Trio

Not sure how it happened, but I recently found myself reading three books at once. Three very different books. I was cheerfully reading through the chick lit book mentioned below and a quick book made up of letters and postcards that's part of the Griffin & Sabine series, then came a plane trip and the need for a small, light mass=market paperback to take. Finished the Chick one, and the new Chuck Palahniuk came in through ILL. Then, within two days, I'd finished all three. Weird.

Chick Lit

What is it about chick lit? THere isn't a specific genre of writing pertaining to men, but we definitely distinguish those books by and about women. Chick lit. After reading Palahnuik's Choke I decided to let the brain mush a bit with some YA chick lit, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. I liked it. It was feel-goody teenager lit, and I could close my eyes and imagine the cute boys from the movie. I then picked up an adult chick lit book recommended by a co-worker. THere is a great difference between the YA and the adult kind. The latter is often akin to Sex and the City. My current reading is a memoir by a New York City gal who is recently divorced, Stephanie Klein's Straight Up and Dirty. It really is like Sex and the City, only FAR less annoying and no having to look at Kim Cattrall's old lady tits. Plus Klein is hysterical, especially when describing the men she dates. Carey Bradshaw's running commentary was too nice. She never would have described a man's too-small penis as a button mushroom, and then giggled at the thought later while in bed with him. I like Klein's neuroses, because I have some of them, too. I like her bluntness, her honesty, the fact that admits to most of what's wrong with her. More human than those fembots on HBO.
Every once in a while she groans on about something really stupid and fem-culture and I want to hurl. There is only so much I have in common with my gender, and only so much I can take of them. That's why I don't read too much chick lit. It would get to me. Sci-fi and fantasy I can usually take in large doses and often. But chick lit is usually the same - man troubles, shopping, dieting, how do you take your martini?, sex, shoes, men, bitching about other women. You need to space them out so you can forget what happened in the last one.
Why do we like these books, though? Whether fiction or memoir, most are the same or similar. And all are based heavily on mainstrean media and cultural stereotypes about what our culture really is like. I read these words and am amazed that this is a real woman and not fiction. I think that I learn more about the modern woman through these books. Yeah, I am a modern woman, but I've spent a lot of time estranged from my gender culturally. Not in a trans kind of way. They just tend to annoy me. Books and TV help me remember what people are usually expecting when they look at me and see the breasts.

Thus far Stright up and Dirty is good when she's being funny, and drags when she gets too philosophical. I want to sit with a pencil and annotate it (ie "This is like ex-boyfriend so-and-so") and then give it to my cousin to read and do the same. There are sections, I swear, she could have written.

More intrigue! More postcards!

Alexandria
by Nick Bantock
Book 2 of the Morning Star Trilogy, sequel to the Griffin & Sabine trilogy
San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 2002
ISBN: 081183140X

I finished up the second book to the Morning Star trilogy, Bantock's continuation of his Griffin & Sabine story. I wrote about the first trilogy here.
The story continues to keep me guessing, keep me enraptured with these fabulously mystical people and places. And the artwork is just as breathtaking as the first one. I am very sad the the third book is on it's way and this journey will be over. I don't want to wait longer, though, because I want the story to remain fresh in my brain.
I keep going back to the way in which Bantock is telling the story, using the postcards and letters. It makes each page so fun - looking over the beautiful artwork on the postcards and envelopes. Does anyone still send postcards that are more than "Having fun in Florida!" using a fifty cent mass-produced card they bought a tourist store? Or put time and effort in to creating handwritten letters and hand-decorated envelopes? I love ephemera so much and collect vintage and antique post cards. I prefer ones that have been sent over the blank ones. They give dates, provenance, and illuminate a moment in two people's lives. Today we sent emails with e-cards for holidays instead of postcards and letters. I feel nostalgic for times I never saw.
It makes me want to send postcards and letters to people, but also to make them beautiful like the ones I collect or the ones Bantock creates for his books. Sadly I have no artistic abilities at all. I have tried, and failed. They come out looking like a 6yr old got herself into the colored pencils, markers, stickers, etc. Cheesy is a good word for it,infantile as well. Crap and "My eyes, they bleed!" work, too.
I have tried all my life to create beautiful things. I've tried drawing, painting, writing, photography. I am successful at failure, though, and I think I do so beautifully. That's something, right?
Last night while reading one of the letters that you full out of the envelopes, I had that wicked feeling of spying come over me. We, the readers, are looking in to these characters' lives from the outside, reading private thoughts and words. Mayby that is part of what makes the postcard so interesting, though. Private thoughts aren't kept private. The other day someone had one on Post Secret that was about wanting to amuse the postman with his/her Post Secret cards. But the letters definitely give that feeling of voyeurism. Here are words spoken written between lovers, secret information about the mystery not to be found by the mysterious and possible evil Frolotti. Here is life being lived, explained on paper, read by strangers. It almost makes the characters, despite the magic and mysticism, seem more real than in others novels. There are no passages detailing their appearance down to the freckles of their face, Gogolian jaunts into their pasts. And yet I think that I know them more than if even Dickens had sat down to write their tale. Their own words speak to so much.
Collecting things like postcards makes me feel like I am sharing in these people's lives. I am not a part of it, and not quite the voyeur since much of what has occurred did so fifty plus years ago. I am sharing because of the tactile action of holding the card in my hands. I had that feeling, too, last night with Alexandria and reminded myself that the letters had not actually been sent by these people. But all of the books I have read have been borrowed. Though I think that some day I will own the two trilogies, at the moment I get all of them by Interlibrary Loan from the library. They come from public libraries and universities. I don't know if I am the first person to read these, but I feel like there is something special about all us strangers gently taking the stiff folded paper out of the envelope, reading it through, and gently re-folding it and putting it back. I have yet to encounter and of these pages ripped or dirtied in any way. Perhaps in a few years I will seek library copies again, seeing if time changes their condition. There is a library subject classification for books with movable or removable parts. They have decided that these books are special. I think they are because they demand an interaction with the reader, but I think librarians may just view it as "things that can and will get lost."

So writing to someone is sharing, communicating, connecting to them. The book, especially when not privately owned but library borrowed, holds its own form of connecting people. Even when it is owned by one person, it holds that special potential because it may be later sold to a used bookstore, given away, lent to friends, sold at a yard or estate sale. These items live lives beyond our creating, using, and owning them. I love old books, not only because they have pretty leather bindings and such, but because they hold history in their pages, they hold lives. I love it when I find one that years ago was notated in the margins. It's this meta conversation between myself and that distant reader. Sharing with a stranger.