Three Things To Start November

Since it's Daylight Savings Time this weekend, I've got an extra hour. What better way to spend it than blogging?

1. I'm reading Grant by Ron Chernow and I'm really enjoying it. Chernow is at the height of his biographical powers. Ulysses S. Grant seems so much more accessible than Washington. Like Hamilton, he jumps off the page. Hell, he jumps off the cover. Look at him. If you don't have the book, go get a fifty-dollar bill. I'll wait........so you see what I mean. He looks modern, all beardly and such. That soulful, forthright gaze. I feel as if I could walk down the streets here in Sedalia, MO and see Grant.  You know who else jumps off the page? General Sherman! He and Grant have a fine bromance. Like many people, I'm imagining a musical. This is a long read and Grant may be my last book for 2017. I hope not, because I was hoping to work in a read of Tess of the D'Urbervilles before the end of the year. If Grant does turn out to be my last book, what a great finish!

2. I haven't participated in NaNoWriMo since 2014, when I took a deep breath and wrote Even If the Sky Falls Down. It was a frustrating, exhausting and exhilarating experience and I want to do it again. So...enter the zygote novel provisionally titled Chicken Diary. I'd forgotten the fun of discovering things about the characters. Maybe I won't make 50,000 words, but I'll get a nice chunk done before the end of the month.

3. I've finally unpacked all my feelings about A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It was compelling, but not exactly the greatest prose I've ever read. Why was I so attracted? Then it hit me: I like overwrought stories. The Young and the Restless. Taylor Caldwell, my go-to comfort read. (I must do a post about Caldwell's Melissa, a novel I read earlier this year. Yikes.) Also, take away the gay storyline, as well as the edgy elements that make up Jude's past and present life in A Little Life and it's a 1940s "women's picture". There's suffering, but everyone is noble and attractive, apologizes profusely, and it's all done in gorgeous clothing, splendid houses and breathtaking settings. Yanagihara unapologetically lays it on with a king-sized trowel. I love the book. It annoys me, but I absolutely love it.

4. Okay, I know I said "Three Things" in the subhead, so just call it being bad at math or something. I found a new vlog on YouTube that I'm crazy about called The Restricted Section. Two young bookworms candidly discuss their reading and their book hoards and drink craft beer. Best of all, they are practically in my backyard! One hundred miles away, which is nothing. Maybe I'll get to meet them one day. Meanwhile, I eagerly await uploads from Megan and Sue.

In the Middle of Everything

Still doing NaNoWriMo, but feeling less frenzied.  One thing about this experience: I sleep soundly at night.  After I empty out all my words, I fall into bed (onto futon, to be exact) at midnight or one a.m, read for ten minutes, conk out and I don't know a thing until the alarm goes off at 8:02 the next morning.  After this is over, maybe I should keep a novel on the go all the time.  Nah.

Predictably, my reading has taken a hit.  I'm now in the middle of six books, and can't seem to finish a single one.  I just drift like a tumbleweed from book to book to book then stall.  The list includes:

1. Insomnia - Stephen King.  I'm mad at myself for this.  I should be reading King.  I would absorb his aversion to adverbs by osmosis.

2. Van Gogh biography.  He was driving me absolutely nuts, so what did I do??  I picked up...

3. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. She spends pages and pages and pages castigating herself for her writer's block.  It was too much of an echo of my own life these days.  I got that Van Gogh feeling, but pressed on. She really annoyed me when she dealt with her writer's block by breezing through three or four Henry James novels in a week while working full-time teaching at Smith.  I liked her dream about meeting Marilyn Monroe, though and how so much of her journal ends up in The Bell Jar, but still. Had to give up.

4. The Slaves of Solitude - Patrick Hamilton.  I don't know.  I love post WWII fiction, I love England, I love Hamilton, I love his prose -- but I froze up and couldn't finish.

5. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing - Marie Kondo.  This is my current subway read.  I wish I could hire Kondo to fly from Tokyo to Busan and we could sort out my possessions "in one go", as she blithely puts it. I could use someone to hold my hand during this process.  Now that I just wrote that sentence, I'm annoyed with myself for writing it. Aren't I an International Woman of Mystery?  Pooh.  A true IWOM would never have picked up so much stuff in the first place.

Finally, I had a dream that all my book blogging buddies -- The Relentless Reader, Bookfool, Sam from Book Chase, Michelle from A Reader's Respite, Susan from You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Susan from Pages Turned, Sandy from You've Gotta Read This! and Unruly Reader -- got together and came to Korea to visit me.  Except they got the wrong city.  They came to Gumi instead of Busan, then they realized their mistake and headed towards Seoul!  NO!!!  I had just caught up with them as the dream ended.  Wondering what it means.