Booklife, It's A Good Life, And It's My Life

My abbreviated stump of a vacation/staycation finished on September 1st, and I went back to peddling English grammar, vocabulary and the joys of conversation. This semester, I'm teaching a class that meets Monday-Thursday, a class that meets every evening right around suppertime, and seven other classes that meet once a week. That kind of schedule will tear your bloghouse down room by room.

Happily, I jerked myself away from work long enough for the September 7th BOOKLEAVES meeting. We picked up a new member, Rebecca, who expresses herself clearly and succinctly and is a delight to talk to about all things bookish. While lunching at the Indian restaurant near Mitzi's apartment, we had an agreeable and extremely lively discussion about Persuasion, then the 8 of us headed back to Mitzi's to watch The Jane Austen Book Club. During the movie, we munched on freshly-baked cookies that Amber had brought, and Mitzi showed off her baking mojo, bringing forth peanut butter cookies and pumpkin empanadas at delicious intervals. After the movie, we chose A Spectacle Of Corruption by David Liss and The Road by Cormac McCarthy for our next two reads.

With a habitually heavy heart, I tore myself away from Seoul, but returning to work turned out to be a good thing for this bookworm. After 3-and-a-half years of working with me, my co-workers finally seem to be surrendering to my unwavering bibliomania. Martin and Zak both have copies of The Omnivore's Dilemma and are rigorously wading through it with promises that I'm next.

Saskatchewan Mike suddenly asked me one day if I'd read Ishmael.

"No, what's it about?" I asked.

"It's fuckin' brilliant; I'll bring it in," Mike told me, with an expression that suggested I was nuts for wanting an actual summary.

Willie from New Zealand is reading my copy of The God Delusion, and has reciprocated generously by loaning me what amounts to a Kiwi book explosion: The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, My Name Was Judas by C.K. Stead and Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones. Cheers, Willie!

My new Aussie pal Belinda and I met up a couple of weeks ago when she came to Gumi, and she pulled The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett out of her bag, telling me that she was reading and absolutely loving it. I had a bookish flashback to 2006, when I went to a book swap in Daegu and some guy came up and pressed this same novel in my hands and insisted that this was a wonderful novel, I must take this book home, I must read it. After seeing Belinda, I grabbed TPOTE off of the TBR shelf in my office, and began reading it. Wow. That book swap guy was right. Belinda was right. Let me add my voice to the chorus by echoing Saskatchewan Mike's abovementioned sentiment. Even better, my co-worker Evan saw me reading TPOTE in the lounge and asked if he might borrow it when I was finished. Wow again.

Even though my Welsh book buddy Pablo and I are no longer co-workers, we're also still exchanging books. He's really getting into Philip Roth's novels; he read Everyman earlier this year and borrowed my copy of American Pastoral. He also asked to borrow Beloved by Toni Morrison. He pressed his copy of Cloud Atlas at me. A few days later, I had a dream in which I decided I would call up Pablo and ask if he had any Evelyn Waugh I could borrow. Upon waking, I sent him an email instead, telling him about the dream, asking him if he had any Waugh, and how did he pronounce Waugh's first name?

Pablo replied: Don't know what's going on in your subconscious with that dream, and how I get into the mix with Waugh (Evelinn, I think) who I only know by repute is beyond me...saw some of the TV series Brideshead Revisted years ago and that was enough to deter me from sampling Waugh. Anybody who creates characters named Sebastian Flyte with an unhealthy preoccupation with teddy bears may encapsulate a certain type of Englishness but it does NOT resonate with us Celts.

So, anyway -- in spite of work, or because of it, my booklife seems to be thriving. The weekend coming up is a 3-day one because of Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving). I'll use the opportunity to resume regular blogging.