John was lucky for a few reasons this week:
1) He didn't go to the gulf coast with a church group this week, which there was some talk of him doing, so that he was here when:
2) He told me, yes, he needed to go to the ER on Monday, instead of staying at home or being stranded at a work site in Mississippi, where his appendix probably would've burst before he had a chance to
3) Have his sick, useless appendix taken out Monday night.

I'm relieved that he didn't go on the trip, that we did go to the ER, and that the surgery did the job without causing any complications. John's been home all week, working a little from home. He's still not completely back to normal, what with the tenderness that apparently accompanies having an antiquated organ removed from your body with the medical version of a drinking straw making bending at the waist a little uncomfortable. So we stayed in the apartment all weekend and I did laundry and read.

I'm pleased beyond words that I finished three books this weekend. Two of these books I started months ago and have been whittling away at a disappointing pace. The other one I started only weeks ago, which is still pathetic, but not so much so. The ebb and flow of books in my life has been truly out of control lately. So much so, in fact, that I didn't finish a single book in the entire month of March. I need to go through all my books again, as I had in our previous apartment, and separate all the books that I have yet to finish (or, in some cases, even start) so that sheer shame alone will keep me on task.

In my defense, one of the books I tried reading last month was The Grapes of Wrath, which has an entire chapter devoted to a turtle walking through a field and is over 600 pages long. Not that this is much of a defense, I realize, because I actually sort of liked the turtle chapter and found the chapters with dialogue to be rather boring.

Anyway, I finished three books this weekend and have grand plans to continue on this self-inflicted punishment of "finishing things." The one of the three I had started most recently was Lorrie Moore's Like Life, a book of short stories. I think Lorrie Moore may be my favorite writer. I've never had a favorite writer before, so claiming to have one feels weird and unnecessary, but I think it's warranted. Of her five books, I've read three. (I would love to start one of the others tomorrow, but that would be in direct contradiction to my whole scheme of "finishing things," so I won't.) The other books of hers I've read are Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, a novel, which is my favorite, and Self Help, another book of short stories. My copy of Self Help is a used hardcover with an elegantly hideous, oh-so-eighties, pink dust jacket:

Like Life is amazing. There are these moments, about one in each story, where I just had to close the book and pull it to my chest. Some touching or horrifying moment when the world of the story changes or my world changed because of the story, I'm not sure.

Labels: books.

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