Blotter Paper

I know this might be hard to believe, given the oh-so-retro totally standard theme and look of this site…but I have maybe one regular reader. Maybe. So when I get twenty or thirty hits on a given day, and they’re from an academic IP address at a school attended by no one I know…I’m going to guess it’s you. Or maybe I have shy, adorable stalkers. They glimpsed me from afar in high school, and they’ve never since been able to forget me.  Yeah…right. It’s okay guys, I forgive you. I would definitely never admit anyone to my program, or hire them, or date them, or really engage in any sort of extended interaction with a person (at least not one in which I had the power-advantage) without googling that person and reading their blog.

But this kind of gives me an interesting opportunity. I mean, sure, I turned in a personal statement. But a personal statement has all these, like, rules, you know? Like, totes bogus word counts. And stuff you’re supposed to say because they ask you to say it. So I was like, here’s an opportunity to reveal all these other facts about me that they totally did not know. But I don’t know, that sounds sort of needy. And honestly, kind of dull (not for you, I’m sure it’d be fascinating for you, I meant dull for me — although I guess reading seven hundred personal statements probably familiarizes you with just about every sad, thoughtful, amusing, or pathetic fact a person can possibly whip out about themselves). About the only thing I’d like to point out to you is that I am almost exactly two meters, or six feet and seven inches, tall. It’s kind of weird to think that anyone who knows me primarily from some textual medium would not know that, since it’s obviously the first thing anyone who sees me realizes about me and it colors every facet of my life in a way that I am utterly unable to appreciate.

Instead I just decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a year. Last year, around this time, I read a bunch of peoples’ lists of all the books they’d read in the previous year. And I was like, “Wow, that is so cool, I am going to start logging the books I have read and then I will post them on the internet”. And that is exactly what I’ve done. My only criteria for the list were that the books had to be ones I’ve read for the first time this year, so I did not include anything I re-read (like the ten or so works of glorious military science fiction that I inevitably read year after year after year). Well then, the list is as follows:

That is 92 books. Which is not particularly astounding, but it’s certainly not bad either. And I think this list is a perfect example of the kind of sullied mind you’d be admitting into your graduate program. Let’s see what leaps out at us

• Paranormal romance novels – 13 – Not only did I read the entire Twilight series (which one could conceivably pass off as cultural studies), I also read the first six books in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries (the inspiration for the HBO series True Blood. I read all six books in one booze-fuelled weekend), as well as three books in Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series. My main issue with paranormal fantasy is that you always get drawn in by this potent relationship between the main dude and the (usually witty, usually bad-ass) heroine. But then, you get a few books and suddenly the woman is knee deep in some totally magical dudes, and you’re no longer able to convince yourself that any of them is really worth anything. That’s why I gave up on Kelley Armstrong and Charlaine Harris. Twilight actually kind of avoids this paradigm (and a lot of standard paranormal fantasy tropes), which is kind of interesting.
• Nonfiction – 19 (albeit under an absurdly idiosyncratic categorization that counts Rousseau’s Confessions – the work of a man who was certifiably insane – but not Satrapi’s Persepolis, which is autobiographical) – I was kind of surprised there were so many. But a bunch of them were that crunchy fluff that is actually kind of pernicious; the kind that dumbs down and simplifies the world in order to brainwash smart people. Stuff like Sway and Outliers and everything Christopher Hitchens has ever had the gall to commit to paper.
• Science Fiction – 11 – But that’s under a disappointing metric that counts Don Delillo’s White Noise and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest…however, if those are not SF, then what is?
• Graphic novels – 6 – I guess the exact number depends on how you slice them, since I counted the two parts of Maus as two, but the two parts of the Complete Persepolis as one. I’d actually never really read a graphic novel before this year and – to be honest – I wasn’t extraordinarily taken with the form. The Watchmen was great, the first part of Persepolis was pretty fun, and the rest were merely kind of pleasant.
• Fantasy – 6 (19 including paranormal romance) – I also included Pale Fire and Invitation to a Beheading in this category, because, you know…there’s magic in them. But I did not include the Ramayana or the Iliad, because I do what I want.
• Books by David Foster Wallace – 5 – Infinite Jest was totally sweet, don’t get me wrong. But the DFW works that really blew me away were his essay collections. The main problem, for me, with essays has always been that they seemed to require actual research. Now I just know you need an engaging tone. For awhile, imitating him kind of blew my writing to hell, but I think I am mostly over it now.

I was going to include a best and worst list, but it would have just amounted to me saying, “Wow, Paradise Lost is totally sweet…” and I think the annals of criticism have enough of that to last it a few centuries. So yes, grad admissions folks, look around, make yourself at home. Read my post on Jhumpa Lahiri for something slightly less playful (the numerous missing words in that post do not come from me sucking at writing things down, but from me going back and inserting words and moving them around and changing wordings…you’ll notice this post does not suffer from that problem, because I have not edited it at all). This blog is both public and under my own name, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not embarrassed by anything on it.