A Parcel of Penguins.

I was drafting this morning, and I realised that I needed to know the date of the Branch Davidian Massacre in Waco, Texas.

I've already looked up the date of the Waco massacre, and I've written it down. Twice. On the backs of pieces of paper that had important things on their other side. So heaven knows where they are now.

I may have written something important for The Shore on the back of my CAS Letter, which is the sealed and notarised document that gets me into the country.

So I realised that I needed a notebook dedicated to information about this novel, since it involves a lot of this type of minutia.

The notebook I bought, because every time I go to a bookstore I spend twenty minutes looking at them

 I have a thing for notebooks. An obsession. And i figured that this circumstance justified indulging the obsession. So I went to Waterstones especially for a Paper Blank. Because they are pretty and I've wanted one for a while. Which is why I didn't go for a Moleskine, which are like crack to every academic I know - someone gives us the first one as a present and then ever after you can't switch back. I have one I was given by the head of the writing lab for tutoring my sophomore year of undergrad, and it still looks new. After being in my bag when a water bottle exploded. Twice.

So I went for a notebook, and I had a poke around, and I discovered something beautiful.

I have the biggest intellectual crush on this man. 

There are one hundred of them.

Left to right: The Art of War, A Room of One's Own, and the Tao Te Ching.

They each cost less than a double on the rocks. 

I've gone to bookstores in three cities and I still haven't found a copy of A Tale of a Tub: The hunt is on!

And they make me happy - Penguin was originally founded to provide good, cheap reading material for people in transit, way back when all the real literature worth reading was expensive and not pocket sized. So having a copy of Mill on liberty feels like a wonderful return to basics. Though I may have taken to darting into every bookshop I pass in the hope of finding them all.

If all of my books were bound in this format The Luminaries would probably be six inches thick.

Oh, and look what wandered over my doorstep today:

There was one thing that surprised me upon finally seeing these two side by side:

See it? Seeeee it?

There's a half inch difference in the thickness of these two books. I measured. And it isn't because Twilight has large print and wide margins. Quite the opposite, actually.

Stars on the left, Twilight on the right

For some reason, I expected Stars to be more substantial. And Twilight to be quite a bit less substantial. Huh. So far, the only comparison I can draw is that one's got a handily short title, while the other is a pain to type over and over again. That should soon be remedied by the four hour train journey to Reading that's coming up later this week. I don't know whether I'm apprehensive or excited.

Leveling Up

Thursday was the Upgrade Panel, which I prepared for by losing my keys, drinking six cups of coffee, and being too nervous to eat. And also wearing my lucky socks. I had to go through a similar panel in the final year of undergrad for my honors project, so I was expecting a few hours of complicated questions on things that I hadn't really thought about - in undergrad they made me read all of Faulkner because I couldn't articulate exactly why the three stories I'd given them had their section breaks where they were, or any section breaks at all - and then to be told to leave the room while they deliberated on whether to let me continue on. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the office, sat down between my two panelists, and was told, "You've passed, just so you know. I think we're going to begin with the critical section; tell us about your methodology." So now, against all odds and in spite of what all of my male professors in undergrad told me, I am officially a PhD candidate.

The meeting ended with the directive to take it easy over the summer, and not turn in anything until September, which is directly at odds with the Hub's directive that all students shall be at their desks during business hours. But the supervisors make the rules, I suppose. So I meandered home and celebrated with whisky and a re-read of Bridget Jones's Diary, which is much funnier now that I know what all of the Britishisms mean.

Despite visiting the 26 charity shops in Norwich that I know of, I haven't found a copy of The Fault in our Stars, which is irritating because I swear I've seen one before secondhand. It's also a bit surprising, because popular books cycle through the charity shops at a rate of knots in Norwich. I could always buy it new, but he's already rolling in royalties, and it's a bit of a matter of principle to only support (no matter how little they'd get from the sale) writers that I actually support. In some cases, I'd rather Oxfam got 2.50. Twilight, despite being a few years on from top of the list, was for sale in the first shop I checked, and I felt immensely embarrassed of buying it while not being sure why I should be embarrassed and wondering if there was something wrong with me for being embarrassed.

A Multitude of Faults in Alaska

Lately a lot of people I know have told me that I have to read The Fault in our Stars, including people that I don't usually talk books with. In fact, it's mostly been people that I've never talked books with. The last time that happened was a few years back, when Twilight came out - which I never got around to reading because I was a fresher in undergrad. This time things are a little different.

I read Looking for Alaska when I was in high school, and I remember being squicked out by the dynamic of the oral sex scene between Lara and Miles, followed closely by being irritated by the male character's lack of reciprocity and the female character's lack of dimensionality. There were other things that bothered me about the book, including the incident with the stolen Breathalyzer and why that was important or proved anything, but it was a first book. With A Multitude of Katherines I realised that the main character was reducing all of his girlfriends to equations, threw the book across the room, and decided to never read John Green again, because there were too many good books out there for me to waste my time on ones that were so half-baked.

And the years rolled on, and YA boomed while I had my back turned, and now everyone I know insists that he has produced a masterpiece, and I'm a bit sceptical as to whether the author who squicked out pre-ideals 16 year old me is capable of producing a masterpiece. But then, in the past ten years I managed to gain the education and vocabulary to explain what about his debut novel bothered me, so it is not inconceivable that he has also improved with time. So at first I thought that I'd go back and re-read all of Green's books, just so I could explain coherently why I don't like his work when people gush at me about the latest instalment. 

But then I had an idea.

My first degree is in analysing books, essentially. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to compare or contrast two texts. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to read some Young Adult fiction. And the overlap between people who I've heard mock Twilight and the people who are telling me to read Stars now is substantial. 

So, as soon as I can hunt up used copies of both of them, I think I'm going to do a comparative reading of The Fault in our Stars and Twilight, concentrating on the things in Green's early work that bothered me when I was younger. Off the top of my head (and ten years on) that would include the complexity and agency of female characters, the consistency of tone, the logic of the plot and the world, and the overall shape and pacing of the novel.

And since there's no where else for me to put it, whatever I come up with will probably wind up showing up here.