the Dalaverse

Kill the Macs. Kill the Macs. K-I-L-L THE MACS.

I have a paper on the Tudor landscape to write, and the only computer in this bloody lab with Word has stopped responding to anything, even repeated pressure on its power button. The rest of the computers contain only AppleWorks, whose word processing program is like Notepad only stupider.

Also, I am suddenly overcome with an affinity for the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker ship even though Han/Leia is one of my very few rock-solid til-the-end-of-time OTPs. This is entirely the fault of crack_van.

In order to a. excise my frustration in a constructive manner b. further procrastinate on said paper, which isn't due till 3:00 tomorrow anyway and c. quash my longing for Jedi/scoundrel naughtiness, I will relate what I've read in the past two and a half weeks, for pleasure, which is easily the most I've read in such a span of time in, oh, four years or so. I don't know what it is, possibly the expulsion of Spider Solataire from my life, but all of a sudden I'm reading like I did when I was twelve. And when I was twelve, I read in the shower and in the car and at the dinner table and walking down the hallway at school.

To begin with, I brought my copy of The Da Vinci Code on the plane with me, figuring it would be that sort of book. I actually ended up reading most of it here, though. What can I say? It was a poorly written, manipulative, predictable piece of crap and I gobbled it up like movie popcorn. Yes, the thing kept me reading, but I felt dirty and cheap afterwards. The enomous success of this novel makes me wince for the American people. It'll make a great movie, though.

Then, because I'd watched the new film on the plane (and because after that I needed to read an author who could construct a fucking sentence), I nabbed Pride and Prejudice from the JCR. I'm not one of those crazy Austen and/or A&E miniseries fans; when I read it in high school, it was for a teacher I hated, and she didn't have us do anything with the book because she didn't like it. It didn't make much of an impression on me. However, this time around, I absolutely loved it and gobbled it down in two (busy) days. If I stopped and thought about it, the subject matter seemed tedious, but Elizabeth Bennett is an engaging narrator and the novel is peppered with enough humor and social commentary (it was one of the Penguin editions, and I read every footnote) to charm me.

Next I turned to the most daunting of the novels I brought -- The Drifters by James Michener. Being a Michener, it's something like eleventy million eight hundred pages. And it is one of the best books I've ever read. It doesn't follow his usual "pick a place and follow a family from the beginning of civiliztion" formula; it's about six roughly college-aged kids in 1969 (or possibly 1970) who meet up in Spain and travel about Europe together. The story is related first-person by a man in his sixties, their "Uncle George," as one of them calls him -- only it doesn't seem first-person to begin with, because it begins with the story of two kids he only met through the others, so he describes why this young man is in Europe without any personal involvement. The other four he knows from previous experience; he hangs out with them all together over the course of the novel.

Because I had so much page to get to know these characters, they became flesh and blood to me, and so did the period in which they lived. The reader is allowed to examine everything from dual perspectives -- the young people themselves, and the narrator, who comes to understand them better than you might think, if not perfectly. The vivid descriptions of exotic locales -- in addition to Torremolinos, they visit Mozambique, Pamplona, and a bunch more I can't remember, plus one kid is from Israel, one from Norway, one from Africa -- certainly don't hurt.

It's just...okay, I don't even have words to express myself. It made me very thinky and touched me profoundly, and I think I'll read it again in a couple of years.

Right now I'm two-thirds through H.M.S. Surprise, and am enjoying it immensely. Jack and Stephen are so an old married couple, Sophie (whom I like very much) and Diana Villiers notwithstanding. And I finally got to "you have debauched my sloth"!

Oooookay. I'd better get to this paper now. Ian said he'd come by to compare progress when he got back from Bodley, and I can't have a totally blank screen.