more books to read

Neil Gaiman...one of my favorite authors.  I finally went and got one of his latest picture books

(illustrated by Charles Vess), "Blueberry Girl".  You can hear the book in it's entirety here:

                                 

          I love Mr. Gaiman's voice, his accent too. 

I enjoyed turning the pages along with the narration. It was kinda like being read a bedtime story....by Neil Gaiman...(if he asked I would say yes, check this picture out...It's a joke by the way.)

I also bought "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.

It has been all over the internet for quite a while, but I can't stand the cover...

I need to put a book jacket on this, pronto.  

My local bookseller has been very eager to sell this book (Pride and Prejudice, for some reason is one of my favorite reads), so I finally decided to pay up despite my anxiety.

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Also grabbed "Physics of the Impossible" (a scientific exploration into the world of phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel) by Michio Kaku.  Whoa.

I like how the preface starts with a word from Albert Einstein: "If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it."

...Amen...

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...and I couldn't not buy the Commemorative Edition of Necronomicon - the best weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

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I also bought all three books of the Divine Comedy by Dante today.

The wonderful bookshop owner was kind enough to tell me that I can read it online for free...

BUT I ALREADY TRIED THAT and it didn't work for me.  I NEED the paper and if I print it all out, I will waste paper and ink because the printer will get jammed...and the whole process will turn into some kind of zen training thing  (I would have to tell myself that "it will all pass...blah, blah, blah).

I also need to write memos and stuff in these books...they will be more like my notebooks.  I usually don't, (can't) do that with books, but on this occasion, an exception will be made.  It's (ehem) RESEARCH.

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So, that's what I bought at the bookstore today...I wanted to by the new Haruki Murakami book "1Q84" but like many other Japanese books, this one comes in two separate books, each costing about 19 US dollars... I'll wait for the bunko edition (Japanese equivalent of the paperback edition).  I have tons to keep me busy (obviously) and two other Haruki books I have to read first anyways.

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As far as my current reading endeavor goes:

"Middlemarch" is a good read so far (albeit a little dull sometimes) but I am not caught up with the majority of fabulous readers over at Fill in the Gaps.

So I should peel my eyes off this screen and stick them in the book...

The sticky note things you see on the side, mark the places I found particularly interesting...one of them was in the book "Old and Young".  

Will (a young man who still doesn't have a real job...at this point..and is probably falling in love with one of the main characters, Dorothea) is saying: 

"...I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit him with his excess of meaning.  But this time I mean to outdo him in breadth of intention."

Can you guess which word made me stop?  

Despite the fact that this story takes place in a time when there weren't even telephones, I couldn't help but imagine Will with a mobile phone, twittering.  Twittering and trying to say more in less words than Naumann.

Goooooooood grief. 

So much to read, so little time.  Now off to my other blogs...

97 to 99 (filling in the gaps)

The picture is actually of numbers 97, 98 and  53 because The Leopard was right there in the same are with the other two books, nd I just love the cloth cover of my everyman's library edition!

97. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

98. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

99. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (because I want to read the Widows Of  Eastwick!)

So, one more to go.  However, new books cross my path almost everyday and it so hard to stay focused on what I think I need to read the most.  I don't know how everyone else is managing to cross of those books on their lists so fast!

86 to 96 on my list of books to read

Uh-oh.  I haven't included the book that will, no doubt, be helpful for my current "novel adventure".

...

Dante's "Inferno".  I suppose since I know the story I fell like I've read it... However, that will not do, so it goes on my list of 100 books to read.  Might as well kill 2 birds with 1 stone (enlightenment and research).

Ngh...

I'm a vegetarian, and I just realized I really don't like that expression...kill, bird...argh.

Ah, so here are a few more to add to my list that previous

ly stopped at number eight-five.

86. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

87. Divine Comedy by Dante

?

Recurring theme here?

ANYWAY,

88. Complete Prose by Woody Allen

89. Glass Book of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist

90. Five by Endo Shusaku

91. The Keep by Jennifer Egan

92. Native American in the Land of the Shogun by Frederik L. Schodt

93. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (I think I read a kiddy edition when I was little but that doesn't                                                                        count so here it is!)

94. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

95. The Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux

Oh good heavens...FINALLY number 96...

96. Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson

So, four more to go.

As for my "novel adventure" it is still going pretty well.  I am writing chapters out of order though.

I have a map in my head so I know where I am headed and feel rather comfortable shifting back and forth in time.  

I just wish I had more time to read things like Dante so that I can learn something from the "masters".  

I shouldn't even be blogging right now ... but it is very therapeutic...

Speaking of therapeutic, must go take a bath in candlelight...aahhh.

filling in the gaps..

I haven't been able to choose 100 books yet...  

The whole process of looking at my list of books that I own...

The stacks of books that I brought home (when the store that I worked at closed down last year) have been looming over me like a tree in a Dr Seuss picture.

For some reason I still think that this is a necessary process.  So, here is the list of books that will continue to grow:

1. A Parisian Affair and Other Stories by Guy de Maupassant
2. The Sunday Philosophy Club  by Alexander McCall Smith
3. Dune by Frank Herbert
4. White Noise by Don DeLillo
5. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
6. The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
7. Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill
8. Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies by Ken Kalfus
9. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss
10. Purple Hibiscus  by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
11. A Changed Man by Francine Prose
12. General Theory of Magic by Marcel Mauss
13. A Woman's Life by Guy De Maupassant
14. Tales of Wonder by Mark Twain
15. Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn
16. Male and Female by Margaret Mead
17. Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education by Margaret Mead
18. Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
19. Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner
20. The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella
21. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
22. 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
23. Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady
24. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
25. Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass
26. Tolstoy's Short Fiction: (Norton Critical Editions) by Leo Tolstoy
27. The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende
28. Taking Pictures by Anne Enright
29. Passin' by Karen E. Quinones Miller
30. Adam, One Afternoon And OTHER STORIES by Italo Calvino
31. The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser by Marianne Hauser
32. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book one by Stephen R. Donaldson
33. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book two by Stephen R. Donaldson
34. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book three by Stephen R. Donaldson

35. Middlemarch by George Eliot

36. Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

37. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

38. The House at Riverton by Kate Morton

39. Leave It To Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

40. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

41. First Into Nagasaki by George Weller

42. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

43. Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong

44. The Famished Road by Ben Okri

45. Starbook by Ben Okri

46. The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst

47. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

48. Paradise Lost by John Milton

49. From the Shadow of Dracula by Paul Murray

50. White Gold by Giles Milton

51. The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch

52. Summer Doorways by W.S. Merwin

53. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

54. Writing With Intent by Margaret Atwood

55. The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

56. Possession by AS Byatt

57. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

58. No God But God by Reza Aslan

59. A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen

60. The Black Angel by John Connolly

61. Big Boned by Meg Cabot

62. Amenable Women by Mavis Cheek

63. Pope Joan by Donna Cross 

64. The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

65. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

66. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

67. Chez Moi by Agnes Desarthe

68. The Keep by jennifer Egan

69. The Island of the Day Beefore by Umberto Eco

70. The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde 

71. Imperial Reckoning by Carline Elkins

72. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

73. Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris

74. A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

75. The World To Come by Dara Horn

76. Forever by Pete Hamill

77. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

78. Margaret Wise Brown Awakened By the Moon by Leonard S. Marcus

79. Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clezio

80. Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning

81. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

82. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

83. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

84. Magoc Seeds by V.S. Naipaul

85. The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This could be a miracle but I am still writing!

I have been writing like a "mad woman"...  most of it in notebooks since I have been working a lot and for some reason most of my ideas have been popping into my head during work or during my one hour train commute.  It might have something to do with me not enjoying my 9 to 5  job ...I'm not sure.

I wanted to sit down and type today but yesterday I received a lovely birthday present and it inspired me to do something else creative.

You can find out what I did at my other blog.

As for my "book"... the MC (female) who is on a journey through a very wretched land (?) ... has come to a point in the story where she needs to go out on a limb and try to "rescue" somebody... she is one of the world's biggest procrastinators, or so she thinks... so I  am not sure how she intends to do this...

This writing "process" has been very unique for me.  It is as if I have almost no say in the story.

It is more like I am watching a film in my head and I am busy dictating it onto paper.  I know EXACTLY what everyone looks like and all the details of the MC's apartment etc... OMG the wallpaper...!

I'm a tad bit worried about dialect though!  Since their is this "odd" English "dude" who looks a lot like the current Dr Who.

I have no idea who I am going to ask to read this story first just to make sure my "English dude" doesn't sound like "a lame 38 year old American woman who has been living in Japan for over 20 years" .... any ideas?

Oh, and the "villain" of the story... "he" is turning out to be quite sneaky...Kevin Spacey/ Bobby Darin sneaky...(not the Usual Suspects sneaky).

Wish me luck!

what happens when you get sick?

What happens when you get sick?  I have no idea, but I am starting over.

I was totally out of it from April 3rd up to yesterday.  A high temperature had me bedridden.  I couldn't open my computer and turn it on, I could hardly walk near my desk!

I got delusional.. because of the fever...

I had nightmares.

Strange dreams.

And then I had the ULTIMATE strange dream.

Why do I say ULTIMATE ?  Because, it is now my new book.  The story came in three dreams over 3 days.  Stephenie Meyer mentioned that she had a dream...it became TWILIGHT.

My dream didn't have any vampires...I think. 

But this is going to be "my Twilight".  

ehem

Maybe I still have a fever...but I am really excited about this story because it includes a little bit of everything that I've ever wanted to write about.  For research and inspiration I have lined up the following books I have at home to read, or reread:

the Japanese ones in the middle are :

Akutagawa Ryunosuke's book of short stories

an introduction to the gods of Japan

and an introduction to Celtic history and myth

The one book missing from the picture is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...the book seems to have taken a trip along with my copy of Peter Pan...another book that could be in this picture too.  Where do books walk off to?

I am SO excited.

Day 19 of writing

OK...I have been writing.  I just haven't posted about it.  Why?

I keep starting over! (Not editing.)

I have 5 stories going now...  I have had a tremendously inspiring week.  

for example:

new job = new people = new characters

Sakamoto Ryuichi's concert (I write about the experience here.)

So, now I have my original "The Strangest Story Ever" (8,023 words) along with (these are all file titles not real titles, I hope...)

+"That Girl that ended up in my embryo file" (8,054), 

+"The Romance of Curlicues and Dials" (roughly 3,000 this is still in notebook form so I'm not     sure), 

+"The Apple Book"(256 words...I think this is going to become a compilation of short stories)

+"Homage to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" (still in notebook form so not sure about this         either but it looks around 1,000)

Total word count around 12,310.  It's supposed to b e 25,005.  Ooooops.

I can't stop thinking of more new things to write about... The more I write, the more daydreaming, the more I see things in everyday life that seem interesting to write about etc...

I should have given my blog a different address. 

...

I will think about priorities later, this is a time for me to let it all out.  I will keep writing whatever strikes my fancy for the remaining 11 days.  If I let my "inner editor" into the gate now it will probably drive me so crazy that I will dump all the files in the garbage can and THAT WILL NOT DO.

 

So, although I am failing terribly with NaNoWriMo, I think it is good that I am writing again.

Like I said before, starting a new job and a new novel around the same time is NOT a good idea.

AND I agree that if your trying to write a novel in 30 days, it IS a good idea to start on the first instead of in the middle of the month since...you forget where you are...very easily...

I will continue to write about my progress on all the above titles and whatever else pops out of my head.  Then, I will edit and start another attempt at a novel in 30 days, this time starting on the first of the month.