I am a bookshop addict. I cannot walk past a bookshop without taking a peek inside, especially if it is a second hand shop. Second hand book shops have characters, I find. You will not always find the kinds of books that you are interested in reading, but you will inevitably find the kinds of books that the owner is interested in reading and there is something about walking into a secondhand bookshop and browsing the shelves that makes you feel connected to the owner of the shop as well as to the previous owners and future owners of the books. New bookshops do not have the same kind of warmth and character attached to them, but you can still sense something about the shop by perusing through the shelves and noting what they have and, more specifically, what they don't.

When I walk into a bookshop, I do so with a sense of purpose. There are books that I want to read that I have yet to find, and when I walk into a bookshop and start perusing the shelves, I am looking for specific authors, names that I will recognise. When I don't recognise any names, I immediately write that bookshop off my list of possibilites. When I recognise even a name or two, I start to make myself comfortable and peruse the shelves with more ease - I might only know a few of the authors, but there is a sense of visiting some old friends and being introduced to some of their contemporaries.

You might ask where I got the list of books that I look for from, and this is simple enough - it has been built up from years of English books that I neglected to read when I should have and books that have been recommended by friends, but was added to last year during my creative writing course when we were given a list of books longer than anyone would be able to manage in the mere three months that we had to complete the course. Then there are those that I gouge from the internet pages that I read. Internet pages like the one that I stumbled across this morning: "Thirty Books Everyone Should Read Before They're Thirty" (http://www.divinecaroline.com/22189/98450-thirty-books-everyone-read-they-re).

Looking over this list, I realised that I hadn't heard of most of the books and had only read a grand total of four of them. But most of them, upon reading the short descriptions, were ones that I had no interest in in any case! People's tastes are completely subjective, and I know that mine is no different, but I have decided to put together a list of the books that I want to read before I am thirty, compiled from a combination of that list and the creative writing one (excluding the ones sitting on my bookshelf here waiting to be read). And here it is, in alphabetical order, rather than that of preference:

Lara's List of Book She Wants to Read Before She is Thirty

1. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
2. Arundhati Roy - God of Small Things
3. Bernard Schlink - The Reader
4. David Cohen - People Who Have Stolen From Me
5. Ernest Hemingway - For Whom The Bell Tolls
6. Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis
7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
9. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
10. Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain
11. George Orwell - 1984
12. Jack Kerouac - On the Road
13. James Ellmore - The Black Dahlia
14. JM Coetzee - Boyhood
15. John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
16. Jonathon Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
17. Jose Saramago - The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
18. Joseph Heller - Catch 22
19. JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
20. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
21. Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt
22. Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
23. Ma Jian - Red Dust
24. Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye
25. Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion
26. Michael Ondaatje - Running in the Family
27. Milan Kundera - Life is Elsewhere
28. Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
29. Paul Theroux - Dark Star Safari
30. Peter Matthiessen - Snow Leopard
31. Plato - The Republic
32. Primo Levi - If This Be A Man
33. Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
34. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
35. Xiaolu Guo - 20 Fragments of a Revenous Youth
36. Xinran - The Good Women of China

Some of these, like The Lord of the Rings, are ones that I have started reading. Some are ones that are sitting on my shelf back home in South Africa, awaiting my return and itching to be opened. Some I am weary about and some I am confident in. There are many more to be added to this list, but this is just the beginning. You can expect to find it edited over and over again, but never cut down unless one of the books is read. But for now, this is all that I can do. I would like to hear opinions, so feel free to comment!

Lying between my folded arms
Held awkwardly against my body
As I strain to see over your curves.
I gently caress your strings
And let your music ring out into the silence.

My fingers are the instruments
As they pluck out the melody
Fret after fret,
Chord after chord.
You are just the vessel for my creative mind.
My tool.
My means to an end.
Without me you would be empty and silent,
Gathering dust,
Your strings rusting to uselessness.

Without me you are nothing.
Without you I am silenced.

I walked down the street this morning and it felt like something had changed. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. The same bits of rubbish still clung to the edges of the street, the buildings still wore the same shawl of dust, the neighbours still eyeballed me as I made my way down the street pretending to be oblivious to their stares. The world was the same, but I was different.

Suddenly I wasn't shuffling along, watching my feet and only looking up to glance at my reflection in tinted car windows. Suddenly I wasn't shying away from the gazes or blushing under the scrutinizing eyes. Instead, I was walking with my head held high, catching their glances and throwing them back, not self-consciously picking at my hair or clothes every time my reflection flashed past, but reveling in it. Damn, I looked good.

These were the same streets that I walked down yesterday, but then they had been unfamiliar, awkward, uncomfortable streets. They were someone else's. Today they belonged to me. I walked down them with a confidence that I didn't know I had.

I don't know where it came from. I don't think it was there when I woke up and tiptoed my way across my apartment, trying to avoid the landmines of clothing. Maybe it flew in with the breeze that is playing on the back of my neck or is stored within the sunlight that is warming my hair. Maybe it descended with the dust from the passing cars.

I don't know where it came from, but I like it. I am taking it as my own. It is mine. You can't take it from me now.

Books have always been a big part of my life. All you have to do is look at my bookshelf in Cape Town to know this. It is filled with the books that I have accumulated over the years, or at least the favourites. Every so often, my mother insists that I do a thorough Spring Clean which involves the giving away of old clothes and old books to some hospice or another. It's not really that I mind giving things away. It's just that my books hold memories for me. Even the ones that I haven't opened for years and years have a special place in my heart. The ones that are falling apart are particularly special. They might look like trash, but they are the ones that have been thoroughly pored over time and time again.

When I moved from Grahamstown to Cape Town, I came bearing many boxes of clothing, laundry, notes and other things that I had accumulated in four years of studying at Grahamstown. And I came bearing at least one box filled with books. Of course, on trying to unpack all  of my stuff, I realised that it was never all going to fit into my room, and decided for myself that a thorough Spring Clean was in order. I think that it was the most penetrating Spring Clean I had ever done. A good 50% of my clothes were thrown into plastic bags and at least two boxes of books were sent away for donation - books that I had bought with the full intention of reading and had lost interest in; books that I had read but weren't worth a second read; childrens books that were good, but not classics to be kept for the children. When I was finished, I looked at my bookshelf and it felt empty, as though a part of myself had been thrown away in the process. But it wasn't empty for long.

There is an amazing bookstore in Seapoint called Cafda (in fact, there is a second one in Claremont, but I have never been there, so have no clue where it is). It doesn't look anything special from the outside, but make your way in there and you will find yourself lost in a myriad of books - you can find anything ranging from fiction to non- for as little as R5 or as much as R50 (I can't remember ever seeing a book in there for more than that.) It is a charity shop, all the books being donated and all the proceeds going towards AIDS orphans. I would go into the store at least once a week and leave with no less than three books each time. By the time I was ready to leave South Africa, my bookshelf was filled once more, and this time it was filled with books that I wanted to, no... NEEDED to, read. Khaled Hosseini, Salman Rushdie, Lionel Shriver, Milan Kundera, David Eggers and a number of authors I didn't even know, lined my bookshelves and stared me down, begging me to open them up. I had placed them in an order - alternating humorous and serious, alternating authors, alternating themes. I had a plan for how I would read them, and every time a new book was added, my plan was altered accordingly. I wouldn't just put it on the end (though the time of its arrival was included in my decision making process). I would consider how much I wanted to read it, which books I wanted to read more, which ones didn't seem quite as important; which ones Michael would want to read first, which ones I would want to read before Michael; which book I was reading at the moment, and how it fit in line with that book (was the one I was reading humorous? Was the next one serious?) It was a very detailed process.

And then I got the call. I had just over a week left in South Africa. I  looked at the books on my shelf, at least 35 new ones now, and realised that there was no way in hell I was going to finish them all. I only had 30kgs to take with me on the plane. I was going to have to leave most of them behind. Ten, I decided. I  would take ten books with me. I chose the ten carefully and started packing my suitcase around them. But alas, my bag was too heavy. No matter how many frivolous items of clothing and pairs of shoes I removed, it wasn't enough. More of my precious books would have to stay behind. I ended up whittling it down to four.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage - Kate Kerrigan
Shalimar the Clown - Salman Rushdie
The Man Who Ate the 747 - Ben Sherwood

Within the first weekend of arriving in Cheongju, I sailed through the first two books, hardly stopping for air. I had no TV (or at least, no English TV), no computer and I was stuck in a city that I didn't know with no way of contacting the few people that I had already met. I started Shalimar the Clown, but didn't make it far before the Internet arrived in my apartment, and I was able to entertain myself in other ways. The books I still had to read were left to burn a hole in my bookshelf.

About two months after I arrived in Korea, I went with a friend to Seoul, and we found ourselves in a bookshop. I had been avoiding Korean bookshops, having heard that the English selections were pitiful. This was an exception. I sauntered down the aisles and found many of the books that were sitting on my shelf back home, and ones that I had been searching for, but was unable to find. I had to hold myself back and stop myself from spending a small fortune. I only bought three that day, but they were three that I had been wanting to read for years:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Reading quickly became my bus activity. I realised that the bus trips between cities were the ideal time for reading - I had a couple of hours to spare and reading on the bus didn't make me feel ill. My only other options for entertainment were music (which could often be listened to while reading) and sleeping (how boring!) I thundered through Haddon, sauntered through Salinger, and was just getting into Lee when another friend introduced me to "What the Book" in Itaewon, Seoul. I quickly fell in love with the new and secondhand bookstore. While their filing system for their secondhand books (arranged according to the first letter of the authors surname, but with no order alphabetical or otherwise thereafter) frustrated me to no end, finding a book that you wanted became as exciting as finding a treasure. I ran around the shop, gasping or squeaking on finding a new author that I wanted.
"Rushdie!"
"Ooh, Saramago!"
"They have Hornby!"
"MITCHELL!:" (This particular one was almost certainly followed by a squeal.)
I left that first day, clutching two books:

Number 9 Dream - David Mitchell
The Enchantress of Florence - Salman Rushdie (though I had not opened Shalimar the Clown since my first attempt, my faith in Rushdie had not been shaken.)

On my next visit, I managed to keep it down to only one, the last of a series of books that I have, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, been indulging in for years:

Shopaholic and Baby - Sophie Kinsella

This was all, I told myself. This was the last book I was buying for a long while. My small bookshelf was already starting to creek under the weight of my teaching books and lesson plans, and I needn't add any more strain to it with my fetish for fiction. But then I was convinced, a couple of weeks ago, to buy yet another, from a shop in Gwangju this time. Though I was tempted to buy even more, I kept it to a minimum, only buying the one:

Wicked - Gregory Maguire


 It only recently dawned on me the problem that I will have trying to get all of these books home, for they are ones I feel that I cannot abandon. These books will join my bookshelf upon my arrival in Cape Town, and each one will hold a memory for me. I will look at Hosseini and Kerrigan and remember the lonely first weekend spent in bed, wondering why in God's name I had chosen to come here. I will look at Haddon and think of the trip back to Cheongju from Incheon, a freshly bought secondhand guitar lying at my feet. I will look at Salinger and think of sitting on the Busan sand, indulging in his words while the sun set and sipping on an awful vodka and lemonade drink which I believe is called KGB or something along those lines.

Each book, as I make my way through it, will attach itself to a memory in my mind, and whenever I will look at them in passing, I will have a glimpse of my time here. Because books are more than just pages of meaningless words after all.

A torrential rainfall is coming down. I can see it falling from the metal sky, flowing in sheets and layering itself on the floor, preparing for me to step in it with my ever-too-long jeans. It falls down the window next to me in a waterfall, rather than the droplets that I can stare at for hours on end - the kind that join together when the wind snatches them up and tumble unwillingly down to the edge, gathering momentum with each refugee that they acquire, before being flung away to land on an unsuspecting leaf or car or piece of gravel. But no. Today it is waterfalls and torrents and sheets. There are no individual personalities amongst the masses. And I watch it, all safe and dry in the semi-comfort of the bus.

A song pops into my head, one that I was thinking of earlier, and I snatch up my iPod from the Bermuda Triangle that is my purple work/travel/everything bag and skim thtough the artists, albums and songs until I find the one that I'm looking for. I gingerly tuck the earphones into my waiting ears and let the music wash over me. I close my eyes as his voice fills my mind and drift away into oblivion. For a moment, I forget that I am the only waygook on the bus. I forget that I am on the bus at all. I forget about Korea, about teaching, about the last five months.

I am back home. Not my parents' house or the Grahamstown room that I rented for two years. Home. With him. I am lying on his bed, under the blue, patterned duvet, and his music is filling the room. He is playing some silly computer game and I am pretending to read, but my eyes keep darting towards him. He is too engrossed in his game to notice.
"Do you have any Switchfoot, baby?"
The thought comes out of nowhere. The voice just popped into my head, and it is reverberating there now. I won't be satisfied until I hear it. Maybe not even then - this might be one of those moments where I need to belt it out to be completely at peace.
He looks at me as though I'm nuts. "Any what?"
"Switchfoot."
He changes changes the screen over to his music player and starts the search. I know it's there. I remember making him download it at some point. Or possibly downloading it for him.
"Which one?" He asks the question reluctantly, bracing himself. He never trusts my musical stylings.
"Twenty-four."
He double clicks it and the voice rings out over the speakers - a clear voice, but with a hint of roughness behind it that makes me think that it doesn't come naturally - it has been polished to perfection after years of practice. He listens for a few seconds before announcing his disapproval.
"Yeuch."
I smile at him, but he has returned to playing his game, leaving me to enjoy the rest of the song without too many distractions. With each resounding word, I sing along silently in my mind and the nagging lyrics are erased from my persisting consciousness. My craving has been satisfied. I return to my book, but occasionally I look up and smile at him. He doesn't see it.

As I said in the post that I wrote a moment ago, I spent a good part of the last hour writing a story. When I finished writing the story, I stored it away in my writing folder on my computer. But when I was saving it, I came across this story that I wrote about four months ago and completely forgot about. I quite enjoyed rereading it, so here is Popcorn:





“Um, Lara.”
“Yes?”
“What are you doing?”
He's looking at me as though I'm crazy. And I'm prepared to admit that maybe I am, but that still doesn't justify him looking at me that way. I pause with my hand above the popcorn box. I can feel the chocolate melting in my closed fist. I knew that it was going to come eventually. No one ever understands it the first time that they see me doing it.
“It's how I eat my popcorn.”
I empty the brightly coloured balls into the container and shake it around a bit until all that can be seen of them are the hints of colour shining through the spaces between the white clouds of popcorn. My explanation hasn't helped. He is still staring at me dumbfounded.
“Try it.”
He shies away from the box that I have thrust towards him, as though it is diseased.
“No. I'm fine. Thanks.”
“No, really. Try it.”
He looks from me to the box and back at me again. Eventually I reach into the box and carefully select a single piece of popcorn and a single Astro. I open his hand and place them in his palm, staring him down until he eventually gives in and pops them both into his mouth. He chews slowly, as though expecting to have to spit it out, but then as he crunches through the candy coating into the chocolate and biscuit centre beyond, mixing with the slightly salty taste of the popcorn, he seems to come around. He no longer has a disgusted look on his face.
“What do you think?”
I've been watching him carefully, but its as though he hasn't noticed. He stares at the screen ahead of us, considering the left-over taste in his mouth.
“It's okay,” he admits.
“Not bad though, right?”
“No.”
I dig a hand into the box and bring out a fistful of the mixture. There's more popcorn than there are Astro's, but that's okay. As long as I have one or two per handful, I'm fine. I slowly start popping them into my mouth and turn towards the screen. The previews have started. When I look at him again, he has a piece of popcorn and one of his jelly-tots in his hand. He's eyeing them thoughtfully.
“I don't think that will work.”
He shrugs and chucks them both into his open mouth. I watch as he bites into them, more courageously this time. I see him splutter and his face fall at the taste. While my popcorn and Astro's might work, his popcorn and jelly-tot experiment is clearly a failure.
“I told you so.”
He glares at me in the darkness. I can't see it, but I know him well enough to realise that, when he looks at me like that, he is unamused. Or at least pretending to be. I turn back to the previews, my favourite part of going to a cinema, a self-satisfied smirk spread across my face. I take another handful of popcorn and carefully place two at a time into my waiting mouth.


It starts me thinking about popcorn. I never used to understand those people who always poured heaps of icing sugar over theirs. I have always seen popcorn as something that is meant to be a salty snack rather than a sweet one. One of the obvious exceptions, of course, is caramelised popcorn, but to me, that is a completely different story – I have always loved anything dipped in caramel, and I am sure that if you handed me a brussel-sprout dipped in caramel, I would eat it, and I would be happy to. But to pour icing sugar over popcorn instead of salt seemed like sacrilege to me. I tried it once or twice and it took a lot of willpower to not just spit it out. Instead I had to swallow and smile so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. And so, I always stuck to the savoury sprinkles at the cinemas, steering clear of the icing sugar as though my life depended on it. I can't remember the precise moment when I discovered the joy of adding chocolate to popcorn. I know that it was in my university years; probably the first one. I must have gone to movies with a friend who ate their popcorn that way, and I am willing to bet that I looked at them in the same incredulous way that Michael looked at me this afternoon. But, once I had tried it, there was no turning back. It has now become a habit that is hard to get out of. I see the two together now – chocolate and popcorn – and can't imagine either one separately, really. I have gone off chocolate, you see. I can't bring myself to eat very much of it, unless it is mixed in with the saltiness of popcorn. And so, I don't particularly mind when people look at me strangely as I pour the Astro's over the container, because I understand that they have just not been revolutionised yet. Soon they too will discover the delightful concoction.

Next year seems to be approaching awfully fast. A little bit too fast for my liking to be honest. It's fast-approaching and seemingly distant at the same time. Sometimes I look around me and wonder how on earth I am going to survive this country for another 7.5 months, and other times I look around me and find it hard to believe that 4.5 months have already passed me by.

When thinking about next year, one of the first things that always comes to mind is what the hell I am going to be doing with myself. I can see myself in Grahamstown, with a job as a journalist at Grocott's Mail, running around and interviewing people and coming home to my awesome boyfriend. And whenever I picture a job at Grocott's, I don't just picture myself as a reporter. I can see myself doing some of the other things at the same time - Lara Salomon: reporter, photographer, editor, ruler of the world.

I did a little bit of editing at my time at Grocott's anyway. It wasn't too bad. It was quite fun actually, holding someone's article in my hands and trying to turn it into something printable without changing the essence or the style of the person who had written it. Trying to take someone's hard work and turn it into something more. It is a powerful feeling holding a person's pride in your hands and knowing that you can make it even better. Or at least, you can have some part in making an article amazing. I quite like the idea of editing really. Or I did.

Today I have edited seven stories. Seven out of the twenty seven that I still have to edit. 37 pages out of the 127 that need to be edited by me by the end of this week. And I hate it. These stories are ones that I have read over and over and over again. I am tired of them. I want to throw them in a corner and forget about them, maybe come back to them in a couple of years time, but that's about it. Instead, I have to scour over them once more, dissecting them, looking at each page, each paragraph, each line, each sentence, each word and make sure that there is nothing wrong with any of it. It is dreary work. I hate it.

And so, instead, I have spent two hours reading over seven stories and spent an hour being inspired to write my own. Perhaps I am more of a writer after all.

Have you ever had the feeling come over you - the need to write down something. It isn't that I feel the need to write about my life. The exact opposite in fact. I feel the need to write a story. A story about something important, someone important. That isn't me. Here I am, sitting in my bed in my pyjamas, a dull day ahead of me and nothing in particular on my mind, but there is something nagging at the back of my brain telling me to write. But what about?

Should I write a poem? A glimpse into the way that I see the world. A poem about my room perhaps.

Seemingly meaningless objects lie scattered
A book thrown here
A stuffed dog there
A guitar lying dusty and untouched in the corner
Begging to be played
It's silent plea unheard.

Perhaps a short story. I used to love writing those. They would come so naturally to me. An idea would pop into my head and I would just start typing, my fingers taking over, not thinking about what I was typing but just typing away. Sometimes I would close my eyes and my fingers would take over completely. I would feel them hitting the keyboard and I knew that letters, words were filling the screen at my doing, but I was not entirely conscious of what was being written. My mind was in control of course, but it felt like I was a different person entirely. I would separate myself from myself, close my eyes and just drift away, hearing the keystokes, hearing the words going through my mind as though I was saying them out loud, and my fingers were just typing it all up without my willing them to.

Perhaps I will return to the novel that I have started to write. The one that I haven't looked at in months after spending half a month getting lost in it. I should never have stopped writing it. Somehow I knew that as soon as I stopped typing, as soon as I let my mind drift to other things, things like packing and moving and silly material things, I would never come back to it. It is sitting on my computer. Sometimes I open the document and look at it, read the first page and contemplate carrying on. But the characters seem like strangers to me now. I need to connect with them again, but I cannot bring myself to. It has been too long. I have changed and I am scared that they will no longer speak to me. I suppose that at some point I will have to find out.

I need to write something. I cannot let this creative stint go unnoticed, unrecognised, unfulfilled. And so I come here, to release my creativity, to open myself up, to let my mind and fingers take over and let myself go.

It has been a long while since I last looked at this blog. I have been focussing on my Korean sojourn and haven't been doing too much creative writing or focussing on too many other issues. But, I thought that I would just update this blog to mention that Cry Baby is going to be published! Twice!!

It will be in a South African literary journal known as New Contrast as well as in the collection of short stories from the creative writing course I did last year, which will be called "A Day at the Zoo". Not my choice of title, I won't lie, but it will suffice. For those of you who want to read some of the stories that will be published and more, all of my submissions as well as those from the others in the creative writing class can be found at http://creativew09.wordpress.com/

Though my journalism career has come to a halt for this year, I have not forgotten newspapers completely, and was featured in one a couple of weeks ago. Being interviewed for the article was a very harrowing experience, but I couldn't help but laugh at his cliched questions and the monotony of the whole interview. The article itself is all in Korean, but can be found on page three of this website: http://www.jbnews.com/paoin/viwer.html?exec=viewpage&height=5929&GCC=AH60399&PaperDate=2010-06-11&PageNo=3501962&PageName=01&CNo=0&COI&NCT&scope&keyword&period&startdate&enddate&page&page_size&idx

That is all for the moment. I hope to return to this blog at some point in the near future.