Currently

Books I'm Reading:

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius


This week: 342
Last week: 457
Semester: 1877


Sentences:

1. "And if dead people aged, wouldn't it be a comfort? To think of Ethan growing up in heaven - fourteen years old now instead of twelve - eased the grief a little. Oh, it was their immunity to time that made the dead so heartbreaking."

2. "It seemed she had webbed his mind with her stories, wound him in slender steely threads from her life - her Shirley Temple childhood, unsavory girlhood, Norman flinging the screen out the window, Alexander mewing like a newborn kitten, Muriel wheeling on Doberman pinschers and scattering her salmon-pink business cards and galloping down the beach, all spiky limbs and flying hair, hauling a little red wagon full of lunches."

3. "Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding."

(All from "The Accidental Tourist")

As much as I dislike mushy romance novels (which doesn't exactly identify this book but comes somewhat close), these quotes called out to me.

Title Goes Here

I've been reading The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, in which Macon Leary, a travel guide writer, meets Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer. Love ensues and ultimately succeeds, because this is a romance novel and people will cry for blood if love doesn't triumph.

In the novel, Macon and Muriel are almost opposites, just like Macon and his ex-wife Sarah. Macon is neat, fastidious (bonus points for vocab word), stolid, and does everything according to system, while Muriel is something of a "wild child." Sarah is actually more opposing in personality to Macon, with her messiness, tendency to distrust systems, and active personality.

What I don't get is this: why are opposites attracted to each other? Is it the tendency to be fascinated with the personality type you don't have? Is it some genetic thing, or instilled into us by society?

Actually, some opposites don't attract. There are probably some couples with the same interests and personalities. Still, this "opposites attract" thing is very interesting.

Bingo of the Close Reading Variety

1. "His clam, but intense attention to detail leaves readers intimidated yet expectant for the forth coming of his next step."


Rule 4 - Don't refer to the reader(s). Btw, "clam" is spelled "claim." Derp.


2. "The sound and vulgarity shows Holden's ruthless and loud personality."


Rule 6 - Avoid the word "show."


3. "Baker uses a lot of language that magnifies the importance of the coldness felt, "spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails", this creates imagery for the reader of what the daily worker sees."


Rule 8 - Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.


4. "His negative connotation is straightforward and precise."


Rule 3 - You never explained why the connotation is precise, and only ever implied straightforwardness in a very discreet way.



This is my favorite close reading:

Practice Diction Analysis

In this excerpt from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the narrator’s conversational, slightly harsh diction emphasizes the youthful, rambling, aloof style with which he speaks and thinks. The narrator rejects talking about his childhood, labeling it as “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” He furthermore isn’t going to “tell you [his] whole goddam autobiography or anything.” Rather, the narrator centers his attentions on his brother, a rich writer whom he admires, in addition to “this madman stuff that happened to [him] around last Christmas.” From the narrator’s colloquialisms and lack of consideration for conventionality when first telling someone about himself, one can derive that the narrator is a brash youth given to roughness of speech.

Style Mapping

The diction in Neil Gaiman's Stardust is rather nondescript in terms of elevation. The diction here tends to be connotative, using the same words quoted above to establish a mood of foreignness and foreboding. The sound here is more harsh than mellifluous, with phrases such as "dark slate roofs and high chimneys" and "grey and tall and stocky" which serve to evoke a feeling of strangeness which one feels when placed into an unfamiliar situation.

The diction in Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is incredibly formal, as evidenced in the following sentence: "Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task." While the previous passage was more connotative than denotative, the tone of this passage is denotative, which goes along with its genre, self-help. The sound here is sophisticated, so one might call it musical.

Finally, the diction in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is denotative, the sound noncommital, and the elevation more formal than informal. The author uses fancy adjectives to describe his surroundings, while denotative-ness can be derived from the informative tone with which he explains what he is doing. The sound, going along with the fancy adjectives used to describe, is more harmonious than discordant.

Aging and Death

I've been reading The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, about Macon Leary, a travel guidebook writer who hates to travel. Macon has a wife, Sarah, who is his polar opposite; while Macon is uptight and fastidious, Sarah is messy and carefree. Their son, Ethan, was killed in a fast-food restaurant shooting. The book tells the tale of how Macon, after divorcing Sarah, finds new love in Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer several years his junior. In particular, I found this passage at the very end captivating:


"And if dead people aged, wouldn't it be a comfort? To think of Ethan growing up in heaven - fourteen years old now instead of twelve - eased the grief a little. Oh, it was their immunity to time that made the dead so heartbreaking. (Look at the husband who dies young, the wife aging on without him; how sad to imagine the husband coming back to find her so changed.) Macon gazed out the cab window, considering the notion in his mind. He felt a kind of inner rush, a racing forward. The real adventure, he thought, is the flow of time; it's as much adventure as anyone could wish. And if he pictured Ethan still part of that flow - in some other place, however unreachable - he believed he might be able to bear it after all."


This passage was worthy of being mentioned in that it made me think of the people I've known that have passed away. (Fortunately, they number only a few.) I thought of my grandmother with whom I lived for four years, a grandfather and an uncle I hardly knew, and a great-grandmother, of whom I've never seen the face. Like the passage says, it seems that these people I knew stopped aging the moment they died. Their faces, some half-formed and others clear as day, remain frozen in time in my memory.

Then, I thought to myself, how would things be different if I knew that they continued aging somewhere, albeit somewhere unreachable, foreign? If stillborn infants could live on, cry, laugh, go through childhood, and rule the world? It would be somewhat comforting to the bereaved, I imagine.

Currently

Books I'm Reading:

None. I've finished all my books.
I am, however, planning on reading:

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler


This week: 457
Last week: 138
Semester: 1535


Sentences(passages) of the week: (All from "Battle Hymn")

1. "Of course, I also wanted Sophia to benefit from the best aspects of American society. I did not want her to end up like one of those weird Asian automatons who feel so much pressure from their parents that they kill themselves after coming in second on the national civil service exam. I wanted her to be well rounded and to have hobbies and activities. Not just any activity, like "crafts" which can lead nowhere - or even worse, playing the drums, which leads to drugs - but rather a hobby that was meaningful and highly difficult with the potential for depth and virtuosity. And that's where the piano came in."

2. "One jarring thing that many Chinese people do is openly compare their children. I never thought this was so bad when I was growing up, because I always came off well in the comparison. My Dragon Lady grandmother - the rich one, on my father's side - egregiously favored me over all my sisters. 'Look how flat that one's nose is,' she would cackle at family gatherings, pointing at one of my siblings. 'Not like Amy, who has a fine, high-bridged nose. Amy looks like a Chua. That one takes after her mother's side of the family. and looks like a monkey.'"

3. "The Chinese parenting approach is weakest when it comes to failure; it just doesn't tolerate that possibility."


First of all, everyone knows that learning the drums leads to drug use. There have been 5 cases of people I knew who started learning drums, only to be tempted by drugs. Drums and drugs: the two are interchangeable. Of course, I exaggerate greatly. However, that is sort of the mindset that Asian parents have. If you do something that your parents disapprove of, it will automatically lead to the worst possible result without fail. Sometimes, I really hate that mindset.

2nd quote. Again, something I dislike from the Asian parenting method. While Amy Chua explains why parents do it in her novel (to express confidence in the child on the losing end that they, too, can be like the child on the winning end), it's still incredibly tedious to hear parents say, "Oh, look at so-and-so, he/she can do such-and-such. How are you so worthless as to not be able to do such-and-such?"

3rd quote. Failure includes yelling, constant nagging, and threats, so yeah, I'd say failure is intolerable.