How to win at reading Agatha Christie.

Now, before we begin here, I ought to let you know why I am qualified to write this list.  I am an Agatha Christie devotee - and have guessed the endings of a good many of her books, which is no mean mental feat, I must say.  I have only been truly surprised by the twist ending of one book in my entire life, and it wasn't one of hers.*  I have read all but one of Madame Christie's stories.  (It's one about Poirot going to the dentist, and finding it is the quest of my life.) I've seen the movies, the TV show, and read commentaries on her.  I subscribed to both the UK and US Agatha Christie newsletters, which has proven rather pointless as they're exactly the same. I own the Agatha Christie Who's Who.  I once even went to a meeting of the local Murder on the Orient Express book club.

(These are some of my Agatha Christie Books. The hardbacks are not shown.)

So, obviously, I know what I'm talking about here.

My mom once asked my Grandpa, who was a surgeon and knew every answer on Jeopardy (and so was, clearly, a genius), if people really could guess the ends.  "You can guess," he said, "but you'll guess wrong."

Now, with all due respect to Grandpa, you can guess right.  The likelihood that you'll get every detail right is slim, but you can guess who did the foul murder.  I'm not a surgeon and I only know Jeopardy questions that relate to the Beatles and Johannes Gutenberg, so if I can do it you can too.

Basically, Pay attention. Use zee little gray cells!

This, really, is the only thing you have to do. People claim that she doesn't give you all the clues to the mysteries - but Agatha Christie herself declared that was not true.  You just can't read an Agatha Christie novel lazily or with your brain turned totally off.  If you're serious about guessing, you must pay attention. This manifests itself in a number of ways.

1. Nothing is arbitrary. 

This is something all the best mystery people do.  You have to assume that everything - every passing remark, or thing noticed or action taken is significant.  Everything is connected.  These books are like... baclava. Or spider webs. They seem delicate and fluffy, but they're labor intensive and carefully organized.  Recognizing that will help you immensely.  To use an example from a Dorothy Sayers book, Have His Carcass, putting together what it means that Paul Alexis's joints hurt after activity, and that he refused to shave - seemingly tiny things that are mentioned off-hand - have to do with each other solves the whole mystery.

2. Don't assume you won't be able to guess because there will be historical things you won't get.

I sometimes complain about this with Sherlock Holmes - occasionally the stories seem dependent on facts that, had I lived back in those good old days, I might have known.  However, only once - once, mind - in all my readings of Agatha Christie (in Murder on the Orient Express) did I think that there was something I couldn't have gotten because it was a historical fact. And if I was British I wouldn't have missed it.  I'm not a history buff, so you can't claim to be fooled by this.

3. NEVER write anyone off. 

Poirot himself is forever explaining to Hastings that he suspects everyone until the very last minute.  And you ought to do the same!  Don't fall into the habit so many Agatha Christie characters do themselves - pinning their money on one character being the murderer, and making all the facts bend to fit the theory. It just doesn't work that way.  You have to take every piece of evidence against each person and add it to their list.  Then, at the end, you see whose evidence is the most convicting and ba da bing! You have your murderer.

4. Think dirty.

To half-spoil Hercule Poirot's Christmas, when the murdered man boasts of having sons born on "the wrong side of the blanket," (after taking careful note of it, per number 1) think about it.  He's got illegitimate sons, eh?  Are any of them around? This woman has died and there's a chap there whose half her age.  Could he be her son? Use a weird mix of logic and creativity when you think about people's social stations or ages.  Never believe people when they say who they are.

5. Enjoy yourself!

If you were a mystery writer, you would totally mess with people's heads, wouldn't you?  Agatha Christie did exactly that in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and it made her famous.  It drove people NUTS. And it's fantastic. Think of the wackiest explanations you can.  You never know - it might be right.

a volcanic ensemble

Moderate adoration.  Or maybe not moderate.  What can I say, the man oozes personality. 

Everybody is getting married right and left.  A friend and an acquaintance, both twenty years old, got hitched within the past couple of weeks.  (Not to each other.) What's the deal?  I didn't realize I would reach the proverbial age when all my friends would begin trotting down the aisle quite so soon.  Do people usually get married at 20?  Maybe these cider in lieu of champagne marriages are more widespread than I was aware.  21 and unmarried seems to make me practically an old maid.  

I'm trying to write my diary every day, and have also recently decided (like, as in this afternoon) to try to read a book every day, or at least finish one a day.   I think it's doable.  How is that a word?  Doable.  Is my spell check weak or something?

The internet is boring me right now.  I go online, delete emails from Teen Vogue, scan a weary eye over my Facebook page, read blogs - and then just sit there.  I feel like there's this super fun thing to do online that keeps my friends glued to it, but I don't know what it is.  I also feel like there is some secret site where all the cool people in the world go and talk about cool stuff together, and make themselves even cooler.  And it's called 

Could somebody kindly direct me to this site?  I mean, it has to be out there.   Some people I know could not be as cool as they are without some kind of outside help.  It just isn't possible.   Is it like a club?  If you people would let me join I would be very grateful and admiring and stumble over myself to write nice comments.  Or wait! Maybe I won't because that wouldn't be cool.  Aloofness is often deemed cool, from what I've observed.  This learning to be cool, studying for coolness, if you will, is certainly a tricky business. 

This actually used to bother me a lot more than it does now - but lately I've taken to embroidering "As My Whimsey Takes Me" on hankies, and it takes my mind off of it. 

No joke. Getting rather obsessed, what? Almost embarrassin', don't you know!

(Later edit: Ugh.  Is this too weird of me? No weirder than people slobbering over pictures of Johnny Depp on their blogs, right?  I'm just showing my adoration for Dorothy Sayers in a rather peculiar manner, that's all.)

I'm feeling a bit inferior right now.  Everyone is funnier and nicer and better at writing and taking pictures than I am.  But, oddly, I'm not too depressed by it.  It's an okay feeling of inferiority.  Like, I'm busy admiring the awesome people, and not so worried about myself.  I read some F. Scott Fitzgerald the other day, and even though I knew I would never be able to write like that, and the stories themselves were depressing, I didn't get mopey at all.  Felt very good, actually.  Just last year The Bell Jar was making me batty.  It's getting better all the time. I used to get mad at my school (Now I can't complain!) The teachers who taught me weren't cool...

Sorry. Lost control of myself there.  Writing singing down is almost impossible.  It just doesn't work in this (ahem!) medium.

I don't know why I expect greatness from myself.  I've never tried writing, so I don't see why I should get all depressed when I can't conjure up some fabulous poem out of the air with a flick of the wrist.  I'm quite happy being a nice ordinary egg.  

I'm sure there's some Ben Franklin quote that would just be a killer post title for this.

When I someday make my thunderous slide into financial ruin, I will at least have things to read and listen to on the way down.  And I won't have to blame something vague and confusing like the stock market. (Which hopefully means that I will never have to learn anything about the stock market.  The only reason I would do so is if I wanted to complain to people about how it did me wrong.)  I'll just point a long, bony finger to the bookcase and the ipod and the whole story will be told.  I am the most gluttonous book and music buyer I have ever met.   I never want to find out how much money I have spent on music downloads.  Never, never, never.  Knowing without a shadow of a doubt that I could have had a car instead would make me feel too guilty.  I like my happy ignorance.

I don't know why I feel more guilty about buying music than I do about buying books.  If the books and music I own were sort of graphed together, it would clearly show that the music has got more use.  I guess I feel less guilty because books can theoretically make me smarter.  The music I listen to can only boost my self-esteem a bit, give me tinnitus and make my brain cells burst in tiny, multi-colored explosions.  (According to Bill Bryson, you only get one lump of brain cells - and they don't get re-made or replaced.  So I really don't have any to spare for math.  I need all the cells I can get for other things.  It's vitally important.)

I would like to say that I am making a solemn vow to knot the purse strings and be frugal from now on.   No more five dollar amazon albums for you, Kelsey! Put down that paperback!  But the honest truth is, I don't feel particularly repentant. At all.  

Wait a moment, I thought I felt... No, not a bit. 

Now that I can practically smell my own room approaching (29 days to closing), I have decided to recommend a bit of prudence to myself.  Just suggested it.  You know, avoid buying tatty paperbacks of The Complete Works of Sophocles just because I know I ought to read it, and instead go for things I know I will read for sure.  Right now my bookcase gives off a much stronger aura of well-read girl than I actually deserve - I've bought stacks of learned looking paperbacks en masse at sales and never got around to reading them.  Shameful, but there it is. 

So, when I go to the library sale this weekend, I solemnly swear that I will not to grab every book I see, nor will I purchase any of the dubious "surprise" boxes that I know, deep down, will mostly contain murderously boring old textbooks.  I swear.  Or may I be chopped up and made into soup. 

I must impose some moderation.  Otherwise it's all going to end in some sort of turn on the body in the library theme. 

books about death and crime, mostly

Hey, my dashboard changed! My hands are flapping about in a helpless manner. This feels weird. Unsettled whimperings.

I started reading Rebecca this evening - whoo boy.  Danvers has just taken her on the horrible tour of Rebecca's room.  The atmosphere is incredible.  I'm sure a lot of people probably say they relate to the main character - but I'm going to say so too.  Maybe because she's young and awkward, I just see a great deal of similarity between us.  I feel a bit desperate to please people sometimes, and I bump into things and hide from people.  Schoolgirlish, self-concious. And I'm not good about clothes and hair and things like that.
Maybe I'm in a morbid kind of mood or something, but I'm getting terribly wrapped up in the story.  I need to see the movie after this.  I think Hitchcock is almost the only person who could have got the particular feel of this book right in a film.  It sometimes seems like he's driving off fumes, if you know what I mean.   He can put a fat lot of sinister thoughts into your head with a quite remarkably tiny pinch of scary images.  (Of course, I'm saying only he could have done Rebecca right and I haven't seen it, but I'm basing this bold and completely un-researched assertion on the feel I've gotten from the Hitchcock films I have seen.  And didn't it get an academy award?  The only one he got?  Or am I making this up?)

Okay, I have an awesome life.
Last night I went to a meeting of the Orient Express book club at Barnes and Noble.  Oh yes.  On the way there, I decided that I wanted it to be either:
1. So horrible that it was funny
2. Young-ish people obviously reading scary psycho books, so I would know after getting a peek at them that I shouldn't even sit down
3. Or actually good.  Pleasantly geeky

It was the latter.  They're all at least fifty years old, and have been meeting for twelve years.  They were very friendly.  The leader lady told me that they read for pleasure - don't dissect things (yessss!).  They go to mystery dinner theatre shows.  The leader asked me if I'd read any mystery books lately, and I mentioned Dorothy Sayers.  "Oh, which version of him do you like better?" She asked me.  And - get this - I KNEW WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT!  I felt like a genius.  (To explain - when Dorothy Sayers wrote Lord Peter Wimsey, she made him a cross between Bertie Wooster and Fred Astaire and intended to do a few books and then marry him off and be done.  But, from what I've read, she got attached to him and, in the later books, made him a more complete character.  Some people like the early, more Bertie Wooster LPW more than the more human later one. I don't know which I like better.  From a pure, shallow enjoyment standpoint, the Bertie Wooster version is more fun.  But I am hugely attached to the more human version too.  So I don't know.  That's what I said to the leader lady.)

I am so going again.  I have to find a mystery book involving some sort of royal personage.  The club reads books by topic, so you don't have to buy anything.  Nice, I think.  It's a sort of title-swop, I suppose.

Also, I am reading A Short History of Nearly Everything.  You already know, dear blog, that I adore - worship - Bill Bryson.  I have dithered about how hilarious and witty he is, and how I feel well-traveled and somewhat brainier when I come away from his books.  Now, I can say (with incredulity) that he is actually capable of making me take an interest in science.  Or at least make me want to keep reading a very long book about it.  Right now I'm reading a bit about how Yellowstone park is basically one enormous volcano. (The sort that look like a champagne glass below the surface, from what I understand.  The name begins with a c and sounds like caldera or something similar.)  From the hints he is giving, I think we will probably all die if it blows.  Oh well.  At least it would be quick and exciting, what?

what's all this about lonely gods?

Feeling rather dithery today.  Probably been reading for too long, if that's possible.

Question:
How important is it that I investigate Doctor Who?  I have a vague feeling that I would like it if I did look into it.  The people I know who like it also list The Hitchhiker's Guide and Monty Python as favorites - both of which I happen to adore.  Plus I wouldn't feel so left out when my mates have these sort of doctor who worship fests on facebook.

Question:
What will I do after I've finished all the Lord Peter Wimsey books? I've only got two more. Read the 23 other books I checked out from the library, I suppose.  But it will be a little sad.  What a delightful couple of weeks of reading it has been, what?

Question:
Will I ever have a good French class?  So far it's been 2-0, baddies decidedly winning.  The bummer is, I really do want to learn French.  I know I'm missing clues when Poirot says things in French. Unfair, that's what I call it.

This weekend, I spent about three hours on wikipedia, looking up alcoholic beverages.  I did this, she hastily explained, because I read a lot of books where people get themselves a drink, or toddle over to the bar, or offer their guests refreshment, about every three pages.  And I never, EVER know what the drinks really are or what they're supposed to look like.  Well, I should say I never used to know - I do now.  I drew little pictures of the drinks I come across about most often (brandy, sherry, whiskey and sodas, etc. in their appropriate glasses, thank you very much!) and then painted them in appropriate colors.   I'm positively bursting with information.  Port, for instance, is just wine that comes from Portugal.  How totally understandable and logical is that?  I always thought port was something quite different than wine.  And Madeira - also wine - just has to come from the Madeira islands.  I finally get why they use a snifter - though I will never understand why they had to give the glass such a silly name. I always thought it was just affectation, holding a glass that way.

Anyways, I think I am going to make a whole set of charts about things in books.  I like to picture what I'm reading very accurately, as you can see.
So far, I've thought to look up:

Types of noses
Carriages
Difficult foods.  The sort characters get at fancy restaurants, I mean.
Jane Austen attire and miscellany
The more obscure types of furniture.  I can guess what a hip bath looks like, but I'd rather know.
Possibly, if I am very brave, a less pictorial chart about levels of English nobility and all that.  It wouldn't be fun but it would be very helpful
Particular types of facial differences - ears, for instance - that detectives use when identifying people/bodies

I'm sure I'll think of more.
On the subject of obscure information, I also looked up gunshot residue the other day, and read some very interesting things.  I wanted to know if people could conceivably fake suicides these days, the way they do in Agatha Christie novels.  It seems like it would be pretty darn hard nowadays, with all the tests I'm sure the cops have at their disposal.  The only way it could work is, obviously,  if you managed to get some of residue on the dead person's hand - and the only really safe way I could think of doing that is by getting them to shoot the gun earlier in the day.  For example, pretend there's a party at a country house and Lord so and so has just bought a new gun or is slightly eccentric and makes reproduction pistols in his attic. If everybody is cajoled into shooting the thing, you would have realistic residue on your future corpse's hand.

Oh. My. Gosh.  Am I really this insane?  I'm not planning to murder anybody, I promise. I just wondered.

Er... I think I'm going to go for a walk.

broadway always wears a smile

It's been a while, has not it?  It feels so good to stretch my narcissistic blog muscles again.

SO! I turned 18 during Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or whatever that monstrosity was called - guess what I will be watching when I turn 21?  (Puts on posh British accent while doing foofy hand-motions) The American Ballet Theatre performing Giselle.  Yes!  How infinitely chic-er can you get? (I must be very tired, because I almost made some very, very bad, pun-laden jokes about the leap - see? - from bad movie to good ballet.)  We are going to New York and Boston for an actual, real vacation.  We NEVER go on vacation.  We always go to something - a speech tournament, Aunt Nancy's birthday - and pretend that it is a vacation.   I have to pretend pretty hard sometimes.

Anyways, I'm dreadfully excited.  In Boston we are going to see John Williams directing the Boston Pops.  My dear sister almost pees her pants when she thinks about it.  She wants to make movie music for a living, and he's her favorite composer.  When I think about Boston, I also get very excited because after three years of waiting, I will finally be able to buy a sweatshirt with Harvard on it, spelled phonetically.

In New York we are also going to see (triumphant horn blow!) How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  Well, Dad and I are going to see How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying - Mom and Cee are going to see Daniel Radcliffe.

Because I must burn off this excitement or I will never go to sleep, here is a small pictorial representation of what this trip will be:

I'M RATHER EXCITED.

I like New York very much.

Okay, right now I am going to think of every song I can... um... think of that mentions New York.

"New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!"
"Autumn in New York, something something ah something..."
"NYC, just got here this morning! Three buck, two bags, one me!"
"I guess the Lord must be in New York City..."

Uh...
Oh dear. This is bad.  One of the songs is from Annie, for crying out loud! Think, Kelsey!
Do songs like "the Lady is a Tramp" and "Uptown Girl" and that rap that says something about Tribeca count?  New York is implied...

Oh! oh! on a side note, I've read like five Dorothy Sayers novels this week.  Lord Peter Wimsey's piffle is just so delightful, I can't seem to stop.

I read somewhere that Christopher Paolini is digging a hobbit house in his backyard.  I would almost - almost - write and ask if that's true.  Because that's just great.

On the subject of hobbits, the guy who played Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie is going to be perfect as Bilbo.  The man can say, "I need a cuppa tea" with such believable passion... he's going to be a dead cert.

These side notes were meant to distract the reader away from the fact that I know four measly songs off the top of my head that directly mention New York.  Pathetic.

"You know what it's like when you try and tell someone what your dream is like? It's so boring because it evaporates in the telling somehow. A novel for me is an attempt to build a kind of hermetic vessel that can contain this essence you've been dreaming about, this feeling that you don't want to evaporate. You keep it enclosed and you don't tell anyone about it until you build a vessel that can contain it and keep it at its maximum intensity and purity — that's the novel."  

Philip Pullman.  I don't know if I like him a ton, but this is spot on.

I JUST THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW, BLOG, THAT THE FOURTH OF OCTOBER - A DAY WHICH BEFORE TEN MIUTES AGO WAS GOING TO BE HORRID (A MONDAY, THREE QUIZZES, TWO ASSIGNMENTS) - IS NOW OFFICIALLY GOING TO BE THE BEST DAY IN A VERY LONG TIME.  WHY, YOU MIGHT ASK? BECAUSE, ON THAT DAY

THIS IS A PIECE OF NEWS THAT MERITS ALL CAPS. REJOICE AND BE GLAD IN IT.

Tuesday:
I bought the book this afternoon.  And I would like to add that this is the first book I have ever, EVER bought in hardcover the day after it came out.  EVER.  Now you see how truly important and marvelous this happening was, don't you?  I hesitated to buy sunglasses for five bucks this afternoon, but paid twenty two dollars for this book.  But it was worth it.  I like to think that Mr. and Mrs. Bryson will use the money I spent to go out to breakfast or buy a new toaster or something.

And on we march through the reading list.  Finished The Hobbit today. I wish it had taken longer.

As all things come to an end, even this story, a day came at last when they were in sight of the country where Bilbo had been born and bred, where the shapes of the land and of the trees were as well known to him as his hands and toes. Coming to a rise he could see his own Hill in the distance, and he stopped suddenly and said:

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known. 

Gandalf looked at him. 'My dear Bilbo!' he said, 'Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.

From Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Some freakishly good writing, in my opinion.

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?  For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was valuable to herself the way Briony was?  Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?  Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it... Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman?  If the answer was yes, then the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone else's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.  One could drown in irrelevance.  But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had.  This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely.  For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers.  She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it."

From "Nine Notes on Book Covers" by Orhan Pamuk

I'm reading Other Colors at the moment, and it's definitely one of the best books I've ever encountered.  It just sucks you in.  But, anyways, here are some truths I enjoyed this morning:

• If a novelist can finish a book without dreaming of its cover, he is wise, well-rounded, and a fully formed adult, but he's also lost the innocence that made him a novelist in the first place

• Detailed depictions of heroes on book covers insult not just the author's imagination but also his readers'. 

•  When designers decide that The Red and the Black deserves a red and black jacket, or when they decorate books entitled Blue House or Chateaux with illustrations of blue houses or chateaux, they do not leave us thinking they've been faithful to the text but wondering if they've even read it.

•  If, years after reading a book, we catch a glimpse of its cover, we are returned at once to that long-ago day when we curled up in a corner with that book to enter the world hidden inside. 

From the Guardian Books Blog

By Tom Edge - Does size matter?

It occurs to me that the simple definition of novel versus novella could usefully be updated to account for ultra-sized works of fiction, those titanically-proportioned books so often taken to be the defining criterion for admission into the Serious Novelists Club.

Ulysses, The Corrections, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: All are books wide enough to carry the author's name horizontally across the spine when shelved.

HP and the Order of the Phoenix, Infinite Jest, Moby Dick: These are the kind of books that furniture removal men hate, but which can also be used as furniture (small stools, door stops and so on).

At present we have the short story (small), novella (larger, but still small) and then the novel. Perhaps we need a new word for the type of 600 pages-plus book that will concuss a Chihuahua if knocked from the kitchen table...

Like comedies at the Oscars, short works often seem overlooked in the canon of Great Novels, physically dwarfed on the bookshelf and struggling to compete for critical attention. We seem impressed by marathon efforts. Short stories, on the other hand, get relatively short shrift.

The organisers of NaNoWriMo say "we don't use the word "novella" because it doesn't seem to impress people the way "novel" does." They're right. Which is a shame, as there are some wonderful writers out there who rarely, if ever, overstep the 300 page mark.

At the Back of the North Wind.

When he knew he was coming awake, he would sometimes try hard to keep hold of the words of what seemed a new song, one he had not heard before—a song in which the words and the music somehow appeared to be all one; but even when he thought he had got them well fixed in his mind, ever as he came awaker—as he would say—one line faded away out of it, and then another, and then another, till at last there was nothing left but some lovely picture of water or grass or daisies, or something else very common, but with all the commonness polished off it, and the lovely soul of it, which people so seldom see, and, alas! yet seldomer believe in, shining out.

"Could it be all dreaming, do you think, sir?" he asked anxiously.

"I daren't say, Diamond," I answered. "But at least there is one thing you may be sure of, that there is a still better love than that of the wonderful being you call North Wind. Even if she be a dream, the dream of such a beautiful creature could not come to you by chance."

Care to read it yourself? Project Gutenberg is so nice.

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing"

"This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and full of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them."

Read by...

Ugh.  I think my least favorite Austen character is Anne Elliot's horrid sister Mary.  I despise her.
I'm going through an Austen phase, re-reading all the books (except for the only one on my book list, bad person that I am) and I'm enjoying them terribly.  I've always said I didn't like Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion as much as, say Emma, but they were so lovely.  I actually listened to them on audiobooks from the library - read by Nadia May.  Since we've been taking moments to acknowledge the greatness of people these days, let's take a moment  for the great audiobook readers of the world.






A long moment. They deserve it.






Prunella Scales for Emma and Nadia May for all the rest of the Austen books.  Nadia May for Till We Have Faces. Wonderful, wonderful Nigel Lambert for Dog Friday (the best book on tape ever, possibly) and There's a Viking in My Bed.   When I was a kid, my family swore eternal devotion to Jim Weiss, reader of The Cat of Bubastes,who also reads a set of endearingly oddball short stories (in which he sang as well. If I recall correctly, one song ran, "Snow white, Rose Red joy was sure to follow from the life they led.  Rose Red, Snow White something-something-else will find delight!").  Geoffrey Howard for his exceptional, suitably scary Out of the Silent Planet.  Whoever reads the version of The Screwtape Letters my library has on tape.  I worshiped Kate Maberly (still do, as a matter of fact) for Catherine, Called Birdy.  Listened to it almost every day for a year or two. The tapes are so worn that, every once in a while, her voice suddenly pitches down about three octaves.  I expected Jeremy Northam's read of The Silver Chair to be excellent and, big surprise! it was. Tim Curry is fabulous, and Daniel Handler reads excellently.  Listening to the author is usually a let down, but Lemony Snicket and Bill Bryson are both delightful readers. I could go on and on and on about good books on tape.  Or, audiobooks, I ought to call them.  But in my head they're still books on tape.  I'm a 90's kid.

Let me end by saying I LOVE AUDIOBOOKS.  I am a huge geek about them, and I don't care who knows it.  They make car trips ten thousand, and house cleaning a hundred thousand times more enjoyable.

Okay, last thing.  On the way to Disneyland last week, we stopped at Starbucks for breakfast (because we are the stopping kind.  We believe in gum and snack runs.)  And, right next to the Starbucks was an old Hollywood video, turned into a sale bookstore.  So what did we do? What would any sane person do?  Go in, of course. I love cheap books.
But, the point of this very long tangent is that, while in this shop I found this:

A little teensy book on tape!  You plug headphones in on the side! And only one dollar.  The audio quality isn't the best, but it's still pretty sweet.  And the absurdity of a line on the other side of it which reads "Written and read by the author" doesn't even annoy me.  I love audiobooks.  I'd like to go back to that book shop too.  Good stuff.  I got Ibsen and a huge book of Hercule Poirot mysteries for a dollar each.  Also, there's something pleasantly absurd about pouring over shelves of books with a giant Nicole Kidman head looking down at you.

"Bye, bye Basil!"

Everything is standing a toss or keep inspection at the moment, even books and blogs. I apologize heartily to all the blogs I un-followed.  I doubt you care whether one geek in California un-follows you or not, I still feel sorry. But, it is time to simplify! Everything must go! Besides the practical (and rather uninspiring) advantage in having less stuff while moving, I don't want so many things.  Too much stuff.
Although, I don't want less books.  I've done three exceedingly painful go-through sessions with my mom sitting on a chair saying heartless things like, "You have two copies of A Severe Mercy? Why do you have two copies?" and "Ugh, That Pickwick Papers looks moldy." And then I have to hotly explain why two copies are necessary and besides they're both paperback, and it isn't moldy it just looks moldy because we bought it at that falling-down shop downtown that was going out of business. And moldy cover or not it's still quite readable, it just smells a teensy bit...

We gather today in memory of all the worthy books who served their owner well, and have now moved on to a better place. (Goodwill.)
Oh dear, a whole lovely memorial service is playing itself in my head.

To commemorate the getting-rid-of of so many fine books, here are two notable graduates from the Mostly Used Sometimes New Always Loved library of yours truly.

Ugliest cover:

And it's broken in half.  One of her weird world domination by evil science ones, if I remember rightly.

Prettiest cover (or at least, Prettiest Spine):

That is very nice looking, I think.  

Aren't book covers fun?  My new obsession is book covers.

I'm lost, lost, lost.

Not actually.  I just couldn't think of a post title.

Actually, I am lost. Bewildered or terrified may be more the right word.
I'm writing my second English essay (well, obviously, I'm not - I'm here being a first-class procrastinator) for British Lit this week.  Eeks.  I'm probably a theatre major - maybe graphic design - the only essays expected of me thus far in my education have been semi-illiterate theatre critiques and compare and contrast papers. I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THIS.  I don't know how to pick apart sentences and explain why the author used that word there and this one here! Yikes.
Why I chose Paradise Lost for my book, I don't know.  We just read some fun pieces from The Spectator, William Congreave, and A Modest Proposal for pity's sake! - all wacky things I could have found a lighthearted thesis to write on.  But I somehow thought up views of hell in Paradise Lost.  What was I thinking? Not only do I have no clue - I mean, not even a smidgen of a notion - how to write literary analysis in the first place, how do I approach the exceedingly delicate topic of hell gently?  I mean, torture vs. torment is my theme! Let's just plow right in there, Kelsey! Oh boy.

Okay, do these:

Sorts of quizzes crack anybody else up?  Gosh.  I mean, if you know Austen pretty well (or even just the movies, really) you can totally figure out what answer leads to who and make sure you end up with Marianne. I tried to answer truthfully, and was surprised to get Elizabeth.  I usually consider myself pretty darn Anne Elliot-y.  Or maybe I'm more Elinor-ish. Ah, well.  I suppose we'll just have to be content with Lizzie. 

The only quiz result I've been truly satisfied with - and, just so you know, I do not take these dumb quizzes very often - was a how similar are you to Dan Bergstein one on Sparkslife.  I answered with complete honestly, and the questions were not obvious at all, yet I got like a 92.  So ha ha.  I take all the victories I can get. 

That's all I have to say really.  So I guess it was just an boasting post.  Boast post.  Ha.  Oh dear. 

Quick question for other Austen freaks - does Jennifer Ehle ever stand on a floor like that in the movie?  I just don't remember that floor in the BBC film.  I know Keira Knightly does in the whole "look how beautiful Pemberly is don't you wish you'd said yes" scene. Can this perplexing mystery be solved by any other means than sitting down and watching both adaptations together?  It's a means to the answer which, may I say, can't be proposed lightly.  It's like eight hours of concentrated sitting.  And, in my opinion, even worse than watching, say, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. At least each Lord of the Rings movie is a different story, and if I plead extreme sensitivity to violence or Gollum I get to cover my eyes and take short dozes during the fight scenes. It's really quite a restful movie when you cover your eyes during the fighting.  Just a lot of elves floating about.

yet again, semi-serious. what's the deal these days?

Davy died in A Severe Mercy today.  Something must be seriously out of whack in my brain.  Hormones or indigestion are the only things I can think of that could reasonably explain this excessive weepiness and generally soppy mood I'm in.   I didn't cry the last time she died - but my eyes totally welled up today.  Where is my Ice Queen persona going?  Am I just super, super tired?  I mean, I even got a bit choked up while watching Catch Me If You Can this afternoon! WHAT?! And I never, EVER cry in movies. I've gone round the bend.
Reading A Severe Mercy in the bath this evening, I came to this bit about time:

"I saw with immense clarity that we had always been harried by time.  All our dreams back there in Glenmerle had come true: the schooner Grey Goose under the wind, the far islands of Hawaii in the dark-blue rolling Pacific, the spires of Oxford.  But all the fulfillments were somehow, it seemed to me, incomplete, temporary, hurried.  We wished to know, to savor, to sink in-into the heart of the experience - to possess it wholly.  But there was never enough time; something still eluded us."

"We shall come back, we said, and find it... But there wasn't enough time to go back, way leading onto way.  And if we had gone back, there wouldn't have been time enough then, either, for ahead there would be a terminus. Always."

"Time is our natural environment.  We live in it as we live in the air we breathe.  And we love the air - who has not taken deep breaths of pure, fresh country air, just for the pleasure of it?  How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments.  Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it."

"C.S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?  Or if they did. would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?' Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?"

"... it may appear as a powerful proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home."

Now, sure, this is lovely - and I've always appreciated the logic behind C.S. Lewis' statement.  But, with recent changes in my ideas, this has all taken on a new significance.
My picture of Heaven will always - like everything else in my life, apparently - be tinted by Narnia.  The final chapter of The Last Battle, "Goodbye to Shadowlands" (Oh dear, forgotten how to punctuate chapters. Italics?), gave me chills as a kid.  Still does.  I strongly recommend giving it a read, if you already haven't.  You'll never have so much as a passing thought of harps again.

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan.  And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

"There was a railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands- dead.  The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.  And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.  But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I'm very quote-happy tonight.  But, anyways, I have no problems imagining how lovely Heaven will be. But, as a silly kid, I always imagined that Heaven, the promise of eternal life, meant less to me.  Less in the sense that it wouldn't be the main thing that drew me to God if I weren't a Christian already.  Meaning, knowing there's a reason and explanation for existence, meant more to me.  Heaven was like a very, very nice perk in an already great package. I'm sure half of this was due to simple lack of capacity - the scope of eternity is a bit too much for me to grasp - the temporal concerns of my life on earth are a bit easier to figure out.  But, with all this thinking about idleness and time, the eternal stuff suddenly means more.
The quotes from A Severe Mercy, above, are a very nice (drat, what's the word?  Explanation? No. Something like it though.) picture of unformed, half-recognized ideas I've recently been mulling over.  Even as I imagined my own ideal life, debt-free, in a Wind in the Willows house, or saw future pictures of myself lazily reading in a lovely wooden canoe, or even gliding along in a shining Grey Goose with a "comrade-lover" by my side, I knew somehow, in the back of my mind, that the manifestations of the dreams would never be as good as the dreams.  I can't escape from time.  And, this evening, at this time in my life, the weight of it has never thundered down on me with such force.  I began thinking; all the true idlers i've been reading about - and according to Sheldon Vanauken, many poets, too -  seem desperate to be free, wishing for more time to live. "O for an age so sheltered from annoy/That I may never know the change of the moons". 
But, in this world, there will never be enough time.
It's slightly pathetic that I never put this together until now.
Do you see why, suddenly, heaven has a new significance for me?  Talk about timeless!  Never having to run off to this, no going home in a week, no slogging back to workplace drudgery, no ending. The ultimate idlers' paradise, literally!
This is another post I ought to delete, but shan't.


P.S.  But no way does this mean my idling visions for my little puff of life are a waste of time.  Why not make the best of it?  It may be short, but this life is still important.

think thank thunk

I've been doing some thinking. ("Really?" My dad would say to that, grinning. "You?")  For the umpteenth time, I'm reading A Severe Mercy. I'm trying to figure out why I like it.  The obvious reasons - the beautiful love story, portraits of Oxford life and England, the relationship and correspondence with C.S. Lewis, the writing style itself -  are, well, obvious.  I adore these things - but the aspect I think I relate to the most, is their pre-Christian "pagan" life.  I honestly think that, if I had not become a Christian at a very early age, I would have also worshiped and "adored the mysteries of beauty and love."  Eventually, in the same way, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up a Christian.  No bias at all - I think that's the truth.  (Now that I really think on it - the Narnia books probably would have pulled me in pretty quickly.  I'm not the sort - like the authoress of The Magician's Book - who would have felt betrayed when I learned about the themes behind the Narnia stories. I loved Aslan so much - recognizing the parallels would almost certainly have led me to Christ. I can imagine myself thinking, "well, if that Jesus is anything like Aslan, he's worth looking in to.")
C.S. Lewis talks about feeling the pull of the occult in Surprised By Joy - for me, I think beauty will always have a pull.  When I say beauty, I don't mean physical, human beauty or attractiveness - I mean the pang of joy a line of poetry or a lovely view gives.  Sudden agonizing, splendid stabs of longing.  But, it's just that - an empty longing for something, not the something itself.  It feels like you've just gotten a glimpse, or a half-picture of the real joy, but it's gone, before you can catch it, or even figure out exactly what it is.  If that makes even one drop of sense.
Gee whiz, I sound like a stuffed-up prig.  Erg.  I can't explain it at all without talking like a self-satisfied fool.  Forgive me, dear void, for senseless blogging.
Somewhere in A Severe Mercy, he explains it all a lot better than I ever could - the way, in the end, God was the thing he always longed for - but I can't find the quote.
I'm feeling like the worst walking representation of a wonderful God - and it's terribly convicting. (Though, does anyone ever not feel that way?  I don't know. How could anyone feel any joy if they did?  This is all very messy.)
I shouldn't post this - but I'm going to anyways.  Writing helps me figure things out - and this certainly needs some figuring.