readingredhead: (Reading)
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As usual, this is a question that demands multiple answers, because it's me we're talking about, and I rarely read one good book per year. But this past year, I've done a lot of re-reading (both in school and out), so my new books intake has severely dropped. Thankfully, that's what next year is for...?

I feel that in order to appropriately answer this question, I have to give three answers. Maybe four. So stick with me.

When I first saw this question, the answer that immediately sprang to mind was Possession by A. S. Byatt, in which two modern academics discover the lost letters of two (fictional) Victorian poets, and follow the literary clues therein on a detective hunt through Great Britain and parts of France. Oh, and did I mention that they may or may not have something like a love story of their own throughout? I purchased Possession from a small used-and-new independent bookstore down the street from the hotel my grandmother stayed at in London this spring (right by the British Museum, where one of the characters actually works). I began reading it on the Eurostar train from London to Paris, and finished it in a small hotel room overlooking a tiny street between the Louvre and the Opera Garnier; I read with the kind of energy that a book hadn't evoked from me in far too long. Possession felt a little bit like the story of my life-as-it-could-be told back to me as a fiction: a collection of various texts (the novel includes third-person omniscient narration, snippets of poetry and academic prose, the discovered love letters, and various other ephemera) meandering over a wider ground than entirely necessary (it's been compared to a Victorian novel), questioning and testing but ultimately affirming the relationship between literature and love.

The other important books of this year (for very different reasons!) are ones I've talked about elsewhere: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg and A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane.

The rest of the texts I'm going to mention are very, very literary. But they're also very important. I think that Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion all belong on this list because the time I've spent with them, starting this summer with my SURF research, has really launched me into the thesis of a lifetime. Although Northanger Abbey is the only one out of these that I actually read for the first time this year, I've become increasingly close with the others, to the point where I have a bordering-on-brilliant fifteen-page Pride and Prejudice paper ready to be sent out to various graduate schools as we speak. My experience as a reader of Austen has changed so much since I was a freshman in high school disdainful of Emma, and I couldn't be happier about it. More and more, I feel like I've chosen (or been chosen by) the topic and the time period that are just right for me.
readingredhead: (Stars)
I don't have enough time to provide a full update -- November has started and with it, my frantic novel-writing; by this time next week, I will be in Barcelona, about to depart for Marrakesh, and very little of that is planned yet, aside from plane tickets and a place to sleep -- but I find it necessary to relate that I spent a long weekend in Paris and fell in love.

It's a different kind of love from the one I feel for London. Queen Mary is another "home" now, and this city feels contentedly mine in a way that only Berkeley really rivals. I still remember the first time I ever went to London, with my hopes all up, and I got this giddy feeling the instant I stepped off the plane, like being there had turned on some kind of switch and lit up something new.

Paris wasn't like that -- I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport at about ten in the morning Paris time, after having been awake since four in the morning London time in order to get to the airport, etc. I don't know when it hit me that I was actually there. But once it did? The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I've always loved French history. It's part of the reason why I like romanticism so much -- it's a literary and artistic movement inspired in large part by the actions of the revolutionaries in France in 1789. I spent the summer reading and re-reading A Tale of Two Cities and thus getting to know Dickens's Paris like the back of my hand. When I was walking the streets, everything came back to me, and even if I didn't have a map in my head, I could tell you who the streets were named after. I love London for its history, as well, but the history in Paris has a different flavor to it, something I can't quite pin down.

In four days, I saw so much that I had wanted to see -- everything, in fact, that was on my list, and more besides. And yet I still know that there is plenty that will pull me back. It's hard to say that I like it better than other places I've been, because all European cities are different, and admirable for different reasons. But still, I think it wouldn't be entirely incorrect to state that, after London, Paris is the second most amazing city I've seen in Europe, and that I know I'll be returning.

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