And the winner is...

Jane is the winner of The Girl Who Played with Fire! Jane, email me your address, and I'll get the book in the mail as soon as possible. I hope you read it soon and enjoy it as much as I am.

I am over half finished with the book, and I think it's more enjoyable than Larsson's previous book. It kept me up until almost 1:00 a.m. last night, and I might have read longer if I hadn't glanced at the clock when I came to the end of Part 3. I had to go to work today, so I decided to go to sleep instead of reading further. I will probably finish it in the next couple of days.

Book Giveaway!

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson hit bookstores on July 28. It is the follow up to Larsson's The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, which I read in the spring and blogged about here. (The earlier book is now out in paperback.) The publisher sent me a copy of The Girl Who Played with Fire to give away. I'm also supposed to have some temporary tattoos to give away also, but I have not received them yet.

If you haven't read the first book, I do recommend it, but don't let that keep you from entering the contest. I've read almost 100 pages of The Girl Who Played with Fire, and I think you could read the second book without having read the first book first. Larsson does a good job of filling in the pertinent background information

To be entered into the drawing for the book, all you have to do is leave a comment below with your name. This giveaway is open to those in the U.S. and Canada only, and the deadline for entry is midnight Central time, Friday, August 14, 2009. I will pick use a random integer generator to pick the winner and announce the winner on Monday, August 17.

Watching Golf, Thinking about Reading

The Open Championship is concluding today, and I have been enthralled watching Tom Watson try to win his 6th championship at 59 years old. My dad would've loved this! As an adult, I LOVE watching the major golf tournaments, especially when they have exciting endings like this one. Growing up, I'm not sure I really enjoyed the golf that much. Mostly, I think I endured the TV viewing because my dad loved it. I was a daddy's girl.

While watching today, I've been thinking about reading, mainly because I have a 50% off coupon to use today at Half Price Books. I've been thinking about what book I would buy. I would love to find a copy of Drood there, but I looked for it at two different locations earlier this week, when I had a 40% off coupon to use, and had no luck. I will probably look for it again today, but I'm only going to one location. If I don't find it, I have to have a second choice. I can't waste a 50% off coupon for a book--that would be a sacrilege.

I have wanted to read a novel by James Baldwin for a long time. I have read one of his short stories, "Sonny's Blues," but nothing else that I recall. I remember liking the short story very much and thinking that I should read more of his work. I did a little research about his works, hoping to discover what is considered his masterpiece. According to information on PBS' American Masters site, "Go Tell It on the Mountain has long been considered an American classic." Classic is close enough to masterpiece for me. So, I am going to look for a copy of it.

In other reading news, I will finish reading The House of Seven Gables today. Hopefully, I will not be lazy and will post about it soon. Last week as part of my short story reading project, I finished reading Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. This week, I am going to finish reading Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock. There are 6 stories in the second part of the book plus an epilogue. If I finish the book, I think I will have made up for missing days when I was on vacation and a couple of other days since then when I was busy or reading something else. This book of stories based on her family's history has reinforced my admiration for Munro's writing. If I can't find a copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain, maybe I will look for an older Munro book because I definitely want to read more of her work.

Well, the 4-hole playoff is half over, and Watson is one shot behind Cink. I should probably get dressed now, so that Valerie and I can go eat lunch and maybe do grocery shopping as soon as it's over. Enjoy your Sunday!

Short Story Project Update

Last week, I finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. The final three stories are linked, alternately focusing on Hema and Kaushik, a girl and a boy who are thrown together as children when Kaushik's family returns to the U.S. and stay with Hema's family for a while. Although they are not friends and their parents do not remain close friends, thier short time together leaves a lasting impression on them both. In the final story, their reunion and subsequent coupling is not unexpected, but Hema's ultimate decision about their relationship, while probably not the desired ending for many readers, is completely fitting with her character. I really enjoyed these three stories. With this book, Lahiri has further cemented her place in my list of authors I love, authors whose books I will buy as soon as they are released.

Other short stories that I have read since my last post:

• The opening story in J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." This story concerns Seymour Glass, a World War II combat veteran, who is not coping very well with the return to civilian life. He is probably suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder, but I don't think it was being called that in the late 40s/early 50s.
  
• Another story from Nine Stories, "For Esme--with Love and Squalor." I think this story has appeared in many anthologies. I recognize the title, but I don't think I ever read it. It is another post-World War II story. I found it funny and sad. In this story, Clay relives a meeting he had in England during the war with a young girl and her brother and the lasting impression that the meeting had on him.
  
• On a much lighter note, "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" by James Thurber. Have you ever read any Thurber? I think I have only read two of his stories before this one, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "The Catbird Seat"--both read a very long time ago, but if I remember correctly they are silly on the surface, but the silliness reveals a deeper, more serious problem lurking under the surface. Well, "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" is just silly to me. Still, I wish I had used it when I taught Macbeth all those years.
• Another silly story, "Carry on Jeeves" by PG Wodehouse. A very funny story that I found in book at a bed and breakfast that Valerie and I stayed in on our recent trip to the Hill Country (I need to blog about our trip soon too). I had never read any Wodehouse but have intended to for a while.
  
• Two short stories Alice Munro, but I'm saving them for another post.
  
• Another by Salinger's Nine Stories, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut." This story is about two former college roommates who get together for lunch and end up spending the afternoon getting drunk while catching up and reminiscing. I'm not sure what I think about this story. I just read it this morning and haven't had time to fully process my thoughts. Maybe I will post more thoughts about it later.
  

Okay, that's enough for now. I need to do something else for a while today. Later.

My Short Story Theory

From the first sentence, a good short story makes you feel like something important is about to happen. By its very nature, you know that the climax will occur relatively quickly, but you still enjoy the path to the climax. I've noticed this week that I tend to approach the reading of short stories like I approach the reading of mystery novels. I find myself mentally predicting where the story is headed. Of course, it's easy to predict the trite turns that a story about human relationships might take, but the best short stories do not go to those trite places or they go there in an unexpected way.

Most of the time, Lahiri, like a great writer should, takes the story someplace else. When she does take the story to an expected place, she focuses the story in such a way that the climax isn't merely the expected outcome but some other aspect of that outcome. For example, in "Nobody's Business," Sang, a young Bengali American woman, is being duped by her Egyptian boyfriend. To me it was apparent from the beginning of the story that Farouk was hiding something and most likely being unfaithful to her. He wouldn't let her spend the night with him, wouldn't spend the night with her, and didn't introduce her to his family. Sang's housemate Paul discover's Farouk's secret, but he keeps it from Sang for a while. In the end the story is more about how and why Paul discovers, keeps, and finally reveals the secret than it is about Sang and Farouk's relationship.

The previous story, "Only Goodness," is a story about family relationships, but this one focuses on the siblings in a family, Sudha and her younger brother Rahul. While this story is about a Bengali American family, I would label this a universal family story. I think that anyone with at least one sibling could find something to connect with in this story. For example, when Sudha thinks of the stories of her birth and early childhood in London, she thinks of them "like an episode out of a Greek myth or the Bible." I can think of a number of my family's stories that might, to us, be thought of on the same level. Those are the best family stories.

Despite having been raised essentially the same, Sudha and Rahul end up in very different places. Sudha is a successful academic while Rahul, the smarter of the two siblings, is a floundering alcoholic. Rahul is kicked out of college and living at home with his parents. He has no car and only a part-time job. During a visit home, Sudha becomes "aware of a horrible imbalance between them. She felt accused, simply because her life wasn't broken in the same way." I sometimes feel really bad when I talk to my younger sister, who is constantly having money problems. I know her problems are not my fault and not my responsibility, but I still feel bad that I can't make her life better, can't solve her problems.

(FYI - I typed up most of this post a couple of days ago. Then I added the following paragraphs tonight.)

I think this story can be summed up in one simple sentence from the story: "Life went on." Of course, we know that it must, but, like Sudha, we still feel guilty when we realize that we are moving on. We can sit still; our lives must be lived. Sudha can't wait on her brother to get his shit together before she takes the next step in her life. And no one would really expect her to.

I'm really enjoying this book of stories. The final three stories are related to one another. I took a break from Lahiri today to read "Goldrush Girl," a short story by Jeanette Winterson. You can read the story online here. I'm still trying to decide what I think about it. Maybe I'll post something about it later.

The Short Story Project Continues

Today, I will read my fourth short story, another one from Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Concentrating on short stories in this way has reminded me of Poe's rules for the short story that I used to teach my Junior English students.

From what I recall, Poe said that a short story should

• be able to be read in one sitting.
• create a unified effect - every sentence should contribute to the effect.
• complete in itself.

I'm sure there's more but I'm too lazy to try to find any old teaching notes that I might have saved. It seems like there was a specialized vocabulary word that I taught my students with these rules, but I can't remember it.

I'm sure that lots of great short stories break Poe's rules, but I have been thinking about them as I read the first three stories in Lahiri's book, pondering what the one effect might be of each story. However, I haven't been so focused on the effect that I'm not enjoying the whole of the stories.

The second story "Hell-Heaven," like the first story, focuses on generational differences. This time, though, the focus is on a daughter's changing views of her mother and her mother's feelings for a male family friend. I really like how Lahiri doesn't create the cliched love triangle; she doesn't take the easy way out of the story. Although the traditional Indian rules of behavior haunt this story, much like they do many of Lahiri's stories, I don't feel like it constrains the characters in an artificial way. (I really should write something about each story as soon as I finish reading. If I did, I think I would have more interesting things to say.)

The third story "Choice of Accommodations" concerns a marital differences rather than generational. Amit and Megan have been married long enough to have two young daughters. Amit is a former doctor-to-be turned medical journal editor, and Megan is in the last year of her residency. The story takes place on a weekend trip to the wedding of one of Amit's old friends. The daughter of the headmaster of the prep school he attended, a woman that he has always been in love with but never really pursued. They have been friends for a long time now. The night of the wedding, which takes place at the prep school, Amit does a lot of thinking about his past and his present.

Thinking about this project has made me think about short stories that I have read through the years and chosen to teach because I enjoyed them so much. Here are some of my favorite short stories:

• Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
• Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"
• Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"
• Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
• Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"
• James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" - I read this story several years ago now, and since then I am often reminded that it made me want to read one of Baldwin's novels, which I have yet to do. I wonder which one I should read. If you read one, please make a recommendation.
• William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"
• John Updike's "The A & P"

That's all I can think of for now. It's time to read now. Later.

The Short Story Project Begins

To review, my Summer of Short Stories involves reading one story each weekday of my summer vacation, a total of 45 short stories. I'm not sure what form my blog posts about the stories will take or how faithful I will be at posting about them, but I'm going to attempt to post each day soon after I read the story for that day.

I decided to begin with Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. The first story is the title story. It is a lovely story about the way family members, especially fathers and daughters, understand and misunderstand one another. When I read Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, I was completely drawn into each of the stories from the first word to the last, and "Unaccustomed Earth" was no different. Lahiri is able to make me feel much for her characters even though I will only know them for a short while. Ruma and her father share more than they will ever realize. It's quite poignant how Lahiri captures the way they misunderstand one another on the surface yet come to understand each other on a deeper level in the end. (I'm not sure that I'm making sense here, but if you read the story, maybe you will see what I mean.) They each want to protect the other from the one thing that humans can't be protected from, life as it happens: "He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from he start." Although we know that life lessons are learned best through experience, we still want to protect those that we love from having to learn the hard lessons through their own experience.

I enjoyed this story so much that I immediately wanted to read the next story, but I resisted the temptation. I have other books to read today. I want to finish Unwind and make some good progress with Shadow Country, which I must be finished with by July 12--it's 875 pages; I've not read 200 pages yet. Plus I do have some errands to run and things to do around the apartment.

Later!

A Summer of Short Stories

I know that I will read several novels this summer, both adult and young adult ones. Still, for a couple of weeks, I've been thinking that I need a plan for the summer, a plan for reading and/or writing something everyday. I have considered walking to the park every morning and doing some writing, like maybe planning to write one poem a day, and I might still try to do that on some days. But tonight, while I was doing my five-mile walk, I had the idea that I could read one short story per week day, and I could only read them from books that I or Valerie already own but I haven't read.

Here are the short story books that we own that I have not read:

• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Diamond Dust by Anita Desai
• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Stories of John Cheever - I have had this book for a very long time, but I have only read a few stories in it.
  
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
• Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner - As far as I can remember, I have only read one story from this book when I was an undergrad. Do you know how long ago that was?
  
• The Early Stories: 1953-1975 by John Updike - I have read a few of the stories in this book, but it's a big book with lots of stories that I haven't read.
  
• Collected Stories by Carol Shields
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
• The book of Ten Nights and a Night by John Barth

We also own several short story anthologies and some literature anthologies that include some short stories. I will have plenty to read. My plan is to get up every morning and read a story before I do anything else that day. I have nine weeks of summer vacation, which equals enough days for 45 short stories. I will try to post/tweet about each of the stories, but I'm not making any promises that I will stick to that part of the plan or to the plan itself. It will be fun to try though.

I wish I had said that

Sunday night at book club, we realized that only 2 or 3 of us would be able to attend our June meeting. So, we decided to skip a month and read a longer book: Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen, 892 pages.

I don't know about you, but I have to read all the blurbs on a book before I can begin reading a book. I knew that Shadow Country won the National Book Award last year; and, I wasn't surprised that the blurbs were all raves. However, I was surprised by the sheer number of them and by the high level of the praise. If this book lives up to its blurbs, I will be in book club heaven--two great books in a row!

My favorite blurb:

"The book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go."--Los Angeles Times

Man, I really wish I could think of things like that to say about the books that I read. Actually, I wish more books that I read enthralled me like the mariner's story does the wedding guest. Here's hoping Shadow Country does not disappoint.

Since I last blogged

Geez, I can't believe how long it has been since I posted here. It's not like I haven't had anything to post about. Valerie and I moved to a new apartment--much smaller but much, much nicer. I requested a transfer to a high school library--still angry that someone who didn't want the transfer is being forced to take the position instead of giving it to one of the two of us who did want it. I started Twitter-ing. I have read some really good YA books and one really great book club book.

First the book club book: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - I really loved this book. It is obviously reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger in that Balram, the main character, is confessing to and rationalizing a murder that he has gotten away with committing. However, I don't remember The Stranger as being the least bit funny. Adiga's book, on the other hand, made me laugh out loud more than once. Here are two of my favorite passages:

• "These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things they have no say in." - Isn't that the perfect description for our election years, perhaps for any country's election years?
  
• Balram asks a bookseller, "So how do you sell books without knowing English?" To which the bookseller replies, "I know which book is what from the cover...I know this one is Harry Potter...I know this one is James Hadley Chase...This is Kahlil Gibran--this is Adolf Hitler--Desmond Bagley--The Joy of Sex. One time the publishers changed the Hitler cover so it looked like Harry Potter, and life was for a week after that." - I'm sure that someone who bought what they thought was Harry Potter would be outraged to have recieved a Hitler book instead, but I thought this idea was terrifically funny.

The effects of rampant illiteracy is one of the big ideas in this book, so I wasn't surprised to find some good book quotes. I'm always on the lookout for those. Balram tells the bookseller, "I just want to stand around the books. I had a book once. When I was a boy." I know some people do not have books and some do not want books, but the thought of someone wanting books and not having them is one of the saddest things I can think of. Another book quote that I liked is this one: "Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books." This quote makes me think of Frankenstein's reading of his father's outdated science books and deciding to build a human, and we all know (even those of us who never read the book) the horrible outcome of that reading. For one more book quote, check out my right sidebar.

The three great YA books that I read recently are Ash by Malinda Lo, which doesn't come out until September, Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I will post reviews of these at my work blog as soon as possible and will either link to them from here or post them here too.

Now, I need to get off here and get moving. Valerie and I want to finish hanging things today and do our grocery shopping before going to book club tonight. Enjoy your Sunday!

Spring Break Reading

I finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson on Saturday. It's not a perfect mystery/thriller, but I found it to be very engaging. I'm a slow reader, but if I had been able to just sit and read without interruptions, I could probably have read the book in just a few days, maybe even one or two. There were a few places where I thought the story dragged, but most of those places consisted of background information about the Vanger family or the Swedish financial markets/economy. The mystery involves the niece of an elderly Swedish industrialist, retired from heading his family's business. Harriet Vanger went missing when she was sixteen, and her uncle Henrik convinces a convicted libelist to make one last ditch effort to find out what happened to her before Henrik dies. Eventually, the journalist Mikael Blomqvist hooks up (in more ways than one) with Lisbeth Salander, a hacker who had done a background check on him for Henrik Vanger. She ends up helping him solve the mystery and saving his life along the way.

In addition to being a mystery, this novel is also trying to make a statement about the number of women who are violently abused in Sweden. Each section of the book is introduced with a statistic about the subject. In the end, I'm not sure the novel does anything more than make the reader aware of how horribly women can and are abused in Sweden.

The novel was written before the author passed away in 2004, but Larsson seems to have predicted some of the current economic events that we have been witnessing for the last couple of years. Late in the novel, after a major financial player has been exposed as a fraud, Blomqvist discusses the Swedish economy, but he could be discussing the American economy or any other economy that is market driven:

"You have to distinguish between two things--the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. There are telephones from Ericsson, cars from Volvo, chickens from Scan, and shipments from Kiruna to Skovde. That's the Swedish economy, and it's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago...The Swedish Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy."

If only the latter didn't affect the former so much these days, we would all probably be much better off.

Something about this book made me think of the Sidney Sheldon books that I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, as a teenager and young adult. It's been too long for me to remember enough details to make a real comparison, but I recall that there was some kind of mystery/crime to be solved. If I remember correctly, though, the main female characters usually ended up happier than the Salander does in this novel. Still, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes crime novels.

More Spring Break Reading

• On Sunday, I read Mary Oliver's introduction to The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (I like the Modern Library Classics editions.) I don't know if I read something about this book recently, but I have been wanting to read it ever since I finished War & Peace. Before I purchased the book and read the introduction, I had forgotten that one of my favorite Advanced Placement essays required an analysis of a passage from this novel. Maybe I will post about the passage when I get to it in the novel.
• I started The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean yesterday and read a bit more early this morning. It's my book club's current selection, and I think it will be a quick read. So far, it's interesting, but I'm not completely hooked. The story is about a Russian emigre with Alzheimer's. She clearly remembers evacuating the art from the Hermitage in Leningrad during World War II, but she can't remember much present information from one moment to the next.
• This morning, after I read more of The Madonnas of Leningrad, I read the introduction to George Eliot's Middlemarch, another Modern Library Classics edition. The introduction was written by A.S. Byatt. I have wanted to read Middlemarch for a long time, but I am such a slow reader that I often postpone starting such long books, 799 pages in this copy. However, after reading Byatt's introduction, I don't think I can put it off much longer.
• Finally, this morning, I read "The Sisters," the first story in James Joyce's Dubliners, which I have never read. I have read the story "Araby" and maybe "The Dead" before, but I don't think I have read any of the other stories before today. I have a Vintage International edition, which doesn't have an introduction, so I just jumped right in to the first story.
• This afternoon, UPS delivered my latest LibraryThing Early Reviewers book, Easter Parade by Richard Yates, which brings to three the number of books that I have from this program waiting to be read and reviewed. I still need to read Etta by Gerald Kolpan, which just came out today, and Rocket Man by William Elliot Hazelgrove.
  

I had actually thought that April would be my read and review month, but now, I'm all excited about reading some classics and Valerie and I are moving to a new apartment in a few weeks. Oh well, I'm sure I will figure something out. Now, I'm going to read for a while before I go to bed.

Sunday Morning Reader Reading

I am enjoying this Sunday morning, sitting on the patio (which I will probably not have much longer but that's a story for another post), getting caught up on my Google Reader reading. In a post from March 2 (I really am behind on my Reader reading), Malinda Lo wrote about Daily Routines, a blog that she recently discovered. According to it's tagline, the blog is about "How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days." I haven't read through much of the blog yet, but Lo's post included a her favorite description, which is from Toni Morrison, my favorite author:

“Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was–there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard–but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space I can only call nonsecular… Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense."

Beautifully said! Morrison never ceases to impress me. I just had to share that very quickly. Now, back to my Reader reading.

Quick Early Morning Post

I finished War & Peace on Sunday, and I have things to say about it but no time now. I will probably post something later this week or this weekend. Yesterday, I finished my book club's current selection, Towelhead, but I will wait to post about it until after our meeting on Sunday. I'm really curious to see how other members reacted to this book. At work yesterday, I started reading a YA book called Boy Minus Girl. I actually checked this on out at the public library to see if it's appropriate for junior high students.

Last night, I started The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I was tired and didn't read very much, the prologue and part of the first chapter. Valerie will be out of town Thursday and Friday, so I will probably do a bunch of reading then. I will read unless I get sucked into watching Olberman and Maddow and/or playing mindless computer games, which I have a tendency to do sometimes even when she is here.

Now, it's time to go to work.

Reading Now

If you look at my right sidebar, you will see that three books are tagged as "Currently Reading" in my LibraryThing catalog, but I am really only reading one book right now. I have set February 28 as my deadline for finishing (finally!) War and Peace. I am currently just past page 800, which means that I have just over 400 pages left to go. I will meet this deadline!

The past two days and tomorrow at work students are taking TAKS practice tests, and my duty in the mornings is relief hall monitor--I have to relieve the hall monitors who make sure only one student goes into the bathroom at a time. In the afternoon, my duty is to monitor testers who did not finish the test in the morning. Both duties lend themselves to getting a bit of reading done, and I have taken advantage of the opportunity. I will meet this deadline!

Another factor: Valerie is going out of town next Wednesday and won't return until Sunday, so I will be able to concentrate on reading for the last four days of the month. She is such a distraction when she is here. ;-)

I will meet the deadline! And then I will immediately begin Towelhead, the current book club selection. I read the first few pages after I bought the book, and I think it will be a fast read. I hope so, since I am leaving myself just two week to get that read. After that, I have decided that I am going to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I am in the mood for a mystery.

And about that other "currently reading" book, The Warrior Queens, I will work it in here and there and will eventually finish it.

Hemingway is finshed

My boredom with For Whom the Bell Tolls didn't last long. I read for a long time yesterday and finished this morning. I'm still not sure if I "liked" the book, but I do feel like I read something important, something very good. The last 50-100 pages were surprisingly very intense too. I definitely think this is a much better book than Garden of Eden, which I read last summer and didn't like very much. Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls made me want to read A Farewell to Arms or read (actually I have listened to it on tape) The Sun Also Rises, so that I could make some kind of comparison.

Classics are supposed to be works that remain relevant, and this book is no exceptions. Passages like this one speak to today's world as much as it speaks about the Spanish Civil War: "To kill them teaches nothing...You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred." -- This statement explains why I am not the least bit surprised that so many ex-cons end up back in jail or that someone released from a place like Guantanamo would return to fight against America.

I don't generally read biographies, but I think I might like to read about Hemingway, especially his attitude toward war. I feel like this book shows that he was rather cynical about war. Of course, he was part of the "lost generation" so his disillusionment shouldn't come as a surprise to me. Still, I might like to read some of his letters or a good biography.

Okay, that's enough for tonight. I'm going to watch some TV now. Later.

The Hemingway excitement wanes

Last month, when we chose For Whom the Bell Tolls for our next book club read, I was very excited because I like classics and this was one that I had never read but always meant to. Plus, despite occasional classic options, our book club hadn't selected one in its year and a half of existence. Most of the members who were present at the meeting seemed genuinely excited about reading a classic.

For the first 50-100 pages of the novel, I was still excited to read this book. I was drawn into the story and anxious to see what would happen next. Now, however, I have become bored with the story. Hopefully, it's just a short slump--I'm only on page 137--I'm going to spend some concentrated time reading today, and I plan to not watch very much TV this week. The book is almost 500 pages and with my slow reading, I will need all week to finish unless the pace picks back up and stays on a fast-moving course.

In other reading news, I still need to read the last half of War & Peace and can't wait to find time to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and 2666, which are both chunky books. I'm going to start one of them as soon as I finish Hemingway, regardless of what the next book club selections is.

Now, though, I am going to read for at least an hour, until time to head out to a Super Bowl party.

A Great Day for America

I think that I have smiled almost non-stop today. It was a very exciting day at work. As soon as I got there, I started trying to get our school TV system set up to show live coverage of the inauguration. I was absolutely elated when I finally made it work with less than an hour to go before the oath and speech. I really felt like all students should be able to see this historic event as it happened. I know this may sound corny, but I felt like it was my duty to try to make it happen for the students at my school. And I loved all the talk from teachers and students about it.

I watched the speech live and again this afternoon on a special report from Channel One. Actually, I also heard some of it two more times while I did a little library work this afternoon--yes, today was not a very productive day for me. Tonight, Valerie and I are watching the coverage on MSNBC and plan to watch The Daily Show later, and I plan to watch Colbert Report too. It's like election night and the night after all over again. :-)

Speaking of Obama's speech, I thought it was awesome!!! Here are a few of my favorite passages:

• On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
• The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
  
• At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

I also enjoyed Elizabeth Alexander's poem and Joseph Lowery's benediction. Maybe I'll write about them later. All in all, I feel like I don't have to be so cynical and pessimistic about our government anymore. I truly feel more hopeful!

Books vs. Music

I have very specific and sophisticated taste in books. I can easily spend a $25.00 bookstore gift card. My biggest problem in a book store is deciding what not to buy as opposed to what to buy. I would never feel insecure about talking about the books I read. Actually, I can be rather superior about my taste in books, and it is sometimes difficult for me to refrain from showing my scorn about books that I feel are trash.

Music is another story completely. I have never felt that I had good taste in music. I spent my teenage years and early twenties listening to New Wave, pop, and rock--MTV years--and my thirties listening to hip hop and R&B. Now, I listen to a lot of the music from those earlier decades of my life and a few newer people that I have discovered from various sources, such as from Valerie, from the Houston Women's Festival music lineup, from iTunes commercials, and from TV/movie soundtracks.

Before my birthday, I had an old iPod 1G Nano that holds just over 200 songs as long as nothing else is on it. I had to make tough choices about what to put on it and take off of it when I got bored with my playlist or bought new music. I no longer have that problem.

For my birthday, Valerie gave me a new 8G iPod Nano, a bright orange one. It was a great surprise! I never expected her to give me an iPod for my birthday. And now, I can put so much more music on it and put things other than music on it. As a matter of fact, I put all the music from my iTunes library on it, and it isn't even half full--obviously, I have a very small library. I haven't had time yet to add much to my library to see how much it will hold either.

For Christmas, my older sister gave me a $25.00 iTunes gift card, and I had a lot of trouble today deciding what to buy with it. Well, actually, I had an easy time deciding on one album. I have been wanting a Nina Simone album for a while now, so I knew I was going to get one. The second album presented a much harder decision. I wanted to buy something "good." After looking at some best of 2008 lists and listening to some snippets of some songs, I settled on Coldplay's Vida La Vida. I already had the one song that had been on the iTunes commericial. Hopefully, I will like both of these albums.

Now, I need to get ready for New Year's Eve festivities. Later.

Healthier Thoughts

Last Monday, I turned 45. For a couple of months leading up to my birthday, I had been thinking about how unhealthy I am and how I would like to be much healthier when I turn 50. Yes, I know that's five years away, which gives me time to procrastinate, something I am very accomplished at doing, but I wasn't thinking about putting it off. I was thinking that I need to make changes now to be healthier in the near future as well as five years from now. And, I'm not just talking about losing weight, which I definitely need to do. I generally don't do new year's resolutions, and I'm not making this a resolution. I'm not sure why I have suddenly decided that I can't put my health needs off any longer, but I kind of feel desperate about it.

I've also been thinking a lot about menopause, which I feel very ignorant about, but I resist becoming intelligent about because it is an undeniable indicator of aging. I have a real problem with the idea of myself becoming an old woman. Also, I don't have any close friends near my age that I feel like I can talk to about it. Today, Allison Bechdel blogged about The Wisdom of Menopause, a book that she is reading. She's about three years older than me, so I was very interested in what she had to say about the book. She gave high praises to the book, so I looked at the reviews on Amazon. However, I can't decide if I would/should read this book or not. I'm not at all into New Age-y kinds of things and several reviewers complained about that aspect of the book. I do feel like I need to be more informed though, so maybe I will check it out from the library.

For now, I should be get my lazy butt up off the couch and do something active today. Later.

Bad Baking

I have been talking about baking pumpkin muffins for a couple of weeks. I decided last night that tonight was the night. I made sure that I had all the necessary ingredients, or so I thought. After adding the dry ingredients to the batter, I noticed that it was more watery than usual. I have made these muffins many times before, so I knew something wasn't quite right. The batter tasted okay, but it didn't thicken like it should have. I went back over the recipe to see if I missed something or if I had put in too much of something, but I didn't. I thought I would cook them for the required amount of time and see what happened, but I wasn't optimistic.

When the timer went off, I pulled the pan out of the oven. What a mess! It looked like the batter had merely boiled in the pan. I think Valerie thought that I must have put too much water in the batter, but I reviewed the recipe and knew that I had measured all ingredients correctly. The only difference I could point out is that I now use eggs from cage-free hens but different eggs shouldn't affect the thickness of a batter. Then I had another thought: the only ingredient that I wasn't mine or bought recently was the flour . It was some that Valerie had in a plastic canister--needless to say, we don't do a lot of baking--at her old apartment, and we've been here for a year. Still, I doubted that the kind of flour could make a difference, but if it wasn't flour in the canister, it would make a big difference. I opened the flour and stuck my finger in it. It was sweet. I tasted it again, and I knew: it was powdered sugar! DAMN!

Of course, we didn't have any other flour either. Valerie offered to go to the store tonight, but I told her that I would bake the muffins tomorrow or Thursday night. I really wanted a muffin tonight, too. (Funny side note: I didn't get angry, which is surprising because I would have been a total bitch about the mix-up in my previous relationship. Valerie really does bring out the best in me.) The worst thing, though, is that now I have to clean up the kitchen, and I didn't even get a yummy muffin out of the work that created the mess.