Reading: The Lovely Bones

Listening: Cocteau Twins, The Pink Opaque

Watching: "Casablanca"

Moving: walked 2.5 miles

26 August 2002: Cube

I feel back in book mode after a month or more out of it.

Middlemarch has been on my conscience for more than two months. In Connecticut I read Winter Solstice and The Physician instead of Midnight's Children, with Middlemarch as a backup that I didn't touch. Since then I've read Geography of Nowhere and some children's books and I think that's all. I probably reread something too. Harry Potter.

But yesterday morning I put Middlemarch to bed and opened Atonement, which captivated me immediately. And then today at the library I reread Toby Lived Here and borrowed The Lovely Bones, and last week I read an early Louis Sachar. All of these have stories.

We went to REI to stock up on camping toys, with me feeling not at the top of my game (I don't even have a game) and having to walk through the bike sections not really helping. What is it about rubber that sucks the oxygen out of a room? When we took bike repair classes at Scott's Cyclery in romantic Willimantic, I regularly would get woozy by the end of the session and finally realized why. This might be why I still don't know how to change my own inner tube.

So we came home and I settled on the couch to read for a few pages before I realized I would soon fall asleep. I put Blake in his cage, next to me on the couch, which he didn't like, curled up with Atonement--lent by a fellow Usual Suspect and JournalCon attendee, it opens with a girl having written a play, which reminded me of both Noel Streatfeild and I Capture the Castle--and fell asleep. So I've read 25 pages and it will be rich and absorbing.

But interruptable, like Middlemarch, because today I picked up The Lovely Bones. Also Toby Lived Here, which title I prized from Loganberry Books. This brilliant used bookseller who specializes in children's books realized that her online patrons could help match other patrons with their long-lost books despite forgotten titles and authors and names. I remembered sisters in foster care, with an unstable mother, unrealistically perfect foster parents, and a pair of canaries, neither Housekeeping (which someone suggested but is, hello, neither YA nor children's), nor The Pinballs, nor The Great Gilly Hopkins. Thanks to Loganberry Books, I found out that I wanted Hilma Wolitzer's Toby Lived Here. Thanks to the library, I just read it. Seventy pages of memories, details immediately familiar despite how few I could conjure up for my query.

Anyway, The Lovely Bones. First Eliza raved about it, then everyone else in the online world did, and then Haitch's first non-school book in ten years was this, balanced precariously throughout that day of packing. I was powerless to resist. The opening penguin metaphor of the epigram is exactly right. And the tone she sets is just right. La la la, and then the dog brought my elbow home. Compelling without being at all (yet) horrific. Happily I had some copying to do this afternoon and could read while I babysat the machines.

Re: Camping for a week, appropriate books, the:

• Miguel Cervantes, Don Quijote
• Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Ian McEwan, Atonement
• My guess: Chabon and McEwan, being the easier two

And there is no way I'll be able to finish listening to How Green Was My Valley before we go, even if I walk both ways every day this week. Nearly. Maybe if I walked slow.