Taking a Break

A belated message: I will be taking a break from this blog to focus on history-related writing

The Time Traveller's Wife

The Time Traveller’s Wife

I was an awkward child in middle school.  Seventh grade was a social minefield, now littered with memories of when my best friend became too cool for me, I mispronounced ‘vagina’ in front of the entire class, everyone aside from me seemed to know how to flirt, and, looking back at photographs, I realize that I was a bit chubby.  It wasn’t until my freshman year of college, when I suddenly realised that I was pretty, and even desirable.  I started then, to really date in earnest.  I loved the rush I got from first meeting someone, after the first date, and the first kiss.  Now, seven years later, I’m exhausted.  I watch my friends from high school and undergrad getting engaged, married, and having children, and I can’t help but think, “How can you be so sure, so satisfied?” 

Reading through The Time Traveller’s Wife, I was a little envious of Clare, the female protagonist, who as a young child meets Henry, her time traveling husband.  Henry arrives in a meadow near young Clare’s childhood home.  He arrives as an adult, into Clare’s childhood.  Clare then, grows up with the certainty that one day, in her own future, she will meet Henry and they will marry.   Although she goes through her own difficulties as an adolescent, she knows, she has that sense of certainty that so many breakups wear down.  However, throughout the book she remained real and plausible to me.  She was struck by doubts, longing, and “consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.”  Her marriage to Henry didn’t cause her to lose her individuality, to become a ‘we’.  Henry remarked of her, “Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door.  She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something.  I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone.”  Clare herself admits later, as a secret, that sometimes she is glad when Henry disappears on one of his time travelling trips. 

Now, why is it that in today’s society it seems so hard to be an ‘I’?  Why the rush to become a ‘we’?  A relationship isn’t moving forward unless you move in together and spending a Friday night alone is looked upon with pity.  We never stop, ashamed to be caught in public with nothing to do, no phone to check, no friend to talk to.  According to my Facebook page (a dubious source at best) true happiness is getting engaged, married, or having a baby.  While I don’t disagree that all of these events are cause for celebration, why wait for their appearance to be ecstatically happy?  As an alternative, I propose we all spend a little more time getting to know ourselves, before rushing to find someone who we believe will complete us. 

Clare and Henry loved one another passionately; I have no doubt about that.  In the final chapters of the book, Henry dies, the date and manner of his death known to him but unrevealed to Clare.  There was something beautiful, and selfless in this act that brought tears streaming relentlessly down my cheeks.  This was a love story, but a love story of two individuals, who rather than completing one another, made something that was greater than the whole that each of them was.  

Not an epiphany, but still a pleasant thought

I had an idea, born of a passion, that came to me while perched in the candlelit corner of The Windmill, a bar in Brixton.  Swathes of no-longer-sticky tape clung in peeling ribbons from the ceiling and above the bar a floral teapot exhaled dustily beside a wooden model of a conestoga wagon.  A faint smell of stale sweat emanated from the woman beside me, clad in triple-strap Birkenstocks, green cargo pants, and a sleeveless white hooded top.  Further away, the cocky guitarist on stage cranked his amp up again, exacerbating my ears with piercing highs while the girls at the next table analysed the structure of the wax dripping from a tall red candle crammed into the mouth of an empty Jack Daniel's bottle.  I noticed one of the girls had a rolled up cigarette tucked behind one ear, crisp, waiting, and filtered.  I had just started reading a new book, The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger, 2004) and was immediately struck by the beautiful simplicity of its prose.

I love this feeling, the feeling of being struck by a book, of knowing that a great adventure awaits within its pages.  However, I wonder, why are readers still settling for less than feeling struck by their latest read?  Like a mediocre relationship, we allow ourselves to 'escape' within inferior, less than witty repartee and repetitive plot lines.  Therefore, I propose a change, a breakup if you will.

A few years ago, the BBC posted a list of 100 books, and they estimated that most people had not read more than six of the titles.  I aim to read my way through this list, tracking my thoughts and experiences  as I go along.  Throughout this journey, I will also, of course, be reading other books: books I stumble on in a bookstore, books that are recommended, and books that are 30 pence at the library book sale.  Why do something like this?  Good books deserve to be shared.  They deserve to be written about, talked about, thought about, and I want my words to applaud the efforts of a great writer.

BBC Book Challenge

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Divine Comedy - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo