Bye Bye For Now.

Kyrgyzstan is calling. It’s time for me to pack up my 100 pounds of possessions for the next two years and start slaying bitches left and right. I am excited and ready, but due to Some Unforeseen Things, I am also slightly terrified and more than slightly heartbroken. I’m going to miss this city for the first time, miss its glaring polluted rhythms, the air that feels wet, the bullying strength of the sunshine. I’m scared of leaving a place where I only communicate with people who love me for a place where I can barely pronounce hello. Maybe more than anything I’m scared to be out of reach. But I’ve got my game face on. Like this chick to the right, I can handle my shit.

I started this blog in June because I felt like I and my brain were becoming vaguely useless. I didn’t expect that so many people would end up reading it and linking to it, and I feel genuinely surprised and excited every time someone thinks that I had anything good to say. I will certainly still be reading and writing the entire duration of my service and updating this whenever I can get to an Internet cafe–and I think that my perspective on things, and books, will change in an interesting way because of my drastic change in circumstances–but at least for the next few weeks, I won’t be able to.

So I guess what I’m saying is, subscribe to this blog if you read it or want to continue reading it, so that you’ll be able to see when I update it. I only publicize this by posting to my Facebook profile, and I doubt I will be trolling the Book very much anymore (I will be measuring time by pages of Proust and the slow procession of sheep across my backyard, and will likely be unable to handle seeing glamorous photos and minute-by-minute wall posts like “Wake up bitch I want to go to brunch at that new place!” etc). Thank you for reading. 123 books so far, and I have no intent of stopping.

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Being a girl in rich old America is hard, right? You gotta be cool, you gotta get you some boy friendz, you gotta look like this chick to the left, and if you don’t have any of that, you’re fucked. Well, not fucked, and that’s the problemo.

This pressure is disguised in various ways and sublimated by religions of all sorts, but it pops up everywhere. Like Taylor Swift. I hate on this lady a lot, but she deserves it. For example, you know how in every one of her songs there’s a running theme of “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts” or some other variation of “I’m an awkward nerd but I understand you better than the pretty girl,” etc. I find this infinitely annoying in light of the fact that Taylor Swift is the most intentionally cookie-cutter, packaged, traditionally beautiful star we’ve got going these days–that, in a nation of girls struck with Princess Syndrome since they watched their first Disney cartoon, Taylor Swift is succeeding because she is that pretty girl. For girls who are truly sidelined in the social Venus fly trap of high school, the situation is very different: the lacrosse players look at them with mild confusion, and years pass full of daily battles of un-narrated insecurity and overthinking. And if a happy chance miracle does occur and the quiet girl gets picked–something which does happen, and happens in Prep–the story gets more and not less complicated. Boys don’t just bring flowers and tell you you’re pretty, and giving blowjobs does not a state of self-actualization make.

This is why I like Prep. It’s not a brilliant book by any means, but there’s also nothing else like it: nothing that so maturely and honestly takes you through every step of an out-of-place girl’s adolescence. It’s boarding school in the eighties, and Lee, the protagonist, is never going to look like the girl on the cover of Contra. That alone–an awareness of beauty, or personal magnetism generally, and how it can become a haunting, pervasive, objective force working its way through the social order of a school–makes Lee an amazing narrator. She’s fully aware of the contrast between her life and the lives of the Beautiful People (class is a huge factor) and she states things with a flat, minor melancholy that I love: “In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.”

But back to Taylor Swift. The real nugget of genius is about Prep is that Lee is a girl who’s grown up believing the Taylor Swift stuff–what high school girl doesn’t, at some level?–and before she realizes that it’s false, she feels the part of it that’s real. In the voice of an methodical, self-aware but lonely eleventh-grader: “Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.”

Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh

As far as Shitty Reinterpretations go, this one might take the cake. Let me draw your attention first to the cover on the right. Whimsical, light, and personal, it suggests exactly what Harriet the Spy is about: a little kid in New York City traipsing off to make adventures for herself. Let me now draw your attention to this nasty thing on the left. Behold Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars, a Disney Channel movie due to be released later this year. Harriet the Spy fucking Blog Wars. What. The. Fuck.

What is wrong with the people making these decisions? Even the combination of the phrases “Disney Channel” and “Blog Wars” is enough to suggest how miserable this production will be, but it gets worse: Harriet is supposed to be 11, but in this thing she’s a 16-year-old engaging in a Gossip Girl-type battle for control of her school via blog. Instead of (like Old Harriet) recording entries about The Boy with Purple Socks (so boring that no one can remember his name) and smushing herself in her co-op’s dumbwaiter to spy on Harrison Withers, a bachelor with 26 cats, New Bloggy Harriet will be relentlessly stalking a Jonas Bro-type pop star named Skander Hill. At least in the Michelle Trachtenberg/Rosie O’Donnell adaptation–which was made 14 years ago, yeesh–shit was age-appropriate. Whereas 2010 Harriet will probably look like Ke$ha. Awesome!

I mean, as originally written in 1964, Harriet is a real kid, in that glorious stage of kid-life where you can actually engage in gender-neutral activities. Her two best friends are a boy named Sport and a girl named Janie who wants to be a scientist. Living in New York City, she very early comes to understand that the everyday activities of ordinary people are fascinating. It upsets me that such a character is very unlikely to be written today, especially if the setting is 2010–the children’s books of this sort that are still being written (like When You Reach Me) are almost necessarily set in pre-paparazzi times. I hope that there are still Harriet types running around today, girls who daydream about things other than turquoise push-up bras and putting out their own pop album, and I’m sure there totally are. But the decade’s media decisions strongly suggest otherwise.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Long books are hard to read. Who likes reading for two hours and then being like “Oh good, only 950 pages to go”? It seems to me that in truth there are very few people who actually read long books, and all of them end up in graduate English programs because the hobby is so time-consuming that it actually has to become your job at some point if you want to sustain it–and I’d consider myself one of those people, except for the fact that I can’t really read long books. I go through stages. Stage 1, I remember that I can’t remember more than ten names at a time and stop reading so closely. Stage 2, I get sick of details and want to watch TV. Stage 3, things start weaving together, I enter a reading blackout and emerge at Stage 4, the end, at which point I feel like I haven’t been reading the last half of the book but rather that it’s just happened in my head.

It’s always worth it. I was ready to shit all over Our Mutual Friend after I was forced to read it for a class (as in literally shit, like use it for toilet paper) but then halfway through it became my favorite Dickens book (an impression reinforced by the fact that Desmond in LOST likes it too). And then there’s the mama of big long virtuosic books: War and Peace, weighing in at about 1300 pages. For my major at UVA, it was like this thing that everyone had to read this book over Christmas break of third year (or obviously–”read” it) and so I slogged through the beginning scenes filled with fancy living room furniture and people named Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov, and all of a sudden I was in Stage 3 and totally forgot I was reading.

Really. Just like Wishbone. I was straight-up feeling like I was in the book. And I could not be less interested in historical novels, aristocracy, war stories, or epic romances, but masterpieces like War and Peace change the game. Some critic once said, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy,” and it’s absolutely true. In pace, scope, and style, this novel is a supernaturally perfect mix of minute and huge; it makes you feel like all other books are creative writing projects. It’s also perfect on history, letting you see that there are a dizzying number of stories, thousands of them, millions of moments, that exfoliate outward from every half-page description of a battle. I recommend it, especially if you are about to embark on a venture that will leave you with the isolation and time to read big scary books. Oh wait, that’s about to be me. Fuckz.