Category Archives: Books

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Eating: Food I cooked myself, can you believe it? It’s been many, many months since I last spent time in the kitchen. In other fun news, my carbon monoxide alarm now goes off every time I use the oven.

Making: Haven’t made a stitch of progress in anything. But I am going to KIP tonight so that should be good for a couple rounds on a sock.

Reading: Our November challenge book, “The Oxford Book of Short Stories” edited by V.S. Pritchett. I am only a few stories in so still in the “way back” part of the collection. I’ve read it (somewhere?) before and I really, really hate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.” HATE. But the other stories have been good.

Watching: Old, but from this season, episodes of House on Hulu and remembering exactly why I’m not watching this show at home either in real time or on TIVO anymore. It’s WAY beyond time for a new formula.

Listening to: Everlast. Joseph Arthur. Ray LaMontagne. The Avett Brothers. The Billionaires. The Wave Pictures. Mumford and Sons. Sam Phillips. Just kinda wandering around my iPod.

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Eating: Pumpkin scones from SBUX. They are sooooo good. They are also 500 calories, which lands on the not so good side. So as long as you just don’t eat anything else…

Making: Vaguely knitting socks for Dad and socks for me. Vaguely. [All the same quilts in all the same stages they’ve been in.]

Reading: Same as last week…since I spent a gazillion hours at the Chicago Film Festival I’ve barely done any reading at all: At home I’m reading the Ford-edited short stories from our July / October challenge. On the train I’m reading “The Conversations at Curlow Creek” by David Malouf which is very slow and measured but weighty in its own way.

Watching: The Offce, Pushing Daisies and Sons of Anarchy. Those three are definitely my favorite shows right now so I generally watch each episode a few times. You know, once the night it’s on, once the next night while I’m falling asleep, once over the weekend when I don’t feel like doing anything on my to-do list… [As well as random online video interviews of my future husband. They do keep popping up!]

Listening to: Last few days I’ve been listening to everything I bought in August, September and so far in October in one big shuffled pack. I am particularly loving Mumford & Sons “White Blank Pages“, First Aid Kit’s cover of “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” (Fleet Foxes), Carla Bruni “Tu es ma came”, The New Frontiers “Mirrors”, Jump Little Children “Cathedrals” (old and kinda cheesy but damn I can’t stop listening to it), Ryan Auffenberg “Pictures (of Someone Else)“, but that’s just a samplin’.

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Eating: Way too much. Every day. I can’t be stopped. I WILL be the fattest girl in the universe, just give me a couple more days.

Making: Started a pair of dad socks. That’ll only take me 10,000 years. Have one quilt basted and another just about to be but won’t be have time to work on either of them for a week or so at least.

Reading: At home I’m reading the Ford-edited short stories from our July / October challenge. On the train I’m reading “The Conversations at Curlow Creek” by David Malouf which is very slow and measured but weighty in its own way.

Watching: A crapload of movies at the Chicago International Film Festival. You can follow the updates on the 2008 movie page. Or you can wait for me to post about them here.

Listening to: Not a damn thing. Dad was here for a few days so all the times I’d normally be listening, I was busy talking to him. And just a few hours after he left, the Film Festival started and now all the times I’d normally be listening, I’m in a dark movie theater mostly watching totally intense, brutal movies where people’s hopes and dreams are crushed to pieces and/or ripped to shreds, which may sound like the same thing but isn’t necessarily so.

Fiction: Iodine, by Haven Kimmel

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If there is one author I would want to be, if I were an author, it would be Haven Kimmel. I’ve read and loved her previous novels (here and posts from June 26, 2004 and April 13, 2004 on this page) AND her nonfiction/memoirs (here and the post from April 24, 2005 on this page). When I saw a new Kimmel in the window of the bookstore on the way home, there was no question I was stopping to buy it, regardless of my many grocery bags.

This one is a bit darker than you may be expecting. While her lead characters are often girls in crisis…generally they are girls finding a way out of it. This book is about a girl who may not even know she’s in it. But we the reader certainly do.

While Trace and her haphazard life sucked me in just as powerfully as Kimmel’s other characters have in the past, this was a more distressing read and a very intense one. Academically somewhat dense, with rampant literary “nods”, and mentally unsettling.
If you liked Sharp Objects or My Sister’s Continent (April 16, 2006 on this page), I think you will find a way in to this book. But it may be a tough read for the faint of heart.

Fiction: Sway, by Zachary Lazar

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A fictionalized account of a number of non-fiction events. There’s a) the Rolling Stones in their drug heydays, with Brian Jones falling off the deep end, a fan getting murdered at Altmont, and a trip to Marrakech; b) Charles Manson and his groupies beginning their swath of murders; and c) Kenneth Anger, whose psychedelic filmmaking forces the groups to intersect and ties the two stories together.

Really creative premise. Very effective blend of fact and fiction. I didn’t love all of it. I liked the Stones-centric chapters a lot better than the others. And I particularly enjoyed Lazar’s handling of Anita and Keith’s “characters”, and the vivid candlelit interactions as the group circles ’round each other during the trip to Morocco.

A very interesting read.

Short Stories: Dead Boys, by Richard Lange

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This was our September challenge book and it was so nice to be reading short stories again after slogging through the Musil in August.

These are not happy times stories. Someone in every story is lost (physically, mentally or emotionally), or lonely, or angry, or … or they’ve come to the end of what they can handle or find their way around.

For some characters, their searching leaves them in a better place than where they began, but never the perfect place. But for some, the story’s end is further down a road they never should have been on in the first place.

Really engaging. Unexpected. True and original. Unlike stories you’ve read before. In a very gritty down to earth way.

Fiction: The Man Without Qualities, Volume I, by Robert Musil

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Tthis was our August challenge book. And we did not enjoy it.

The reason it made our list was Dad had bought it years ago and always meant to read it, particularly after the Wilkins/Pike translation came out and it was lauded everywhere as “the third member of the trinity in 20th-century literature, complementing Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past” (Wall Street Journal).

In the beginning, I found it sardonic and was open to it. As it went on, it dragged and felt very pedantic and, as I put it, “kinda prissy.” Dad’s more adult reaction was “It’s very arch.”

We can sort of understand the reaction, originally. A big book trying to touch on a million different European themes right as the War is sneaking up on everyone…

But to compare it to Joyce? or Proust? No. Not in the same league. Not experimental, not groundbreaking, not even truly entertaining. And not worth our time to read Volume II so we’ve scratched that from our plan.

Challenge ’08 Update.

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We are tweaking our challenge slightly.

In July, we both only got through the first half (it was THICK). And in August, we finished (eventually. Or I did, a few days into September, can’t remember if Dad actually did or not) but we did NOT enjoy the book and have no interest in reading part II (which was the book for October).

So we are scratching October’s choice and reading the second half of the July book this month.

In case you were wondering.
October: “The Man Without Qualities, Vol 2” by Robert MusilSecond half of “The New Granta Book of the American Short Story” edited by Richard Ford
November: “The Oxford Book of Short Stories” edited by V.S. Pritchett
December: “The Trial” by Kafka

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Eating: The occasional square broken off a chocolate bar from a Claudia Care Package. But mostly just drinking beer.

Making: The second sock to go with the first sock that I mostly knit at Dragon*Con. I am sooooo close to being done with #2.

Gearing Up For: The Chicago Film Festival! Yay! I bought tickets to 11 films. Woooooooot. Although it’s highly possible I may not wind up seeing all of those.

Reading: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson. So far that girl hasn’t been much involved. But I like the other characters as well.

Watching: One of my favorite shows from last year’s shortened season, LIFE, which has had three episodes in a week’s time and another on Friday. Last Monday’s? Pretty good! Glad it’s back. Friday’s? Sucked soooooo bad. May have been the worst episode of any TV show EVER. This Monday’s? Awesome. Mostly. I had a few reservations. What will Friday bring? Who can say.

Listening to: My Morning Jacket, who I’m going to see tomorrow nightoh. 🙁 Also Joseph Arthur, Nana Grizol, Carla Bruni and some songs from this post and this post .