read a book every week

initially i was going to read a book every day, or MAYBE every two days if i needed a break (this during summer vacation of course), but my attention span turns out to be way too short for that – i can’t even read for an hour straight!

i did finish both animal dreams and on beauty this week, so i didn’t TOTALLY fail at my original goal. i also got a copy of madness and civilization at an used bookstore, and i salvaged a truckload of books from the sundry corners of my house, and i just bought atwood’s oryx and crake at this lovely bookstore i found, so i have lots of reading material for the months to come. finally, i’m undertaking the project of translating kate chopin’s the awakening line by line into chinese over the summer for the benefit of mi madre. so far i’m about 40 pages in!

6/10 – just finished the best american short stories of 1989, which is, coincidentally, anthologized by margaret atwood.

6/13 – finished oryx and crake, um, two days ago? yesterday? i’m not sure. at some point this week, anyway. just finished one hundred years of solitude today.

6/17 – mood all over the place, stopped reading, picking it back up again gradually.

i didn’t read anything new this week (although i ALMOST finished one hundred years of solitude before i had to return it to the library), but i did gain about 30 books from people who just didn’t want their books anymore. so i have lots of reading material for the summer ahead! i’m also armed with several lists of recommendations, so that’s a bit of a buffer too…

i am so excited for my summer (sort of), i’m going to be writing letters and postcards up the wazoo. that’s a complete lie, by the way. i’m an awful pen pal. i tried to be a good pen pal earlier this year but it didn’t work out. if any of my pen pals are out there reading this, I’M SORRY I WAS SUCH A BAD PEN PAL! YOU ARE AWESOME AND DESERVE SOMEONE BETTER.

edit – 6/2/08 – i finished toni morrison’s jazz yesterday and am now reading zadie smith’s on beauty and barbara kingsolver’s animal dreams, both fast reads to me.

so i didn’t win… that’s okay

immediately upon finding out, i sank into a seeth of self-loathing and despair – self esteem plummets through the ground! it is always funny how suddenly i can lose my sense of worth, but then again how suddenly i can regain it. after denouncing all i had ever done as “nothing worth speaking of” and writing a teeth-clenching email to my (amazing) friend to cheer him on, i went out to the diner with my greek class and promptly ordered an omelette with extra cheese and a large coffee milkshake. i balked at getting a quarter pounder, although i did get a bacon cheeseburger later on, but i got sick enough from all that egg and milk anyway. even now, i can feel the acrid creamy sting of dairy in the back of my throat and the curves of my stomach.

after my attempt to vindicate myself through self-sabotage (i am a lactose intolerant vegan), after this purposeful act of senseless violence, i felt much better.

and now i can come to terms with the fact that i didn’t win, and my self esteem has returned.

anyway, i only didn’t win because i turned in absolutely awful pieces. it’s true – i’m not just saying this because i have an inflated ego – i really am amazing, but thanks to a combination of depression, psychosis, memory loss, and anxiety (note the oxford comma!), i turned in absolutely nil work for the first half of the year and increasingly shoddy work for the second half. if i was given to embarrassment, i would be ashamed of the quality of my work this year. the fact that i was nominated at all, despite such glaring mishaps, is already a testament to the strength of my talent.

and so on, and so forth, until i convince myself that i am actually the best english student in the school, were i only to apply myself and turn in work once in a while.

i also finished to the lighthouse this week.

So I didn’t really stick to my plan for last week (namely, to read a book). But I’ve been making headway in several books! And now everything in my life is working out lovely for me. Unrelated to books, mostly, but true.

One of the things that’s working out for me is that I’ve been nominated for my school’s most prestigious rising senior English prize, which honors the best English student in the junior class. I am SO EXCITED!!! I think I’m going to totally rock it, and I might win, too. (I am saying that partly because I am like way egotistical and partly because, for better or for worse, it might be very true.) The one thing that I’m worried about is the interviews. I tend to be completely amazing in interviews, because I come off as charismatic, optimistic, and confident, but I say “like” way too much! That might be a problem, especially since this is an interview for an English prize, after all. Moreover, and to get back on topic, I haven’t read enough books this year. I know that the interview will at least delve briefly into books and literature, and I’m worried that I won’t be able to hold my own in terms of books read and remembered (I have REALLY short term memory, too).

On the bright side, my passion and interest in English and literature should shine through, and no matter what, even if I don’t win, I’m still having fun and still readin’, so all is good.

Anyway, partly in order to abet that process and partly just because I’ve been lazy all this time and I need to get my ass in gear, I will be reading TWO books this week. I’m thinking of To The Lighthouse and something else, but I haven’t decided what else yet! Maybe The Waves?

I just borrowed In The Time of the Butterflies and finished two books. I wish I had time to read, though, cuz I really don’t at all. APs are this week and I’m completely burned out. I think I’m going to have fun just as soon as this shit is over.

On the bright side, I’ve decided that being forced to take three APs in three days (I’m lazy, don’t judge me) means that I TOTALLY have license to buy new books! So I’m going to buy a new book after every AP… and maybe before every AP… or you know what, we have a buy three get one discounted policy here, so maybe I’ll buy EIGHT, what the hell, right? Now I just have to decide what to buy!

Friday, 5/9/08 – I just finished reading Giovanni’s Room and cried for like ten minutes, which is totally a lot for me. On a more lighthearted note, I bought four books the other day – Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (which I promptly got tea all over… oops), and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. I’m pretty excited for all of them!

So. This week, as in previous weeks, I have opted to make headway in a large amount of books rather than finishing any one book, although I’m gettin’ closer and closer on several. I’ve decided that that totally counts – as long as I’m reading a couple hundred of pages a week, this goal is officially MET, you know? Even if I only read 50 pages a week, I’ll be happy; that’d be 50 more pages than I would have read otherwise, after all. (See for evidence the entire winter term, when I opted to watch movie after movie – 75 in fact, give or take – rather than doing work or reading books.)

I just borrowed two more books from the library, A Wild Sheep Chase (which I started once and never finished) and The Vintage Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction, thus bringing my grand total up to a whole 20 books at one time. And knowing me, I’ll be borrowing even more in the days to come. On the bright side, I’m almost done with at least one!

edit 4/23: I just started reading another book – Go Down, Moses. Faulkner is my LOVE. I am so excited!

edit 4/29: I haven’t been able to read a lot lately, just a few pages here and there, but I just bought a new book: A People’s History of the United States. I’ve read sections of this book before and I love it! My plan is to finish it in time for the AP next week.

So this week… well, things aren’t going so well. I’m being completely overwhelmed by schoolwork, bad scheduling, personal dilemmas, etc, and I’ve had practically no time to read at all! Of course, I could always have read another page instead of sleeping that extra minute – after all, one minute (or less, as I read fast) really doesn’t make that much of a difference in how tired I feel the next morning – but somehow, this never strikes me as a viable option at 10:30 PM or whenever it is when I decide that I have to GET TO BED RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

And yes, you read that right. I go to bed at 10:30 and I still wake up the next morning feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck. And don’t worry, everyone in my period two English class makes fun of me for it every day already.

Anyway, I’m about 50 pages – less than 50 minutes! – away from finishing Reporting Iraq (by the way, why is the italics code just two underscores? wouldn’t be more rational to make that the code for underlining?). That was going to be my goal for last week. Unfortunately, that looks to be the finished book for this week instead. On the bright side, that means I’ll be able to make headway on another book for next week!

Right now, I’m at various stages of completing The New Kings of Nonfiction, Reporting Iraq, The Best American Short Stories of 1989, The Shock Doctrine, Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA, Oryx and Crake, The Worst Thing I’ve Done, and Final Harvest, a book of Dickinson poems.

i used to be a bookworm. this was right after the phase where i hated to read because the words kept on moving around. well, i got past that, although sometimes if i’m tired or stressed i have to concentrate super hard on letters to make them fit together right, and in the summer before 4th grade i became a legitimate bookworm. i spent most of my time in my 4th and 5th classes blatantly reading nonclass materials under the desk, and most of my time outside of classes neglecting my loves for my new best friends dostoevsky and ezra pound (what can i say? i’ve always been ambitious). i got a little better at balancing social commitments with book time in middle school, but most lunchtimes, you could find me squirreled away in the library, reading just one more book of fiction or flipping through volumes of poetry.

well, all that changed when i got to high school and instantly had so much WORK dumped on me that i barely had time to sleep, let alone read.

two thirds of the way through my junior year, i have FINALLY figured out the intricacies of the high school balancing act. extracurriculars and cocurriculars and homework and social time AND sleep are all finally looking like a possibility. and you know, maybe a little time for watching movies, too, and listening to music, and, yes, reading outside of class work. i’ve decided to jumpstart myself back into reading by attempting one book a week. of course, the key word here is ‘attempting;’ i read fast as hell but with only ten minutes to spare a day, i’m not promising any _crime & punishment_s.

right now on my desk i have an assortment of books – the collected short stories of ernest hemingway (the book i finished last week!), eat pray love (halfway done!), the shock doctrine (partway done!), the best american short stories of 1989 (my comfort food – also halfway done), an assortment of poetry, some texts for school, and james joyce’s ulysses. which i love, and have read before, but somehow i don’t think i’m getting through that in a week, especially considering that i look up about 5 words a page, at best. with any luck, i’ll be able to finish one of these books this week. i’m looking at eat pray love, which is turning out to be a really quick read, but i have so much work to do that i might just pull out my trusty book of short stories instead! we shall see.

11:05 AM next day – two thirds of the way through eat pray love.

SATURDAY – finally sat down and finished eat pray love... one week done! and i still have a day off to relax and maybe start a new book! it’s perfect.