At the start of this story, I was not, by any means, sold on Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic idea, nor was I thrilled about his writing style. However, having read The Road in all its entirety, I have realized that his lack of commas, quotation marks, and apostrophes, as well as his infatuation with run-on and complete sentences, do not bother me nearly as much as they once did. They rarely hinder the reader from understand the descriptions or from understanding who is speaking when.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. I will be the first to admit that I was turned off by its initial style, but I found that the more I read, the more I enjoyed it. As we briefly talked about in class, I would have probably enjoyed the book just that much more if I had read it from cover to cover. Reading fifty pages and stopping, then picking it up and beginning again made it a tad bit difficult to follow. I think that reading it through from start to finish would have amplified the effect at the end.

In all honesty, I loved the ending. I know that a lot of people were bothered by the fact that the boy happens upon the stranger, that it seemed lucky, rushed, and the means to an end. I definitely had a feel-good moment at the end. I was glad that the boy was taken in by this family—it seemed kind of fitting, that as soon as his father (who did not stop to help people on the road) had died, someone stopped and helped the son.

I didn’t, however, understand the last paragraph about the trout. We didn’t really discuss it in class, and had I thought of how to ask about it, I would have. But if anyone has any ideas about the fish at the end and their significance, shout ‘em out!

Though I have only read a small portion of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I have noticed some interesting things from the very beginning.

When I read the synopsis at the back of the book, I thought, hey, this sounds pretty interesting—a unique take on the desolation life presents. I just might like this book.
 

When I opened the book, and saw the large and well-spaced letters upon the page, I will admit that I felt a bit relieved at the prospect of reading 100+ pages at a time (something frequent in this course, and something that continues to bother me to this very day, I might add).

And then I read the first sentence: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” No commas. Okay, not that strange, I suppose—writing styles vary from author to author, and I took this as no different than just that.
 

Then I read the second sentence: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” I had to read this sentence multiple times before I finally got the point. It’s an incomplete sentence! From a young age in our schools, we are taught to avoid using incomplete sentences! And, as I read further on, these incomplete sentences—almost like tangents, like incomplete thoughts—seemed to multiply. I don’t know how many complete sentences are on page one alone, but I’d rather not count and discover the despairing truth.
 

Then, on the third page (which is actually marked as page five), I read the first evidence of dialogue in McCarthy’s novel. And, lo and behold, there were no quotation marks, of any kind!
 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I enjoy an author’s creativity in his/her writing styles. Writing exists for you to make it your own. But I hadn’t figured that that meant ignoring the (pretty much) universal laws of grammar.
 

I’m only a few pages into the book (I have yet a far way to travel), but I am already put off by McCarthy’s writing style. It’s one of those things I’m not quite sure will be able to grow on me. I’ll let you know when we’re another 100+ (or so) pages in. Monday, then.

One of the things that confuses me most (and yet still intrigues me a fair bit) about Still Life is the fact that, in my personal opinion, the story has taken nearly two hundred pages to evolve from a hunting accident to even slightly hinting at a murder. Why has it taken so long? It was not until the end of the reading assignment that needed to be done for today that the people of Three Pines had really begun to suspect that Jane had died because of someone in their own community, that Jane had really, truly been murdered. Murder. It’s a harsh world we live in, something apparently just as true in Three Pines as it is anywhere.

               Personally, I have a theory about Jane’s death. I cannot remember if he has an alibi (and I do not have the book at hand to look this information up, unfortunately), but I believe that Peter Morrow has the motive to have killed Jane. After all, Clara loved Jane and trusted Jane like she never could love or trust in him. I think that Peter might have been jealous enough to have committed this crime.

Other than that, I haven’t a clue as to who might have killed her. (This is assuming, of course, that this “murder mystery” is in fact a “murder mystery” and not a murder mystery which, after weeks of investigation, will be proven to have actually been an accident.) Unless, of course, it was someone whose art had been turned down from the show because Clara’s work had been included.

I am glad that the story is starting to pick up and become the “murder mystery” I had thought it would start off as. Finally, after almost two hundred pages, I am getting incredibly anxious to read ahead and see where the story takes us.

I for one think it is very interesting that Lahiri's collection of short stories that we have read thus far all seem to revolve around the idea of marriage, the sanctity of marriage, the art of getting married, and, briefly, the consequences of not getting/being married. I believe that the pain point Lahiri makes about marriage in these four short stories is that marriage is a necessary aspect of life, something needed in order to live happily and feel fulfilled. It is a tradition heavily ingrained in Indian culture.

Marriage might not be a concept that is deeply engraved into American culture—as is evident by the inclining divorce rate nowadays—but it is still something most women think about and dream of. Personally, it’s one of my own goals in life: get married, settle down, start a family, et cetera. I think most girls want that at some point.

Maybe that is what enables me to enjoy these stories so much. I was really glad, at the end of “A Temporary Matter” that, after the husband—angry and hurt that his wife was going to move out on her own, thus leaving him—told his wife the secret he’d been keeping, and it touched her so much that she turned out the lights again and sat down. I know that there wasn’t much more of a conclusion to this story, but I got the vibe that things were going to work out for them—they might be rough, but I felt that everything would be okay, eventually. And while we don’t know what exactly happened to Bibi, I was glad that she was “cured” in the end by the birth of her child. I’m glad that Mr. Kapasi did not soil his marriage—as I figured his thoughts were leading to—and I was glad that Mrs. Das had stuck it out with Mr. Das; I felt as if when their son was attacked by the monkeys that it brought the both of them just that much more closer together. I figured that was some kind of happy ending. And I was really especially glad for the distance between the narrator of “The Third and Final Continent” and his wife Mala had shrank, and that they had fallen in love. I am quite a sucker for happy endings, I suppose.

Although I guess not all marriages end up happily ever after, these ones seemed to (some more than others), and that is why I have really enjoyed reading Lahiri’s short stories thus far.

Still trying to figure out this whole LiveJournal thing. I like blogging. It's a good escape from Writer's Block, that fickle fiend.

Just so anyone knows, some of these posts won't be for Engl110. Those I'll try to clarify by putting "Reading Now" at the begining of the subject line. In case you're part of the Nightside Crowd and don't want to read my random late-night ramblings. Frankly, I don't blame you.

NaNoWriMo in a week! I'm getting excited. HOPEFULLY things will go a lot smoother this year. I love writing, and I love the idea of NaNoWriMo, but I'm afraid that these two loves have had a rocky history in the past few years. So, here's to a brand new November! *glass chinking*

I'm going home this week! Not under the best of circumstances--quite sad ones, actually--but it's still home, and I can't wait to see my family again.

Life is short. For some, it's shorter than others. And that really does suck. But what I've learned is that you have to live life, you have to live, to your fullest, be your best self, try your hardest, give your all, and love with your whole heart, because that's the only way you can live life. Carpe diem, my friends.

God, I don't know why I'm writing this--no one reads these things anyway.
Curiosity, I suppose. I think I've synchronized this with Facebook, so I'm trying to see if it works.
I guess I'll let you know in the next post, then.


Ta.


-Alex

Imagine the jealousy all the toasters, microwaves, and other domesticated appliances across Ireland must have felt when left in the wake of Saiorse the British fridge. Ice trays, spatulas, kettles, and irons alike must have been both relieved when Tony and Saiorse crossed the pond, and at the same time they must have felt unloved, ignored, and insignificant. Sure, the washing machine could still wash the laundry, but nobody would be hauling her around the south of France anytime soon, would they?

For a fridge, Saiorse certainly had a wide array of interesting, albeit strange, happenings while in Ireland.

Surfing, sharing trailers with horses, being covered with hundreds of signatures and adorned with Gaelic stickers and coins taped on, visits to a King, et cetera.

What household appliance can say that they have met the world’s poorest king? Or that they have spent sleepless nights in hostels? Or traveled through the “dangerous” territory of Northern Ireland?

Surely a full-sized fridge with its own freezer compartment would have felt the tiniest twinge of the Green Monster, given Saiorse’s freedom. Or perhaps that would just have been the mold growing in the vegetable drawer.

What toaster wouldn’t love to have its own religious, life-style following? Think about it: the Toaster Philosophy. You just put a little effort into it and wait for something to pop up!

And what kettle would not have wanted to take the fridge’s place atop that surf board?

Did the people of Ireland ever stop to think that maybe the cloths iron from the laundry room would have liked to visit the Mother Superior? That the stove would have enjoyed cooking dinner with the other stoves?

Of course not. Perhaps it takes an Englishman, in a drunken and gambling state of mind, to give a household appliance a little bit of freedom.

Saiorse. You lucky, lucky fridge, you.

I want to blog about the fourth question on our list of questions from discussion today. What about the rain?

Rain has always had symbology attached to it. Ordinarily, the rain is a symbol of rebirth. In this story, in the last handful of chapters, it is raining. When I started reading these chapters, I had a feeling that something was about to change—something bad was going to happen. I wasn’t sure what (I sort of figured that it was going to be something with Kate, since she was relapsing and going through chemo yet again), but I knew that it wasn’t going to be good. I had heard that the story was a sad one, so I’d been bracing myself this entire time for someone to die (usually, when I hear “sad”, I tend to think “death”), and since Kate has been on her deathbed for most of the story, I assumed that she would be the one to go.

But, as we all know, Kate is not the one to die. I was shocked. After all, Anna was not the one who was supposed to die—she spent all that time and emotional effort to not have to give a kidney, and yet in the end, she does. I thought it was a bit ironic that Anna had no say in this, after this entire case.

The rain at the end of this novel is most definitely a symbol: it is washing away the years of pain and suffering, the drama and heartache and worry over Kate’s health, leaving in its wake a new life for Kate at the end of Anna’s, and a new hope for Kate and their entire family. It’s like Kate says at the end of the book—she sees a couple of girls doing lazy pirouettes and she thinks of them. They were each other’s keeper, and in the end, Anna did exactly what she was conceived to do: she saved Kate’s life. Sadly, in the process, she lost her own.

First and foremost, I must give some major props to Jodi Picoult. Six hours before I opened this book, before I’d bought the book, I was doing some milestone-thinking about my own novel, a novel I have spent years working on but put on the back burner sometime last year to focus on living projects, rather than one I’d presumed dead. But early this past weekend, I perused through some old documents on my hard drive. I settled on one marked “just text”, having forgotten what this “text” contained. Reading through the thousands of words in those pages, something sparked within me—a new hope for a long-dead project.

It was then, just hours before I began reading My Sister’s Keeper, when I had a light-bulb moment: I could play around with POV, I thought. I can designate single chapters for individual characters and tell the story in the first-person point of view. It was a splendid idea, I reasoned—unique, genuine, and ground-breaking. Who would have thought it up before me? I thought it was a clever and genius idea, a creative twist on a multi-character based storyline. And then Jodi Picoult crushed my dream.

But, through reading My Sister’s Keeper, by examining this unique twist on first-person POV, I have learned something very important about writing in this fashion: it can be confusing, but it works. And it really works. Jodi, as a fellow writer (albeit a non-published undergraduate), I commend you. I’m not sure how brave it was, to set the story in that manner, but it was unlike the POV in most stories, and it enables the reader to connect with the characters on individual basis. We get to see things through their eyes. We get to see how other people see them. We get to see how they view themselves. Other points of view cannot offer this, and I think that is what makes it so special.

I hope that we will, by the end of the novel, get to see things through Kate’s eyes. She is the center of this, whether she wants to be or not; I, personally, would like to hear from her how she feels.

Again, kudos to Jodi. Genius move. Well played, well played. And exceptionally written.
 

There was something about this short story that did not sit well with me. Perhaps it was the fact that the story’s plot did not make much sense. I did not think that it tied together in a way that was logical and fit together. I feel as if most of the books we have read as a class have not made sense, and that there was no real point to reading them at all, especially if there is no concrete plot line or story. A lot of the characters we have read about have seemed really rather distant and hard to connect with, emotionally speaking. When we read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I really connected with Charlie, and even with some of the other characters, like his sister and Sam. I thought that that book was excellently written, especially considering the fact that I could relate to characters other than the main characters in that point of view. But every other book we have read for this class has put me rather on the fence about contemporary fiction. We have read several examples of contemporary fiction thus far, and there is only that one example that I have actually, honestly, found enjoyable to read. This might just be a rant on contemporary fiction in general, but I feel it does indeed apply to the readings we have done so far this week. I cannot stand to read half of the things we read, and the majority of the other half I find is often redundant, annoying, and barely manageable for me to even process. In my opinion, a good book should hold a reader’s attention, not drive them away with useless, boring, redundant detail and narration. You have to have a hook. And I feel as if most of the things we’ve read have been icy cold, un-relatable, and hook-less.