A post is a post is a post

There is a children's book about Gertrude Stein. Why someone thought this was an appropriate topic for a picture book aimed at ages 4-7 is beyond me. Exactly what child did they expect to be interested in an obtuse modern writer? And it was written in her style -- repetition, random statements, nonsensical sentences. I managed to make sense of it because I knew what the author was trying to mimic, but a kid would be lost. It wasn't funny (for kids), it wasn't engaging, it was trying far too hard. This book will only be picked up by other English major parents who can't believe there is a kiddie book about Gertrude Stein. And her lover.

Of course, I don't care for Stein in the first place. I can appreciate what she was trying to do with the repetition and meandering thoughts trying to mimic what the mind does. I really can admire the effort. But it's just not nice to read. I only had to read a novella in college, and I didn't make it through. I couldn't stand to read the same scene in a slightly different way ONE ... MORE ... TIME. I'm not much of an artiste, I guess.

Kids' books should not be depressing

I just finished reading "Meet Kit" to Abigail. It's one of the American Girl books, which I generally find to be wonderful. I loved the earliest series as a kid, and so far Molly is Abigail's favorite.

But tonight was Kit. Kit lived in 1932. Kit's world was waaaay too similar to today's world. Her dad lost his job, people are losing their homes, the economy is in a shambles. Kit is not good escapism right now. We need to go back to World War II's Molly, or pioneer Kirsten, my personal favorite. I don't need to read about my own life!

Waving the literary white flag

I'm very sorry, Vicky, but I have to give up. I have tried to get through The Secret Agent, but I'm just getting lost in all the description of individuals. I keep dozing off. I like description, give me an expansive Hardy landscape, but I can't get into these in-depth thought processes of people of varying importance. It took too long for the "event' to happen, and now the investigation is getting bogged down, too. So I'm really sorry, I've tried to love it, but I'm going to put it away at about page 100. Other tomes are calling my name.

It hurts to not get through a piece of literary fiction. I can pitch mass-market without guilt, but I'm supposed to like Conrad, right? I liked Heart of Darkness the second time through, really! But he's lost me.

And I saw part of a Masterpiece version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and I'm dying to read it again :)

Even MORE books!

Smitty posted the Modern Library list of 100 top books, so let's do it again! Bold for read, italics for mean to read.

I find this list equally flawed. (Only 17 for me.) Looks like they just compiled syllibi from college English courses -- let's see, how many books can we list by the same author? And crazy, Death Comes for the Archbishop as the only Cather? I was a Cather fiend in high school, and My Antonia was much better. Maybe they just picked it because it was short.

Of course, reading this one makes me realize who wasn't on the other list, and wow, how do you not include Faulkner? Or Cather, for that matter.

Anyway, books are fun!

1 Ulysses – James Joyce
2 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
4 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
5 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
6 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
7 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
8 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
9 Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
10 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
11 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
12 The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
13 1984 – George Orwell
14 I, Claudius – Robert Graves
15 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
16 An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
17 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
18 Slaugterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
19 Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
20 Native Son – Richard Wright
21 Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
22 Appointment in Samarra – John O'Hara
23 U.S.A. – John dos Passos
24 Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
25 A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
26 The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
27 The Ambassadors – Henry James
28 Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
29 The Studs Lonigan Trilogy – James T Farrell
30 The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
31 Animal Farm – George Orwell
32 The Golden Bowl – Henry James
33 Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
34 A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
35 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
36 All the King's Men – Robert Penn Warren
37 The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
38 Howard's End – E.M. Forster
39 Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
40 The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
41 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
42 Deliverance – James Dickey
43 A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
44 Point Counterpoint – Aldous Huxley
45 The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
46 The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
47 Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
48 The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
49 Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
50 Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
51 The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
52 Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
53 Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
54 Light in August – William Faulkner
55 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
56 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
57 Parade's End – Ford Madox Ford
58 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
59 Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
60 The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
61 Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
62 From Here to Eternity – James Jones
63 The Wapshot Chronicles – John Cheever
64 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
65 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
66 Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
67 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
68 Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
69 The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
70 The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
71 A High Wind in Jamaica – Richard Hughes
72 A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
73 The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
74 A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
75 Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
76 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
77 Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
78 Kim – Rudyard Kipling
79 A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
80 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
81 The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
82 Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
83 A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
84 The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen
85 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
86 Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
87 The Old Wives' Tale – Arnold Bennett
88 The Call of the Wild – Jack London
89 Loving – Henry Green
90 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
91 Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell
92 Ironweed – William Kennedy
93 The Magus – John Fowles
94 Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
95 Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
96 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
97 The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
98 The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
99 The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy
100 The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington

Books! Books everywhere!

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

I've read 38, which isn't bad! I could say I've read more, but I guess watching BBC versions of Austen doesn't count, huh? And what can I say, I don't care for fantasy, never have.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- well, not complete ...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The History of Love

I just finished reading "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss. I've been wanting to read it for a long time, intrigued by reviews and the premise: a young man falls in love and writes a book just before the Holocaust; the book is published by a different man; years later, a girl named for the woman the author loved and wrote about wants to find her namesake. The novel is written from several different points of view as the characters' lives intertwine -- common in modern fiction, but I love it.

So it was an excellent book, and I must say the ending has really given me pause. It wasn't what I expected, though I don't know what I expected. I had to just sit there and reread it several times, flipping back through the book to see exactly how it fit with the rest of the story. I wouldn't call it a twist, really, just surprising. I often wish books weren't over, but this one really left me not quite knowing what to do with myself. I definitely recommend it for my more literary readers.

One passage really jumped out at me as truly beautiful:
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.

Huh. In looking up the book link, I discovered that Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. I haven't read "Everything is Illuminated," but from the movie, it seems they have similar styles. And topics. And Polish heritage.

Austen it isn't

So, who's read/seen "Vanity Fair"? I watched the first episode of the A&E version, and wow, that was odd. Are the characters really such stereotypes in the novel? Interesting. I'll keep watching, of course. I chose this over the Reese Witherspoon version since I heard it completely veered from the novel, though at lease the Mira Nair film would be pretty. This one so far is very, very brown. Hmmm.

Almost well rested

And with this Monday morning, Spring Break ends. Abigail was at the beach all week with Nana, and was I productive? Of course not. Well, I was with the magazine, but not with the house. I read a book -- in one night. The husband and I went out to eat and saw a movie in a place called a "theater". I napped a lot. I slept every morning until at least 8 a.m. I call that a good vacation.

The book was "My Sister's Keeper," and it was surprisingly good. I'm giving my book club till the end of spring since they're nice ladies, but the book selections leave something to be desired. But this was actually good. It tackled lots of interesting ethical dilemmas and didn't try to say one side was right or wrong -- which really, in the cases presented, there wasn't a right, just varying levels of wrong and painful but necessary. The writing was decent, though not many amazing passages, but it was a compelling story. I just wish the author hadn't copped out finally and ended an otherwise complicated story with something too pat, too "deus ex machina."

The movie was "Stop-loss." It was pretty good, some flaws in continuity and some unbelievable side stories, but definitely a powerful view of the torment soldiers may be going through. And it was interesting to hear Brad's thoughts as a man, about under what conditions he would fight and why.

Developments

The first designer is back. I'm not happy about this, but there was a long meeting and we'll see what happens.

Last night, I started a book at 8:30. I finished it at 10:30. Okay, okay, it was kiddie lit, a book called Stargirl, and believe it or not I was reading it for a book club I'm in where the average age is probably 45. The book was about individuality in high school, and it was actually quite good. I always wanted to be the quirky individual in high school, but I never stood out. Now I'm accepting that I find quirky individuals fascinating, but I am just not that quirky. I like jeans, solid colored shirts, simple makeup, even simpler hair, and that's fine. I will admire the quirky folk, hopefully even befriend them, but I will just have to be the straight man in the relationship.

If you know an adolescent, though, it was a very good book. A., they even have a teacher's guide for it.

Fond farewell

I said goodbye to some old friends today. I've known and loved them for 8 years now, have been intimately familiar with them, but it was time. Goodbye, Let's Go Europe and Let's Go France. You served me well. You gave me hostel advice and suggested cheap, tasty eats. You pointed me at the highlights as I tooled around cities. But you are not written in Euros, and I am too old for hostels, so it is time we went our separate ways.

Plus you took up too much shelf space.

I also steeled myself to thin my L.M. Montgomery collection. The books were filling Abigail's shelves, and she's starting into the brave new world of chapter books herself, so we had to make room. No, no, I kept Anne and Emily and some other favorites, but the short-story collections are being donated to the library. Hopefully an adolescent girl will find them and give them a good home.

Almost Splendid

I really ought to be doing other things, but it's been a while since I've posted and I've already been quite productive today, so I don't feel guilty. Plus I'm posting about a book, and that's redemptive in its own right.

This weekend, I finished reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini, the author of "The Kite Runner." While Afghanistan and its turbulent recent history are always fascinating, I was disappointed about half-way through this book. It seemed too pat, a bit contrived. There were too many coincidences. But it was still a good story, so I kept reading. And, satisfyingly, a plot twist arrived that made the earlier concerns no longer relevant, plus a nice bit of come-uppance for one character. Overall, I probably liked Kite Runner better since it was my first encounter with Afghanistan, but this one was also interesting as it presented the female point of view. If you're curious about Central Asia and are looking for a fairly fast read, I'd say this is a good one.

The agony of 13

I just finished yet another excellent book by David Mitchell. "Black Swan Green" was a very convincing coming-of-age novel about a 13-year-old boy in Worcestershire. Mitchell never lost the adolescent voice but still managed to make some beautiful/poignant/amusing observations about nature and sexuality and finding yourself. Really very good. I still prefer "Cloud Atlas" -- and strenuously, highly recommend it -- but this was a very interesting read.

Ahhh

I've just come off a reading binge. No huge tomes, of course, but the entire "Griffin and Sabine" series by Nick Bantock. I received the first three books in a boxed set as my reward for winning an essay contest in college (though I really, really doubt my "Frankenstein" essay was all that good. I think I was the only entrant.), and Bantock has since written three more books based on the characters and their uncanny yin-yang abilities.

They are some of the most beautiful fiction books you'll ever see, loaded with Bantock's collages on slick art-book paper. The stories are told through postcards and letters -- which you get to take out of the envelope to read -- and begin with the saga of Griffin, a British graphic artist, and Sabine, a South Pacific islander who can telepathically see what Griffin draws. From there, we follow the soul mates through self-realization journeys and being chased by someone out to stop them from coming together. The three new books, "The Gryphon," "Alexandria" and "The Morning Star," bring back Griffin and Sabine, who contact Matthew and Isabella, lovers separated by distance who also have supernatural abilities. The new lovers are also pursued, and if they come together, will somehow unleash some amazing knowledge of balance and harmony that has been lacking from humanity for centuries. Maybe sounds a bit hokey, and the first three were better, but all the books are just an absolute delight to read and caress and marvel over.

Quite a View

Well, that was quick! I started "A Room with a View" last night and finished it just moments ago. What a great book! Thank you, sister dear, and I'm sorry I didn't appreciate it when I was 12. I didn't have the background for it, and was frankly probably too young. But now I am well steeped in Victorianism, have a mature understanding of love, and have seen "Manor House" and "1900 House". Seriously, those shows made me really able to picture what was going on :) So thank you, though I still don't see much "Anne."

This was a truly amusing read (I'm sorry if I use silly words, I mimic what I've been reading. Last night I called Brad "peevish."). The story is a straightforward narrative, but every once in a while Forster pops in to make sure you're reading everything properly. Big chunks of story, a rambly paragraph of philosophy, more story, a quick first person aside to clear up something he was trying to do with words, more story ... . I thought he characterized Lucy really well, brought her out with great dialog and thoughts and description without just telling you. And it was great fun reading an Edwardian picking on Victorians, while as Brad pointed out "There's nothing different about them except for a monarch."

Interestingly, the only other Forster I've read was "A Passage to India," which is not at all light or funny. "View" was published in 1908, "India" in the 20s; modernism definitely separates them.

So very, very good. Shana, you'd probably like it. Maybe a., too. Even Smitty.

And thus ends my 2006 reading. What's in store for 2007? I think I'll decide tomorrow.

Reading rewind

Ages ago, my sister gave me "A Room with a View" by E.M. Forster. Perhaps because she called it a more grown up Anne of Green Gables, which I didn't see, I didn't really get into it at the time. I was probably 16. When I went to college, I really enjoyed "A Passage to India," so I got to thinking the first Forster deserved another chance. So that's what's up next, probably once the holiday insanity slows down.

I must say, I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason than the chapter titles. I don't recall Forster being particularly zany, but the table on contents is great! Chapter 3 is "Music, Violets, and the Letter 'S'" while chapter four is brilliantly "Fourth Chapter." But chapter 6 has them all beat: "The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them." That's GREAT! And then comes chapter 7, simply "They Return." This should be good.

And this morning, I got to thinking about other things I should add to my to-read list, and for some reason I'm now convinced I need to read "The Inferno." Ah, nothing like a little Dante for some light escapism! And of course, after that I must do "Paradise Lost," which I managed to essentially escape as an undergrad. I had a modern poetry class just after the Milton class, and the scribble on the chalkboard always made me so very glad I wasn't in the Milton class. But I feel it's something I should read, especially since the majority of our ideas about heaven and hell and all that come from these two works and not the actual Bible. What fun.

Not quite so girlie

I've already finished "Anne of Green Gables," and while it may just be young adult lit, it got some very adult thoughts going through my head.

The book is set about 1870 in a farming community on Prince Edward Island. While I know it glosses over the hardships of Victorian life, I find myself wishing my life was more like that. I'm a very smart woman, but they had so much practical knowledge. They canned, made all their breads, raised their livestock, grew their vegetables, and could name just about any plant under the sun. They were so connected to the natural world, to the rhythms of the seasons and the weather. I'm amazed by the lavish descriptions of little hollows and wooded paths, even when I can't begin to picture the fauna they're talking about. If some monumental natural disaster or nuclear winter ever occured that shut down our interstate/international economy, I would probably wind up among the dead. All I can grow is zinnias and petunias, and while I make a lot of my food from scratch, I'd hardly know where to begin if I couldn't buy my staples at a megastore. Our Earth has just become earth; we have lost so much wisdom and destroyed so many resources by our vanity and ignorance.

I also found myself wondering at the blackness or their nights. We had Abigail out a bit late last night, and when we got out of the car at home, I eagerly pointed out a star, which she doesn't often see. Of course, I knew that given our well lit parking lot, that sparkle was no doubt a satelite. My poor little girl has no idea what the actual sky looks like -- she was no doubt very confused when we went to a planetarium a while back. I myself have a very limited concept of the sky. I know the main constellations and a few minor ones thanks to a very late night under the stars on a Clemson rugby field. And I have seen the Milky Way and understand its monniker: The Buxton clan held a party for my grandpa's 80th birthday more than 10 years ago now, way out at the ancestral homestead in rural Missouri. My sister and I had just come back from an evening in St. Louis, and we were transfixed in the driveway by the stars. My suburban youth gave me no inkling that so much existed overhead.

We're so isolated in our modern world, it's scary. We have bottles and cans full of chemicals guaranteed to clean our homes, but what are they doing to us? We exercise in gyms, maybe stopping at a park to walk, but we have no idea what the world around is actually like. It's so sad.

But despite it's wholesome lifestyle and oodles of romanticism, I won't be finishing the Anne series again. The first book is always my favorite, follwed by the eighth, and I just don't have time to read all the others in between. I skimmed "Anne of Avonlea," and while I remember every scene, it just didn't call to me like "Green Gables." So away they go again on a shelf, waiting for my little one to hit about 10 and discover their magic. But time for just one more quote, one of my favorites and why I always thought I was a romantic (until I encountered Byron's "Don Juan"):

"... perhaps ... perhaps ... love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath." -- Anne of Avonlea

The White Way of Delight

Male readers, you may want to just skip this post. Female readers, I'm so happy to know all my girls will understand perfectly!

Sigh, I just love "Anne." I just love it. I'm already up to chapter 4, and it's even better the 12th time. The descriptive language, the charming Prince Edward Island, the precocious Anne. I want Abigail to grow up to be a black-haried Anne. Not Diana, mind you, much too pragmatic, that Diana. I want her to be Anne with all her dreaminess and love of nature and big words and love of books and idealism and optimism and drama and ... God, I love "Anne."

Heck, I want to be Anne. To look like Megan Follows, to marry Gilbert, to live the romanticized 19th century life, to believe in wood nymphs and fairies, to have children like Walter and Rilla (hard to say when I cried more, when Matthew died or when Walter did). Sigh.

I'm going to be talking like a Victorian lunatic for days now. What a great book.

So who wants to plan a trip to P.E.I.? Dead serious about that, say in two years? All out girlie road trip? We could all braid our hair and run around scaring Canadians!

I always hated tag ...

... but this involves books, so you know I have to do it. And I'm not even technically related!

1. One book that changed your life?

Perhaps not very profound, I'd have to say "Anne of Green Gables" by L.M. Montgomery. While I always loved reading, that's what fully put literature on a pedestal for me and inspired the English-majorness. I could also add "Busy, Busy World" by Richard Scarry, which very well may have given me that first glimpse of a tantalizing wider world.

2. One book you have read more than once?

Most notably, the entire "Anne" series eleven times, as well as "Emily of New Moon" and the rest of that series. My large collection of Berenstain Bears was probably my first obsession, followed by "Little House on the Prairie" et al. at least five times.

Oh, and I have reread as an adult! "The Red Tent" by Anita Diamant is an amazing take on the often overlooked women of the early bible.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Um, um, um -- that's hard! I'd tire of the same fiction over and over, so I guess I'll be good and say the Bible.

4. One book that made you laugh?

"The Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson is a hoot for any language fiend. Yes, I know he's not 100% correct, but it's still loaded with amazing facts and humor.

5. One book that made you cry?

I love books that make me cry, so there have been many in this category. I know I openly bawled at the end of "Anne of Green Gables," "The Red Tent," and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving.

6. One book you wish had been written?

What a good question. Perhaps a gospel from the point of view of Mary or Mary Magdalene. Yes, there's an apocryphal version accredited to the latter, but a canonical version would be nice.

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Not that I have anything against Edith Wharton, but "Ethan Frome" was the bane of my 11th grade existance. How my self-destructing, Elmer Fudd look-alike teacher could take more than two months on a novella is beyond me.

8. One book you are currently reading?

"Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter" by Barbara Robinette Moss for a book club I'll never actually attend. So far it's mainly making me mad that the mother wouldn't leave her husband to protect her seven kids.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

There are so many on this list. Too many to name, and some of which would be embarassing to admit are still lingering on my to-do list.

10. Now tag five people.

They'll love me for this, I'm sure, but Carrots, Smitty, Coffee, Rambling and Years.

Mixed messages

I just finished "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel. It was a very interesting story of the survival of a castaway, though rather gory at times, and made me think about to what lengths I would go to live. Sadly, I'm not moved to say much more about it, though I wish Smitty weren't quite so far away so we could talk about it.

Next up is a French novel, "Le sabotage amoureux" by Amelie Nothomb. French publishing is interesting. The book I bought is a high quality paperback, their version of a hardback, which is so intelligent. Who really wants to pay for a hardback? But it's strange how large their margins are, how big the type. This is really a novella, padded out to 186 pages. And French titles run up the spine, rather than down it as in English. Does anyone know what other countries/languages do?

And my final comment for the night, I played my flute for the first time in years today, and it was so enjoyable! I've played it maybe two other times since Abigail was born, but really all I was able to do was sound out some kids songs and play school fight songs for her to dance to. Today, though, she was at Nana's and I could pull out my old classical works. I'm not exactly a virtuoso, but my fingers haven't forgotten what to do. It was so relaxing and refreshing, feeling myself sway a bit along with the crescendos and decrescendos, my fingers fly through glissandos and trills. I should do that more often.

Interpreter of Maladies

I just finished "Interpreter of Maladies," a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. As I worked my way through the collection, I was amazed at how human her characters were. Yes, all the stories centered around Indians, though only a few were set in India, but other than adding interesting details and flavor, these stories could have been about anyone. She has an incredible talent for believable voices and relationships. Most of the stories ended rather cynically, but I guess that's life. Not really tragic, not really sad, just flawed. I thoroughly enjoyed "A Temporary Matter," the first story in the collection, which Brad has already addressed very well. I also thought "The Third and Final Continent" was particularly good characterization, following an Indian man as he first arrives in Boston and meets his 103-year-old landlord. You could really picture the characters' mannerisms and hear the ever-so-slight awkwardness of phrasing of a non-native English speaker even after four decades. Excellent.