Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell -- Susana Clarke

I thought this book was by Neil Gaiman, and happily picked it up from oddesy. Turns out it's by Susana Clarke, with an intro by Gaiman.  So far, the intro is the best part, but the reviews all say that even though this book is 800 pages long, it leaves you hungry for another 800.  The beginning is kind of weak so far, and in trying to find a book to take with me to Paris and Seattle.  I'm leaving poros tomorrow, so, if this doesn't get better soon, I'll have to leave it till next year. 

The Fourth Hand -- John Irving

This was the last book my dad read.  His bookmark was still in it when i picked it to to read again, with this knowledge to completely skew my opinion of it.  I'm writing this 6 months later and remembering the struggle i had with reading past where he read and feeling it was unfair, but deciding i was finishing it for/with him.  After my dad died i found hearts everywhere, and now, a few seconds after starting to write this, i find a heart in the tile near me to remind me that he is still finishing The Story with me <3

The Bolter -- Frances Osborne

The idea of this book is fun, but a hundred pages is, I realize that there really no plot. I feel halfway inclined to finish it because of the glowing reviews, but there's so much information about random people, that it comes across as a history book written by someone with little skill for creating a page turner.  Don't remember if it affected my dreams, I gave it up a few days ago when I was having nightmares about soldiers shooting each other point blank in a storm.  Both of the sons in this book died around 30 and were soldiers, but there wasn't much of that story told.

Underworld -- Don DeLillo

So, I remember that Ian's best friend, Julian, had given him this book for his birthday back in 99 or 00.  He was really mad because he doesn't read, and thought it was inconsiderate, considering that Julian should have known better. Ian was the king of well thought out gifts.  Julian insisted that if he were to read one book, it should be this. So I read it. Or at least, i started to.  I was also doing my Master's at the time, so i didn't have so much time to devote to it, and it really is a brick of a book.  Anyways, i remember really enjoying it and bring annoyed that Ian wouldn't let me take it back to Greece with me because it had been a birthday present, even if he wasn't going to read it.  Finding it at The Odyssey, I remembered my desire to finish it, but to my dismay, in finding it a real struggle.  It starts off with baseball in Golden Age America, and that's where I'm stuck.  I don't think I will haul it back to California with me next week, it really is a brick of a book.  I'll try again next year.  Def. didn't affect my dreams. 

The Riddle and The Knight -- Giles Milton

I found this book at a restaurant on a beach in Koh Samui where I had a Greek Salad.  It's a really interesting true story about a guy searching for the true story of a knight who claimed to have travelled the world, discovering bizarre creatures and unheard of lands.  Several towns claimed themselves as where he was born or where he died and left his bones. It turns out he may have just been a drunken liar. I remember the drawings in this book as particularly cool linocuts from the original book that he published about his travels, of fat, hairy one eyed creatures and exotically loose women.  I remember the place I found this book every time I think of the story, it was a huge bungalow under the stars and I wanted to stay there all night; it was so warm and lovely, but a huge family came and took up so much space with their yelling kids that I was forced to go back to my hotel that had a thin pool that ran in between the two-storied rooms.  I swam down to the very end and discovered that all of the rooms were empty, save one nearest to mine, and the very end of the pool was in complete darkness and bats were swooping over it to drink.  The other end of the pool stopped right at the street, just a foot or two above eye level, where I could watch locals and tourists wandering by the neon signs for spas where the fish eat your dead skin.

The Divine

The Fourth Way -- P. D. Ouspenski

The Fourth Way was suggested to me by someone I met at Olga's tavern who's name was Brian, but whom we (Jann and I) insisted on calling Briam, because Olga makes it so good.  We'd also had quite a bit if "medicine" (tsipouro, masticha and rosé) and had been crying on and off.  For no reason whatsoever I brought up The Ultimate Frontier and he and Jann got very excited and insisted that this be my next book on this 'journey'.  So far it's quite interesting, although it is just in the format of an interview, or rather, random people asking Ouspenski about his understanding of life, humanity, spirit, etc.  There one thing that stands out to me is that he stands against imagination.  T.U.F. also stood against the Arts as a waste of time.  Ouspenski states (and I'm paraphrasing) that there is no point in imagining things that are not so, and that daydreaming is a waste of our life and it distracts is from our psychic abilities.  To access the other floors of our brain (he says we confine ourselves to the basement and kitchen of a beautiful mansion) we should be aware of ourselves and our functions, breathing, digesting, seeing, etc., and analyzing if they are voluntary, involuntary or two other choices I'm not going to rack my brain to remember (I think I left that knowledge in the basement, I'm currently making a snack in the only other room I can get into).  He says that it is impossible for your average Joe to have complete self awareness without running away with frivolous thoughts for more than a couple of minutes.  I've tried it, he's right. It does become rather tedious.  So is the book, to be honest, but I'm reading it without expecting to understand what is being said exactly and just allowing it to pepper my subconscious with the hopes that someday, if I'm ready to read it again, it will have started to take root.  A pepper root. Although I have a pepper intolerance.  That's OK, I might never even finish it, let alone read it twice.

Corelli's Mandolin -- De Bernières

I've tried very many times to read Corelli's Mandolin (which I always thought had a"Captain " at the head, but apparently (Hollywood be damned) does not), but I could never get past the second chapter. This summer I have solved this hitherto insurmountable problem by skipping the second chapter altogether. I suppose I will go back to it when I've finished the book entirely and am missing something of de B.. Although chapter 2, or THE DUCE (Mussolini), is a character we don't  really meet or care about until later in the book, unless you are reading this book solely for it's historical and political rants, which I find interesting at first, but too tiresome to sit though chapter upon chapter of...I am, of course, talking solely for myself. I'm sure that the political insanity of the time is of much interest to almost any other person reading it.  I would be happy to have enough background to know what's going on, but not so much that I feel that it is two different books, shuffled like a deck of cards in with one another.  I have my suspicions that de B just liked the thought of chapter 2 being named The Duce, because Americans will read "deuce" rather than "duche".  Probably mislaid suspicions.  Glad I skipped it and insisted on reading ahead, (I even got through most of chapter 35, also about el Ducerino).  I'm very much enjoying all of the rest, except for Pelagia calling her father 'moped' (Papakis) and other small annoying Greek translations you'd think would have been caught and set right by now.  It's only been 21 years.  To be fair, though, maybe the editors never got past chapter 2 either. I am not ending on that sentence because it is accidentally too Bryson/Barry endingesque.  Even if this is just for me to read and remember what I have and haven't read, I could never forgive a Brysonberry closing remark.  In conclusion,.

The Golden Notebook -- Lessing

Aborted

The Summer of the Bear -- Bella Pollen

The Summer of the Bear is another book rescued from the pile of sun-bleached pool-side "recyclables".  It was the only brick in the pile that seemed to be without a serial killer or military adventures,  with the added bonus of having a bear in the title which sold me before I could read the back flap.  Like To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is divided into chapters that cycle through the characters one by one: the bear (or his wrestler-owner, I can't make out just yet), Letty, the bereaved mother of Georgie, Alba and James, however, it is in the narrator's omnipresent voice, rather than the character's.  It is set during the Cold War, which may explain why, after reading this until 3am last night, I dreamt of war myself.  I remember being told that there was a GPS coordinate where we had to go to defend ourselves.  I didn't want to be involved, but there I was, at the end of a dark street. There was nothing happening there, but we could here gunshots and saw that across a dark body of water there were tall hills where machine gun wielding planes were taking off, headed towards us.  We started to run back the way we came but the planes kicked up a thick fog of dirt and I couldn't breathe. I pulled a scarf over my nose and noticed that it was a red and white Arab headscarf, and was worried that I would be taken for an enemy.  We came out into a plateia where all the young people had similar scarves and I ran through them to a movie theater, where no one was aware that we were at war.  My husband threw 2 euros to the ticket taker who was my unrequited high school love, Duncan, and told him we were going to the bathroom. He said he would show us where it was and led us to a large underground ballroom where the bathrooms led to underground tunnels where we were meant to either protect ourselves or spread the word that we were under attack.  I wondered if Duncan could take better care of me than my husband and felt immediately guilty. In a room with very yellow light i saw my family and my daughter was spraying her whole body with my deoderant.  She was very thin, standing behind a ladder, wearing a peach dress.  I noticed my bag was torn and full of crap in the lining. My dad put it in a bag with paplomata and gave me a needle and sent me to the tailor to have it fixed.  I was surprised that the tailor had other customers during war time and wondered why i had such a large needle for him.  When I woke up it was after noon, I was groggy and still stuck in this dream world for hours afterwards.  

Two Weeks Later

I finished this book slowly, one paragraph at a time.  This is the second book I've read this summer about a father dying.  Life, unfortunately, imitates art.  How I wish the spirit of my father were in a bear who would come to save me from my broken heart.  I have to wonder if that dream of war and tailors that I had the night before my father's stroke, was a precursor to the battle we just fought and lost, if that big needle my dad gave me was to mend what broke?  It's unmendable. 

The Island of Doctor Moreau -- H.G. Wells

I'm a Stranger Here Myself -- Bill Bryson

Last fall I organized the tumbling bookshelves that make up the library at Odyssey. It was raining on Poros and Annette was nearby, editing her food blog, asking for grammar advice.  The Dutch like to use short sentences. Sometimes they do not make sense in English.  Anyhoo, I noticed this book then and found it kind of boring, but this summer I picked it up thinking that Pano might like it (he wouldn't) and found a new appreciation for it. I'm a Stranger Here Myself could have been written by Dave Berry (who Pano detests), but it's not, so the zippy closing one liner is a little less contrived.  He's a little more educated and not quite as silly, so it's a matter of taste as to which one is polio and which one is cholera.  I can definitely identify with anyone trying to make heads or tales out of a return to his birth place, and I like that he uses British colloquialisms without feeling a need to explain himself. Except for his background in economics and penchant for khaki pants, I feel like we have a lot of similarities.  I don't know if the stories are strong enough to have influenced my dreams yet, but there's still time. I'll get back to that.

The Covenant of Genesis -- McDermott

Picked up The Covenant of Genesis from a book exchange on the island for lack of better options and because I am a sticker for Ancient Civilizations. So much so that I will arbitrarily capitalize those words when put together.  The author mentions plot points from previous books and so I realize that this is not the first of his books that I've read and I'm certain that I've attained the previous McDermott missive in exactly the same way.  The writing is mostly violent action sequences that sound like pleas for Hollywood to take notice. Exploding eyeballs, hanging goats used as sheilds, bombed archaeological sites and control centers with flaying electrical wires... These are a few of his favorite things, and so I'm half reading, half skimming and chanting "blah blah blah".  I wish it were a little more Dan Brown and a little less Mario Puzo, but I guess it's OK for a summer read that you can forget until the next installment you find waiting for you at a beach bar somewhere down the line.

The Ultimate Frontier -- Kueshana

Super interesting, but after a few pages raging alarm bells go off.  I picked up this book because it was the only thing in English at the house in Samothraki.  We pulled the beds outside and I feel asleep reading under the stars.  Last year I had a lot of trouble sleeping for some time, until one night when I envisioned my ideal sleeping environment, outside, in a cove of trees with an opening to the night sky. It worked, I felt safe and embraced.  Whenever i feel too crazy to sleep, i envision that cozy cove around me, and I'm alseep in seconds.  The second night I feel asleep in Pano's yard in Samothraki, I realized that I was experiencing the exact thing I had pulled from the ether in my room in Ventura.  Strange that this is the night I would begin reading a book that explains that we are essentially existing in four coexistent, interpenetrating bodies; the physical (our bodies, bound to time and of which we are most aware), the Vital body, which exists on the etheric plane, maintaining the spark of life, responsible for the phenomena ascribed to the genes; the astral body, which is on the third plane of existence, which we use after three death of the physical body; and the mental body, which is our highest form of awareness.  Coincidence/irony that i am reading about the astral body which is not bound by time on the night I realize I've already been where I am at that moment, book in hand.  These concepts are not new or innovative, but interesting to revisit and form a deeper understanding of.  However, in reading reviews of this book, I can see where the alarm bells are coming from... Eklal Kueshana is the nom de plume given to the author and autobiographer, Richard Kieninger, by "the mysterious Dr. White, who tells him that he is The Judge of Israel, responsible for choosing the enlightened and starting a new society with the teachings he will receive from the Masters throughout his life.  Creepers. I was enjoying the story until I realized that he would go on to predict the end of America in 1976, and of the world in may 2001.  Later editions conveniently leave these dates out. Anyways, it's still an interesting read, if you aren't too worried about the people he duped into liquidating everything to move to his society in Stelle Il. I'm kind of looking forward to the chapters on how the world will end 14 years ago.

Pieces -- Maria Kostaki

I loved/lived this book in the 24 hours in which I devoured it.  I have known the author of this book since I was in sixth grade at TASIS.  She was a couple of years older than me and really into A-ha.  I remember telling me they were my favorite band and she asked me when Morten Harket's birthday was and I was so embarrassed, realizing that I wasn't a real fan.  Ever since then I never say anything is my favorite, lest I be asked for obscure information on the subject.  ANYWAY.  As a child I looked up to her, and later, in college I got to know and like her much better, although we were never very close, she's been in the periphery of my life for about 30 years.  I know her family and friends and she knows mine, so I realize that me gushing over her book might be biased just a tinge, but I still thing it's amazing on any level.  She writes with such incredible detail that I can see and smell everything as it's happening in the story. In part, it is because she is writing about Athens and being from there and elsewhere, as we all were at TASIS and ACS.   The time she spends at TASIS in her book brought back memories of things I hadn't visited since they happened in 1989.  She writes the letter as though out were a letter to her unscrupulous father (think Boris' father in The Goldfinch), and had me on the verge of tears, my heart in my throat, throughout.  Reading the book back in Greece with the cicadas screaming in the background imbued the whole experience with an explosive nostalgia for me.  The night after I read it I dreamed that my friends and family had to sacrifice me so that Mary Sexson (a family friend that we met at the same time that Maria entered my life, or I entered hers) could become president of the United States.

The Angel's Game and Prisoner of Heaven -- Zafón

Vendetta told me I needed to read The Shadow of the Wind by Zafón, and as usual, I did as she commanded.  I read it, loved it (even though I left it at LAX at the beginning of a 40 hour flight to a destination where I would spend hours of my life in a hammock)... and as her tutelage further commanded,  I purchased copies of his next two books. I'm currently at the finish line with  Angel's Game and the narrator, David Martín, has just taken a train to a sanitorium in the mountains, where he paid for two nights at a hotel before finding his love, Cristina, who has lost her mind. She goes on a walk out onto the ice on the night he comes to free her and run away with her.  He follows her bloody footprints out across the snow and runs on to the ice that is cracking in veins around her feet.  All of this, and what comes next; his journey back to Barcelona, finding his boss in an armchair and shooting him in the head, only to realize that he's just shot a dummy; finding a passageway to the basement where he finds more dummies; all of this is suddenly so familiar! Is it transplanted into/from another book verbatim? Has it been made into a movie? HAVE I ALREADY READ THIS BOOK? DAMMIT! !!!
I don't know the answer. 

  Two nights ago I dreamed that I was on the porch of a grey Victorian house at night drawing a baby.  As I was drawing, a great Dane paddled out into the black sea before me that surrounded the house where I sat.  He tumbled forward and had only his haunches outside of the water.  It was beautiful and I waded out in the water next to him to draw him.  The drawing was awkward, and I closed my notebook.  I also ducked my head under so that I was upside down, facing the dog. It was so completely peaceful and beautiful underwater until I realized how large a whale would be compared to me if he were to surface and I was suddenly afraid.  I tipped myself upright again and opened my notebook. The drawings of the dog and the baby were on pages facing one another and had completed the drawings of one another in confident lines that I would have never thought of using.

This has nothing to do with the book, but I feel that the book has somehow influenced my dream-life, and I want to remember the dream and the book in a connect four kind of way. But with just the two of them connecting.  Yesterday I painted an abstract teal and lime backdrop for a YouTube gameshow at Drew the carpenter's house in Encino with Bean the tranny-loving lead painter. Today I went golfing in Palm Springs. Those two facts can be the connect 3 and 4.

Ta-da, Zafón.