Procrastination is the thief of time (well duh!)

You know how frustrating it is when you finish a book and it's late at night so nobody is awake to talk to about it? That's what a book blog is for, right? But when it's that late it just feels like so much trouble to fire up the laptop and talk to the blog. If, instead, a person decided to just blog in the morning, can you see how it would be that much more frustrating to wake up and realize that all of the brilliant ideas and insights of the night before are gone? That's essentially what happened to me last Saturday night. I finished Meg Rosoff's What I Was (YA/MYA?) and I'd practically written the entire blog entry about it in my head but I was too tired to actually get the stupid thing on electronic paper. Trying to reconstruct those thoughts now is immensely frustrating and just points to the fact that I (and maybe you too) need to write when the muse arrives to bring brilliance with a thump on the head, not later.

Meg Rosoff writes strangely compelling (or possibly just strange) books. Her 2004 novel How I Live Now (MYA) was a book I considered for the seventh grade dystopia list last year but discarded, reluctantly, because it was a little graphic on a number of levels. I wandered across What I Was (MYA?/YA) a couple of weeks ago in the public library and checked it out just to see if Rosoff followed the same pattern. This book, published in 2008 by Viking Adult press, does offer a similarly weird and otherworldly flavor, but the writing style and plot progression are both dramatically different.

The main character, whose name we don't learn until the end of the book, is a young man on the brink of, well, even he's not sure about that. As the book opens, our seventeen year old protagonist is beginning what should be his final academic year at St. Oswald's School. St. Oswald's is his last-chance for graduation, following expulsions from three schools in as many years. And, while our hero's parents expect their son to follow a typical, if mundane, upper-middle class British career path but he is, at best, ambivalent about his future plans. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this lack of ambition, though it is a lifeless sort of wailing (Rosoff's strange style comes through particularly in the colorless fog that is the future for her main character). The action begins, perhaps predictably, as the main character meets his destiny while trying to escape from P.E. class. Here's our hero pondering that moment as an old man: "We know now that time leaps and skids and suddenly stops short, as it will soon for me, as it did once on a day in the middle of the twentieth century when I met the person I wanted to be and asked him for a drink of water." (p. 204) Read it and let me know what you think. Post a late night comment if you finish reading and nobody else is awake...


What I'm reading right now: At the moment I am cruising back through, in chronological order, Angela Thirkell. A friend lent me Wild Strawberries which I had never read (thanks KWK!) and I've been diving back in to Thirkell with enormous delight (as usual). I'm also trying to finish William J. Mann's biography of Katharine Hepburn, Kate, which I borrowed from a colleague about a year ago. I need to finish that one before school starts, because it's 656 pages long and I'm only on about page 200 or so. I think I'll go see what progress I can make.