Tuesday, June 19, 2007

A filler post, because my life is rather boring right now

Finished reading two books over the last week.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

I started reading this during the break after Patho, and stopped during the electives because I had to study (no, actually I didn't do much studying but I would have felt guilty if I wasn't doing much studying and was reading fiction heh).

I think on the whole it's a story that gives you the feeling that it's very solid, with strong foundations. It's evident the author did a lot of research to write this book (I think she took somewhere upwards of 10 years to write it) and it shows. I always get very blown away by very well-researched books because I think it's phenomenal how much effort an author can go to in delving into a topic he or she has obviously never touched before, like a graduate in literature writing about a doctor, or something like that. Novels like that, with roots that stretch away further than your mind can encompass (well, my mind can't encompass so much, at least), make the story feel more real, and almost non-fiction. That was one of the things about this book, that it's difficult to see the line between fiction and non-fiction, and where the author has taken liberties with historical/geographical facts for the sake of the story. I'm not much good with history, or the cities of Europe, so I had to assume everything was true haha.

The way the novel was written involved mainly narratives of various characters in the form of letters - the characters' way of recording their experiences. The entire novel feels like a letter written by the author to her readers, interspersed with the letters of other characters as she read them. This idea gets a bit cumbersome at times because I keep getting the feeling that many portions of the text are just like a normal narrative spliced into letter format, which is a bit disorienting. I mean, the first person view is supposed to give a view of the events of the story from that particular character's perspective, but at a lot of times I feel that the narrative becomes detached, like an academician's cold calm detailing of facts, which I guess is also part of the intended effect because the characters are academicians (historians). It therefore gets a bit boring and yawn-inducing because I felt like I was reading journal articles at some points, and I kept drifting away. Somehow my mind isn't very good at following non-fictional-type writing, probably because it's difficult to visualise things in the mind.

Erm haven't said anything about the story. It's basically a look at the story of Dracula from a historical viewpoint, since the story is inspired by a real person, Vlad the Impaler, who some believe became a vampire after his death. The protagonist is the daughter of a historian-turned-diplomat whose mentor disappeared many years ago while investigating Dracula, leading this father character to go on his own hunt for the legendary vampire to find his missing mentor, which brings him to various places such as Istanbul and Hungary where various pieces of the Dracula story are unearthed, eventually leading to a tantalising dead end (won't spoil the story here). The protagonist inherits this search in the form of letters penned by her father, including letters from his own mentor detailing his (the mentor's) part of the investigation. Much of the story is taken up by the father's search for his mentor, and how he was joined by the woman who later became his wife, so they have the most characterisation; the protagonist appears not often enough for me to get a feel of what her character is, and I also thought that a particular part was pretty weird in its spontaneous appearance (difficult to detail without spoilers).

I haven't had much exposure to, or interest in, vampire-related stories, so I don't have much to comment. I thought it was an interesting way of crafting the story, to present it from the historical evidence of Vlad's life and events that occured after his death (as I said, I assumed that the evidence is in fact, truly existent), while taking a supernatural leaning and suggesting that the legend of the vampire is true (because otherwise it'd just be a boring textbook). I'm quite ambivalent about the ending, because it felt a little bit trashy, like some B-grade horror movie, but I guess there's no way of ending the novel on a definite note because the author is, after all, dealing with a myth that cannot be wholly proven true or false.

All in all, a fantastic read. For all that I got tremendously bored in parts with the narrative and its bland presentation of fact after historical fact, the climactic parts were truly exciting and suspenseful, which was quite surprising after the boredom. Worth the effort to get to the end, I think.

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Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

A fun book that I started reading during this break. Actually that's about all I can say about it, it was fun and made me laugh quite a bit, and it had just enough of a plot to keep me going. The sheer strangeness of how events occur in the story almost gets predictable after a while, but I kind of started liking all the characters after a while for their quirky idiosyncrasies, so I guess that's good?

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I'm trying to finish books 5 and 6 of Harry Potter, and also this medical book by Atul Gawande titled Better (he's a pretty good author, very impressive for a surgeon lol). I picked up The Dragonbone Chair thinking I could maybe run through Memory, Sorrow and Thorn one more time during this break, but it seems that I won't have time to even start. Oh well.

Watching quite a few anime too: Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto (my first samurai anime, and it's got me hooked on Jap history o_O;), Code Geass (another mecha anime with the typical features: angsty lead character; characters with improbable hair colours like neon green and plum purple; that overused plotline of two childhood friends ending up fighting on opposing sides; but it's still entertaining), and downloading but haven't started watching Jigoku Shoujo. It's weird how I'm paradoxically watching more anime with the crackdown on ani.me down.loa.ding. Shhh.


For entertainment's sake, there's always Youtube! Here's a follow-up to the Dick Lee video I posted ages ago (you can still see it if you scroll all the way down). Kumar! Actually not as funny as the Dick Lee one, and the Hossan Leong one is even more unfunny, so I'm just posting the Kumar one, because I love Kumar lol.

Avaris / 6/19/2007 05:32:00 PM

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