Books, for lack of a better post.

Since graduating from a masters program I’ve had a lot of time for reading- or at least few enough things to fill the day with that I’ve done more reading than usual.  I’ve gotten through the first four Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, Love In The Time of Cholera (finally), The Power and the Glory, My Name is Red, and sadly Twilight, New Moon, and Skinny Bitch.  The last three were mindless distractions, but were at least enjoyable.

Of all of these, the two that have affected me the most are Love in the Time of Cholera and My Name is Red.  Perhaps it’s the descriptions of emotional passion, be it for people or careers or memories, that put these two books in my top book list.  After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude a few years ago, on the suggestion of a dear friend who did an entire art project based around the imagery in the book, I’m suprised it took me so long to read another Gabriel Garcia Marquez book. And even though I loved Cholera, I still think Solitude is the better book.  Reality is s ofar removed from the book that you spend half of it feeling like you’re reading it while standing on your head, which I can’t help but find more interesting than a love story- albeit beautifully written and constructed with moments of such truth that you have to stop to record sentences so you don’t forget them.

And what I like about both books, Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red is the cultural settings that I am so far removed from.  Marquez’s South America is a place I understand only through being not so far removed geographically, and from knowing  people from that area.  Pamuk’s Ottoman Istanbul, though, is a world I will never experience beyond the pages of his book.

The romance in the book is not it’s strength, which was just the author’s intention, I think.  The best moments are the inner thoughts of the Sultan’s miniturists and The Murderer.  The passion he gives to their beliefs and convictions make me wish I could feel a calling the way Pamuk’s artists do.

In both cases, I am left longing to be doing something other thant tearing through books, sending out job applications, and knitting all day.  Can something please finally break?

Now to decide between finishing Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, or starting either Middlemarch or Eclipse (darn you Stefanie Meyers and your addictive story-telling).