When did you ever see me trouble my head about my dignity?

It's Tuesday so we're at week...something in the Villette in March readalong. I am bad at keeping track of things. But even if I don't remember what number post this is, I'm remembering to get them done so good job, me. This week we're discussing chapters 27-33. Thank you, Alice, for hosting this thang.

Last week I had high expectations for this party with Dr. John, Ginevra, Lucy, and Polly all in one place. Even M. Paul was there. And it was not soap opera-y at all. Boo, CB.

Lucy is getting over her crush on Dr. John which, whatever. I am bored with that storyline. Let Dr. John and Polly get together which is what we've been leading up to since the first chapters. Instead Lucy is focusing her interest on M. Paul and going on about how excited she is he's shown up and given such a performance and then she's super awkward around him.

I had plenty of praise in my heart; but alas! no words on my lips. Who has words at the right moment? I stammered some lame expressions; but was truly glad when other people, coming up with profuse congratulations, covered my deficiency by their redundancy.

M. Paul continues to be weird by sneaking up behind her and hissing (Lucy's word) in her ear and unfortunately I don't really know what he said because French class was a long time ago and my free book does not include translations. Lucy called it an insult and given his past behavior, that isn't super surprising.

I know CB is all...

Thanks Alice!

...when it comes to guys, but come on now.

Or Ginevra would be good. Look, then it fits in with above cos she's kind of a pain in the ass and says mean things to Lucy but Lucy regularly seems to fight back. And besides, I think the two of them could balance each other out. Even if Lucy does feel the need to put a pin in her girdle to keep Ginevra to keep from elbowing her. I mean, really, it's sort of adorable.

The rest of this section is mostly focused on M. Paul and Lucy fighting and then making up and then fighting again. They fight over stuff like if her dress was red or pink, and Lucy is VERY ADAMANT it was pink and subdued with black lace and OMG, M. Paul, do you think she's a hussy? M. Paul keeps accusing her of being "too airy and cheery", "too flowery and coloury", so I wonder if he's ever actually met Lucy.

At one point Mr. Paul is very offended because for his birthday (I think it's his birthday) everyone, students at least, give him flowers but Lucy won't. M. Paul gets all bent out of shape, as he does. Starts railing against all things English because if people aren't insulting other races and cultures, why bother? Don't worry, she actually made him something extra special. And not long after she finds him snooping through her stuff, she makes a declaration (to herself) about her feelings for M. Paul: she does not dislike him. Well now.

We get a chapter where it seems like we're actually going to find out about the nun, both M. Paul and Lucy seem to see her but then the chapter ends and in the next two chapters anyway, we don't get more information about this ghost/apparition/creepy lady thing.

Instead we get Polly talking about how Dr. John has been writing her letters and naturally Lucy doesn't approve because of course she doesn't. Then everyone at the school goes to a farm for breakfast and there we are.

Title quote from page 318

Bronte, Charlotte. Villette. Amazon Digital Services. Originally published 1853.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MEEEEEE

Hey you guys, guess what!

IT'S MAH BIRTHDAY!

Last year I was sort of in denial of the whole birthday thing cos I turned 30 and was like "Shit, do I need to be an adult now?" Turns out, no, not really. Well, I guess a little (considering we're working on selling our current place and buying another, which are fairly adult things) but overall not much as changed. 

The other day I was checking mail and saw a package that looked like a book. Except I didn't remember ordering any books. Or winning any books. Or agreeing to review anything. But I also don't have the best memory so really, any of the above was possible. What I assumed definitely didn't happen was that Tom would get me a book cos he's always talking about how I should get rid of some books, considering our shelves are mostly double stacked. Or were before we were prepping for all the open houses. Anyway. The point is, I figured whatever this book was, it wasn't from him.

Obviously, it was from him. Tom found this site called Just the Right Book, a book-of-the-month club where you fill in a profile of what you like, what you don't like, and they pick out books for you. Like StitchFix which I am also a fan of*. The first book is The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty and oh, Just the Right Book, aren't you guys clever. So yeah, Tom is pretty great. And there is a surprise tonight, but I don't know what that is yet so I'll have to give you an update later.

Last year I did a giveaway for my birthday and I thought about doing it again, except we're in the middle of 4000 things, what with the whole house buying/selling deal, so I WILL be doing a giveaway, but not till the summer. If I was smart I'd have figured out a giveaway before I packed up all my book. But yeah, I did not do that so now I get to move a bunch of books I'll get rid of as soon as we unpack. See, older and yet no wiser.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ME!

*And if you want to try out StitchFix, which is awesome, oh hey, I have a referral code you could use.

Your old October was only desirable while forbidden

Another Tuesday, another Villette readalong post! And guess what, POLLY IS BACK! I didn't realize how much I missed that weird little kid/baby thing until we spent all this time without her and WTF, where the hell is she?

Before we get to that, Lucy is swinging between being super depressed

I could have cried, so irritated and eager was I to be gone. I longed to leave them as the criminal on the scaffold longs for the axe to descend. 

"But if I feel, may I never express?" "Never!" declared Reason. I groaned under her bitter sternness. 

Better, perhaps, to die quickly a pleasant death than drag on long a charmless life.

And being crazy in love with Dr. John and the letters he writes her

I folded the untasted treasure...feeling as if fairy tales were true and fairy gifts no dream. 

[Mr. John] asked me, smiling, why I cared for his letter so very much. I thought, but did not say, that I prized it like the blood in my veins.

One evening Dr. John invites Lucy to the theater with him when his mom can't make it and you sort of think that means things are going to go forward with these two BUT NO, there is a fire at the theater and a poor woman is hurt in the riot. Being nice people, Lucy and Dr. John help the girl and get her to safety. Who does the girl turn out to be? OH HEY, THERE YOU ARE POLLY.

She's still sort of a weird girl. She's 18 (ish? is that right?) but still acts like a little kid a lot of the time. Lucy is threatened by Polly showing up and tries to quiz her about her feelings for Graham when they were younger. Lucy keeps telling her "But surely you don't remember all of your ridiculous, childish affections from so long ago and Polly won me with her response:

"You think I have forgotten whom I liked, and in what degree I liked them when a child?"
"The sharpness must be gone - the point, the poignancy - the deep imprint must be softened away and effaced?"
"I have a good memory for those days."

But don't worry, Polly likes Lucy. There's no real competition between the two, probably cos Polly doesn't really see Lucy as competition. At least not for Dr. John. Polly's dad, Mr. Home, offers to pay Lucy to hang out with Polly but she turns down the offer because yeah, that's sort of weird and at least she has her (constantly spied on) freedom teaching under Mme Beck. Instead she hangs out with Lucy for free and they start taking German lessons with a lady that could possibly be a hobbit, given her eating habits

[She] habitually consumed, for her first and second breakfast, beer and beef

 This section doesn't quite end with the same dramatic cliffhanger as the earlier sections, but there is something here. While Polly and Lucy are arguing about Polly talking about love (Polly insists she's old enough for this stuff and Lucy says she's going to always be childlike to her so yeah stop that nonsense) Polly says she DOES understand, but she doesn't want to talk about it because you see, there is someone Polly is worried about. Her cousin, Ginevra (DUN DUN DUUUUUN) 

Ginevra says she doesn't really care for the Dr. John anymore. I mean SURE, she says he'll totally still marry her if she'd say yeah, but overall she's bored with the guy. Polly wants to invite all of them over and see if Ginevra is right or Dr. John is really over her. That is a formula for some Telenovelas style hijinks so I AM FOR IT. 

Or more likely, Kimmy Schmidt style dinner party, but I couldn't find a gif of that.

Thank you Alice, for the good times. Our readalongs are the best. Till next week!

Housing update

I'm still not quite ready to give details yet, but since I didn't feel like writing a review, I thought I'd provide a housing update.

Not too long after my last post about adventures in house selling we got an offer, and after a bit of back and forth we came to an agreement, inspections were done, paperwork was signed, and in theory we should be closing in a couple months! I say "in theory" because until you're at that closing table, anything could happen though now that we have approvals and signed contracts and lawyers have been brought in, I'm (knock on wood) hopeful things will go through.

All of this did mean one very important thing: we better find somewhere to live, either permanently or short term cos we're gonna be homeless soon.

We'd put an offer in on a place that was pretty sweet and in a fun area. Unfortunately a LOT of people thought the same thing, and we knew we'd be going up against a lot of other offers. I don't know how much it actually went for but I know it was 1) higher than our offer and 2) all in cash.

Who are theses people that can buy places in cash? Jerks, probably.

Wherever we end up won't be the first place we'd be buying (that'd be where we are now), but there are always lessons to learn. For example, the purchase price isn't that important. I mean, it is, obviously. And it's the biggest number and therefore the scariest one. But when you break it down into monthly payments you realize what sounds like a BIG difference in the total price translates to like $50 extra per month. Way more important than setting a budget on the total purchase price is setting a budget for monthly costs. Cos what you can afford on the purchase price may vary widely once you start throwing taxes and HOA (if you're in a condo/co-op) and such in the mix.

Pretty much

Tom and I are fairly good at budgeting. Mint has been super helpful in helping me see where my money goes and made it very easy to get an average for what I spend throughout the year so when we put together a budget for this whole house thing I could quickly get numbers. Also it tracks stuff automatically, which is quite important to me keeping track of anything. (Thank you, FitBit and no thank you, any system that makes me manually enter shit.)

Still don't want to jinx anything but I'm hoping we'll only be homeless for a month (knock on wood, fingers crossed, other superstitions) and another "hopefully," we'll be able to crash with relatives which means freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I'll share more details as they come up or as I want to procrastinate from writing reviews.

I don't want to keep my country imprisoned in my memory

Back in December, two things happened: I made a resolution to to diversify my reading and I got an awesome Secret Santa gift that included a book that met my diversity criteria. And now I'm finally getting around to reviewing Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh.

Beirut Blues is the story of Asmahan, a Lebanese woman trying to make sense of her currently war-torn world. She loves Beirut but wonders if she should leave to somewhere safer: the country where some of her relatives are, the U.S. where here mom is, France with some friends? The story is told through her letters to her friends, family, lovers, and Beirut itself. Although honestly, the letters thing didn't really work for me because they don't read like letters. It's more like diary entries she's vaguely directing at someone except not really. It's not a straight narrative of events and at times it was hard to follow what was going on and who everyone was, but overall I still got the feel for things.

Surprisingly, Asmahan rarely seems to fear the war. It doesn't seem to affect her directly and other than a brief encounter when some soldiers take a friend away for questioning there aren't any tense moments. This could be in part because of the structure and the fact that she is telling these events to people who know she obviously made it out fine. She's here writing the letters. Most of the tone of the book is focused on Ashmahan's longing for the Beirut of the past. The bombings don't seem to bother her so much as annoy her, but the fact that the Beirut she loved is gone is what's truly upsetting. Sometimes she feels trapped by what Beirut has become, that even though she herself isn't being held for ransom, she has been kidnapped by the fighting.

I appreciated that Asmahan was a fully independent woman. She talks about her lovers (which is how she refers to them and probably makes more sense than boyfriend or something, even if I can't help but say the word sarcastically), new ones and those she had, with a certain nonchalance. It's not a big part of the story, but I appreciated when it came up it wasn't a big deal. She does her thing and she's not demonized for it. You go, Asmahan.

While the book is sort of slow, there was a lot in the language that was beautiful. I guess some of that credit goes towards the translator.

I don't believe I'll think about anything beyond the confines of my room. But I have to stop myself sneaking a glance through a gap in the garden wall at a house which is said to be occupied by party members. The night was calm, and everyone was asleep. I saw the fighters sleeping with their families. I could almost hear them snoring. I lowered my head and wondered if I had really been kidnapped. Perhaps I was still having a bad dream. People sleeping peacefully couldn't be kidnappers. Then I reminded myself that evil sleeps too.

You prescribe laws as if you were in a normal country with citizens who still glory in that title and all it stands for. It's easy for you to propound these views, when you haven't hidden in a shelter, had friends and neighbors killed in bread lines, returned home to your apartment building and found it has vanished, and realized after a moment that the rubble under your feet is all that remains of it.

But here he was now treating his own life as if it was more precious than any other in the country. Perhaps he and the others who had left were perfectly entitled to do so: they had escaped to protect the precious gift of life while we were persisted in walking carelessly over minefields.

It's a slow story. There isn't a lot of action or activity, but it has very pretty moments.

Gif rating:

 
Title quote from page 360

al-Shaykh, Hanan. Beirut Blues. Trans: Catherine Cobham. Anchor Books, 1995. Originally published in Arabic 1992.

He actually thought I was stung with a kind of jealous pain similar to his own!

We're now in week 3 of our Villette readalong, hosted by Alice (aka Reading Rambo). Also thank you for making this week's reading much smaller than the last time around cos yeah, I wouldn't have made it otherwise. Here we go, chapters 16-20.

When we last left Lucy she fainted outside a church. She wakes up and finds herself in a place that is foreign to her and yet strangely familiar. All of the furniture looks like the stuff from Mrs. Bretton's house. Well, that is odd, isn't it? There's even a picture of Graham that apparently Lucy used to spend all this time gazing lovingly at and what the hell? Where was all that in the early chapters?

I well remember how I used to mount a music-stool for the purpose of unhooking it, holding it in my hand, and searching into those bonny wells of eyes, whose glance under their hazel lashes seemed like a pencilled laugh; and well I liked to note the colouring of the cheek, and the expression of the mouth.

But the question is, why was all this stuff at this stranger's house? UNLESS, this stranger was actually Mrs. Bretton's. But how would she end up there? Well, it turns out Dr. John is actually Graham. Oh but more than that, Lucy knew the whole time.

She just didn't want to tell him. And was totally confused by why she would see Bretton stuff, even though moving your old furniture with you isn't an odd thing.

I'm going to call BS on CB here. Cos listen, either Lucy knew who Dr. John was the whole time, at which point she shouldn't have been SO CONFUSED when she woke up. But then, of course, you don't get your big surprise reveal. OR she didn't know, but then you lose your...I dunno what? Lucy being a super know-it-all, I guess.

Also CB, you can't write lines like "The plot was but thickening" Or you can, but you just make me think of this

But at least it's nice to see Lucy happy. Somewhat happy. As happy as Lucy seems capable of being, which isn't so much happy as it's not-actively-miserable. Also she gets to spend more time with Graham who she has been madly in love with since FOREVER apparently. No wonder she was so bitchy to Polly. Even though that is ridiculous because Polly was a small child, but it's Lucy so whatever.

The fact that she gets all this Graham-time is sort of marred by the fact that he wants to spend all this time talking about how awesome Ginevra is. Well that and Graham and Mrs. Bretton make weird comments at each other.

"Mamma, under such circumstances, you always remind me of Titania.""That is because you, yourself, are so like Bottom."

Yeah, those would be two characters that had sex with each other. While one of them had the head of a donkey. Just, stop that.

Lucy starts going to art museums by herself, but seems to spend most of the time looking at art that she doesn't like. Because of course she does. Why spend the time looking at art you like, when you could spend the time talking about how terrible everything is? She is especially disgusted by this giant portrait of Cleopatra, so much so that she sits on a bench across from it and just looks at for awhile, thinking about how awful it is. M. Paul sees her looking at it and is SCANDALIZED! She is at a museum without an escort looking at filth like this?? FOR SHAME! Lucy sort of shuts this down, but also agrees to stop looking at it, so I guess two steps forward, one step back.

Lucy, Mrs. Bretton, and Dr. John got to a concert/charity event deal with lots of fancy people like a King and Queen of...somewhere. And also Ginevra. You'd think now we're going to hear more from Dr. John about his love except Ginevra throws some shade towards Mrs. Bretton and OH MAN, you wanna drop out of Dr. John's good graces, that is apparently the fastest way. "Love love love...hold up, did you just side-eye Mamma? OOOOH HELL NO. BACK OFF, HARPY." So now maybe Lucy can slide right in there. Or you know, probably not.

Where the hell is Polly? She is going to show up, right?