House:
Yule
Garden
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
My fourth Iris Murdoch.
The prose, the descriptions of the physical setting, primarily seascape, is extraordinary. The protagonist frightened me severely, and some of the plot patterns hang unfinished, not clumsily but deliberately to unsettle. I didn't get all the symbolism the book is supposedly packed with, and certain events were unbelievable. Yet I loved it. Murdoch's expression of personality and interplay and history propelled me along.
I could tell its writing was better but I didn't like it as well as The Green Knight, whose characters resonated with me. Then A Severed Head, then this, and far, far below, Under the Net.
The gym has replaced several Precor ellipticals with Cybex "arc-trainers." The ellipticals with handles have your arms and legs move as they do when you run: when one knee is up, that elbow is back. The arc-trainers--I used one until one of the remaining two, damn, handle-less ellipticals came up--mean your arms and legs move in the opposite, unnatural way: knee up and arm forward at the same time. I don't get it. But I did 10' on that, then
Precor Elliptical, 45', 11/20 resistance, 20/20 incline, ~5410 strides. A lower average spm and total stride count than previous, but I haven't indulged in purposeful cardiovascular exercise in a month. Also--and this is big--I watched tv during it. Since Gym Foofy installed wee tv monitors on every cardio machine, I can always watch CNN, but the wee monitors don't display captions. I could maybe deal with just video and the scrolly thing, but at the time CNN was showing "People in the News," featuring Britney Spears. On another monitor, I glimpsed soccer, so I not only deliberately watched television but a televised sporting event: UCLA v. Notre Dame women; there was only one commercial interruption in three quarters of an hour. It was tied 1-1 when my time was up, and I see that Notre Dame won 4-3 in penalty kicks (I rooted for Notre Dame because they are the Fighting Irish).
*Dot Org is an occasional exception, in addition to UConn and Old Lyme, to my rule about not wearing things with words on them. A couple of years ago a sponsored event resulted in blue canvas bags with our logo on one side and the sponsor on the other. I attacked the sponsor's side with acetone and a blue permanent marker.
I am listening, which is worse than reading, to I Am Charlotte Simmons, and I just heard a detailed scene of freshling deflowering. One should not infer from "detailed" anything like "prolonged and sweet and fun and living up to expectations" (not that the defloweree had any). I jerked out the headphones in disgust, at greedy predators with no thought for their naïvely consensual prey, at Tom Wolfe for writing a character untrue to herself when his needs required, and at myself for having ever said unkind things about the partner with whom I shared a mutual first. However badly matched we were personality-wise, sexually we were just fine. When I consider how many hideous first experiences I have heard about, I am the more grateful that we spared each other haste and heedlessness.
I hope you're well and happy, NCS.
And ha! Thanks, Haitch, for the link: Tom Wolfe earns a Bad Sex in Lit award
Precor handle-y elliptical, 25', then handle-less, 20' @ 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline. Then a scant 5 minutes and 20 floors on a stairmill, and then 3 or 4 minutes on a treadmill until my pulse was below 100.
All books are one book: Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe’s heroine, thinks that the El Dorado she had come to DuPont University to find was now the entire known world.
A dramatic reader gave the flat characters more personality than Wolfe did. The egregious stereotyping and trite, minimalistic plot wore on and on. I hope I wouldn't have read it, but it was an okay listen, an easy and entertaining story. I know this was a better listen than read: reviewers at Amazon complained of things like ":::::STATIC:::::" that the performer, not I, had to deal with. I did have to deal with lots of thrice-repeated words, rut rut rut or caress caress caress, which might work once or twice in context, but not continually, and not of a truck churning uphill ("struggle struggle struggle"), or multiplous times in one paragraph of a heart beating, pound pound pound pound (because sometimes the word would be quadrupled).
Among the several unbelievable things is Charlotte's first experience in high heels. Any female with any sartorial concern at all, and we know Charlotte has some, would put on dress and shoes and try them out, especially heels, before wearing them at an event.
Precor Elliptical, 45' @ 20/20 incline and 11/20 but mostly 12/20 resistance, ~5650 total strides (average spm 125).
Stairmill, 10', ~40 floors. I forgot to check but twice now I've done 20 floors in 5 minutes. My comfort level is between 6 and 7. I don't believe in holding the rails.
Packages shipped: seven--SFR, RED, ZLT and CTL, HAO, RSH, DMB, Charenton. Packages to ship: two (CLH and RSH). My father's second can go out tomorrow, some way faster than ground, with the peanut butter cookies I baked this evening. I have to finish CLH's stocking and Catalog of Tackiness and should be able to ship hers Tuesday or maybe Wednesday. I wrote 15 cards but have to ask my father for new addresses for his sister and sister-in-law. I have 75, or 62 if I skimp, to go; this shouldn't be a problem if the ink cartridges hold out. This week I get to bake oodles of cookies, go to Blossoms of Light at the Botanic Gardens, have bothersome hair ripped from my skin, and get a haircut.
...ovaries. It's been over a year now and I think I have settled down. The first half was 26 27 30 25 26 22 24 but the second half has been 30 28 26 26 26 27 28 and that's better: not so much more often than 28 days to piss me off and not so much less often to stress me out. I have noticed I have a mood thing, though, at about three weeks, touchy and paranoid and so forth. Having recognized it only means that now I'll watch for it, and however much hormones might not cause, my expectation will fill in.
How very very pretty. A lot better than the lame Wild Lights at the Zoo, which I went to once, thankfully without paying for the unprivilege. At the Botanic Gardens, the color, size, and frequency of the bulb complements the plant in question, both its overall shape and that of the foliage, if any.
I had more to say, but it's been two months and I just discovered this is a draft and if I don't have a ticket stub in my scrapbook I still have to commemorate the evening somehow.
Well, yesterday we broke in the spirit not by watching the South Park short "The Spirit of Christmas" but by having a party. We didn't watch the short until this morning, but I think the spirit found its way to our house anyway.
I had wondered how to entertain the hatchlings. (Like the selectively particular matron I am, I put the dozen ornaments I dragonly love the best on the tree-shaped ornament stand I dragonly bought for dragonly display the year we didn't have a tree, so that there on the mantel they would be safe from hatchling exploration. As we trimmed the tree this year, one ornament already went off to the Great Big Christmas Tree in the Sky, and I didn't want it joined.) I printed several sheets of a hunt ("on the tree, can you find an elephant with a howdah? a spotted reindeer with wings? a merry-go-round? etc.") and brought my picture books upstairs and--big effort--offered up my crayons for sacrifice, along with a pack of construction paper, which last stayed downstairs in the kid-friendly basement. From my crafts box, left over from a Hallowe'en costume or two, I pulled red and white pipe cleaners. (I think the red ones gave shape to my Cat in the Hat bow tie, but I can't remember what the white ones were for. Maybe for when I wanted to be the misfit Spotted Elephant, to shape the trunk?)
Although Booboo didn't make the same fuss Mrs. Bates does, I stowed him safely in the fruit cellar called my closet. No child happened to play in the bedroom and there discover the less destructible Hamlet, Morse, Monty, and Pantalaimon, but in my study they did discover Dan'l Bloone the knock-off Beanie Baby blue bear, Ophelia the okapi, Babe the gallant pig, and the salamander from the Prado, as they were welcome to.
(Dan'l Bloone has not previously occurred in the census of my animals because it has lived at work all its years. A coworker gave it to me, a give-away from a Big Top the year that someone named Blue from Kentucky was involved with Dot Org. I brought it home specifically as a hatchling party favor.)
Almost-four-year-old Gethen is my new best friend (since Hallowe'en). She and I made candy-cane jewelry with pipe cleaners and colored pictures and played bumper balls (with the exercise balls) and one of us got a booboo on her toe and required two kisses and a band-aid to make it better. She wanted to be barefoot like Miss Lisa. I'm a bad influence.
Ms. Begonia has Scarlett call adults Miss or Mister Firstname, which I think is an excellent compromise between the possibly stand-offish Title Surname and the possibly overly egalitarian First Name Only. And Miss is just fine, easier to say than Mizz.
This morning on the porch (whither I had gone to shoo off some pigeons that are trying to nest atop a column) I discovered scary lump of…something. I am really hopeful that it is the Silly Putty that someone discovered and that I last saw with Scarlett. Does it discolor as it freezes? Because otherwise there is Silly Putty somewhere in the house.
A few coworkers came, including ÜberBoss who had never come to the house before. He liked it, which made me happy. He admired the upstairs décor and the downstairs plentitude of space and the kitchen work, and he admired Blake and had him on his shoulder. By the time Minne arrove, there was enough of a crowd that Blake was imprisoned, but he wasn't yet so frustrated not to be friendly. He bowed and chucked to her, and she asked how she should respond. I suggested bowing and chucking, and she did that for a few volleys. Another coworker's almost-two-year-old daughter really wanted Blake, and while her mother sensibly kept her fingers out of the cage, the proximity of children and the crowd in general respectively frightened and frustrated Blake, whose mood didn't improve for quite a while after the attendees thinned and aged enough for him to have the liberty of the top of his cage.
I invited Kal's aunt and uncle, since I have been to their house for dinner but never met them: Kal was house- and pet-sitting, so I had met Picasso the green-wing macaw (red otherwise, and so perfectly Christmas-colored) and the dogs and cats but not them. Also, parrot people should flock together. We hit it off, as Kal expected.
RDC fishes with Gethen's father, but I have seen the parents only at party intervals since they moved a distance away. They hosted us for a lovely Thanksgiving in the mountains, lo these eight years ago, but Gethen's mother and I don't know each other very well. So in the basement as Kal and I played with Gethen, her mother asked if she and I were sisters. We looked at each other and grinned. She was willing, because she never has had a sister, and I allowed as how I'd have to vet the situation with CLH but it would probably be okay. Gethen's mater meant physical resemblance, more than inner sanctum communion. I don't see it, but maybe because I am used to looking like only CLH. Certainly how we followed each other's cues playing with Gethen could have increased whatever resemblance exists.
Gethen asked if this was my house, and what my name was (I might not be her best friend, even is she is mine, but her father said she'd been looking forward to going to Lisa's house all week). And when she ran to me for huggies and I swooped her up, a stranger asked if this was my little girl.
Yes, a stranger. I invited some neighbors to come, including the man across the street whose ex-girlfriend I knew better than him. They both saw the garden evolve from its inception, and while he and I had not been on more than hi and isn't the garden beautiful, thank you so much, basis until last night, the girlfriend, while she lasted, and I chatted a bit more. Anyway, I invited him, saying it was an open house for neighbors and regretting that I know only the people on my own block. Farther afield I know dogs' names but not so much people. He took my mild chatty statement further, inviting some other neighbors to meet him here, which friend-of-a-friend-ing I have never participated in but worked really well, I am happy to say.
RDC came down into playland to say that people we had never met were in the house, and I went up to say hi, and the woman, Scarf, and I hit it off immediately. Meanwhile Scarf's husband Drums and RDC did so over Thomas Pynchon, Java programming, and the North Mississippi All-Stars. Scarf invited another neighbor, and all was good.
Lou invited us to her own party in the evening, and while I like her a lot and am clearly swinging more toward outgoing again (see below), when the neighbors left to continue their evening at a nearby jam I used Lou's party as an excuse not to accompany them but didn't go. I had been on all day and had had enough.
I asked Dot Org's COO if I might ask her daughter to the Lemony Snickett movie, since she is the only child I know (of) who has read them. I met her only once, on the way to Don Giovanni, but I know she is outgoing and friendly, and the COO and I are palsy about Harry Potter and Lemony Snickett, so I figured it would be okay. And it is. We three have a date for a girls' night this week, and if it is not Tuesday then I will celebrate Solstice with Scarf and some other neighbors.
Two 3.6-mile city rides. I miss my bike! The morning ride was fine, though a tad windy; the evening ride was chilly. The next two days are forecast to be colder, but if I can bike back and forth on the second-shortest day of the year, only low temperature and not low light can remain as my excuse.
The earlier part of the evening was Blossoms of Light, which I bailed on; but RDC and I went to Drums and Scarf's house for glögg (I drank one full glass of mulled wine, minus the bit I dribbled on my sweater because I'm a lush) and chili and Solstice. RDC brought mix CDs for Drums and the across-the-street neighbor, whom I guess I'll call Howard, and I brought star-shaped cream-cheese cookie-cutter cookies (wrapped in star tissue paper). Most of the attendees were neighbors, which was really good. Scarf knocked on every door in the neighborhood this summer and fall, ensuring that everyone was registered and planning to vote, which is how she met a lot of them.
Scarf is intensely cool (worked in Antarctica, has been to every continent but Africa, travels with her dog), intensely committed (it's awfully brave in my book to knock on people's doors, though clearly I am more sympathetic about it if you do so for political rather than religious reasons), and overall intense. After she sketched what the Solstice ritual would be, I smiled to the woman standing next to me. "Scarf has the biggest heart I have ever met," said she, and after only two meetings I agree it is quite sizeable.
I didn't stay very long, just an hour and a half. Bless Scarf for not pressing me to stay but--after ensuring I had participated in the rites--just thanking me for coming. I stayed long enough to light a candle (for Emlet) and to write a wish (for my sister) for the coming year and tie it to their tree.
This book is amazing. I know I have consistently enjoyed almost all my recent books, but that is a pleasant effect of reading good books. This one--I was only on page 74 when I began this entry--is better. Sophie doesn't come on stage until page 40, and around page 60 we see the number on her arm, and now on page 74 Bobby Weed is mentioned. So I asked my friend Google who Bobby Weed was. On a page about Sophie's Choice, a non-spoiling paragraph said, "In December 1845...a Jewish merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, was arrested for selling a pair of gloves on Sunday.... The Charleston Sunday Times editorialized in favor of the court's decision: An ordinance for the better observance of Sunday...does not say to the Hebrew, You shall not keep holy the seventh day,' but merely declares that you shall not disturb the Christian by business or labor on his Sabbath."
I am going to feel guilty by transference by reading this book. Within the same site is mentioned Philip Roth's Ghost Writer, of which I hadn't heard, which imagines that Anne Frank survived Bergen-Belsen and became a creative writing student in the United States. I also haven't heard of Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews, which is about a Jewish tyrant within the ghetto system. And the page itself, which I didn't read closely for fear of spoilage, posits that Sophie's Choice is not about the Holocaust but about its "ideological representation."
The physical and psychological stereotypes about "race" make me itch: "wore in lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race." It's set in the late '40s, but the narrator implies a few decades of hindsight.
In Maus, Spiegelmann speaks of his father's having survivor's guilt; I have the egotistical guilt of the latter born. I love Styron's writing, and I love his forthright, examining what interests him and dealing with lambasting, and most especially his not shirking that intellectual obligation just for fear of the lambasting.
The downstairs fridge has Gethen's drawing of a dragonfly and two flowers. Haitch gave me hot chocolate to remind me of her all winter long. Scarf welcomed me to her Solstice celebration. I sent Kal home to Mitten Country with cookies and a card signed "love actually" (for the movie we intended to watch together but which I didn't have at the time), to which she responded, briefly because at work, "ditto." My mantel is plastered with cards from everyone--my uncle admiring my pluck and spirit, PSA's son in a spectacular Japanese costume, SFR surrounded by the paraphernalia of a first Christmas. My cup runneth over.
It is nonetheless somewhat short of full. Tonight my longest best beloveds are collected at Charenton for Nisou's birthday. Having a Christmas birthday makes you feel shortchanged as a child, but as an adult can be a blessing because your best present is seeing everyone come home. The house is full of children, cacophony, and revelry, but one after another HEBD, Nisou, PLT, and SEM closeted themselves in a pantry so they could hear me on the phone.
I spoke only briefly with each, HEBD telling me what everyone is doing--SPG stirring fondue, a nine-year-old the oldest and only boy of at least eight children, the Zs surely hatching a drama or two--and Nisou accepting my birthday wishes and love and PLT pondering gulping tempting foods and my god-husband SEM threatening a February visit and being the last to agree to distribute all my love and nose-lickings and strangulations of love to the rest and especially our goddaughter.
I am just a tad homesick and jealous. It should be just envy, but it's jealousy too, because I am selfish.
Today we went to the Denver Art Museum to see Tiwanaku, an exhibit of ancestors of the Inca; Japanese Prints: 150th Anniversary of United States-Japan Relations; Heaven and Home: Chinese Art of the Han Dynasty from the Sze Hong Collection; and "No Boundaries," 13 works "leading us to the intersection of fine art and fiber art."
I miss downtown, I miss noontime access to the museum, and I even miss the ménage aux roues that is the Colfax bus. We had a lovely time, even finding points of commonality among the two-dimensional art we liked--I liked a depressing still life and he liked a Georgia O'Keeffe, and then we came home and had tea and read in the direct sun of later (and slightly longer) afternoon.
So I had a lovely day, and I am surrounded by love: my tree, with ornaments from my sister and grandmother; my husband, napping on the couch with Blake; my bear, whom I fetched for the last few pages of Sophie's Choice because Blake was otherwise occupied; and I had a nice conversation with my mother this morning. But I still miss the rest of my family.
Yes, a nice conversation with my mother. Overnight I had a bad dream about her, she and her husband building an ostentatious house without windows (ooo! symbolism!) and she getting furious with me because I was so foolish as to walk home (across the road) from HPV's house (in real life, our parents' houses are joined by a now-overgrown path through the woods between) in the dark without an escort.
In daylight, I talked with my mother. RDC says 80% of our discourse is my explaining things to her. She wanted to know if I made my cards. I told her yes, I colored them each with crayons so carefully that they looked like they were printed, and she understood I was making a joke! She wanted to know where I got the stock (Office Depot) and if that was like a Staples. She appreciated points of the Catalog o' Tackiness I made for CLH but didn't get the toilet seat illustrated with fishing lures (of course she didn't get it: the reason for its inclusion is its utter absurdity) or the story behind the crystal objet de snot that I called the Ice Princess. My sister, of course, understood why this thing would have to be preserved from the Cassadine family and probably explained it to our mother at the time, but today was four whole days later so she'd already forgotten. From a gardening catalog I included a photograph of a cement (therefore white) tomato and gave the plot summary of Bunnicula before querying why anyone would want a cast of a giant tomato at all, let alone a white instead of red one.
She didn't remember Kal's name but did remember that I had a new friend only half a year older than my youngest babysitting victim, and was happy to hear about Scarf and socializing with neighbors, and when I confessed to homesickness, she seemed purely to sympathize without taint of blame, since it's my fault, or my victimization at my husband's nefarious hands, that I am so far away.
Awake, if not asleep, I get along with my mother better now than I ever have. And that makes me happy. More spillage.
Blake has been one-footed for most of the day. He was mad when we went to the museum but has happily napped or sung in his box since we've been home.
I have no idea what he's looking up at. I checked for spiders and saw none. Possibly he is looking up at the ceiling fixture to bring on a sneeze, but I don't know if cockatiels have that light reflex at all, and he didn't sneeze, and the reading lamp is brighter anyway. Possibly he is just a cockatiel.
yawning and napping on my leg
Precor Elliptical, 45', incline 20/20, resistance 12/20, 5809 strides: average 129 spm, which I felt. Plus 5' of stairmill.
Precor Elliptical, 45', resistance 12/20, incline 20/20, total strides 5650: average 125+, and I didn't feel it at all. Wasn't my goal some times ago 6000 strides in 45'?
After we returned from the museum on Thursday I made gingerbread. I knew enough to make the top and bottom the same size and I really tried to make the walls the same height but unsuccessfully, so I joined some of the walls to the roof with marshmallows. Also it didn't occur to me to leave a brim, so my gingerbread drum was a slice of column. Drums don't have brims, but I've never met a drum that bore any resemblance to what I created. It was, as I anticipated it, a reason for me to play with frosting, and as such I should have gone prospecting for decorations earlier and farther afield than Christmas Eve at the corner store, and however much a drum is decorated isn't the top usually empty, for drumming? Not mine. It didn't occur to me until after I had glued (with confectioner's sugar and water) a few M&Ms to the top that I shouldn't have. And the 7-11 didn't have regular marshmallows (as I knew from an excursion that was supposed to have resulted in s'mores, since we had an outdoor fire, instead of ice cream) but only wee ones for cocoa, so I crammed about three onto the ends of unmatched candy canes (the only two I had) and used more glue.
It was a sight. A damn funny one, I thought, and I expected it would still eat well, but its present-ness was in its humor value. Except that its recipient is two, when a drum is a drum and candy is candy; and his parents are polite; and it did eat well. Well, now I know what I did wrong. Experience won't give me taste but perhaps it imbued me with construction guidelines. RDC said it looked like Stonehenge with a roof.
When I talked to Charenton, Mémé thanked me for the measuring spoons (making cookies there last month, I had use of a tablespoon and a half-teaspoon measure, and I am not so skilled a cook that I easily got by without the regular assortment) and the earrings. Also during that visit, she complimented my tanzanite (periwinkle blue) studs and I told her how they had come to be, with RDC finding them when one of the amethyst studs was (temporarily) lost. She told me then of having lost a hummingbird earring, and I asked if it was a flat gold hummingbird touching a flat gold dime-sized disk at three points of beak, wing, and tail, because her daughter had given me such a pair many years ago and I had also lost one of mine. Gold's not my thing and I was thinking to give her the other. But she said no, these were three-dimensional birds. Today I told her that when I shopped for stocking materials and came across the wee hummingbirds, I decided to make her a new pair. (I already had periwinkle seed beads; it's a favorite color of both of ours). "You made them?" she asked, now appreciating the gift more. I was glad she liked them and also a little stoked she hadn't immediately seen they were hand-made.
The stockings went over well, I am happy to report: Siblet did not have a stocking yet and the ones they were going to use were flimsy and unpersonalized. Nisou liked the beading, colors, and fabric. Whew. The fish puzzle is beautiful and the circus animal ornaments perfect. I liked them because they looked handmade and because one of them is a giraffe, like Nanabush. The books--The First Starry Night and In the Garden with Van Gogh--Mémé and I duplicated. Ha! We have the same excellent taste. So they might go on to one of Nisou's French god-children. (She has four altogether: everyone wants her in their family.)
I am wearing a t-shirt from the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, even though I am not much of a t-shirt wearer anymore: Nisou gave it to me, and it has Eric Carle's catepillar and Leo Lionni's mice and Maurice Sendak's wild things on it. Also an M whose picture-book source I do not recognize.
My mother's husband liked his share of a llama, except from now I think I am going to give six months of education to a child in someone's name instead of livestock. Except maybe a goat. I really want to give someone a goat. My notstepmother loved her turtle cookie-cutter and ornaments and chocolate-covered blueberries and I hope she likes having read Falling Angels as much as she likes anticipating reading it. My father is looking forward to True History of the Kelly Gang and probably has already played a round of gold in his new shirt on his new tees. And my mother seems to like her slate-teal fleece sweater. So that's all good.
When my sister and I talked the other day, she asked if I had listened to the message she left at my cell number. "I lost my phone," I told her. In it, she had told me about Kitty's out-of-body experiences with her new catnip toy and other escapades from their early Christmas. The one escapade that bears repeating is An Improvement on our mother's part. I made my sister a construction paper house to contain a token contribution toward a down payment on an actual house, and when she lifted the roof and withdrew the currency, our mother asked, "Oo, how much did she give you?" CLH just didn't answer, so that was fine, but the Improvement is that the next day, our mother apologized, uttering the actual words "I'm sorry, I was wrong" for what my sister reckons was the second or possibly third time in her own life. CLH supposes that BJWL's husband gave her a ration of shit, CLH's phrase, for the crass question. CLH tried to communicate appreciation for our mother's accepting her own responsiblity without possible implication that appreciation meant such inquiries are permissible. When CLH and I unwrapped stockings this morning over the phone, she said something that cracked me right the hell up: "why is there a phone in here?" "I found my phone," I told RDC. CLH and I appreciated our own and the other's stupidity: mine for shipping my own phone two thousand miles away and hers for not making the connection between unpacking such a device last weekend and my announcing two days ago I had lost one.
My notstepmother gave me a cookie-dough scooper, sort of like a melon baller but with a half-circle scraper thingie to knock the dough out. That will help me make more uniform cookies. My sister gave me a silicon sheet for over a cookie sheet. This season I converted myself to parchment paper: I could prepare all the batter at once, instead of having to wait for a cookie sheet to cool to use it again and not waiting and melting the dough before baking it, and then slide a prepared paper onto a cooled sheet as a rack opened. Genius, I say. Also the cookies were popular at the party, which made me happy. My mother gave me elderberry jelly, which makes me terrifically happy. You can never buy it anywhere and I have got to make sure she records all her secret berry patches more permanently than only on her mental treasure map. Also she dug out yet another of Granny's photograph albums, this one full of treasures. I really want one of Gram Lawrence on a moped (these exist from a mother-daughter jaunt to Cape Cod, I think), and one of my father tilting a beer bottle into the mouth of his diapered younger daughter so that when people say "you've really never drunk a beer?" I can show them that okay, yes I have done, but not for decades.
RDC made me a stand for the emu egg he brought me from Australia. On its face is etched a cockatoo-like bird, and before he flew home from Sydney he said I would either get the present he intended or many itsy-bitsy ones. The one unshattered present he intended rested on its side on a pallet of bubble wrap for months until yesterday. He bought a gnarled root of manzanita wood from the wood-working store, ground all the dirt out of it, carved out a more egg-shaped curve than the natural one that inspired its use, and sliced off the bottom into a flat surface. It is lovely, and now lives atop the bookcase.
I didn't make him anything. I beaded his name onto his stocking, which he already knew, and fed the brilliant suggestion of a cookbook holder to my mother for my sister to steal. It was brilliant because I knew he would like it but was unlikely to know such a thing exists. Otherwise I gave him books: five. It is the first year he has received more books than I. Except that one book, and another from his mother, are really presents for me, along with cookware: Roasting: A Simple Art and The Breadbaker's Apprentice.
Oh, that's why I've had Kate Bush's "Houdini" in my head: the cadence of the entry title. "With a kiss/ I'd pass the key/ And feel your tongue/ Teasing and receiving."
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker for this. I like the parallels between the two courses of action 50 years apart, and what it had to say about the British in India 25 years before and after its independence, but I confess I know so little about India--Midnight's Children, two Rumer Goddens, and Just So Stories are about my limit--that I must miss oodles of meaning.
I linked this and Heat and Dust for several insubstantial reasons: I had them both from the library at the same time, neither is over 200 pages, and both won the Booker prize.
Both books are about women coming to terms with unexpected relationships, but despite that similarity I doubt Ruth Prawer Jhabvala will stay with me. Anita Brookner, on the other hand, will. I don't think it's just because England and Switzerland are more familiar settings than India. And I should think about Brookner on her own and not in comparison to someone else, not even Penelope Fitzgerald, a compliment.
In one of the most surprising instances of All Books Are One Book, Joan W. Blos's protagonist Catherine hears about Nat Turner's 1831 uprising. Otherwise, despite her being from New Hampshire at exactly the time Sturbridge Village is set, this book barely touched me and I don't see how it won the Newbery.
I was goofy with the elliptical, resetting it when I didn't want to, and I had already reset it after five minutes of warm-up, so when I had done about 15 minutes I decided what the hell, I should do some weights for once in an era. So I did. The one advantage to weights is that I can listen to a book instead of music, though I probably would have stuck to music if I hadn't had only two hours of Lonesome Dove to go.
Reasons: it won a Pulitzer; also the Western is the one genre I have never read.
I liked the first section with Call and Gus at Hat Creek, as long as the men were alone. There was one woman, the hooker with a heart of gold, and a scattering of unwomen, like desiccated widows and shrewish wives.
Then we meet Elmira, another shrew, who never hears anything her husband of four months says because he never says anything new. Except that immediately preceding Larry McMurtry's telling us this is her being annoyed at his habitually asking his stepson at every dinner whether he wants any buttermilk, which the stepson doesn't like.
I only recently learned the term "cover" for "to mate": I was looking up the origin of a horse breed and came across mention of a gene pool so small but so desirable that horse-breeders had sires "cover" their own offspring. I would have understood "he covered her" without that, but I would have missed the lovely, and so appropriate for the genre, bestial taint.
I admit that I expected to sneer at The Da Vinci Code and I read the first chapters pen in hand to mark logical fallacies (instead of, say, not reading them at all), but I don't think it was solely my predisposition that made my eyes bleed in the third paragraph, when a silhouette glared. As a metaphor, it just didn't work for me. I thought of that when, in contrast, I really liked once in Lonesome Dove when sun groped through clearing rain. Without a "the," I can read that as "sunlight," where the article would have made it Sol and too close for comfort.
Flat stereotypes in I Am Charlotte Simmons annoyed me, but the same thing--the John Wayne silent type, the hooker with a heart of gold (most of them), the bloodthirsty Comanche, the instinctually superior cowboy, the wise but unheard Mexican--didn't as much: I expected them in a western. I didn't expect the Dickensian coincidence of everyone happening across everyone else's path: in the four points between Texas and Montana, Arkansas and Colorado, there seem to have been only a score of people.
A great story. Except that the very ending was an afterthought.
Eight nonfiction
Literary Analysis, History, Cultural Studies:
Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague
Dan Chiras and Dave Wann, Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods
Richard Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey
David Gifford, Annotated Ulysses
Daniel Pool, Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novels
Grammar Geekery:
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Well-Tempered Sentence
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Memoir:
David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Sixty novels, including nine audio and six onscreen
Joan Austen-Leigh, A Visit to Highbury: Another View of Emma
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself
Pat Barker, Another World (audio)
Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (PG)
Antonia S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (audio)
Tom Carson, Gilligan's Wake
Tracey Chevalier, The Virgin Blue
Carolyn Chute, Beans of Egypt, Maine
Douglas Coupland, All Families Are Psychotic
Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!
Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone
Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus
Don DeLillo, Underworld (audio)
E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (audio)
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (PG)
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Jasper Fforde, Well of Lost Plots
Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Molly Gloss, Wild Life: A Novel
Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs (audio)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (audio)
James Joyce, Ulysses
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (PG)
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (PG)
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
Jack London, The Call of the Wild (PG)
Gregory Maguire, Mirror, Mirror
Robin McKinley, Sunshine
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (audio)
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Edna O'Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little
E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
Mary Renault, The King Must Die
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (audio)
Geoff Ryman, Was
José Saramago, The Stone Raft
Cathleen Schine, She Is Me
Juliette Shapiro, Excessively Diverted
William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron, Sophie's Choice
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (audio)
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius
Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (PG)
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of the San Luis Rey
Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons (audio)
Other:
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1953-1954
Forty-one children's books
Joan Aiken, Nightbirds on Nantucket
Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
Marion Dane Bauer, On My Honor
Joan W. Blos, A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32
L.M. Boston, Children of Green Knowe
Bill Brittain, The Wish Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree
Ellen Conford, A Royal Pain
Caroline B. Cooney, What Janie Found
Sharon Creech, Granny Torrelli Makes Soup
Sharon Creech, Heartbeat
Roald Dahl, Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes
Kate Dicamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
Olivier Dunrea, Peedie
Jeanne DuPrau, People of Sparks
Walter Edmonds, The Matchlock Gun
Nancy Farmer, A Girl Named Disaster
Nancy Farmer, House of The Scorpion
Rachel Field, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain
Paula Fox, One-Eyed Cat
Jackie French, Diary of a Wombat
Jean Fritz, Homesick: My Own Story
Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Cornelia Funke, Thief Lord
Ruth S. Gannet, My Father’s Dragon
Virginia C. Hamilton, M.C. Higgins The Great
Charles Hawes, Dark Frigate
Karen Hesse, Just Juice
Carl Hiaasen, Hoot
Polly Horvath, Everything On A Waffle
Irene Hunt, Up A Road Slowly
E.L. Konigsburg, The Outcasts of Schuyler Place
Lois Lowry, Messenger
Katherine Paterson, Preacher's Boy
Katherine Paterson, The Same Stuff as Stars
Francine Prose, After
Willo Davis Roberts, Girl With the Silver Eyes
Ruth Sawyer, Roller Skates
Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto
Armstrong Sperry, Call It Courage
Lawrence Yep, Dragonwings
Of the 25 adult novels that I read not by reason of award or list, and not because their medium (audio or Project Gutenberg, which both allow me to fill otherwise bookless time) constrains my choice, what were my reasons?
Five were by favorite authors or authors of favorites--Byatt and Saramago the former, Chevalier, McKinley, and Schine the latter; another two were for Davies becoming a favorite author. Coupland and Maguire were more for completion than for favoritism. Two were Austen complements; Fforde was purely escapist; and Kidd was to ease my brain after Ulysses but also sent me haring back to better fare. Four were direct recommendations, Bray from Melissa, Gloss from Jessie, Hosseini from the UConn Co-op, Updike from ÜberBoss. Carson and Foer were Suspect mentions, and because of Suspect love I read my second Murakami. Of course, without the Suspects I wouldn’t’ve read Ulysses either, or got as much out of Faulkner as I did. Bainbridge was a combination: I began it at some friends' house while catsitting, napping with a cat in the sun, and when Beth read it I thought to borrow it to finish while napping with my own pet. The Chute I had meant to read since a Phoebe book club discussed it during my tenure, and the LeGuin because it is a seminal sf title. And Brown I read for hype.
Twenty-one of the 41 children's books won Newbery Medals or Honors. Of the others, only the Conford wasted my time, though the Cooney is also trashy. Roberts I read because of Eliza; the Dunrea because it is adorable, ditto the French; Dahl was there, but of course also worth reading; for Hesse’s Newbery I have read two but will not read additional others. Aiken, Creech, Konigsburg, Lowry, Paterson, and Snicket are favorite authors of favorites. Boston and Funke could be new favorites. DuPrau milks the sequel beast, which I should resist, and the Prose could have been decent but wasn't. I might continue to think that because I have read all the best of the Golden Age for my favorite age range (1960 to 1985, for 10- to 12-year-olds, except that 1959 gave me Witch of Blackbird Pond and 1986 Sarah, Plain and Tall (which is perfect despite being younger)) that children's books are all used up for me, but then Creech and Curtis and Sachar give me hope.