July 2010 Books

June 7
The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin

I am not in the mood to do anything new, lately, and I also feel like I have been reading some crappy-ish books, so I am re-dedicating myself to some old favorites this month. I grabbed this out of the library before going away for a long weekend and very much enjoyed lounging around reading a book with a big ol’ red anarchy sign on the front. Hardcore, man. This is, of course, the very first book I ever read by my beloved Ursula K. LeGuin; I chose it off a list to do a book report in my 10th grade AP History class after the exam was over. I was blown away by it—I think it was my first experience with a utopian vision and at first all I could think about was what living, basically, on a big hippie commune would be like. I think I even Print Shopped (on our Apple 2e and daisy-wheel printer) a cover for my report that identified me as a ‘wannabe Odonian,’ if you can feature such a thing. I’ve read a lot of other books by UKLeG by now and I wouldn’t necessarily class The Dispossessed as one of my all-time favourites, but re-reading it I had a lot of affection for the story and the characters. There was one passage when good old crazy physicist genius Shevek is talking about the differences between the awesome beautiful evil capitalist world he’s traveled too and the sort of ugly dry desert hippie moon he’s from, and talks about the differences in the beauties of the two planets: on one, everything, you know, all the stuff, is gorgeous, but the eyes of the people are all dead inside, and on the other it’s all dust and rocks and the only beautiful things there are the eyes of the people. It’s a little obvious, maybe, it’s a little earnest, but I like it anyway.

June 14
The Stories Of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

I picked up Eva Luna (classic orange Penguin edition!) six months ago at the Auckland airport while I was trying to get to the Coromandel for my Christmas holidays and was very happy to have it with me. I actually read this set of stories before I read the novel so in some ways the novel was reverse engineered for me—but I don’t care because I like both books. Anyway it’d been quite some time since I read these, and as always I enjoyed the prose very much. I am always very interested by Allende’s portrayal of women, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. There’s often this sense of a mix of extreme pragmatism and extreme idealism (or maybe romanticism) that strikes me as very odd somehow—it’s completely believeable, and makes complete sense and everything…maybe it’s just that I don’t know anyone like that. Maybe it’s that I know I’m not like that, and I want to be. Maybe.

June 16
The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Man, it’s been a long time since I read this. Spoiler warning: I cried, as usual, at the end when Celie and Nettie finally see each other after thirty years. I have been crying over that ending since I was seventeen, I think. What hit me this time around was how this family is built: everyone is married to each other and then they break up and get together with other people and then break up again and get back together with their old partners and everyone takes care of all the kids and it’s all just cool. There’s this whole discussion of jealousy in partnership and true love that I seem to have missed the first eight or nine hundred time I read it. And I love how Mr. ________ is totally redeemed in the end. Actually everyone is redeemed in the end, the way you always hope but never expect to happen, and maybe that’s why I love this book so much.

June 20

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

This is a more recent set of my girl Margaret’s short stories, and you can sort of tell she’s thinking about her childhood a lot (well, her childhood as represented in Cat’s Eye at least). The past is clearly so vivid for her characters—they are all (we are all) time travelers, in the sense that we’re traveling forward from our pasts, but in some ways as we get older, the past is our real world, our home. That’s what I think about when I read her, at least.

June 27
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Yeah THAT’S RIGHT, another Margaret Atwood! That’s the kind of anarchy we’re living with here on the old book blog. Anyway, I haven’t read this one for quite a while and I just…sort of enjoyed it. I didn’t think too much about why, I just let the language wash over me. Pure pleasure.

I SO wanted to break the five-a-month barrier and finish up yet another re-read (The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende, if you must know) BUT I fell asleep last night before I could finish and obviously the integrity of my reading list demands full disclosure. Only thirty books this year—I mean, I know it’s not a race or anything, but still. Oh well. Onward to July!