Singularity
My friend Scott had the idea to ask the community at Making Light about the book I’ve been seeking. Thirteen minutes later… he had the answer.
Singularity by William Sleator. Anybody remember reading it?
south of the loop
Please Help Me, Internet
This has been bugging me for years, and if anybody can help me, it’s you.
I’m trying to remember a young adult book. I probably read it sometime between third and fifth grades, and it probably falls into the 8 – 12 year old category. I have no idea if it was new at the time, but I likely read it around 1987 or so. The basic plot, as I remember it:
Twin A and Twin B, both boys, are perhaps around 12 or 13 years old, or perhaps 16 or 17. I think they were getting ready to start either high school or college. Twin A is the more athletic one, and Twin B is always a little envious of his brother.
They either discover or build some sort of shack in their backyard that, when inside, time moves more quickly. I believe they figured out precisely how much more quickly, and make certain pacts with each other so that they don’t screw up their lives by spending too much time inside.
But then Twin B’s envy gets the better of him, and he spends an entire year in the shack—a year that passes in real time as a single night. He spends his time reading, doing situps, working out, trying to catch up to Twin A.
The book fell broadly into the category of sci-fi/fantasty, but definitely had broader appeal; I remember really enjoying it (and it’s stuck with me for the last twenty years). I don’t think it was a trendy book at the time (a la Twilight). And, of course, I could be misremembering the details I’ve outlined above.
I really want to read this book again and have never been able to pin it down. Do you remember reading this? Do you remember the title or author? Anything?
Receipt
Before leaving for some gift-card spending this evening, I got out my gift card to put in my purse. Except that I accidentally left it on a desk upstairs in my parents’ house. Which I realized as I was being rung up at the bookstore. So. Tomorrow I return to sort out whatever return/re-buy issue I need to, which gives me at least 12 hours to contemplate my overspending.
Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler
Home by Marilynne Robinson
2666 by Roberto Bolaños
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (the hardback was remaindered for $6.98, what was I supposed to do?)
Oops?
Breaking Promises
I wrote a few weeks ago that I was determined to read at least half of the thirty unread books on my shelf before purchasing any new ones. I made it… well, a few weeks. Just before Christmas, I broke my pact and bought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which has been recommended to me by several people over the years. I would argue that it doesn’t really count as breaking my pact because I devoured it immediately. The reason I made this promise was to avoid purchasing books that would sit on my shelves, lonely and unread, while still more books stacked up around them. (I think Bird by Bird is worth its own post. Stand by.) I’ve followed the spirit, if not quite the letter, of my promise. Mostly.
But I just got a $50 gift certificate to a bookstore for Christmas. I already know I’m going to end up spending more than $50, but I am planning my purchases out carefully so as not to go too far over. And I’m planning on blowing the entire gift card before I leave Indiana, to save myself some sales tax (Chicago’s has recently gone up to 10.25%).
2666 by Roberto Bolaños was recommended to me by a friend, and it looks intriguing, and possibly a good book for the coming winter months (it’s 898 pages, which would hopefully distract me from at least a few weeks of miserable temperatures and falling snow). The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, about the dust bowl of the 1930s, was recommended by a colleague as an excellent piece of nonfiction, and it looks quite good as well. I’m also thinking about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, since I’ve loved everything else she’s written, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, which may provide some much-needed running inspiration as I gear up for another year of half-marathons and my second full marathon.
Have you read any of these books? What would you buy with $50?
What Next?
I have a book-buying problem. It might actually be worse now than when I worked at McBookstore, because then at least I had the option of borrowing books from the store instead of buying them (this was easily the best perk of working at a bookstore—better than the discount, even). I have tried to become a library user, but I really just love owning books. Also, I have yet to return a book on time, have racked up hundreds of dollars of fines over the years, and am blacklisted in at least four different library systems in Indiana. Oops?
I realized recently that I now own a lot of books that I’ve never read. So I’m making a decision: read at least half of those books before I buy any more. I made a list of books on LibraryThing that I own but have not read. And now I need your help: where do I start? What do I read first, and why? I’m listing them below, or you can check them out here, where you can also find descriptions of the books and other information. (If you’re really interested, I also keep a list of books I want to read but don’t own).
Assume that I want to read all of these books equally, and in cases of particularly “difficult” authors—like Cormac McCarthy and Salman Rushdie—assume I’ve read other books by them and know what I’m getting into.
- The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie
- Numbers in the Dark and other stories by Italo Calvino
- Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
- Slammerkin by Emma Donaghue (thanks, Ryan & Lisa!)
- The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- The Magus by John Fowles (which I technically don’t own, but have on loan from Ryan)
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (thanks, Tim!)
- Islands and other essays by Jean Grenier (I have already read the lovely essay “Mouloud the Cat”)
- Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosas
- All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
- Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
- Omeros by Derek Walcott
- Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler
- Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing by Joanna E. Ziegler and Christopher A. Dustin (my two favorite college professors)
So. What next? And why?
No Bean Spilling
But I did just finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I’m exhausted from 6 1/2 straight hours of reading; my neck hurts, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, and I’m going nuts without anybody to talk about it with. So please, if you’ve finished, let me know! (By email, since I don’t want to be responsible for any bean spilling in the comments).
I decided—after I finished, of course—that I wanted to see what the alleged spoilers had said. I came across a spoof spoiler claiming that Harry would get all the girls in this book because now they “are old enough for Sex Magic.” Ha.
Snape: Friend or Foe?
If you are not a fan (or a reader) of Harry Potter, it’s probably best to stop reading this post now, as it won’t make much sense.
In The Sorcerer’s Stone, Professor Snape turns out to have challenged Professor Quirrell’s loyalties—not, as Hermione, Harry, and Ron thought, tried to get the stone for himself. It seems clear enough that Snape suspects Quirrell’s intentions, whether or not he suspects that Q. has got himself tangled up with Voldemort. Right? He even confronts Q. on this matter, once overheard by Harry (under the cloak of the Invisibility Cape), and once when Snape tries to head Q. off on the forbidden third floor (after a troll diverts the rest of the teachers).
But by the end, it is known that Voldemort has used Quirrell as a host body. So Snape must know, at least after the fact, that all his confrontations have been witnessed by Voldemort, his old boss (and whose name I keep typoing as Voldemart).
So how, much later on, does he convince Voldemort that he is worthy of spying at Hogwarts? Surely Voldemort is suspicious after the Sorcerer’s Stone incident? Or am I forgetting something?
We Knew How Violent Reading Can Be
I was trying to describe the ennui that follows the completion of a good book to Advisor, who responded by loaning me Hélène Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Behold:
Not everyone carries out the act of reading in the same way, but there is a manner of reading comparable to the act of writing—it’s an act that suppresses the world. We annihilate the world with a book. You take the book you have opened, either knowingly or unknowingly, but often with an intimation that this book may be an instrument of separation. As soon as you open the book as a door, you enter another world, you close the door on this world. Reading is escaping in broad daylight, it’s the rejection of the other; most of the time it’s a solitary act, exactly like writing. We don’t always think of this because we no longer read; we used to read when we were children and knew how violent reading could be. The book strikes a blow, but you, with your book, strike the outside world with an equal blow.
Yes. Exactly.
To the Boy Who Lived!
Thus begins another cycle of rereading Harry Potter, which I fear I’ve begun too early. Every time a new Harry Potter book comes out, I reread all the previous ones, but I never time it quite right. And so again I’ll frantically reread bits and pieces of the first six books over and over as I wait for book seven. The final book.
You know the feeling you get when you’ve finished a book that you’ve been completely absorbed by? There must be a word for this feeling, the feeling of being jerked rudely from a paper-and-ink world and slammed back into reality. I fear for it—I can only assume this time, when the series ends, the feeling will be many times magnified—come the third week of July, when Harry Potter finishes his last year at Hogwarts. And then what, Ms. Rowling? Now that you’ve got the world dancing on a pin, and we’re all aswirl in mixed-up emotions? Will you leave us with any promise of more Harry to come?
I think the last time I so dreaded and anticipated a book was when The Amber Spyglass was released, the third book in Philip Pullman’s brilliant His Dark Materials trilogy. But although Pullman’s books are more substantial than Rowling’s, and although Lyra and Will’s world is just as absorbing as Harry’s, the fact that there were only three books lessened the blow of finishing them.
And so I’m terrified to keep reading. It’s not just about what might happen to our beloved characters, it’s that their paper-and-ink world will soon be closed.
* * *
current book: Finishing The Sorcerer’s Stone and starting The Chamber of Secrets. How quickly it is already moving…
current music: The Shins’ Wincing the Night Away.
current run: Ten miles last Saturday, which felt much better in the cool, rainy weather. I just bought new running shoes tonight… sadly, they are lavender. Which is entirely too close to pink for my tastes. Why can’t they make running shoes like cars, where you can pick your model and color separately?
Thirty Second Book Review
I’m still not done with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, even though I’m probably less than two essays from the end. I keep thinking that if I put off finishing it, I’ll blog about it right when I’m done and it’s still fresh in my mind, but of course it’s no longer fresh anyways. So what the hell:
I just started Zadie Smith’s On Beauty this morning, and it is something that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t, at least not as a whole—compelling. Didion’s first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” was the exception. It grabbed me by the toes and pulled me in (which perhaps unfairly set my expectations for the tone in the following essays). “Some Dreamers” is a murder-mystery story with all the necessary ingredients: love affairs, betrayal, denial, drugs. Didion’s spareness is especially intriguing in this context, because she’s not as chatty or as judgmental as your best friend might be in telling you the same story, but nor is she writing cold hard journalism. California, she says, “is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new lifestyle…” After the sets the scene, she weaves, Memento-like, from the scene of murder backwards to the events leading up to it. It was the only essay I had to force myself to set aside when my Metra ride ended.
The rest of the essays are good—they’re well-written, and they’re a weird and fascinating window into the 1960s. Joan Baez, fuckin’ hippies, drug culture, it’s all there. Didion is sort of the antithesis to other, more contemporary writers I’ve read in the past few years, the kind of writers whose prose is so thick and lush that you have to gasp for air every other sentence. In that sense she’s refreshing. And while “compelling” isn’t a quality required of everything I pick up, and while Slouching Towards Bethlehem was still far from being a chore… well, maybe it’s just the kind of book I appreciate—for her swift insights and deliberate writing—more than I love.
(That took me longer than thirty seconds to write, but that’s still about the amount of time I devoted to thinking things through. Take it as you will.)
* * *
current book: I suppose now I’ll have to blog something about On Beauty, since I’ve already mentioned that I’m enjoying it…
current music: It’s my own damn fault that The Shins’ “Phantom Limb” is running a loop in my head. Better that, however, than the campfire song “Lloyd George Knew My Father,” which wormed its way into my ear whilst fact checking a bit on David Lloyd George earlier today. It is more annoying and even more pointless than “The Song that Never Ends.” If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself a lucky, lucky person.
current socks: Tomorrow looks like it will be sandal weather!
