the ideal male protagonist

(I'm back from wordpress, by the way - even though I liked the layout of the site way better, formatting was a bitch.)

I'm very particular about my favorite male protagonists. I like them a certain way: young, attractive, charismatic, arrogant, lazily aristocratic, somewhat delicate-looking, anti-heroic, blond, pale, precocious, occasionally rather tormented, and, most importantly, devastatingly sarcastic. I also tend to like them more if they're a tiny bit evil or at least really, really self-absorbed. I wonder what this says about me.

Anyway, my favorite fictional characters (I'm not just limiting myself to novels, but I am excluding films) are as follows. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Amory Blaine from F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
I love Amory Blaine. So much so, in fact, that I went through a three month phase where I was determined to name my first child after him (until Mackenzie told me this was way too cruel). Seriously, what's not to love? He's brilliant, careless, and dashingly good looking, goes to Princeton in the 1920s, and says things like, "I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again." Oh, and another one of my favorite lines is when he realizes he has only $24 to his name and observes, "Well, people make money in books and I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do."

Zooey Glass from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
I just read this book for my American Novel Since 1945 class. I always found Catcher in the Rye a little angsty and trite, so I wasn't expecting to really enjoy this much. HOW WRONG I WAS. Zooey is "surpassingly handsome, even spectacularly so," makes people extremely nervous (it's probably all the hilariously cutting remarks), and appears to have the exact same personality that I do. Consider, for example, what his mother says about him: "Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don't like...If you don't like somebody in two minutes, you're done with them forever." Or perhaps the reason he himself gives for not wanting to get married: "I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window any more when you're married." I just can't explain how awesome he is. You'll have to read the book yourself (it's only 200 pages and very tiny, so there's no excuse not to).

Hamlet from Shakespeare's, uh, Hamlet
Okay, I know how pretentious it is to put Hamlet on the list. BUT OH MY GOD I LOVE HIM. I reread it this year for my Shakespeare class last semester and became hopelessly, terribly obsessed. I watched the Lawrence Olivier film version twice in 24 hours. And also the marathon Kenneth Branagh version, which I think is honestly almost five hours long (and has S-E-X. Yesss). So how could I not include him? He's incredibly intelligent, rhetorically gifted, desperate, tortured, and, best of all, quite possibly crazy! Yeahhh. I'd do him.

Light from Death Note
I'm just going to say this and get it over with: yes, this is an anime series. DO NOT JUDGE ME. It is the only one I watch, and I only watch it because it is so dark and sexy and well-written and compelling. Anyway, the best part of this series is the barely suppressed sexual tension between the two main characters, Light and L, both of whom are, of course, stratospherically intelligent, bitingly sarcastic, and completely obsessed with defeating each other with strange little mind games. Except Light is evil and also hotter, so I am clearly on his side. No, seriously, he is unbelievably good-looking. And super evil. And he treats women as expendable. So much to love.

Draco from Cassie Clare's The Draco Trilogy
Since I'm making embarrassing revelations, here's another one. Yes, this is a fanfic series. Yes, I used to read Harry Potter fanfic. So shoot me. 95% of it is absolute crap, but there are a few truly gifted writers in the fandom, and Cassie is one of them. She's a published author now, and even though apparently her original fiction isn't as good, this fic is absolutely outstanding. The trilogy is very, very long (the length of three actual books easily, if not longer), but it's one of the best stories I've ever read. The characters themselves are so vibrant and alive and wonderful - almost as if J.K. Rowling had actually bothered with serious character development (I love her, but she does have her weaknesses). But I'm spending too much time explaining myself. Draco needs no explanation. He's the standard I hold all my other fictional favorites to. See the above list? He meets every single qualification. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Ender from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game
Is there anyone in the world who didn't like this book? (Except for my little brother, who "didn't get it.") I still cry every time I read it. Poor Ender. I love him so. I'd write more but I'm sooo tired.

Okay, I'm done for the night. But uh, I hope I have effectively communicated how much I love these boys.

some thoughts at 5:08 am

A few things:

First, I'm going to be moving over to wordpress soon I think, largely because it's easier to use and also more convenient, as I am going to also start music blogging there (www.waitingforthetrain.wordpress.com) with Mackenzie soon. Also, the book log on the side of this page is not correct. I think the box got too full or something because it's eaten part of the list and duplicated other parts of it. I am going to start keeping a separate list in Word.

Second, I posted my Best of 2007 list below and also on Facebook, so please take a look at it and then go read the books! They're all fantastic.

Third, I've been getting a bit of a head start on my 2008 reading challenge. I finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy during finals week (meaning I've now read five and a half of the 27 Pulitzer Prize fiction winners since 1980). It was fantastic and I might blog about my feelings on McCarthy later, as I also read No Country for Old Men on the plane ride home. I also bought a few other books on the list. As far as my Booker Prize challenge goes, I also finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty a few weeks ago (which, like The Road, makes an appearance on my Best of 2007 list), meaning I've now read three and a half of the 18 winners since 1990 (I just picked that year arbitrarily, but I think I'll stick with it rather than attempting the whole list in one year). I've read a lot more of the shortlisted ones than the actual winners, but ah well.

Fourth, I've acquired a number of new books. I'm going to see if I can remember them all without having to get up and look.
The Sea - John Banville (also on my Booker list)
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Underworld - Don DeLillo
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
After This: A Novel - Alice McDermott (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer! so that kind of counts)
Fire from Heaven - Mary Renault
One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson (already finished)
The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud (also already finished. Should have included it in my best of 2007 list but I read it after I finished the list)

Shit, I bought at least two more but I can't remember what they were now. I'd go check but I'm far too lazy. Anyway, I'm making another Half Price run later today (last day of the 20% off sale!) and am aiming to pick up about 10 more. The one I usually go to was pretty picked over so I'm going to trek out to the one at 91st and Metcalf with Lanie, which I think is bigger and will hopefully have some of the books I'm looking for. I'd like to pick up Pale Fire (which I've been meaning to read forever), some more Fitzgerald, Amsterdam or Enduring Love by McEwan, and... well, actually, I have a list of about 20 authors I'm looking for. I have got to find a good used book store in New Haven.

Fifth, after reading an article on the subject (which of course I can't seem to find now), I've started keeping a notebook with two different kinds of lists. The first is a list of words I am unfamiliar with and their definitions and the second is a list of words I know already but would like to start using more in my writing. Also pretteh words, because there are so many of them.

Finally, I've almost settled on a schedule for next semester (pending my impressions during shopping period and advisor/professor approval for some of the upper level English courses):

FREN 115 Elementary French
ENGL 291 The American Novel Since 1945
ENGL 265 The Victorian Novel
HIST 218 Intro to Roman History: The Empire

I'll also be taking one more class. Right now I'm hoping to finagle my way into a junior seminar, either ENGL 206 Shakespeare and His Dramatic Contemporaries (with my favorite prof, Brian Walsh) or ENGL 259 Jane Austen. If that fails, I'll try and get into a freshman literature seminar (Mortality and Immortality), but I'll be honest, I'd sort of prefer not to do that.

So it should be pretty novel-heavy, which I'm delighted about. I also feel like I'm cheating a little because surely I shouldn't enjoy the reading lists this much. Isn't school about taking courses you don't really want to take but feel obligated to? Ah well. Also, after seeing my history grades from first semester, I've decided to stick with the history/English double major after all despite my initial reservations.

That's it! It's so late (er, early), but my sleep schedule is so off lately that I'm not even tired. I think I'll go read for a bit (I really want to get a move on Portrait of a Lady, which has been in my "currently reading" pile for weeks).

Also, I want to post pretty soon about my feelings regarding marking in books. I'm writing this here to remind myself.

best of 2007

I did this last year too. When I say "of 2007," I mean books I read in 2007, not just ones that were published this year. And I read a loooot of great books this year, so this list is by no means exhaustive. I hope I did these books justice in my descriptions, because they were all amazing. Enjoy!

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
This book was so beautiful. Michael Cunningham and Hollinghurst have both convinced me that gay relationships are just so, so much more interesting to read about than straight relationships. Especially stories about gay relationships that take place in class-conscious 1980s Britain! No, but seriously, this book was sometimes hilarious, often sad, and always lovely.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Seriously, can you believe I didn't read this until after I graduated from high school? Oh well. I read it. It was amazing. I loved it.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfield
I wrote a pretty long post about this in my book blog, but I'll do a shorter summary here. I usually avoid coming-of-age fiction, beacuse that particular period in my life was awkward and horrible enough the first time around and I can't imagine why anyone would be particularly interested in reliving it. Also, they always have warm and fuzzy endings and everyone escapes from their teenage years relatively unscathed, which I feel is not typically the way of things. Fortunately, Sittenfield is totally with me on this one. Don't be put off by the cover or the title - Sittenfield's editors market her books as chick lit for some inexplicable reason. They're anything but.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Quirky. More poignant and thoughtful than her debut novel White Teeth. I still have somewhat mixed feelings about Smith, though I think she's very talented and funny. Someone once described her to me as being a little too aware of how insightful she is (actually, it might have been someone tagged in this note. Who knows!), which really does detract a bit from how much I enjoy her novels. I think it's something she will outgrow, though, as it seems less pronounced in On Beauty. The last few pages of this book were especially beautifully written.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
So scary! I have to admit right off the bat that I am a huge sucker for really well written and well researched literary thrillers. And vampires. And books set in Eastern Europe (for some reason). This was a huge book but it was a fast read, if only because I was racing through it to find out what happened next. It was also TERRIFYING.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
At first I wasn't really crazy about this book. Roth's prose is sort of spare and almost journalistic at times and usually I hate books with child narrators because almost every adult writer apparently has no idea how children actually behave. But it turned out to be reaaally good. It's an alternate history which assumes Charles Lindbergh (the airplane guy) defeats FDR in the presidential election and embarks on a campaign of "folksy anti-Semitism." Very interesting, though I felt a little cheated by the ending, which is perhaps a bit too convenient.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Do I even need to say anything? Apart from the last chapter, it was perfect. LOVE.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
This is an epic, sweeping novel about a single Midwestern family and their attempt to come together for one last Christmas. The plot sounds a bit trite but the book itself is not at all so, I swear. The characters are beautifully drawn and the dialogue is wonderful and hilarious.

The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Okay. I was obsessed with ancient Greece as a kid. Like really, really obsessed. But I had no idea that people were actually writing insanely beautiful and meticulously researched fiction about it! Actually, I'm not sure that anyone besides Renault is, but still. This is the way historical fiction should be done. Elizabeth gave me this for Christmas and I read it straight through. And then went out and bought two other books by her. SO GOOD.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Creepy as fuck and strangely beautiful. It will haunt your dreams, no joke. I'm not crazy about gratuitous violence in general, particularly in the other McCarthy books I've read (No Country for Old Men and a little bit of Blood Meridian), but in this book it seems more appropriate, though still not exactly tasteful. I cried a lot in the dining hall after I finished it.

Hamlet by Shakespeare
Okay, so I've read this before, but I never realized how UNBELIEVABLY AMAZING it was before, largely because I read it in Dr. Ream's class, which was a joke. I love it, okay. I love it. I also love Kenneth Branagh, but that is a topic to discuss later.

Okay. AND NOW for my favorite book of the year...

Atonement by Ian McEwan
This book is hands down one of my favorites of all time. Mackenzie had been recommending it to me for ages but I kept putting it off because I thought the first few pages were boring. MY MISTAKE. It is absolutely amazing. And I cried a ton. And also oh my GOD. Ian McEwan is one of the best writers alive. His prose is just achingly beautiful. Ahh ahhh ahhh. And if the ending doesn't totally destroy you, you don't deserve to read ever again.

books i just bought:
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Love in the Time of Cholera - Garcia Marquez)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

authors i intend to read (or read more of) in 2008:
Toni Morrison
Edith Wharton
Cormac McCarthy
Philip Roth
Helen DeWitt*
Vladimir Nabokov*
Salman Rushdie
Ian McEwan*
Kiran Desai
Alan Hollinghurst*
David Mitchell*
Michael Ondaajte*
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

*i am particularly excited about these.
(this list is by no means exhaustive)

other things i intend to do in 2008:
-finish reading the booker prize winners (i've only read 5, but in my defense, i've read a lot more of the shortlisted ones)
-begin reading the pulitzer prize winners. eventually i intend to read all of them, but this year i'll start at 2007 and work my way backwards, with the goal of reading my way to 1980 by this time next year.

Atonement.

Occasionally somebody (read: Mackenzie) will recommend a book to me and I will put off reading it for months and months for some reason or another. And then I will read it and I will feel two conflicting emotions: one, disbelief that I did not read it earlier because how could I have lived without this book in my life, and two, great joy that I did not read it earlier because that meant that I got to read it for the first time now!

Atonement by Ian McEwan is one of those books. Fuuuuck.

I think it was the most beautiful piece of fiction I have read in the past two years. No fucking joke.

John Irving and end-of-summer reading.

I love John Irving so, so much. And in the light of having finally decided that my FAVORITE BOOK is Irving's The Cider House Rules, I thought I would write a post about him.

First, though, I would like to describe why choosing a favorite book is such a momentous occasion. I despise people who have favorite books, largely because their favorite book is usually something appalling like The Notebook. People are always asking me what my favorite book is (well, sometimes asking me, as most people do not care about books, much less what books I like to read) and I am always at a loss for what to say. I have different favorite books for different moods and sometimes for different months (for example, I feel differently about Michael Cunningham in the winter than I do in the spring - I always love him but I seem to love him more passionately when it's cold out). I have favorite books in many different genres and all of them are so wildly unlike the others that it is impossible to make any kind of comparison.

Yet I realize it is important to have an answer to this question, especially if people are asking you for recommendations (though you should know I try to tailor my recommendations to each individual person, which is also important). If you don't have an answer, then people assume not that you are widely read and thus cannot choose from the many books you have read, but rather that you do not actually read and instead sit in your house accumulating large stocks of books for show purposes. As both of my younger brothers have taught me, non-readers who are flirting with the idea of becoming readers are like very nervous birds. You have to be careful not to make any sudden or threatening movements (i.e. not knowing your favorite book, which is something they assume should be simple) or they will take flight and then you will have lost them forever! I spend a lot of time trying to subtly lure people into becoming readers, so I know that it's best, on the whole, if they wind up thinking it happened mostly by accident.

I spent way more time discussing that than I thought I would. But anyway, onto Irving. I wrote out this huge paragraph about why I love John Irving and why I chose The Cider House Rules, but then it just devolved into this frenzy of superlatives and wild praise and I hate writing things like that, so I will spare you by turning it into a conveniently numbered list (I am limiting myself to 5 general things). Sorry if I'm slightly inarticulate - I'm also watching the Daily Show while I write this.

This is why I like John Irving:
1. He writes the best characters. Period. Homer Wells from The Cider House Rules is my favorite male character in fiction.
2. His writing is so very much a boy's writing, if that makes sense, which means that the unexpected moments of tenderness and heartbreak are all the more poignant.
3. His books are comfortingly familiar (they almost always include some or all of the following: boys' prep schools, wrestling, New England, writers, and European whores) without ever becoming predictable.
4. He does his research. Particularly for The Cider House Rules, which centers around illegal abortions in 1940s Maine.
5. Homer Wells. Seriously. I love him.


Okay. Now let's move on to other things, namely my impending departure for the hallowed halls of Yale. I got a giant cardboard box to put my books in and I am going to tape it up and check it with my other luggage at the airport. Unfortunately we had to take back the bookshelf we originally bought because we had no way to get it to New Haven and downgrade to a smaller one, so I can only fit probably about 40 books. I'm not sure yet how many books will fit in the box, so that might actually determine how many I take rather than shelf space. Anyway, during the course of making this list (which I won't post here as it is much too long), I made a second list of books I need to read before I leave. Most of these I own, though some I will need to borrow from other people. Here it is!

1. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller (I just bought this yay)
2. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (also just bought it)
3. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (seriously, it's about time, I've been meaning to do this forever)
5. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (I read a "young classics" version of this when I was like eight but seriously, it's time for the real thing)
7. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
8. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
9. The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
10. Atonement by Ian McEwan
11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
12. At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
13. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
14. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (I have seriously started this at least three times and have never been able to get into it, but Sarah loves it so I might give it another try)
16. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (I am really excited for this one)

As you can see, I have a lot to do in the next four weeks. I'll keep you updated on my progress. There are a few on that list that I doubt I'll finish - some of them I've already started several times and have never been able to finish, which doesn't bode well for them this time around. But I think I can get through 10 or so if I just read at a moderate pace and restrain myself from rereading old books, which I've found myself doing a lot this summer.

Also, on a final note, I got Jasper Fforde's latest Thursday Next book and it is no good at all. Don't waste your time with it. I got halfway through and quit in disgust.

HP7.

I can't possibly write about HP7, except to say that I loved it intensely the first time around and am enjoying it even more the second time. There were some flaws (the last chapter alone was almost enough to ruin the entire book for me - good LORD, what was she thinking) and some of my questions still remain unanswered, but overall it was an incredible ending to an incredible story and I am so, so pleased with it. Even so, I spent most of this weekend in a state of utter depression - I just really can't believe it's over.

Ahh, Harry Potter. I am so sad to see this era end.