Book List Set 1

This my personal book list: all the books I want to OWN and READ.

Here's my first set.  I'm hoping to have a copy and read all of them Before This Year Ends.

1.  A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin

The fifth book in Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.  Need I say more?

2.  The Complete Earthsea Novels by Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea ,The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, The Other Wind)


Taoist, Feminist, Environmental, Magical. I can't wait to read all five books.

3.   Kokoro, Natsume Soseki


Loneliness, Guilt, Self-hatred, "the vanity of Life", Youth, Old Age, transition from Japanese Meiji society to the modern era (which I'm so fascinated with), Love, Isolation. Kokoro literally translates to "heart" or "heart of the matter'. 

4.  Luka and the Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie


Lightheartedness, Magic, Love, Fables, Allegory, Myth, Fantasy, Freedom, Truth ... Salman Rushdie explains it better:  "As well as the central theme of life and death, Luka explores in, I hope, suitably fabulous and antic fashion, things I have thought about all my life: the relationships between the world of imagination and the "real" world, between authoritarianism and liberty, between what is true and what is phony, and between ourselves and the gods that we create. Younger readers do not need to dwell on these matters. Older readers may, however, find them satisfying."

5.  Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro


Hope, Repression, Love triangle, Cloning, Science Fiction, Friendship.

6.  White Teeth and On Beauty, Zadie Smith


White Teeth -- "race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light." - Amazon.com review


On Beauty -- "characters such as Claire Malcolm, an east coast poet/intellectual portrayed with a stunningly accurate feeling for the type. Or Carl, a sharp, touching study of a ghetto teenager making good, done with all the volatile political and sexual currents set in motion by such a progress. Or Howard Belsey himself ... whose limitless capacity for folly keeps deepening and strangely sweetening his character." The Guardian review

7.  The Lake, Banana Yoshimoto

8.  The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood

9.  The Tigér's Wife, Tea Obreht

10.  The Trial, Franz Kafka

11.  The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

12.  The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

13.  Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Sadaawi

14.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and The Visible Man, Chuck Klosterman

15.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

Excerpts from Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman

Excerpts from Banana Yoshimoto's N.P

From page 15, Kano's observation on Otohiko's appearance:

From page 191, Kano, looking at Otohiko again:

I have a bone-deep love for this book.  It consumes me.

The Year of Reading Madly & Writing Dangerously

I'm on a mission.  I've been delaying this for the longest time.  I tried locking it away, I tried to bury it, I tried to eat the key, burn the spade, I tried to throw it towards the deepest foulest bowels of my mind's hell, I tried everything to keep my heart from reaching out and claiming what it always wanted.  I've climbed in and out of shit pits, sinkholes, black holes, made an asshole of myself, I bled, I crawled, I've traveled the depression highway, blindly (and barely) surviving the labyrinthine urban guerilla warfare I imposed on myself, and yet I kept on refusing that one thing that I know could truly save me.  I need to write.  Or to borrow words from one of my favorite writers Adrienne Rich - "You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it."  And truly now, my life does depend on it.  I know it will not get me out of the financial rut I'm in, I know I might turn out to be the worst wannabe writer in this fickle cruel world, I know it will not provide me the comfort and stability people say I should have achieved at my age, I know it will not provide a solution to any of my so-called "real life" problems.  I know too that if I don't start opening up my mind and let all the words, stories, images gush out, my imagination will rot and fester away into non-existence.  When you are all alone feeling like shit for something that you regret you did or didn’t do, or for whatever reason you suddenly find yourself inside the pitch-black cavern of moods, where the darkness is a viscous liquid fear attempting to drown you in wretchedness, imagination is the only thing that can save you. 

“Logic will take you from A to B.  Imagination will take you everywhere.” (Albert Einstein)

“What is now proved was once only imagined.” (William Blake)

This year started with me reading voraciously and writing sporadically.  This must change.  I need to sit my ass down everyday for a few hours and fuckin’ write.  I need to finish all the stories, all the poems I’ve started.  I can no longer defer this dream.  I need to write as if I’m traversing a very sharp narrow mountain ridge where the winds are strong and the drop full of spikes and boulders.  I need to write as if I’m dancing on hot coals.  I need to write as if there’s an electrical storm happening inside my body, with lightning shooting off my sweat pores.  I need to write as if I’m a rocketship shooting towards the sun, skirting it’s teasing licking flaming tongues.  I need to write like a lioness stalking an equally vicious prey.  I need to write as if a hot thick bubble of poison is waiting to explode inside my mouth. I need to write as dangerously as a supernova waiting to happen, daring to explode, consume an entire galaxy but birthing new stars in the aftermath.  I.Need.To.Write.

The writing process is different for every aspiring nut like me who wants to take on the big fat trolls and muses and lava surfers prancing around inside one’s mind.  Thank goodness for the masters who came before us, generous with their nuggets of whimsy and inspiration:

Kurt Vonnegut  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/03/kurt-vonnegut-on-writing-stories/

Margaret Atwood  http://gu.com/p/2f62t

Jack Kerouac http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/22/jack-kerouac-belief-and-technique-for-modern-prose/

Junot Diaz  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/05/junot-diaz-creating-a-str_n_1077760.html

Adrienne Rich  http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/5/rich/writing.htm

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Play and Theory of the Duende is my Narsil, my patronus,  my direwolf, my own ferociously tenacious weapon against that mammoth of a villain called mental block.  http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

These are my other valuable sources of techniques and inspiration:

Taken randomly from my shelf, some of the books that continually astound me:

A very good advice (that I failed to follow wholeheartedly) from one of my literature professors was this:  Keep everything you write. No matter how ugly you think it is now, keep it. It may just prove useful later on.  Thankfully, I managed to keep a few.  

My old and new journals

Old drafts of poetry

A long long loooooong time ago, I used to make lists that I believe will inspire me in my writing journey. 

A list of mythological characters

A very old list of films and music I wanted to hear/see

I have a burning curiosity that makes me want to experience and try a lot of things.  I take photos, I shoot videos, I celebrate moments through various mediums available to me.  And I DOODLE, a lot.  I'M NO PAINTER, how I wish I am but I am sadly not. I just love to play around with color from time to time.  It helps "de-clutter" my mind.

And to end my personal rumination on writing, I'd like to share with you something from, again, Junot Diaz:

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden.  In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. 

   

Integrity (Adrienne Rich)
      the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety ~ Webster

A wild patience has taken me this far


as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.

The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.

The light is critical: of me, of this 
long-dreamed, involuntary landing 
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself 
to go by; nothing 
stands in the realm of pure necessity 
except what my hands can hold.

Nothing but myself? ... My selves. 
After so long, this answer. 
As if I had always known 
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.

Anger and tenderness: my selves. 
And now I can believe they breathe in me 
as angels, not polarities. 
Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius 
to spin and weave in the same action 
from her own body, anywhere -- 
even from a broken web.

The cabin in the stand of pines
is still for sale. I know this. Know the print
of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked the door,
then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one's sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails 
emptied that kettle one last time 
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat there through this hot 
misblotted sunlight, critical light 
imperceptibly scalding 
the skin these hands will also salve.

Poets Lie (both literal meanings)

Today's dose of penned drumfire:

Crispin's tirade. After narrating the story of poet Mutya Dimatahimik, who, during a protest rally against Marcos, lay down in front of an oncoming tank. She was 5 months pregnant. The tank only stopped when it was only a few feet from her. The soldiers inside the tank dragged her aside and beat her unconscious. She nearly lost her child.

"Truly romantic bullshit, in retrospect ... And yet 'No lyric has ever stopped a tank,' so said Seamus Heaney. Auden said that 'poetry makes nothing happen.' Bullshit! I reject all that wholeheartedly! What do they know about the mechanics of tanks! How can anyone estimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions. If not, what then?" - Crispin Salvador, from Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco, page 205.

KABOOM! Right through the heart.