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A Readerly Retreat in the 94102

Think I'll be stopping by one of my favorite slightly musty book nooks in Hayes Valley today, Bibliohead Bookstore!
                     

                                             

They sling new, used, rare, and "uncommon" tomes, packed on wall-to-wall shelves with cardboard Sharpie-markered placards poking out to guide you on your way through the fiction, philosophy, food, arts, occult, poetry, and children's sections. I am always in the back left corner looking for old hardcover editions featuring my favorite young adult fictive heroes like Nancy Drew and Horatio Alger. I also look forward to the DOLLAR BIN of books always parked outside of Bibliohead's Gough Street storefront. Past pulls from this "last chance" cart have been some gently worn classics like George Eliot's The Mill on the  Floss, a selection of George Bernard Shaw's plays and The New Connoisseur's Handbook of California Wines (the still vastly relevant 1993 edition).

The environment of this idependent bookstore envelops a reader like a rainy day, a windowseat, and a pageturner. And taking into consideration the loss of several small-time booksellers within the City over the past few years (RIP A Clean Well-Lighted Place For Books and Cody's in Downtown SF), Bibliohead needs our patronage! Here is what Bibliohead's owner Melissa Richmond has to say about keeping the faith versus Barnes and Noble and Borders. 

Browse on a third Thursday evening of the month and stick around for Bibliohead's Poetry Series. Each evening features a reader or two and the opportunity for bystanders to get behind the mic! The spoken word event begins at 7:15pm and the next poetry event will feature Giancarlo Campagna, an active member of the SF theater community and a writer featured in small town magazine, a publication out of the Tenderloin.

The Guilt List

A few months ago, I came across a list of books posted by San Jose State University's English and Comparative Literature Department. They have termed the suggested texts as their "guilt list", offering this warning---"Any English major who hasn't read most of these has no right to joy!"

As a Lit major from Florida State University (Scalp 'em Seminoles!) and a voracious reader AND as someone seriously contemplating my master's in the field, I took this list to heart. Since coming across it, I have been trying to familiarize with some of the books on the list that I hadn't encountered before. Peruse the list. What do think should be added or omitted? Do any of these books stand out as tomes that changed your life? Comment, discuss, enjoy!

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart
Aeschylus. The Oresteia
Allende, Isabelle. The House of the Spirits
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima
Aristotle. Poetics
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, Emma
Barrio, Raymond. The Plum Plum Pickers
Barth, John. The Sot Weed Factor
Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson
Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks
Buck, Pearl. The Good Earth
Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita
Cather, Willa. My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton. The Lady with a Dog (and plays)
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
Cooper, James Fennimore. Leatherstocking Tales
Crane, Stephen. Red Badge of Courage
Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times, Bleak House, David Copperfield
Doestoevski, F. M. The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
Eliot, T. S. The Wasteland, The Four Quartets
Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man
Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen
Euripides. The Bacchae, Hippolytus
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Light in August
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Maddox. The Good Soldier
Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz, Where the Air is Clear
Garland, Hamlin. Main Travelled Roads
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl
Goethe. Faust
Grahame, Kenneth. Wind in the Willows
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key
Hardy, Thomas. Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance
Hemingway, Ernest. Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises
Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey
Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes
Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God
James, Henry. Turn of the Screw, Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady
Johnson, Charles. The Oxherding Tale
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses
Kafka, Franz. The Trial
Kennedy, William. Ironweed
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road
Keys, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon
Kinnell, Galway. The Past
Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men
Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love, Experiment in Criticism
London, Jack. The Sea Wolf
Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn
Lowell, Robert. Life Studies
Machiavelli, The Prince
Mahfouz, Naguib. Midaq Alley
Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain
Marlow, Christopher. Dr. Faustus
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
McCullers, Carson. Short Stories
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, Typee
Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose
Middleton, Thomas. The Changeling
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons
Milton, John. Paradise Lost
Momeday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain
Morrison, Toni. The Song of Soloman
Munro, Alice K. Selected Stories
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Norris, Frank. McTeague
O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Orwell, George. 1984, Animal Farm
Ovid. Metamorphosis
Paterson, Katherine. Jacob Have I Loved
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49
Plato, The Republic
Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way
Rich, Adrienne. Selected Poems
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela or Clarissa
Roethke, Theodore. Words for the Wind
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye
Saroyan, William. The Human Comedy
Scott, Walter. Waverley, Ivanhoe
Shakespeare, William. The Major Plays
Shaw, George Bernard. Mrs. Warren's Profession
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony
Silone, Ignazio. Bread and Wine
Sophocles. Oedipus the King, Antigone
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queen
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row
Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose
Stendhal (Henri Beyle). The Red and the Black
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind
Styron, William. Lie Down in Darkness
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William Makepace. Vanity Fair
Thurber, James. The Thurber Carnival
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace, Anna Karenina
Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run; Trust Me
Virgil. The Aeneid
Wallant, Edward Lewis. The Pawnbroker
West, Nathaniel. The Day of the Locust
Wharton. Edith. The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence
White, E. B. Charlotte's Web
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Ernest
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward Angel
Wolfe, Tom. Bonfire of the Vanities
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway
Wright, A. T. Islandia
Wright, Richard. Black Boy, Native Son
Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems
Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian
Also, Genesis, Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, The Bhagavad Gita, Qu'ran, Song of Roland, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sorry to leave y'all hanging

Been under the weather for the past few days, so I hope to be making up for lost time by popping up some good stuff over today and the President's Day holiday.

While infirmed, you know I was reading, and, in fact, I was really ripping through Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. This book is spellbinding with its pure and unfettered descriptions of the vast plains of New Mexico and the young protagonist Antonio is articulate and wise beyond his mere six years of age. There was a particular passage that struck me as awesomely beautiful because of all it captured in just a few words.  To give it some context, I will explain that Antonio has just been sent out into the academic world, experiencing all the trepidation and exhilaration that one can feel on thier first day of school. He feels like an outsider at first, though, being thrust into a diverse mix of town kids as a farming child of the llano. The other laugh and point at his green chiles and tortillas for lunch and mock him because he does not even speak English yet.

As Antonio narrates: "The pain and sadness seemed to spread to my soul, and I felt for the first time what the grown-ups call, la tristesa de la vida."  I interpret this to be a Spanish phrase for a very poignant realization that we all reach in our lives, and yet, in English, we have no words/universal phrases to explain what is happening to us. Or perhaps we call it a loss of innocence? At this point, when Antonio is feeling alienated, otherly, unwanted, uncertain--he has a glimpse into the understanding that we are all suseptible to being hurt by this life and that pain is par for the course. Just like this epiphany at primary school--your mom has dropped you off at this place of persecution and you are told to enjoy it--I'm sure that we have all had that "Aha" moment where we realize that life is a helluva lot more than just a bowl of cherries.

Anyone care to comment? When did "la tristesa de la vida" first rear its ugly head into your consciousness? I found that thinking back to my first "tristesa" moment, it had to do with learning something about my parents that made them and me less invincible. They were no longer blameless and I somehow just then "got it" that we are all using a trial-and-error system to get by from day to day.

Current Reads of SF's #47 Muni Bus

I've started to notice the titles in hand of my fellow bus travelers on our handy public transportation in San Francisco. Here's a few picks by the people you walk by on the street everyday. :)

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason (2003)

Edgar Drake is a rare piano expert summoned by his British government to travel to the Burmese jungle for his piano expertise. Set amidst the steamy jungle scene and an exotic culture, this soft spoken fellow finds himself completing his instrument tuning duties for an eccentric war surgeon and finding a more rewarding purpose for his placement in this compelling landscape. He and his employer are able to encourage camaraderie and understanding between the British and the local villagers through music.

The Wendy Dilemma by Dr. Dan Kiley (1984)

Using the archetypal character of Peter Pan's Wendy as a model, Dr. Kiley breaks down the tendencies of many women to overly coddle or mother their children or their significant other. He characterizes the many acts of self-sacrifice these women endure and explores the idea of self-pity as an embedded inner voice that allows and validates the continued self-deprecation, i.e. the bending over backwards with reciprocation that a lot of ladies have decided must be par for the relationship course.

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)

This is the second of a trilogy of lively biographies by Morris on the 26th President of the United States. Meticulously researched, his eight years of office are chronicled including major historical feats like his "big stick" policies swung against monopolies in the market and his realized dreams of the Panama Canal among innumerable others. These are smoothly integrated with vignettes portraying just the type of presidential  "day-in-the-life" incidences that can only be shared by Teddy and recovered personal writings.      

Spend a few extra surfing seconds promoting literacy

Do you know what a CAPTCHA is? Yeah, neither did I. It happens to be that begrudging box full of wavy numbers and letters at the bottom of some secure web pages. You are forced to reiterate its indecipherable contents as a security measure ensuring that you are you, and not some computer program trying to generate spam. They are tedious to say the least-- particularly when you inadvertently mistype a 'q' instead of the desired '9', thus mucking up your whole process of registration on the site. Now that really gives me a bit of web rage.

That's why I was pleasantly surprised to see a bibliophile's CAPTCHA while verifying my intent to email an online mag article to myself on Democracy Now!

reCAPTCHA is a project out of Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department and they claim to put this pesky precautionary puzzle to good use. Instead of writing codes containing the meaningless sequences of characters, reCAPTCHA has teamed with the Internet Archive to post words that folks can correctly retype, while also digitizing the word as part of a literacy project. Each CAPTCHA is a chance to make thousands of famous pieces of literature available to all in the public domain--a few words at a time. Here are the actual skematics of why human edit skills are needed to complete this feat.

Ingenious! If you have a need for CAPTCHAs for security and spam prevention, help recapture the written word for all to enjoy.

 

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi- Some Ramblings

  To live as an object of ridicule and abuse for a patriarchal culture.

To have little refuge in dedicated service to career or schooling. To feel your first sense of individualism and personal fulfillment in the shackles of prostitution.

And finally to glimpse personal worth at the very hour when your life will be taken.

These are the tribulations of the Egyptian woman Firdaus, a murderer devoid of remorse who will meet her executioner in a matter of days. She endures abuse,rape, genital mutilation, homelessness, prostitution. Her most soul-wrenching defeat, however, is being told that she is not "respectable". Through the rich story-within-a-story framework of Woman at Point Zero, the allegorical character barely impacts the page at her first introduction. She is transparent and ghost-like, as if she is already a spirit , perfectly resigned to barely owning her own existence at this point. She begins to share her story with a young female psychiatrist (presumed to be autobiographically based on El Saadawi), who has doubts as to her own worthiness in her professional endeavors as an Egyptian woman seeking commonalities for a dialogue on the female experience.

Though there are no blatant references to tenets of faith or political underpinnings that may be used to perpetuate the mistreatment of females, the use of scene from small village to cosmopolitan Cairo and the presence of the Nile itself indicate both historical context and the age-old plight of misogyny. Firdaus also sets up independent practice as a high-class prostitute along the banks of the Nile. The money and the deception of having choice for the first time in her life empower her and she mentions being able to peel away masks from her countenance. They may represent throwing off acceptance of a system that seeks to keep her meek and inferior. She may be dropping her layers of oppression and innocence in order to finally shine before being snuffed out.   

Concerning her perceptions of physical presence, she chooses to imagine the setting of an eclipse in the penetrating eyes of the people who have made her feel love and hope. As the whites of their eyes and their equally dark centers expand to her imagined sizes of earth and sun, they meld together and become dark and indistinguishable. It seems as if she is looking for something mystical, for the magical realism of natural phenomena to shake up her life.

Only through inflicting violence and smiting a man who seeks to control her does she truly feel she has been released from the bondage of the tunnel vision of oppression. She has executed her first and last show of dominance.

Slave to the Page

Hello community! My name is Kasey and I aim to be your guru, your go-to girl, and your page-turning comrade through this blog named for me-- the Belle of the Book. We will be delving into book news, reviews, literary analysis, random tangents of mine and yours, and anything else falling under the blessed category of the written word. Get excited. It promises to be a fictitiously fabulous journey.