65 Books in a Year: Book #9 Neverwhere

Neverwhere is one of the first books that I bought on my Nook. It was on-sale for cheap and I 'confirmed' without a second thought. And, yet...I didn't read it. I devoured American Gods and still there Neverwhere sat. I drooled through Stardust and still didn't read it. I even knew it was about London and still...nothing.

I read about the BBC radio version coming out later this month and my interest surged. I read that I'd be listening to James McEvoy and the delicious voice of Benedict Cumberbatch and I flippin' opened up the old Nook, hoping that I read the book fast enough to be finished before I listened.

From the opening line:

"The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself."

I was hooked.

Neverwhere is the song I sing every time I look at a tube map or flip through old pictures. Neverwhere is London and, if you love that city or have a passion for any city, really, this book will definitely fill your heart with delight and your mind will wonder about the city above, beside and below you.

While this book has some great main characters; Richard and Door really are quite lovely and Hunter and the Marquis are also tops. It's the city characters that make this book so darned awesome. There's actually an earl in charge of Earl's Court. The Angel Islington and the Black Friars with their dark names like Obsidian are just fun to imagine...and 'Mind the Gap' turns into a scary phrase of warning.

Here's a book that pay homage to the wonderful city that is London. This book is soooo darned good that I want more...I need a New York Below and a Paris Below and, and, and...I don't want to leave the characters or the world. What a perfect ending...sigh.

Can't wait to listen to the BBC Radio 4 version.

OK, so funny tidbit...I keep on reading reviews that compare this book to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I find that funny since I couldn't help, but imagine Richard Mayhew being played by Martin Freeman who played Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie...strangeness.

65 Books in a Year: Book #5 Londoners

I'm genuinely having a hard time writing a review for this book. If I could go by the introduction alone it would get an A++. It is nostalgic, personal, descriptive, gives a beautiful homage to the A to Zed (the 1998 copy of which I still have--although if you look at it pages just fall out because I used it so much) and it opens with one of my favorite quotes of all time ("When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford" ~Samuel Johnson). It's too bad that Londoners, well, at least the majority of the 80+ interviews that make it into the book seem to have forgotten all about Johnson.

OK, so reading most of these interviews made me depressed and yearn for a London I guess doesn't really exist if you live there. While reading I was reminded of an interview Stephen Fry conducted with a former Essex guy who now lives in California. Fry asked the guy why he, one of the two most famous modern British guys, chose to live in America and the guy replied, "I think there's just a conspicuous lack of cynicism and skepticism...". After reading this book I'm only beginning to see what he's talking about.

I love that this book is set up pretty much like Stud Terkel's Working, in the sense that there are tiny little stories categorized by a common theme, but the stories don't have to be read in order to get a sense of the place and time in which they were written. I get, from the few stories that I connected with, that London is as vastly different as any city, and, that it is a city's history that differentiates it from any other. I guess the sense that, whether it is realized or not, one falls in love with a city based on its history.

Stories of note:

• the black dancer who became a plumber, yes, plumber...
• the woman who is from the Middle East who still hasn't told her parents that she's modern and living with her boyfriend
• the manicurist who can tell more about the collective economy than most economists merely by looking at the people who get their nails done and for what reasons
• the guy who's spent his time in London revitalizing Canary Wharf
• the story of the rickshaw driver and his passenger's fetish for feet and socks
• the teacher who, across The Pond, has the same struggles with students and parents and motivation and admistration and frustration that I have as a teacher in little 'ole Missouri
• the dominatrix, the beekeeper, the Wiccan priestess
• the funeral director who targets immigrant families because, well, funerals are a business that last generations
• the city planner who understands that greatness cannot be planned...this man loves himself some London
• Adam Byatt and his flavor for all things traditional, yet modern...I would like to try some John Dory

Oh, and I'm totally curious about the 100+ interviews that didn't make the cut...I wonder if I'll ever be able to read those? I'm also curious if this same feeling of weariness is so prevalent in other cities should you interview 'the man on the street' in say Paris or New York or Los Angeles. I wonder what Taylor thinks of London.

Thank goodness there's that delicious intro talking about rain and umbrellas and, London as 'propulsion, [that] rewards those people who push forward'. There's loads of great stuff in this book, I learned so much (see my list below), however, if I went by these stories alone I'd never take public transportation anywhere, I'd not yearn for London, a city I definitely yearn for, and, *whimper* I'd be tired of life, I'd be tired of London.

What I learned:

• 'Places make the best lovers...'
• 'People's worst qualities come out at night...'
• Cornershop's Handcream for a Generation
• 7/7 Terrorist Attacks
• Stephen Lawrence, a racially motivated attack improperly handled, for years, by the police
• I am part of the easyJet culture
• "Dog Man Star" by Suede
• The Jam
• The Long Good Friday
• John Dory...it's a fish, by the way
• words: vertiginous, cenotaph, Canberra, biro, plinth, Geordie, alluvium, cormorants, courgette, grotty, paracetamol, pissoir, peripatetic

All right, all right! I may love this book, just not the people in it!

And, here the covers I wish I had instead:

30 Days of Truth: Something You Hope to Do in Life

I found this meme here and here.

Five: Something You Hope to Do in Life

So, seriously, I want to live in London, England. I want to live in London, England until I am sick of being there (which will be NEVER).

Here's how that dream used to look:

Stephanie goes to London. She works in a pub (the easiest place to get a job when you are not from, say, um, England). She lives in a studio flat in the top floor of a building in Northern London. She goes to museums, she eats jacket potatoes, she spends her days off in Hyde Park. She has British friends. She is happy.

After going to school there:

Stephanie goes to London. She is a tour guide (after two years of training). In her spare time she reads books and visit museums and writes. She drinks lots of wine. She faces herself Bridget Jones. She lives in a studio flat with her cat. She drinks lots of tea.

OR

Stephanie teaches English in a teach abroad program or as a second language. She lives in a one bedroom flat. She goes to concerts and shows and parties. She visits The States for two weeks every summer.

Latest incarnation:

Stephanie's husband and kiddo go with her to London. They spend summers there...whole summers, well at least Stephanie and the kiddo do, husband has to go back to The States to work. That is until he gets a job in London doing what he does, Stephanie teaches and the kiddo wears a uniform to school. We go to the park every Saturday, we play around the Peter Pan statue. We go to museums and eat in Harrod's and go to the Tower and talk to the birds. We go to Portobello Road and Camden and Covent Garden. We watch lots of shows. Family and friends come to visit.

Too bad, the husband's dream is to live in Australia--the last frontier.

55 Books in a Year: Book #17 Anna and the French Kiss

When I was younger my life's goal was to go to/live in London, England.

This goal was so prominent in my mind that during my Home-Ec class when other girls were making those big wedding plans (a project I'm soooooo glad has been deemed sexist and inappropriate) I planned my trip to London--no, really, I told my teacher I wasn't planning on getting married and that if I did I would do so in Vegas. She told me I should plan my honeymoon instead and my trip (not honeymoon) was a go.

My friends used to help me dream about my life in England.

I'd meet a boy named Nigel "Something"(I don't remember his last name)worth the Third and he'd be handsome and rich and have lovely gardens we'd stroll around. I'd meet the Queen (or is it The Queen?) and she'd be so taken with how polite I was that I'd be offered a job and a place in the palace. I'd own a dog. I'd go to pubs. I'd become an archaeologist and figure out what happened to those boys in the Tower. I'd eat lots of fish and chips. I wish I would have kept all the papers on which we doodled my life plan.

And, then it happened. Everything worked out so I could go to London, England...not just a week or a month, but a whole semester...sigh.

I became a part of the Missouri London Program.

I became an exchange student.

It was awesome.

I'd forgotten how much so until I read Anna and the French Kiss, a wonderfully written, light, but in no way breezy, young adult novel by Stephanie Perkins.

This book would just be another typical teen fish out of water tale if it wasn't for the amazing dialogue. I fell in love with Anna the first moment she was introduced. Actually, Perkins has quite a lovely grasp on dialogue and characters and I fell in love with and related to them all. Each character exhibited traits of people I know and cherish. There's the boy who everyone knows is in the wrong relationship, but he doesn't have the backbone to end it. There's the girl who has had a major crush on said boy, but understands that she is not the one. There's the jealous, over-the-top girlfriend. The boy, who is this case happens to be named Etienne (sigh), has his own wonderful set of quirky guy friends. And, there's all the romance of being in a foreign country sans adults. Something about the way these seniors acting seemed totally believable. This may be the first time I've read a book where a girl or two cries alone or accidentally in front of someone and I didn't want to bash my head, or hers, into a brick wall. I even had some of the same culture shock moments ("What the world I left went on without me while I was having a life overseas?"). This book was soooo good that I couldn't put it down and had to finish it, while my friends waited, sitting on a bed in a lovely Los Angeles hotel an amazing view of the Hollywood sign behind me.

The only thing that would have made this book better is if it would have been set in London, no really, I mean that...maybe Stephanie Perkins will do that someday.

So study abroad. If you're lucky you'll meet people half as cool as these people and you'll have wonderful adventures with or without all the romance. If you can't study abroad right away at least read this book and remember your first love, your first time away from home and live overseas vicariously through them.

Reading this book made me get out the 'ole scrapbooks. Memory lane never felt so good.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day Six

Day Six: A song that reminds you of somewhere

           One of the first things that we bought for our flat when we spent the semester in London was a radio. This was one of those small alarm radios, it was white and the sound was terrible, but when you have a TV that only shows only BBC 2 when it feels like showing any television at all and said television lives in the scary basement of your apartment building on Knaresborough you love your radio...and we did. Although there were other people in the Missouri London program that obviously had money to blow, we did not and we cherished our shared radio, hair dryer, curling iron and kool-aid pitcher.
           From the moment we bought the radio I'm not sure it was ever turned off. When I'd come home from classes or from checking my email there would always be a guest in our rooms listening to our radio a) because we had the cleanest and friendliest set of rooms and b) because we had the only, much coveted, balcony.
           Even now 13 years later, I can remember our Sunday night Chicken Tonight dinners and our pasta meals taken out on the balcony, the smell of the diesel, the sounds of the trucks and cars honking in the streets as we ate and talked about our day and how we were going to spend our night. If you were hanging with Amanda and I it would be playing cards and drinking tea or taking a walk, if you were hanging with Julie and Becca you'd head to O'Neill's. No matter what, the soundtrack was the same and went a little something like this:

Bittersweet Symphony The Verve
Brim Full of Asha Cornershop
Let Me Entertain You Robbie Williams
Never Ever All Saints
Laid James
Together Again Janet Jackson
High Lighthouse Family
Real World Matchbox 20
The Ballad of Tom Jones Space with Cerys from Catatonia

and the song that reminds me most of this time and of the city of London is from a lovely lady from Australia named Natalia Imbruglia and the song is Torn. While we saw the video and heard the song everywhere and often during our semester there (including our hotel room in Amsterdam), I am reminded most of that little radio, our flat and the wonderful city of London, England...my favorite city in the world. Who knew that song would do that?

Feel free to join in by commenting below (I really do love comments, on fb or here), or doing this challenge on your own blog.

The 30 Day Song Challenge

Day 01 – Your favorite song
Day 02 -- Your least favorite song

Day 03 -- A song that makes you happy
Day 04 -- A song that makes you sad
Day 06 -- A song that reminds you of someone
Day 06 – A song that reminds of you of somewhere
Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event
Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to
Day 09 – A song that you can dance to
Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep
Day 11 – A song from your favorite band
Day 12 – A song from a band you hate
Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure
Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love
Day 15 – A song that describes you
Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate
Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio
Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio
Day 19 – A song from your favorite album
Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry
Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy
Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad
Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding
Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral
Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh
Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument
Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play
Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty
Day 29 – A song from your childhood
Day 30 – Your favorite song at this time last year