Rainbows, cinammon rolls, and The Quickening

While a certain web video has corrupted my rainbow photography forever, I still thought this one was worth posting.

I don't know about you, but I'm ready for changing leaves, sweaters, and pumpkin-flavored foods.  This heat has got to stop.  And I love Colorado, but oh what I wouldn't give for a Trader Joe's run, so that I could make these.  When we drive back in a few weeks, I think I'm going to make cute husband stop in and buy the pizza dough before we even get home.

And I wanted to share with you this book:

 

(image taken from the author's website)

Please go find it--it's so wonderful.  It's about two Iowa farm wives spanning from the early 1900s through the Great Depression, and the chapters alternate in their voices as their shared story is revealed.  It absolutely brought to life for me the hardships of farming in the midwest during those desperate times, and the story itself is riveting.

I visited the author's blog where she wrote that it had taken her nearly fifteen years to get this novel published.  She finished it when when she was twenty-three, and she's now thirty-eight.  She described the excruciating and long revision process: "I cut five characters, two narrators, forty years in my timeline, and at least two hundred pages.  I had about thirty pages left.  I re-envisioned my plot, created another narrator, two more characters, and finally started in."

Sheesh.

In her acknowledgments, she thanks her literary agent, Esmond Harmsworth, who believed in her so long ago when her novel was but a dream.  Well guess what?  I interned for him at his agency in Boston, right after college.  I sat in a back corner of the office and read the slush pile all day.  Glamorous it was not.

The morning

The morning has so many secrets I would otherwise not know about, if not for a sleepless night.

So thank you worries, thank you concerns...

...in truth you never got the best of me.

And I'm reading this book:

I demand you go out and buy a copy today.  It may be making it into my Top 5 Ever.

The Weekly Reader

It's quiet here on the mountaintop.  Yesterday--the first day of summer--was marked by an elk herd sighting, and, get this, a baby deer sighting as well! (I was furious with myself for not having my camera with me.) I had never seen a baby deer before.  I had no idea they were so small.  For some reason when I thought of a baby deer I was picturing the baby cow that's born out on the trail in the movie City Slickers.  But no, they are adorably little, and speckled, and this one was hopping like a bunny just following his (or her) mom down a big hill with his (or her) little head darting all around looking at the great big world.  For a moment I wanted to be a deer, so I could have deer babies...

 

 (wunderground.com)

In other news, I wanted to share the book I'm reading with all of you--I know I did this just a few days ago, but when the really good ones come along, I think I've got a duty to share.  I mentioned in that post that I was intrigued by Julie Orringer's new book, The Invisible Bridge.  Well, before I started that one, I thought it would be good to read her first book, a short story collection called How to Breathe Underwater.  I picked it up from the library last night around 7:30pm and at 12:30pm today I've got about 60 pages left to go.  Yes, it was one of those that I sort of, um, stayed up all night reading.  Most of the stories have to do with girls coming of age, and as someone who tends to read a lot of women's literature, I'd be hard pressed to think of anything I've read that achieves such a pitch-perfect portrayal of what it is to be a girl, in terms of our relationships with men, each other, our families, and ourselves.  It's just beautiful, and makes me so excited to pick up The Invisible Bridge.  Before I started How to Breathe Underwater, I had been reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, a book about which I've read and heard many excellent reviews.  But I just couldn't get into it--it's just so British, like the petroleum.  Other than the Immortal Bard, Brit Lit has just never been my thing.  Think I'll wait until it's out in paperback so I can slog through it on my own time and not have to beg the library for one more week.

I titled this post "The Weekly Reader" thinking it was a clever title for a weekly reading update, but then it reminded me of an old elementary school memory.  Remember Weekly Readers?

(wow, found a very retro one)

And that reminded me of another elementary school memory.  Scholastic book orders!  Do they still do those?

 (Yep, looks like they do.  Sadly the one pictured above is offering "American Idol" books.  What?)

On book order day I would literally go mad.  The teacher would bring in the box after lunch--the white one, with the Scholastic red.  She'd say, "If we have time, we'll hand these out at the end of the day."  I'd spend the rest of the afternoon eyeing that box behind her desk, and if I felt like she was forgetting, I'd go up to her desk and remind her.  Having to wait until tomorrow was simply not an option.

Many are happy it's summer.  I am too--seems like summertime always produces a few happy, carefree times.  But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy that we are now on the down slope--the days will all be getting shorter, fall is the next immediate season.  But I shall attempt to live in the moment.

Summer reading

Between the local library and the small but excellent indie bookstore at the bottom of the mountain, I've been doing more reading up here than I've done in a long time.  (This is not necessarily a good thing, considering there's some other stuff I need to be doing, but really, when is reading great books bad?)

This summer has so far produced a wealth of interesting-seeming books that have now been bumped to the top of my list.  Cases in point: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, The Passage by Justin Cronin, The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum, and The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall (both Brady Udall and Jenna Blum have visited or will soon visit that great local bookstore at the bottom of the mountain that I was talking about).  I'm also intrigued by Brady Udall's older book, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.

But this week I'm reading Day for Night by Frederick Reiken, who happens to have been one of my college profs.  Before I got to college, and with the goal in mind of taking a course from him, I read his earlier two books--The Odd Sea and The Lost Legends of New Jersey--just because I was so excited to be taking class from a real live published author I could find at Barnes & Noble!  Both of his books were quite good, but this one that I'm reading this week is leaps and bounds beyond quite good.  It's amazing to see how much he's changed and grown, even within the confines of his own specific set of excellent skills.

I don't want to give too much away about the book--it's one of those that it's best to go into it sort of blind--but I will say that it's got me rethinking the way that I write in the sense that it's telling a story in a truly daring and different way.  When I sit down to write, I tend to think very linearly and very straightforwardly in terms of narrative, description, character development, and all those other writerly (and annoying) buzzwords.  Reiken's book knocks all that on its head to great effect, and does so without being even remotely showy or bizarre.

I've updated my to-read list (jeez, now it's just gotten out of hand) on the right, so take a peek and maybe we can all read something great together.

Now, a transcendent mountain photo.

I decided to just recycle a rainbow photo, since books are a great way to get to the end of the rainbow, no wishes or leprechauns necessary. 

Speaking of...

...Memories!

Crime & Punishment or, law school

I hadn't planned on blogging this evening.  I got home late and was doing good just to be sitting in front of my computer spooning my Trader Joe's Chana Masala into my mouth while surfing the net.  Cute husband is in finals so dinner together is, basically, out of the question.  Law students in finals are fascinating, someone has got to do a study.  They sit in one place for hours at a time in a state of complete and total concentration.  When they do finally get up--either to eat or go to the bathroom--they remain in a kind of airtight bubble out of which NOTHING can pull them.  I will simply say, "How's it going?  Feel like you're making progress?"  And I get this haunted stare, like, WHO ARE YOU, why have you entered my extremely private thought cave?  Furthermore, he is so in the swing of torturing himself so that he can do well, that any offers of kindness are rebuked as scathing critiques of his ascetic way of life.  "Need anything?" I say in my sing-song sweetest-wife-ever voice, as I do his dinner dishes.  He does not look up from his papers.  "All I truly need is to study."

Touche.

So I guess I decided to blog tonight because, well, I'm kind of lonely.

During my sad and pathetic dinner/web surf, I found this link and I had to share it.  Once again it was found via Blog of a Bookslut.  Apparently, there is, truly, now a video game of Dante's Inferno.  So someone by the name of Robert Brenner decided to write a what-if of a Crime & Punishment video game.

Highlights:

CHARACTER: You’re Raskolnikov, a student radical in St. Petersburg. Somebody’s stolen your birthright. Somebody’s gonna pay.

MISSION: Fight your way through a nightmarish philosophical struggle that anticipates the rise of Communism. Smash the capitalist class. Raise the consciousness of the lumpenproletariat. Redistribute the wealth—to yourself.

WEAPONS:  Marxist dialectics, Napoleonic complex, an axe. You can upgrade your axe to a chainsaw.

CHEAT CODE: Ctrl-P unlocks Sofia’s panties.

It cracks me up...

But it got me thinking about reading Crime & Punishment in Mrs. Jenkins' 12th grade English class.  (Lauren was by my side for this traumatic experience, hope she reads this so she can tell me if I'm remembering everything correctly.)  Mrs. Jenkins spent weeks telling us how much we were going to love Crime & Punishment--it was going to change our lives, make us better people, turn us into geniuses in just under 500 pages.  On the day the books arrived we were all chomping at the bit with our $5 cash, thinking, I've got to get my hands on this thing!

That night I sat in my bed struggling, fighting against the meager 30 pages she'd assigned us.  It was the first time in my whole life when I was truly just reading words; they meant nothing to me.  Night after night I kept forcing myself, promising myself I would get to the bitter end, I had to see the bright light I knew must be at the end of this tunnel.  But alas it was an oncoming train--of nothingness.  To this day, I hate that novel.  I have met many people who loved it.  I even married one of them.

A professor in college said that reading is just the reader trying to connect with the writer any way that he can--searching for any commonality that will put them both on the same ground so that he (the reader) can feel like he's in good hands, like he's listening to someone who knows something about him, and the two of them can move forward together.  Dostoevsky and I just weren't meant to be.  Mrs. Jenkins loved that novel so much.  She just couldn't get over its power.  I do that with books too--I push them on people, say, it's so amazing, it will change your life, you'll never forget it!  But in the end reading is just for two.  And what happens between reader and writer no one can ever really know.

But it wasn't all for naught.  Tonight when I ran across Crime & Punishment: the video game, it was nice to get the jokes.

Chips

The coffee still tastes good out of a chipped cup...  If not better, because a chip means age, and maybe a nasty run-in with the kitchen sink, and good things come with time and experience.

My mission for the weekend is to accept the little chips of life as elements that add character.  Hope you'll do the same.

I also need to get reading...

 { my bedside table }

This always happens when I come home.  It's actually a 3-tiered problem, as follows.  (1) I am incapable of bringing just one or two books with me when I travel, I bring 6-7 because I never know what kind of mood I'll be in (needless to say I never finish all the books I bring), (2) I end up going through my old books I store here and finding a stack that I want to bring back with me, (3) I can't go a week without a stop in at the bookstore, especially when I'm home and our Barnes & Noble is oh so well stocked, so I end up buying a couple.  That I'm a nut goes without saying.

Happy weekend my friends.  Thanks for reading this week, it really means a lot to me.

The Book Thief

I finished the wonderful and amazing book The Book Thief last night.  For me, it was one of those rare books that will probably stick with me through the years.  I know some of my readers have read it (it was on the recommendations of my mom and my father-in-law that I finally got to reading it), but for those of you who haven't yet, I really hope you'll pick it up one day soon.

Somewhere in the middle of the book's 550 pages, the characters became real to me--whether for their own sake or because many of them reminded me of people in my own life, it's the same difference.  At least to me, it was such an unbelievable story of the triumph of words.  And more specifically, the ultimate triumph of good words over bad: a reminder of the importance of telling one's own story in the face of tragedy.  Surely writing is one of the great human acts of renewal, one that I think rivals what others tell me of their religious or spiritual experiences--it's a way to clear a path through worry and pain and surprise yourself by finding the good in things you were so sure were completely bad.

Just wait'll you meet Liesel Meminger and Hans Hubermann, and sweet little Rudy Steiner, a boy with a pure heart.  And, as books about World War II go, I can't think of one that gave me a stronger sense of time and place, nor one that had such a strong hypothesis to the oft repeated (and unanswered) question of how Hitler and the Nazis could have done what they did.  Just as good words have real power to heal, so do bad ones have power to destroy...and I'll leave it at that for now.

In the same vein--because you know how you'll be thinking about one thing you've read and then you read something completely unrelated and yet somehow the two stick together in your mind for no other reason than their proximity to one another--here's an interesting article from The New York Times that I read late on Saturday night.  It's about a palliative care doctor who, when faced with her own form of terminal cancer, decided--again and again--against palliative care.  I found myself thinking of her story in terms of what it might offer the rest of us.  It's something I feel I could ruminate on all day: this idea of feeling one way your whole life, but when faced with a decision, acting in defiance of those feelings.  How frightening and exhilarating to think of ourselves in this way--so unpredictable, even to ourselves.

And here are a few photos of our weekend.  How was yours?

UPDATE: Some updated thoughts.  I've just been perusing the internet a bit looking for others' thoughts on The Book Thief, and the vast majority are highly favorable.  That said, some think it's overwrought and doesn't deserve, as the book jacket suggests, to be included in the same literary canon as Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl.  I've heard this same sort of criticism about the book Little Bee (haven't read it yet), which is not about WWII and the Holocaust, but which also claims to be an "important," "life-changing" book.  Similarly, cute husband, as most of you know, is a Bob Dylan freak and finds that many fans are hesitant to give Bob credit for his later work (namely, the sublime Love & Theft, released on 9/11/2001).  They claim that the legend has lost his touch, when in truth he's just changing.

I find this phenomenon fascinating and annoying.  There seems to be a fear of adding something new alongside the old, as though the two cannot co-exist without canceling out one another.  I think that the process of older works giving way to and having influence upon the newer works is the essence of what we think of as "Literature" (big L).

Any thoughts?