Adventures in Reading

Sometimes old books are cool just because they're old, and sometimes they are downright MADE OF AWESOME. This one belonged to my great-uncle George.





















First Reader, by Florence Rose, Heath & Co., Boston, 1904

Easter Blah, Easter Hooray

It started out as a fairly blah Easter, due to (1) lack of belief in Jesus, at least the resurrection end of things, (2) lack of kids in the house to either color or search for eggs, and (3) backlog of freelance work (me) and work work (girlfriend) that put the kibosh on our vague plans for a hike on what would have been the first free weekend day we've had in ages.

So we spent the day sitting at the kitchen table, me drawing and her editing but me mostly scowling and (mostly) silently cursing a crap Easter day, until mid-afternoon, when we returned a movie to Casa (success!) and looked for a new kitchen table at World Market (fail!) and, what the hell, took the leftover gift cards from Christmas on a field trip to Barnes & Noble.

And lo, there did I an Easter miracle witness.

First off, I'm pathological when it comes to bookstore gift cards. I'll take a chance on something at Bookman's, since it's essentially free and it probably going back to be traded in eventually anyway. But a new book? A nice new shiny book that's sat on no one else's shelf? God, the pressure. So I'd been saving the cards for something special, something that I might want in hardback, something I wouldn't flinch at dropping 25 or 50 bucks on because it's just that awesome, and had settled on The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel, and anything by Daniel Martin Diaz, a Tucson artist who paints and renders in graphite freaky Latino-Catholic-derived stuff that's just totally trippy. And today at Barnes & Noble, there they were, one copy of each, hardcover and spotless, and covered by what was left on the gift cards.


The newest acquisitions.

The girlfriend made me sloppy joes for dinner to make me feel better about the lack of eggs, bunnies, and a ham. She makes the finest sloppy joes in North America and possibly the entire hemisphere, so I felt much much better indeed. It was the perfect capper to the book coup. Hope your day had its own pleasant surprises.

Here's to Ya, Studs

Aw. Studs Terkel passed this afternoon, turning a final page on a legendary literary career. I don't like to mourn people who make it that far in the game--Terkel managed to hit 96--but rather to celebrate. Go root out a copy of Chicago or Division Street-America and soak in a little of a great voice telling the story of a great city. Good on ya, Studs.









"My epitaph? My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat.'"

Grump.

Nuthin', I got nuthin' here. pace pace pace. Girlfriend's out of town and it's getting cold at night and I can't find the warm blankets and the dogs won't cuddle and I am grumpy from it all. Lemme see here. ND pissed one away against North Carolina on Saturday. Last I checked, the Cubs are still not in the NLCS. And some hacky dude on the other team Friday night went knee-to-knee with me and then, after he fell down, kicked me in the ankles. So I am left bruised and sore and sulky from my usual sporting obsessions.

On the plus side, on re-reading The Razor's Edge for the first time since high school I am pleasantly reminded of why I fell in love with Somerset Maugham way back in the day. The man had an elegant yet easy writing style that makes the words float smoothly and richly off the page and through my brain, painting pictures all the way. It's an old Penguin edition my mom gave me for Christmas, I think, in 1984, all yellowed pages turning brown at the edges and alarmingly brittle, the orange spine washed out to something approximating the old Crayola "flesh" color. It's comforting.

I am simulataneouly reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, so I have lyrical language going in stereo. Never read McCarthy before, and his writing style--so different from Maugham, but equally evocative--is magical. This one was recommended by Dave; Maugham came courtesy of Brother Phil. Thanks, guys, for both.

Oh, and I heard some chick named Maddow was on Leno last week way after my bedtime. Quelle adorbs!

When the Truth Really, Really Hurts

Book sighting reported by Ian today:

The companion volume, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Maybe Not Being Quite So Much of a Total Fuckup, All the Fucking Time, But We're Not Holding Our Breath Where You're Concerned, I Mean, Seriously Now, is apparently out of print.

LibraryThing Joy!

Tim the LibraryThing guy is the best online book cataloging guy in the history of the universe, like, ever. If you see him on the street, buy him a beer. I am very, very happy tonight. That's all I'll say. Tomorrow? Onward with the books!








Awesomest Book Guy Ever Trophy, awarded this year to Tim.*

* okay, this may actually be the George Stainforth Trophy, awarded to the best overall performing division in the RAF's Strike Command, but we're giving it to Tim instead.

LibraryThing Heartbreak!

Bastards reeled me in, then it hung as I was attempting to add my 1961 Signet Classic edition of Babbitt. Free memberships limited to 200 books. Upgrade to an unlimited membership for $10 a year. Oh, sob.

Other things I could buy with ten bucks:
* a CD at Bookman's
* twenty Wendy's hamburgers
* one (!) Sam Adams at Chase Park with a whole dollar left over to tip the beer guy
* two tickets to a UA women's soccer game
* a quarter tank of gas

Hmmm.

BookGeek Heaven

Oh my. I think I know what I'm doing this weekend. LibraryThing is an online personal library catalog with social networking tossed in. I added a few books to my shelf, just for fun, but probably should do something billable today, so I'll leave the rest of the exploration for tomorrow. It looks like once you get your booklist put together, you get linked to other people's libraries based on common titles. And there are about a zillion discussion groups set up. It would appear to be one big happy recommendation list.

If it turns out to be from the Devil, I'll let you know.

In Which Three of Our Favorite Things Happily Converge

The Fighting Irish, every Irish girl's favorite cereal, and Teh Gay! Erin go bragh!

Oh, my, have the cease & desists from Notre Dame and General Mills been hand-delivered to Topeka yet? Fred Phelps (of the gay-hating Westboro Baptist Church) found out that Ireland is taking a breathtaking stride into the 21st century by preparing to accord full marriage rights to same-sex couples in civil unions (h/t Pam's House Blend), and his head exploded right on schedule, spewing a companion site to the execreble one I won't link to here. But I'll link to God Hates Ireland only for the adorable Notre Dame-Lucky Charms leprechaun mashup he chose as a logo. Go see it before he's forced to take it down; how in the world did Fred forget to show Lucky dropping a bar of Irish Spring?

Speaking of things Irish and gay, the latest recommended easy two-evening read is Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, a set of interconnected, reworked fairy tales evocative of Jeanette Winterson, at least when Jeanette tolerably balances "fanciful" and "comprehensible narrative." Familiar stories are twisted just enough to let out the lesbian protaganists you may have suspected lurked there; waiting for charming princes to come to the rescue is not high on the priority list.

Unrelated safety tip: your fingers do not deceive you; those rocks that have been sitting out in the sun all day are hot, in fact, hot enough to leave second-degree burns with blisters on your fingertips. That's all I'm going to say.

In Which We Read Harry Potter in a Single Sitting (updated)

Updated with more space before the spoilers. And stuff.

The plan had been to buy the book at 8:00 yesterday morning and read. I got sidetracked a bit by the need to help a friend move, so I didn't hit the readathon until roughly 1:30, at which point I started playing catchup with my housemates.

Wire-to-wire time: 10 hours.
Actual reading time, subtracting a trip across town to drop the boy at a friend's, and pauses every four chapters until everyone was at the same spot: roughly 8 hours.
Total pages: 782.
Sustenance: handful of chips, teriyaki noodles with tofu, Breyer's Light ice cream, an Oreo.

Spoiler alert!



Crucial details revealed below!



*cough cough* you've been warned.



Deathly Hallows was okay. I got confused about the ending, as usual for me and every book in the Potter series. The unusual bit was coming into the book knowing that somebody important was going to get whacked. The former part-time housemate, who is an expert on all things Potter, warned at the outset that J.K. Rowling had said two major characters would die. So, imagine my surprise when my Dead Major Character counter ticked over to the three with a couple hundred pages left. And then four, then fivesix in quick succession. The woman killed off people left and right. Oh yeah, said the former housemate, she said at least two people would die. Fabulous.

Lupin? She killed Lupin and Tonks? What the hell? They were my favorites (!), and their deaths did exactly squat to advance the story and everything to totally piss me off. And Colin Creevey? That was just plain mean. Snape's murder was too abrupt to be satisfying, and his inevitable redemption left me kinda deflated, delivered as it was via the recovered memory in the Pensieve. I don't know. Maybe Rowling got tired and figured the best way to do it would be through the book equivalent of a flashback show. Same with the whole Harry and Dumbledore in... Purgatory? King's Cross Station? The light at the end of the long tunnel? Too much hurry-and-cram-it-in revelation. The two chapters coming on each other's heels felt like a cheap out after so much grand storytelling.

Even so, I realized I respect Rowling the most for creating nuanced characters that, rather than being one-dimensional stock good and evil children's book figures, were all deeply flawed and thus accessibly human. At the end of the Deathly Hallows, I am coming to believe Snape is the ultimate hero of the series. His choices made all the difference, and were far more difficult than the actions Harry believed were not choices so much as destiny compelled by his place in history.

Rowling's ability to spin such a complex tale and keep it consistently compelling and well-written through seven books and however many thousand people borders on the unreal. Final verdict on book 7? I don't have a regular rating scale, but let's call it... five Oreos. A nice handful. The complete series? It gets the whole package of Double Stuf.

Bye, Harry (and Remus, sniff sniff). It's been amazing.

Book Anticipation

Yes, I am preparing for the arrival of Harry and those Deathly Hallows. Although the movies are generally a fine accompaniment to popcorn on a Saturday night, I have always gotten much more enjoyment out of the books than the films. There's nothing like getting engrossed in the print version and losing hours in hundreds of pages, being unable to put the damn book down despite the 800-odd pages weighting my forearms into cramps.

The plan was for the girlfriend to run out at the crack of 8:00 Saturday morning to buy an armful of copies from Target, since they'll be on super-sale there and should be amply stocked. Then the houseful of females--me, the girlfriend, her kid, our former semi-housemate--were going to sequester ourselves and read all day, fortified by food from El Molinito. However, another friend needs help moving, so I will miss the first part of the readingfest. It's okay. I read pretty fast and can probably catch up by the end of the day Sunday, so hopefully we will all find out simultaneously whether Harry lives or dies.

Boltgirl predicts: Harry won't die. That would kill the eternal prospects of the franchise, and JK Rowling ain't stupid. I will be very interested to see how she wrangles it if she's decided to redeem Snape at the end. If Hermione or Ron die I will be seriously pissed.

The other book release I'm looking forward to even more than Harry is First Among Sequels, the next Thursday Next novel from Jasper Fforde. If you liked high school English even just a little bit, or have rediscovered British and American classics now that you're a grownup, the series is required reading. I want to be Jasper Fforde. Actually, I want to be Thursday Next. Or date Thursday Next. The writing is crisp and so incredibly, impossibly clever. Anyway, the next Next comes out on July 24, and I'm grooving into it without even a smidgen of the stress surrounding Harry. No worries about some git shouting out the ending on the way into Borders, no hopping around biting my fingers waiting for the rest of the household to get to the part I just read that desperately needs discussing. Just me and Thursday and, probably, a bottle of wine to accompany me on frequent runs into my library to look up literary references that escape me.

Bring it on. My eyeballs are warmed up and ready to go.

100 Books Meme; a Lovely Way to Kill Half an Hour

Hey, it's officially summertime and my brain is distracted with impending travel and god-awful Tucson temperatures. I finally sat down and scrawled out a list of things to take on the trip to Chicago, and picked the books that get to go on the train ride. Then I stumbled across this meme on GrrlScientist's blog and thought, well, what the hell. This isn't the list of 100 interesting books I would have compiled (each separate Harry Potter? I likey, I likey, but they take up six spots on the list), but it's a summer reading start. Forthwith:

Look at the list of books below:

• Bold the ones you've read


• Italicize the ones you want to read


• Leave unaltered the ones that you aren't interested in or haven't heard of


• My addition: add shame level and snarky comments in brackets after the author name.
  

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown) [shame level high! I know it was stupid! But it was fun!]
   


2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) [liked it okay. liked the Keira Knightley film adaptation okay too.]
   


3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) [as with most of the other classics I had to read in school, I liked this better the second time around as an adult, reading it because I wanted to, not because I had to.]
   


4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) [haven't even seen the movie all the way through. I do want to read The Wind Done Gone (Alice Randall) sometime.
   


5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (JRR Tolkien) [saw the movie. does that count?]
   


6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien)
   


7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (JRR Tolkien) [got halfway through before getting severely creeped out by the Ringwraiths, which I found much scarier in print than on the screen.]


8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) [I associate this with the white-and-green Yearling edition binding that always made me think old book that was probably required reading for young ladies when my mom was in school.]
   


9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) [no idea what this is]


10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) [another fine mess?]


11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling)


12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) [I know, I know. It was fun!]


13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (JK Rowling)


14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) [hated this; don't do well with stories where somebody's mom gets killed; sorry if I just spoiled it for you]


15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)


16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (JK Rowling)


17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)


18. The Stand (Stephen King) [aw HELL NO. no vampires, thanks.]
    


19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling)


20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) [one of the classics that's much more enjoyable if you read the Thursday Next novels first]
    


21. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)


22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) [recently read this for the first time since sophomore high school English, liked it much better without freaky Mrs. Syburg (god rest her soul, even though she gave me severe willies) reading it out loud and cackling.]
    


23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) [it's on the shelf; my only experience with the title is as a card in the Authors game I played as a tad with my parents.]
    


24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) [another one I have never heard of]
    


25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel) [heard it is deadly dull, but am open to arguments in favor]
    


26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) [have read the entire series several times]
    


27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) [if you haven't read it yet, totally read the Thursday Next novels first and it becomes hilarious. Heathcliff and all the other characters are far more enjoyable when framed as unwilling participants in anger management therapy.]
    


28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) [read it as a middle schooler; seem to remember liking The Phantom Tollbooth much better]
    


29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) [eh]
    


30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) [no, fuck no.]
    


31. Dune (Frank Herbert) [read it in high school and didn't understand a lick of it; should probably pick it up again]
    


32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks) [was that a movie? no idea]
    


33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) [it's on the shelf but I don't see it anywhere in the queue in the immediate future]
    


34. 1984 (George Orwell) [yup, in high school, and keep meaning to re-read it to get thoroughly disillusioned with the Bush administration]
    


35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley) [shame factor high! makes me feel all SCA-ish!]
    


36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)


37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay) [?]
    


38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb) [meh]
    


39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant) [picked it up, put it down, picked it up, put it down, didn't end up buying it]
    


40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) [sounds creepy. if creepy, not reading.]
    


41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel) [Jean Auel is Gary Jennings' spiritual twin, apparently trying to cram as many sex scenes into a prehistoric setting as possible, with Auel beating Jennings by a nose by virtue of her cringe-inducing flowery prehistoric vernacular. Read this if you want to feel slightly stupid about sex for the next, oh, large bit of forever.]
    


42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) [own it, not sure if it's worth the depression]
    


43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella) [already read Bridget Jones; have I not suffered enough?]
    


44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) [aw FUCK NO. what the hell is the fascination with Albom? He's an okay sportswriter, but the pap level of his fiction is more than I can take.]
    


45. The Bible [bits and pieces, but I haven't sat down with it since I got out of my required high school theology classes, which, being set in a Catholic school, were not exactly heavy on the Bible.]
    


46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) [own it, have yet to find a Russian author I can enjoy enough to actually finish a book; Anna Banana is not a likely candidate.]
    


47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) [own it, liked the movie, very much like swordfighting in a platonic non-SCA way]
    


48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt) [believe the hype]
    


49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) [Christ, how depressing. read it in high school and got depressed; reading it as an adult would probably make me flirt with the pilot light.]
    


50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb) [who is this Lamb guy? can anyone recommend?]
    


51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) [good stuff]
    


52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) [oh, Jeeves? put this one on the list of stuff you hate because you were forced to read it in high school before you had half the life experience necessary to appreciate great literature, but if you read after 30 you'll probably like it. a lot.]
    


53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) [sounds vaguely familiar]
    


54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) [be that as it may, I will always want to throttle Pip]
    


55. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald) [gaping hole in my literary enculturation]
    


56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence) [Kate says Laurence is good, so I'll give it a go]
    


57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (JK Rowling)


58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough) [shame level high! enjoyed the early '80s miniseries with Richard Chamberlain: shame level even higher!]
    


59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) [should be required for every female of reproductive age]
    


60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)


61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) [again with the Russian thing]
    


62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)


63. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) [long winded Russian writers]
    


64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) [HELL NO. NO VAMPIRES.]
    


65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)


66. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
    


67. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)


68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)


69. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)


70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) [I seem to remember many middle school classmates loving this book. I never got past the first couple pages.]
    


71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding) [shame!]
    


72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)


73. Shogun (James Clavell)


74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)


75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)


76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)


77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)


78. The World According to Garp (John Irving) [John Irving is bent.]
    


79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)


80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) [fucking book made me cry when I was seven.]
    


81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)


82. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck) [apparently I am not a Steinbeck fan. ignorance or good instincts? you decide.]
    


83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)


84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)


85. Emma (Jane Austen) [I have this but don't remember if I finished it; thus the half-bolded title.]
    


86. Watership Down (Richard Adams) [bunnies, a fun bunny language dictionary in the back, a bittersweet ending that made me cry but not in the bad way fucking Charlotte's Web did; maybe my soft spot for pigs is bigger than the one for bunnies.]
    


87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) [read it in high school; don't remember a whit about it.]
    


88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)


89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)


90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)


91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)


92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) [goodness how disturbing; I remember thinking as a kid, shit, did they really kill him?]
    


93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck) [also depressing as hell, at least at the time]
    


94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)


95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) [pretty cool]
    


96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)


97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch) [liked it a lot, worth re-reading]
    


98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)


99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield) [HELL NO]
    


100. Ulysses (James Joyce) [ah, I keep trying, and will keep trying until I get through it]

A Brief Respite from the Madness

Gonzo's on his way out but the boys bogged down in Baghdad are not. Garrison Keillor apologized, sort of, but I still don't get it. Property taxes are up 25%.

So, naturally, my thoughts turn to books. The latest reads in the Boltgirl household have been The Mammoth Cheese, by Sheri Holman, and Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson. The storycrafting of The Mammoth Cheese evokes Jane Smiley at her best, with the bonus of being free of annoying characters I would sooner strangle than read one more sentence about. Think Moo and Lidie Newton, or A Thousand Acres before people start going nuts. Anyway.

I had looked forward to Lighthousekeeping for a long time, after reading excerpts on Winterson's website, and I'm not sure if I am let down or merely finally comfortable enough with her writing style that it didn't register as much more than a blip when I finally read it through in one sitting. It was okay. She plays around with the narrative structure in a different way than in the other books of hers I have read (granted, each one is an exercise in a different style), and it works. Pew is a good character, not one of her most fanciful creations, but serves his purpose well.

NCAA basketball? My men's bracket is hopelessly screwed and my women's is heading toward a tanking as well. No big bucks coming my way this year. Kim Malkey still annoys the shit out of me. But at least there have been a few stunners on the women's side to make up for the general lack of upsets by the men. Go! Heels!

In Which We Panic and Review Books

Panic mode! Christmas in 13 days! Cards neither purchased, signed, nor mailed! Gifts for out-of-town family neither purchased, wrapped, nor mailed! Party this weekend! House not cleaned! Wassail not brewed! Many people coming! If I know you you've probably been invited; if I don't, and you haven't, just come with Homer.

Pant, pant.

In a perplexing development, our house is the only one on our block--and, actually, on our street for several blocks--to have put up lights. The neighborhood is usually lit up pretty well, so this year the girlfriend scrambled and got the front of the house tastefully strewn with electric festiveness the day after Thanksgiving. Ha, we said, we have finally beaten Mario across the street for once. Eat it, Mario! The days and now weeks have dragged on and no other lights have appeared. Was there a neighborhood protest of Christmas we weren't invited to? Perhaps our lights are so incredibly awesome as to make everyone else decide it is not worth trying to top them. I'm flattered, but sad.

Bibliophilia corner: Current concurrent reads are David Copperfield and an utterly bizarre Bookman's find called Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures. It caught my eye because it's big, robin's egg blue, and on the spine has a drawing of a weird little horned, pink puppy clutching a sword. And was printed in Canada! Quelle exotique! It's a fantasy, but not one of those annoying fantasies where all the characters are named Galadriel or Etherial and speak in hack faux-Elizabethan prose. In a huge plus for a grownup book, it's full of pen-and-ink drawings reminiscent of Edward Gorey, if not as dark. If you hated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you'll probably hate this. If you liked it, maybe give Rumo a shot, for the pictures if nothing else.

Never got around to reading Copperfield in school, and I am pleased to find that I like it. I liked A Tale of Two Cities when I read it last year, after loathing it as a high school sophomore, and have decided that people shouldn't be forced to read Dickens as teenagers because they'll probably end up screaming every time they hear him mentioned and won't give him a second chance as adults.

Same for Faulkner. Reading The Sound and the Fury off and on is rather not unlike wading through molasses, having to go back every three steps to retrieve your boots yet again, but it feels worth the effort. I did give Cooper a second go several months ago, managing the first fifty pages of The Spy before admitting defeat. Is that the one he wrote on a bet with his wife, that he could churn out better fiction than what she was currently reading? That must have been one fucking dull book Mrs. Cooper was saddled with at the time.

Panic mode! Again! Christmas in 13 days! Fuuuuuuuuuck!!!!

What a Week

Whew. After the adrenaline rush of Wednesday and Thursday, it's all sweetness and light today.

Music recommendation du jour: Leila Lopez, folk fusion from Tucson. Another chick with a guitar who gets it right.

Tolerable alternative to M.I.A.: Lady Sovereign. But just barely.

Book recommendation, Old Skool: Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos. Written after World War I, this follows three American soldiers--one from New York, one from Indiana, and one from San Francisco--into France for the fighting and the aftermath. It is a masterful study of how the machinations of war grind three mens' psyches into very different forms.

Book recommendation, current: Living with Saints, by Mary O'Connell. This collection of short stories intertwines the themes of the lives of selected saints with abortion, aging, body issues, sexuality... the prose is tight and the emotion wistful but not overdone. I hope O'Connell keeps writing. While growing up a Catholic female probably adds extra touches of familiarity with the settings and personalities described, you don't need that experience to totally get the book.

Shows pissing me off recently: Gilmore Girls and CSI. Please. I couldn't even get through ten minutes of GG this week and found other things to do last night during the non-creepy bits of CSI. I know, I know, CSI isn't supposed to be a deadly accurate reflection of reality, but I expect a reasonable level of plausibility that doesn't leave me looking for things to hurl through the screen. I think I was churning out that level of screenplay in eight grade.

Recommended late-night snack food: Thai coconut curry chicken sticks from Trader Joe's. 15 minutes in the toaster over gets you light, crispy, lemon-grassy goodness with a low calorie impact and decent amount of protein.

What the hell happened to this place since the last time I was there, oh, four years ago?: The Biz. Ay.

The Man: Keith Olbermann, always.

Hasta proxima semana.

Recommended

After the weekend, focus is still slow in coming. I don't want to think about politics, immigration, feminism, organic farming, or gay marriage. I don't care to care that much about anything at the moment, truth be told.

In the interim before I get my angsty freak back on, here's a list of recommended diversions.

Books.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and The Passion
Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
Franco Ferucci, The Life of God
Jay Winik, April 1865
Ruth Reichl, Tender At the Bone
MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal
Ian Frazier, On the Rez
James Lileks, The Gallery of Regrettable Food
Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea

Music.

Natalia Zuckerman, On a Clear Day
Nortec Collective, The Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3
DeVotchKa, How It Ends
Nada Surf, Let Go

Soccer.

Brazil.
Ghana.
Italy.
Not us.

Soccer coverage.

Univision.
Not ESPN. JP Dellacamera is a blithering idiot.

That is all. Deep insights tomorrow, really.

Book review

I am reading The Life of God (as Told by Himself), by Franco Farucci, picked up during the last trip to Bookman's. I carry a little notebook with titles of books and CDs I want written in it--it makes the Bookman's excursions like little scavenger hunts, oh! how exciting when I find something on my list--but this particular book wasn't in it. I like to just scan the titles, picking up volumes with interesting names or even just interesting designs. This one jumped out at me.

It's been a challenging read; I usually scream through fiction fairly quickly, but I can't do much more than an hour at a stretch on this one, often going back and re-reading paragraphs or pages to figure out what he's saying. God, in the first-person narrative here, is deeply flawed, confused, and at times doubtful of his own divinity or unsure what to do with it.

Essentially, it's God in my own image; thus the attraction. And of course the story meshes neatly with my own thinking about the Bible and some prominent organized religions. In the novel, God knocks heads with a stubborn Moses who's more invested in his own petty rules and regs than in discussing the nature of creation with God, ignoring his (His?) objections to Moses' heavy editing and creative re-writing of God's own texts.

It's a scene repeated in each of God's visits to various major philosophers, priests, and mystics through time, including Jesus (if you have a delicate constitution when it comes to dogma surrounding either the Annunciation or the Crucifixion, you probably shouldn't read this book). Only Buddha stumps him, only John and Magdalene recognize him without skipping a beat; the rest--Augustine, Ambrose, Heraclitus, Seneca--see him but are so possessed by their preconceptions of both the nature and will of the divine that they can neither recognize him nor hear the message he's trying to impart. They are ultimately destroyed by their inability to live up to the artificial, impossibly high divine standards they've constructed in their own minds. Indeed, even the devil is presented as insurmountable, not because he's evil, but solely because he's a creation of human imagination. A fascinating thought, that.

Anyway. I guess I find comfort in the notion that God doesn't know what the hell's going on either, a god seeking not perfection or adherence to man-made laws but collaboration in an inquiry into the nature of existence. Huh. No wonder the Greek philosophers have such significant roles in the book.

Sunday Afternoon

Lovely late-afternoon sun making the palo verde blossoms glow yellow... woodsmoke on the breeze... a comfy chair in the shade of my mesquite tree, a good book, and a cold beer. It makes a body downright reflective. Well, "reflection" isn't the term. More like "open conduit for random memories."

1977, and I'm living in an apartment complex in northern Indiana with my mom and step-dad. I mostly hang by myself; there are plenty of dumpsters for diving, a small woods to explore, and a vacant lot covered with limestone gravel that is chock-full of plant fossils. I still have two small boxes full of crinoids in the top of my closet. Anyway. I occasionally played with two girls who lived across the parking lot, one a year or two younger and the other a couple years younger than that. They were some brand of Baptist I hadn't encountered before. Early on in the association we were sitting in the room they shared and the younger one--the names escape me, but she was the whiny one--fixed me with a glare and said, "Girls ain't s'posed to wear pants." Befuddled, I looked over at her sister, who was reclining on a bed. She explained, with infinite world-weariness, "It does not please the Lord." I was too green at 10 to fire off a snappy comeback, but I remember wondering why they thought God was so offended by my Levi's but would groove on the goofy corduroy culottes the Jeebus sisters always wore. I mean, come on. Culottes? Flouncy and skirt-like at first glance, but two very pants-like separate slots for the legs anyway. You're telling me God falls for that crap?

More 1977, or possibly 1978. My hamster gives birth to a litter of 9. I name them after the Cubs' starting lineup. DeJesus and Buckner die within days; Blyleven and Madlock are the only two to survive into hamster adulthood. Flash forward to today: Bill Madlock throws out the first pitch at the Cubs game this afternoon and sings the seventh inning stretch. The thrown pitch was much better than the sung one.

Things that bug me: "hampster." "bumber sticker." "rediculous." "ammendment."

Jalapeno update: Plant One has five peppers in progress; Plant Two has three. The plants need snappier names. Reggie and Lothario, perhaps.

Recommended reading: Bitch magazine. Seed magazine. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.

Recommended listening: Neil Anderson. Sera Cahoone.

All in a summer's day.

Post-Easter Religion Corner

So anyway, I read a flyweight historical novel over the weekend (The Burning Time, by Morgan... somebody), a bit of fluff purporting to be based on the court transcripts from the first witchcraft trial held under the Inquisition in Ireland in the late 1300s. The premise was far more promising than the execution, so to speak, or maybe I'm just way too easily distracted by glaring historical errors. Please, if you're writing a novel set in pre-1500 Europe, do not make repeated references to the peasants harvesting more summer squash than they know what to do with. And for the love of whatever goddess, god, or tree you worship, don't cut and paste words and syntax wholesale from Wicca For Dummies and transpose it onto your scenes of 14th century Celtic pagan rituals and think no one will notice. More Blessed Bes and Merry Meets flying around that book than at the monthly SCA confab over at Himmel Park.

Anyway. Once I decided to view the story as more of a modern parable than a historically accurate account, it was slightly more enjoyable, a tolerable mini-saga of the terrible price exacted by attempting to preserve your spiritual integrity in the face of religious intolerance. It made me consider how various groups of people react to religious issues in different ways, how the ultra-religious tend to categorize the fight to maintain church-state separation as fear or hatred of religion. I never quite understood that until very recently, say last week. It is, I believe, because that is their conditioned reaction to belief systems other than their own--fear.

I came to this enlightenment courtesy of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course, not so much by the power of its gospel (despite the powerful allure of pirates, to which I am not in the slightest immune), but by the vituperative e-mails sent to the Pastafarian founder by good Christian folk. Some seemed to be motivated by genuine concern for the man's mortal soul, but many others can be condensed into:

LISTEN DUMBASS YOU THINK THAT YOU ARE SO COOL BECAUSE YOU THINK SOME PUSSY SPAGHETTI MONSTER RULES THE FUCKING WORLD YOU STUPID FUCK YOU NEED TO FIND JESUS YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER.

I just find this fascinating. Many, many of the e-mails used more permutations of "fuck" than even I drop in my worst moments--which, if you know me, can be quite a few--while simultaneously exhorting the reader to find Jesus. And then they're signed "God bless."

The consistent themes and wording running through these (at least the ones that seem to view the FSM as a genuine religion rather than the satire it's intended to be) are (1) concern that the FSM is leading people away from the True Faith, so please turn to Jesus (worded politely), (2) if you believe in the FSM you are fucking retarded, (3) if you believe in the FSM you are a fucking faggot, (4) if you believe in the FSM please go kill yourself, (4) if you believe in the FSM I hope your kids are fucked up and you get anally raped and eaten by animals.

Maybe this is an unfair assumption, but it seems a fair bet to me that the same people saying FUCK YOU IN THE NAME OF JESUS look at pictures of Muslims rioting over cartoons or blowing up each other's mosques and find it proof positive that Those People are monsters. I guess I'm equally unable to understand religious paranoia as they are to understand my lack of religious fervor, but if a perceived insult to your religion is all it takes for you to go on a physical or verbal rampage that is completely contrary to the stated tenets of that religion, well, it's time to take a deep breath. Is your god so fragile that he can't withstand the scorn of a lowly human? Does he really need you to do his judging and smiting for him? Think about that for just a second or two. If an omniscient, omnipotent being really needs humans to carry out the dirty work for him between bouts of bowing down in obeisance, is that really a deity worth worshiping?