Jan. 28th, 2020 11:22 am
Back on track
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muckefuckSo vacation was the worst of times for reading, and the best of times. My flight day out was almost 16 hours all told. I thought by the end of that I'd be too tired to even focus on print but that turned out to be where I really hit my stride: I finished off a short novel set on Oʻahu (Zamora Linmark's Rolling the r's) and read 200 pages of a longer one (Hulme's The bone people).
Then I bottomed out. Evenings, when I'd normally be reading to fall asleep, I was keeping Ginger Farmboy company. Even the day I spent recovering from seasickness I don't think I read more than one or two short stories in Under Maui skies and other stories, a collection by local boy Wayne Moniz that I found in the "Hawai'iana" section of the Maui Friends of the Library Bookstore in the Queen Ka'ahumanu Center in Kahului. (Apparently they have a warehouse south of town with ten times the number of volumes but we didn't have time to make it there.) Not great literature by any means but everything else they had looked worse.
I had high hopes for the return trip, but I was sleepy on the flight to the mainland and developed motion sickness on my last day in California, so I could only read with great caution. The time shift wrecked my sleep schedule so when I got home I found I had to force myself to stay up in the evenings to get back on track. Reading isn't conducive to that, especially something like the Hulme that requires significant concentration.
But now I'm back in the saddle. I dawdled over Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the attic, a short novel with a simple style the nonetheless had some heft. It's an account of issei and nisei immigrants in California in the early part of last century ending with their deportation to the camps in 1942. Rather than focus on a single family or settlement, as most authors would, she tries to tell the story of all the immigrants at once using a first-person plural voice that embraces multitudes. You'd think that might be distancing but I found myself having to take breaks to stave off getting too farklemt fun hertsn.
Randomly, I also picked up some Flaubert again. I recently acquired Trois contes and raced to finish "Un cœur simple" before leaving for Maui so I wouldn't have to haul it with me (slim though it was). Last weekend, I began "Saint Julien l'Hospitaleur", which is a trove of vocabulary for medieval things like turrets and headdresses. I'd really like to get back to Un nos ola leuad but a couple weeks ago I hit a patch of full-on Literary Welsh and skidded hard. Maybe next week when I start to get my concentration back.
Then I bottomed out. Evenings, when I'd normally be reading to fall asleep, I was keeping Ginger Farmboy company. Even the day I spent recovering from seasickness I don't think I read more than one or two short stories in Under Maui skies and other stories, a collection by local boy Wayne Moniz that I found in the "Hawai'iana" section of the Maui Friends of the Library Bookstore in the Queen Ka'ahumanu Center in Kahului. (Apparently they have a warehouse south of town with ten times the number of volumes but we didn't have time to make it there.) Not great literature by any means but everything else they had looked worse.
I had high hopes for the return trip, but I was sleepy on the flight to the mainland and developed motion sickness on my last day in California, so I could only read with great caution. The time shift wrecked my sleep schedule so when I got home I found I had to force myself to stay up in the evenings to get back on track. Reading isn't conducive to that, especially something like the Hulme that requires significant concentration.
But now I'm back in the saddle. I dawdled over Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the attic, a short novel with a simple style the nonetheless had some heft. It's an account of issei and nisei immigrants in California in the early part of last century ending with their deportation to the camps in 1942. Rather than focus on a single family or settlement, as most authors would, she tries to tell the story of all the immigrants at once using a first-person plural voice that embraces multitudes. You'd think that might be distancing but I found myself having to take breaks to stave off getting too farklemt fun hertsn.
Randomly, I also picked up some Flaubert again. I recently acquired Trois contes and raced to finish "Un cœur simple" before leaving for Maui so I wouldn't have to haul it with me (slim though it was). Last weekend, I began "Saint Julien l'Hospitaleur", which is a trove of vocabulary for medieval things like turrets and headdresses. I'd really like to get back to Un nos ola leuad but a couple weeks ago I hit a patch of full-on Literary Welsh and skidded hard. Maybe next week when I start to get my concentration back.
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