Why I'm a Girl on Etsy

After I bought my first e-reader for Christmas (a now already old generation Barnes and Noble Nook), I was broke, but I still wanted a cover for it. I thought it would be pretty cool to hollow out a book and use it as a cover, so I looked online how to do that, and after a few months, I think I'm close to being decent. My first hollow book was ok. The Nook fitted well and it looked nice, especially because I gutted the newest Garrison Keillor book. Sad. I'm never doing that again.

I then found some cheap hard covers at Hastings ($1.00. Not bad) so I got a bunch and made some hollow books out of that. I then found brand new books at Barnes and Noble for $2.00, so I got some of those as well. I now use whatever looks nice and it's big enough. I had seen some leather journals at Ross and TJ Maxx that I thought would make nice Nook covers, but since I was looking for a journal for myself, it took me forever to find something I could carry around without feeling self-conscious, or without having to justify my sexual orientation. I finally found a really nice brown leather journal with a flap with snap-on buttons, which I got at once and proceed to destroy.

I kind of messed it up with that coin

As I kept going back to the store to find more of those awesome looking journals, I kept finding pink, flowery, cutesy journals that I wouldn't find myself dead carrying, but I figured that other people would like to, more specifically women, you know. So, once I had more hollowed out journals that I knew what to do with, I finally opened my Etsy store. Since my hollow books ended up being quite cutesy, I decided to make an equally cutesy banner, so I decided to conceal my name from it, and the fact that I'm a guy! Hey, it's all about the money. And the fact that it's a lot of fun to make these hollow books. So yeah, I'm a girl on Etsy.

See what I mean?

By the way, the store's address: http://www.etsy.com/shop/hollowbooks. Check it out. They're cheap!

Most of my hollowed books are journals, but I will do an actual book now and then. I thought it would be fun to look for interesting words as I carved, and then I put them together in a kind of MadLibs sort of way. This is what I came up with after butchering A Summer of Butterflies:

Remordimiento literario - Literary Guilt

__ ¡En Español! ________________________

Mientras más aprendo de literatura, siento que tengo que leer más y más libros. ¿El problema? Que soy un lector muy vago, y lento, y lo que es peor, acabo de comprar un libro llamado "1001 libros que debe leer antes de morir". Un bajón. Y eso que el libro ese no incluye a Shakespeare, y a la mayoría de los escritores en español que vale la pena leer, así que la lista es en realidad el doble de larga. Si consideramos que lea un libro cada dos semanas, calculo que voy a terminar de leer esos 2000 libros cuando tenga 116 años. Algunos libros van a llevarme más tiempo, así que redondeemos a 120 para estar seguros.

Ojalá pudiera convencerme de que en realidad no es necesario, que puedo ver la películal, o algo así, y que eso sería suficiente, pero después de ver todas las versiones de El Principe y el Mendigo o Wuthering Height, me alegra de que leí los libros primero, así que eso no ayuda. Hay otras peliculas como Harry Potter, o el DaVinci Code, o los libros de Stieg Larsson que si uno las ve, no le hace falta leer el libro, porque no se perdería nada, pero esos libros no están en mi lista de libros para leer, asi que eso tampoco ayuda.

Un libro que he estado de leer por años es el Ulises, de Joyce. Lo empecé tres veces. La primera vez intenté leerlo sin ninguna ayuda, pero terminé aburrido, confundido, y curioso, porque no tenía idea de lo que había acabado de leer. Después imprimí el resumen de los capítulos de Wikipedia y traté de usarlos como un "bastón" para ayudarme, pero no sirvió mucho, ya que me perdí como el 80% de las referencias en el libro. Finalmente usé las SparksNotes (libros que tienen resumenes y análisis de los capitulos generalmente usados por estudiantes vagos que no quieren leer el libro). Como es un libro finito, lo pegué atrás de una de las versiones de Ulises que tengo, y leí los resumenes y análisis antes de cada capítulo, y a pesar de que entendí la historia (más o menos), todavía no entendí las referencias. La primera página del capítulo 3 me llevó como una hora y me parece que es una historia de la creación del mundo, aunque ni Wikipedia ni SparksNotes mencionan nada de eso. Hay un podcast dedicado al libro, pero después de un año de podcast semanales, el autor cubrió solamente el primer capítulo del libro, y no quiero esperar los 18 años que el proyecto parece que va a llevar. ¿Y por qué trato tanto de terminar el libro? Porque está entre los mejores libros en todas las listas que he visto, y TENGO que saber de que se trata, o por qué es tan importante. A veces desearía que pudiera ser como mi maestra de griego en la facultad, a la que le pregunté durante un final, "¿Leyó el Ulises de Joyce?" "No", me respondió. "No tengo tiempo". Que lindo ser así.

Es cierto que hay algunos clasicos que son tan grandes que podrían parar la puerta de una catedral, y sin embargo lo más importante en esos libros es la historia y no el lenguage. Me imagino que los libros de Homero en el original griego deben de haber sido increíbles en la belleza del idioma y la poesía debe de haber sido conmovedores, pero cuando leo las versiones en inglés o español, todo eso parece haberse perdido, y todo lo que nos queda es la historia. Por supuesto que finalmente lo acepté despues de haber leído las primeras 180 páginas de las 330 de mi edición de la Ilíada. A diferencia del Ulises, que es dificilísimo de entender, la Ilíada es simplemente difícil de leer porque tiene tantos detalles que hacen que el libro sea lento y aburrido. Uno aprende los nombres de todos los soldados que todos los otros soldados matan, sus países de origen, el nombre del padre de cada soldado, y la manera en que murieron. Después de haber leído casi la mitad del libro, decidí que si leo un buen resumen de cada capítulo va a ser suficiente. Por supuesto que hay capítulos que uno tiene que leer, como la pelea entre Aquiles y Hector, o cuando Priam va a buscar el cuerpo de su hijo y tiene que negociar con Aquiles, pero los capítulos de las batallas se pueden facilmente saltear y uno no se pierde mucho.

Me imagino que esa culpa que siento por no leer más viene de algun tipo de problema mental que adquirí como consecuencia de leer demasiadas traducciones mediocres de buenos libros, o por comer tanto chinchulín de chico. Quién sabe. Lo que sí sé es que si puedo encontrar una justificación para NO LEER esos 2000 libros antes de morir, voy a tener una vida mucho más agradable. Como diría Kanye West, "Yo no leo libros. Yo hablo con la gente y escucho sus historias directamente". Perdón, ¿dije Kanye West? Ignoren eso, por favor. Después de todo, todavía me gustaría comunicarme con frases y oraciones enteras y no haciendo ruidos como cavernicola, así que creo que voy a seguir leyendo. Además, no puedo empezar a imaginarme dónde va el coso ese si quiere aprender algo de historia antigua, ya que todos sus protagonistas ya estiraron la pata. Pero realmente necesito encontrar una manera de deshacerme del constante remordimiento cada vez que veo mis "bibliotecas." Y desafortunadamente Kanye West y su logica infalible todavía no me han ayudado.

__ English, please! ____________________

The more I learn about literature, the more books I feel I NEED to read. The problem? I'm a lazy reader. And I'm slow. And to make things worse, I just bought a book called "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die." Now that's encouraging. And that book doesn't even include Shakespeare, or any of the most amazing Spanish writers, so the list is probably twice as long as that. Considering that I may read one book every two weeks, that means I'll read those 2000 books (there will be a bunch of new books I want to read. "The Psychopath Test," for example, is in my personal list and it just came out) by the time I'm 116. Of course some books take longer, and at times my Nook may run out of battery, so let's round at 120, just to be sure.


I really wish I could convince myself that that's really not necessary, that I can just watch the movie, or something, and that's be enough. But then, after watching all the versions of "Wuthering Heights," I'm really glad I also read the book, so that doesn't help. Of course you can just watch the Harry Potter movies, or the "girl" movies ("The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo" and so on), or any Dan Brown or John Girshman movie and you won't miss anything, but those books don't even make the list of books I want to read, so that doesn't help either.


I really tried to read Joyce's "Ulysses." I started it about three times. The first time I tried to just read it back to back without further ado, but that just let me bored, confused, and curious, since I had to idea what I had just read. Next, I printed out the chapter summaries from Wikipedia and went at it with that help, but that didn't make much of a difference, since I still missed about 80% of all the references in the book. Finally, I tried the Sparks Notes (I actually bought them and glued them to one of my copies of the book), and it helped me understand what the plot was, but I still didn't get any of the references. I now found a 24 hour lecture on the book which will hopefully help me get through it and actually say that I got it. There's also a podcast dedicated to the book, but after a year of weekly posts, the author only covered the first chapter, and I really don't want to wait 18 years before the project is finished. And why do I go through all that trouble? Because Ulysses is at the top of every serious book list in the world, so of course I have to read it. I so wish I could be like my college Greek professor, to whom I asked during an oral final test once, "Did you read Joyce's Ulysses?" "No," she responded. "I don't have the time." Lucky.


But then, there are some classics that are so big they could stop a cathedral's door and yet are mostly about the plot. I know, I know, if you read Homer's books in the original Greek they're probably beautiful, and the poetry is probably moving, but I haven't read any translation that moves me with its very words to the level that other books in their original language have done. To me, the Iliad and the Odyssey are mostly about plot. Of course I found that out after I read the first 180 pages of the total 330 in my edition. What I did was to read the plot summary on sparksnotes.com and then read the chapter, to make sure I understood what was going on. Unlike Ulysses, which is terrible hard to understand, the Iliad is quite simple, but what makes it hard to read is the painful description of each soldier's family background. Half what I've read so far is an account of who killed whom, literally, with the names of the soldiers, the name of the country they came from, and the name of their fathers. I have decided, at this point, that after reading a few kids' versions, I can just read the Sparks Notes and I will know exactly what the book is about. So, instead of taking a month to read that, I can take 30 minutes. It took me about three weeks to figure it out (I told you I was slow), but I'm most definitely not spending another three weeks finishing it, and however long the Odyssey was going to take me. Of course there are chapters that I need to read, like the battle between Hector and Achilles (they did a beautiful reading of that chapter on Selected Shorts, which makes me think of what those old retelling of the book might have been like in the ancient Greece), and the chapter where Priam goes to get his son's body from Achilles. Other than that, you can skip all the battle scenes and read a summary instead and you'll be fine.


So there you go. I imagine that my self-inflicted book related guilt trips may be related to some kind of mental issue I've acquired while reading too many crappy translations of good books, or by eating too much cow intestines as a kid, who knows. All I know is that if I can find ways to justify NOT READING those 2000 books by the time I die, I will have a lot more time to enjoy life. Or like Kanye West would say "I don't read books. I rather talk to real people and hear their stories." Did I say Kanye West? Nevermind, I would still like to be able to communicate with actual words instead of mumbling, so I'll definitely keep reading. Besides, I can't begin to imagine who he would need to talk to if he wanted to learn something about ancient history, since, you know, they're all dead and stuff. But I really need to work on a way to get rid of the guilt! Unfortunately, Kanye's flawless logic ain't done it yet.