Looking for a Challenge

I am one book away from finishing my Winter Reading Challenge from Overdue Books. So, having looked around various book blogs, I've decided to join a couple more, just to keep me going. I am signing on to the

Classics Challenge : 5 classics to be read in January & February 2007

1. Miss Marjoribanks / Mrs. Oliphant (the crossover from the Winter Reading Challenge)
2. Mary Barton / Mrs. Gaskell (I love Mrs. Gaskell!)
3. My Antonia / Willa Cather (it's been TBR for ages)
4. The Moonstone / Wilkie Collins
5. The Man who was Thursday / G.K. Chesterton

Alternates for the Classics Challenge - in case I get carried away...

1. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde / Robert Louis Stevenson
2. The Ambassadors / Henry James

I am also signing on to the Chunkster Challenge, although the decisions proved a bit hard for me! I love long books; the length allows you to sink into them and really live for a while in someone else's world. However, I also have to live in my own world, so I must keep the list reasonable. So, according to Bookfoolery's very flexible rules, I will choose 6 books over 600 pages to read within the next 6 months. My choices:

1. Armadale / Wilkie Collins (816 pgs)
2. The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters / Gordon Dahlquist (760 pgs)
3. Camilla / Fanny Burney (956 pgs)
4. Kristin Lavransdatter / Sigrid Undset (1047 pgs)
5. Sir Charles Grandison / Samuel Richardson (1597 pgs)
6. The Little Country / Charles deLint (636 pgs)

Alternates in case one proves dull:

1. The Mists of Avalon / Marion Zimmer Bradley (876 pgs)
2. The Green Darkness / Anya Seton (579 pgs -- it's over 600 in other editions!!;) )

It's shaping up to be a great winter of reading!

Write away

Further to my handwriting concerns...I can't quite believe that a person can get through life without using script. Does it show a lack of introspection? One of the primary uses of my pen is in journalling. Although I know some people keep online journals, I can't imagine myself doing so. I like to curl up with my notebook someplace comfortable, and write to my heart's content. This can be a place that it isn't convenient to have a computer -- in bed, outdoors, in a window seat. There are some journalling instructors who recommend using your non-dominant hand to write with, to access deeply buried thoughts and feelings. The use of this suggests that there is, within handwriting, something integral to thought and self-knowledge. To make writing habitual is thus vitally important. If you need ideas or prompting to begin with, Higher Awareness is a good place to start. I encourage anyone to take up the practice of journalling.
The other frequent use I make of a legible and attractive (I like to think) hand is in letter writing. I still write letters the old fashioned way, and don't believe it is a dying art. I have found many delightful penpals who also enjoy the artistic and meaningful experience of communicating via snail mail. Two good places to search out penpals are at Interpals and Sassociations. A bit of determined searching and you can develop fascinating friendships with people all over the world. If you need encouragement in the fine art of correspondence, try picking up Alexandra Stoddard's appealing guide The Gift of a Letter , or the sadly now defunct magazine Victoria's The Pleasures of Staying in Touch. Either way, these are two marvellous ways to increase the use of a fine hand. And to learn everything you may have ever wanted to know about letter writing as an art, or as a fictional device, check out this great epistolary website.

With a fine hand

I was intrigued by an article in the Toronto Star about the loss of handwriting skills among young people. It says, among other things, that:

Handwriting is irrelevant (The Toronto Star, Dec. 5, 2006. 12:03 AMJEN GERSON)
They couldn't remember how to write the letter "I."
Is it one loop or two? Does the pen start at the top of the squiggle or the bottom? "I forgot how to handwrite," says 18-year-old Kris Tofer Baker, as he mulls over the execution of a "w." Don't misunderstand. Baker is an intelligent young man. He just hasn't needed to use cursive script since Grade 4.
"I print out or type the majority of my school work."
He's not alone. On the Ryerson and University of Toronto campuses, few students were able to handwrite naturally, when handed a black felt-tipped pen. After some moments of meditation, most remembered, sort of, how to script — although they couldn't remember the last time they needed to.
Computers have turned cursive handwriting into an archaic and unnecessary form of writing. It has been relegated to an era of calling cards and heartfelt love letters crafted by candlelight and fountain pen.
"One of the comments I got back on a test was `I don't understand what you wrote.' The teacher had told us to handwrite, but you saw, I had trouble with the T. I don't remember what they're supposed to look like," says Ikram Abdi, 19.
Her friend agrees. What need is there to handwrite? "Everything we do is on the computer," says Fatima Nuzhat, 19.......But Toronto-based forensic document examiner Pat Girouard ponders this new trend and remains skeptical. Sure, computers dominate our writing lives. Sure, handwriting seems somewhat anachronistic, but still, cursive seems to be an ironic sacrifice in the digital age. After all, she says, "printing takes longer (than handwriting) because it's disconnected."

I really was a bit shocked by this. I am a big proponet of legible handwriting; printing everything you write looks so childish. If I get a memo from somebody written in chunky, messy Grade 1 handwriting, my opinion of them suffers. Yes, I'm a cursive snob. I enjoy writing with pen and paper, and do it every day, almost entirely with fountain pens. Yes, the kind with cartridges; I don't carry bottles of ink around in my pockets. The physical act of writing - using your hand to shape your thoughts - has a visceral power that typing lacks. Researchers have suggested that cursive script also assists in the formation of more complex thought processes. Also, as graphologists know, one's idiosyncratic handwriting provides clues to one's self. (UPDATE: test yourself at http://handwritingwizard.com. Thanks to DoveGreyReader for the link!)
Can this be true if one has no habitual style of writing? Can typing out one's thoughts so that they appear identical to anyone else's be the death knoll of eccentric individualism? Is one confined intellectually and/or philosophically by a keyboard? Interesting questions to ponder - feel free to weigh in.
Meanwhile, I will continue use my fountain pens to express myself, as well as my keyboard.
Paper and ink, someone's carefully shaped words, still mean something. Perhaps this is why, even in this wide world of blogs, there still exists a vibrant zine culture.

Wifely silences...

I was looking forward to reading The Seal Wife, by Kathryn Harrison; I like books about weather and the North. (What can I say, I'm Canadian!) Unfortunately, it was not ultimately a satisfying read. There were a lot of problems with the story for me. The main character, Bigelow, was a bit of a sad sack; I wanted to yell "Get over it!" at him. The women in the story were voiceless. The "Seal wife" was known only as "The Aleut", she does not speak and barely attempts to communicate with Bigelow even when they are having sex. It was entirely mysterious as to why she would even sleep with him in the first place. When she suddenly disappears he falls into an engagement with another mute woman, although she communicates through writing. This engagement ends with a bang when the Aleut returns at the end of the book, to very unconvincingly settle down as his mistress/maid of all work, hand sewing a huge weather kite for his work to replace the one his previous crazed fiancee caused him to lose. Domestic skill at his disposal, and silence, and sex. Just what a wife should be...
On first perusal, the title confused me. What was a Celtic myth doing attached to this story? However, on further research, I discovered that there is a coastal Native myth of the seal wife, in which a man is abducted to live with seals, escapes to discover he no longer fits in with his original grouping, and returns to his seal wife under the ocean. This bears out in this novel; if you see the Aleut as a "seal wife", or completely other, Bigelow is transfixed by her, and gives up his non-native fiancee in a flash for her. He suddenly shifts his outlook to seem to be an Alaskan, someone you could imagine staying where he was rather than endlessly dreaming of home.
I found a real positive in the crisp writing style. I could admire how the actual writing seemed to mirror the cold and isolation of Arctic life, and it was clear she inhabited her research. However, the actual story was a disappointment for me. If I were to recommend a novel of men in the Arctic it wouldn't be this one. I much preferred Andrea Barrett's "The Voyage of the Narwhal" for a novel of exploration, both of geography and of interior psychology.

Racy reading!

I've finished Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann, the first book on my TBR list to be tackled. Wow. Written and set in the 1920's, it is shockingly modern. We thought we were risque in college; no, indeed, these girls did it all many years before us.
The plot : young only child Judith, immured in the countryside, becomes fascinated with the group of cousins who stay summers with their grandmother next door. Judith grows up, to become romantically linked with 3 of the boys in succession, as well as a college mate named Jennifer. But all of these relationships are uncertain and ephemeral. I should have read the title page quote before beginning it -- that may have given me more of an idea of what I was getting myself into! It is a quote by George Meredith: "Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul / when hot for certainties in this our life! "
The writing style reminds me of other women writers of the same generation; ie: Rumer Godden, Elizabeth Goudge, Dodie Smith, but the themes and the lack of circumlocution are startling and refreshing. I really enjoyed the feeling that this was a different world they were living in. All the basic assumptions underlying the storytelling were so foreign - in some ways I feel that I am closer to the great Victorian novels in their views of society. What a weird blip the 20's and 30's were! I was quite impressed by this novel; so much so that I've gone on and read another of her books, Invitation to the waltz, which was at the library rather than go to my next TBR pick! I will get to my stack shortly...
**One warning : read with tissues near by. I was snivelling at the point where Judith's relationship with Roddy, the first of the cousins, comes to its apex.