thoughts.

01.  i think i will do a big post of all the books i've dropped this year because i've dropped quite a few books this year.  i'm wondering if i want to get going on that post now or if i ought to wait until the end of the year because it's only the beginning of october -- i still have three months to drop more books.

02.  over the weekend, i attended two events at the new yorker festival -- toni morrison with hilton als and patti smith with david remnick -- and i was planning on writing them up as usual, but i don't think i will because, one, there's no need and, two, i'm rethinking event write-ups in general and whether or not i will continue doing them at all.  (i probably will not.)  (not that i've been very good about doing them, anyway.  there are many more events i've attended that i haven't written up here, even though i have notes.)

the guardian did a write-up of morrison's talk -- you can find it here if you're interested.  lithub also transcribed the franzen event with wyatt mason from september 26 if you're interested in that, too.  the new yorker should be posting videos of its festival events soon, so you should be able to watch the patti smith talk -- and you most definitely should if you can.  she had a great conversation with david remnick, read from m train, and did a little surprise at the end.

03.  i'm going to see keira knightley in her broadway debut in the stage adaptation of thérèse raquin tomorrow and hearing margaret atwood on friday!  yey!

10 books that changed my life

(i’m a sucker for book memes, and this one’s a particularly good one.)

01.  jane eyre, charlotte brontë, for being the first book i truly, thoroughly loved.

02.  anna karenina, leo tolstoy, for introducing me to the awesomeness that is 19th century russian literature.

03.  atonement, ian mcewan, for getting me out of a bad reading slump and back into literature.

04.  never let me go, kazuo ishiguro, for … never letting me go.  (har.)  (okay, seriously, though, i read this book at least once a year, and it never ceases to get me right in the gut.)

05.  the unabridged journals, sylvia plath, for just getting me.

06.  man walks into a room, nicole krauss — or nicole krauss in general for being brilliant and thoughtful and amazing.

07.  please take care of mom, shin kyung-sook, for making me appreciate motherhood and womanhood in post-war korean culture, which is all very relevant to me because my grandmother, my mother, even i have emerged from it.

08.  nothing to envy, barbara demick, for humanizing north koreans.

09.  the corrections, jonathan franzen, for getting me started on contemporary fiction and an awareness of the industry as a whole, although, okay, maybe it’s more accurate to cite freedom here because it really was all the media frenzy around freedom that got me reading the corrections (i read freedom six months after i’d read the corrections).

10.  the english patient, michael ondaatje, for being so fucking exquisitely written in language that breaks my heart and gives me hope.

the question 'why?' is one that goes unanswered so often.

It is a strange thing to love a city. In the end because no city is entirely knowable. What you love really are pieces of it. You are like Dr. Aadam Aziz forever peering at sections of his beloved through the perforated sheet. In Midnight’s Children the sheet was finally dropped and the beloved revealed, but with cities that never happens. That is perhaps part of the allure, what brings us back to the cities we love: our desire to accumulate enough pieces so we can finally have it whole within us. But to love a city is also to love who we were at that time we fell in love. For me, my love for Tokyo is intertwined with my love for my best friend, who did, in the end, survive his surgery.

-  Junot Diaz, 'Junot Diaz Reflects on Tokyo'

For me, my love for New York City is intertwined with the lost child who had nothing but the written word as faithful companion, with that first reassurance that I’m perfectly fine the way I am, with old friends of the rare breed that compels respect who have been absorbed into the emotional space I identify as home.  ‘Home’ is an amorphous tag that means both nothing and everything, and, whether or not I finally learn to lay my roots down in the city that’s called me back since youth, I hope I never lose this feeling of loving a city that’s always forgiven me and offered me the hope I so desperately needed when I was spiralling down the abyss.

voices tell secrets, too.

Sylvia Plath’s voice is deeper than expected and tinged with inflections of the British accent — very proper, very film star.  Camus sounds just as French as I thought he would.  Sartre is more nasal than expected, Heidegger more breathy.  Ted Hughes is more precise, higher-pitched, less intense and wild.  Virginia Woolf could be a professor at Hogwarts; Dame Maggie Smith’s manner of speaking in the Harry Potter films is very reminiscent of Woolf’s way of speaking.  Anne Sexton has a low, husky drawl.

Amongst those living, Ian McEwan is very proper, Jonathan Franzen very collected, and Nicole Krauss simultaneously diminutive and assertive — and these are the voices I’ve amassed in my own person, and, hopefully, more will be heard and experienced in the near future.