Notice (on the sidebar) that Lena and I now have the same book on our separate bedside tables. That’s because my bookworm side trumped my mom side and I just couldn’t wait for her to finish Little Town on the Prairie before starting it myself. So we’re going back and forth (“it’s my turn now” “no, you had it all morning, it’s my turn now” “oh come on, can’t you read something else for a while?” “just let me finish this chapter” “mo-o-o-om!”). I can’t believe I didn’t like these books more when I was a kid. Sure, I read ‘em, but (as I recall) more from a feeling of duty and mild curiosity than any great love. One thing that really fascinates me is the way Laura acts as Mary’s eyes. She has to describe everything, and perhaps that’s the root of her becoming a writer? Even more fascinating, too, is the way Mary is always scolding her for not telling the truth when Laura gets poetic and metaphorical in her descriptions.
Monthly Archives: November 2006
Why Hubby needs his own blog
So, he was surfing the net the other day and came across this marvelous photo:
And his immediate thought was that it just begs for funny captions, heh heh. Here are some of Steve’s best efforts:
Breathless
Wow, it’s been a busy week. A LOT going on . . .
1. I had the theater experience of a lifetime. God bless the University Musical Society, for bringing the Royal Shakespeare Society to Ann Arbor, Mich. They didn’t just come and do a couple of shows, either. They were in residence for three weeks, giving talks and lectures and demonstrations and so forth. And we saw Julius Caesar and The Tempest. In the car on the way to The Tempest, I must admit Steve and I giggled over the fact that while we would be watching Patrick Stewart (as Prospero) in the flesh, our kids would be back home with the babysitter watching him in X-Men 3. And The Tempest was, well, I can’t even come up with an adjective. All I can say is, at the end, during the applause, people were shouting not Bravo but Thank you to the actors. And Steve and I were quite literally trembling as we left the theater.
This book is one hundred dollars
I started Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with low expectations. I didn’t even want to read it. All I knew about it was that Jonathan Safran Foer, who judging by his very cute author photo couldn’t be more than about fifteen years old, was considered to be some kind of wunderkind prodigy making a big splash and billions of dollars and a movie off his first novel. But book group is book group, so I got me a copy from the library and in I plunged.
Bookworm read WHAT?
The assignment. The other day Veronica posed me a challenge I could not resist. “Join me in writing a post about chick lit,” she suggested. She was planning a post tentatively titled “Why I Hate Chick Lit” and she guessed that I might be in the same camp. In fact — I realized after some discussion — I didn’t even know what chick lit was. I had always assumed “chick lit” referred to crap like The Red Tent and similar pseudo-feminist pseudo-literary drivel. That would have been a fun post, too, but Veronica and Wikipedia soon set me straight. “Well, now that I know what it is,” I emailed back to Veronica, “I realize that I am hopelessly unqualified to write anything about chick lit. I’d sooner read the back of the shampoo bottle than novels about the love lives and business struggles of hip stylish urban twentysomethings. When I was twentysomething my favorite author was Philip K. Dick.”
What the Civics teacher said
I hope my dear hubby won’t mind me posting an excerpt from the email he sent out to his extended family.
Let me add a bit from a Civics teacher’s perspective. I’ve been showing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to my four classes of ninth graders, as we study the legislative branch. We’ve been seeing it in chunks of 20-30 minutes, so it stretched over the last few days of class, and we had Monday off for an in-service, so today we’re finishing it.
Disappointed
My Penguin Classics project is proceeding ve-e-e-e-ry slowly. I requested La Regenta, by Leopoldo Alas, via interlibrary loan. It took forever, but it finally came, all the way from Dallas! (Written by Alas, sent from Dallas. :) ) And you know what? They only let me have it for three weeks, and they refused to renew. Why they bothered to send it at all, I do not know. No one could read this thing in three weeks. La Regenta is a 19th century Spanish novel over 700 pages long. The first fifty pages were intriguing, as was the description in the Penguin book (“an intelligent woman’s quest for fulfillment through marriage, adultery, and religion”). I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and buy it. Hey, wait! Chrismubirthdaykah is less than two months away! But I don’t want to wait that long. It’s been ages since the last Penguin Classic and there’s fun stuff coming up after this one. After Alas comes Alcott, and then Horatio Alger, and then, whoa! Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, one of the funniest books ever and long overdue for a re-read.
