I could have asked him what was wrong, pointed out the obvious, but why do that? That might lead to an open, frank discussion about our future, and who wants that with a man you’re about to marry?
–Clare O’Donohue “The Lover’s Knot.
Or with any man, really.
Bought:
A sweet little story by the author of the amazing His Dark Materials series (for which my love knows no bounds).
It doesn’t have the deep mythology those do, but it has a pretty sharp social message nonetheless.
Eating: Toaster Strudel. It’s my go-to breakfast when I have to leave the house before 5 a.m. Like I have to every day now.
Making: Supposedly working on two baby boy quilts. Supposedly.
Reading: Our challenge book for February, “The Broom of the System” by David Foster Wallace, which I am loving. I call it “Vonnegut if he wrote female narrators.”
Watching: BStarG season 4.5 and Holy Frak the last two episodes have been NUTS. Remember all those interviews Tahmoh was giving where they asked him about the last 10/11 and he said “Everybody dies!” Yeah, I’m wondering if that might not be the truth! Also loving Bones (hockey dream sequence!!!) and the past few episodes of The Office have been really side-splittingly funny. I have a bunch of random other series on DVD saved up but I just can’t get around to watchin’ ’em.
Listening to: “Alopecia” Why (like a lot); “Oracular Spectacular” MGMT (Love! and hello where have I been?); Bon Iver “Blood Bank” (love) and a few singles from LadyGaGa (sounds like a combination of Pink + Gwen Stefani? no?) and just bought the latest singles from Kelly Clarkson (only the second song of hers I own! but it’s fun!) and Eminem!
The best movie I saw in December…was Bolt, the ONLY movie I saw (Pathetic! Especially considering I was on vacation the first week of the month.
The best book I read in December was… hmmm, hard to pin it down when you read 11 books that month!!! I’ll make it a three-way tie between Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan; Deaf Sentence, by David Lodge; and Black & White, by Dani Shapiro. But I don’t think there were many of my December reads that I wouldn’t recommend to you. It was a great month for reading.
The best gig I went to in December was My Morning Jacket, which was allright but I actually thought the time I saw them at Lollapalooza was a better set. The ony other show I went to I didn’t review. It was The Sea and Cake on New Year’s Eve, which was good, but I wasn’t really aware of their stuff before so I wasn’t necessarily super engaged. Plus you know, NYE, crowds, loud drunk girls, etc. Cathy and I had fun but then we had enough fun so we went home early! 🙂
My favorite tunes in December boils down to one album: Frightened Rabbit “The Midnight Organ Fight” which I pretty much listened to nonstop. And I listened to a lot of Kanye, Killers, and Pink (all from November) as well.
Random personal highlights: A week off! Yay!; hung out with Cinnachick!; Back to the Future marathon with Carlos; dinner with my cousins; brunch with MK; brunch with KC; dinner at the Coopers; and Cathy came to visit!!! YAY!!!!
Lowlights? Can’t remember any in particular. Now that’s rare!!
Oh look, I finally got through December. Now I can write up my year-end lists. I’m SO TIMELY this time around. Ha!
It’s possible you remember me going to my parents’ house for Christmas 2005 and re-reading all my mom’s Cherry Ames books, ’50s novels about a girl who becomes a nurse and inadvertently solves little mysteries. (See the end of the 2005 reading list or the beginning of 2006 or search for Cherry Ames on this page.)
And then I got back to Chicago and went a little crazy on eBay buying up copies for myself. And then I found that the women who wrote Cherry Ames also wrote books about a flight attendant named Vicki Barr.
I don’t find them quite as enthralling as the Cherry Ames series (I say this one book in), but it could be because when I read Cherry Ames I am enthralled with all this childhood nostalgia and that’s just not present reading the Vicki books for the first time. But they’re still fun. Full of totally non-PC sexist garbage that can either make you mad (eh, why bother) or make you laugh (that’s my response), they’re almost pedantic. Were they written to be pseudo instructional books for girls on possible careers? Be a Nurse (in Ames’ case) / Flight Attendant (Barr) and Solve Mysteries! YAY! 🙂 Ha!
Gifted to me by Ginger.
A lot of people in these stories have reached their limit and the story concentrates on them at their last efforts, their last decisive actions. The woman in Sinking House, Zoltan in The Human Fly, Anthony in King Bee. More based in reality (or “our” reality) than say the Greenman stories I read earlier in the month, but that just makes the unexpected even more jolting when it happens.
Really good, I’ll definitely be seeking out more T.C. Boyle.
A very intense book about a messed-up mother/daughter relationship with lots of cool photography stuff to boot. I doubt anyone with knowledge of 20th century photography can read this without thinking of Sally Mann’s photographs. (However, while Mann shot all three of her children, the photographer in the book concentrates only on the one daughter.) It was sometimes a tough read (my overly enhanced Piscean empathy gets me way too involved in fictional conflicts!), but I thought it was completely engaging and I may have stayed up until 3 a.m. finishing it. Really loved it.
Alec Waugh = Evelyn’s brother. I read about his books in Slightly Foxed and then sought some out on my most recent trip to Myopic (conveniently located down the block from my haircut so I’m there quite often). This is subtitled “an erotic comedy” and I remember wondering for the first, oh say, 40 pages or so when exactly that was going to kick in. (But it does, no worries. Hee hee.) Apparently (per the book jacket), this is a spoof on “Anonymous Underground Victorian Novels” and I did find it quite silly at times. Silly mingled with a lil “Eyes Wide Shut” wannabe action.