Category: Books

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"Other people" Awesome Books Memoir Sentiment Theatre Work

“I always wanted to be an expert at something.”

This morning I was thwarted – again – from getting my iced latte.  As I pulled up and parked in front of Starbucks (you park perpendicular), I watched this guy track in front of my car and then wait there for me.  I’ve seen him outside of Starbucks before* and he’s asked for money, and I’ve given it to him, but I wasn’t feeling it today.  I killed some time sitting in the car, avoiding making eye contact (easy because the visor was flipped down), putting on mascara and whatever.  Someone parked next to me, and he tracked in front of their car and asked for a dollar.  After a minute or so of debate I decided I didn’t really want to deal with this – I had $4 in cash, enough for a drink, not enough for a handout; I didn’t want to have to use a credit card so I could save him a dollar; etc. – and I just started the car back up and pulled out and went to work.  I drank my VitaminWater Zero and was sort of satisfied.

But tomorrow?  No one is standing between me and that iced latte.

(*One big difference between Mill Valley and Menlo Park/East Palo Alto…I liked the bourgeois atmosphere in MV.  I miss that.  Also it was so much easier to just “run out and grab some dinner” – at TW that involves getting in a car, and sometimes on the freeway, if you don’t have a hankering for Togo’s, Jack in the Box, or something from the Extra Mile, also known as Chevron.)

Tonight I worked front of house at Snow Falling on Cedars.  I was there partly for Patron Services, and indeed there were a few people who had tickets for the wrong night, or the wrong show (the curse of overlapping shows in different theatres).  I was there also to sell subscriptions and subscription renewals, which mostly entailed me sitting behind a counter smiling at people and telepathically instructing them to come renew their subscriptions.  I had two bites early on, and then another two bites, and I was like, “Yeah, four sub renewals!  That’s awesome!  Last night the person working got ONE.”  (No judgment, I know it’s all about the patrons there that night.)

Then the first act started and I got a sandwich, and I was going to read but instead I listened to Sarah and Vinnie because I’m still a week behind.  Then intermission happened and I majorly lucked out – a group was there and SIX of them wanted to renew their individual subs.  So there I was, filling out forms right and left and collecting credit card numbers.  Ten renewal forms altogether!  I’m pretty stoked.

So, the second act started and I’m half-planning on going down the street to the Starbucks, which I’m pretty sure is closed by now (when I get hooked on something it’s hard to let up).

Then this usher, Judie, starts talking to me.

[I just realized I totally slip into present-tense whenever I’m telling stories.  I’m constantly going back in my writing and just changing the beginning to present tense to keep it all consistent.  But whatever, it’s almost midnight and I don’t care right now.]

So Judie the usher starts talking to me, and then the second act of the show just slips away.  Because she is just talking and telling stories about growing up, and how she moved all the time because her father was a furrier and kept opening up new stores and getting them on their feet.

You know when you’re talking to someone and you’re just wishing you had a tape recorder?  I would have settled for a nice subtle way to take notes.  But there was no way.  For the next hour she and I just talked – I don’t want to imply that she talked the whole time, but she definitely held up the conversation.  But it was all stuff about how she worked as a shill at a carnival when she was a teenager…how she married her husband after 12 days…her college roommate asking her in a letter before they even met, “Who did your nose?”  She’s Jewish but she doesn’t “look Jewish.”

One day her mom met the rabbi in the street and the rabbi said, “Goldie, I didn’t see you in service this week,” and her mother replied, “That’s right Rabbi, you didn’t see me because I wasn’t there.”  …I mean, is she stealing that line from somewhere?

I just kept thinking, Judie, you should write a book.  She just had all these stories, but more than that, she told them really well.  Like, insanely well.  (One might say, as well as a certain famous Jewish writer?  She did remind me of him.)

OMG, Judie, I hope you come across this blog in the universe, and I hope you read it.  If you do, do you want to dictate all your stories to me and I’ll write them down?  I mean, you probably don’t even need me, your delivery is amazing and you clearly know how to tell a story, but I’d still love to be involved.  Thanks for saving me from spending yet another $4 on coffee I don’t need, as well as keeping me entertained for an hour.

I’m sure I’ll see her again – it sounds like she ushers all the time for TW.  So our paths will cross.  And I’m actually kind of excited for that.  (This is the first time, in all my theatre experience, that I’ve said that about an usher.)

Here’s to Judie!

(And also: more info about Snow Falling on Cedars here)

Categories
Being a girl Books Religion

The Game of Life

I’m reading this book that someone at work gave me: The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn.  I haven’t gotten very far into it but the first chapter has already brought up an interesting concept.

The book is along the same lines as The Secret (which I haven’t actually read, but I’ve read about it and I think I grasp what The Secret is).  Florence breaks down the mind into three departments:

The subconscious is: “simply power, without direction…Whatever man feels deeply is impressed upon the subconscious mind, and carried out in minutest detail.”

The conscious is: “the mortal or carnal mind.  It is the human mind and sees life as it appears to be…it impresses the subconscious.”

The superconscious is: “the God Mind within each man, and is the realm of perfect ideas.”

I learned all the id/ego/superego stuff in high school, but the term “superconscious” isn’t familiar to me, at least not described like this. 

“In [the superconscious] is the “perfect pattern” spoken of by Plato, The Divine Design; for there is a Divine Design for each person.  There is a place that you are to fill and no one else can fill, something you are to do, which no one else can do.  There is a perfect picture of this in the superconscious mind.  It usually flashes across the conscious as an unattainable ideal – something “too good to be true.”  In reality it is man’s true destiny (or destination) flashed to him from the Infinite Intelligence which is within himself.”

A part of me knows this is just one person’s theory; it’s not really something that can be proven or shown through science.  But the rest of me thinks that it makes sense and fits in line with the kind of view I’ve been taking on the world.  I like the idea of The Secret – attracting to yourself the things that you want.  I also like the idea of the Divine Design – that things are predestined for me and that the choices and actions I make resound within this overall life plan that is already in place.

I know that a lot of people are against this idea for just that reason: they don’t want to think that they don’t actually have any say in the way their life turns out.  But the Divine Design doesn’t eliminate free will.

Probably if I’d read this book three years ago I would have dismissed it as yet another psycho-babble self-help book.  But this year the way things have been falling into place, Drew and I keep saying to each other that everything happens the way and when it’s supposed to.

A year and a half ago we had just moved back to California and we kept saying that 2010, after crazy 2009 with its engagement, cross-country move, and wedding, would be the calm year of just working and paying off debt.  But apparently that wasn’t part of the plan for us, and it’s just been this year that we’re finally, finally starting to make great strides forward.

I don’t know whether we managed to finally attract these things to us, or if it was just part our Divine Design, or if our collective superconscious finally made our jobs materialize.  Or a combination of all three.  I guess it doesn’t matter how it happened so much – I’m just so happy that it did. 

That’s actually what caught my eye in those paragraphs about the departments of the mind: that this perfect picture of my future already exists inside me somewhere and that when I’ve had those flashes of the way things could be, it’s not “too good to be true” – it’s inevitable.  That’s a good feeling.

Categories
Being a girl Books Memoir

Ima let you finish, but Injun Joe is the best nickname of all time. Of all time!

When I hear people talking about certain things, I have this deep seated yearning to chime in.  When the people are my friends or family, I definitely just put my two cents in.  But what to do when I overhear conversations between, say, two lower-tier Facebook friends, or the hosts on my favorite morning radio show, or the actors chatting in their dressing room before the show?

Lately I’ve found myself biting my tongue A LOT to keep from piping up with my extensive opinions and feedback on a variety of topics.  Here’s an incomplete list:

Black Swan
Trader Joe’s (and Trader Joe’s products)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (the book)
Mormons
the Mill Valley Health Club
crossword puzzles
that “Why Chinese mothers are superior” article
bacon jam, or bacon candy bars, or bacon and chocolate
The Social Network
The King’s Speech
the Oscars in general
The Office
Huck Finn (the new edition)
Ricky Gervais, in particular his performance at the Golden Globes
Real Housewives
The Bridge (the documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge)
TheatreWorks
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (the book)
Megan Mullally
Broadway
Big Love (the TV show)
Biggest Loser
Kelsey Grammer
Jeopardy! (especially that Watson the computer is going up against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter)

So, if you have any questions about any of these topics, feel free to ask me, as I’m ready and more than willing to address any of them.

Categories
Awesome Books Fiction Not awesome

I hate when someone else gets the good idea first

There’s this guy who has set out to tweet an entire novel.  Here are the salient points.

  • He is tweeting 5 or 6 days a week.
  • He started on 1/11/11 and intends to finish on 11/11/11, so it’ll be 10 straight months.
  • It appears that he tweets more than once a day. (Looks like about 100-150 words per day, according to his website so far.)
  • It’s about a girl who lives on the streets in Berkeley, and she gets a cell phone and starts tweeting.  Apparently the point is that it will circle back around and be about the redemptive qualities of social networking.

Here are things I don’t like about it.

  • That I didn’t think of this first.
  • That he’s writing it day by day…I feel like if he doesn’t plan ahead and outline at least a little bit, how is he going to create a good story?  I suspect reading this will be a waste of my time.
  • I don’t really care for all the text speak.  I get that the medium is twitter, but it’s obnoxious to read all the 4s and 2s and Us and Rs and thxs, etc.
  • So, doing the math…there’s no way this thing can be much longer than 25K.  That’s not a novel.  So I wish he would stop calling it a novel.

This is a really interesting concept and now it’s something that I’m just thinking about, in the way you just let things marinate.  I think it could be a really amazing way to “publish” something.

I’m reluctant to put his website here, because I don’t want to give him any traffic, lol.  This is an awesome concept and I love the idea that the book speaks to social networking bringing about redemption.  So it bums me out that a) so far I’m not impressed with the writing or the story, and b) he’s hardly committing if it’s only 10 months and less than 30,000 words.

But, his website is tweetheartnovel.com, and you can follow him on Twitter and get all the text-speak updates if you want.  (I’m not.)

Categories
Beauty Books Drew

There’s been a change in me…

So last night found me watching Watch What Happens Live, an interview show where Andy Cohen talks with people from Bravo TV shows, particularly the Real Housewives.  His guest was Kim Zolciak, from The Real Housewives of Atlanta.  I think Atlanta is on the far trashy-and-stupid end of the Real Housewives spectrum, and so I spent the first 20 minutes of WWHL making fun of Kim (who is particularly trashy and stupid).  I called out her lack of interview skills (she spent a lot of time looking down or just not at Andy); when she said “Do I look fat or something?” I said yes; and I was eager to watch her “perform” one of her “songs” at the end of the show.

We came back from a commercial and she was sitting on a stool, sort of bobbing her head with a track, and then she started “singing” along with the pre-recorded song.  It was awful.  I mean, truly awful.  She’s not a good singer, but she also lacks any confidence, so her “dance moves” are all half-hearted and self-conscious.  Like when you watch a middle-school production of a musical where they all have to dance and sing.  It even fell out of the “delightfully bad” range and into “painful and pathetic.”

Afterwards, Andy told her she sounded great, which was sweet of him, I think he’s a nice guy who’s just stuck with a superficial job.  Then he started taking phone calls from viewers, one of whom asked Kim, “Will you ever sing without a track?”

Kim said, “Well, that was me singing, the microphone was a lot louder than the background singing.  So you heard me.”

The caller said, “But will you just sing now, without any music?”

So Kim kind of intoned, “I’m not a material girl…”

And then you heard the caller and her friends laughing hysterically.  And Kim looked down and away some more and didn’t really talk very much for the final couple minutes.

And I found myself suddenly feeling sympathy for the trashy, self-centered Real Housewife, with the giant blonde wigs and the short tight dresses and the married boyfriend (“Big Poppa”) and the “singing” career.

Jeez.  It’s like…you don’t want to feel sorry for them.  That ruins everything.  I think this may have changed, if not the way I view all the Real Housewives, then at least the way I view Kim.  Darn.

Categories
Books Drew

Walls and windows

A couple weeks ago I read a book called Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat Pray Love fame.  It offered me some of the best marital advice I’ve ever gotten (which reminds me of a funny story about my mom).

I wish I had copied this straight out of the book but alas, it’s back at the library (or hopefully being read by someone else impressionable).  The book is called a sequel by some people, but I hope people aren’t disappointed when they read it and find it is hardly Eat Pray Love 2 (Eat Pray Love Returns? Son of Eat Pray Love?).

It’s more a history of marriage and it’s adaptations and evolutions over the years.  Each chapter is “Marriage and” something, for example “Marriage and Motherhood,” “Marriage and Religion.”  Again, I wish I’d taken notes.  It’s really interesting and covers a lot of ground, geographically and chronologically.

The basic plot that makes it a sequel is that Eliz and the man she falls in love with near the end of Eat Pray Love are blissfully happy together, and swear never to marry, having both been married before and liking things the way they are now.  But when he’s banned from entering the US, they have to face up to the fact that the quickest and easiest way to secure him a permanent visa is to be married.  So while they gather paperwork and get it processed (just under a year, I think) she travels with him and investigates the sacrament of marriage as it applies to many cultures and generations, in order to work out her own perspective and point of view on marriage.

But the part that really stood out for me, the best marital advice I’ve ever gotten goes something like this.  In every relationship, like a room, you have walls and windows.  The walls go up around you and you don’t let other people see certain things about the two of you and your relationship.  The windows are the parts you make public.  Sometimes, you will connect with someone outside your relationship and have an intimate and amazing conversation with them, in which you put up extra windows between you and this outside person.  Then you feel guilty so you don’t tell your partner, thereby putting up a wall between the two of you.  Then this continues until everything is so mixed up, there are windows and walls everywhere, and you end up making out with this new person, and then you cry to all your friends saying you weren’t “looking to cheat” and it “just happened.”

What Eliz says you should do, if you find yourself in that type of intimate conversation with an outside person, before anything goes any further, is you should go to your partner and say, “I had this incredible conversation with Mark today, like the kind you and I used to have, and I don’t know why I let that happen.  I would rather share these things with you, so let’s talk.”  Basically.

I think you can apply “walls and windows” to all sorts of situations, not just the example above.  If it’s true that your loyalty, first and foremost, should be to your partner, it eliminates a lot of guesswork.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have confidences outside your relationship (bestie girlfriends, anyone?) or that you should confess every single thing (sometimes I find myself doing this, and rather than titillate Drew I think it just bores him, LOL).  But I think that if two people can keep this concept as the foundation of their relationship, lots of trouble would be avoided over the years.  Walls and windows, people.

Categories
Books

Books for sale, two bucks a book

In the past, I have (twice) kept a list of books that I’ve read in a year.  It’s an interesting exercise, because then I can go back over it and remember titles that otherwise I would have forgotten…but also it turns reading into a race, a “I have to finish this by Tuesday so I can add it to the March column.”  I have been reading A LOT lately (not sure why, but it is kind of a cyclical thing with me), so I wanted to be able to write some of these down, not that I’ve been keeping track all year.  Most of the books have come from the library, where I assumed there would be some sort of easily-accessible check-out history.  Unfortunately no.  The SF Public Library doesn’t seem to have anything like that at all, while the Peninsula Library offers a Reading History, but you have to have “opted in” already, which I hadn’t.

So I’ve cobbled together this list based on what I can remember and I know, sadly, I’m leaving things out.  But just to give an example of how out of hand this has gotten, yesterday I finished The Namesake, finished Thin, Rich, Pretty, read Five Little Pigs, and read half of The Late, Lamented Molly Marx.  Yikes.

Possibly I need a full-time job (both to keep me busy and so Drew doesn’t have to work all the time), and/or a hobby.

Hope In a Jar, Beth Harbison – These books are fluffy enough to keep me turning pages but not really interesting enough to talk about.  Also I’m tiring of overweight heroines.  There, I said it.

The Nanny Diaries, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus – I have never seen this movie, but I secretly love the book.  It is so well-written.  It’s the perfect complement to The Devil Wears Prada.  If you haven’t read either of those two, do it now.

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann – Okay, I feel like this was kind of a tongue-in-cheek book club pick between Erin and me, but ultimately I liked it.  It was so trashy in a 60s way.  No one was happy and everyone got what they wanted and then it became their downfall.  LOL.  (Also, I noticed there is a book called Jacqueline Susann’s Shadow of the Dolls, written by a “Rae Lawrence,” which is theoretically based off of JS’s notes for a sequel, but updated to the 80s/90s.  I read one page out of the middle and it was AWFUL, not to mention I saw a misspelling right away, which made me think maybe not this time.) PS. The Dolls are pills!

Kissing in Manhattan, David Schickler – A collection of stories about people in Manhattan, all of which are gradually intertwined.  This is the kind of Manhattan life I NEVER led, not that I wanted to.

The Good People of New York, Thisbe Nissen – I loved this, I loved the characters, I loved the wandering of the story, I loved the lessons, I loved the author’s first name.

The Fourth Hand, John Irving – So not as good as The World According to Garp or A Prayer for Owen Meaney.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson – The interesting thing about this is that I think that everyone understands the deal with Jekyll and Hyde, but few people maybe have read the story.  Like, I have seen the musical and the Wishbone episode, so I grasped the concept, but the story is set up with the idea that the reader doesn’t know they’re the same person (oh, spoiler alert) until nearly the end.  Which I bet really threw a lot of people for a loop when it was first published.  Also in the story, lots of juicy details about why Dr. Jekyll did this to himself over and over again, and delving into good vs. evil.  Loved it.  (Bonus short story in the book: The Bottle Imp, which I am mulling over adapting or otherwise updating.)

The ABC Murders, Agatha Christie – 50 pages into this book I realized I’ve read it before.  That happens more than it should.  (See The Department of Lost and Found.)

Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie – Thank God, I didn’t think I’d read this already and I was right.  I am definitely going to check out more AC stuff from the library, I forgot how much I love her (and Hercule Poirot).  PS. I totally thought I knew who the killer was, and I was wrong.

The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri – I know I’m late to this party, but I love love loved this book.

Smart Girls Like Me, Diane Vadino – Interesting protagonist and interesting story, but not something I’ll really recommend or ever purchase.

The Department of Lost and Found, Allison Winn Scotch – I liked this book, but definitely have read it before, I’m guessing in New York.  This is just sad.  Jen Lancaster told me to read books by Allison Winn Scotch and Beth Harbison, so I’m fulfilling my duty here, but I’m not enthralled.

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx, Sally Koslow – I way liked this book, even though the protagonist is dead through the whole thing and I’m still not entirely sure who is responsible.  I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.

The One That I Want, Allison Winn Scotch – Meh. Lots of musical references. Another “fantasy” novel by AWS.  Maybe going to stick to my own instincts and do less blindly-following-where-Jen-Lancaster-leads-me.

Categories
Books cars Family Theatre

“Well, it was no Les Mis Junior…”

This afternoon, Drew and I headed up to my alma mater theatre company in Mill Valley to check out the teen summer conservatory production of Jason Robert Brown’s 13.  I saw it in New York and loved it, so of course I dragged Drew who had never gotten a chance to see it out there.

Man, if I thought the audiences liked Woody Guthrie…this audience was literally screaming in happiness after certain songs.  At the curtain call, the father (?) of the lead actor jumped up and did major fist pumps when his kid came out.  It must be amazing to see a person that you created, now a teenager and up on stage doing something they love.

But if we spent 2 hours in the theatre watching the show, we spent something like 3 hours in the car just getting there and back.  It took us a little over an hour to get up to Mill Valley, thanks to horrendous Saturday traffic.  When the show ended at 4:00 we booked it out of there to get Drew to work by 4:45 in the city…and hit major Saturday traffic coming back over the bridge (closed down to 2 lanes! wtf?).  He was only a half hour late but it was still super frustrating, making us both sit tensely and mutter obscenities at other cars, when we should have been gabbing about the teenagers.

When I left him, it took me a half hour just to get to the freeway.  I spent a lot of this time sitting at traffic lights through several cycles, leaning my head on the window and sighing deeply to show other people how annoyed I was, and occasionally yelling, some of which were swears.  Mostly the yelling happened when a dozen cars zoomed past me in the BUSES AND TAXES ONLY ALL THE TIME lane and then tried to cut in to our lane, in time to make the light I’d been creeping up towards for the last 5 minutes.  It might be true that when I turned onto the onramp to the freeway, a car from a non-turn lane turned next to me, then started to drive in the middle of the onramp, which is two lanes.  It might also be true that I honked at them and then sped around them.

After that I thought, maybe I’m too stressed about this, but the fact was I had been in the car for an hour and 45 minutes basically trying to get the 25 miles home.  I breathed deeply and later went to the gym to punch it out.  (Day 5: $6.40.)

I’m Zen-ed out now but I thought it might still be helpful to make a list of things I love.  Plus I’ve been collecting all these cameraphone pictures.

1. I love that on Tuesday my parents came down and the four of us went to see Wicked, which I’ve been dying to show them.  I love that they loved the show.  I love that my mom and I have been emailing each other just little updates about our day.  (She told me she found some blue nailpolish for her pedicure; I told her I was at work and was hungry but forgot a spoon for my lunch.) 

Here are my parents on BART (they are SUPER excited about going to see Wicked, you can tell):

I have no problems showing my excitement.  Shut up, I love this show.

2. I love our world map shower curtain.  I told my dad I had just bought a new shower curtain, and it was awesome, and he said, “What, is it like a world map or something?”  OMG, Dad!  You were kidding but now that you’ve seen it you realize how awesome it is.

It faces in so you can study while you shampoo.

3. I love the San Francisco Public Library.  I’ve been a member of the Peninsula Library system for awhile now, and finding it very helpful now that I’m working only part-time and really shouldn’t (I deliberately didn’t say “don’t”) spend money on books.  But I walk past the main branch of the SF Library on Grove and Larkin, and I gotta tell you, it’s very promising on the outside.  So on Friday I went in, even though they were closing in 15 minutes, and picked up a library card and admired the inside.  I can’t wait for next week so I can go browse.

The outside reminds me of Shields Library at UC Davis…

…while the inside is what Heaven might look like.

None of these pictures are of books.  But there are totally books there too.  And I walked out with my very own library card and keychain library card!  The library is a really great system, you know?  Free books!  Paid for by the government…or someone.

4. I don’t love leaving Lake County, but I LOVE the way the landscape looks, especially in the summer.  Driving from Lakeport to Davis and vice versa is my little deep down mushy Achilles’ heel.  I can’t help but think of being in college.  And in high school.  This one time, we (CSF, or Academic Decathlon?) were driving back from a field trip to Ashland, and there are no streetlights or anything out there, but I just remember that it was so bright because the moon was full.  I have definitely made Drew pull over on the side of the road and look at the stars from there.  You can see so many.

Speaking of stars, when I went home last week I remembered that I always forget how many you can see out there.  It’s not just, stars in the sky, it’s like the sky is made of stars.  And the Milky Way and everything.  I wish I could see that every day.

But in the daylight, I love this combination of blue, yellow, and dark green.

So now I miss my parents and Lakeport, I am sad because I can’t get any new library books until Monday and because Wicked is closing, and I want to take another shower so I can study Africa.

Categories
Awesome Books Drew Sentiment

At least mine were human, Agatha.

I recently remembered this game I used to play when I was a kid and couldn’t fall asleep.  I would lay in the middle of my bed and make up this family for myself – all my own children – and take as long as possible thinking up all their names and ages.  There was always at least one set of twins.  There was no father involved, I don’t think that even occurred to me.  Then I would imagine the circumstances leading to our poverty, and why my 10 children of varying names and ages, and I, all had to share a bed.  I would assign them places around me.  Usually by the time I got to this point I was tired from all the cogitating, and would fall asleep.

When I told Drew about this, he said, “You used to daydream about being a single mother of 10?” which really put it into perspective.

But kids play weird games when they’re by themselves, and I offer this proof, from Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, published in 1977:

From as early as I can remember, I had various companions of my own choosing.  The first lot, whom I cannot remember except as a name, were “The Kittens.”  I don’t know now who “The Kittens” were, and whether I was myself a Kitten, but I do remember their names: Clover, Blackie, and three others.  Their mother’s name was Mrs Benson.
          Mrs Benson was terribly poor, and it was all very sad.  Captain Benson, their father, had been a Sea Captain and had gone down at sea, which was why they had been left in such penury.  That more or less ended the Saga of the Kittens except that there existed vaguely in my mind a glorious finale to come of Captain Benson not being dead and returning one day with vast wealth just when things had become quite desperate in the Kittens’ home.
          From the Kittens I passed on to Mrs Green.  Mrs Green had a hundred children, of which the important ones were Poodle, Squirrel and Tree.  Those three accompanied me on all my exploits in the garden.  They were not quite children and not quite dogs, but indeterminate creatures between the two.

This only makes me love her more.

Speaking of kids and their trains of thought, here’s an excerpt or two from Drew’s third-grade in-class journal.  These are all responses to writing assignments.

And my personal favorite:

This is turning into Blast from the Past week.

Categories
Awesome Books Fiction

The Last 5 Books I’ve Read

You were wondering, right?

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I wanted to show the cover of my copy so that you would know why I’ve never gotten around to reading this book before.  It just looks so…Dune.  My dad gave me this book (his copy?) when I was younger and I just never tackled it.  So I decided to go for it, and Erin and I read it as part of our bicoastal book club…and I could not put it down.  Love love loved it.  The balance of epic hero tale (a la Lord of the Rings) and rabbits (a la Animal Farm) just really worked for me.  I love a good protagonist who gets put down and fights back and comes through it.  I love a happy ending.  I love a story that moves, and keeps me turning pages.  I sat backstage every night for a week reading this furiously with a flashlight, despite how the light bulbs kept burning out and the angle of sitting hurt my back and I should have been working.  So good.

A text conversation with Erin as she neared the last third of the book:
Erin: OMG why didn’t they kill the patrol??
Me: Good guys never kill the bad guys if they have a choice.
Erin: But now there has to be a big battle.
Me: [LOL] What did you think the last 100 pages was for??

Recommend recommend recommend.

Thin is the New Happy by Valerie Frankel

I know the title is kind of a turn-off because it sounds like she’s advocating losing weight as the only thing to make you happy.  But actually the point of this memoir (by a woman who’s written something like 14 fiction novels) is that after 30 years of on-and-off dieting, she needs to fix whatever is under the surface and causing her to treat herself this way.  While reading about her struggles with her mother and how screwed up her body image is, I realized that while I too had to deal with occasional comments from my mom growing up, I didn’t have it nearly as bad.  Nor did I, apparently, get as screwed up.  Also, some of her boyfriends say things to her that I can’t imagine hearing from Drew…so maybe I’ve just gotten really, really lucky.

I just picked this up at Target because of the bright colors, but I found it to be really thought-provoking.  Several people asked me about it based on the title, looking ready to rip apart the statement “Thin is the New Happy,” and I found myself waxing athletic on the actual message of the book and what I was taking away from it.

Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

I should really figure out how to pronounce his last name.  This was a birthday present from Drew, who dutifully noted that I’ve been working my way through Mr. Bohjalian’s oeuvre.  This was one I hadn’t picked up yet because every time I read the back, I got intimated by the setting – WWII, Holocaust, and all that.  But I got sucked in by this book, the way I have by all of CB’s books, and I wasn’t really surprised.

The 3 main characters are: an 18-year-old German girl and her good-people farming family, who are being squeezed between the Russians and the Germans as the war crescendoes; her 20-year-old British POW lover; and a young Jewish man who has managed to stay alive by killing bad guys indiscriminately and impersonating soldiers whenever necessary. 

It’s a love story and a war story and a morality tale and an adventure story all in one.  They’re Germans, but they’re not bad guys, but Anna has to figure out where she stands and how she can stand up for what she believes in.  (If she can stop having crazy sex with her hottie Brit for one second.) 

I tore through it and enjoyed it immensely, although often got all cringey at descriptions of war crimes. [Shudder.]

The Catsitters by James Wolcott

I just grabbed this up at the library because I liked the cover.  It’s about a bachelor living in New York City, and when he catches his girlfriend cheating on him (worse yet, she forgot to feed his cat while he was away for the weekend), his best friend who lives in Georgia coaches him over the phone on how to A) manipulate and torture her until she’s ruined for other men, and then B) be the perfect guy, no longer a “bachelor,” now an “unmarried man.”

He’s an actor, so I got little glimpses of the actor living in New York City, which was fun, but not as in-your-face as Christopher Bram’s Lives of the Circus Animals.  I didn’t have to tiptoe my way through constant theatre in-jokes or “show business” remarks.  I really empathized with the main character, and I adored his cat Slinky.  I sort of thought I might cry at the end of this book.

One thing I wasn’t expecting – it’s from 2000 or 2001, so there is mention of “email” and “cell phones” as things that not everyone automatically has. That made me check the copyright date.

Time of my Life by Allison Winn Scotch

Jen Lancaster told me to read books by Jennifer Weiner, Beth Harbison, and Allison Winn Scotch, so when I trooped off to the library, I dutifully picked up books by the latter two (I have read a lot of Jennifer Weiner, and for me, it’s kinda hit-or-miss).

Um, hello, is this not essentially the “novel” I was writing when I was in high school, which is me waking up as a 20-something with the perfect life?  Here are the differences between my untitled novel and Time of my Life:

-AWS actually wrote her book, and mine consisted of a compelling opening, and then mostly just outlines of how my perfect life would be.
-TOML is about a woman going to sleep in 2007 and waking up in 2000, the person she used to be, and how she uses this opportunity to explore the road not traveled.  My book was just me wishing my perfect future life.
-This book is really good and people seem to really enjoy it.  Whereas mine was really only enjoyed by me.

It was a little predictable and a little too neatly wrapped up, but I liked this story and read it in an evening and then a morning.  Fun read, and I am definitely going to pick up more of her stuff.

I kind of fudged this “5 books” thing because I wanted a range.  Other books recently read include: John Irving’s The Fourth Hand and Beth Harbison’s Shoe Addicts Anonymous.  Books currently being read include Kristin Chenoweth’s A Little Bit Wicked and Aimee Bender’s The Girl with the Flammable Skirt (short stories of the super artistic type, like nothing I could ever write but I enjoy reading them now and then).

Enough talk, I’m a-wasting my reading time.