First Brush with Thomas Pynchon

Although I am what others might consider a bookworm, I am relatively an unadventurous reader and I frequently rely on authors that I have previously read (Anne Rice before her Christian series) or books that are in the bestseller list.  I also went through a sort of hiatus from reading and it was only last year that I consciously took steps to rediscover my love for reading.  The result was my "discovery" of authors like Chuck Palahniuk and and Haruki Murakami.  I also made an effort to read the timeless classics like War and Peace, Fountainhead, and Crime and Punishment.
One of the considerable upside with the goal that I have set for myself this year is that it will afford me the opportunity to read authors I normally would not go for.  It shames me to say that I had to google Thomas Pynchon given his notoriety.  I have 4 works of Thomas Pynchon in my list and first up was The Crying Lot of 49. 

 The Crying Lot of 49 is a postmodern fiction that deals with one woman's struggle to prove a theory: the existence of Tristero and the conspiracy behind it.  In her effort to find meaning among all the rambling information and seemingly meaningless events, she struggles between believing that it is real or that it is just an elaborate plan on the part of an ex-lover and that there are two possiblities: "Another mode of meaning behind the obvious or none."

Authors like Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Kurt Vonnegut have already initiated me in postmodern fiction and I am well acquainted with "magical realism" but what made TCL49 so challenging were the multiple cultural references that were lost to me and would have offered me a more fruitful experience if only I got them.  But given that I was hampered by my own limitations when I read this book, I still found the experience a gratifying one and is a testament to the benefits of stepping out of one's own comfort zones.

"Oedipa wondered whether, whether at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back"

Dream a little dream: my wish list for the next 2 years

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that I was able find most of the books in my to be read list online.  I am now posting the list of books that I have yet to find as part of my wish list (hint*hint*ahem*ahem)
Wish List

1. A Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

2. Against the Day by Thomas  Pynchon

3. Atonement by Ian McEwan

4. Austerlitz  by W.G. Sebald

5. Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

6. Empire of the Sun  by J.G. Ballard

7. Life of Pi  by Yann Martel

8. Nostromo  by Joseph Conrad

9. On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleza

10. Remembrance of Things Past  by Marcel Proust

11. Requiem for a Dream by Hubert  Selby Jr.

12. The Accidental by Ali Smith

13. The Bell  by Iris Murdoch

14. The Book of Daniel  by E.L. Doctorow

15. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting  by Milan Kundera

16. The Grapes of Wrath  by John Steinbeck

17. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

18. The Human Stain  by Philip Roth

19. The Melancholy of Resistance  by László Krasznahorkai

20. The Plague  by Albert Camus

21. The Portrait of a Lady  by Henry James

22. The Sea  by John Banville

23. The Sun Also Rises  by Ernest Hemingway

24. The Talented Mr. Ripley  by Patricia Highsmith

25. Vertigo  by W.G. Sebald

Of course my wish list would not be complete without some shooting for the stars entries:
26.  Kindle (or an Ipad...hehehe)
27. Asian tour for two (hint hint ahem ahem...hahaha)
28. Shopping trip in HK or Thailand (hehehe)
29. 24" (or higher) flat screen TV
30. Macbook or a pink Sony Vaio
31. Xperia X10

Ok ok, I know the last items in my list are pushing it but there's nothing wrong with dreaming big, right? It may be out there but I won't go as far as to say that it's out of the picture (hehehe)

Exuberant weekend

The long weekend is almost up and surprise, surprise, I am almost 3 days behind on my reading.  I find it somewhat ironic that I get more reading done during the weekdays.  Although I was able to finish "The Crying Lot of 49" last Saturday afternoon, I haven't been able to squeeze in any more reading time after that.  It is almost as if reading is akin to work.  Blasphemy!  But oh well, I just have to comfort myself with the fact that I cooked 3 new dishes over the last weekend.

As a spur of the moment thing, we bought sapsap or ponyfish last Saturday night.  I only had a vague idea of what I was going to do with it, more like a dim remembrance of how my lola used to cook it.  Good thing I came across a recipe for Pangat na Sapsap (find the recipe here) and we cooked it for lunch yesterday.  I find the dish really simple and it goes perfectly with rice (one proof of that is that Fil consumed twice than what he normally eats for lunch...hehehe)

We went to Greenhills last Saturday and I tried out the Raspberry yogurt of Golden Spoon.  It was nothing spectacular and Fil even went as far as to compare it to Tempra but it was not as bad as that.  I definitely prefer it compared to the chocolate icicle passing off as yogurt from Tutti Frutti. It just made me miss White Hat's Green Apple Yogurt even more.

After Greenhills, we went straight to Robinsons in BF to do the groceries (well, our main destination is really the building beside it...hehe).  We tried out the pizza place in the 2nd floor of Robinsons and it was a good thing that we did.  As a rule, my fiance and I don't really eat in pizza places because he is not a fan but the Buffalo Wings of that restaurant (for the life of me, I cant remember the name of the place) quickly made a convert out of him.  I opted for the traditional pepperoni pizza and I loved it.  Can't wait to taste their other pizzas and stromboli.

The Sunday and Monday was spent lazing around and catching up on DVDs.  Fil made me watch "Cinco" and as my revenge, I made him watch "I'll Be There" with me. As they say, all is fair in love and war.

On a totally unrelated side-note, I was really happy to hear that Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) won in the Emmys for Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series.  I am so in love with him and I am even willing to learn Klingon for him.  Can't wait for the new season of the Big Bang Theory.

Re-acquainting myself with Sherlock and Holly

Holly Golightly and Sherlock Holmes are both iconic in their own rights.  Simple black dress, string of pearls,  sunglasses, and holding an oversized cigarette holder, Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly succeeded in creating one of the most memorable images in cinema.

I watched Breakfast at Tifanny's back when I was still in HS and I am rather ashamed of myself to say that it took this list of 1001 books to make me read the novella by Truman Capote.  What can I say, I love the book just as I love the movie.

As expected, the movie has already been given the "Hollywood" treatment as compared to the book.  The book is no love story (although half the characters are in love with Holly just like in the movie).  Instead, the book's ending is more open to interpretation.  The book also focuses on how Holly threw everything away in hopes of finding something akin to home.  One of the most memorable things about the book was Holly's relationship with her cat who she refused to give a name only to realize that they do belong together.

As embarrassing as it is to admit, my first encounter with the Sherlock Holmes was also thanks to Hollywood's Robert Downer Jr.-starrer.  But of course we all know that Sherlock Holmes has already become an archetype for detectives together with his trusty sidekick Watson and for this, I included The Hound of the Baskervilles in my list.

I was kind of let down by the experience.  Part of the reason is that I don't really like reading detective stories.  I have a problem with reading whodunit stories because I find myself constantly distracted with the desire to just skip to the ending and find out what the whole hullabaloo is all about. But another reason why I was disappointed was that I was able to guess the culprit was very early on in the story and I was also spot-on with regards to one of the villain's secret.  But I still consider reading Sherlock Holmes an enjoyable experience and I still plan to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (it is part of the 1001 books but I did not include it in my 151 books) after I have accomplished my goal for 2012.

Perusal of Notes from Underground

I finished Notes from Underground yesterday morning and I can't help but compare the experience with the one I had for other works of Dostoevsky.  His works draw you in.  I found myself struggling to stay with the book for the first 3-5 chapters.  Then I just found myself immersed in the whole experience.  Even after I put the book down for a breather, there is still a part of my brain that stays absorbed in the story.  When I reached the end of the book, I found myself feeling strangely cut off.  I find myself so involved with the characters that I can't let go that easily.    

Notes from Underground is stark and existentialist in essence.  It deals with the darker side of a person and what we as individuals, fail to admit to ourselves. 

 One of the things that struck me was the argument of the narrator on why people do the thing that seems to be against all common sense and defies rational thought. "...reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses."  He argues that one of the things that people fail to consider is the presence of choice and that individuals will sometimes go as far as doing the thing that is most harmful to himself just to prove that he has a freedom of choice.

"And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as postive as twice two makes four, and such postiveness is not life, but is the beginning of death."

As always, reading Dostoevsky is a heady experience and although Notes from Underground is not at par with The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, I still find the experience well worth it.

Multi-tasking Weekend

Last week, I posted here my goal of finishing 151 books from the 1001 books you must read before you die.  In order to gain some headway, I spent several hours finding electronic copies of the books on the list.  It is actually surprising the amount of literature that is already available for free in sites like the project gutenberg.  You just have to download it in the format readable by your favorite reader.

It is not really that practical for me to buy the hardcopy version of every book in my list.  Aside from the obvious economic concerns on my part, there is much to be desired in the bookstores here in the Philippines.  Everytime I enter a branch of the leading bookstore here, I can't help but compare it to one of the bookstores along Orchard Road that I visited when I went to Singapore.  One can actually get lost in that place.  But of course I still plan to buy the actual printed copies of some of the books in my list, especially the long novels (e.g. 2666).  There is a different thrill in reading an actual book...the actual act of turning the pages, leaf by leaf...so tangible and old school.  Many of the contemporary works in my list are also not available so I have to scour for them in the bookstores here.

But I am happy to report that I now have enough ebooks to keep me occupied until end of this year.  On a side note, I was also able to finish "The Island of Dr. Moreau" over the weekend.  I know, I know...it is really not that much of an accomplishment since the book is relatively short.  Still, I am happy to count 1 book down and only 95 more to go.

I am actually happy with last weeked as far as weekends are concerned.  My fiance and I cooked Pork Binagoongan (Pork in Shrimp Paste).  Well, he actually did all the prep stuff and I just supervised. Hehehe.  We were also able to finish all season 21 episodes of "The Simpsons" and we also watched a HK movie (Magic Kitchen).  The series was mostly funny (I still prefer the older seasons), movie was so-so (to think that it stars Andy Lau...so disappointing), and the food was uber yummy. I am actually looking forward to the next weekend already.

Bad case of the Monday blues

So it is Monday yet again and I am once more a part of the general populace that is continually grinding and toiling amidst the hustle and bustle of the city...sorry for the touch of melodrama back there...Mondays and I have a hate-love relationship (with more emphasis on the hate part).

It doesn't help that this particular Monday was previously announced as a National Holiday (by previously, I mean, January this year).  But what can we do?  There was a new president elected this year and he sure is hell-bent on distancing himself from all the policies of the previous government...even the ones that work.  I am all for holding the past administration accountable for whatever they did but when you try to change everything just to prove a point then it becomes counter-productive and even petty.  Stick with what what works great, improve on everything else.  Instead of dwelling on discussions on which holidays should be abolished, there are actually more important issues to be tackled, as the president himself raised on his first SONA. We get it MR. President...you are not anything like the ex-president...When you already have your mind set as early as 8 months ago that you will NOT be working on this particular day, it is a little hard not to go all political on the one person that got you stuck behind your desk.

I could have been lying on the beach sipping an ice-cold pinacolada, Mr. President...well, not really that but you get my point.

Semblance of a Goal

After watching Julie/Julia last week, I felt the sudden urge to accomplish something as tangible as being able to cook all the recipes in the first book by Julia Child.  Of course, I am not really that willing to subject myself through the same "torture" as Julie Powell put herself through.  As much as I profess to love food, I shirk at the thought of deboning a duck and dropping live lobsters in a cauldron of boiling water....

So my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will be related to one of the things I love....books, lots and lots of books....

Last year, a friend of mine gave me an excel version of the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" and I have decided to make this my goal....well, not really the 1001 books...I have to draw the line somewhere.  I have heard time and again that the best objectives are those that are actually achievable and this feat of mine should be no different.  So, here is my goal, "To have read 151 books from the list by December 2011"

Here are my statistics: I have read 55 books from the list so far which leaves 96 books to be read in 1 Year, 4 Months, 1 Week and 5 Days. I had no clear criteria when I selected the 96 books.  Given my leanings towards the literature from 1970 onwards, I just tried to make it a mix between contemporary and the classic.  I also included books that I never would have read otherwise like "The Island of Dr. Moreau".  Of course, I also took into consideration that it must be available in English.  I don't want to add the complication of learning a new language.  In terms of length, it is ranging from 2666 and Les Miserables (Thank God I have already finished War and Peace before I attempted this) to Notes from the Underground.

Books I have read so far:
 

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

2. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

3. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

4. Kafka on the Shore  by Haruki Murakami

5. The Corrections  by Jonathan Franzen

6. The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho

7. Veronika Decides to Die  by Paulo Coelho

8. The God of Small Things  by Arundhati Roy

9. Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

10. The Reader  by Bernhard Schlink

11. The Virgin Suicides  by Jeffrey Eugenides

12. Like Water for Chocolate  by Laura Esquivel

13. Watchmen  by Alan Moore

14. Love in the Time of Cholera  by Gabriel García Márquez

15. The Unbearable Lightness of Being  by Milan Kundera

16. The Name of the Rose  by Umberto Eco

17. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  by Douglas Adams

18. The Shining  by Stephen King

19. Interview With the Vampire  by Anne Rice

20. The Bluest Eye  by Toni Morrison

21. Slaughterhouse Five  by Kurt Vonnegut

22. The Godfather  by Mario Puzo

23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

24. No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez

25. Catch-22  by Joseph Heller

26. Things Fall Apart  by Chinua Achebe

27. The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien

28. Foundation  by Isaac Asimov

29. The Catcher in the Rye  by J.D. Salinger

30. I, Robot  by Isaac Asimov

31. Nineteen Eighty-Four  by George Orwell

32. The Little Prince  by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

33. Siddhartha  by Herman Hesse

34. Rashomon  by Akutagawa Ryunosuke

35. The Thirty-Nine Steps  by John Buchan

36. Sons and Lovers  by D.H. Lawrence

37. Death in Venice  by Thomas Mann

38. Ethan Frome  by Edith Wharton

39. Howards End  by E.M. Forster

40. Heart of Darkness  by Joseph Conrad

41. The War of the Worlds  by H.G. Wells

42. Dracula  by Bram Stoker

43. The Time Machine  by H.G. Wells

44. The Picture of Dorian Gray  by Oscar Wilde

45. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  by Robert Louis Stevenson

46. Bel-Ami  by Guy de Maupassant

47. The Death of Ivan Ilyich  by Leo Tolstoy

48. Around the World in Eighty Days  by Jules Verne

49. War and Peace  by Leo Tolstoy

50. Little Women  by Louisa May Alcott

51. Crime and Punishment  by Fyodor Dostoevsky

52. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  by Lewis Carroll

53. The Hunchback of Notre Dame  by Victor Hugo

54. Frankenstein  by Mary Shelley

55. Oroonoko  by Aphra Behn

Books I have to finish:

1. Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

2. Invisible by Paul Auster

3. American Rust by Philipp Meyer

4. The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck

5. Falling Man by Don DeLillo

6. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

7. Against the Day by Thomas  Pynchon

8. Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland

9. The Sea  by John Banville

10. The Accidental by Ali Smith

11. 2666 by Roberto Bolano

12. Everything is Illuminated  by Jonathan Safran Foer

13. Life of Pi  by Yann Martel

14. Austerlitz  by W.G. Sebald

15. Atonement by Ian McEwan

16. The Human Stain  by Philip Roth

17. The Hours  by Michael Cunningham

18. Underworld  by Don DeLillo

19. A Fine Balance  by Rohinton Mistry

20. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle  by Haruki Murakami

21. A Suitable Boy  by Vikram Seth

22. The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte

23. Mao II  by Don DeLillo

24. American Psycho  by Bret Easton Ellis

25. Vertigo  by W.G. Sebald

26. The Melancholy of Resistance  by László Krasznahorkai

27. Foucault’s Pendulum  by Umberto Eco

28. The Satanic Verses  by Salman Rushdie

29. The Black Dahlia  by James Ellroy

30. The Bonfire of the Vanities  by Tom Wolfe

31. Beloved  by Toni Morrison

32. The Cider House Rules  by John Irving

33. The Handmaid’s Tale  by Margaret Atwood

34. White Noise  by Don DeLillo

35. Empire of the Sun  by J.G. Ballard

36. Schindler’s Ark  by Thomas Keneally

37. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting  by Milan Kundera

38. Requiem for a Dream by Hubert  Selby Jr.

39. Autumn of the Patriarch  by Gabriel García Márquez

40. Gravity’s Rainbow  by Thomas Pynchon

41. The Book of Daniel  by E.L. Doctorow

42. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

43. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

44. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

45. Arrow of God  by Chinua Achebe

46. V. by Thomas Pynchon

47. The Bell Jar  by Sylvia Plath

48. A Clockwork Orange  by Anthony Burgess

49. To Kill a Mockingbird  by Harper Lee

50. Breakfast at Tiffany’s  by Truman Capote

51. The Bell  by Iris Murdoch

52. The Talented Mr. Ripley  by Patricia Highsmith

53. Lolita  by Vladimir Nabokov

54. The Last Temptation of Christ  by Nikos Kazantzákis

55. Lord of the Flies  by William Golding

56. A Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

57. The Plague  by Albert Camus

58. For Whom the Bell Tolls  by Ernest Hemingway

59. Finnegans Wake  by James Joyce

60. The Grapes of Wrath  by John Steinbeck

61. On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleza

62. Of Mice and Men  by John Steinbeck

63. Their Eyes Were Watching God  by Zora Neale Hurston

64. The Hobbit  by J.R.R. Tolkien

65. A Farewell to Arms  by Ernest Hemingway

66. Lady Chatterley’s Lover  by D.H. Lawrence

67. Remembrance of Things Past  by Marcel Proust

68. The Sun Also Rises  by Ernest Hemingway

69. The Great Gatsby  by F. Scott Fitzgerald

70. The Trial  by Franz Kafka

71. A Passage to India  by E.M. Forster

72. Ulysses  by James Joyce

73. The Age of Innocence  by Edith Wharton

74. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

75. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  by James Joyce

76. The Rainbow  by D.H. Lawrence

77. A Room With a View  by E.M. Forster

78. The House of Mirth  by Edith Wharton

79. Nostromo  by Joseph Conrad

80. The Ambassadors  by Henry James

81. The Hound of the Baskervilles  by Arthur Conan Doyle

82. The Island of Dr. Moreau  by H.G. Wells

83. Tess of the D’Urbervilles  by Thomas Hardy

84. The Portrait of a Lady  by Henry James

85. Ben-Hur  by Lew Wallace

86. Anna Karenina  by Leo Tolstoy

87. Middlemarch  by George Eliot

88. Notes from the Underground  by Fyodor Dostoevsky

89. Les Misérables  by Victor Hugo

90. Silas Marner  by George Eliot

91. Madame Bovary  by Gustave Flaubert

92. The Scarlet Letter  by Nathaniel Hawthorne

93. Wuthering Heights  by Emily Brontë

94. Vanity Fair  by William Makepeace Thackeray

95. Pride and Prejudice  by Jane Austen

96. Sense and Sensibility  by Jane Austen

So here's to having goals and achieving them.... 

Point (0,0,0,0)

So I have been thinking about this whole blogging thing for quite a while now and up to now, I can't really say that I am that committed to it. part of it (and a large part at that) is my hesitancy to put myself so out there.  

Think about it.  Writing something like this, no matter how impersonal the subject of discussion may be, shows the readers glimpses of who you are as a person.  The use of one word instead of another, sentence construction, the choice of the subject itself, etc are all facets of the writer as a person. 

I have this notion and I can't really dismiss it as being irrational that writing like this, so personal in such a public avenue, is just well, senseless. But again who among us is really in the position to know the "sensible" from the "senseless".  

As Haruki Murakami puts it, "the pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future.  In truth, all sensation is already memory". So this is my testament to the present....mere snapshots of my quirks and idiosyncrasies....