Cataloging my library

I think I finally found a good system for cataloging my books! Goodreads.com :)

They *don't* import all the information from Amazon, and they allow me to create bookshelves. There are three automatic bookshelves: Read, Currently-Reading, and To-Read. A book can only be on one of these bookshelves at a time. I also have the ability to *create* bookshelves, and all my books can be in as many bookshelves as I like. So, for example, I have a "library" bookshelf, which will contain all the books in my library (so every book should be in here, unless I screw up), and then beyond that, I can separate the books out based on which bookshelf they're in, which is basically a reflection of how I have them organized at home. It's quite useful, and so far it has found a couple of my books that should be harder to find in that they came from out-of-the-country. But still, no problems!

Beyond that, it has options to export my collection in .csv and whatnot, so I'll easily be able to transfer it to my home computer. I'm quite excited. ^_^ Oh, and did I mention it's free to create an account? :D

So yes...if I figure out how to do it, very soon there should be a live feed on this blog of the different bookshelves in my collection. I'm going to try to go for one showing the recently added books in my library, and the books that I'm currently reading. :)

"Old School" by Tobias Wolff

I bought this book a while ago. It must have been at a used book store because someone wrote on the inside in one part: a date for when Robert Frost died. "Born 1874 Age 87 1961". I picked it up off the shelf last night because I was drawn to it for some reason. My cat had practically knocked it off the shelf and it was lying askew, begging to be set upright. And it had been like that for days, but I chose to stand it upright last night, and instead, pulled it off the shelf and read the back cover:

"The protagonist of Tobias Wolff's shrewdly--and at times devastatingly--observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.

The climax of his quest becomes intimately entangled with the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master."

I was drawn to the book because of its promise to be about a bunch of guys competing for literary greatness. Right now, I am in the midst of struggling against my own literary apathy, my feeling that I am unworthy to be at the grad school I'm attending, and the feeling of failure I have that I'll ever even finish my Master's thesis. Not to mention, it's November, which means that many people are struggling to finish NaNoWriMo. So, in some ways, it seemed the perfect book to read right now. I couldn't have been more wrong in many ways.

What I saw inside the book, is not a bunch of boys childishly competing for the right to sit with one literary great, but three: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. And what promised to be a book about many boys, turned out to be the story of one boy as he watched the others around him. He is on scholarship to a school which prides itself on being Ivy League: only the best of the best come there, and the best of the best is determined by name only. But mostly, it seemed like the boy was his own undoing. The rest of the boys didn't really seem to care about his name or his background, and if he was competing for anything amongst his friends, it was the right to be considered a good poet or novelist, nothing more. But instead of letting his own writing come from the heart, he wrote about things that weren't his. And he assumed his own literary greatness before ever setting a word to the page.

All-in-all, it was an interesting story and well-worth reading. I will decline to comment on the rest of the book in case anyone reading this blog also wants to read this book, but I'd be curious to know if anyone else has read it, and if they got the same feeling from the book as I did: that the boy was not as serious about becoming a writer as the back cover claimed him to be, and that really this was a novel about a specific person's thoughts and feelings, not about the whole school in general. In some ways, it reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger more than anything else.

As an aside, it also made me want to reread The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, although I am not sure if this would be a mistake or not. Her characters are so depressingly angular in their feelings, motives, and lifestyles.

Isolation and Aloneness

Funny words to say, but English doesn't really have a good equivalent to something that means both "isolation" and "aloneness". The Spanish equivalent is "soledad", unless I've misunderstood how it's been used. However, the related word in English "solitude", lends a feeling of tranquility, and not of isolation.

So, all of this came up as I was reading Aldous Huxley's "Island". It's a great book, and I highly recommend it. Evidently it is his last work, and the one in which he elaborates on most of his philosophy that he has developed through the course of his life. But in it, it contains this quote:

"In solitude, for of course nobody can help, nobody can ever be present. People may stand by while you're suffering and dying; but they're standing by in another world. In your world you're absolutely alone. Alone in your suffering and your dying, just as you're alone in love, alone even in the most completely shared pleasure."

This quote struck me because at once my mind is agreeing and disagreeing with it simultaneously. In the depths of my depression, this quote made absolute sense, although the reference to being alone in love while sharing yourself with someone...cuddling and caressing them while simultaneously feeling so absolutely separate from them, seems to me to be the saddest thing in the world.

You may feel alone while you're suffering and dying. This is completely plausible to me. No one can understand what it's like to feel what you're feeling when you're in the depths of depression and honestly wishing you had the courage to kill yourself. Only another currently depressed person can even remotely begin to appreciate what it is like to have your mind wish to be dead while at the same time trying to fight with itself to stay alive. Although I cannot fully understand what this is like, I also imagine that it is equally isolating to be diagnosed with a deadly disease or condition and know that you only have a few months to live.

In death, one is truly alone, and no one may follow you there. This was made extremely clear to me last February when my granddad (my mom's dad) was in the hospital because a leaky heart valve that hadn't been diagnosed for over six months finally burst, and he was essentially waiting in the hospital for his heart to finally give out and for him to die. Sadly, he also went into the hospital a few days before his birthday. I had already planned to come visit him that weekend for his birthday, but instead of visiting him just to celebrate his birthday, it was also to say goodbye. The hardest part about the whole thing was that he wasn't ready to die. If his leaky heart valve had been discovered six months earlier, then maybe he could have undergone surgery for it. But now, the likelihood of him dying on the operating table was extremely high. So we could only just stand there by him and watch as he struggled to breathe and as he stated that he wasn't ready to die and looked scared. Considering that I had only been feeling a bit better from my depression for a mere two months, I found it all extremely symbolic. It scared me that someone who was just turning 82 could be that scared to face death, and even more so that they had no choice in the matter. I couldn't even imagine what he was going through for those couple of days when he realized that the hospital could only do so much to support him, and that he was going to die whether he was ready for it or not. By the time he finally passed away, he was at least ready to face it, but I don't think he was necessarily ready for it.

That experience left me with a very non-peaceful view of death. Yes, maybe death could be peaceful in that if you are lucky, you will pass away in your bed while you are sleeping one day when you are extremely old. But I don't think it necessarily happens that way. And the knowledge of upcoming death is extremely scary and isolating. There is nothing that anyone can say or do to make it better. Things are not going to be okay. Nobody can follow you wherever you are going, whether it simply be the ground, heaven, or another life. Death is a stopping point at which the living must leave you be and only the other dead await you (at least, if you believe that there is a heaven and that you don't just get put into the ground to rot, or reincarnate as another person or animal).

So yes, death is a truly isolating experience. But love?

Love is the one thing which you can share with another person. So it is beyond me how Huxley can claim that love is an isolating experience which makes you realize how truly separate you are from other people. If anything, it should be the experience or act that makes you realize how truly inseparable you are from someone. In which all the world should suddenly align and just make sense. Or even if it doesn't make sense, at the very least everything should be at peace.

It makes me sad to think that someone should feel alone in love. If that is the case, I don't think that can be called love. Maybe a gross perversion of love in a world where there is so much hate and sorrow and too little kindness and generosity. But it is definitely not how love should be.

Biking and whatnot

I just rode my bike for the first time. I biked ~1.5 miles to the nearest Starbucks and back (I didn't get a drink because I didn't feel like one/didn't bring any money). It was immensely tiring getting there because there was a minor grade going uphill, but going back was super fast and easy because it was a minor downhill grade. It was also awesome because a random guy on the street talked to me saying how awesome bikes were and congratulated me on recently getting a bike (I told him this was my first trial run on my new bike). He told me to watch out for crazy drivers.  : )

In other random news, my cat is sitting on my lap while I am typing up this blog post, so I have to lean forward because I can't put my laptop in my lap. However, she hasn't really been this cute and purring and loving recently, so it's awesome.  : )

And this morning was awesome. I woke up still kinda sleepy, and instead of falling back asleep I decided to get up and read. Reading is something I used to do a lot more when I was younger, and not so much now even though it's still one of my favorite activities. I find it's hard for me to concentrate on one thing for such a long time...there's the distraction of the computer and people on AIM and me wanting to talk to people in general, so very rarely do I shut everything down and go have some time to myself to go do my own thing without someone else's input...like read. Well, this morning I did for about 4 or 5 hours or so (I was reading a book by P.G. Wodehouse called "The Code of the Woosters" that Nisan recommended to me). I don't think I was reading completely consistently because at some point I got up to make breakfast and do other things, but it was still awesome and it started off my day completely right. Afterwards was when I decided to go ride my bike around for a little bit less than an hour and now I'm sitting here sleepily wondering what I should cook and thinking I should work on my MA. Although the sleepiness is making me want to put it off.  *shrugs*

Anyways, my rambling means I don't have much else to say, so I should probably stop.

*waves hi to the MystBlogs people who are seeing her blog for the first time*

Climbing trees and other things

So, yesterday I got to visit a couple of friends of mine, and we decided to go spend the day wandering around doing whatever we felt like and wherever the day happened to take us, which was absolutely awesome. It's been a while since I've just hung out with people and wandered around all day like that. It started off with going to a bookstore and buying four books: two recommendations that one of my friends gave me ("The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, and some book by a guy named Wodehouse, or something like that), one replacement for a book I used to have ("Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez, in Spanish of course), and a book of short stories called "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges book was something that I should have had in my book collection, but for whatever reason I didn't (I discovered this recently while organizing and alphabetizing my library for the first time), nevermind the fact that I read lots of his short stories in high school for the Spanish AP exam. So I'm very excited to have new books, although I know that I don't have any bookshelf room for them since 7.5 40" tall bookcases evidently is barely enough room to house my book collection.

After the bookstore, we picked up our other friend and wandered over to the coast and found a straw maze to wander around in, which was kinda fun. It wasn't incredibly hard, but we had fun screwing around in it anyways. There were a couple rooms in the middle that looked exactly like another room further towards the edge, so that was confusing unless you noticed that there were either more doors in the side or purple flowers in one room but not the other. We even discovered a rotating door! And we also kinda scared this little kid by sticking our hands through the hay bale really quickly from the other side.

Then we wandered down the coast, stopped on a beach and watched the parasailors and continued on towards a local college that had this climbing tree. It's this tree that someone tied a rope and a rope ladder to and so you climb up this rope ladder and keep on going up the tree until you reach the top, about 300 ft up. Only one of our group went past the rope ladder (my other friend and I are scaredycats :( ) and he ended up climbing all the way up to this natural chair formed from the trunk and 7 branches extending outwards like a spiderweb. I've decided that one of these days I need to get up the nerve to go up that tree because it sounds amazing, especially if you go up around sunset so you can see the sunset from above the trees while the forest gets increasingly shadowy below you. 

All-in-all it was an amazing day and it makes me miss living up here.  :(

In other news, I got an early Christmas present today! Mostly because I decided I couldn't wait until Christmas, so I decided to go buy it now. It's a bike! I asked my mom for one for Christmas, but we're going to be up at my parents' retirement home during Christmas and I'm flying up there because there's going to be snow on the ground and it's going to be too hard for me to drive up there. So my mom was just going to give me money for it, and I decided that I'd rather have a bike now so it'll make my commute to school easier. So whee!

Life is good and very exciting.  : )