Girls who read Part 2

I know, I know. It's been a while. I am getting back in to the swing of things, so here's a little plagerism for starters...

by Rosemarie Urquico

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

Girls Who Read

I am not very good at finishing things, so apologies that I have not yet completed my Asia postings...they are written by hand, they are waiting, but I just need to type them out. Sorry.

Coming back to London I launched into my new job. It's insanely busy, and most days I run around like a headless chicken, with no real life/work balance what so ever. So this is just a plagerised post from someone else, something sent to me by my sweet friend Riz, that was so brilliant I wanted to repost it. I will return soon, dear readers, with more posts from my own mind I promise, but until then, enjoy...

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl

"...because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgartory is better than a life in hell. Do it because a girl who reads can describe the amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled - a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accesible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows. and rightly demands, that they ebb comes along with the flow of dissapointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses - the hesitation of breath - endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a perios and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn't read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don't date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the cafe, you in the window of your room...The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colourful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed properly, of someone who is better than I am... You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take you Hemingway with you..."

A Million Little Pieces - Days 13 and 14, A Fiction and Nonfiction Book

I am gonna be combining Days 13 and 14 for this post, which may seem oxymoronic (is that a word) but hang on and you'll understand why...

James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces caused a media sensation. A harrowing account of drug addiction and rehabilitation, the book was billed as completely factual. Under closer inspection however it appears that Frey had perhaps overstated how truthful his account was, and in fact had used a lot of poetic licence and portrayed his perception of his experiences, rather than what actually happened. To add insult to injury, the queen of melodrama Oprah Winfrey had added A Million Little Pieces to her book list and thus took his 'betrayal' personally, and so invited him on her show under false pretences and launched a blatant attack on him and his writing, bleating on about how he could lie to her, how could he do this to her.

Obviously at the time of all these goings on I was living in some sort of media bubble (also known as Grahamstown, where I went to University) and so was unaware of the shit storm brewing around this particular book. In 2006 I picked it up in a book store, and it was prefaced with a sort of apology and explanation by Frey, obviously to account for what had happened in the media, and so I read it quite aware that it was not a totally true account. I was blown away. Frey takes language and pushes it to its limits. He adds an urgency to everything he writes by making the sentences contain more thoughts and feelings then they were meant to. I found that most of all what overawed me was his ability to show how time has different meanings when we are in different states of mind. His desperation shows in the way he attempts to pack the hordes of emotions flying through him into these long running sentences, which seem to collide with one another and roll over each other, until I felt I was reading what he was feeling. I long to have this power over words so that I could magic emotions into being, and the fact that he has honed his craft to this effectiveness meant to me that the truthfullness of his account was not nearly as important as the fact that the way he had described it made me believe he knew what it was to feel that way.

If you have not read A Million Little Pieces, or its follow up My Friend Leonard, I would urge you to do so, as Frey manages to examine this period in his life with such a unflinching eye, and with so little compassion for his own choices, that it urges you to do the same in your own life. It is a work that profoundly effected me and the way I saw mental illness and addiction, and I think that regardless of its factual merits, Frey's style is certainly one to learn from. Read from the excerpt below:

"The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and thinking and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve or deserve anything else yet it is here and I am here and I have all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment and this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen ticking of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving."

The Importance of Being Wilde - Day 5, My Favourite Quote

If you ever go to Paris, make sure you visit the Pere Lechaise Cemetery. It was a sharp, frigid day in November when my friend Tarryn and I visited it. We were 18 and had been spending our gap year before university abroad. We were hungry for new experiences, and had learnt so much in our few months away from home. Yet we were still so impressionable, sensitive and naive. Experiences that would no pass over me then profoundly changed my outlook.

The graveyard was icy - the grass crunching beneath our feet, our breath swirling in the air before us. It was strange to me to come to a cemetery, pick up a map and then hunt down the resting places of great men and women. I felt disrespectful as we clambered over the gravestones of unknown residents to marvel at the remains of Ingres and to hold a moment of silent vigil at the Marlboro and condom strewn grave of Jim Morrison. Pere Lechaise Cemetery is on a hill, and we made our slow progression up to the site of Oscar Wilde's memorial. As we came to the apex of the hill we saw a white, stone memorial. A large modernist angel dominates the tomb, and it reminded me of something in a Pharaoh's tomb. As Tarryn and I moved closer we realised that the surface of the angel was mottled in shades of raspberry, scarlet, fuschia, cherry and plum. Upon closer inspection these smudges were a collection of hundreds of kisses left by admirers. The grave is marked with a sign asking visitors to respect, and not deface it. And so, in deference to, or perhaps in spite of this sign, faithful followers have left this mark only. We were touched by the dedication to Wilde so long after his death, by the love he seemed to inspire. We had come seeking Morrison and in the process had found Wilde. And so we rouged our lips and silently pressed our pursed mouths to the cold stone.

We walked back down to the entrance quietly, mindful of the things we had encountered and suddenly well aware of our own mortality. Aware of the greatness that had gone before.

Over the next year I read every bit of Wilde I could get my hands on and fell deeper and deeper under the spell that had been cast when I first saw that strange angel. Wilde's wit was as sharp as a razor, his insight profound, and so below I present you with a select collection of Wilde's quotes:

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing."

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

"I am not young enough to know everything."

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth."

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

"I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being."

"I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything."

101 Books to Read Before You Die - Day 4, My Favourite Book

Another impossible decision imposed upon me, and yet again I shall avoid it with aplomb. As you may know I am a passionate reader, and I pride myself on reading books that teach me something. I have read a lot of good books in my time - some of which I have thoroughly enjoyed, others of which have been rather bitter disappointments. Despite my dedication to literature generally there are certain gaping, and rather embarrassing holes in my reading, and so in order to remedy this I set myself a task. Exclusive Books, a book store in South Africa released a list of 101 Books to Read Before You Die. I have been reading in and around this list for about a year now.

Unfortunately, occasionally I get distracted by some lesser popular culture (lost a couple of weeks of valuable reading time to those bloody Twilight books) but I am moving through it, and reading some goodies that might be related to the list along the way. I have also invested in some of the ones left to read which I consider a step in the right direction too. So here it is:

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Spud - John van de Ruit
The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Possession - A. S. Byatt
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Chocolat - Joanne Harris
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
Q & A - Vikas Swarup
Dune - Frank Herbert
Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
River God - Wilbur Smith
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Magician - Raymond E Feist
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
The Magus - John Fowles
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
The Beach House - James Patterson
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Kringe in 'n Bos - Dalene Matthee
The World according to Garp - John Irving
Northen Lights - Phillip Pullman
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Shades - Marguerite Poland
Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
Fiela se kind - Dalene Matthee
Story of an African Farm - Olive Schreiner
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne

The Very Hungry Reader

Books are a blessing. The best ones stay with you, and repeat on you for years to come. Generally I don't have the best memory for plot and action, but I tend to remember intricacies and details. The way light is described, a turn of phrase, a strange historical fact - my perception of the world is coloured by these little facts that rattle around in my brain, and occasionally pop to the fore when I am trying to recall all the information I have on a particular subject.

I am a reader, a rampant devourer of the written word, a literary glutton. I go through stages were it seems as though book after book passes through my hands, and I struggle to disentangle the subtle nuances in the plots. And then I go through reading droughts. Terrible, intellectually arid times when I can't commit to a storyline and when the words float through me and refuse to take hold. At the moment I am experiencing one of these self propagated phases of famine. I have a shelf of volumes, each with their own charms, and yet I cannot seem to settle with any of them. I flit from one to the other looking for god knows what to reel me in.

This has been going on for weeks, and alarming me somewhat, and then yesterday I sat down and read a whole book. I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This Eric Carle classic has been known to me as long as I can remember. At first I am sure I was fascinated by the holes in the book, as he munched his way through, and then by the amazing illustrations, and then by his sheer greed, and eventually by the message of transformation. I love this book, and with my sweet second cousin turning one (and me being one of those nightmarish people who buy children books) I bought it. And because I am one of those even worse people, I read it before the poor child had even clapped eyes on it. And as I read once more this original make over story (through binging - who knew?!) I vowed to return to my neglected tomes. And tonight I finished a chapter!

Meet Toren - the proud new owner of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Don't let his poor personal hygiene fool you, he is going to be a literary genius.