summer 2012...a new beginning?

It’s that time.  That time when I re-commit to participating in the blogosphere.  It seems to happen at least once a year since that golden era when I blogged much more often.  It’s June 2012, and here it is happening again.

While this post is about recommitting to blogging on a more regular and meaningful basis, it’s also about setting some goals for this summer.  At the moment, I’m an academic, and that means that much of my life revolves around the university calendar.  Tomorrow marks, at long last, the first official day of summer vacation for me.  My students will be turning in their final projects and yes, I will have some small amount of grading to do in the next couple of weeks, but there won’t be any daily prepping for classes, there won’t be any teaching, there won’t be the daily drives to campus.  At least, not until fall semester arrives.  Like most academics, I have a long list of things that I want to accomplish this summer.  Unlike most academics I know, though, most of the items on my to-do list are wholly unrelated to academia.  There are many reasons for this, and perhaps in the course of blogging this summer, some of those reasons will leak into my posts.  For now, I want my posts to focus on what I want to do and accomplish on a purely personal level.  I have three main goals for the next nine weeks of summer vacation—writing, reading, and finding an online community. 

Writing – At the end of spring semester, I made the decision to write at least 1000 words each day.  I write fiction, usually something that is suspenseful, and while some day it would be awesome to be published, I mostly write to entertain myself, keep myself busy, and give myself a creative outlet.  With only one class to teach during summer school, I scheduled my writing time first thing in the morning, and I was more or less able to meet my goal each day.  Then June came along and brought with it the beginning of CampNaNoWriMo—the summer version of National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November.  November is practically an impossible time for me to participate in NaNoWriMo because of my teaching commitments, so I have been looking forward to the summer version for a few months.  I’m halfway through June and have already written a little over 45,000 words on my summer writing project.  My goal is to finish this project (and by finish I mean finish the first draft and type THE END) by the end of June.  Then, as July and August unfold, I want to finish the first draft of the project I began in May. 

Ultimately, I want for this summer to be a summer of writing what I want to write.  I have come to realize that academic writing is likely not the kind of writing I really want to do, and there’s nothing about it that fulfills me.  I take pride in the fact that I completed my dissertation, and though it’s not the best dissertation, it is a finished dissertation and I’m proud of it.  Still, I have discovered over the last year that not only do I not want to produce academic writing, it’s also okay that that’s not what I want.  What I want is to write fiction and if I’m the only person who ever reads what I’ve written, I’m okay with that.  I just want to write on a daily basis this summer, meet my daily writing goal, and complete the drafts of two works-in-progress. 

Reading – Like last summer, there are a ton of books on my summer reading list.  To be honest, I’ll be happy if I can read at least ten books over the next nine weeks.  I have had an unusually difficult time finishing any book I have started in the last couple of weeks.  The titles may or may not be part of my 2012 Reading Challenge where I try to read as many novels from the Booker Prize shortlists from 2000-2011, but whatever I read, I want to get back to posting a review on my blog.  Reading is a big part of my life, and it’s what made me decide to pursue a Ph.D. in literature so I want to find a way to make what I read more meaningful to me.  Exactly what I mean by that or how I am going to do that I’m not sure, but perhaps I’ll have a better idea at the end of the summer. 

Find an Online Community – True confession: one of the sources of my unhappiness over the last year is that I cannot find a community to be a part of.  One of the reasons why I have looked forward to CampNaNoWriMo is because I love the community of writers that burn up twitter with tweets about their progress, their struggles and their successes as they take on the insane challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days.  Since the first of June it’s occurred to me that perhaps what I need most right now is to find an online community of writers to belong to, so this is one of my goals for summer as well.  I am planning to participate in the third round of ROW80 which begins on July 2^nd, so that’s one alternative, but I think what I need to do is push myself out of my comfort zone and visit multiple communities with the hope of finding the one that fits me best.  Maybe the watch word (watch phrase?) for the summer is: stop being an introvert.

The thing that all three of these goals have in common—not only am I trying to discover what I want out of the next phase of my life, but I’m also trying to recover that passion that I’ve always had for writing and reading.  Somehow that passion has been…diminished in the last few years.  Neither writing nor reading has ever stopped being important to me, but they have stopped being more important than most other things in my life, and I want to change that.  I hope this is a positive first step in doing exactly that.

2012 reading challenge - book #2

Although Shame by Salman Rushdie was published in 1983, I’m still going to include it in my 2012 Reading Challenge because it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year.  Here are my thoughts on the novel and I suppose the best place to start is trying to say what this novel is about.  Like the best novels, Shame is about a lot of things so this is no easy task.  The story falls several main characters—Omar Khayyam Shakil (‘the peripheral hero’), Sufiya Zinobia (the heroine), and the families of two men who are, if not enemies, then adversaries—General Raza Hyder and Prime Minister Iskander Harappa.  The story takes place in the country of Q in the fifteenth century, but as the narrator tells us, Q is like Pakistan, but it’s not Pakistan.  This is important because on one level, the novel can be read as a satire of a historical moment in Pakistan’s history; though the narrator (with tongue in cheek) tells us that his story is simply a fairy tale.  As the story unfolds, we watch the characters rise and fall, and as the narrator makes sure to explain, shame is the root of violence. 

I’ve been teaching this book in one of my literature classes, and one of the things that frustrates my students is that it is not told in order—that is, the story isn’t told linearly, from the beginning to the middle to the end.  However, personally, this is one of the things that I love about the book because it makes me have to pay more careful attention to what is happening, and it makes me the reader have to do some work in order to see how all of the pieces fit together.  Another thing that has frustrated my students, or maybe puzzled them is a better description, is the use of magical realism.  Again, this is something that I love about the book.  I like how Rushdie introduces fantastic elements into the story but couches them as being completely ordinary.  One of the characters in the book, Good News (that’s her nickname) gives birth to twenty-seven children.  Of course it’s fantastic, and yet it totally makes sense within the story and by making it so fantastic, the point that we are supposed to understand can’t fail to be received by us as readers. 

On the one hand, I think that this is an outstanding book, but on the other hand, I can see how it wouldn’t appeal to everyone.  Indeed, I can see many readers putting this book down.  Still, I would definitely recommend it to readers who are looking to read a novel that makes them think but also that pushes them a little bit out of their comfort zones.  I also think that you need to have an open mind when coming to this book.  In my opinion, this story takes place in Q, but it’s not just about Q, and it’s not just about one specific culture or area of the world.  While I was reading this book, I found a lot that I could relate to and I found a lot of my own culture in this book.  I definitely think it’s a good read. 

2012 reading challenge - book #1

It’s been a couple of days now since I finished The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.  I was drawn into the novel fairly early, and my attention was held from the beginning to the end, to the point that I deliberately forced myself to take a break at the end of Part One before beginning Part Two.  The first thing I thought when I finished this book was “Wow.”  Not sure that I can be more eloquent now, two days later, than when I finished reading it, but I’ll give it the old college try.

This book is about…well, in some ways that is an easy question to answer and in some ways it’s a hard question to answer.  It’s about Time. Memory.  History.  The history of our lives and how memory and time changes the way that history is viewed and known and understood, how the history of our lives as well as the lives of others are written and re-written, over and over again.  That even when we think we have the history of our lives correct, it may still be incorrect, or incomplete.  On one level, the novel is asking how much of history is fiction, and how much of it is truth?

I’m not sure though that this answers the question of what this book is about.  Maybe I have to resort to identifying some of the plot.  Our narrator is Tony Webster, and he tells the story of his life—or at least, a part of his life.  He begins in Part One by telling us about his two childhood mates (Colin, and honestly, I can’t remember the second one’s name right now, and I don’t have the book beside me to look up his name!) and the third of his mates who arrives on the scene much later but is absorbed into their little group—Adrian.  The three boys are instantly taken with Adrian—he seems to be the philosopher, the one who is much more serious about school, but also the one who has a bit of mystery, the one whose thoughts and mind are somewhat impenetrable to the rest of the boys.    While the boys are at school, one of their classmates commits suicide, and the reason that he commits suicide as well as the question of how much anyone can know of his reasons for doing so (as Adrian points out, no biographical history of the boy’s life can be complete without a direct account from the boy himself, that any biography of his life would be subject to some level of conjecture and speculation that could prove to be accurate or inaccurate) becomes a debate among the boys.  This event—and the reactions to it—set the stage for reading the events that follow in the novel.  Which I won’t spoil here.  What is important is that as Tony, from his 60s, looks back upon those events as a result of a bequest made to him by a woman he barely knows, he writes and rewrites his own history even as he questions the accuracy of his memory and his own speculations and conjectures that fill the holes and blanks in his own memory and his knowledge of specific events. 

I read this book in one sitting, for multiple reasons.  Now that the spring semester has begun, the time I have to read for leisure is much less than I would probably like.  But I also read this book in one sitting because I had to know what happened.  I had to see how the mystery would unravel.  Oftentimes, I read to get to the end and to be able to say that I’m done with a particular book, but with this novel, I kept reading because I wanted to and because I felt almost compelled to.  I didn’t want to put this book down.  Also, as someone who teaches literature, I could really appreciate the way that this novel is structured and the way it is written.  And, Barnes does something that doesn’t always work out well but certainly works here (and I was reminded of the way it works in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy)—he uses repetition in order to heighten the intensity and importance of what is being said (or thought) as well as intensify the impact the words (or the memory of the words) have upon Tony as the narrator.  I think it is so beautifully written and yet for me there is also something that is haunting about the words and the reflections and realizations Tony makes, not just about the events that have taken place but about himself and about human nature in general.  I would definitely recommend this book because it’s one of those books that evoked a strong emotional response from me, which isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do.    When I finished this book I thought “This is the best book I’ve read all year” and then I had to remind myself it was only January.  So I changed my response to “this is the best book I’ve read in a while.” When rating it, I gave it 5 out of 5 stars, and I haven’t done that in a really, really long time.  I’m interested to see what other people I know think about this book, so if you’re looking for something to read, definitely pick it up.  I have heard people say that you have different reactions to a book depending upon where you are in life when you read it.  I completely believe that this is true.  So I wonder if other people will have the same reaction or a complete opposite reaction than I did, and if my response to the novel says more about where I am in life than the book itself.