i'm reading margaret atwood's the edible woman, and it is amusing and enlightening. the book was published in 1969 so it is dated, but atwood does seem quite timeless. i don't think any description does it justice (the description on the back of this paperback is awful) so instead i will quote from a paragraph i like, where marian (the main character) describes the women's christmas party at her office. she works at a surveying company.
[Marian] looked around the room at all the women there, at the mouths opening and shutting, to talk or to eat. Here, sitting like any other group of women at an afternoon feast, they no longer had the varnish of officialdom that separated them, during regular office hours, from the vast anonymous ocean of housewives whose minds they were emplyed to explore. They could have been wearing housecoats and curlers. As it was, they all wore dresses for the mature figure. They were ripe, some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel; she thought of them as attached by stems at the tops of their heads to an invisible vine, hanging there in various stages of growth and decay ... in that case, thin elegant Lucy, sitting beside her, was merley at an earlier stage, a springtime green bump or nodule forming beneath the careful golden calyx of her hair ...
if there's anything you're reading now that you really love, please let me know. i'm on a bit of a reading tear.
1 comment:
wow omar - lots of good posts in the last couple of days! esp the aol thing - didn't hear about it, until i read it on your blog. as for good reads, i've been re-reading two books:
1. the shipping news, by anne E proulx - its so good, and if you've been to newfoundland, its even more profound because it reminds you of the culture, of the people, of the land. its so beautiful!
2. the soul of malaya, by gondekort (sp) - written by a frenchman, and its about malaysia during the turn of the century. same with the shipping news, this book is a lot more meaningful if you've been to malaysia, and you start to notice why the people behave certain ways, and this book kinda explains it in the context of a foreigner that has been in malaysia way too long.
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