Daily Archives: December 19, 2007

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Making: Mix CDs. I had ideas of quilting I would do this week, but so far I haven’t done any. So there you go.

Reading: I just finished a book today; I think tomorrow I’m going to start reading “Ludmila’s Broken English” by DBC Pierre (who won the Booker for Vernon God Little a few years back, which I did enjoy). Somehow three books in this month, everything I read had a red spine. So I decided to keep the trend going for the rest of the month. Oh the crazy ways the reading list evolves.

Watching: This week’s K-Ville I enjoyed. Also loved Juno on the big screen. Maybe Beowulf tomorrow? We’ll see.

Listening: I’ve listened to many many things today as I’ve been running around in iTunes listening to samples of lots and lots of stuff. Plus the new Lupe Fiasco that came out yesterday (“The Cool”). Yay! Love Lupe: : Love it. Also bought Kid SimpleSimple Kid (sounds like Beck’s little brother with some Elliott Smith thrown in) and Nick Light (another melancholy boy, singer, songwriter type), and old Siobhan Donaghy since I can’t find the new one yet (Reckless ordered it for me), which is very girly girly pop. Girly pop! Yay! I have to fill the iPod up for the long ride…

Fiction: “Incendiary” by Chris Cleave

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Very intense! A stream-of-consciousness letter to Osama (yes the Bin-Laden one) from a (lower?) middle class wife who lost her son & police officer (bomb defuser) husband to a terrorist bomb blowing up an Arsenal/Chelsea match…which she feels even the worse about as she was having sex on their couch with someone she met in a bar (on a “my husband is off defusing a bomb and I am insanely nervous and when I am insanely nervous I go have sex with strangers” evening) when the bomb went off. She winds up going a little crazy and getting involved in some messed up situations, some beyond her control, and throughout it she continues her commentary, directed to Osama.

She starts the novel thinking if she tells him about her sweet, sweet boy that he killed, maybe he’ll just stop bombing things…and ends it in a very different place.

The sentences are long and breathless and meandering (they felt like something Elizabeth Crane or Megan Stielstra would write), the emotions are hot and present and flustered, and it all feels very, very real.

Blew me away, in more ways than one. Wow.

I think some of the social class commentary was perhaps lost on a non-Brit reader; there are a few places where I thought “and I bet THAT adjective is explaining to someone EXACTLY what position she’s found herself in but it’s not something we say here so it’s not really doing that for me.” But that did not denigrate my enjoyment or the content at all.

Short Stories/Fantasy: “Red Spikes” by Margo Lanagan

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As I mentioned when I read another collection of Lanagan’s in March, her stories are really unusual. They take you to other worlds and other times; to unexpected voices and unusual resolutions. They’re violent and sudden; sometimes a nightmare, sometimes a dream. I particluarly loved “Winkie”, “A Feather in the Breast of God” and “Hero Vale” but really there wasn’t a single story I felt I could have done without.

Short Stories: “Simplify” by Tod Goldberg

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As snarky and sarcastic as you would expect, if you read his blog. Far more tender and sweet than you would expect, if you read his blog.

Whereas the Jason Brown stories were primarily about relationships or interconnections — friends, lovers, families — the characters in Goldberg’s stories are much more loners or those who have been alienated, by either choice or circumstance; suicide attempters, people on the fringe of their own lives. Some of the stories seem right out of the everyday; others have a little sprinkle of the kind of fantasticalness that one would find, say, in an Aimee Bender story (particularly “The Jesus of Cathedral City” and “Comeback Special”).

Strong. Good. Compelling. I’m impressed!

Fiction: “The Uncommon Reader” by Alan Bennett

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The Queen (of England) comes upon a lending library…and starts reading..and it changes her entire life.

This book was an absolute delight. Clever, funny and thoughtful. An excellent treatise on the many things reading brings one.

Slim book, huge margins, huge print. It’s a quickie. Really enjoyable.

She’d never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people. (emphasis = mine)