

A task

Still trudging through Revolutionary Road. What's taking so long isn't so much that it's a bad book, on the contrary. It's a very well-written book with very vivid characters and a very subtle, yet powerful conflict at the center of their lives.

The problem that's keeping me reading at a very slow pace, I think, is the fact that my imagination is not being worked at all. I mentioned before that I actually saw the movie before I read the book. This is something I try to avoid, seeing as how I had a bad experience with that when I read Interview with the Vampire after seeing the movie, and found that I was so blinded by images of Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas that I missed a lot of major differences as obvious as hair color and age. It was ridiculous.

Ever since my experience with IWTV, I pretty much made it a point to try to read the book before I venture into the land of movies. Every once in a while I break that rule. One instance where I broke that rule was very interesting, because I saw the movie, loved it, then read the book and hated it... even though the author of it is one of my absolute favorites. By the way, skip The Painted Veil in bound form and believe that Walter Fane is, indeed, none other than Edward Norton and that Kitty Fane is none other than Naomi Watts.

So, with Revolutionary Road, the thing that is making it a task to read at a reasonable pace is the very thing that makes the movie adaptation so excellent and Oscar-worthy-- it's too damn close, near identical to what you see in the movie!

All I see Frank Wheeler being is Leonardo DiCaprio. All I see April Wheeler being is Kate Winslet. I can hear those actors' voices shouting at each other during dramatic scenes. I can see Leonardo DiCaprio's vulnerable face so clearly, it's like I'm running a movie reel in my head, and the same with Kate Winslet's mature, troubled face. It's like I'm reading the screenplay, and that bores me.

I feel like I'm being robbed of my ability to escape and use my imagination by casting anyone I feel like casting into each of those roles, even if they're not actors to begin with. I like this freedom that a book offers, as opposed to a movie.

Back to reading...

Revolutionary Road, 150 pages in, and I already have something to say...

As you can see, I am still in the process of reading Revolutionary Road, but I do want to talk about it a bit.

At 150 pages in, the book has proven to me what a great movie adaptation Hollywood produced. I watched the movie first, which is something I try not to do very often, and it is clear that the movie follows the book almost to the T, only leaving out ignorable or insignificant details.

Most of the dialogue I remember from the movie is word-for-word in the book, and I feel that the actors chosen for each part match the descriptions I am reading now, save for the character of Frank Wheeler, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie. The only problem with Frank being played by Leo, and it is an insignificant one, is that Frank is described as having black hair, while Leo is clearly not of this coloring. Other than that, I'm happy with both forms of this deep story.

There is one thing April Wheeler says in the book, and I can't remember whether it was in the movie or not, but I really liked it. She says: "... certainly it's not going to be easy. Do you know anything worth doing that is?"

What a great quote! Liking the book, a lot and will write more about it later.

Life gets in the way of reading, but I do it anyway

A lot has been going on to prevent me from practicing my favorite hobby, but I did manage to get two books read since the last book I wrote about.

Actually, there was one non-fiction book in the middle that really was a tome, and though it was super interesting, I never finished it. It eventually got to a point where it was just repeating the same statement over and over again using just different examples to prove the point. The message of A People's History of Science is simply this: science is something that only recently has become a subject linked to elite brains and geniuses, it actually was practiced by the illiterate working class, and some of the greatest discoveries of science do not belong to the likes of Galileo and Newton, but rather to the working class who Galileo and Newton gathered data from. There're only so many ways you can say that before it feels like you're beating a dead horse, so although I recommend this book by Clifford D. Conner if you're interested in this sort of thing, I think for someone like me who just wanted to get a brief peek into how science came about, it can be a little too much.

After my non-fiction stint I moved onto fiction, though there was a gap of a few weeks inbetween. I read two books. Here is what I have to say about both.

The Bad Girl, by Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa

I picked up a romance of sorts. It is a story that I will not soon forget for many reasons.

The Bad Girl, told from his own point of view, is the story of Ricardo Somocurcio, a Peruvian boy belonging to a middle class family, living in a middle class neighborhood. Actually, Ricardo is an orphan who lives with his aunt in a neighborhood of Lima, Miraflores, in the 1950s. He is a teenager when he meets the girl who will later fall into the role of the bad girl. And she's really a bad girl, this girl Ricardo falls in love with, because he loves her forever, though not even he knows why. He doesn't even know her real name until he's fifty years old.

Ricardo's goal in life is very simple: to live in Paris. That's all he wants aside from the bad girl, really. He makes his dream of living in Paris come true by being a translator for hire, mostly for the UNESCO, which also gives him the opportunity to travel all over the world. Ricardo leads a very interesting life in the sense that he lives in Paris, travels all over the world to translate in different cities, and keeps running into the girl who stole his heart back in Peru and disappeared until he was in his mid-twenties. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Well, it is.

This bad girl who Ricardo's world seems to revolve around is pretty rotten to him. There are many times when you almost hate Ricardo for being so stupid as to allow this woman to treat him as bad as she does, but there is a boiling point that serves as a mini character arc halfway through the story. Ordinarily, a love story would make you root for the people who love each other to be together, and when they do get together, you are happy that they have. That's not always the case here, though something tells you it's the only way things can be for these two unique characters.

She treats him like someone who was put on earth as a cushion for her, to fall back on whenever things go wrong, and things really go wrong. She has many names in the book; Lili, Comrade Arlette, Madame Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko, Chilean Girl, Peruvian Girl, Otilita. Different names, different lives, different decades and cities are covered by Ricardo in his recitation of the love he spent his life suffering through. In the end, you find that no matter how ugly love can get, it is still love, and it is a beautiful thing.

I am sure there was a lot lost in translation, given that this was originally written in Spanish, but the beauty came through. There was world history woven in with personal history, a love story woven in with friendships; Llosa is an expert storyteller who can cover a million aspects of life in one story, one scene. The translation speaks of an originally flawless masterpiece set in places and times the author obviously knew enough to describe so well. Paris comes to life through the decades that Ricardo spends living there, as does the political climate of Peru. I learned a lot about Peru's history and a lot about the Paris of yesterday that still throbs with its neverending charm today. London is also described in such a way that I felt I was there, it was done so well.

My favorite thing about this book is my favorite thing about reading. It took me on a trip all around the world with two very interesting companions. I could not put it down, and whenever I had a chance to abandon my responsibilities to just curl up with it, I took that chance. It was hard to say goodbye to the characters finally, and I prolonged the process of reading the last chapter, reading it in little bursts, but the end eventually came and all I can say is that this is definitely a book I can see myself reading multiple times and will definitely make permanent room for on my bookshelf. I even hope that one day, when my Spanish is good enough, to read it the way it was written.

The next book I tackled was:

Lady Chatterley's Lover, by none other than D.H. Lawrence

I had actually tried to read this years ago, and even attempted to do so for my western civilization class in college, but never managed to get further than the first four or five chapters.

This time around I was able to read it rather smoothly. I would even venture to say that I was unable to put it down, it was so engrossing. This leads me to believe that there are books which require a certain level of maturity in order to be appreciated and understood the way they ought to be. Lawrence's final novel is one of those pieces.

More than trying to shock the reader, or introduce a new style of sexually frank writing, I believe that Lawrence was really trying to explain what would happen if the English classes came together and did something natural, indiscriminating.

That's really what happens between Connie and her lover, Oliver Mellors. Connie is married to a man who cannot give her the thing any woman would want in a marriage, the means to procreate. Connie's husband, Clifford, is paralyzed from the waist down, the result of an injury he got during the war. Somehow these two make their marriage work, though it's clear they come from different worlds intellectually. Lawrence makes it clear that Connie had already experienced sex before her marriage, while her husband was a virgin. We are told that they both don't place much importance on sex, preferring good conversation over the thing that ruins a good intellectual relationship in their eyes.

Connie seems resigned to her life the way it is, acting more like a mother or nurse than a wife. You know she's not happy, but you can't say she's unhappy either. That is, not until she becomes intrigued by Oliver Mellors, a free-spirited gamekeeper working on her husband's family estate. We see Connie's interest in Mellors grow and eventually turn into love, the very thing that awakens her to the reality that her life with Clifford Chatterley as it is is no life at all.

A series of encounters between Connie and her lover is what prevented this book from being published in the author's own country in 1928, though piracy took care of its distribution there. In fact, Lady Chatterley's Lover was not officially published in Britain until nearly thirty years later, and only after a trial that called for literary types to testify that although the book contains explicit material, it is there for a reason.

These controversial trysts are somewhat steamy, even by today's standards, but it is not so much what these two do with each other that makes this book so innovative, but rather what it all leads to.

Up until her affair with the gamekeeper, Connie had been living a dull existence. Her husband's friends discuss matters between the sexes in her presence as she sits quietly in the corner and does something women were expected to do back when they were considered unfeeling, without brains or intellect. Before we are presented with this scene that apparently occurs often in Connie's life as the wife of an upper-class man, we are told that although Connie is of lower birth than Clifford, she is intellectually at a higher level. She is a woman who has traveled and studied, and maintained relationships, intellectual as well as physical, with men prior to her marriage to Clifford. Clifford is nothing but a boring businessman, I thought. As Clifford and his friends talk, she listens silently, never letting on that she possesses the things the majority of British society believed women lacked at that time.

With the gamekeeper's presence in her life, Connie is able to examine her marriage from afar, and sees what a sham her marriage to Clifford has been. She is finally convinced of her needs and takes the necessary steps to get what she has come to crave in life: an all-encompassing love with a man, and a child.

Probably the most interesting part of this story is that although Mellors is presented as lower than Connie by class, he is closer to her intellectual level than Clifford is. He is well-read and able to speak properly, not with the vernacular he uses as an act of defiance. We realize it is his way of defying society through his confrontation with Connie's sister, who looks down on him and takes the attitude of the general population in separating the classes.

I'd have to say that although Connie is a complicated, interesting character who presented a side to women perhaps never seen so clearly before, Oliver Mellors is the character that interested me more. I loved the fact that he was educated, well-spoken, able to come off as a true gentleman, but chooses to tell the world "screw it," and sticks to who he really is. Like Connie's role toward women, Mellors's role is to present a side to the lower-class people toward society.

I am very glad that I finally got through this book, and I am happy to report that I thoroughly enjoyed it for its innovativeness, social commentary and eventually beautiful love story.

Next on my reading list:

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

I actually started it already, and so far so good. I usually read the book before watching the movie, but with this, I saw the movie first. It seems like the screenplay follows the book almost to perfection, but I haven't even read 100 pages yet, so my opinion might change.

And that's it for now. Until next time... .