Theseus: completed

Last Friday, after many glitches and a great deal of emotional stress, I printed out my dissertation and handed it in.

I am happy with it. I am confident that I did everything I could to make it perfect, and there is nothing I would change. That’s all one can ask for, right?

Now it only remains to be seen what other people (namely my supervisor and two other markers) think about it and if I get a decent grade.

It was my life for an entire month. When it was done I was both immensely relieved and strangely empty. I had no idea what to do with my time anymore.

Luckily, packing came along to keep me busy. That and Firefly.

I’m proud of myself. For finishing this and for getting this far. This is the physical manifestation of all of the work I have done in the last 5 years, and everything I have learned.

And, believe it or not, I think I finally found my niche. Yes, I could talk about pots, myths and political myth making forever.

A matter of time

On Monday I heard Jeanette Winterson speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She talked about how we all exist in three different times at once, that we are used to walking around made up of the past, the present and the future. And that this is what art does, it allows us to touch our inner selves, the ones that live in all of these times at once. The ones beyond the calendars and clocks. Clocks and calendars are human constructs with which to regulate the world, when really our lives are not linear. We can relive the past and change it, in our minds. We can affect the present while we think about the future and, essentially, affect that as well.

And it’s interesting, to think of one’s self as non-linear. There’s something comforting in knowing that one hour leads to a next, that Wednesday follows Tuesday and March follows February.

But there’s a reason why Jeanette Winterson’s books speak to me, and I think she touched on it with this. While consciously I have trouble being non-linear, my inner self recognizes something about how the past, present and future are not fixed but simultaneous, are non-linear. Because, when it comes down to it, each moment we live is affected by our past experiences and our hopes or worries of the future just as much as it is affected by our present situation.

It gave me a lot to think about. And a lot of insight into Jeanette Winterson’s unique writing style.

At least I beat last year’s…

So, June 26th marked the end of my 50 Books in a Year attempt for this year.

I read 34 books this year. It’s not 50, but it’s one more than last year’s 33.

And I think that 34 books is pretty good when you consider that for each essay I wrote (6), I read an average of 10 books, so that’s 60. Plus at least one a week for my Roman Archaeology class last semester, that’s another 12.

But the 50 Books in a Year isn’t about academic reading. It’s about making time for myself amid essays and seminars and reading requirements.

Maybe next year will be the year I make it to 50. Because it will be the first year in 20 that I haven’t been in school. I’ll (hopefully) have a real job and a life outside of work. And freedom from academic guilt!

Also, this year I want to get back into the habit of blogging about all the books I read, because I sort of failed at that.

Neverwhere

“Under the streets of London there’s a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.”

Neil Gaiman has been getting a lot of press lately, since his book American Gods was chosen as the first for an online Twitter book club, 1 Book 1 Twitter. I haven’t read American Gods yet, but I thought it was about time that I write about the last book of his I did read, Neverwhere.

Neverwhere was originally written as a tv series for the BBC in the 90s. According to Neil’s prologue to my copy, there were things that he wrote which were cut from the final script for the show. And so he wrote the “author’s preferred text,” which is what I read.

The plot is extremely interesting. The idea is that there’s a whole world under London (under many large cities) and that it’s made up of the people that our society tries to make invisible. But one man, Richard, crosses that line when he rescues a girl called Door.

Once you’ve gone into London Below, you can’t come back.

It’s an adventure story, with unique characters and interesting twists. Gaiman uses well known London landmarks in clever ways. This is Gaiman’s genius - he makes his stories believable. There’s a subtlety to Gaiman’s writing that you don’t often see in fantasy books. Usually, fantasy novels try so hard to create this elaborate world and spend a great deal of the book describing it in great detail to prove it to you (Hello, Tolkein!) Neil Gaiman doesn’t need to do this. His worlds are believable in a much more simple and eloquent way.

I also watched the miniseries. It was very similar to the book, and it was enjoyable. But the 90s style of it was a bit distracting.

“‘You’ve a good heart,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.’ Then she shook her head. ‘But mostly, it’s not.’”

“He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more informative), to comprehend the city…”

“…and she would whisper to him how much she loved him, and he would tell her he loved her and always wanted to be with her, and they both believed it to be true.”

There are some other quotes I flagged but when I reread them they seemed to give away too much of the plot, so I think you should just read it for yourself.

War stories

I’ve been a bit lax on posting about the book I’ve been reading for my 50 books in a year, but I read two books back to back a couple of weeks ago that formed a post in my head from the beginning.

I started off by reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I know, you’re surprised I never read it before, right? It wasn’t required for school and the Second World War isn’t generally my thing. But it’s like, a classic, so you have to read it eventually, right?

Also, Chandra bought it because she’d never read it. Then she handed it to me in class and said she’d finished reading it quickly so that I could read it after her, like we’d talked about. So I started reading it.

The next book I read, immediately afterward, was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I bought it a while ago, on recommendation from Fae. I didn’t really realize, as I sat down on an EasyJet flight to Paris, that I was about to start reading the second book about the Second World War in as many weeks.

“They’re strange, those wars. Full of blood and violence - but also full of stories that are equally difficult to fathom.” - The Book Thief

I think these are the only books I’ve ever read about the Second World War. Truly, my love of history stops at about 500 CE and starts up again during the Cold War. Nothing had ever brought the World Wars to life for me, really. It was all a blur of battles and mud and air strikes and assasinations. There were no faces to the stories, no names to the tragedies.

I think that’s probably why a lot of people are forced to read Anne Frank in school.

I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Diary of a Young Girl, per se. It dragged on in lots of parts, and I wasn’t terribly interested in how much a 13 year old girl hates her mother. But it was undeniably real. It was the real voice of a real girl and the horrible things she had to go through. And even the parts that were annoying were real. It was her life. And sometimes it was horrible and terrifying and other times it was so shockingly normal.

I only picked out one quote from The Diary of a Young Girl.

“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”

It’s pretty powerful to think of a quote like that coming from a girl who spent more than a year in hiding above a warehouse, hoping for the end of a war.

The Book Thief, on the other hand, was entirely fictitious, but also very poignant. And much better written, no offense to Anne. I adored The Book Thief. It was a truly unique book. It’s told from the perspective of Death, watching over a girl called Liesel, who encounters him a number of times. It’s full of really interesting foreshadowing, intertextuality and interesting devices like pictures and short lists. The style is very interesting, and being narrated by Death means that it has a lot of really great one liners, my favourite.

“It’s the leftover humans. The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions, I still fail.”

“When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started not just to mean something, but everything.”

“It’s hard not to like a man who not only notices the colours, but speaks them.”

“Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. That was the business of hiding a Jew.”

“It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.”

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words?”

I’ve had enough war stories for a while. It was pretty intense, reading these two books next to each other.