Joie de vivre

Dare I hope that LJ is on the mend?

YOU GUYS I HAVE SO MUCH TO TELL YOU.

But I hate to post anything of substance until I know LJ is back up for real and everyone can read.

1. All Clear, Connie Willis

Basically refer to whatever I said last month about Blackout, only more so because taken together, these two books are AMAZING. And I wondered some throughout about the pacing, but in the end it made sense - although my gosh, these two books need diagrams or cross references or something.

2. ...And Furthermore, Judi Dench

This is written just like she talks, so you can almost just imagine she's sitting in the room with you, chatting away. It's long on theatre stories and short on personal details, and will mean most to people who have some interest in and knowledge of the English theatre world. I enjoyed it, but it left me wanting more - more explanation of theatre things she takes for granted that the reader will know, and more information about what she was doing between shows.

3. Your Brain At Work, David Rock
   
Although the writing style and before-and-after dramatizations seemed a little hokey, this is full of really scientifically researched information that is helpful for understanding and improving brain function at work.

4. My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
   
I can't remember who recommended this (unless it was Nancy Pearl), but it 1) wasn't what I expected, and 2) was AWESOME. It was written by the youngest son in a Cheaper By the Dozen-type family who move to Greece on a whim and have adventures and collect animals and it's just really whimsical and fun.

5. At Home, Bill Bryson (audio book)
  
Bill Bryson has a genius for taking any subject, weaving a whole ton of rabbit trails into it, and making it all fascinating. In this one he uses the rooms in his old rectory in England to explore architecture, social customs, and a lot of random history.

6. The Wilder Life, Wendy McClure

Like many children, Wendy McClure grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. But unlike many of those children, her interest in the world of Laura never really went away, and as an adult she found herself revisiting the books with new interest. It started small: she ground her own wheat berries to make bread like they did in The Long Winter. She learned to churn butter. She started a Twitter account called @halfpintingalls. But before long she was visiting historical sites relating to the series, ranging from Pepin, Wisconson to Springfield, Missouri – at least seven in all.

With equal parts humor and introspection, The Wilder Life explores the uneasy relationship between the real Ingalls family history, the book series, and the television show … and why we still are enchanted by the Ingalls family after all of these years.

I grew up with these books and Laura was often my pretend playmate ... I've even been to her homestead/museum in Missouri. I HAVE SEEN PA'S FIDDLE, GUYS.

7. The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

Really REALLY liked this one. Gawande is a doctor who took the type of checklists used in aviation and figured out how to use a similar system in hospitals. He was able to prove that using simple checklists cut the rate of infection dramatically and made operations safer.

8. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente

Just absolutely fell in love with this one. It looks on first glance like Alice in Wonderland style silliness, but there's a lot of depth and beauty in those pages.

9. The King's Speech, Mark Logue and Peter Conradi (audio book)

Still haven't seen the movie, but at least I've read the book! The audio book is great because it starts of with a real recording of King George VI speaking.

10. Blood, Bones & Butter, Gabriella Hamilton

I'm not quite sure why this has gotten as much attention as it has - as foodie memoirs go, it's not bad, but there are many better. And when it strays away from food and into Gabriella's personal life, it just gets odd. She enters into a marriage of convenience with an Italian so he can get a green card and doesn't take the marriage seriously at all, but then the next chapter she is moaning about how much she loves him and he doesn't love her back? Not to mention that for the entire preceding portion of the book, she was a lesbian?

11. The Skin Map, Stephen R Lawhead

I'm starting to get disappointed with my man Lawhead. He was positively brilliant with the Song of Albion series and the Pendragon Cycle, and perfectly acceptable with Patrick: Son of Ireland and the Crusades series, but everything I've read after that has been mediocore at best. This book has an interesting premise (certain people can travel both geographically and through time using ley lines, the ancient lines of energy that Stonehenge and other standing circles were built around) but the characters are cardboard cutouts, no dimention whatsoever, questions are raised and never answered, and one particular character who finds herself transported back to medieval Europe without warning or explanation spends NO time angsting about the hows and whys and immediately fits and AND introduces the idea of the coffee shop to poor pre-coffee Europe. *headdesk*

12. The Time-Traveling Fashionista, Bianca Turetsky

Such a great idea (a vintage dress that transports the wearer back to its original time period - the Titanic, in this case), such poor execution. =\

13. Death Cloud, Andrew Lane (audio book)

Alternate title could be Sherlock Holmes: the beginning. Sherlock is 14 and though bright, not possessed of the extraordinary skills we know he'll have as an adult. By the end of the book, we starts to get an idea of how he acquired those skills. It's a perfectly acceptable book, but not brilliant.

14. Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, Terrance Dicks

Came upon a 10-volume set of Doctor Who books from the 70s, had to read at least one. They're ... not very good. But it's the Doctor!

15. Manning Up: how the rise of women is turning men into boys,  Kay S. Hymowitz

Along the same lines as Save the Males, but better. I think the title says it all.

1. Strings Attached, Judy Blundell
   Young adult fiction which I liked very much (Blundell has a way of making a creepy/sad/mysterious admosphere throughout her books that I really enjoy). Plot in a nutshell: small town girl moves to NYC to be a dancer, there are secrets and lies and an ex-boyfriend with a creepy gangster father and it's all very 1930s-noir and I LOVED it.

2. City of Glass, Cassandra Clare
   Losing interest in this series so fast. Jace is still being emo. Emo Jace is emo. See emo Jace run away from Clary ... AGAIN.

3. The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten
   A collection of Steingarten's articles as the food writer for Vogue. Hit and miss ... some of them are really excellent, but a lot appear dated (mostly the ones discussing health scares/fads we've all gotten over a long time ago.)

4. Johnny and the Bomb, Terry Pratchett
   Probably the best of the three Johnny book, although maybe I only think that because I'm into WWII.

5. The United States of Wal-Mart, John Dicker
I have neither loyalty to nor antipathy towards Wal-Mart, so I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to spend time reading this one. It was repetitive and openly hostile, but redeemed itself slightly when it called Nicholas Sparks an "emotion pornographer." haha, right on.

6. The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson
An obituary (at least a well written one) is a small slice of a life. Who was this person? What impact did they leave on the world? How old was he, where was she born, what did he do during his life, who did she leave behind?
In this book Marilyn Johnson has collected stearling examples of obituaries and the writers who craft them. I loved it!

   Clementine Werfel blessed priests at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Strongsville with heavenly desserts, memorable meals and seemingly miraculous coffee.
   The retired parish housekeeper, who died Aug. 2 at 96, routinely walked around the dining table in the rectory, offering coffee to each priest.
   "Would Father like regular or decaf?" the 4-foot-something Werfel asked them one by one.
   Regardless of the priests' individual preferences, she filled all their cups with coffee from the same pot. The coffee drinkers silently accepted what they got, as though Werfel really could turn regular cofee into decaffeinated, much the way the biblical Jesus turned water into wine.

 

7. Dying to Meet You, Kate Klise
   Really adorable kids book. Charming illustrations!

8. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery (audio book)
   By the time I reached the end of the first disc I was pretty sure I hated this book. It was a whole lot of wordy philosophical ramblings maskerading as a novel, with two main characters who pretty much sit around and think about how much better they are than the rich, shallow people around them. And oh yeah, the plot goes absolutely NOWHERE. For 3/4 of the BOOK.

And then the last fourth came along and broke my heart, in an i-see-what-you-did-thar-and-i-hate-you-for-doing-this-to-me-but-it-IS-brilliant way, if that makes sense. I know that's hardly a ringing endorsement, and I was SO MAD about the ending, but ... yeah. It was strangely worth reading. Er, listening to.

9. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer
   Journalist covering the US Memory Championship becomes interested in the tricks of the trade that allow the competitors to memorize 3 pages of unpublished poetry in fifteen minutes and the exact order of a deck of cards in less than two minutes, starts practicing these techniques and goes on to win the championship the following year. Interesting but not particularly practical unless you are insane, er, really dedicated.

 

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily  and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memeries stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

 

 10. Blackout, Connie Willis
      I'm going to ditch any attempt at a real review (check here if you want that sort of thing) and just flail around saying that I LOVE this book, you should all read it, it is so real and vivid and wonderful, and captures the ordinary everyday heros of WWII, AND it's got awesome time travel, and I sort of know the ending of the second book already and that makes some parts of this one all the more poignant and yes, I did possibly cry over some of these characters.

 

Someone expressed shock that I had no Plans for the long weekend, and I was similarly shocked that given a chance to have three solid days at home, one wouldn't wish to take it.

I took it, my friends. I haven't gone anywhere at all since Friday.

I knocked out so much of my to do list. I took early morning walks, and evening walks. I cooked for five hours straight and then read Blackout for almost that long. I napped under trees with kittens curled up by my side. I listened to chattering birds and tended the herb patch and watched a Bourne movie without even ever figuring out if it was the second or third. I baked bread twice and drank a total of about three pots of coffee.

I thought a lot about London.

I saw the same rabbit three mornings in a row.

And I slept with the windows open.

Part one: Weeks ago I stumbled upon a picture in Decorology - a home office, the decor of which didn't appeal to me, but a printed-out quote stuck in a frame did. I didn't know what it was from (How I Met Your Mother, it turns out), but I liked it and I liked the offbeat inspiration it provided.

Part two: sometime later I was looking at a really awful cheap print hanging in a staff area at work, all mauve and teal and looking like something you'd find hanging in a nursing home (God bless 'em, but they aren't exactly examples of wonderful interior design). And I thought ... what if I ripped out that print ... and cut out some letters with the Cricut... and put it all on a craft-paper background ...



Part three: I picked up a tiny oval frame somewhere either free or almost free, and I kept meaning to design some sort of miniature collage or something else awfully clever to go in it , and I kept not doing anything and it kept sitting there all empty and sad. And then ...



Now it sits on my dresser and reminds me to be awesome.

(I feel compelled to point out that this isn't my natural handwriting. I was deliberately going for the sort of loopy unevenness, and I DO know how to capitalize things.)

1. The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak (audiobook - great reader!)

Read this because Mark Reads read it. At first I wasn't a fan - the writing was beautiful in a poetic way, but what does it MEAN? And the omnipresent narrator, out-of-order storytelling, and strange interjections were jarring. But then ... I started to get the hang of it, and I started to fall in love with it.

Basically, Zusak managed to rip out my heart and make me enjoy it. And all, somehow, without being overdramatic about it. For all the poetic imagery, it's a story told quite simply and matter-of-factly. It's heartbreaking. It's also beautiful. And it's a worthy addition to the WWII-fiction genre.

2. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

A reread, although the audiobook I listened to before was abridged, so this is my first time getting the FULL story. Controversy, blah
blah blah, I happen to like the plot and characters. (But I like Reardon a lot better than Galt. Heresy?)

3. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

I totally get why this won the Nebula! Like The Book Thief, it's a very powerfully emotional story, but simply told. It takes a lot of talent to write that clearly. I can't believe I'd never read it before now (thank goodness for friends who say READ THIS), but now that I have I'll be recommending it often to oh, just about everyone.

4. The Treasure is the Rose, Julia Cunningham
 
Step forward if you recommended this one to me! It was delightful - a really classic children's book. Lovely illustrations, clever story, and deeper than it appears on the surface.

5. To Timbuktu, Casey Scieskza and Steven Weinberg
 
World travel, falling in love, lots of food, new people, adventures ... in an alternate life, this might have been my story. So my practical side won't throw caution to the wind and leave for parts unknown, but I can certainly enjoy reading about it. Casey (Yes, Jon Scieskza is her father) provides the text and Steven the illustrations: a match made in heaven. 
 
6. The Green Mile, Stephen King

YOU GUYS LOOK I READ STEPHEN KING!! I'm having an identity crisis because I can no longer say that he's the one author I don't read. So, um, yeah. It was really, really good. I never want to read it again, but that's a testament to King's powers of description. If anything surprised me, it was the depth of the story - I knew King was an excellent writer/storyteller, but I didn't expect the emotional complexity that I found here.

7. The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown

This book contains three sisters, one Shakespeare-scholar father (who mostly communicates in the words of the Bard), and a mother with cancer. I don't usually go for the human-drama kinds of books, but this one was really excellent - real without being a downer, funny without being over the top, sad without making me break out the tissues. How's that for a recommendation?

Also the cover art is perfection.

8. One of our Thursdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde

If you've read Jasper Fforde, then you know what to expect. If you haven't, I won't be able to describe it. But if you like books and you like speculative fiction, you should try this ... because Fforde is BRILLIANT, and because I said so.

- improvising with hummus: because I found out the hard way that hummus doesn't really work in traditional blenders, at least not mine. But a mortar and pestle and a little elbow grease does. Nope, it's not perfectly smooth, but it was a lot less angsty than working with the blender, and it's good enough for me.

- anyone want a half bottle of Slatkin & Co "creamy nutmeg" home fragrance oil? I broke my oil warmer this weekend (it took up too much room anyway) and I hate to just throw away the rest of the oil. I'll mail it to anyone who wants it. :)

- I read The Weird Sisters (Eleanor Brown) over the weekend. It wasn't what I expected but it was wonderful. And I marked so many passages, including this one:

She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.

"How do you have time," he asked, gobsmacked.

She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer [...]? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading!

"I don't know," she said, shrugging.

Currently: I have a new haircut, matzo ball soup on the stove, and a tattoo of a parrot on the back of my hand. Also a wicked headache, because SOMEBODY has for TWO DAYS IN A ROW been so busy that she forgot to drink anything until mid-afternoon. This person is hereby notified that this is UNACCEPTABLE and must CEASE.

Nevermind. I made a pot of curried peanut soup and ate two bowls.