Sunday Salon: A Day Late

I know, my bad. My Twitter feed has been clogged up for the past couple of weekends with numerous Sunday Salon updates. Each week I've thought 'I really must sit down and write a post.' Hence why this one is a day late.

My reading tastes seem to be swinging towards non-fiction at the moment. My bedtime book is currently a biography called The Bolter, written by her great-granddaughter, whose husband is the Shadow Chancellor. Not the most taxing read but it does prove the theory that real life can be more exciting than fiction. Idina Sackville was married, and divorced, five times between 1918 and 1945. Scandalous for those times, heck even scandalous for this day and age. Osborne did make an interesting point that the perception of affairs changed in the early twentieth century. In the Edwardian era, having affairs was a way of married life for the upper classes. As long as no-one got pregnant or wanted a divorce, all was hunky dory (in theory) and become something everyone knew about but didn't talk about. Once divorce laws became looser and went on the increase, affairs became more public. Hence more scandal.

Idina seems to have trumped them all. She emigrated to Africa with her second husband and set up home in Kenya. Her parties become known as "orgy hotspots" and romantic entanglements ahoy! I'm halfway through the book, on husband no. 4 (I think...) and the story is becoming more about the author's grandfather, Idina's child from her first marriage. Not sure where that's going to go but I shall keep you posted.

I finished No Logo which was my bus book for most of February. I thought it was about time I got around to reading this book about the power of the branded world we live in. As much as I hate to admit it, buying ethically can be very difficult for the ordinary consumer to do. People do appear to be shunning brands for cheaper retail shops such as Primark but, in turn, this creates a market for cheap labour to produce clothes. In the age of a recession, ethics can be an entity that goes out the window very quickly. Klein's prediction of a short term contract and freelancer job market seems to have hit in some industries. Not sure where that's going to leave us.

Currently, archives are seeing something of a 're-branding' in the UK with moves to encompass libraries, archives and other areas as 'information management' and break down barriers of job titles. This has caused bristling in some areas and I don't think this change is particularly welcome. Yes, working together with libraries but not interchanging archive and library work without good reason. Lots of archive money is being sucked out by the Olympic Games hoover which has lead to a decline in jobs. Most jobs advertised are for short term jobs, average pay with lots of uprooting. So I read Klein's 'No Jobs' part with some bitter pessimism. Apologies for the tangent.

My current commute read is The Search which is about the rise of the search engines. It's hard to believe but, in the early days of the Interwebs, people didn't think search portals were going to make any money. Hard to believe in this so-called Google era. This book is not necessarily about the foundation of Google but about the change in how business can be conducted on the web. Some information is slightly outdated. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is treated very cautiously rather than a staple of on-line marketing.

So yes, a very weird switch to non-fiction over the past month. It hasn't been intentionally. Fiction is still a major love judging by my piles of books everywhere. Study leave has started for this semester so my reading intake could go up. In lieu of doing any revision of course.

Valetine's Day and Why I Hate It

Personally I am not a big fan of Valentine's Day. When asked, as a "grown-up", I usually respond with some rant about how it's capitalist, just another way of spending our money, how insecure your relationship is if you need a £2.99 card and an expensive meal to reaffirm your affections, blah blah blah.

"But what about Christmas or Easter?" they usually cry. Well, the reason is that I was happy at Christmas or Easter. Valentine's Day was just another humiliation event to face during the school calendar.

Hence why I agree with this school's decision to ban Valentine's Day cards. Most comments are from outraged parents, including this mother who says: "It's a tradition, I can remember when I used to receive cards from boys in school. It's a lovely thing to do." Yeah but you got cards, didn't you love? Speaking as someone who never received a Valentine's Day card that wasn't from her gran, it hurts. Like most schools, there was a postbox system for delivering your cards. Actually it was the same box used for delivering Christmas cards to classmates except a massive heart was stuck on the top; with the fake snow almost hidden from view. In high school, it was incorporated into "Business Enterprise" and plucky students would go from class to class offering a range of services. You could buy a fake plastic rose for £1 going right up to a small box of chocolates, a card AND a rose for £3. The one year I was brave enough to send a card, I was laughed at. And it hurt.

Seeing these cheap gifts and expensive cards being handed out only reinforced how unpopular I was. Being constantly told I was ugly and disgusted chipped away at my confidence. Early high school was not fun. Therefore banning these cards will help those who know they will not receive such gifts. Yes, it's a bit of fun for those involved. But those left out? It sucks.

Out of interest, this Sunday Him Indoors and I will be celebrating Valentine's Day by eating lots of takeaway food and watching that romantic classic of Hackers.

Sunday Salon: Writing on the Page

I started writing my response to this post on my Facebook profile but I felt I could squeeze a blog post out of it. For the link-phobic, the article concerns the issue of unrelated marginalia. The author goes beyond annotating the text to using a book as a temporary notepad (repository?) of their immediate thoughts. One such tale includes a scribbled note to phone someone. Now they cannot remember why they needed to contact this person but it remains a constant reminder of a point in their life.

Sometimes I am not sure where I stand on annotated books. Books have always been precious objects to me. In primary school I lent a so-called friend pristine copies of my Roald Dahl books to read in class. Two months they came back, tatty, dog eared, one cover even ripped. Even now, that moment when she handed my prized possessions back to me still brings a small lump to my throat.

Then I started university and had a massive reading load to battle with. Luckily I could afford to buy most core texts but still refrained from writing in the margins; preferring to make my notes on paper. Then I got a Sociology teacher; probably one of the best teachers I have ever had. Her class had a mouthful of a title (Titles of Comparative Sociological Thought and Theory, to paraphrase) but she had taught a previous class in Sociological Theory that I had been rather impressed by. I signed up and went to the first class. There the teacher said it would be "extremely" helpful to annotate the texts that we were studying. "Bring a pencil, do it in pen, use those colour tabs, anything! Even buy a cheap second hand copy," she told us. Now, one problem I have with annotation is that I have big, messy handwriting. On an average line of paper I maybe fit five-six words; less if I'm in a lecture and writing fast. So I took a deep breath and got my pencil out. To make a confession, I rather enjoyed it. The text I remember most was Persian Letters by Montesquieu. My copy is still somewhere in my mountains of books and has notes scrawled all over it. It makes me happy seeing them; reminding me at one time I loved and enjoyed studying Sociology.

However I have not continued annotating every book I own. My reading taste is dominantly contemporary fiction and I enjoy analysing in my head, as I go. Sometimes I annotate a text for studying (if my camera hadn't died I would have posted one of my course textbooks that has a forest of colour tabs growing out of it). I especially enjoying doing so to printed out journal articles. But I would never do so with a library text. It still narks me when I get a book out the library and someone has left their notes written in the text. Or, worse, highlighted passages. It's very distracting if I'm reading the same text but for different purposes.

At the same time, my stance seems hypocritical when you consider my Bookcrossing habits. For those who don't know, Bookcrossing is a website that tracks books. When you register a book, it is given its own unique tracking number called a BCID that needs to be written or recorded on the book. You can simply write the number on the book or stick a bookplate into the book that captures the same information. A lot of Bookcrossers have similar feelings to mine. "You want me to do what to my books? Write on them, stick labels in them, good Lord!"

A theme that keeps cropping up on my course is the sanctity of the text, or specifically, the printed book. As a potential archivist, it is part of my job to look at objects, manuscripts, notebooks, journals, anything to assess its uniqueness and importance for future study. Take your bog standard printed book, Mass Paperback by A.N. Other. Typically it will not be accessioned by an archive. But what if this book belonged to Barack Obama in his student years and, being the rebel he is, coated the book in his own annotations of his thoughts and feelings? In that example it is the information that matters, not the medium it is recorded on.

In an attempt to conclude, I am not promoting the mass annotation and defacement of books. Even in this 'age' of the e-book, many readers still favour the interaction with the physical object of the book; the touch of the page, the smell, the spotted front cover. Shared texts should not be actively annotated. For a new reader, this can interrupt their interaction with the text, that wonderful feeling of entering a new world that books open up. But for your own personal collection? Go wild. Annotate, highlight, scribble. Alas I will not be joining you (she of the messy handwriting) but I wish you well and God speed.

Name Change

There have been some changes going on lately. Hence the change of my blog name. This woman still has opinions but this blog has grown into a forum for my thoughts on books. My name change does still reflect my previous identity as Women with an Opinion but I do like this new title a lot better.

Sunday Salon: January Round Up

Highlights so far:

Sookie Stackhouse
I finished the most recent addition to the True Blood saga. This is probably the first time I have dipped my toe into the paranormal fiction genre and completed my mission (Twilight ended in a ball of fire and an unfinished read). Dead and Gone has a 'Final Battle' feel to it and I'm not sure where Harris is going to go after this. The book opens with the Weres/shape shifters coming out of the closet. And the small matter of a murder occurring in the backyard of Merlottes. Believe it or not, Sookie has more pressing concerns such as mad, bad fairies turning up. Thoroughly enjoyed this adventure and read it almost in one sitting. Now I just have to wait for series 3 of True Blood later this year *grumbles*

The Believers by Zoe Heller
Absolutely loved this book. It's a short read (comes in at just over 300 pages) and follows the Litvinoff family in New York. The patriarch, Joel, suffers a massive stroke and this provides the framework to explore the relationships in his family. Audrey: his hypocritical Socialist wife. Rosa: their eldest daughter who is looking to religion to answer her empty life. Kara: the youngest girl who is stuck in a loveless marriage, trying for a baby. Lenny: the adopted and feckless younger son.

Heller has such a fantastic way of writing that highlights the flaws of characters. Kara's weakness for high calorie snacks, Audrey's nasty and downright cruel temper. The Believers is an adpt title for the book as Joel's stroke provides a stimulus for his family to question the very (shaky) foundations its based upon.

Despite this, the book does have a bittersweet ending. I found myself cheering for one particular character and mentally jumping up and down, waving pom poms. Although I was surprised Heller chose to end the narrative at that particular point. Was it, perhaps, to convey a small sense of hope and optimism for the characters she had created?

Go read it. Go on, I dares you :)

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Farber

Finally finished this door stopper of a book last week. My creative writing tutor had warned us about the ending. Silly thing to say but it just ends. Although you can guess what happens, Farber doesn't explicitly show us where some of the characters end up. It is nice to read something in which you're not spoon fed an ending but it did leave me wanting more.

The language and sometimes explicit sex scenes may put some people off but please read past this. In the later stages of the book, it truly doesn't matter and there's very little sex that takes place. An important feature of the narrative due to the changing role of Sugar, the book's prostitute and some may call her the heroine of the book too.

February looks like it's going to be the month of the Millennium trilogy for me. I broke my aversion to buying hardbacks and used some Christmas money to buy The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet's Nest by Steig Larsson. Already I've been sucked into the final installment of the lives of Lisbeth Salander and Michkel Blomskiv. It does make me sad that we won't see any more from these books due to Larsson's untimely death.

Finally, I was saddened to hear of the passing of JD Salinger. Thank you, sir, for writing The Catcher in the Rye. I read it when I was 12, didn't understand it very well but numerous re-reads later and Holden Caulfield has a small place in my heart. A glass will be raised in his honour this evening.

Verdict so far?

For lots of reasons I won't go into, 2010 has not run terribly smoothly so far. At the moment I feel like I'm limping from one drama to the next. And it's only the end of January. One positive offshoot from my current 'oh woe is me' state is that my writing productivity has seen a small spike lately. The last time I was this miserable I was 15, hated school and wrote obsessively to escape from my festering pit of teenage depression.

This reminds me of something my current creative writing tutor said. He remarked that not all writing had to be a brutal, bearing open the soul process. Sometimes I'm not too sure about that. When I hit 18, I found myself happy. I had a good social circle, a course with little practical use for real life but something I enjoyed, a possible boyfriend (though that turned out to be an utter car crash....), a part-time job that awarded me some financial independence. Then I stopped writing.

Now I find myself scribbling away at the back of my notepad, writing random lines, pieces of dialogue, characters that have popped into my head: some to stay for a while, others just a flying visit. Perhaps I have to be a little bit miserable to want to write. That doesn't feel like an entirely bad thing. Now, when I refuse to come out of my flat and have stuck post its all over the floor then people should start worrying....

FYI

And so another semester commences. Due to the nature of the course I am doing (MSc Information Management and Preservation, thanks for asking), the class has been split into those following the Theory route and those who are doing the Digital strand. I am firmly in the Digital camp; purely because I couldn't cope with another semester of reading about what I'm meant to be doing. Also I have never really written reports or embarked on a formal project; something I think I need to experience before I venture into the working world. The Digital strand is assessed via two projects and two reports.

So far the classes have been interesting. They are a hybrid of I.T. and archival theory; strange bedfellows. Yesterday's pratical session involved basic elements of appraisal, document handling, all the stuff I learnt whilst on various pre-course placements. We share the class with some I.T. students and some of them looked so bemused, bless 'em. Some of the language triggered ten year old high school computing classes such as DPI, 8 bit, 600 resolution. Nice to realise I have forgotten all that. And I'm learning similar stuff that I was learning ten years ago. That's a bit scary and makes me feel I haven't moved on terribly much.

So that's where I am at the moment. How are you guys?