The Year Wanes
I’m having a very mid-November feeling, despite the fact that we are officially on the 12th day of Christmas—if indeed the days started at 12 and counted down until Christmas Eve on the 24th? Is that how it worked? Ah for lost days, lost times and lost ways.But before I go down a nostalgia whirlpool (I can vividly remember writing “The year wanes” in a diary of mine on a gloomy November of highschool or university….probably the year was 2003)…oh for THOSE time and those days…
It’s very odd that the past doesn’t just evaporate when it goes. It can be clearly brought back for seconds-long visions, like my arm reaching over to slap my radio alarm clock—god what happened to that trusty thing—so faithful—everyday at 7am on my blue dresser with the sky lightening and the room frigid. (Well, actually, the moment I recall is from a sunny warm day, must have been a summer morning, when for a second I realized I am living and my brain recorded it permanently…)
Like I said…before we drop through the wormhole…
Oh no, I promise this isn’t drafted (I’d never!) but this leads too well into what I wanted you mention to you, on this blog ostensibly about books but more about my feelings, is that after polishing off The Idiot I read Alice in Wonderland (and Alice Through The Looking Glass, as they were bound together) and I didn’t like either at all.
Now I should say, that since I got back from Canada I was suffering a lot, in my head, from homesickness mainly at first, then that faded out, leaving generalized Very Low Mood for the past few weeks, so much so that when I was reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a very depressing book, on the sly, I felt like YES I need this misery-train read right now, but I would ALSO step back and be like “dear Jesus thank you that I’m not in such a bad place as THIS girl” the narrator, god her life was awful. So that book slightly put things into perspective for me. And secondly, I’ve been feeling so anxious overall that I ACTUALLY caved and did what everyone tells you to do, but is “the most under-used treatment” —and I did some exercise (gasp, horror)!
And I’m so out of shape that it’s HARD for me, and it’s only saving grace is that I’m following along to 80s and 90s workout videos on youtube and they are GREAT and kind of hilarious and seem to somehow preserve a totally different, possibly more naive, and more optimistic time.
Yes, when all else fails, at the very last ditch (before therapy) there is exercise….
But where was I? Oh yes. Tumbling. Alice. Yes. I really tried to put away my low mood and read something which I always have meant to, something that people find light and exciting. And I didn’t like it. I can see that it might have been light and exciting for 1890—and oh yes, Alice was a real pert little thing—but I really had to make myself get through it.
This did lead to a conversaton with my boyfriend about how he has something good to say about almost every book ever–and I never do (I did think to myself—IS this depression? Inability to enjoy things?) but I don’t think so. I know what I like (the Anne of Green Gables series, the greatest literary achievement the world has ever known), but Alice just made me tired. I mean, Alice walks around tired herself most of the time, and frustrated at all the nonsense. So yeah, August’s Classic down, disappointment all around…
I really did try by the way, I watched a documentary about Lewis Carroll on youtube, which of course, having the context that he probably was a pedophile only mad it worse, and I watched the Disney cartoon too, searching for the magic. It must not be my kind of magic, though it has delighted generations of readers.
Lest you run away thinking that I myself am tired of my self-imposed 12 Books a Year, or that I have over-extended myself (I have), I have had some thoughts about that. Alice was August’s book, and it took a lot of the effort I had left. I thought about giving up–it’s no fun if you are just making yourself read things you are not enjoying, and I had a big think about the rest of the books I’d like to read for the last 4 months of the year.
I’m now very sure about 3 of them. I want to read, as I’d planned from the start (because I am a very funny girl) The Waste Land for September (with whatever explanatory notes I can grab for free off the internet) because September is back-to-school month in Canada (the joke is that I’m still in school wasting my life—ooh it doesn’t look so good when written out like that, it’s supposed to be read WRY) and although I wanted to read any truly spooky story in October, with the dead leaves swirling, October vanished in the run up to my sister’s wedding (perfectly reasonable), but October is the only time I would read scary stuff, because it’s atmospheric, obviously.
And since that #atmosphere is over, I’m reading The Persians by Aeschylus, because I always wanted to read that and something tells me I am for once hitting the nail, it’s going to be brilliant and I’m going to love it. So that’s good, but so far I’m only in the Introduction to Edith Hall’s edition–still, I was Loving It while I perused it in the waiting room before my visa renewal.
As I had planned, I got ahold of a copy of Cold Comfort Farm for November–it has stood out in my mind for years as the absolute best thing to curl up in as blanket with and snicker to. But surprise, that is not happening, I have only slightly raised my eyebrows once and drawn my mouth down into a firm, but impressed line at another point. (The second one was funny, but so far, every sentence is dripping with a malignering sarcasm, it seems so heavy-handed. I can imagine it is a parody of Thomas Hardy’s novels, full of rural people with raging passions (or similar, I haven’t read him). But I’m a bit miffed–the back said it would be screamingly funny! Perhaps it will pick up.
So, I have 17 days til the end of the year, and 3 short works to read, and a humongous PhD to write—I’m not worried. I have just decided to not proclaim what my last book to read will be, the December book, except to say that it will certainly not be De Rerum Natura-–honestly, what kind of person was I in March? I don’t know her now.
But I’ll tell you two things—I did a big used-book buy on Amazon (wasn’t it big when those euros were slapped into Canadian, eh?!) and I bought quite a lot of the titles that I have been diligently keeping track of in my phone as things I’d like to read next year. So I’m already cheating on my next year’s list, and December, with each other, and I’m not going to write about that situation until the dust settles.
The second thing is (oooh I like how I’m perking up with talking about reading plans, and just a tiny second pisco). As human nature WOULD have it, I realized in the tub that the only thing I want to read Right Now is something I forgot to buy, and that is Schadenfreude, a Memoir. THAT is what I need right now. I’m really struggling with German, I want to be fluent without having to practice with other humans, or read in German (this plan is going as well as it sounds) and my suckiness with the language is increasing my fish-out-of-water-ness daily. This fish struggles with the persistent feeling that the water rubs her the wrong way a lot of the time—this fish is squandering the best opportunity for learning German she will ever have—ugh this fish is so privileged—-And it finally hit me, when I made my brain very quiet, that Schadenfreude is about a person who LOVES German literature (and perhaps also the culture). It’s about an English native speaker who loved German so much she pursued it to a PhD—this book will likely be peppered with love for German that I can absorb and be influenced by, as I’m far too apt to be in most situations!!! I must get it, as an ebook if I must, now now now!!
Originally I was just hing to read because it’s the story of a thwarted academic (from the blurb I have the idea that post-PhD, academia does not love her back) but this approach–how and WHY to love German is much better. Show me why I should care—please don’t start with Goethe, but if you work him in later….I’m listening.
So yes. This has been “The Waning Year,” called a “Reading Wrap-Up/Reading Vlog on youtube when accompanied by pictures. Thank you for attending Slow Scholarship, where we SHOULD endeavor to read in order to contextualize our life, but more often end up inserting literature INTO our lives, with negligible to minor impact on our outlooks. But I bought a new bookcase today, to house the pile of books that have lived on the floor for three months, and I feel hopeful. I must be getting somewhere.