Top Ten Literary Couples

And it's Tuesday again! Woot Woot! I've had an absolutely crazy week (grading 75 freshman essays, holding 2 Plagiarism hearings, writing 2 chapters of my thesis (under major professor duress!!) and spitting out a semi-decent conference paper...*dies*) and I have a ton of craziness still ahead of me. But NO WAY am I missing my Top Ten Tuesday Post!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme run by The Broke and the Bookish. Every week we get a new topic to ponder, list, and explore.


This week's theme is "Favorite Couples in Literature."  I'm so excited to see what everybody else writes for this. The best literary relationships (in my mind) are the ones that sweep us off our feet and make us really feel the passion and the struggle. I think the types of relationships a reader 'falls in love with' say a lot about that reader, their dreams, and their image of 'the perfect couple.'

My Favorite Love-Bugs (in no particular order)

1. Jo and Laurie from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I know they don't end up together... but they SHOULD HAVE!!! I love their playful, sweet relationship and absolutely hate that that little whippersnapper Amy messed things up.

2. Elizabeth and Darcy- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice I have a thing for witty, independent, strong minded heroines falling for the complicated, silent, brooding, misunderstood leading man. Lizzy and Darcy are kind of the poster children for this.

3. Daine and Numair from Tamara Pierce's The Immortals Series Now normally I find the teacher/student thing kind of creepy, but I could not have imagined Daine ending up with anybody else. Numair's funny, brilliant, protective, curious, and (sometimes) humble. He's kind of my perfect nerd-guy.

4. Beatrice and Benedick from Wm. Shakespeare's As You Like It  Much Ado (Thanks for catching my brain-fart Allie!). Beatrice is one of my favorite literary characters of all-time and I would have been pissed if Shakespeare had married her off to some fluffy, air-brained twit. Benedick has just as much spunk and sass as Beatrice-- I'm sure their married life was chaotic (and probably involved a lot of chucking of crockery and witty repartee) but they totally deserve one another.

5. Lucy Snowe and M. Paul Emanuel from Charlotte Bronte's Villette Lucy hides her heart beneath a thick layer of calm self-control; M. Paul wears his heart on his sleeve (or pinned to his forehead, or on the tip of his tongue... wherever it will be most obvious). She's cool and collected, he's fiery, passionate and unpredictable.  I did not see this relationship coming (neither did Lucy), but absolutely adored it while it lasted.

6. Sayuri and Nobu-san from Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha I know most people think the Sayuri-Chairman thing is more romantic and more 'epic,' but I always loved Nobu's dedication to Sayuri, his willingness to be honest with her (especially when no one else would tell her what was what), and his desire to teach her to be practical and to stand on her own two feet. Sayuri was awful to him a number of times throughout the book (ungrateful little grrrr)... but I think she underestimated what she had.

7. Leah and Anatole from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible Leah and Anatole come from wildly different backgrounds and have different views of the world and their place within it... but they find a way to make love work through these challenges (and many many many more struggles). Their relationship is never easy or uncomplicated and they may never be able to fully see eye-to-eye but they're willing to sacrifice everything for love.

8. Vivaldo and Ida from James Baldwin's Another Country This is another one of those "When Worlds Collide" relationships. Vivaldo and Ida never seem to agree on anything, and they constantly struggle (particularly Vivaldo) to figure out what the other one is thinking and why they do what they do. Their relationship is bound up in racial, class and gender tensions but even with all that working against them they continually fight to 'keep love alive'.

9. Kambili and Fr. Amadi from Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Purple Hibiscus This almost doesn't count as a relationship.. you know that Kambili and Amadi love eachother deeply and that they see the other as their link to a better understanding of beauty and joy in the world, but circumstances and self-less ambitions force them apart. Part of Amadi lives with Kambili forever though...

10. Cal and Abra from John Steinbeck's East of Eden I'm fascinated by Cal's character in this book. I hate him and love/pity him periodically throughout the story. He's a smart, emotional guy who has been royally messed up by his upbringing and his competitive relationship with his brother (Cal and Aron are based on Cain and Abel.. fyi). Abra is really one of the first people who can reach Cal and help him get over his anger and fear. It's a beautiful, incredibly painful and heart-wrenching story. You're never fully cheering for him, but your heart goes out to him anyway.

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme run byThe Broke and the Bookish designed help the blogging community share its very favorite titles/characters/scenes/etc. Each week we get a new "topic" and the instructions to list our Top Ten-- I love this feature both because it forces/allows me to think back over my years of reading to locate the books/personalities that have meant the most to me, and also because it gives me the chance to read and interact with blogs I never would have come across in my regular voyages. Sometimes, while reading another person's blog, I'll come across a title I haven't read in AGES and I'll wax nostalgic. Sometimes I'll even go hunt the book down in my stacks and have a grand old time getting reacquainted with an old friend. Occasionally, I'm convinced to pick up a new title and start a new relationship with a stranger-book. 

This week's topic is Top Ten Favorite Book Quotes. I'm going to have to say right off the bat that my post is going to be more like "Ten (of my) Top Favorite Quotes" because there's no way I could limit myself to having 10 favorites and I KNOW I'm going to leave some out that I absolutely adore... C'est la vie!

1. "Only strangers have no secrets. Before you begin to know them they are faces, open and pure, only when you delve deeper do they grow personalities, grow mysteries, grow caves of experience to plunge and explore." 

Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood

2. "What a great difference there is... between dreaming of something and dealing with it." 

Another Country by James Baldwin

3. "Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone cold dead." Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

4. "Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him." 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

5. "Meaning is a shaky edifice  we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death. " "Imaginary Homelands" by Salman Rushdie

6. "I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." 

Diaries of Isaac Newton

7. "You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified."

 Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

8. "Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

9. "To espresso or to latte, that is the question," he muttered, his free will evaporating. I had asked Hamlet for something he couldn't easily supply: a decision. "Whether 'tis tastier on the palate to choose white mocha over plain," he continued in a rapid garble, "or to take a cup to go. Or a mug to stay, or extra cream, or have nothing, and by opposing the endless choice, end one's heartache--... To froth, to sprinkle, perchance to drink..."

 Something Rotten (from the Thursday Next series) by Jasper Fforde

10. "You will never be alone, with a poet in your pocket!" 

Letter from John Adams to John Quincy Adams

And a bonus quote-- "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou

Trivia(l) Pursuit!

Last weekend a couple friends and I decided that we would attend a trivia night at a local bar. We'd never really done anything like that as a group before, but since we have such a diverse group of interests we thought we'd be able to handle any question that got tossed at us. It was the first time any of my friends had attended an event like this... but during undergrad I attended trivia nights fairly regularly, and absolutely loved the atmosphere (a weird mix of light-hearted frivolity and cut-throat competition..) and the excuse to celebrate my nerdiness. I was excited to be 'back in the game' but worried that my once semi-formidable skills would be all rusty-useless :(  *all-time favorite trivia question: What is the longest 1-syllable word in the English language?... I'll put the answer at the bottom of the post. No peeking now!*)

We ended up doing decently as a team (11th out of 38 teams), and, now that my friends have caught trivia-fever, we're definitely planning on going back next week (and the week after that, and probably the one after that...). I'm wickedly competitive though, so I decided that it would be a good idea if I boned up on my trivia during the week. So... I poked through the stacks and came across the ultimate guide to random-facts and nuggets of knowledge:

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs

I picked this book up partially because it seemed to suit my needs (who WOULDN'T want the smartest person in the world on their trivia team?!) and partially because I read Jacobs's The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it. I was looking for obscure facts presented with humor and humanity... and I got exactly what I wanted, plus a whole lot more!

At its most simplistic level, The Know-It-All is a record of the year Jacobs spent reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.  It highlights some of his favorite random facts (did you know that you only need to  get three rowdy people together to legally qualify as a riot? or that Hank Aaron once played for a baseball team called the Indianapolis Clowns?) and traces patterns and contradictions throughout the text. Jacobs is an incredibly funny writer, and half of the humor of the book comes from the fact that he is such a normal guy (a former writer for Entertainment Tonight who admits that he "stopped reading anything except tabloid gossip columns for years!") undertaking such an incredibly immense project.

While the factoids themselves are fascinating, thought-provoking, and often hilarious, Jacobs breaks up the encyclopedic exploration by interweaving narratives from "his life outside the Books." He deals with family members and friends who are confused and often dismissive of his (crazy) goal, and describes his contrast attempts to work his new-found knowledge into daily conversation (there's a particularly wonderful cocktail party dialogue about the mating habits of amoebas...). There are also stories about his attempts to become recognized as "The Smartest Person in the World:" He attempts to join Mensa, competes in a hard-core Crossword Puzzle Tournament, hangs out with Alex Trebek,  tries out for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire... and each experience teaches him that he's not quite "there yet." He says, tongue-in-cheek, that the only reason he doesn't blow his competitors away is because he hasn't reached the Z's yet!

I absolutely adored this book -- I learned so many randomly wonderful things and had a wonderful time reading (and laughing) along with the author. There's something awfully joyous about reading about somebody else's reading (I guess that's why we blog, after all...) and I enjoyed every minute of this one!

5 STARS We're heading to Vegas and getting hitched next Tuesday. Send flowers!

* the longest 1 syllable English word is "screeched" just fyi :)

BBAW: Forgotten Treasure

Today’s Topic:  Sure we’ve all read about Freedom and Mockingjay but we likely have a book we wish would get more attention by book bloggers, whether it’s a forgotten classic or under marketed contemporary fiction.  This is your chance to tell the community why they should consider reading this book!

I sat and stared at my computer screen for a long time after coming across today's topic. At first I thought it would be easy to come up with a title (or an author? maybe even a genre?) that I thought was woefully under-read and in need of some blogger-loving, but I had a terrible time narrowing down my ideas. There are so many books I've loved that seem 'out of fashion' in today's reading community. I often feel lost reading other blogs because I'm fairly out of touch with the contemporary/YA lit world-- I love visiting and maybe adding other blogger's favorites to my TBR pile, but I never quite get over the feeling of being a tourist in a strange land... 

Anyway-- here are my final picks for forgotten treasures!

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes. I think Hughes, in general, is horribly under-read at the moment. Sure we usually get a couple of his poems in school (usually in the month of February when teachers are instructed to celebrate African American History month...) and during President Obama's inauguration Hughes quotes were tossed around all over the place... but actually reading his collected works? Or his short stories? His plays? His non-fiction work? Not so much! I was actually guilty of 'forgetting' Hughes (or of never really knowing him...) until fairly recently. A dear friend of mine in grad school is a Hughes scholar (one of the few, the proud) and he basically tied me to a chair and refused to let me up until I'd worked through a couple collections. It was an eye-opening experience. I'd never realized quite how long Hughes's career was-- he was a major voice not only in the Harlem Renaissance, but also throughout the Second World War, the Red Scare of McCarthyism, and the early Civil Rights Movement. He traveled extensively in the US, the Carribbean, Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, and Japan, and wrote about his experiences every step of the way. He wrote in almost every genre imaginable (even opera!) and was a huge American presence-- artistically, politically and socially-- for over 4 decades.

I would really encourage anyone to dive right into Hughes's work, but if you're only going to read one thing of his cover-to-cover, I would suggest checking out the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea. It's a fabulously lyrical account of his childhood (in the US and Mexico) and his growing awareness of both racial identity and the power of the written word. It follows him on his journeys as a young writer in Harlem, on book tours deep into the American South of the 1940s, and over to the artistic community in 1950s Paris. It's a beautifully written, emotionally powerful narrative that gives you an insight into one of the most prolific and influential writers of the first half of the 1900s. I can't shout enough praises...

AND (because I love this one too much to leave out...)

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead. I know this book got some flack(!!) for being 'overly literary' and Whitehead's complicated prose and kaleidescope of images, scenes, time periods, genres and voices can be messy and confusing, but if you let yourself get lost in the story/stories the experience is really magical. It's a haunting book. It's an ambitious look at the history/development/modern applications of the John Henry myth (a former slave working as a pile driver for the railroads who engages in a man vs machine contest to save his livelihood). The novel playfully, yet dramatically, explores stereotypes and race relations over the course of the past hundred years. It also engages with modern commodity culture-- where history, myth, and tensions have been turned into purchasable 'things' so that we can buy (and own) little bits of the past (a 'John Henry action figure,' 'black face lawn jockeys for the front yard,' 'stereotyped Aunt Jemima syrup bottles' etc.) You may not love the book for its language (though I actually do..) or for it's wildly spinning construction, but the messages and characters will stay with you!

BBAW: New Treasure

It's Day 3 of Book Blog Appreciation Week! Each day we share the blogger-love and describe posts, bloggers, and relationships that have shaped our experiences as readers and writers.

Wednesday’s Topic: We invite you to share with us a book or genre you tried due to the influence of another blogger. What made you cave in to try something new and what was the experience like?

I've added a huge number of books to my TBR pile thanks to wonderfully thoughtful reviews by fellow bloggers, but unfortunately I've only been able to actually read a couple of them :(

I laughed out loud when I read English Major's Junk Food's review of Ophelia Just Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook by Sarah Schmelling, and then I immediately logged on to Amazon to order a copy. I loved the idea of this book (perhaps more than I loved the book itself) and couldn't wait to share it with my students. What a great way to 'modernize' the canon! A couple weeks ago I assigned Hamlet to my first-year English class and then had them read the 'Facebooking' of those characters. It really seemed to bring home some of the relationships and emotions from the play.. plus is was so much FUN to talk about. I asked my students to pick characters NOT represented in the Schmelling book and to write their own Facebook interactions. It was the most energetic and engaged class-period we've had all semester!

The other review that made me jump off my seat and run directly to the used book store was Things Mean a Lot's reading of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. The review gave a great, intriguing plot summary without giving too much away, and then gave a list of similar works and provided a number of (fabulous!!) quotes. I was hooked as soon as I read this paragraph:

 "But before I go any further, let me tell you a little more about the alternative world that Thursday inhabits: this is a world where dodos have been brought back from extinction thanks to cloning and are popular pets (Thursday has one named Pickwick); a world where the boundaries between reality and fiction are malleable at best; a world in which a device called a Prose Portal allows people to enter works of fiction; a world in which the interests of the giant Goliath Corporation have pretty much trumped democracy; a world in which Wales is an independent nation behind a sort of Iron Curtain; and finally a world in which artistic and literary matters are the subject of debates so heated that they can lead to imprisonment or to terrorist acts."

I LOVED this idea, and ordered the rest of the series before I'd even finished the first one. I've been sticking pretty exclusively to classic and 'academic' literature, so the playfulness and chaos of Fforde's books was a bit out of my norm... But I'm so very glad I was encouraged to go there!

How about you? What "New Treasures" have your blogging adventures led you to? 

Top Ten TBRs

I know that I'm going to be posting later today for the BBAW topic, but I love my Top Ten Tuesdays and just wouldn't be able to get through the week without my fix...

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme run by The Broke and The Bookish (if you're hopping around for BBAW, definitely go check this one out!). Every Tuesday they post a Top Ten Topic for us to answer. This week's question is "Top Ten Books I'm Dying to Read." I'm struggling with this one, which is surprising since I have a TBR pile that is slowly taking over my room...


Top Ten Books I'm Dying to Read

1. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Different Languages by Guy Deutscher. I've always been interested in the ways language shapes our understanding of the world (and of our place with/in it). I've had Deutscher's book on my shelf for a while now but live keeps interrupting!

2. High Tide in Tuscon: Essays From Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver.  (One of) My mission for the year was to familiarize myself with essay writers/writing and, since BK is one of my all-time favorite writers (Poisonwood Bible!!) I grabbed her collection to get myself going. Still haven't managed to crack the cover though...

3. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Language games, conspiracy theories, meta-fictionality... there are so many juicy tags attached to this book. Friends are always shocked (and appalled) that I haven't gotten to this yet.

4. The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins. Before you start yelling at me about this.. I KNOW I have to read it, I KNOW it's supposed to be wonderful (except, possibly, Mockingjay?)


5. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I'm not allowed to watch the movie until I've read the book. And I hear the movie's incredible...


6. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. An epic Whodunnit about censorship that takes place at a library known as The Cemetery for Forgotten Books? Yes Please!


7.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.


8. Songs of Enchantment by Ben Okri. This is the sequel to Okri's Booker Prize winning The Famished Road. Loved the first one, feel guilty I haven't touched the second


9. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. I've read his controversial stuff (Satanic Verses in particular), so it'd be nice to engage with him as a storyteller instead of being caught up in the politics.


10. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon.

BBAW: First Treasure

It's finally time for Book Blogger Appreciation Week!! I was a lurker last year and promised myself that I would have my own blog up and running in time for this year's festivities. It's such a great opportunity to explore new blogs and to celebrate the bloggers who help to shape my reading and reviewing habits. I'm also madly truly deeply in love with the theme of this year's celebration -- “A Treasure Chest of Infinite Books and Infinite Blogs” -- because I have a minor obsession with pirates and treasure maps. I taught a class last week on the parallels between first-year composition projects and pirate map construction, and I plan to teach next Monday (the day AFTER International Talk like a Pirate Day...) in a full peg-leg/eye-patch/parrot-on-the-shoulder glory.

Anyway! Today's topic is "First Treasure," an account of the blog that first got you interested (obsessed) with book blogging and with the blogging community.  My first blogger-crush was definitely Amanda over at Dead White Guys. She's hysterically funny and often has pointed insights about the nature and relationships of classic literature. I was particularly drawn to her blog because it was the first time I'd seen a blogger try to take on 'classic, high-brow literature.' I'd read plenty of blogs about YA and chick lit, and while I love those genres, I am an academic and feel guilty if I don't engage with the big guns. Dead White Guys turns reading about Hemingway or Thomas Moore into a rocking, rollicking good time.

I'd recommend her blog to anyone interested in an irreverent take on the Old Masters, or to anyone looking to bone up on the big names without getting too intimidated by their dry authority.

Logophilia!!

It's hard to be excited about this Tuesday. I had a fabulously relaxing holiday weekend (hanging at the beach, exploring the history of St. Augustine, going wine tasting... all kinds of lovely-ness) and then this morning reared its ugly head and forced me to rejoin the real world. Booooo!! I came home to an email Inbox absolutely flooded with angsty, "Why aren't you responding to meeeee" type messages. My students are working on drafting their first papers of the semester. For most of them it's their first college paper ever.... so they're freaking out. I'm amazed by how much hand-holding this year's gang seems to expect -- they email about evvvverything and expect me to pass out answers/excuses on demand. They're a charismatic, really bright group, but they have a hard time accepting responsibility for their work. Drives me batty!

Anyway! Despite all the stress of getting back to teaching, and of responding to all the questions/demands I "neglected" over the weekend, I'm stoked that it's Tuesday! Why? Cause it means that it's time for Top Ten Tuesdays at The Broke and the Bookish. Woot Woot!

This week's topic is... Your Top Ten Favorite Words. That's a tough one, but I'll do my best :)

1. Facetiously- adj. not meant to be taken seriously or literally.  I love this word for a number of reasons-- it's fun to say, it has all the vowels in alphabetical order, and it contradicts itself (starts out by presenting you with a "Face" but you can't take it at "face value").

2. Onomatopoeia- n. a word that sounds like its referent. The world would be a much more musical place if all words were onomatopoetic. 

3. Brouhaha- n. excited public interest, a hullabaloo (bonus points for sneaking my 11th favorite word into a definition!) When I try to practice my mad scientist cackle I just repeat Brouhaha with a creepy, drawn-out accept.

4. Tintinnabulation- n. the sound of bells. You can almost hear them ringing ...

5. Orangutan- n. King Louie from the Jungle Book. The epitome (12th favorite word) of awesomeness

6. Amoeba- n. a protozoan bottom-dweller. Not sure why I dig this one... it's not like it comes up in regular conversation... but it has a fun ring. I'd totally name a kid Amoeba.

7. Indubitably- adj. cannot be doubted, unquestionable. Great word when you want to sound pretentious. It also has a fabulous rhythm when it comes off your tongue. Kind of like a kettle falling down stairs. Also... rhythm is a weird word. Where are the vowels? How does that "thm" thing work?

  

8. Frumious- adj. blend of fuming and furious. I love love love the the Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/ Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/ the frumious Bandersnatch!" Oh so fantabulous! 

9. Smite- v. to deliver or deal a blow.  It's always fun to play with the tenses of this one. "I have been smitten" "I was smote" "He smit me"... good times :)

10. Ken- n. knowledge, understanding. I enjoy this one because one of my best friends is named Ken, so whenever he's confused about something we can say "Ah, so sad, it's beyond our ken..." Plus, it works best when you assume a Scottish accent (i.e. pretend to be Sean Connery) and that always makes for a good time!