Contrasting Autobiographies

So in-line with deciding to run the half marathon in July, and my tendency to read a Murakami for every second book, i started reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. This is essentially a few autobiographical stories and thoughts of Murakami, set amidst his training for the New York Marathon one year. It's nice to read a bit more about his history, although there tend to be a lot of "I'm the kinda guy" sentences which I don't like... and all of the distances are in miles, i wonder whether this is due to the americanness of the translation.

At the same time my dad gave me my uncle Colin's autobiography. Uncle Colin would love to be able to do a little of what Murakami does, he would love to be able to walk down the street, but he has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 3. His outgoing nature and love of music has allowed him to live quite a full life, socially with a club he began in his early adulthood and throughout his life as an entertainer. Like anyone who learns to get on with it and love life in the face of a limitation, Col's most difficult moments are when he has to confront his disability head on. Whenever anything happens because of his disability - a girl's parents won't support their relationship, a wife decides it's getting to be a bit too much, his boss decides he's just a bit too slow at getting around - these moments are the hardest to deal with, because the last thing he's ever wanted to do is blame his circumstances for his happiness. When someone tells you it's specifically because he is in a wheelchair that they won't be with him, how could he do anything but blame the chair for this disappointment? Colin is also a bit of an "I'm the kinda guy" type of person, but I guess this is the essential question when someone reads an autobiography.

2011 China Books

So after I accepted that I would give up on Flatterland, I did manage to start (and finish) Great expectations over the course of 2011. Wonderfully playful and interesting throughout, but long I guess. I was surprised how much I remembered of the Ethan Hawke film but looking back at a trailer it seems like the story is pretty different. Again, unrequited love is sometimes over-romanticised, but here it is at least is not held as something transcendentally pure - rather we just think Pip is a bit young and foolish. Glad to have finally read this - it's been on the shelf for a while.

Then back into the Murakami short stories The elephant vanishes. Some of these stories were extended to his longer stories, others seem like short exercises. I guess one that, although simplistic, really stands out for me was a little love story about passers-by. We could walk past the perfect person for us every day, but of course as we get older it becomes much less of a good idea to hassle people in the street and tell them this. Fortunately, people have RSVP which is sort of the same but doesn't involve as much of the uncertainty that hassling people on the street would.

Because I finished it earlier than expected while traveling in China, I also read The Scarlett Letter - entirely on my iPhone. It did seem like a bit of undesirable thing to read a book in this way, but it wasn't available in the library after I cam home either. I certainly would rather a book for recreational reading. The Scarlett Letter has become such an icon in our society - even Tool's the grudge has a reference to it, but I had no idea what the intention of the book had been. The story seems a perfect illustration of Sartrean bad faith - on the one hand you have an adultress who, by proudly wearing her confession, is able to accept herself and become quite a beautiful character, while on the other you have the community, forcing her to wear the confession and disfiguring their moral beings Dostoyevsky-like in the process. Despite the Christian overtones of the book, Christian morality doesn't really play much of a part here, since there are so many symbols and dreamscapes in the book the society and religion that governs it may as well be fictional.

a year and a bit of books...

So... seems like I gave up a while ago... i hadn't realised. Well, I guess August 2010 I was just finishing up the writing of my PhD so there probably wasn't much time to keep count.

I did end up reading Everything Ravaged, Everything burned - which was pretty nice. Estelle Tang had a nice review of this. I recall being a little unsettled with the graphic descriptions in the final story - in particular a creative viking ritual called a "bloody angel". Like watching a Chan-wook park film - you sort of wonder what it adds to your life to be exposed to macabre art. I guess at some level it stops you from making your way passively through life without having to experience emotion, which is sort of good. There were a whole lot of pretty human characters in these stories, I remember hearing Tower say that he liked to bring the reader's character sympathies to an alternative point as the stories progress... I'm not sure whether this worked or not. The characters were human, but because they weren't my kind of human, I found it hard to genuinely sympathise.

I also made attempts to read flatterland, but i found it got a bit dull and I couldn't be bothered with the teenage girl-square protagonist (or is she a pentagon?). On the other hand, I found reading flatland earlier in the year delightful. It is a metaphor for relativity, in particular of how we perceive the forces of 4 dimensions in 3.