House and Garden
Yule
Errands
Kinwork
Read
Moving
Two 3.6-mile rides. I have to find a way to affix my headlamp to my helmet for the afternoon half. For the morning half, I managed to wedge my hands into both glove liners and full-finger bike gloves. It was 22 degrees and my fingers were still cold when I got to work, but not frozen to immobility and it only tingled instead of goddamn hurt as they warmed up.
The other bookgroup had its annual brunch and gift exchange at Le Central. I had pain perdu, offered The Bookclub Cook Book, and received a set of notecards in a box (it's always about the box) shaped like a circus tent.
Afterward I strolled up the to the library, where I have barely set foot since Dot Org moved to the hinterlands. My first destination was a performance by someone from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival called "Shakepeare's Sister." Almost as soon as I entered (a little late, but not disruptively), "Joan"--Shakespeare did have a sister so named--asked for a volunteer to be Titania and called on me. She sat me down on the edge of the stage, asked if I could snore (yes), and then put something "on your pretty hair." At that I was putty in her hands. To a portly man who had to play Bottom without any prop, but who did get to bray, I got to say--well, repeat, phrase by phrase, like wedding vows,
I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.
Because no, I don't have a tremendous lot of Shakespeare committed to memory. I can, however, snore, and speak such lines with eye contact, affect, and without balking at the pre-vowel "mine." When she released me, I began to return to my spot but she had to remind me, "May I have my tiara?" So that's what I got to wear. It was just like the one I got for Haitch to wear at her graduation party.
It was fun, if not so fun as the audience-participation Richard III in The Eyre Affair.
Afterward I wandered happily about, browsing, selecting Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor and in between discovering, in the jacket matter of The Basic Eight, that Daniel Handler--i.e., Lemony Snickett--at least used to live, if not still lives, in Old Lyme! Damn, I wish I had known that when I saw him in October so I could have pestered him instead of just handing my book to him with a smile and mere hello.
Later the Denver Gay Men's Chorus performed in Schlessmann Hall (the atrium, pretty much, except not Greek). They sang the national anthem and several secular Christmas songs, including one piece memorable for its being African instead of European, with different voices chanting in different rhythms, really nice.
I stopped into Capitol Hill Books on the way home and found How the Grinch Stole Christmas for pertinent English practice for the frenchlets, and even The Trumpet of the Swan to go with the Audobon stuffed trumpeter swan I picked up ages ago. I mean to replicate American fauna in the frenchlets' house, it's true. They already have have a bison named Wyoming (a hard sound for French speakers) and a bald eagle named Sam. I mean to find a skunk and a raccoon, but after those I'll have to look up specifically North American critters. Or American, like mountain lions.
Precor elliptical, 15' @ 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline
Treadmill, 30' between 5 mph and 6 mph. 2.5 miles, not 3K, because I forgot socks and I could tell I had an abrasion along the top of one foot and blisters on the insteps of both, caused by sockless lacing.
Weights.
I shouldn't've shied from this for so long. If its language isn't as lovely as that of Mrs. Dalloway, it is infinitely easier to make sense of, and I can follow its narrative, unlike that of To the Lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf is probably incapable of writing ungainly prose, even if it's less studied than Mrs. Dalloway: "He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong."
Also, what a large debt Margaret Atwood owes Woolf.
Ran four miles in 47+'; longer this time because I warmed up on the treadmill rather than the elliptical, walking at 4 mph and a 15% incline. 350+ vertical feet.
Some weights.
Swam 600k.
Flannery O'Connor managed to create something as sad as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, though without the love, and as wretched as Tobacco Road, but without the what I hope was supposed to be humor. Plus a tetch of A Handful of Dust. Quite cheery.
Damn. Wise Blood was about as depressing as Live Girls or Jude the Obscure, so the arrival today of a package from Powell's was especially welcome. I haven't read it for years, and goodness me, the things I didn't notice before. Measles still endemic in 1973, but already discussion of the Channel Tunnel.
When I gave blood today my pulse was not 48 but 64. So much for having the heart of a horse. More worrisome is that my blood pressure was 137/80. What the hell's that about? Perhaps keeping my weight under my IQ is unrealistic but my systolic is nigh on lapping my brain as well and that's unacceptable.
I don't know how we managed this but we had about 30 guests this year, same as last year, with only five repeats. Last year seemed like more maybe because there were more children. This year weather deprived me of my best friend Gethen, despite my having the red and white pipecleaners all ready for jewelery-making and had bought stickers and set out construction paper and crayons. Pynchon discovered the tupperware from which I supplied the cookie trays and commenced stacking, and I showed his mother the treasure trove of more tupperware, so there was more stacking and knocking over. I also speak enough baby-sign to tell a mother when her child has asked for more.
Once again I shoved Booboo in the fruit cellar, and a good thing I did because Pynchon also discovered Pantalaimon. After that I brought out Hamlet and Monty and from downstairs Tigger and Opus and Babe and Ophelia the okapi too. Trish wanted me to wear the Rudolph nose (the battery contact is made when the roundthehead elastic is taut) so I did, and another baby thought that was peculiarly interesting, but he didn't want to wear it. I turned Hamlet into the Red-Nosed Elephant instead.
Friday night AEK organized drinks at Café Star before carpooling to Blossoms of Light before cocoa and cookies at her house. I took a shine to a man at whose unpronounceable last name I stared on a business card and who was gobsmacked when I assessed the origin of his name (Hungarian). "She's really smart," MDD offered, and I was giddy and flirtatious and agreed, but when he and RDC started talking geeky tech talk I flirted with a baby instead.
Thursday was Dot Org's holiday party, and Saturday before my own party I was feeling grumpy and ill and unsociable (but I rallied); and when Sunday dawned just as buttclenchingly cold as the all the days of previous week, I blew off Jack and Diane's party in Beigeland and a neighborhood 50th birthday party and hibernated.
But in the evening when Charenton called to invite us to their New Year's Eve party (as they might have even if I hadn't invited them to our Yule fête), I was sorely tempted.
Haitch, please dispatch your penguin candle holder and the penguin candy dish and penguin cocktail shaker to hold an intervention at our house. RDC reports that our penguin cocktail shaker is drinking more than its share of vodka.
What a repellent book. Dostoyevsky wrote three times as much about the insides of people's heads as Ford Madox Ford but I didn't want to slit my throat even once during Crime and Punishment. If this hadn't been a library book, I would have flung it with great force. Instead I am contemplating the fact that I agree with Ernest Hemingway about something.
Last week I fell hard on the steps and got myself a viciously dark and complicated bruise the size of two fists on my left buttock. Besides palpating it (and admiring that, well, my butt is firm in at least that one coagulated spot), I have nothing fun to do with the bruise. (I am such a grown-up now: I recently also didn't pop a blister on my instep.) I've even run out of people to show it to.
Plus the endpaper in one of RDC's ski magazines is a photograph of a skier whose one entire buttock is deeply bruised. The magazine, despite being geared toward adults, blurs out the man's cleavage, and at least I was not that prudish when I dropped trou and demanded Scarf's admiration. But my hematoma is both smaller and less severe than that skier's, and RDC turned that page the same day as my fall (bad socks), so it makes me feel all inadequate.
Plus today I "ran" for the first time in 10 days and the bruise and I did not enjoy the butt-bouncing. Resolved: eliminate the butt bouncing.
I am going to confuse this Graham Greene book with Graham Swift's Last Orders, even though I don't remember for certain whether the Swift destination was Brighton rather than any other seaside resort within reach of London, because it's a seaside resort and because of their names.
I don't say that a good book can't tell every last damn detail, just that The Good Soldier did and did so badly. But it seems like I am saying that, because here're several characters sketched with a detail or two and lots of backstory only hinted at, yet overall a much more fulfilling story.
Why yes, yes I do. I do think that, and I do know her work. Well, five of the six completed novels. Northanger Abbey and the juvenalia I admit to being weaker on.
I've enjoyed John Sutherland's literary quiz books (Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Is Heathcliff a Murderer?) and I have Deirdre Le Faye's edition of Austen's letters.
(Damn it, I can't call her Austen. I like calling her Jane.)
I will come back to this book again and again. Some of their questions and analyses I like a lot--e.g., what godparents are identified in Mansfield Park, and what kind of farmer is Mr. Knightley--and others I think are obvious to the point of unnecessary--is Mrs. Weston Emma's accomplice or even confidante about her marriage project for Harriet Smith--and others I disagree with. To wit: when Darcy refers to the impropriety displayed even by Mr. Bennet, what is he referring to? Le Faye avers it is Mr. Bennet's partiality for Wickham. Er, no, it's Mr. Bennet's unkind manner of preserving the Netherfield Ball from any more of Mary's exhibition.
One of the fun things about this--an exceedingly casual look at literature through a lens of evolutionary biology--was reading it while overhearing RDC's current audiobook, The Inner Ape. I did not read the following line exactly when his book used it, because that might have caused the space-time continuum to collapse, but both texts did a) quote "The African Queen" at all and b) one of my best lines: "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put on earth to rise above."
The father-daughter pair of authors, David and Nanell Barash, obviously like their movies as well as their books, the former perhaps a bit too much. Perhaps specifically Humphrey Bogart movies: they use "shocked, shocked" from "Casablanca" at least twice and maybe thrice (but never credit it).
I took advantage of the car, the day off (today is the Day After Christmas according to Dot Org's calendar), and the lovely weather to break in my new running clothing (pants and jacket). If it hadn't been windy the black and the thinsulate might have been too much. I drove down to Haitch's and my old walk and commenced the 5.2 link.
I ran most of the 2.6 miles out and maybe half of the way back. I can run three or four miles without too much gnashing of teeth on a treadmill, and this is the difference between a mill and the real world.
I pointed out to an elderly couple ambling along the hawk that'd been perched at the top of a tree for two miles, met a six-month-old merle collie named Skye, and even a basset hound out for a jog with its humans, one adult jogging and the other a child with training wheels on her bike. The adult said the hound was okay running short distances. Who knew?
Accompanying me were PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Fiona Apple. I could still hear the magpies mag, mag, magging, and it was lovely to run toward a horizon instead of a television monitor. So much of my life is spent focusing less than two feet in front of me--computer screen at work, immoveable monitor at the gym, laptop or book at home.
I cannot see how I am going to run 5K after biking 20K and swimming .5K. Why can't the running be first, to get it out of the way, and the swimming last?
Two 3.6-mile city rides. What is even the last time I rode 20K (the triathlon distance)? Who'm I kidding.
And a dog! Why isn't the dog in the title?
Jeanne Birdsall. Obviously E. Nesbitt-y and Edgar Eager-y and Elizabeth Enright-y and even Eleanor Estes-y and all those good E things. Not March-y except in their number, though there is a single parent and a boy in a mansion next door. Good in all kinds of kid-book ways except why ever would Mrs. Tifton be a landlady if she's so damn concerned about Keeping Up Appearances? Renting, even a vacation cottage, would be, in her opinion, Not My Kind, Dear.
Okay, I've had enough. Some time ago I plucked from the swap-a-book shelf a bodice-ripper entitled Something about Emmaline because the title was almost perfect. I was going to send it to Nisou as a gag present. Sometime in here I dreamt of a character called Sedgwick the Rodent, and that cracked me up. Her box ended up being really full, so I left the book out and considered sending it to CLH. Wrapping and packing, I skimmed its first page again and saw that I had not made up the dream-name, because there it was. Poop. I decided I wouldn't insult my sister with such a thing and decided it could be the booby prize for whoever won the pool for Scarf's baby: at the Yule party people could initial a date and guess B or G. o
On Christmas Day what did I find in my stocking but a Regency bodice ripper: CLH also gave me So You Think You Know Jane Austen? and figured I could use more Regency books since I've drained the Austen well dry. That present screams for re-gifting almost as much as the prize of the stocking, the Glade "room freshener" candle set into votive glass with a Thomas Kinkade scene. (Haitch, I have just given away your next birthday present! Please don't be heartbroken.) The reason I have had enough is that today at work I came across the name Sedgwick again, and damn it, I liked thinking that I had made up that name. "You pick up the paper, you read a name, you go out it turns up again and again." Yes, Kate.*
Perhaps I should take solace in knowing that--despite the knowledge being worthless, since I can't do anything with it--my idea for swing voters doing swing dance is still all mine.
And that my Ratty and Moley::Huck and Jim dissertation is still viable, especially considering Tom's unnecessarily complicating things compared with Toad's distressingly human traits.
My all-books-are-one-book thing isn't helping either. My last haul from the library included Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Both have to do with Africa! And the Penguin edition of Bellow has a nice lion on the cover, and I just saw "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" on Monday! (Which was fine except that I wish Aslan's voice had been another unknown, like all the Pevensie children especially the charming Lucy, instead of--spoiler, Haitch?--Liam Neeson.) But I am 80 pages into Henderson and hating him (where the antecedent for "him" could be either Henderson or Bellow, who cares). Henderson is more hateful than Ignatius Reilly, and there's all this Heart of Darkness shit going on, and I asked ÜberBoss today if he's read Saul Bellow and he resolutely said no and again gave me permission not to finish a book. Eighty pages is less than a quarter through, and damn it, he's right, this is not a situation about which Bill could say, "There ought to be a law."
*Speaking of Kate, SMW gave me her new Aerial. I've been waiting only since 1993, Kate! No worries! SMW also gave me, proving herself the best notstepmother ever, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. My library is now complete.
This morning I picked up Morgan from the neighbor who's had her since Wednesday; her parents are away for New Year's. She is a nine-year-old black Labrador Retriever with very sore hips whom I thought Blake could tolerate. He can mostly ignore her--she is on her bed at my feet and he is tucked on my shoulder; they're both asleep--unless she is wagging her tail. Unfortunately, this is her default activitiy when awake, and she has a proper Lab otter tail, and Blake has never liked windshield wipers and this is worse.
The vet said last week (in addition to admiring Blake's excellent plumage, assessing his muscle tone as excellent, and observing that he didn't have to inquire about Blake's vigor or opinions) that a dog could hurt the buddy under the paw or in the mouth but not by inflicting a fear-induced cardiac arrest. Well, the tail is certainly a danger too, and so is asphyxiation. I had forgotten how much a dog smells. Her coat is lovely, not as oily as Shadow's was, but she has her share of dog-stank, plus dog-flatulence.
We had a little walk this morning that seems to be as much walk as she could handle. We saw a dachshund and two beagles and Pele the Hawaiian soccer god-terrier, and though I thought she was picking direction I think the duration was too much for her. I don't know her well enough to be certain whether her gait was lamer at the end than at the beginning, but she hasn't stirred from her bed (except for changing positions) in almost three hours.
She seems sad, too, which makes me sad. She must miss her human parents and her two canine and five feline siblings. Her tender hips mean she can't manage kennel life, so I get her, and that's nice, but does she feel abandoned? Is her job at home not as to be a toe-warmer, such that my foot is only an obstruction and not also communication, contact, and affection?
I have missed how a dog stretches her toes in her sleep. For her hips' sake I have resisted tickling the hair between the pads of her hind feet, but her ears are all mine. The three of us have sat here napping and reading for a while now, and Blake smells better, but Morgan snores and and snorts and is bigger and keeps both my insteps warm and she doesn't think that her mission in life is to remove the freckles from my neck. Ow.
Plus she's already a guard dog. She didn't rouse from her sleep at all when the mail rattled into the box but when RDC returned from his errands, she growled as soon as he turned the knob and barked until he opened the dog and she recognized him.
Both bird and dog have really cute eyebrows, and hers are big enough that I can admire them from farther than my shoulder. No crest, though.
In 2005, I spent 16 hours on elliptical and stairmill exercise machines. I lifted the same amount of weight a few times. I starting jogging in September and logged a vast 27.2 miles in the real world and another 24 on treadmills. I didn't walk, hike, or kayak much. I biked about 735 miles, including 100 days commuting to work, and I swam 46.5 kilometers. I started and ended the year at the exact same weight and percentage of body fat.
In 2006, I hope to bike 1000 miles, run 250 miles, and swim 50 kilometers.
I am drawn to retellings of classic stories, of fairy tales, Arthurian legend, Christian myth. Penelope has waited long enough to speak, and Margaret Atwood did her proud. She employs her usual detached, dry tone with an overlay of waspishness for Penelope.
Officially, the count for the year is 44 fiction and 11 nonfiction books, plus 13 audio, five on-screen, and 32 children's books, three short stories, four trash, and six other.
Seventeen nonfiction, including six audio
Daniel Barash and Nanelle Barash, Madame Bovary's Ovaries
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men
Mark Bittner, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Melvyn Bragg, The Adventures of English (audio)
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (audio)
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
Katharine Graham, Personal History
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (audio)
John Leonard, Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures
Louis Menand, American Studies (audio)
Nancy Mitford, The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles (audio)
Thomas Pakenham, Remarkable Trees of the World
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (audio)
John Sutherland and Deirdre Le Faye, So You Think You Know Jane Austen
Fifty-six novels, including seven audio and five onscreen
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Robertson Davies, The Manticore
Robertson Davies, World of Wonders
Don DeLillo, Mao II (audio)
E.L. Doctorow, The March (audio)
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (audio)
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
David James Duncan, The Brothers K
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (audio)
Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
E.M. Forster, A Passage To India
Julia Glass, Three Junes (audio)
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Philippa Gregory, The Virgin's Lover
Knut Hamsun, Hunger (PG)
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness
Pam Houston, Sight Hound
Zora Neale Hurston, Collected Stories
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (PG)
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (PG)
Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (audio)
Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra
Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
John Scalzi, Old Man's War
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (PG)
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (audio)
Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me
Bram Stoker, Dracula (PG)
Graham Swift, Last Orders
William Trevor, Death in Summer
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Thirty-two children's books
Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks: A Summar Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
Gennifer Choldenko, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog
Ann Nolan Clark, Secret of the Andes
Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits
Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Tomie de Paola, 26 Fairmont Avenue
Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Enchantress From the Stars
Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye and the Arm
Charles Finger, Tales from Silver Lands
Jean Craighead George, Tree Castle Island
Alison Leslie Gold, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend
Steven Gould, Jumper
Elizabeth Janet Gray, Adam of the Road
Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, illustrator, What Do You Do, Dear?: Proper Conduct for All Occasions
Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, illustrator, What Do You Say, Dear?
Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira
Holly Keller, What a Hat!
Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Laurie Joffe Numeroff, If You Take a Mouse to the Movies
Christopher Paolini, Eragon
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Kate Seredy, The White Stag
Todd Aaron Smith, Cow in the Dark
Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Ghosts of Rathburn Park
Virginia Sorenson, Miracles on Maple Hill
Jerry Spinelli, Loser
Barbara Foster Wallace, The Summer of L.E.B.
Elizabeth Yates, Amos Fortune, Free Man
Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
Four trash:
Pamela Aidan, An Assembly Such as This (Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman: Book 1)
Philippa Gregory, Meridon
Philippa Gregory, The Favored Child
Philippa Gregory, Wideacre
Three short stories
E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"
Doris Lessing, "The Summer Before the Dark"
Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"
Six graphic novels or other
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Audrey Niffenegger, Three Incestuous Sisters
Robert Sabuda, Winter's Tale
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1957-1958
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers
Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1985-1995
Of the lists of 100 best that I began tackling in 2001, this year I read six from Feminista (55 total), five from Radcliffe (82 total), four from Modern Library (65 total), and five from Triangle (22 total). Of Newbery medal winners, ten (leaving nine outstanding); of honor, four (leaving 186). I read two Man Booker and four Pulitzer prize winners and four books by Nobel laureates.
I read the first Philippa Gregory because it was faux Tudor gossip and not bad of its sort. The faux Austen was fun and didn't make me feel unclean, as did the three non-Tudor Gregorys (two of which I sped through chez my sister, leaving me to request the third through the Denver library). Shudder. Two other books I regret reading are The Alchemist and Stranger in a Strange Land. The former was for bookclub and took me a couple of hours, whatever; the Heinlein disappointed me on multiple levels.
Without the two bookclubs, I wouldn't've read Cowboys Are My Weakness, Sight Hound, The Razor's Edge, The Time-Traveler's Wife, The Dogs of Babel, or Death in Summer. I am glad to think better of Maugham than I did after Of Human Bondage and Houston was fun to discuss and to meet (and I loved the cat's chapter). I unapologetically love Time-Traveler's Wife and I guess I forgive the CM rating of The Dogs of Babel because for Yule I gave each member of that bookclub a device to cube-ify a boiled egg.
For favorite authors I read The History of the Siege of Lisbon; The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; the Deptford trilogy; Hurston's collected stories, and No Country for Old Men. I'm glad I only listened to the McCarthy, but I'm not done with him yet.
Usual Suspect or online journal hype led me to The Brothers K, Bel Canto, and Old Man's War. The two former are among my favorites for the year and I'll probably read Ghost Brigades even if OMW didn't rock my world. Other hype led me to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and The Myth of You and Me, all three of which I loved.
Project Gutenberg gave me Ivanhoe and Dracula and these reaffirmed my stance that except for Jane Austen I prefer 20th-century fiction to 19th. Ditto for The Brothers Karamazov. The lists I've harnessed myself to led me to Graham Greene, whom I enjoy, and Wise Blood, which I...finished, and The March. Medieval geekery, language trickery, and Iain Pears set me up for The Name of the Rose, which I enjoyed reading and got more from than I expected of myself. Three Junes had tantalizingly too little parrot in it (as did The Final Solution).
Of the children's books I read, 15 were Newbery medal or honor books; the five picture books were read aloud to children, Paolini was for hype and Rowling and Snicket because I like the series the hype has led to. I'll read any early Cleary (Otis Spofford is still unread) and Jean Craighead George was pretty good for 40 years later (also the book wasn't an unworthy sequel). The Wallace I read for Claudia's sake and it was fine but didn't motivate me to find other books with Claudia in them. I have author-loyalty for Snyder, the Spinelli was to see if I suddenly like him (eh), and the Yolen was for fairy-tale retellings.
By count of texts, 70% of my reading was geared for adults. Page-wise, I'm sure that percentage is higher, but I refuse to do page counts, partly because that would be yet another quantification for me to obsess over and partly because I am just as glad, and gladder, to have read The Return of the Soldier at 112 pages as I am to have read (listened to) The Brothers Karamazov at 900+. And mostly because Al Capone Does My Shirts is not less valid than Rubyfruit Jungle.