How I Read

I am reading the most fantastic translation of Anna Karenina. It is brutal and lucid and utterly unlike the prissy, clean, Victorian version I remember. I have read Anna Karenina at least three times since I first plowed through it in tenth grade (with most of it sailing several miles above my geeky, little head) and this is not the same book. It is heavy, messy and I take it with me everywhere.

Living on an island--an island with a Borders Books that is desperately low on books this year--can be tough for someone who consumes books the way I do. I love the idea of the library but after reading a book I just do not want to give it back. I am just not that good a person. A book is thoroughly mine when I am done with it. I write in the margins, inside the front cover, over the text, under the text, around the text and all sorts of other prepositions too. I tear out bits of paper to give notes to other people. I never just put a number in my phone but scribble it in my book only to most likely forget which book it is in later.

I stuff my book with: movie stubs, receipts, phone numbers, doodles, random bits of scribbled on paper, shopping lists, rail tickets, plane tickets, photos, business cards and anything else from the life I was living while I was reading that book. Anna is currently sporting a baggage claim stub, a plane ticket, notes on Frost's "Out, Out" (for my 12th grade student that I wrote while waiting in line at CVS), two Twilight: New Moon movie tickets (I convinced Noah to see it on his birthday no less), receipts from Chipotle (super veggie burritos for only 3$), six phone numbers and reminders to call the six people, eleven words I love, receipts from the Kilauea Shell Station, beach sand, a written out copy of W.H. Auden's "The Fall of Rome" that I wrote in line at Whole Foods, two dollars, and a bit of sticky candy cane. Priya was definitely here.

As a result the book gets fat, distorted, unwieldy and liable to come apart and spill its very personal contents all over the floors of very public places--not good. Yesterday just this happened at the Starbucks at the top of the Barnes and Noble here in Hollywood where there is never anywhere to sit. The skinny jeans, black trendy plastic glasses, expensively spikey haired young man next to me gave me a pityingly condescending "you shouldn't do that to books" sort of look. The plastic tagged Barnes and Noble man at the information desk gave me the "I really hope you paid for that and are not just trying to make it look like that is your book" kind of look. (Although I might have imagined that one as I have an abject paranoia of being called out as a shoplifter when I walk into a bookstore with my own book.)

To make matters worse I teach my students to write, underline, annotate and generally think out loud inside their books. I love the messy, personal and utterly undignified result.

Scribble Scribble

When I started this novel that I thought would never actually become a novel, the hurdles seemed endless--absurd, gigglefit endless.  The agent, the publisher, the editor and then of course, writing the book.... 

So I decided not to think about it.  After completing my doctorate (well my doctorate but not my revisions) I moved from Pimlico, London, back to the North Shore of Kauai and ignored all that lay ahead.  What better place to write about 17th Century London than Hawaii?  Made perfect sense.  It also was my only option as writing a book that was not yet a book did not pay terribly well.  So back into Kalani, my parents' empty summer house (empty that is until it is rented by hordes of tourists who boot me straight onto my friend Michelle's couch or my beautiful room in my hanai mom Wendy's beautiful happy house by the sea) to write. 

I was lucky and had done a huge hunk of my research for the book amidst my far-reaching PhD research and armed with the Complete 10 Volume Diary of Samuel Peyps and 300 auxiliary texts, photos, etchings and old maps, away we went.

My mother is an editor and she always says in her wonderful mixed metaphor way: "Nose to the grindstone.  Scribble Scribble."  Not looking up, holding my breath, total immersion, a winter ocean, loving encouragement and three years later...a first draft.  The Orange Girl.  One hurdle safely cleared.  Zillions to go.