I've been remiss...

From the age of seven onward, I kept a never-ending series of journals--in composition books (I liked their retro appeal), on a Word document on the family Gateway marked "PRIVATE!!!--KEEP OUT!", on parchment paper with a calligraphy pen (how I wasn't stuffed in a locker at some point in my public school career is still a mystery), and yes, even on an early blog, in ninth grade, where I went by the unfortunate online handle "Chacha." These life-documentation endeavors would always begin earnestly enough: "Dear Journal, Hey! What's up? Let me introduce myself, since I think we are going to get pretty well acquainted, and since I will write in you every day. I'm in the fifth grade, I like blue and playing the piano and Twizzlers. What about you?" This poor, silent, unobtrusive new friend would promptly be forgotten a couple of days later. Skip to Mom-enforced spring cleaning time two years later, when I would discover its sad black-and-white-speckled self underneath a family-size pack of the aforementioned candy. "Dear Journal, Oops. LONG time no talk. So much to update you on. Wow. Middle school is sooooo different...check out this Gelly Roll pen."

My love of starting journals, and my difficulty keeping them up, is just to illustrate that I am not the world's greatest daily updater by any means. Doing almost any non-hygienic daily task, really, is challenging. Which is why I am late writing this post. My original idea for this blog involved reading a book and then writing about it early over coffee the next day, preferably after having gotten up at 5:30am, eaten fruit for breakfast, and done an hour of yogalates.

Alas, after a day of work, a midnight snack of Nutella and TV, and having just squeaked by my ridiculous self-imposed midnight deadline for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I have three books I have yet to write about, all of which were interesting and rare and complex. So here goes:

Monday was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This book had been so hyped to me that I was prepared to hate it. I loved it. Oscar de Leon is the winningest protagonist, a "ghetto nerd at the end of the world." He is an irrevocably dorky, literary, overweight Dominican gamer growing up in New Jersey who compliments girls in the 'hood on their "pulchritude" and "insouciance." The story traces a Kennedyesque curse on Oscar's family, called the fuku, which has ravaged and ripped apart the de Leon family; the fuku's counterforce, in a sense, is love, both romantic and familial. Books painted as tragicomic are so rarely equal parts both, but this one actually is--it is heartrending and alternately hilarious. The narration reminded me a lot of another book I like quite a bit, The White Tiger, which also has the kind of distinctive, unselfconscious, first-person narrative voice that allows you, the reader, to forget the author's presence altogether. Oscar Wao was also filled with tidbits of Dominican history--which I know literally nothing about--in amusingly sarcastic footnotes that Michiko Kakutani informs me are "David Foster Wallace-esque." Another author to add to the ever-growing list...

Tuesday was Men Without Women, an early collection of short stories by Hemingway. When I was in high school, we had a "Hemingway unit" in which we all had to read The Old Man and the Sea (likely my least favorite Hemingway book) and then pick another novel or work of his to read on our own. (I picked A Farewell to Arms--the romance! the war! the Italian setting! the tragic end!) Anyway, a vast majority of students ended up reading Men Without Women because it was by far the shortest. I happened across a copy the other day and picked it up, having never read a Hemingway short story.

Aside from a mutual love of Paris, Hemingway and I have very little in common--he is, after all, the whiskey-drinking, bullfighting, womanizing, mustachioed, comma-eschewing epitome of Man (three of his books made it on the "The Essential Man's Library" list that I somehow stumbled upon while picking books to read for this project.) But I have always been strangely attracted to his work. The short story form fits especially well with his style--the unfinishedness, the economy of prose. I loved a few stories and could definitely have done without others (the bullfighting ones in particular...)

Wednesday was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, who writes (I believe) in Czech and in French. I could not imagine translating this work, complex as it is, into English. Loosely, it's a story of two couples living in Europe in the Prague Spring of 1968 and of dichotomies: lightness/weight, love/lust, cyclicality/linearity. The idea of "unbearable lightness" comes from the book's rejection of history's cyclical nature--if everything were to happen once, and once alone, then humans are unburdened: "what happened once might as well not have happened at all...history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow." I found the story completely frustrating and dreary, the writing beautiful and pithy. For example, on coincidences, which play a huge role in the novel: "It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in daily life, for he therefore deprives his life of a dimension of beauty." Or on kitsch: "Kitsch excludes anything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence..." Kundera has a brilliant way of putting things.

And now it's on to Dorian Gray, and hopefully a timely entry tomorrow!