Packing For Mars

I'm reading Packing For Mars by Mary Roach, and it's just fascinating.  She's a great science writer - easy to understand, funny, with a good sense for interesting details and asides.  This is all about the details and minutiae of space travel.  What sort of interpersonal problems occur? How do our organs react to zero gravity?  What happens if you throw up in your space suit? Etc.  It's great.  I'm about halfway through it.

Also, I got an awesome black lace dress for New Year's Eve from Ann Taylor Loft for $30!  It was originally $98.  Good deal.  I can't find a picture online, so I'll post one of me wearing it later.

Potica

My boyfriend and I made potica tonight.  Potica (pronounced "puh-TEETZ-ah") is a Croatian dessert.  It's made by rolling dough super-thin (see-thru, ideally, though I can't get there), spreading on the filling, then rolling the whole thing up, cutting it into small loaves, and baking it.  The filling is made with walnuts and lots of sugar and cinnamon and it is the tastiest substance ever created.  I use my Grandma Telfer's recipe.

Two Great Books

A couple days ago I finished The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg.  As I've said previously, I just love her books.  They aren't fakey-light chick lit, where you know characters will never be touched by any true problems, but they aren't full of deliberate drama that pulls your heartstrings.  They're sincere and real and funny.  Read them, if you haven't.  The Last Time I Saw You is about several people attending their high school reunion.  No one is made to be 100% good or bad, it's quick and satisfying, and there are dogs in it.  I recommend it.

After that, I read Faithful Place, the third mystery novel by Tana French.  During the first few chapters I thought the main character seemed too deliberately clever and his dysfunctional family too fake, too stereotypical.  But somewhere during that third chapter I changed my mind and couldn't put it down.  It's a page-turner.  It was great, satisfying, and I certainly enjoyed it.  

The only thing I hesitate over is that I'm still a little hurt over some developments in her first book, In The Woods.  Questions that were left unanswered, and characters that, frankly, didn't make the choices I wanted them to.  Frank Mackey, the main character of Faithful Place, is only tangentially related to the main characters of In The Woods, but I still wanted new information on them.  It's not a criticism of her writing.  Really, it's like a less-intense version of my hurt over certain events at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

A Note

I think one of the reasons I haven't completely fallen in love with the new M.I.A. album is the line "You're tweeting me like Tweety Bird on your iPhone" which is just the dumbest thing I can think of.

Boots

I've been looking for a versatile, stylish, COMFORTABLE pair of cold-weather vegan shoes for a couple months now.  I've bought three pairs from endless.com and then returned them because they hurt my feet.

Today, I bought a pair at Aldo.  They're short boots ("booties" sounds like something for a baby, and I will not use it), they'll go with brown or black, they have a small heel but don't hurt to walk in - exactly what I want.  They looked great with the jeans I was wearing when I tried them on (dark blue straight leg Levi's), and I can't wait to wear them with a skirt, maybe with an odd-colored pair of tights.

Here's a pic:

M.I.A.

I bought M.I.A.'s latest album, Maya, when it came out this summer, but I haven't listened to it much.  The first couple tracks are pretty abrasive, and it's been stopping me from popping the disk in my CD player.  But last week I decided I need to give it a chance, since I love her first two albums so much.  Seriously, Kala and Arular are just so fantastic.  Anyway, I've been listening to Maya, and about halfway through track nine ("Born Free"), I realized I was definitely into it.  Some of the tracks almost sound like a punk band, raw and repetitive and screamy.  I am not at a stage where I love it yet.  But I think I might get there.

BCBG Blouse

I just bought this blouse, and I am in love with it.  I'm really interested in asymmetrical things right now (my current haircut is an asymmetrical bob, and I adore it).  I wore it to work with a fitted brown cardigan and brown corduroys, and I wore it to a party with a flowy off-white skirt, gray tights, and flats.  I did not wear it with an expression somewhere between haughty and vacant, as in the picture below (from the BCBG website).

The best thing about it is how it shows off the White Sox tattoo on my left shoulder blade.

Great House

I just finished Great House by Nicole Krauss.  I didn't like as much as The History of Love, but it was still good.  It's a bunch of intertwined stories, all somehow related to a particular old desk.  None of the characters are especially wonderful people, but that doesn't make it less appealing.  Really, the one thing I didn't like was feeling like there were some unanswered questions.  I'm sure that was deliberate, but it bothered me.

Never Let Me Go

I finished Never Let Me Go and it was fantastic.  Sad, but great.  It's best to go into it not knowing at all what it's about, beyond some kids in a boarding school, but even though I knew a sort-of mini-spoiler, it was still worthwhile.  Ishiguro's observations, little details, everything: they were spot-on.  It was one of those books where I wanted to underline certain passages.  Should you read it? If you don't mind things that are a little sad and also a little sci-fi, then absolutely, yes.

I also finished the Bill Bryson book.  It ended on a very down note about global warming, unfortunately.  I suppose ultimately it's good to bring the topic up; ending on it still made me sad, though.

Now I'm reading Great House by Nicole Krauss.  I read A History of Love, her previous book, and adored it.  I absolutely recommend it.  So far Great House is good, but seems to be comprised of separate short stories.  I know from reviews that they end up intertwined eventually, though, and I don't mind.

Two More Down

I finished The Turn of the Screw tonight (only a month behind schedule).  The ending is... ambiguous.  I vaguely remembered hearing that there were multiple ways to interpret the story; now that I've finished it, I've poked around on the internet and read some of the existing theories.  Some seem valid, others rather a stretch.  I need to discuss it with someone.

It was pretty good, but James' style of writing takes some adjusting to.  His sentences are long and winding, full of commas.

I finished My Year of Flops a few days ago.  Since it was mostly a collection of essays, it wasn't like it built to one big conclusion I can comment on.  But it remained entertaining and interesting throughout.  After reading it, I definitely want to seek out some lesser-known, impossible-sounding films like "The Apple."  I even kind of want to see "Elizabethtown" (he opens the book by ripping on it, then reconsiders it in the final essay, and finds it does have some charm).

I still have At Home to finish.  Enjoyable, solid.  Not especially fast-paced.  I'm excited to finish it, though, as I used some birthday Borders gift cards to stock up on novels to read.  Up first, probably, is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Oh no: I just double-checked the spelling of his name on wikipedia and may've accidentally read a spoiler.  I really, really hope not.

Well, anyway, I get to spend the long weekend reading and relaxing and visiting with family.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Farm Animal Information

Two things:

First of all, I'm still plugging away at Bill Bryson's At Home.  It's very interesting but not especially un-put-down-able, since it's nonfiction and broken up into different topics.  Also, I'm concurrently reading Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops, which is based on his AV Club column of the same name.  He spent a year watching movies that did abysmally at the box office, and reported about them.  There are some secret gems that needed to be rediscovered, and there are definitely some movies so terrible it's hard to believe they're real.  It's an entertaining read - though again, it's broken up into small sections and is not particularly un-put-down-able.


Getting back to farm animals, I just learned from At Home that until the beginning of the 1900s Central Park had a flock of sheep to keep the grass under control! They'd just wander around! How cute is that?

Also, UW-Platteville has a working farm, and they've recently added a brush for the cows.  Read this article about it; it's adorable. 

New Album!

Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) put out a surprise new album today! He had announced that he'd be putting one out sometime in 2010 but gave no indication ahead of time that it would happen today.  I've already listened to it once and am in love with it.  Download it for free at his website.

Halloween

Last night I dressed as Frog Mario from Super Mario Brothers 3 for regular Nintendo.  I was originally going to dress as Clara Bow, silent film star, but this just came to me and it felt perfect.

At Home

I finished Anne of the Island, which was actually quite a bit more interesting than Anne of Avonlea, and then started Bill Bryson's new book At Home.  He uses the Victorian house he and his family live in as a framework for explaining the history of why we live in houses and how different aspects of them that we think of as common (kitchens, living rooms, etc.) came about.  It's similar to his A Brief History of Everything, though smaller in scope.

I've already learned tons of interesting things, and I've barely made a dent in the 400+ page book.  Did you know in the 1850s a complete village over 5000 years old was discovered in Britain?  That's older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.  It's called Skara Brae, and it has surprisingly modern aspects - locking doors, dressers, a drainage system, even elementary plumbing.  I had no idea.

Anne of Avonlea

It was a little bit boring.  That's about all I have to say.  Anne is almost a little too perfect, even though she's still said to have a temper and get into ridiculous situations.  There were still some outrageous moments, like when she accidentally sold her neighbor's cow, or got stuck in someone's roof, but there were far fewer.  More often, Anne was a bemused participant in a crazy situation created by someone else.

I still love her creative mind, her zest for imagining things.  Over the weekend, a friend and I were wondering what had become of an ex of hers, someone who hadn't given her his new phone number or contact info.  I thought of Anne, and suggested we imagine what he might be up to, since we couldn't know.  We decided he's working at Walmart but has realized his true passion for the opera.

Anne Shirley

I finished Anne of Green Gables.  It is such a delight.  I really recommend reading it, if you haven't.  I'm not sure how I feel about the conclusion, though. (Spoiler alert here, I suppose.)  Anne gets accepted to college but turns it down after Matthew, her guardian, dies, so she can keep Marilla, his sister, company in Avonlea.  She takes a job teaching at the Avonlea school.  Also, she matures a bit, whatever that means - the story club she formed with her friends (where they make up dramatic, romantic, scary tales and share them with each other) has faded out of existence, and her hair and freckles have softened so that she's now quite objectively attractive. 

I'm not sure how I feel about all this for Anne.  First of all, it's pretty entertaining to see her accidentally getting her 12-year-old best friend drunk on what she thought was a non-alcoholic drink, or getting stuck clinging to a tree branch in the middle of a river, or cracking a blackboard slate over a boy's head.  When she's more level-headed, there's less of this.  Is this supposed to be a moral of how things should proceed for a young woman? 

To argue with myself, she's not giving up college for no reason - staying with Marilla is caring and admirable.  But I feel bad for her nonetheless.  I feel less bad, of course, knowing that she goes away to school in the third book, Anne of the Island. 

I've begun Anne of Avonlea, the second book, and Anne is still spirited and imaginative - but there's a lessening of her crazy ideas and schemes and scrapes, and I wish this didn't have to be the case.

A neutral note: there is much emphasis on being good, doing good, being a truly good person, which I feel isn't there in contemporary young adult literature.  I don't know if that's a difference in the time periods or something particular to the Anne books.

---

I'm also still reading The Turn of the Screw.  I didn't think it was scaring me until I had to walk across my living room in the dark to get to the lamp, and scurried, afraid, the whole way.

Two New Books To Read, Parallels

Okay, really only one new book to read, one very very old re-read.  I've been meaning to re-read Anne of Green Gables since the 100th anniversary of its publishing in 2008.  It was a favorite of mine when I was a kid.  I read all the books in the Anne series, and spent a lot of time pretending to be her (there are pictures of me and a friend all dressed up labeled "Anne Shirley and Diana Barry").  But I didn't remember much about the books except that Anne is raised by a stern but kind woman, and a couple isolated events.  Understandably - it's been maybe 17 years since I last read the series.

I picked it up the other night.  It was in the big collection of books I brought back from my mom's house.  It's so great! I couldn't put it down.  There's a reason it's classic children's literature!  Anne is so hilarious and imaginative.  She's adopted by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an "old maid" and "old bachelor" brother and sister.  They'd asked someone to send them a boy to help out with the farm, but got her instead.  Were adoptions really that easy in those days? Like asking someone to pick you up a particular shelving unit next time they drive to IKEA?  Anyway, I've only just begun it, but I'm enthralled by Anne all over again. 

Tomorrow The Turn of the Screw by Henry James should arrive for me from Amazon.  A friend and I are going to read it at the same time, and discuss it with each other.  We wanted something spooky for October, and I understand it's a classic ghost story.  I'm pretty excited. 

Since it was published so long ago, it's available to read online for free.  (Check it out here if you're interested.)  I started reading it yesterday.  Two children whose parents have died are left in the care of a bachelor.  "Just like Anne Shirley!" I thought as soon as I read it.  We'll see if I notice anything else in two presumably very dissimilar books... 

Announcement! I'm published (and not just here)!

Today Issue 20 of Tryst Literary Magazine went online, which contains a short story I wrote!  It's called "Immortality" and is the first story I've ever had published.  I'm quite excited.  Check it out here - on the main page, I'm listed on the right side under "fiction."  Yay!

Photos!

I found my camera cord! It was in a box full of other black cords - who would've guessed?  Here are some things I've wanted to post:

This is the 1930s blouse I made!

This is a shirt I embellished as a gift for a friend.  It was originally just a plain green tank (on clearance at Target) and I added the lace.  

Finally, this is another photo of the tank top I made:

Another David Mitchell

A quick note: I just re-read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, and it really is great.  It's a completely straight-forward story, not experimental like Cloud Atlas, but it's very true and genuine and just terrific.  It's about a thirteen-year-old English boy named Jason Taylor.  It takes place in the 1982, during the Falkland Islands War, and covers the whole year from January to December in twelve linked short stories.  I recommend it highly.

Our Tragic Universe

I just finished Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas.  She's one of my favorite authors and I'd been anticipating this book for awhile (since February, in fact).  It didn't come out until September 1st, not May like I'd previously heard.  I ordered it right away, but didn't start reading it immediately - I was almost nervous to begin.

And now I'm through it.  And it was good, though I don't know if I like it more or less than her other books.  It's very similar to them: the main character is an intelligent, rather unhappy young woman, and different topics are explored (like code breaking in PopCo) and discussed by the characters.  But it's less eventful, less action-y.  I liked it.

She talks a lot about the plotting of novels, and how we have an idea of what a typical narrative should be, and we try to fit that narrative onto real life, to the detriment of real life.  I like that.  It's easy to see yourself as part of a movie or novel - depending on your worldview, maybe it's a tragic novel, maybe it's one where you triumph, whatever - and see events as all fitting into a story somehow.  It's more interesting to consider life as what Thomas calls a storyless story, where there aren't the traditional three acts, there aren't heroes and villains, etc.  This sounds like a way of saying everything is meaningless, but I don't intend for it to.  It's more that things are richer and more complex than we can even realize.

Summaries

So I was reading little magazine insert from the paper yesterday (called Book World, I believe) and they had a review of A Gate at the Stairs.  I just finished this.  I wasn't crazy about it - I felt like there were too many tonal shifts, too many upsetting things happening that somehow didn't really make me feel anything.  But that's not the point.  The point is the review: it's like they didn't even read the book!  The reviewer made it sound like the biggest focus of the book is the mysterious Reynaldo that the main character, Tassie, is dating.  And he really isn't.  And the mystery is resolved like halfway through.  The review also talks about all the different birth mothers that Tassie and Sarah, woman she'll be nannying for - but she only meets one before they meet the little girl Sarah adopts.  It was WEIRD.

So I finished it, and I also finished listening to Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott, which was great.  Then I read Rosie, also by Anne Lamott.  Now I'm reading Crooked Little Heart, my third Anne Lamott novel in a row.  And the description on the back of Crooked Little Heart is totally wrong!  It makes it sound almost like a mystery, all about this guy stalking the main character's daughter, when that's really just a subplot. 

How does this happen?

Two books done, two ready to go

I finished listening to The Ice Queen this morning.  It just went ON and ON, bashing me over the head with its symbolism, continuing about an hour and a half past when I thought I'd reached the climax, and then tacking on a surprise revelation that felt totally unearned to me.  Should you read it/listen to it? Noooo.

I finished reading Just Kids, though, and that was just great.  My only complaint, if it is one, is that it ended too soon.  I think the book could've covered many more years of Patti and Robert's friendship.  Her choice for when to end the detailed account of their lives together in New York seemed a little arbitrary, and since I was just eating up all her detail about the scene there, I would've enjoyed more. 

I've started A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore.  It takes place in the fictional college town of Troy, Wisconsin, which I understand is pretty much Madison. (Perhaps a small clue: Moore is an English professor at UW Madison.)  The main character is a college student, freshly arrived from a small Midwest farm town.  So far her description of life in her hometown seems a little unrealistically unsophisticated.  Maybe I'm taking a little issue with it since I'm from a small Midwestern town, albeit one only an hour and fifteen minutes from Chicago (that could make a difference). 

I also checked Plastic Fantastic by Eugenie Samuel Reich out of the library.  It's nonfiction about Jan Hendrik Schon, a physicist, fooling the scientific community by faking results on experiments to easily produce transistors.  I vaguely remember when this happened, back in 2002.  I'm intrigued - not just by the tale, but by the examining of scientific culture and how such a thing can happen.

Coincidence

I saw Scissor Sisters play in Milwaukee on Friday night, and they were great.  They're touring to support their new album, Night Work.  I'm also reading Just Kids, that book about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, as I mentioned.  Well, I just discovered that the cover of Night Work is a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph.  It's weird when these coincidences turn up.

A few new books

I'm commuting to my new job, so I got a book on CD from the library to make the trip pass more quickly.  Unfortunately, I can only listen to it for so long before I need to switch to music or talk on the phone - otherwise I end up, as I did two days ago, taking a nap at a Subway parking lot in Barneveld, WI.  But it does help the time pass.

I'm listening to The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman.  I read her Practical Magic a couple years ago and found it enjoyable, so I thought I'd give this one a try.  Whoa, I just realized that the protagonist is never named.  Well, anyway, she is a lightning strike survivor.  Her brother Ned is a meteorologist who studies lightening strike victims.  She's moved to Florida to be near him after their grandmother, who she was caring for, dies.

I'm enjoying it, but there's really a bit too much symbolism for me.  She's still hiding from her emotions and getting involved with people since her mom died when the protagonist was eight years old.  She's also, as a consequence of the strike, always physically cold, and drinks steaming hot tea even in summer.  Another side effect is her loss of the ability to see the color red.  All red things now appear white or gray, icy. So red, passion, has turned to ice.  Okay, I get it.  She meets a man who was also struck by lightning, Seth
Lazarus" Jones, who was dead and came back to life.  Now he's always hot: his breathe sets paper on fire, his touch leaves heat blisters on people's skin.  They're opposites, and they are powerfully attracted to each other.  It's the first time the main character has allowed herself to feel passion for someone.

Yeah, yeah.  It's a bit much for me.  I'm also feeling cranky about it because the main character's scientist brother, observing the moon, mentions that there is zero gravity there.  Not true! A scientist in particular wouldn't make that mistake.  Gravity is 1/6th as strong on the moon as on Earth, but it's not ZERO.  Come on.

And yet I want to know what happens.

I'm reading Just Kids, Patti Smith's account of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe.  It's a great window into life in New York City in the 1970s.  It reminds me of Please Kill Me, which details the history of NYC punk through a series of interviews with the people who were there (I can't recommend Please Kill Me enough, by the way).

Soon I will go to Borders and buy the new Scarlett Thomas book, Our Tragic Universe.  It's a pretty depressing title, but I'm excited regardless.

Shirt

Here's a pic of one of my new creations.  I made this shirt without a pattern.  For the shiny bit at the top, I took a dressy blouse and cut off the bottom of it.  For the rest of it, I used black stretchy material leftover from a skirt I made, and white material from some hacked-up t-shirts to construct the rest of the shirt.  The slightly sticky-out bit on the left of the photo is from an awkward joining of strips of material right there, and is usually not very noticeable. 

The gorgeous bracelet and earrings were made by my mom, as is the painting in the background.  (Her website is marytelfer.com)

(Still no camera cord, but my mother kindly took a picture of me with her camera and emailed it to me.)

More Ridiculous Nancy

OK, The Secret in the Old Attic remains ridiculous, but it's sort of charming, once you learn to go with it.  Take the following passage:

"Near the ventilator was a door which apparently lead to the room.  To Nancy's annoyance it had no knob or visible lock, nor could it be pushed or pulled.

'It must open by means of a secret spring,' she reasoned."

Or this one:

"The music had ceased, but from nearby came the sound of stealthy footsteps.  These were followed by muffled rapping sounds.

'There isn't a harp or a piano in here,' Nancy told herself, trying to regain her composure. 'Maybe this is just a trick to keep people out of the attic.'"

I love the logic! People set up strange noises and display skeletons to keep intruders away from their things, any suspicious-looking room must have a secret passage or hidden compartment, and if you just duck down behind an oil barrel, no one will ever see you.

It makes me want to rent the movie "Mystery Team." It's a comedy about a group of teenage boys who have a detective agency (like Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys), but are hired to actually solve a dangerous murder and are way over their heads.  It's supposed to be quite funny.

Nancy Drew

So I just brought a bunch of my old books back from my mom's house, and a good deal of them are vintage Nancy Drews (mostly from the sixties, though one is from the forties).  I LOVED Nancy Drew when I was a kid, but I haven't read one since... well, at least 17 years ago, I'm thinking.

I've decided to read The Secret in the Attic.  I'm in chapter three so far, and I'm not terribly impressed.  The writing... is not that great.  There are some children's lit books that I still adore (the Bunnicula series by James Howe, anything by Madeleine L'Engle), so I know it's not just that it's not meant for adults.  And the logic is astounding me.

Nancy's dad is a lawyer, and he's been asked by a nice old man to look for clues in old love letters for the location of the man's dead son's unpublished sheet music.  The old man needs the music so he can publish it and afford to take care of his son's daughter, Susan.  Nancy and her dad agree to help him right away.  Were times different then? Why would Nancy and her father assume this music would actually get published and make money? Why would they not worry that the man is crazy?

Then, as the old man is leaving the Drew residence, he gets hit in the head with a rock by a mysterious assailant - so he stays at the Drews' house for the next day or so, and Nancy takes care of him!  I don't trust him.  But I think I'm meant to...

OK, and while he's there, Nancy leaves the radio on for him.  He hears a song, and he recognizes it as a piece of his son's, and knows it's been stolen.  And Nancy believes him!  "Her task was now twofold: to locate the thief and to trace the rest of the unpublished music."

I'm pretty sure Carolyn Keene, the ostensible author, didn't actually write every book in the series.  I think she'd sketch the plots, then farm the actual writing out to a group of writers working for her, like Ann M. Martin did for The Babysitters Club.  So maybe other books are a little better, and don't make the reader think Nancy and her dad are crazily naive, about to be taken in by con men.  We'll see...

Finished with werewolves

I finished Curse of the Wolf Girl two days ago.  It was great.  It was the perfect follow-up to Lonely Werewolf Girl - there were a few new characters introduced, some old side characters were more fleshed-out, the protagonists seem to grow and change a bit (besides changing into wolves, of course).  Best of all, it is very clearly set up for a sequel.  Come on, Martin Millar, you better be writing right now!

When I Won Third Place

Since I still can't find my camera cord, I thought I'd show a picture of a previous accomplishment of mine.  In 2005 I won third place for scariest knitwear on the now-defunct You Knit What? blog.  Behold, my terrible dinosaur tank top, and the description of it that I sent them:

These are pictures of a sweater (?) I knit two years ago. I thought it would be different to have a dinosaur on a shirt instead of boring stripes or something. I also thought "I don't need a pattern!". Which is why it's wayyy too big on me. On the sleeveless side, you can see a lot of my bra, showing just how great the fit is. So it's pretty warm, like a sweater, but sleeveless, meaning that even if I threw a shirt on under it, there was never proper weather to wear it (too warm in summer, too cold in winter). Because of this, last year I decided to add sleeves. I wanted to make them pink, but because my local yarn shop was out of it, I bought blue instead - and not the same blue as the dinosaur. A much uglier, non-matching blue. I made one sleeve, and realized how ugly it was. I tried tying a piece of yarn around the sleeve, like a ribbon, and tying it in a bow. That's the weird string hanging from the shoulder. And the other sleeve? I decided it was pointless, and called it finished

Werewolves

So I just re-read Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar.  It has some flaws, and yet, I love it.  It's about the complicated social lives of various Scottish werewolves, and it's just such good fun!  Sometimes I think the writing isn't that great, that he's telling me something I already know or using too many adverbs or whatever, but it doesn't matter, because the story is so engrossing.

There's a huge cast of characters: Kalix, on the run after killing her father and taken in by two college kids, Daniel and Moonglow (a goth).  Her sister Thrix, an enchantress and a fashion designer.  Their brothers Markus and Sarapen, both vying for the position of Thane.  Sarapen is violent and brutish; Markus is a cross-dresser.  The outcast cousins, Butix and Delix, who play in a punk band and renamed themselves Beauty and Delicious.  Malveria, a Fire Elemental queen who buys clothes from Thrix.  Vex, Malveria's high-spirited niece.  And more, lots more.

The goofy names and the fact that there are werewolves and faeries and fire elementals make it sound kind of cheesy.  It would be, if it Millar took himself too seriously.  But he doesn't, and the book's a riot.

I re-read because, to my delight, a sequel was just released: Curse of the Wolf Girl.  I started it a couple days ago and can't put it down.

New Shoes

I bought these shoes off a friend who ordered them and found them a little too small on her - what luck! I'm in love with them.  I wore them to work just once so far and got lots of compliments.  They're made out of plastic-coated recycled newspaper, and are made by All Black Footwear.  Mine actually have gray straps, rather than the teal in this photo.

Shoe places need to come up with more unique names.  Do you know how hard it is to find that company online? I got lots of photos of black basketball shoes and such...

Joseph Kanon

I've read three books by Joseph Kanon now (just finished Los Alamos) and I definitely have a grip on the template.  Tough sort of guy, maybe a journalist, gets involved in both a murder investigation and some romantic entanglements - usually with a woman who seems like trouble but is ultimately worth it.  World War II and communism are involved.  The murder is solved, and along the way deeper themes are explored (the responsibility of the scientists in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, for example). 

I like them.  Is it bad when books are formulaic? Maybe it's not the sign of the most daring, original, wonderful books (Los Alamos is no Cloud Atlas, which I still can't get out of my head) but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.  Fun isn't even the right word, since reading about the destruction of Berlin in Kanon's The Good German is certainly not fun.  Maybe the word I want is worthwhile.  Plus, after a chapter or two to gain momentum, they're nicely un-put-down-able.

As soon as I find my stupid camera cord I'll post pictures of the blouse I finished.  It's the pink, floral 1930s one, and I adore it.  It's lovely.  I also created a tank top out of a shiny, dressy blouse that a friend gave me, an undershirt of my boyfriend's, and some black scrap fabric.  It has a few more flaws than the pink blouse, but I'm proud of it since I built it myself, without a pattern. 

Cloud Atlas

Oh man, I finished Cloud Atlas, and it was amazing.  I loved it.  The structure - six stories forward into the future, 123456, and then finishing those stories in reverse, 654321 - could've been annoying, but it wasn't.  I liked that it was different.  I liked the way all the stories connected.  The middle story, Sloosha's Crossin', had me intimidated before I reached it, as it takes place in the distant future and is written in a strange dialect.  But once I got through three or four pages of it, it was no trouble at all.

The way Mitchell jumps genres is amazing.  I got completely soaked up by the spy novel, or sci-fi interview, or whatever, far quicker than I thought I would.  Somehow each story seemed completely unique and genuine, not like a quirky exercise Mitchell was attempting.

Should you read it?  The only caveat I have is that not every story ends with a rosy happy ending.  But it's not a downer, either.  If you're okay with that, then yes, by all means, read this book!  This is going to be a book that I push on people to borrow.

Some time results, a book completed

According to this program, I have "distracted browsing" 85% of the time.  I've been on Firefox for about an hour and a half today.  Over forty minutes of it has been on the avclub.  I haven't tried to change my browsing practices, so that the data is a realistic picture of my typical habits. 

I finished The Master and Margarita!  It was okay.  Finishing it was like scratching through an item on a to-do list.  I felt grim determination to push through its end.  Should you read it? Eh.  I don't really recommend it.

Now I've started Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  It's an interesting set up - it's told in different sections that are all written in different genres.  The beginning is told as the journal of a nineteenth century explorer.  I read Black Swan Green and Number9Dream by Mitchell, and really enjoyed them both, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Time

I never made my pie chart about my time usage, but I have been paying some attention over the past few days.  Yesterday TWO HOURS got sucked away on avclub, slate, facebook, and the like.  How does that happen? I was reading Amanda Bynes' Twitter page, for God's sake.  Today already I've lost about 45 minutes.

Now, granted, it's summertime and I'm not teaching, so I have a lot of free time.  But is this how I want to spend it? In two hours I could've made a lot of headway on that blouse I want to sew - maybe even finished it.

It has to stop.  So, I looked around a bit and found something called RescueTime.  It's an add-on for Firefox (which means I'll have to use Firefox instead of Safari, which is unfortunate mostly because I made my Safari icon a nice yellow giraffe).  It tracks how much time you spend browsing, and on what sites, and shows you reports.  We'll see how I like it, and if it helps.

Fashion of the future

Yesterday I was walking past a shop and saw tiny floral prints and plaid shirts in the window.  Now, I've been aware for awhile that the 1980s are back again, fashion-wise, but all these florals and flannels are distinctly 1990s.  It was alarming.  I mean, I remember the eighties, but the nineties? I was a teenager! I was at the mall, buying these things, feeling original!  Designers just keep recycling trends!

It wasn't the first time I've thought this.  But yesterday my thoughts continued.  You know how movies that take place in the future always show some weird fashion (picture a 1950s vision of the future with silver spacesuits, for example).  Well, how are we ever going to get there if designers just keep jumping back twenty years to steal old trends?

Think about how differently we dress now than we did 100 years ago.  Quite different, yes?  But now things don't seem to be going anywhere.  Denim leggings? Yes, I've been there.  And when I was wearing tie-dye and bell-bottoms in 1994, my mom had seen it already.

Fashion designers - or maybe us, the masses - need to come up with some original ideas.  Things need to get weirder.  Otherwise our vision of 2100 should just be maybe some women in low-riding jeans carrying Coach bags.  Boring.

Where is my silver jumpsuit, darn it?

My Rainbow Library

We have a spare bedroom at the new place that has been made into the library/office.  I've organized the books by the color of their spine.  Some people think this is nonsense, but it actually really works for me.  When I'm looking for a given book, I have a much easier time remembering its appearance, than, say, the author's last name.  Also, it's gorgeous.  I did it at my last place, too.  The exciting new changes are that I've done it in ROY G BIV fashion (after black and white), and there are no shelves with work stuff or photo albums intermixed - only books, books, books.

The Man of My Dreams

I finished The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld last week.  (I've been moving in the interim, and have therefore done nothing but put things into and take things out of boxes.)  It was great, just great.  I love her writing.  The book is a series of episodes in a young woman's life, each of them focused on a different romantic relationship.  The characters are three-dimensional, the problems are realistic, not contrived, and the thoughts on male/female relationships are so well-observed and wise!  There were passages in it that were good enough that I'm going to have to copy them down somewhere. 

In the meantime, still working on The Master and Margarita.  It's a slog, because every now and then it flashes back to parts of Pontius Pilate's life, and I don't care for those bits.  The rest of it is intriguing enough, but I don't think it's MY sort of book - there are too many characters and I don't think the reader is encouraged to feel much empathy with any of them. 

More Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm on dangerous ground.  I'm in the process of moving to a new place, but I just picked up The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, and I can feel it wanting to eat my brain, just suck me in the same way Prep did.  I have packing to do, but the book is hard to resist.  Once again I find myself wanting to shout "Yes!" at her main character's observations.

I'm still reading The Master and Margarita.  I'm about halfway through it, enjoying it, but not in a rush to reach the end.

An Off Year

Yesterday I read the young adult novel An Off Year by Claire Zulkey.  I know Claire a little bit, through facebook, because she knows my cousins and because we're dog twins (we both own greyhounds and have parents with shelties).  An Off Year is about Cecily, a teenage girl who abruptly decides, upon arriving at her dorm, not to start college that year after all.  I read it all evening, and loved it.

Cecily has an actual sense of humor, something I feel like is missing way too often in female characters.  Also, something else I liked, there are no tidy resolutions, no perfect tying together of threads.  It felt like real life, like a real girl trying to sort out what she was doing with herself.  It dodges a romantic subplot, which I adored.  I hate that books (and TV and movies and everything) seem practically required to have a romantic subplot.

The romantic subplot thing reminds me (though it's not really the same) of how in action movie trailers, towards the end there will be a bunch of quick shots of the (male) characters doing exciting things: blowing things up, leaping from cars, punching someone, whatever.  And one of the exciting things is always kissing some hot woman.  Watch for it.  It's annoyingly predictable.

The Master and Margarita

I'm currently reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.  It was written in the 1930s in Russian, but this translation was published in 1995.  It's a bit slow going, I'm not sure why.  I'm having a hard time feeling attached to any one character.

It's a retelling of Faust, apparently, which I don't know much about beyond "deal with the devil."  It opens with two men, both poets, walking in the park on a summer day in communist Russia.  They meet a stranger, a foreigner, who accurately predicts the death of one of the poets.  After the poet dies later that day, the other poet, Ivan Nikolayevich seeks out the foreigner, to accuse him, but is thought crazy and put in a mental hospital.  That's what's happened so far, anyway.

I ordered a bunch of books on Amazon last week, and I'm really excited about them.  Thirty-one bucks for six books, pretty good.  Two I've read before and just want to own, but the rest are new to me.  I got another Joseph Kanon novel, a young adult book by Claire Zulkey, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld (author of Prep!).  I can't wait to break them open.

Vegan Double Downs

So you may be aware of the KFC Double Down. It's a bacon and cheese sandwich with chicken breasts instead of buns. Tony and I decided the vegan community shouldn't be left out from such a disgusting part of our culture, so we created vegan double downs.

We realized after a little googling that we were not the first to come up with this idea. It's rather like Leibniz and Newton simultaneously inventing calculus.

Below, step-by-step photo instructions for making your own.

The two geniuses

Vegan cheese is pretty unappetizing.  And grey.

We used Vegansaurus's advice for making the sauce.  

You can read it here.

The corn is not part of the recipe.  Unless you can think up

a use for it...  Also, how funny is the fake, white fat on soy bacon?

And now a confession: I didn't actually eat it! I was super-full from eating a bunch of chips and watermelon, and I set it down, wandered away, and much later came back and saw it had been eaten by someone else.  I was relieved.  But Tony and others said it was actually quite good!

Commander

So I downloaded a bunch of new songs, since one of my favorite DJs (DJ Chester from Berlin Nightclub in Chicago) posted his setlist from last weekend, and I'm currently loving "Commander" by Kelly Rowland and David Guetta.  Kelly Rowland was in Destiny's Child, but this song is way more electro-pop than R&B.  David Guetta is on another song I like from a few years ago, "Love Don't Let Me Go."

Anyway, "Commander" is awesome.  It makes me want to jump up and dance (perhaps because Kelly Rowland is commanding me to).  The outfits in the video are a little bit Street Fighter 2 for my taste, but it's okay.

Searches

A list of what I've googled recently:

define pointy
lucy grealy
spector afro
is waterslide one word or two?
does lupin die in harry potter?
netherlands
espn 360
stream world cup
random number generator
univision

I just started reading As Seen On TV by Lucy Grealy (hence my googling of her name).  I found the book on a table of free stuff in one of the university buildings where I work.  It's great, though sad - particularly since my googling revealed that she'd died in 2002.  Truth and Beauty by Anne Patchett is about their friendship.  I'd heard of that book when it came out in 2004, and had taken notice of it because of its title: I had hoped it was about particle physics, as truth and beauty were original suggestions for the names of the top and bottom quarks.  Finding out it was about friendship instead of physics made me lose interest.  Now, after falling into this awesome collection of Lucy Grealy's essays, my interest in Anne Patchett's book is rekindled.  I'll have to seek it out.

By the way, it's "water slide," two words.

Dresser!

Check it out! The dresser is put together and back in the house.  Yesterday I went to Home Depot and bought some pretty nice knobs ($2.29 each), put them on last night.  Then today I went to Anthropologie, just for some random sale shopping, and found really fantastic ones on clearance ($2.95)!

Here are the Home Depot knobs:

And here are the Anthropologie ones:

And here's the finished product!  Gorgeousness!

Here's the initial photo, for before-and-after comparisons:

Prep

I finished Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld yesterday.  I started it the day before, randomly opening it up even though I hadn't finished Right Ho, Jeeves, and then I couldn't put it down.  I was up until one a.m. reading, despite having to work early the next morning, and after work I read for another two-and-a-half hours until I was finished.

Oh my GOD, it was SO GOOD.

I think Sittenfeld gets exactly what it is like to be a teenage girl.  That's not to say I was just like Lee, the protagonist.  The book follows all four years she spends at a New England boarding school, something I certainly haven't experienced.  But the dialogue and the worries about conforming and the stress and crushes - all of it felt just right.  Just like a teenager.  Perfect.

Should you read it? If you only like action, or mystery, or sci-fi, or non-fiction, then no.  Otherwise yes, for sure.

A note: The author's full name is Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld.  Was the choice to go by her male-sounding middle name made to help her career?  Are men's novels taken more seriously?  Well, yeah, generally.  I knew she was a woman, and that, combined with the white cover with a pink and green belt on it, made me assume it was chick lit.  So maybe there's something to that.  There's a lot to analyze there, but I'll leave it at "ugh."

Dresser, Jeeves

Applying a second coat of linseed oil to my dresser has been delayed due to frequent rain the past few days.  I'm hoping I can get going on it again tomorrow.  I'm sooooo close.  Also, for knobs I'm thinking something black, shiny and simply-shaped. (I can't help but feel like I just described a species of beetle or something.)  

I'm halfway through Right Ho, Jeeves, which is a novel, rather than the short story collections I've read in the past.  I've seen the episode of Jeeves and Wooster based on it, but it's still hilarious.  "The fact that he was fifty quid in the red and expecting Civilization to take a toss at any moment had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy."

Book, sanding finished

I finished The Autograph Man.  It picked up towards the end, but I still didn't love it.  It was alright.  Should you read it? If you've already read something of Zadie Smith's and liked it, yes.  If you like books about semi-miserable twenty-somethings, yes.  Otherwise, eh.

Sanding is a lot easier than I thought it would be.  It turns out you don't need to do a thorough, meticulous job on every square inch of the dresser, only a quick, brusque once-over with each level of grit.  (I started with 100-grit paper, then 220, then 320, then 600.) The wood feels great now, super smooth.  We put a layer of linseed oil on after that, which was gratifying.  It makes the wood look fantastic.  I need to let it dry, then apply another few coats.

Unfortunately, I was informed today that my landlord is having my deck power washed tomorrow at 8am.  That means dragging the unfinished dresser and all the drawers, along with all the supplies, back inside.  Fun times.

More Wodehouse

I finished the last episode of "Jeeves and Wooster" last night.  Season Four overall wasn't my favorite (mostly because some of the recurring characters were played by different actors), but it was still quality, still hilarious.  It went out on the perfect note, too - I don't necessarily like a sitcom ending where everything changes (Monica and Chandler get their adopted kid, the cast of Seinfeld is in jail, etc.).  Far preferable is an ending that ties everything pretty much together but still leaves it open-ended enough that I can imagine my favorite characters continuing to have adventures.  "Jeeves and Wooster" did this exactly.

I picked up another book of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories at the library today, despite not being finished with The Autograph Man.  The problem I'm having with both The Autograph Man and The Savage Detectives is that I'm not all that crazy about spending time with the characters.  I don't need characters to be great people or even good people - just people that I'm curious about.  And both of those books have characters that are rather borderline for me.  I'm saving Right Ho, Jeeves as a treat for myself once I finish one of them.

The Autograph Man

I'm about halfway through The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.  (I've temporarily put down The Savage Detectives, not given it up for good.)  It's good so far.  Lighter than I expected - not a shallow comic novel like any of the Jeeves books, but still amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.  The main character, Alex-Li Tandem, is a 27-year-old British man who trades and authenticates autographs for a living.  His Chinese father died of a brain tumor when he was twelve, and his Jewish mother is still alive.

The book begins (third-person omniscient) on the day of Alex's father's death.  It then jumps years ahead.  Alex has just woken up from a bad trip on drugs an old friend had given him (and is now third person limited - limited to Alex).  As Alex goes about his day, figuring out what happened while he was tripping and dealing with the repercussions amongst his friends and girlfriend, we learn more about his life as an Autograph Man, his identity as a Jew, and his feelings about his father's death.

Note: If this sounds like a more morose take on "Dude, Where's My Car?" or "The Hangover," that's my fault.  That is certainly not the case.

Blouse

I cut out the pieces for my 1930s blouse last night.  Here's a look at the fabric I'm using.  It's a little sheer, so I'll have to put a tank top under it.

I know flower prints are very of-the-moment, and therefore perhaps not the best choice for a shirt I'm bothering to sew myself, but I thought it was really pretty.  It also reminds me of the 1930s (accurately or not).

Dresser Photos

Here's the "before" photo.  Notice the pink rim around the top.  A few years ago I decided to paint the whole top pink.  The top itself had a plastic veneer thing on it that wouldn't hold paint, but the wooden trim took it.  It's been slowly wearing off.

This is after quite a bit of scraping off the Citristrip.  You can see there was a weird black layer under the white paint before you get to the wood.  We weren't sure what that was about.

A close-up, mid-scrape:

The drawers, mostly stripped, waiting to be cleaned:

Where the dresser stands now, stripped and washed and waiting to be sanded:

Some Progress

The dresser is looking awesome (pics posted soon).  It's completely cleaned off, and now just needs to be sanded and then tack-clothed (I will have to find out what that means before I try to do it) and then have linseed oil rubbed on it.

As far as the book, not much progress.  I've been opening it up to read for a bit before I go to sleep, but I can only get through a page or two before my eyes start shutting.  The first section, as I said before, was pretty easy to follow.  Now it's just a bunch of interviews or short segments with several different people, all either talking about the two leaders of the visceral realists - Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano - or talking with them about a girl named Cesarea Tinajero.  It's hard to keep track of who's talking and what's going on when I'm only reading a page or two at a time.  

I think I need to ramp up my effort to get into this, or I'll never finish it.  I don't want to give up on reading it (two books given up upon this year is something of a record).

Stalled

The heat and humidity has stalled my progress on my dresser.  It's now almost entirely stripped of paint.  Once I get the remaining bits off, using more Citristrip, I'll then wash everything thoroughly, and give it time to dry.  That's my next step.

Is it possible the heat and humidity have stalled my progress on the book I'm reading (still The Savage Detectives)?  I got through Part One, and liked it, but I'm having trouble finding the plot.  And now Part Two seems to be dealing with different characters, and I'm not being absorbed by it as easily as I would like to be.

Absorbed is an apt word for how I feel when I read good books - like the book is a sponge and I'm being sucked up inside it, inhabiting it.  Finishing a book I love is a jarring wringing-out.

Refinishing

I've started refinishing my dresser.  Here are the steps I've taken so far, steps you, too, could take if you'd like to refinish something:

1. Take everything off the top of it and out of the drawers, and put those things somewhere else (on top of the dog crate and in some garbage bags, in my case).
2. Take off the handles.  Keep the handles and hardware in a bag together (also on top of the dog crate), but contemplate buying new, outrageously overpriced ones from Anthropologie.
(Interlaced Twigs Handle, only $18 apiece)
3. Lay down drop cloth outside.
4. Set drawers outside.
5. Drag dresser outside.
6. Apply Citristrip all over dresser.  Citristrip is a theoretically non-toxic paint stripper made from orange peels.  It's an orange goo, and I think it smells good, kind of like futuristic Push-Ups.  It should be applied in thick coats -comparable to how much Nutella any normal person would apply to a slice of bread.
7. After 30-45 minutes, start scraping it off with a putty knife.  If the paint doesn't want to come all the way off, apply more Citristrip.

That's where I am now.  I'm going to apply more goo to the un-scraped pieces tomorrow, then start washing and sanding.  It's all very exciting, though a little unnerving, as a ton of my stuff is now in plastic bags scattered throughout my living room and kitchen, and my dresser is dissembled on my deck, covered in goo.  There's no going back (though the thought of dragging it to the curb and buying a new dresser has flitted through my mind once or twice...).

Blouse Pattern

Here's the 1930s blouse pattern I bought.  It's from a company called Decades of Style that rewrites vintage patterns for contemporary sewers (sewers? is that a word in this context? looks like I'm talking about where the Ninja Turtles live...)  Anyway, this is a picture of the blouse, and this is the website: www.decadesofstyle.com

New Books

I bought a new book at Borders today, and then acquired a free one a couple hours later.  First up, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.  Then The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.

I had heard of The Savage Detectives a long time ago but had somehow gotten the impression that it was about a family in upstate New York solving crimes.  (To pinpoint it, I believe I conflated the concept of detectives with the characters and setting of a 2007 Laura Linney movie called "The Savages.")  In reality, it was written in Spanish and translated to English, and so far is narrated by a seventeen-year-old Chilean aspiring poet.

I can usually tell if I will like a novel by the end of the first or second sentence.  This isn't ALWAYS true - I wasn't immediately grabbed by The Good German, for example, but ended up really enjoying it.  However, the inverse does seem to be reliable: I have never fallen in love with an opening line but ended up hating the book.  This is how I picked out The Savage Detectives.  I happened to be sitting by it, opened it up, decided I liked what I read, and concluded that it would be a good book to own.  Here's what enticed me to buy it:

"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.  I accepted, of course.  There was no initiation ceremony.  It was better that way."

Bridget Jones

I just re-read Bridget Jones's Diary while trying to decide what new book to read next.  I have to go to the library today, so I may pick up a new one then.  As far as Bridget Jones, it's always a good book to read if you want to feel better about your own life.  Any neurotic things I do pale in comparison to Bridget's behavior.

Today while eating lunch I began a re-read of the sequel (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), which is hilarious.  It's a book, however, best read in small doses.  For some reason her crazy thoughts about life and romance and relationships seem to stick in my head a bit too much if I devour the book a couple hours at a time.

I recommend both of them without hesitation - they're so funny and spot-on with the characters' behavior and observations.  Just always keep in mind that they're meant as humor, not to reflect any genuine good relationship advice.

The Freedom of Quitting

Oh, I don't like this Raymond Chandler book.  Maybe at some point I'll finish it, but for now, I'm done.  It's not too long, and it's wayyyyy better than that Dan Simmons book I struggled with a couple of months ago, but I still don't want to continue.  Life is finite.  Time to move on to something more interesting.

Speaking of quitting, I effectively gave up on my "Sleepyhead" scarf.  The ribbon was a lot stiffer than the knitted fabric, so it felt weird and wouldn't drape nicely, plus it wasn't as beautiful as I'd wanted it to be.  But I don't want to abandon the idea altogether.  I started knitting another scarf out of the same yarn (gray and white, made from recycled pop bottles) and am hoping I can turn it into something.  We'll see.

Marlowe

I don't like Philip Marlowe.  Maybe I just don't care for the style of the whole book - it's all cool customers with snappy retorts being mean to each other, embroiled in various crimes.  I'll finish the book (it's skinny) but these noir-ish detective stories aren't for me.  I like protagonists with a little self-deprecation and emotion.

I bought a pattern for a 1930s blouse.  Work will commence on that soon, once the semester ends.  I'll also be refinishing my dresser.  I'll post some before and after photos - I've never refinished a thing, so we'll see how it goes.  Right now the most intimidating part is the question of where to put all the stuff currently inside and on top of it.  Bags or boxes, I guess.  For some reason I'm dreading that.

Jeeves and Wooster and Philip Marlowe

I finished Very Good, Jeeves, the second book of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster short stories I've read.  They're great, absolutely the perfect tone for light, pleasant reading, and are the perfect length to read one a night in bed before falling asleep.  I may order another one on inter-library loan soon.

I've started The Little Sister, a Raymond Chandler book about Philip Marlowe, his famous detective in The Big Sleep and a million other books.  It's interesting so far, but it's not anything I'm used to.  Marlowe acts tough - is tough, apparently - and has lots of clever, contemptuous things to say to those who oppose him.  I feel sure that Philip Marlowe and I wouldn't be buddies if we met, but I'm still curious about the mystery. So far there's just an innocent young woman trying to find her brother, who was living in L.A. and has now disappeared.  But Marlowe thinks she's hiding something, so I assume she must be, and I'm waiting to find out what.

It's interesting - the Jeeves stories and The Little Sister were written about 20 years apart (the former in 1926, the latter in 1949) and although the plots are completely dissimilar, I still notice things they have in common just from being in nearby eras.  These things stand out because they're no longer used today.  One example off the top of my head: calling people "birds."  Not just women, in a swinging sixties Austin Powers sort of way, just anyone.  Sort of the way one might say "dudes" or "guys" today.

Game theory and the underdog

I just read an interesting article on Slate about why people love to root for the underdog.  I support the White Sox and the Brewers against any other team (when they play each other every three years, I root for the White Sox), but if I have no real knowledge of the teams involved, I'll root for whoever is losing.  I know some of my friends do this, too.

That didn't strike me as weird until Daniel Engber, the author of the article, noted that it's counter-intuitive that we would always root for the losers, because it means we're more likely to be disappointed.  He goes on to examine this and summarize several interesting studies.  A lot of it relates to the ideas brought up in A Beautiful Math, that book I read on game theory.

It's an interesting article.  Here's the link: http://www.slate.com/id/2252372/

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the movie

I saw the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tonight.  It was an incredibly faithful, skillful adaptation of the book.  But I can't recommend it.  There were some really disturbing parts in the book, and the film doesn't flinch from showing them.  It was hard to handle.  I kind of wish I could un-see it.  Doesn't it often seem that things are slightly easier to read about than they are to see?

Now I'm watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, the best antidote I can find.

Arcadia Falls

I finished the latest Carol Goodman novel, Arcadia Falls, last night.  It was quintessential Carol Goodman - a woman teaching at a boarding school, a murder, an old mystery with echoes in the present, details about art history, a police officer love interest... I could write a computer program that would create the plot of a Carol Goodman novel MadLibs-style, which sounds mean, though I don't intend it to.  I like these books.  She's reliable.  And although I can predict the overall themes, I can't predict what precisely will occur in a given book (who the murderer is, who's hiding something, etc.).  I like her writing, and I like discovering those things.

One thing I noticed in Arcadia Falls is how current her cultural references are.  The main character has a seventeen-year-old daughter, so there are lots of mentions of iPods, Anthropologie, texting, bands like The Decemberists and The Vivian Girls, and other of-the-moment stuff.  It's weird, because that should make the story seem more real, and yet I felt distracted by it.  Maybe it was because I kept thinking about how out-of-date that will make the book seem in a few years.

Overall, it was a good one - not my favorite of hers, but enjoyable nevertheless.  Enjoyable enough that I stayed up till 2:30am last night to finish it.  Should you read it? If you like her books, or like any of the themes she focuses on, then yeah, sure.  It's a quick read, too.

Up next? Another book of P.G. Wodehouse's short stories about Jeeves.

The dress!

I finished my 1940s dress yesterday morning, about half an hour before I had to leave for my cousin's wedding.  Things got rushed towards the end - the hem certainly could've gone better (it is significantly shorter in the back than in the front), and some weird twisty things happened along the back of the neck, but overall, it's cute.  It's an actual dress; I wore it all night, ate in it and danced in it and drove in it, and it didn't fall apart.  This was my first attempt at anything more complicated than a cotton sundress, so despite its flaws, I'm happy.

I'm the one on the right.

Types of Reading

Different types of reading I do, from best to worst:

1. Reading a novel for fun.  

A good novel is so engrossing, so wonderful.  When I put one down, I really feel like I'm leaving a physical (and temporal) place.

2. Reading a nonfiction book for fun.

Here, and with the novels as well, I only mean books that I actually like, not any random nonfiction book.  There are lots of cool nonfiction books out there (I tend towards the ones about physics or math), but they don't usually have the plot urgency of novels that makes reading them feel like a compulsion.  Also in this category are cookbooks.  I love to read cookbooks while I eat, I don't know why.

3. Reading an article/blog post online

I learn a lot of cool stuff on the internet: what are some good independent films, how to feel more peaceful (one tip I keep reading is to always make your bed), what it's like having a child with autism, how it feels to live in China as an American, etc.  

4. Reading info online

This takes up a lot of my time.  By "info" I mean getting movie times, responding to student emails, searching for a house to rent on craigslist, learning how to conjugate "to bark" in Dutch, etc.  All important stuff, some of it absolutely necessary, but it fills up hours quickly - and it's not exactly fun.

5. Reading comments on articles online

The intelligence signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low on this one.  Is the best use of my time really reading what some random teenager thinks of Transformers 2, or what some random woman thinks Prudie should have said in her advice to the sister of the bride?  No, it really isn't.  And yet a disturbing amount of my time gets sucked up in that fashion.

My goal? For one week, starting tomorrow, I'm going to track how much I read (and correspond - so if I am posting a blog entry or writing back to a student, that counts), and what category that reading falls into.  Then I'll make up a nice excel pie chart or something, and display it - most likely so we can all be horrified that I somehow manage to spend 25 hours a day reading old movie reviews on The AVClub...

Hooked Now

I love it when you reach that point in a book that previously hadn't quite grabbed you when you realize you  cannot put it down.  I hit that point with The Good German.  It's fast-paced, it's a mystery, it's a wrenching portrait of post-war Berlin (for example, one minor character is a Jewish woman who saved her own life by ratting out other Jews, and even her portrayal is three-dimensional enough that you ache for her).  I love it.

I can't really talk about the plot, because almost anything revealed would be a spoiler.  So let me just say it's great.  Occasionally Kanon's many characters are hard to keep track of (this was a bigger problem in Stardust) but about a quarter of the way in, I had everyone pretty set in my head.  So no big problems.  And for once the central romance is between people who are roughly the same age!

Slow Progress

I'm working on The Good German, but it's slow going.  I like it, but for some reason I'm just not picking it up that much.  It takes place in Berlin right after the end of World War II, as the Americans, British, and Russians are trying to put the city back together.  The main character, Jake, is an American journalist who previously served in the army in Berlin, and left a (married) woman he loved there.  Now, of course, he's trying to find her.  And while looking for her, he stumbles upon a murdered man, a G.I., who's pockets are stuffed with cash.

I like it.  I've never given a lot of thought to what it must have been like in Berlin after the end of the war, the amount of destruction.  But it's slow going.

Whole Foods article

After reading my thoughts on grocery shopping, a friend sent me a link to this USA Today article on Whole Foods.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/usatoday31005.cfm

Apparently an Austin Whole Foods has been revamped and made into a "shopping experience." The writer compares it to Disney World, where there are separate little lands (one for sweets including a chocolate fountain, one for veggies where you can also sit and have a salad, etc.).  It sounds gimmicky, but it also sounds AWESOME.

Grocery Shopping

When I moved into my first apartment, grocery shopping was exciting.  My roommate and I would drive to the store at midnight because we'd suddenly decided we needed blueberries, or cereal, or microwave popcorn ASAP.  I enjoyed making lists, picking things out, examining the produce.  This was also in the days when I enjoyed writing out checks to pay my bills.  It was like "Hey, I'm an adult! Cool!"

I've been buying groceries and paying bills for long enough that the novelty has worn off.  I still usually enjoy cooking, and I love food, but grocery shopping has gotten to be a real drag.  Something in me protests at the idea of walking through a huge, cold supermarket, racing around trying to speed things up and inevitably forgetting some staple.  These stores are just too big.  

Woodman's is the cheapest in my area, and also the biggest.  It's like a small village.  My usual choice is Copp's, of moderate size and price, comparable to a Jewel or an Eagle in other cities.  It's fine, I guess, but I still hate being in there.  I go to Trader Joe's sometimes, and it's nice because it's small (and there's always a sample of some sort), but they don't have everything I need or all the brands I like, and their produce selection is bad.  There's also the local co-op, which similarly doesn't have all I want (I can be very particular), although their produce is great.

So okay, we have a Whole Foods, which I used to go to more, but haven't so much lately.  We all know it: "Whole Paycheck", right?  I've been avoiding it in an attempt to save some money.  But I stopped in the other day just to pick up some tamarind paste (it's the only place in town that has it, and I was making the tamarind lentils in The Veganomicon, my favorite cookbook).  I ended up buying fifty dollars worth of groceries! (And no, the paste alone was not fifty dollars.  I got a couple bags of stuff.)  More importantly, I sort of enjoyed myself.

Why? Well, they have a ton of samples, just a ton.  I had mango slices and orange slices and chips with salsa and little cubes of cheese from a local farm, among other things.  I happened to go at a time of day when it wasn't too crowded.  It's an attractive store.  And, perhaps most importantly, it's pretty small.  I realize that these qualities are not important to everyone, but they apparently matter to me.  I felt good while shopping, felt good unpacking my things when I got home, and felt good cooking them.  

Their products are not the most economical, but they're fun.  Whole Foods has my tamarind paste, it has bulk spices, it has lots of local leafy greens.  My imagination runs wild creating theoretical meals.

I am well-aware that if I had bought similar items at Copp's it would've been cheaper by at least several dollars.  But - isn't there a cost associated with the quality of my experience?  Isn't it worth paying a little more to leave the store feeling excited about my new foods, not stressed out and irritable?

I realize not everyone is in a position to spend lots on groceries.  It's a privilege, and really it's not like I have bunches of money burning holes in my pocket.  But I don't have a car payment right now, I have no credit card debt, I manage to put money into savings every month - those things are enough for me to feel justified spending more than is absolutely necessary on food.  I may not go to Whole Foods for every shopping trip, but will definitely go more than I have been.

Perhaps sometime I'll compare prices on specific items between Copp's and Whole Foods, and put an exact dollar amount on my grocery-shopping happiness.