intellectual properties

female + fiction

this morning i didn’t go to work because it was super sunny and friday i was in too much pain and so i drank my coffee, took some pain meds and went to sit in the garden and read my book until the pain meds kicked in. and then when i came back inside i was sort of hypercaffeinated/doped up and got into unconscious multi-tasking mode (where you do numbers of things at once even though you’re not in any kind of hurry whatsoever) and almost took a banana into the shower (tweet).

if there’s one plus side to all this pain management it’s that i’m spending lots more time reading in the garden, which is nice because i no longer have public transportation time for reading since they cancelled my AC Transit bus line to work. i also get most of my exercise biking to work now, which is good because i haven’t actually gone to the gym very much at all lately and my bike commute is pretty much the only daily exercise i’m getting. (tweeted side note: yesterday on the way home i got pulled over by the emeryville police for blowing a stop sign on my bike. i have never even been pulled over while driving my CAR in california. i pleaded ignorance and apologized and was let off with a warning.)

anyway, i finished the book – The Anxiety of Everyday Objects. it was sort of eerie, actually, how much i related to this book about a young wannabe artist working a desk job in a small manhattan law firm. and also, i realized part way through, that it’s sort of odd that this was the 3rd book i’ve read in a row about young women struggling with identity/life changes. i posted a bit before about Veronica, a novel about a young model, which i really enjoyed and then handed off to Vera, and then after that i read a book i pulled from my Mom’s bookshelf, What Girls Learn, about a couple of young girls and their mother who gets very ill, which was refreshingly honest about puberty but pretty emotionally dark.  i would highly recommend both Veronica and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects to other women because i think both of them dealt with issues in a very adult and uplifting/bigger-picture kind of way; What Girls Learn was decently written, but somewhat adolescent in it’s view. or maybe the writing just wasn’t as good, i don’t know.

i’m not sure why i read 3 books in a row on such a similar theme.  obviously i am still figuring out “who i am” (always, a neverending inner monologue), and questions about female identity in this modern world are on the forefront of culture right now, what with 2 women taking over the political headlines combined/contrasted with all the plastic surgery/airbrushing/extreme dieting/female imagery and the commentary on that subject in pop culture. it makes sense women (or maybe just me) are discombobulated. in the past i’ve not been regularly drawn to books on this subject, but my fiction choices of late have shown that it’s on my mind a lot more than maybe i was aware of.

because i now needed a new book and to change pace, today i went to “The West’s Oldest Independent Bookseller” and one of the only local bookstores left in Berkeley – Books, Inc. on 4th street- and bought Seeing by Jose Saramago, a tangential follow-up to Blindness, one of my all-time favorite novels (and now a movie but i haven’t seen it yet). this book is about (farcical yet unnervingly realistic) political upheaval. From The New Yorker:

Saramago’s sombre masterpiece “Blindness” had an almost mythic power, whereas his latest novel, a political satire set in the same nameless capital city, opens with more wit and less heart. When Election Day coincides with a terrible rainstorm, the government worries that no one will venture out to vote. This fear is unfounded, but the election results are even more alarming: seventy per cent of the city’s voters have cast a blank ballot. Saramago has enormous fun imagining the official acrobatics precipitated by this apparent vote of no confidence, and, as the political hypocrisies and bureaucratic absurdities multiply, the narrative hums with correspondences to current events. Initially, readers may miss the previous novel’s intensity of feeling, but this one’s lightness proves deceptive: for Saramago’s beleaguered citizens, even thoughts never uttered can be fatal, and everyone is guilty until otherwise notified.

looking forward to it.

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