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I forgot my book in the other room earlier this morning. Not a problem for a normal person, but a huge problem for a new mom.
Now that I have a newborn, my world has diminished substantially from as recently as a month ago. My world, in its entirety, consists of three rooms in my house. As such, I have come to realize the importance of having things at arm’s length (yes, one arm, because the other is holding the baby). Not just things such as burp cloths, tissues, a glass of juice (I do think it is possible, like Tantalus, to die of thirst within sight of refreshment), but other things like this laptop I’m writing on, or, for those brief moments when the baby is finally asleep and I can’t move from my position, a book.
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a potentially brilliant/interesting/funny idea, poorly executed, was probably done as an Emerson College senior project.
At least that is an inside joke that my sister, an Emerson alum, and I have had for years. I was not surprised to hear that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was written by an Emerson alum. Nor was I surprised that it is so popular. The idea is positively hilarious.
I’m no Austen purist, as shown by my benign tolerance of other P&P “spin offs.” I think Ms. Austen had enough imagination to appreciate this humorous use of her work, and she had the kind of sensibility that would make her likely to enjoy a good zombie story. Unfortunately I don’t think she would want to be given credit for this book (she’s listed as a coauthor) because it really isn’t a good zombie story.
A coworker of mine, when he heard I was having a little girl, and discovering that I was the owner of two dogs, told me about this book.
“I read it every night to my daughter, who is allergic to dogs, but wants one so badly” said Dave.
“I ADORE this book,” said Jessica.
And I do. I was head over heels, from the very beginning:
“The end of Kate’s bed was a lonely place. Tiger the cat no longer slept there. Tiger died last winter, so there were only Kate’s two feet to keep each other company.”
Maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones, or the still fresh wound of my favorite cat’s death last summer, but I’m not ashamed to say that before the book even properly started I was bawling in that most cathartic, poignant way that we all need once in a while.
I’m reading a French novel.
Just writing that conjures up all sorts of fantasies I’ve often had about my alter ego. This girl majored in English (instead of Science) and spent her college days sitting in the courtyard of an old, New England, brownstonish, liberal arts college. She drank coffee (something I really do detest), read obsessively (something I actually do) and discussed the relative merits of Russian versus British authors (even in my wildest fantasy she hates those darn Russians, she is me after all. . .) with her equally pretentious but brilliant friends (my real friends are indeed brilliant, but hardly pretentious). This alter ego of mine, incidentally, was taller, thinner, had red hair and wore glasses due to an affected sense of fashion rather than out of actual need.
But fantasies aside, it’s a New York Times bestselling French novel. In other words, just a book like any other. Read the rest of this entry »
Forgive me, readers, for two things. One, for being absent for so long, and two, for being self-indulgent and explaining away my absence. Humor me, it’s relevant (sort of).
Toward the end of the summer I took a new job and simultaneously, somehow, and totally on purpose, I found myself knocked up (no oops there, but I do wonder at my timing). So between the working, the throwing up, the commuting, the being exhausted and the studying for the MBA which suddenly seems much less important, I haven’t had time to crack a book for enjoyment since.
This, I have discovered, is a very unhealthy place for me to be. My body is having a hard enough time keeping down food (like some women, I’ve lost weight in my first trimester). This is no time for my soul also to be lacking in (literary) nourishment.
This baby may not end up being a reader, though with nature (on both sides) and nurture (on all sides) I don’t see how that will be possible. Regardless of how he or she turns out, it will not be from lack of a steady diet of stories.
Starting now.
After 26 years (seriously, that is almost my entire life!) Reading Rainbow will be coming to a close.
Apparently funding is given for shows that teach kids how to read, not why to read.
Sad. Very sad.
Jesse and I are very excited to announce that our friendly little blog has been nominated for three (yes three!!!!) BBAWs:
- Best General Review Blog
- Best Review
- Most Collaborative
We’re currently compiling our best blog posts to send to the nomination committee and jumping up and down with excitement!!!!!
“I love this book,” I said to Tim while attempting read in a moving car, something that, to my intense frustration, I have never quite managed to do without wanting to vomit (thankfully I can read on a moving train, which makes my long commute more bearable).
”Listen to this,” I said, quoting page one (yes, page ONE!!).
Hours later, not long after the genesis of Francis Wells’ idea, the party would meet a premature death with a cloud of plaster dust covering the Gardner’s guests, as well as a dessert table graced with spun-sugar Giacomettis and the life-sized sculpture of Michelangelo’s David, whose penis had all evening been dripping syphilitically.
“And this!” I raved.
By ten p.m. there had been three slideshows – one of which, “Hop Art: A Portfolio,” projected photos of Bunny’s own work onto the ballroom walls, interspersed with a series of dinner courses as carefully presented and unsatisfying as Francis’ wife.
“I didn’t want to love it, but there it is, how could I not?”
“Don’t you want to love all books?” he asked, confused.
I pondered his question; certainly its a valid one. When it comes to reading, as with the rest of life, I’m total cynic. I certainly don’t expect to love all books – an inordinate amount of what is published is trash, or boring, or overdone (or pleasant and inoffensive, but forgettable). But there are those who allege that cynics are disappointed idealists. Maybe. If it were not true that a vast majority of published works are just plain mediocre, if we did live in an ideal world, would I really want to love every book I read?
King Arthur may well be the ur-fantasy story. The ur-hero story even. This story has been told countless times, in many forms including, quite notably, Monty Python’s version (you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!), one of my personal favorites. There is even much academic debate about whether a real Arthur or Merlin existed. While that is mildly interesting, and I have been known to read a treatise or two about what might have happened, I’d much rather read pages and pages (and pages and pages) of stories about what could have happened.
The Arthurian legends were certainly my first foray into “fantasy” and it’s the one story I never tire of, no matter what the medium. I daresay I’ve read them “all” – The Mists of Avalon, the Sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, even Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. I have a grand copy of Le Morte d’Arthur, almost too beautiful to read (or at least that’s my current excuse for not reading it).
I love this story (or should I say stories) so much that I took an entire class in college about King Arthur (me, a science major!), in which we read the older texts based on the oral legends (where Gawain was the hero, not some pretty French dude). They aren’t as flowery as the Lancelot versions with their courtly love, chivalry and the round table, but it is those gritty older texts that, in my humble opinion, have spawned the best modern Arthurian works. As my high school English teacher always told us “Arthur was a peer of Beowulf.” Which means, though he likely carried a sword, his armor was made of leather instead of metal, and he probably didn’t joust.
With some extreme exceptions (Harry Potter for one), I’m generally opposed to book “phenomenons.” If I see everyone reading it on the subway I like to flatter myself that I’m above it all. I tell myself that I read “real” books (which as any reader of this blog can see, is not entirely true). I hate when non readers tell me I *HAVE* to read such and such book. It irritates me. Worse yet are the books that are made into movies, causing an explosion of books into the population, mostly non readers.
The Twilight series is one of those phenomenons, tween girls are crazed about these books (and the subsequent movie). But it’s not just kids, plenty of young adult women have been trying to push the series on me. I successfully resisted, until one of my best reading friends literally put the stack in my hand and said, “Read them, they’re fun.”
I think it was the fact that she didn’t fly into rhapsodies about how amazing and impressive they were that made me take them from her. Still, they sat on my bookshelf. I had no intention of reading them, I figured I would just hold them for an appropriate amount of time and then return them with a disclaimer that I was “too busy” to get to them.
But what I didn’t count on was that my foray into British history was coming to an abrupt halt with Roy Jenkins’ Churchill. That book was painful; somehow he made Winston Churchill seem boring. I had to give up, only halfway through. It was disheartening, and I just didn’t have it in me to start anything even remotely challenging.
“They’re fun,” she had said, and so I reached for Twilight.
