I finished it...

Yes, I did. Just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

And now I feel like I read it too fast, as if I'd eaten too much at Thanksgiving. I feel stuffed.

That's all I can think of to write without giving some impression that may or may not affect how people read the book, except for one more word. Wow!

I Dream in Ink

What is the world coming to? First I steal my own posts; now I'm stealing back my comments. But iHanna had an thought-provoking post on journal-keeping, and I wrote a long comment, and I have the pictures to go with it already, and voila! A blog post!

This is a composite photo of the shelf on which I kept my journals before the renovations. Now, unfortunately, I've had to pack them away to make room for art supplies, but someday I hope to bring them out again. They are my life, literally, on paper, and therefore, deserve a little place of honor, I think.

I’ve kept a journal since I was seven -- the first one was a Nancy Drew diary complete with lock and about three one-sentence entries. (One of those entries is about going to see Return of the Jedi with my dad. I was very excited. I wrote two sentences.). You can see that journal on the right, the thick ivory-ish book seventh down in the stack. I never throw my journals away. My biographers might need them. Or the great-grandchildren, anyway.

I've had tiny journals and huge journals (see the one on the far left?), fuzzy journals and leather journals, spiral bound and other-bound. Most of the journals from my teenage years are pink. The fourth (black with white polka dots) and seventh (blue shiny) journals from the left are the two I kept as an exchange student in Germany. That's when I started buying journals with cool designs and interesting textures. That's about when I started calling them journals instead of diaries, too. In college, I bought the funkiest journals I could find. On my road trip in 2002, I stopped in Oxford, Mississippi and bought a plain red journal with a magnetic closure, at Square Books. I think it cost $12. I filled that journal in four weeks. And I liked that journal so much that I detoured through Oxford again on the way back to the East Coast so I could go buy another one. I'm not kidding. In Philadelphia, I started looking for journals I could keep in my purse, journals that could take a lot of abuse. That's how I eventually started using Moleskines (well, okay, so, I read that Neil Gaiman uses them and that prompted me to try one). Moleskines, as journals go, are almost boring, but oh-so-sturdy and practical, and there is also something indefinably magical about them, which may be why they have such loyal fans. They feel like a writer's journal. As opposed to what, I don't know. Because they feel like artist's journals, too.

I am not sure I can even articulate what keeping a journal means to me, or how it's changed me, because it’s been such an integral part of my life. But I can tell you that when I don’t write in a journal regularly (and I’ve occasionally gone up to six months), I start to feel quite fragmented. I try hard to write morning pages, although often, it's only morning in Hawaii by the time I get around to it. I understand my own feelings better if I write them down. In fact, I often don't even know how I feel about things until I write in my journal. Writing is how I process my life, in the way they say dreaming is our mind's way of processing. My journals are dreamlike -- they ramble, they float, they can be surreal, and often, they probably would make no sense to anyone but me. But I don't know. I don't let anyone read my journals. If I did, I wouldn't write the way I do and they wouldn't work anymore.

See, my minute-to-minute thoughts are very analytical, very curious, very problem-solving, and rarely directed inward. I’m a textbook INTJ, if that helps explain. I'm one of those people who’s constantly asking “Why?” and "How?" and "What?" like a little child… why is the sky blue… why is the bridge built like that... what is electricity (I made my husband explain that one in great detail)... how does the economy work... I usually have three or four tracks of thought going at the same time, most of which have nothing to do with me or my life. (Which explains the vacant stare so often seen on my face. I'm probably thinking about agriculture in Antarctica.)

My journal writing, on the other hand, is almost pure emotion. I do sometimes actually use them to keep track the events that have happened in my life...

... or in the world around me...

....or just as catch-all scrapbooks, when I didn't have the time or interest in keeping up a big scrapbook...

... or even approximate Latin translations of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." But they are usually, long, rambling explorations of my feelings, sometimes venting, sometimes exulting, sometimes pondering. Because I already know what happened, you see. So my journal is where I get in touch with myself. Sounds so cliched, but it's what I do. In fact, the emotions in the words are often so intense that, ten years later, I can step right back into events I forgot ever happened.

So you see what keeping a journal means to me. My journals are my life.

(Incidentally, I know these photos are all from my college journals, and I have no idea why that's all I shot, but like I said, the rest are in the attic now, so that's all I've got except for these.)

The History of Love

I love getting books as gifts -- and this year, I was given The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, as a birthday present. I finished it today.

One of the best books I've ever read.*

I find it so easy to review non-fiction books and so difficult to review novels. And I usually find other people's reviews lacking, as well. Having finished the book, I read the reviews at Amazon.com and shook my head over quite a few of them. Most of the complaints were about finding the book difficult to follow, and I can't address that, because I didn't find it difficult to follow at all. One reader complained that it left unanswered questions at the end. I didn't personally have any unanswered questions at the end, but I don't usually think that's a problem, if the questions are the kind of questions that can't really be answered, anyway.

And if I had read the editorial reviews, I'm not sure I would have ever picked the book up on my own. Technically correct, they don't capture any of the magic of this story. They make it sound so ordinary. And it is not.

So what would I want to be told?

I thought the characters were exceedingly human, flawed but real. I slipped into their skins as I read -- I identified with them, with all of them, even though my life is entirely different from theirs. The pacing is excellent: The story moves and doesn't get stuck in itself. I never got bored, but I had time to think. The book is packed with romance -- not sickeningly sweet romance, but varieties of romance -- both the nostalgic romance of long-lost young love and the romance of young love just beginning, with all the awkward elbows and teeth, and without the nostalgia; the romance of mourning; the romance of mysteries being pieced together. And my favorite: the romance of many people's stories coming together, intertwining with their knowledge, or without. One of the things I loved about the Three Colors trilogy, too.

Do you ever stop and wonder, Is this moment significant? Is this a defining moment? Could I point back at this moment and say, 'That one meant something?'

Maybe you don't. Maybe I'm silly that way. But The History of Love is filled with those moments, blended seamlessly together.

My only complaint? That I can't read the book-within-a-book, also called The History of Love, in reality.


* And I have read a lot of them. On average, I'd guess 1-2 a week since I was 10. I wish I had an exact count, though, because that only works out to 1,144 to 2,288, and I actually own about 1,300 books, most of which I've collected in the past 10 years (and I wonder where my money goes). And even though I haven't read every book I own, I know I've read hundreds of books I don't own. So it must be around 2,000, or maybe more. And of that, I'd say 60 percent would be fiction. So, give or take, I've read 1,200 novels. But do I have any way of proving this claim? Of course not. Unless you sit me down with a list of every book ever published, and then I could check them off. But even that wouldn't be totally accurate, because I might have forgotten one or two or fifty, and besides, that would take way too much time. Which I could spend reading more books.

Wooohoooo!

Another birthday present:

J.K. Rowling has finished the seventh book.



Seven years ago, I must admit, I looked at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with scorn.

Yes, scorn.

I've read fantasy books all my life and I could not figure out why people were getting so excited over a book about a normal kid who discovers he has magical powers and goes to a school for wizards/magicians/witches/warlocks. It's not like these ideas hadn't popped up in many variations before, and in books by authors I adored and respected.

I really thought Harry Potter was another dumbed down version of good things that already existed and that people were just jumping on the trendy bandwagon.

It was a year before I caved in and bought the first book.

I bought the second book within a week.

Truly, it doesn't matter if elements of the Harry Potter books have been in other books before. There are many different delicious dishes made out of flour and eggs. The Harry Potter books are good stories. And that, my dears, is why I read voraciously. Because I love good stories.

I can't wait for Book 7.

And while we're on the subject of fantasy, magic and fairy tales, Pan's Labyrinth is a haunting and beautiful movie and, yes, I think it will be one of my lifelong favorites. I first read about it at Inside a Black Apple, and I point you there, as her description is right on point.

My Books of Scraps

Back in October, I mentioned scrapbooks I kept while I lived in Germany and Prague as an exchange student. They were not exactly works of art, and they are already falling apart because I had none of the special scrapbooking materials used so widely today, but I will always treasure them.

Here are some of the pictures from my Germany scrapbook. I lived in the former East Germany from July 1991 to July 1992, arriving just nine months after the reunification.


When I went to Germany in 1991 with the Congress-Bundestag program (I applied because there was no language requirement and most exchange programs had them), I was one of the few exchange students who didn't receive any information -- name, location, etc. -- about my host family. I just went where the program leaders pointed me, which in this case, was onto a bus. The bus then drove east for a long, long time. When we passed the dirty gray "Kontrolstelle," formerly the border between West and East Germany, I realized my year was going to be very different from what I had expected.

My host family picked me up at the bus station -- they knew my name -- with a bouquet of flowers and a tiny red two-door Ford Fiesta. There were four of us in that tiny car with my gigantic, heavy, American-teenage-girl-traveling-for-a-year-sized suitcase, and I was absolutely terrified. They didn't speak any English, and I couldn't speak any German beyond "Guten Tag" and "eins, zwei, drei." Maybe I imagined it, but I thought they gave me a lot of strange looks that day.


There were eight of us in town for a four-week language program. I was one of the three who stayed in that city after the program was over, and I almost never saw the other two after that. I didn't stay because I liked East Germany all that much (actually, at first, I hated it, and I really just wanted to go to some nice little Black Forest mountain village like I had imagined, not this dirty place where years of pollution had killed all the trees), but because my host brother asked me very sweetly in halting English if I wanted to stay with them all year, while my host mother smiled at me, and I didn't know how to say NO. So I stayed, sure that I was making the worst decision ever, and ruining my whole year.

In fact, it was the best decision I could have made. No better way to learn a language than to be in a city of 50,000 in which about 5 residents speak your own language. You have no choice, if you want to talk to anyone.


And no better way to truly become part of a family and a culture than to be far from everything familiar. Well, not everything: my host mother faithfully bought me corn flakes to eat every morning. But you know what breakfast I liked best? Rolls with cheese, jam, or Nutella. I couldn't stop eating them. No wonder I gained 30 pounds in just a few months.

Even though I played federball with my host brother and sister almost every day (at least at first). I was amazed -- I'd heard of badminton, but I'd never actually known anyone who played it. I wish I did now because there's something quite satisfying about that thwack.


Once I stopped wishing I was somewhere else, I truly started to appreciate where I was. I still get homesick.


And I made friends -- rather a few wonderful girls picked me as their friend -- which also amazed me, because I was not only terrified, speechless and extremely shy, but socially awkward, even in America. And they took me everywhere with them, including the theater over and over and over. It was even better once I started to understand what was being said.

I still can't say exactly what made me decided to apply to go spend a year in a country where I didn't speak the language, at 16 years old, other than a wish to travel that I'd had since I was very very small, and a desire to get out and see the world. But I am so glad I did. My mom didn't want me to go, but she said I could, and I will always be grateful. A full post on all the things I learned, the ways in which I grew, the benefits I gained and the love I came to feel for my host family, my host city and my host country would fill a book. I wish I could send every American high school student overseas for a year. If you know anyone who's thinking about it -- student or adult -- encourage them to go even if you think it's crazy. I can't recommend it highly enough. If anything ever leads to world peace, it will be people who go out and live elsewhere and share their own cultures while learning to appreciate those of others.

A final, surprise benefit I got from my time in Germany: my host family took me to Czechoslovakia (it was still Czechoslovakia at the time) for a trip, and while I was in Prague, I stood on the Charles Bridge and said to myself, "Someday I will live in this city."

Four years later, I walked across the USC campus, and glanced up sign on a telephone pole that said, "Live in Prague." And I said, "Oh, yeah, I forgot, I'm going to do that." So I detoured to the Overseas Studies office and one thing led to another, and I ended up living in Prague, where I had all sorts of further adventures, including a few memorable glasses of the archbishop's wine, and learned how to speak enough Czech to get a fair rate on a cab ride.

That scrapbook next time.