(no subject)
Yes, actually, still in fact quite lonely.
My life is weird right now. When I'm home, being restful, I'm restless and lonely in the more broad sense of the word. But then, when I throw myself out in my social scene like mad (as I have been doing), I find myself feeling slightly overwhelmed and like I can't quite catch up. Where is the balance?
I started reading the Jhumpa Lahiri book I borrowed from Sarah. Wow. She really has a way of inviting you into her prose. I mean, I've struggled to begin a lot of the books I've read lately--even the ones I ended up loving--it just takes me weeks and weeks to get sucked in. But as soon as I started reading, I wanted to read more. I'm worried it may loose momentum--but perhaps she can sustain this. And, I was disappointed to find it was a vignette sort of thing. The intro vignette is so compelling (furthermore, I've recently discovered the joys of the word "compelling"! It's so damn useful). I wanted to know more about them. Maybe the story comes back to them. But I get the impression it doesn't. At any rate, it's a nicely written book. It has heart-breaking, soaring, subtle, and teeth-gritting moments. Or at least this is my assessment of the first 30 pages.
Speaking of which: my thoughts on Wicked. I was vastly disappointed. Hype is always such a risky thing. I need to be a hermit so I can just appreciate everything without expectation. Serendipity is a lovely feeling. But, yes. I wanted it to be a better book than it was. I kept thinking, for one thing, that it really ought to have been in the first person. Because the distance of a third-person narrative for such a story was really killing me--how can you create a character like Elphaba and then keep her at a distance? And all those interesting, philosophical questions it wanted to be asking about the nature of evil would have been better served if we could have glimpsed "wickedness" from the inside-out. Furthermore, so many of the plot points seemed arbitrary and never to lead anywhere. And, aside from my frustration with not getting to understand Elphaba better, Glinda was equally wasted. I mean, at the college, she seems to have all this potential as a character to walk an interesting line (a line for those of you Team-O'ers that I identify with Iris) between her society and her identity, and then...she somehow manages to undo it all. And not even in an interesting way. It just happens, when you're not looking, and suddenly Glinda is once again the flat character she is in the movie. Disappointment abounds. Any one else read it?
My life is weird right now. When I'm home, being restful, I'm restless and lonely in the more broad sense of the word. But then, when I throw myself out in my social scene like mad (as I have been doing), I find myself feeling slightly overwhelmed and like I can't quite catch up. Where is the balance?
I started reading the Jhumpa Lahiri book I borrowed from Sarah. Wow. She really has a way of inviting you into her prose. I mean, I've struggled to begin a lot of the books I've read lately--even the ones I ended up loving--it just takes me weeks and weeks to get sucked in. But as soon as I started reading, I wanted to read more. I'm worried it may loose momentum--but perhaps she can sustain this. And, I was disappointed to find it was a vignette sort of thing. The intro vignette is so compelling (furthermore, I've recently discovered the joys of the word "compelling"! It's so damn useful). I wanted to know more about them. Maybe the story comes back to them. But I get the impression it doesn't. At any rate, it's a nicely written book. It has heart-breaking, soaring, subtle, and teeth-gritting moments. Or at least this is my assessment of the first 30 pages.
Speaking of which: my thoughts on Wicked. I was vastly disappointed. Hype is always such a risky thing. I need to be a hermit so I can just appreciate everything without expectation. Serendipity is a lovely feeling. But, yes. I wanted it to be a better book than it was. I kept thinking, for one thing, that it really ought to have been in the first person. Because the distance of a third-person narrative for such a story was really killing me--how can you create a character like Elphaba and then keep her at a distance? And all those interesting, philosophical questions it wanted to be asking about the nature of evil would have been better served if we could have glimpsed "wickedness" from the inside-out. Furthermore, so many of the plot points seemed arbitrary and never to lead anywhere. And, aside from my frustration with not getting to understand Elphaba better, Glinda was equally wasted. I mean, at the college, she seems to have all this potential as a character to walk an interesting line (a line for those of you Team-O'ers that I identify with Iris) between her society and her identity, and then...she somehow manages to undo it all. And not even in an interesting way. It just happens, when you're not looking, and suddenly Glinda is once again the flat character she is in the movie. Disappointment abounds. Any one else read it?