Yesterday, I got a very depressing email from American Girl. Apparently, they're not going to make Samantha dolls anymore. I'm heartbroken. It's ridiculous how upset this makes me, actually.

The way they're wording it is, "After more than 20 years as a beloved historical character, this American Girl original will soon say farewell. At that time, Samantha’s collection—including Nellie and her accessories—will be placed into the American Girl Archives so that we may preserve her place in history."

The American Girl Archives? Seriously? That sounds waaay too much like the Disney Vault. (And what's with the Disney Vault, by the way? Rerelease "Beauty and the Beast" already, come on. How do they keep selling toys of characters from movies you can't currently buy? How does this new crop of kids see these movies? How does this make any sense?)

I didn't have a lot of friends as a kid. I loved dolls and reading and the idea of those two things mixing together was like heaven. I could read by myself. I could play with my fancy-pants doll by myself, too, since I'd never be willing to share her. Plus, I got Samantha at around the time my sister was growing too old to play with me. Being "into" things like American Girls dolls and my Playmobil dollhouse and wrapping string around stuff / making weird crafts was really what I perceived as being my identity, although I'm sure I didn't realize it then.

And so now, when I'm already shaken up by this economic crisis and how it's beating the crap out of my little business and others like mine, now is not the time for bad news. The books aren't going out of print, but it's just not the same. I never even wanted my car as badly as I wanted that doll. I've still never wanted anything as much as I wanted Samantha. In the months leading up to that Christmas, I think I even slept with the catalog. I know it's not like they're going to come and take mine away, but, she's an antique now. She's vintage. And I'm old.

Labels: books., childhood., me and the awesome things I like., toys.

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Yesterday I finished reading an advance copy of a book called The Little Giant of Aberdeen County that I picked up when Mom and I were at BookExpo this summer. It comes out in January, so I've actually read it in time to contribute to the Indie Next List, which I haven't done yet. The book started out really strong. It felt whimsical and fantastical and magical and all sorts of things that end in -ical. But then it took this turn... And I can't quite explain it, but the writing style seemed to change, the plot got really weird, and suddenly I wasn't sure I liked the main character. Somehow though, I felt compelled to see it through to the end. I'm glad I did, just because it would've felt mean and wasteful not to, but I'm not sure what to think.

I've started another book that also comes in in January that's called Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. I find the title trite and reminiscent of a bad 90's album title, but the story is promising, so...fingers crossed. I don't have much energy for it now though, having rushed through Little Giant without much reward.

The beginning was sooo good! I think it was almost worth reading all the way through. Maybe.

Labels: books.

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The bookstore has been dead quiet today. Strike one: It's Monday. Strike Two: It's rainy. Strike Three: All the blossoms have gone from our mums. Maybe the rain will inspire them to be flowers again instead of boring green plants.

In the absence of customers, I ignored my other responsibilites and read all afternoon. I've just finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Oh. My. Goodness! This book was like a visit from the Easter Bunny. I laughed out loud multiple times throughout the book because it is so witty and charming. I fell in love with every single character. Truly. In love.

I've been writing reviews for the store's website, but I'm so excited by how much I enjoyed this one that I'm afraid to write anything. I'll look like a fool who has fallen in love with the book everyone has fallen in love with lately. I want to at least have the mystique of being a discerning and thoughtful reader...even if the actuality is that books just fall into my lap and I seem to confuse them with kittens: Aren't they all lovely? Well, of course they're not. I've read awful books. And I don't write about those either.

Labels: books., the bookstore.

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I put up a review of The Lace Reader on the store's website earlier today. I finished it last night at the store. At 6 o'clock it was time to close up and I still had about 10 pages left, so I turned off the lights, locked the door and hid in the office to finish it.

Our first few days have been slow, but today I went around to some of the other businesses closeby and passed out buiness cards. And I posted my first (I think) MySpace bulletin. Sara says I'm "networking." I feel more like I'm begging. But that hasn't stopped me yet!

It was so exciting for me to actually finish a book! I've been so busy lately that I've barely read at all.

Labels: books., the bookstore., work.

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Yesterday I had my yearly "inspection" at the lady doctor, who is, contrary to the name I use, a man. It was uneventful, for the most part. They did have to draw blood from me though, since they're testing my kooky thyroid levels, and that was rather painful. My veins are stubborn, finicky, and prone to hiding. I've been turned away during a Red Cross blood drive. Sorry, dear, you're just too much trouble. You may have a cookie anyway though.

As a reward for not crying or asking anyone why the paper sheet was ever thought to be a good idea, I bought three children's books from a bargain bookshop. Edith and Mr. Bear and A Gift from the Lonely Doll by Dare Wright were two of them. A couple of years ago I read a biography of Dare Wright called The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright. Her life was truly bizarre and totally fascinating. Last night I found a website that seems to be run by the woman whose pictures and stories formed the backbone of the biography I read...though the book isn't mentioned on her site. Perhaps she didn't approve of the finished product? At any rate, I now own the only three children's books by Wright that are still in print (the other one being The Lonely Doll). And all three of them are kind of strange. I don't think I'd feel comfortable showing them to a child, since there's something subtly sexual and subversive about them all. Basically, they're creepy. I like them because they're so weird. Actually, I don't really know why I like them. The fact that they're so weird is interesting, yes, but I think I just found the story of their author so interesting that her books are interesting by default.

The other book I got was a version of Disney's Cinderella. It's a Reader's Digest book, which are always a little strange. For example, this book doesn't have an ISBN listed on it anywhere, which feels very much like I've found a book that doesn't actually exist. Anyway, the illustrations by Retta Scott Worcester are beautiful:



They're the same illustrations from the original Little Golden Book from the 40's, which is back in print. I was thrilled to find this book yesterday, since I didn't know there was a Little Golden Book version available until just a second ago. I'd seen the artwork at the last exhibit I saw in the Disney Gallery, which was all about vintage Disney storybook art. It was a wonderful exhibit, but it just made me sad, since the gallery closed shortly afterwards (to become the Disneyland Dream Suite...which I think was a terrible idea). I'm planning on making another shrinky dink bracelet that's all Cinderella. I have a better idea of what I'm doing now, so it should turn out a little more consistant.

Labels: books., disney.

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Yesterday I finished a book called Denison, Iowa that, a quick search through my archives tells me, I started reading in September...of 2005. I don't think that speaks well of me or the book. It really doesn't feel like that long ago, either, since I've picked at it occasionally over the past couple of years and always remembered what was happening. There's something weird about starting a book when it's new (I started reading it shortly after it was published) and finishing it after enough time has passed that it needs an epilogue to update it. It was a good book though, I guess. Not good enough that I felt compelled to read it in a timely fashion, but there are lots of better books that I've left unfinished for even longer.

I also finished reading Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, which I only just started shortly before we moved. (The move upset all the books I was reading, actually, and this was the first I've recovered.) It's sort of about diagramming sentences. More than that though, it's an essay on growing up in a particular time and place and the way education can shape personality. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here's one of the many things I learned from Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog... On the day Ernest Hemingway was born, his mother wrote this: "The sun shone brightly and the robins sang their sweetest songs to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world."

Labels: books.

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I'm feeling kind of sick lately. I hate going to the doctor, but I actually went through with it today. I went to the same doctor I went to when I was a child. This man was actually there in the hospital on the day I was born. And I'm pretty sure his offices have not been remodeled since before I was born. Same weird orange paint. Same ugly, gray wood cabinets.

As for what's wrong with me, I don't really know. It's probably just that my prescriptions need to be updated and dosages re-evaluated and whatnot. I have to have blood work done. I'm susceptible to feeling faint and dizzy whenever I have blood drawn, so that's sure to be a day of fun.

While I was in the waiting room, I finished a rather long story in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. I generally love Lorrie Moore's stories, but the one I was reading today did nothing for me. I kept flipping back to the end of the story to see how many pages were left. I was actually hoping it would take a long time to be called in to see the doctor, just so that I'd be forced to finish it, since I've left the book just sitting around after starting that story. I have high hopes that the remaining stories will, in fact, not suck, since her writing is usually pretty spectacular.

Labels: books.

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Yesterday I finished reading the Hemingway novel that everyone says is his worst: To Have and Have Not. I've owned this book since at least '99, but hadn't read it. I originally bought it as a junior in high school for the huge research paper I had to write. It was one of three books I focused on, but I never actually read it. I just picked through it and pulled out quotes. Not the way to enjoy a book or write a paper.

I finally started reading it last week on a vacation with my mother-in-law, her two sisters, her mother, and a friend. We took a cruise from Miami to Calica, Mexico, by way of Key West, where we toured the Hemingway house. While it was interesting to be there, the house didn't feel very authentic. It felt more like a money-making scheme than a museum and our guide was just a little too practiced. A little too smooth. I'm not saying they shouldn't have a uniform speech that all the guides say, but this one made me feel like he wouldn't be able to answer any questions not covered by his spiel. That's probably not true, either, but that's how it felt.

I started reading To Have and Have Not on the plane to Miami because I knew it took place in Key West. Maybe it is his worst, but I really liked it, actually. My problem with it has nothing to do with the content, but with the synopsis on the back of the book. It ends by saying that Harry Morgan's "adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair." Doesn't that sound like he'll fall in love? Or maybe, I don't know, at least meet a woman? Well, Harry only talks to two women in the whole book, one of which is his wife. I have the sneaky suspicion that whoever wrote the synopsis read about as much of the book as I did in high school. Either that or they just watched the movie. I haven't seen the movie, but I did a little research on it yesterday and found out that it takes place about ten years later (present day for the year it was made) than the book and instead of smuggling Cubans in Key West, he's trying to get members of the French resistance away from the Nazis. Oh, and of course he isn't married yet. Lauren Bacall plays a character named Marie, which is the wife's name in the book.

Except for a stack of four, all my books are still in boxes, waiting for me to build shelves for them. As I sit here, anticipating what will feel like Christmas when I get to unpack my books and put them on new, custom shelving, Amazon.com, a.k.a. Enemy #1 for independent booksellers everywhere, is pushing its new ebook. For the record, I'm anti-ebook. I hate the idea completely. It was on the cover of Newsweek, with the subheading, "Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the book itself." This annoys me on so many, many levels.

Labels: books., family., travel/tourism.

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After a very full weekend, I'm trying to make use of my first day of not working. So far, I've taken John to work and uploaded photos. I'm picking John up later so we can go to a party tonight close to the studio. Why? Because tonight's episode of Slacker Cats was one of the two animated by the studio where John works and they're having a party, that's why! Technically, John's work has been on TV before, but not animation, so this is pretty cool.

As I said before, our weekend was pretty packed. It started off with seeing Pink Martini at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night. They were fantastic! It was the first fireworks show John and I have been to, as well. I'd been to a fireworks show as a kid, but I didn't really remember it. We saw a falling star during one of the first few songs, while we sat there eating our picnic-style dinner. Just the kind of evening LA is really good at.

Saturday we went on a 3-hour whale watching trip out of Long Beach (Rainbow Harbor, right next to the aqaurium, to be exact). We saw at least six blue whales and a couple of them surfaced twice. Here are some of my pictures. The whales are actually gray, but when you see them just under the surface they're this beautiful aqua color. We also saw several sea lions and pelicans and a swordfish.

To wrap up, because I need to get busy and run some errands:

Yesterday we stayed home and watched the Titans come very close to beating the Colts. I finished reading Away, which was pretty good. And we saw 3:10 to Yuma, which was pretty awesome.

Okay, gotta go!

Labels: books., John., los angeles is weird., movies., travel/tourism.

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This is my last week at work. Today I bought a few things I've had on hold for months, which was way more exciting than it probably should've been. But, putting it in another context, these may be the last books I'll buy for...a while. (My sister keeps talking about this place called a library...?) After Friday, I'll have to pay retail for books. It's like some crazy nightmare that I never saw coming.

Labels: books., work.

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Last night was the big Harry Potter release party. It was a huge success. All the planning and organization really paid off. John was there and took lots of pictures. He said a group of kids started calling him Colin.



I made five snitches like this one, which we hung in various places around the store. Three of them and two brooms were suspended from tree branches over the patio.

I bought a copy of the book, just because it felt like the right thing to do. I'm still reading Goblet of Fire.

Labels: books., sewing/crafting., work.

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Sitting in our 'fridge right now is a bowl and a half of banana pudding. This is actually less than I was expecting to have left over. I made three big bowls of it to take to a church function tonight, not really knowing how many people would come. John and I are on the Mission Team and this year the team has chosen to support the Red Bird Mission in Beverly, KY. Our program tonight was called "A Night in Appalachia," because we were informing some of the people of the congregation about the mission and the region it's a part of. My banana pudding was a "regional" treat. Only I didn't make it the fancy way. I used instant Jell-o pudding and Cool Whip.

On Friday, the store where I work is having a Harry Potter midnight release party for book 7. That's in two days. We don't have the books. And we won't get them until Friday. Because Scholastic is freaking out that people will read it early and destroy all the fancy-pants secrets of who lives and dies or who ends up with whom. So because a bunch of meanies want to ruin the fun for everyone, I'm on pins and needles planning a party for a book I've yet to see.

Add to that the fact that our children's section is being / has been rebuilt this week. In fact, our carpenter is probably in the store right now installing some shelves.

On Monday, the book buyer and general manager of the store, who has been living in another state for two years, had her first day back in the store. So, I finally met the person I've been talking to on the phone nearly every day for over a year. It was sort of like meeting Charlie from Charlie's Angels. (At least, I guess that's what it was like, since I never really watched that show.)

Also on Monday, my old boss showed up at the store.

What a crazy week! I'm really looking forward to Saturday. We're probably not going to do much this weekend, so maybe I'll actually read. Or sew.

Our church and both of our jobs know that we're moving back to TN this fall, so I'm starting to feel the pressure of needing to prepare for that. John and I went to Lowe's this weekend and picked out stuff for the house we'll be moving into. (My parents own a little house in the woods that no one is using anymore. My sister lived there for a few years after she got married.) The house needs a little work, like new ceiling fans and paint.

We saw the new Harry Potter movie on Saturday, after going to Lowe's. I really liked it a lot, but the third one is still my favorite.

That night, I think I dreamed about Harry Potter flying around my new bathroom. But the details are a little fuzzy, so I'm not sure.

Labels: books., food., movies., work.

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John wasn't feeling so hot this morning, so instead of going to church I spent my morning finishing Somewhere in Time. It's the first book I've ever read that wasn't better than it's movie adaptation. The movie is actually quite a bit better. Not that the book is bad, exactly, but the writing is a little too sappy, a little too contrived. Plus, the movie has such fantastic music.

If you haven't seen the movie version of Somewhere in Time, you should. It's just one of those movies everyone should see, even if they don't like it. Like Sunset Blvd. or the first Indiana Jones.

There are a few differences between the book and the movie that don't really effect the plot. For example, the book takes place at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego (the hotel from Some Like It Hot--another movie everyone should see, even if they don't like it) and the movie centers around the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. When I got done reading, I googled "Somewhere in Time" because it's been a while since I've seen the movie and I was curious about what other differences there might be. I found the website for INSITE, the International Network of Somewhere In Time Enthusiasts. These people mean business!

Yesterday John and I were listening to a popcast of Spy Vs. Pie, a show done by some guys John knows, and they were talking about the idea of owning a portrait or piece of artwork from a movie. (John would pick Vigo from Ghostbusters II, which I think is super creepy.) I couldn't really think of anything. I couldn't think of any portrait or art from a movie at all, much less one that I'd actually want. And then today I found this: the portrait of Elise. Seriously? Is there anything creepier than that? I mean, if someone hadn't seen the movie and didn't recognize Jane Seymour, it'd just look like an old picture of a relative. Which makes it creepier, right?

One thing I don't think is creepy (partly because I've owned a Phantom of the Opera monkey music box for years) is the Grand Hotel music box. In fact, it would make the perfect birthday present for my sister...except that it's $500.

My favorite thing about the INSITE website? The "back" button is a penny.

So awesome!

Labels: books., movies., music.

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I couldn't stop reading In Persuasion Nation this week. It's been a long time, if ever, that I've read anything so funny and depressingly true. The stories are great--original, skillful, and haunting. While I appreciate that, yes, it is satire, the sheer power and ruthlessness of advertising that Saunders explores feels very much like the plain truth.

There's an iPod ad at Santa Monica Blvd and Highland that's literally the entire side of a building. And it changes. Every few months or so there's some new silhouetted person, dancing so excitedly while the cord from their earphones swings maniacally through the air, always looking like they're either going to accidentally hang themselves or fall out of the ad and step on some poor, unsuspecting semi. Because they're always big enough to crush a semi with one foot. Do we seriously need ads that large? No. We. Don't. The iPod itself keeps getting smaller and smaller, but when I was last at the Griffith Observatory, that freakin' ad was the only thing I could recognize while looking down into Hollywood--because then, on the top of a mountain, looking down, it was a reasonable size.

A book I ordered finally came off backorder today. I was probably a little more excited about it than I should've been. But it's just so purdy. In Stitches by Amy Butler. Makes me wanna buy fabric.

Labels: books., political stuff., sewing/crafting.

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I'm delighted to say that I've just finished reading a book so new and fresh that there aren't any Amazon reviews for it yet. This is really nothing to be proud of, but I am proud of it. Ha, you horrible reviewers! You clowns who never agree with me on anything! Ha! I've beaten you! You will not mar my fresh approach, my mind clear of preconceptions! I win!

Except, of course, that I don't win. Not this time. The first I heard of this book was a few weeks ago when I stumbled across a promotional website. Never before have I ever had the experience of liking a book's website more than the actual book. But such is the case for Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You, which you can take or leave, and its website, which I hope you will look at and find as funny as I did.

That being said, one of the stranger things about my particular reading experience was that I kept seeing Lyon, a character in the last story, as Dakota Fanning (this actually makes some sense, since the story did have elements similar to a couple of her movies, but whatever), who I saw in a Marc Jacobs ad yesterday looking like death in fancy glasses and a lop-sided kimono. She looked as healthy and original as an Olsen twin. I finally found the photo here. Who would do that?

That weird little problem didn't arise until the last story, so it's wasn't really a factor in my opinion of the book as a whole. And actually, I'm not really sure what to think of the book as a whole. It was interesting and quirky, but crass unexpectedly and, I think, a little gratuitously.

Labels: books.

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I so love Stephen Colbert. He's on my tv now and, even though he isn't what I was planning on talking about, seeing his smiling face makes me unable to talk about anything else. He's just so darn cute.

Okay, enough ooeygooey Colbert love. The city is on fire. Literally. The zoo closed early. You know how I love the zoo. The pictures are all over the internet and they're terrifying. The Los Feliz area has been evacuated and most of the area doesn't have electricity. John and I went and oogled it this evening.

In lesser news (much lesser),I finished The God of Animals Sunday night. I loved so much of it, I hate to give it anything less than a glowing recommendation...but... I don't know. I enjoyed reading it and the characters were great...but... I don't know. I think it's worth reading. I'm glad I read it. That's enough, right?

Labels: books., los angeles is weird., tv.

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I just finished Diane Smith's Pictures from an Expedition.

It wasn't as good as Letters from Yellowstone, but I liked it. (This is what I had to say about Letters from Yellowstone.) I think the idea of the story was good, but the execution left something to be desired. I just wasn't all that into the characters and the dialogue was a little belabored. Still, it was interesting. It deals with all the hurtles a paleontology expedition in Montana would've encountered just after the Battle of Little Big Horn. I'd never thought about Custer and dinosaur excavation happening simultaneously, so that was interesting.

Labels: books.

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I'm in love with the Library Thing. It gives you suggestions based on the libraries of all it's members. You can also have an online catalog for your own personal library. Here's mine. (It's not all the books I own...but, as I'm always whining about, I haven't read most of what I own anyway.) My profile is here.

Labels: books.

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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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I'm trying to read Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones, which was a National Book Award Finalist last year, but I'm having some serious problems. I have to keep pulling out my laptop every five minutes to look up some aspect of Chinese, Asian, or Communist history. How did I graduate college? I barely recognize Mao Zedong as an important name. I just realized today that the protests in Tiananmen Square happened while I was alive. That's ridiculous! How did I not know that?

Labels: books.

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I'm stuck in the middle of a book I don't really want to finish. But I sort of have to. It was lent to me by someone who thought I'd really like it and I'll feel like a jerk if I don't finish it before giving it back. I only have about a hundred pages to go...but it feels like a lot more than that.

Meanwhile, I totally ignored the boring book and read Letters from Yellowstone over the weekend. And I loved it. It's in the genre of historical fiction, a genre I do not often find myself drawn to at all really. I bought it 2 years ago while in Yellowstone with my family, taking the long route to LA and a new life of sorts. I bought it because, at the time, I was so enamored with the place that I thought anything at all about it seemed destined to hold my undivided attention. Plus, this particular paperback was a signed copy, long lingering after a book signing in the park that probably happened years before. The thing I so enjoyed about the book was that I genuinely felt transported. I've seen the things the characters were seeing, except that they're scientists and see (at least they would, were they not fictional) the world in a way that is much different than I do. They really see it. They have given names to it. These are the things the book is about, actually, as botanists in 1898 write letters home to their friends and family and try to decipher the boundaries of Science. As I said, it's nothing like what I normally read, but it made me remember my time in Yellowstone and it had a truly lovely passage about the group formed in the park and how they had become a family that is right on target with a lot that has been going through my mind lately. I went to work yesterday and ordered a copy each for my mom and my sister along with a copy of Diane Smith's second novel, Pictures from an Expedition, for myself.



I talked to my dad for about five whole seconds yesterday. That seems to be about all I can take some days. I hear his voice and fall to pieces. Yesterday, especially, since it was September 11. He came to see me at college five years ago yesterday and ate in the cafeteria with me and watched TV's tell us what we already knew. My dad's voice is like a song that I forget I love hearing until it comes on the radio in my car and makes me want to pull off the freeway and park somewhere, anywhere, so I can just listen. Plus, it was my grandmother's birthday. His mother's birthday. And I really need her advice.

Labels: books., family., political stuff.

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So, weekend before last, John and I spent Saturday at the Huntington Library. It was beautiful and the book room made me breathless. I literally had to stop and breathe. Here's an example:



This was, like, the least cool book we saw and it's actually pirate booty. Are you catching this? Captain Morgan's (yes, that Captain Morgan) pirate booty was the least impressive book we saw. Ponder that one. Two words: Gutenberg Bible.

Jim and Adam were here over this past weekend. They went back to Atlanta yesterday morning. And John and I still haven't quite recovered.
Here's John getting home Thursday afternoon and finding his buddies hanging out in our living room. He didn't know they were coming...hence the odd, confused smile he's wearing.
Here are some more pictures. We had a fantastic time. I didn't want them to leave. I laughed almost the entire time they were here.

Labels: books., company., friends., travel/tourism.

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Last night, I fell asleep reading a book. In fact, that's the second day in a row I've done that. And the book isn't even boring. I really like it, actually. I just can't keep my eyes open lately.

The book is Handling Sin by Michael Malone. (For those of you paying way too much attention, his name might sound familiar because he also wrote Red Clay, Blue Cadillac, which I read--now that I think about it, that was almost two years ago, actually--and wrote a review of. That is, back when I was ambitious and wrote reviews. Notice, that section of the site has been gone for quite some time.) I'm a little surprised at myself for choosing this book out of the often-referenced stacks of books that seem to be constantly underfoot in this apartment like affection-depraved cats. Why? Because it's over 600 pages long. I want to finish these books after all, so it seems odd that I picked one of the biggest I could find. It was picked for these two reasons: 1) it had somehow surfaced and was the top book in it's particular stack, and 2) I needed something funny.

It is funny. Though, I'm not that far into it, relatively speaking.

My job has been driving me a little nuts lately. Everyone keeps going on vacation and I have to get their shifts covered, when really, what I want, is to go on vacation myself. Of course. Who doesn't want that?

I will be going home to TN for the last weekend of the month. And I will be flying alone for the first time in several years. I'm embarrassingly nervous. I used to fly much more and am now totally out of the habit. Not that that is altogether bad, considering I've always hated flying, even when I was used to it. I'm going to be in town for my youngest nephew's birthday, which has never happened before.

So, because work has been driving me a little nuts, I can't sit in the recliner to read. Because I fall asleep. Because this is the closest thing to stress retail is going to get you. (I mean, really, it's not like I work for the bomb squad. People won't die if we run out of Middlesex, no matter how good people keep saying it is.)

Labels: books., work.

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Last night John and I went back to Largo to see Jill Sobule. It turned out to be a kind of strange evening.

To begin with, I started listening to Jill Sobule, sort of, when Sara and I were preparing for our trip to California in early summer 2003. Now, whenever I hear that music, some part of me thinks of Sara. Even when it's the new stuff that didn't come out until after I'd moved out here. Her voice is just that unique.

We got there really early. Stupid early. But we tend to do that. We're never sure how long things will take and tend to overcompensate. We do this so often, in fact, that I brought a book along. We sat in the car for about 45 minutes.

The book I brought, the book I've been reading, was The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. I'm hoping, but am relatively certain it won't happen, to finish it tonight after dinner. One of the characters, for reasons I couldn't begin to explain (I know this because I tried to explain it to John last night and it didn't work and I regretted bringing it up), reminds me of my grandmother. I won't call her my "late" grandmother because that strange little euphemism has always irked me for some reason, so I'll be blunt: She reminds me of my dead grandmother.

Sitting there, in her old car, at dusk in a quiet neighborhood in Hollywood, a block off Fairfax, I got lost. I can see her face, imagine her smell, remember the sound of her laugh...but I struggle to string them all together. She's become a collection of disembodied half-memories and sensations. It hurts. I can't dress it up. I don't even want to. It's just pain.

Just as the sun was disappearing, we walked through the neighborhood and stood in line, waiting for the doors to open. We got the same table as last time, when we saw Jude. We ordered.

They brought us soft bread with stiff, cold butter in little foil wrappers. I held the butter over the candle in a jar on the table. Then it was partly stiff and partly liquid. Because butter doesn't melt like I want it to.

Jill Sobule, as John said later, looks like a pixie. She's tiny and the end of her nose points down. She had on a sleeveless dress and black Converse sneakers, like the ones Sara used to wear.

It takes a lot of energy to miss someone. And I miss lots of people. I'm starting to think that's why I feel like I've never gotten enough sleep.

The music was great. She was much better than I expected, actually. Then someone requested this song off her latest album called "Joey." I know the song and most of the lyrics. She didn't. So because, like I said when I talked about the last time we were there, we were practically sitting on the stage, she asked me to stand next to her and hold her little Mac laptop with the lyrics. So I stood there. On the stage. Holding a laptop.

"Joey" is kind of a rock song. So there was a band for that one. A band that came on stage after I did. They sounded really good. Absent-mindedly, I mouthed the lyrics. On stage. She smiled at me.

Then came the chorus, where she grabbed the mic and leaned toward me "50's doo op" style, so I could, you know, sing with her. So I did. And the audience kind of laughed. Because I'm sure it was funny to see the girl from the audience holding the lyrics because the singer can't remember them suddenly lean in and start acting like one of the Supremes huddled around one mic.

And it was both awesome and mortifying.

I'm a little too shy and way too neurotic to have been able to just enjoy it. In my head, I've replayed the scene a hundred times, searching for the point where I must have done something ridiculous. But actually, I don't think I did anything but stand there and say "Joey" a few times into a microphone in front of a crowd of people I'll never see again. Except for John, who promises me I didn't make a fool of myself.

We got home late. And I was still wide awake. I stayed up too late and regretted it this morning.

A photographer was supposed to come to the store this morning to take pictures for a magazine. So, naturally, this morning I hated most of my clothes. I wore something I was trying to not wear for a while because I feel like I've worn it too often lately, but it's still something I really like--one of the only things anyone ever compliments.

I looked okay. I needed sleep. I was going through the morning, doing fine.

I picked up the phone to call the book buyer and go over today's order. As it was ringing, I looked up right into the face of Jake Gyllenhaal. He was walking by with a cup of coffee, on his way to the patio out back (the bookstore is inside a cafe), and he looked at me and smiled a "hello, you're on the phone, I won't bother you" smile and left.

As a married woman who is madly in love with her husband, I still have to say I nearly passed out. A shiver went down my spine and I got goosebumps all over. I'm actually glad he left because I don't think I could've handled him hanging out in the store. Imagine me screaming, "I love you, Donnie Darko," at the Jake Gyllenhaal, like the biggest hick loser ever because he smiled at me to say hi. I'm like Elly May Clampett or something.

After he left, he sat down at the table right outside our mostly-glass back door. There's a window in the children's' section that looks out onto that patio that has shelves in front of it that are covered in toys. The displays at this store are really important because we have so little room. So there are these little dolls with blue hair and butterfly wings hanging off the shelf right about eye level.

Last night, I sang on stage with Jill Sobule. This morning, I stood at work and looked out a window at Jake Gyllenhaal through dangling tiny feet and the bottoms of tulle doll dresses.

This is not my life.

Labels: books., friends., los angeles is weird., music.

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The job prospect that I had lined up looks like it's only going to be part-time... So, I probably can't take it, after all. Even though I did work there on Monday. And am supposed to work there again this Monday. I just found out today, though, that they might not really need me as much as they thought. Hence the "20 Hours a Week" situation.

To which I must say: Ah, crap.

Not to mention, even at full time, it would involve a significant pay cut. Of course, I'm not totally sure I'm not going to go ahead with it anyway. It's not like I have any other plans.

In the mean time, the "we're eventually closing, someday, we promise" sale going on at my present job is causing a serious storage problem in my apartment. There are now books scattered on the counter, piled on the coffee table and my nightstand, and in stacks in front of the couch and our already-totally-full bookshelves.

And in case you're wondering, no, the surplus of books has not helped me to actually finish one. I've just started more. I have no self control.

Labels: books., work.

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I've just finished reading an article from the November issue of The Believer, a magazine I overzealously believed would enter me into the fascinating world of literary fads, social criticism, and intelligent humor that I have decided is the McSweeney's Universe. In fact, the magazine's articles all sound incredible, but I have previously done little more than read Nick Hornby's recurring column "Stuff I've Been Reading" (although not the one in the issue being discussed at the moment).

Strangely enough, I actually think I will one day read all the back issues that are now standing together wedged by our make-shift bookend (two books with the same title, "A History of Art," stacked one on the other, because they are huge and we couldn't find anything else of any weight in our entire apartment) and John's reference books (including, but not limited to, at least six books with titles starting with the words "the art of..."), a new member being added to their ranks each month. I've been floating around in the craptastic world of Retail During the Holidays, while perfectly wonderful books (such as Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw and Denison, Iowa, both of which I am at least halfway through and thoroughly enjoy, but have been collecting dust on my bedside table) have been sitting around my apartment slowly rotting away from the shame of never being read. This is the battle I fight with myself.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been very depressed lately. And I received some bad news at work back in October...and I really haven't read much since then. (I did read Shopgirl, but it's a novella barely bigger than a pamphlet, really, and I wanted to read it before seeing the movie. Which, by the way, I still haven't seen.) I talked to Anna about this a couple of weeks ago and she said she hadn't read much since getting "the news" either. We work with books. Reading at home now reminds me of something sad. It's wearing off though. I'm getting used to the idea, I guess.

But when the November The Believer came, I saw the title of this article and kept thinking, I have to read that one. It's called "Other People's Bookmarks: Fellow Wanderers of a Forgotten Republic," and you can read it, in full, here.

I won't lie: I mainly wanted to read it because I was jealous that an already-established writer beat me to it. Wasn't this really my idea? Obviously, not really. It was just an idea that I happened to share.

And the article is good. Well-written. Interesting. Etc. But there's something missing, for me. Michael Atkinson doesn't include the circumstances which led up to these books coming into his possession. Sure, he mentions that he loves used-book stores and eventually comes to shop in them based on what slips of strangers' lives are peeking out from in between the pages, but it isn't until the article was almost over that I even realized he was in New York. That changed things, for me. The repeated presence of Pennsylvania and the inclusion of New Jersey seemed almost obvious then. Of course people in those neighboring states could have somehow let their books slip away into the used-book stores of New York--it's not that far away.

I've been collecting bookmarks at work for months now. And the prize of my collection is from Anchorage, Alaska. Did someone visit Alaska buy a book on shore and read it on the ferry on the Alaska Marine Highway, and then come back to their home in the Hollywood hills and forget about it for ten years until their bookshelves were so full they weeded out the stuff they'd never read again and took them down to a little store in the valley to see if they could trade them in? Unfortunately, I found this treasure, as I've found most of the bookmarks in my collection, on the floor. I have no idea what book it came out of. I found it in the room where we keep travel books, so it could easily have fallen from the pages of a book about it's origin, but I'll never know that.

I once found a thirty-year-old baptism certificate, written in Spanish, on the shelves of our science section. What was it doing there?

Also, Mr. Atkinson, being an established writer and a person who probably finishes reading books, has the luxury of clearly being employed outside of the bookselling industry. Not me! I can say with some level of modesty that in this one instance I have an insight a real writer-reader person was unable to reach:

There are some items that you cannot remove.

I have no problem collecting lost bookmarks off the floor or that lay hiding behind books, but I have difficulty removing certain items from books still on the shelves. For example, a newspaper obit that has yellowed the pages that hold it--a biography of the same person. Or, more commonly, pressed flowers and four-leaf clovers. I can't take dead plantlife out of a book that isn't mine. I just can't. For one thing, these items seem to have become disconnected from any former life they may have had and have become, all of them, one thing: book ephemera. They're not really even flowers anymore. They've become part of the book in a way even the authors themselves could not.

The sadness of pressed plantlife is that I know, really know, that that book was never read. It's not enough that, in actuality, used books can be seen (although cynically and pessimistically) as cast offs, but to know they were never read and remain unsold is just sad. Imagine your excitement when some bright young girl with braids throws open your pages, letting in sunlight for the first time in five years, and feeling your spine crack and stretch, like stiff bones or aching muscles, only to be greeted by a piece of greenery shoved inside of you and then to be slammed shut, forcing you to take in this foreign object without so much as one of your words (and you know how interesting they all are--you're a reference book--she could learn so much) ever being read. It's heartbreaking. Book and flower, forever wed in their loneliness, forgotten by both the book's owner and the flower's finder. Now they live together in musty disharmony, without the other books in the set, which may be keeping a table level somewhere in Van Nuys for all I know. The point is, to press a plant, you have to put it in a huge book that will easily go undisturbed. And when you do this, do you think you'll ever retrieve it again? Why do we press flowers anyway? What are we going to do with them? They're flat now. They'd make horrible bouquets...

I've gotten sidetracked. I have an immense guilt complex. I love books. I tend to buy them new. At first, that sounds like I don't want to be a part of the greater readership. At first, that sounds like my desire to "save" books from being unread exists only for those I've purchased--in short, that my love is conditional. But I cannot bear the weight any other way.

And let's face it... I probably wouldn't get around to reading them either.

Labels: books.

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I've been reading Denison, Iowa by Dale Maharidge. The subtitle is "Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town." When discussing which town to use for this book, Maharidge says:

[I]t became rapidly clear that this book had to take place in Iowa. One reason was that the state is geographically in the center of the nation. Another reason was its neutrality. Many Americans have built-in prejudices against certain regions and states. "Alabama" said to a northerner conjures stereotypes, just as "New York" uttered to a southerner evokes another type. And to southerners and easterners, "California" has, well, its own baggage. Iowa's neutrality is why so many fictional stories from popular culture are set in the state:The Music Man, The Bridges of Madison County, Field of Dreams.

Iowa definitely is neutral. I'm actually reading this book and I have to keep reminding myself that the town isn't in Idaho or Ohio, as all three state names play a game of musical chairs ignorance in my mind. I've driven through Iowa. About a year ago. And I can't conjure one single image.

The book is really interesting though. I like the writing well enough, even though it is clearly coming from a more cosmopolitan person than any in Denison, which is unfortunate, in a way. Denison is described, maybe not in facts but in tone, as a miniscule town. When I read that it had a Wal-Mart, I thought, Oh. I guess it isn't all that small.

I am reminded that I live in the sprawling metropolis that is LA. Not only that, but I live in the valley. If Manhattan were an animal, it would be something like a cat, with long claws, balled up and ready to pounce. Los Angeles would be a sleeping St. Bernard, legs and feet carelessly spreading out all around him.

I took a ride through Laurel Canyon with my boss today. He doesn't have a lot of respect for the double yellow lines...as in, traffic should always stay to the right of the double yellow lines. He is much more creative than that. The car was in reverse for about a fourth of the time I was in the car. Oh, yeah, and we were lost.

As we rode along (before going into the hills), he pointed at various drugstores and coffee houses and told me what the lots used to hold when he was a boy. And it occured to me that this was a man who never really left his hometown. I know he's lived elsewhere and travelled, but that isn't the same. The comfort that must bring him startles me. I started getting these weird panicked feelings about going back home for my birthday...

I'm never going to see the places I grew up in ever again. Not really. There are more new businesses in town, more houses dotting the highway. Seeing those things gradually, like my boss was able to do, at least means that you're in the loop.

I did a couple of image searches for my hometown...and the results were almost spooky: the courthouse, the stained glass windows of the church I grew up in, a guy I went to high school with, the parents of a girl I knew, Main Street during the parade, etc. Things so familiar, but totally foreign.

Maybe I should read some Thomas Wolfe. Somewhere I have a memory of a professor saying, You can't go home again. You really can't.

Labels: books., tennessee., work.

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Okay, I'm just going to say it: I'm bored. If I were about fifteen years younger, I would fear saying that out loud because I'd probably be told to clean something. Not that our apartment couldn't use a little, um, help, but today is my day off. And somewhere along the line I invented the plan of doing "something fun" on my days off.

Today has been kind of a drag. Which means, tomorrow better rock or I'll be going back to work on Wednesday in the same bad mood I left with yesterday.

My job really isn't that bad. I swear.

Today I felt like I was busy for a good portion of the day, but when my mom asked me on the phone what I'd done, I couldn't come up with anything. The truth is, at one point this morning I was sitting on my living room floor at the coffee table with a bottle of Elmer's glue, a 64-pack of crayolas, a stack of loose leaf paper, and a pair of scissors. Draw your own conclusion. (Bear in mind, the only two children I know are roughly 2000 miles away.)

I don't understand how I can love reading so much, have so many books I haven't read, and still have times when I don't want to read anything I own. It's very similar to the "I have nothing to wear" problem. I want something new. Something I've never touched before. These other books? I think some of them have missed their window of ever being read.

Labels: books.

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Did you know urban babies wear black?

Labels: books.

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I have a cold. In fact, right now as I type, I'm having one of the weird, symptomatic hot flashes that having this particular cold entails. I feel like my face is going to explode. Either because I'm so freakin' hot right now or because my air has no escape, save for my mouth. Therefore, for two days I have resembled a teenage boy, mouth agape, playing Nintendo.

The good news though, is that I'm just a little less than halfway through Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. Every once in a while, I feel the need to actually finish a book, any book, and choose one and push all else aside. Bee Season just shoved everything out of my way. I was seriously considering hiding in the history section and reading one of the store's copies today. I'm really into this book.

To my surprise, Google has much to say about Myla Goldberg, including the fact that the Decemberists wrote a song about her. What was that?! That's right, the Decemberists wrote a song about Myla Goldberg (whose author photo was really the driving force behind me actually reading this book because she's sitting on a stoop in a baggy, black dress and black-and-white-striped stockings with clunky black shoes). And. Because Jim is much cooler than I am and got John and I into the Decemberists, I've heard this song repeatedly, but without making the necessary connections, and it's on my computer right now! Maybe it's the hot flashes talking (or the cold medicine), but that's so cool to me!

I'm somewhat disappointed to find out that Bee Season is already being made into a movie. First, this shows I didn't jump on this wagon quite soon enough. And, I don't really think I agree with one of the casting choices. Plus, this is only going to interfere with my own cast, inside my head, which stars the author (as seen in her back-of-book photo) as the eleven-year-old main character, one of my ex-boyfriends circa age 14 (because he can play the guitar) as the older brother (who is actually 16 or 17), and two unknowns in the parts of Saul and Miriam, the parents. Not to mention that now people will be tempted to watch the movie instead of reading the book. I know, because I would be if I hadn't already started it. At any rate, it comes out in November. You have to time to read the book first.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to blow my nose and lay down under the ceiling fan.

Labels: books., music.

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It's been dark in the mornings this week. It looks like it would be raining. Yesterday, still in bed, I heard the water of John's shower and saw black tree trunks and shaking wet leaves on the backs of my own eyelids.

On days like this, when I can't justify the darkness of the blinds to the quietness of the inevitable sunshine, I grow fitful and restless. I pick at books like a child would pick at a scab. What's that? What's going on? It's starting to bleed... Cover it up, ignore it, do something else.

For a few moments earlier, I was reading Moon Tide, bought at something like 50 or 70 per cent off in hardcover from a bookstore downtown that's going out of business (no matter how I look at it, not a happy purchase--like taking flowers off a grave, then realizing they were fake anyway). It's not the fault of the book, of course, and I feel like I should nourish it, caress it, apologize to my new ward, rescued from certain doom: by me. And it wasn't the only one. (I haven't read the others yet either. They're stacked up on my coffee table, at attention, waiting for direction.)

I think I read three pages. Last night I read an entire chapter of Seeking Rapture, which I found to be both enthralling, because Kathryn Harrison writes like she's twisting a poem around her finger, and too adult, too boring for me to want to touch it again this morning. But an entire chapter, nonetheless. Moon Tide didn't seem to have much of a chance, pitted against my desire to open my mouth wide under a rainshower (complete with thunder, please) and my confusion as to why "sunshine" has an automatic positive connotation. How do I say "sunshine" and make it mean "relentless"? Dawn Clifton Tripp, whose book bled a little on me this morning, I've decided, had no other choice but to write books. And stacks of them. She went to Harvard! Her name--just look at it! She has Lucille Clifton and Valerie Tripp right there in her name. Dawn. Relentless. Searing the horizon. Dawn. No, I can't do it with "dawn," either.

It was happening in Massachusetts, what little I read, and the descriptions really did remind me of New England. Sometimes I forget that all my memories of New England are wrapped up in one vacation. It seems like an expanse of time. Boston! Maine! They stand out so differently than European countries that bleed into each other in my mind, probably because I saw them when I was in such desperate need of just one more hour of sleep.

My most vivid memory is the mosquitoes. Large, imposing, greedy bugs. My neck would itch and I would absent-mindedly scratch, bursting their bodies and finding blood on my fingertips and under my nails. Disgusting.

I remember a pool in Canada. I only know it wasn't raining because I am in the pool, looking out at my aunt, swatting at mosquitoes and looking like a Scottish dancer. But somehow I remember it with rain hovering somewhere in the background.

Maybe it rained the next day.

Labels: books.

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We're watching King of the Hill, the third episode out of eight showing tonight on FX's "King-sized Friday," which I'm totally devoted to. Except that this happens to be my least favorite episode (the one where Bobby gets a ventriloquist dummy and inadvertently freaks out Dale...and me...because it's just a creepy-looking doll).

I finished Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi) Wednesday night. Yestday at work I told Anna that I'd read it (she was the reason I wanted it anyway, because she said it was so good) and she said she had just started reading Persepolis 2 on Wednesday. She finished it on her break, brought it to work for me to borrow, and I read the whole thing last night. I read super-crazy-slow, but graphic novels go pretty fast. Even so, I was still pretty surprised to finish two books in a week. I literally could not stop reading them.

That Sarah Vowell book I've been reading keeps, sort of, getting less and less enjoyable. It's weird. I mean, sometimes I really like it. And I just like her style, in general. But the last story I read, about her and her sister traveling down the Trail of Tears to better understand the history of their people, just didn't sit well with me. The idea is great...but she just didn't carry it out very well. There's this one part where she's at a historical landmark near the Tennessee Aquarium and she starts getting angry because the happy kids going to see the pretty fish aren't being told about the landmark by their teacher. And while I do, to a certain degree, see her point, there's something about the way she wrote it that makes it sound like the kids should be made to feel guilty for something that happened before their grandparents were even born. She compares the Trail of Tears to the Holocaust on more than one occasion, which I think is relatively acurate...but I wonder if she begrudges little German kids and wants them to go around feeling guilty on every school fieldtrip they get to take. She even goes to the Hermitage and confronts some poor tour guide. (Andrew Jackson was largely responsible for the Trail of Tears.)

This all makes some sort of sense. I know that. But it's her attitude. Too willing to blame people who really aren't related to the issues.

Later she talks about Pea Ridge National Military Park in Arkansas, a battleground where about 800 Cherokee soldiers fought for the Confederacy. Sarah Vowell has this to say:

I'm making myself sick trying to reconcile the fact that oppressed Indians could live with owning slaves, to die for slavery's cause.

We all know, without question, that slavery is, was, and will always be, horrible. But to act as though that's the only thing the Civil War was about...well...that's just ignorant.

I'm sick of feeling like I'm supposed to be ashamed because I'm Southern. I'm not. At all. Nor am I going to defend the Confederacy. It's just that...I don't deal in absolutes.

I remember going to Shiloh as a kid. Actually, all I remember was part of the film we watched in the visitor center...the nearby creek turned red with blood. The water ran red. That's straight out of Exodus. A plague on Egypt! 150 miles from Nashville! I was terrified.

In my annoyance, I was suddenly filled with the desire to read about the history of the South. To sort of know the truth in a very symbolic, but real way. I would write a book about it. Me living in California, finding my way home metaphorically. Here are some possible titles (mainly, I'm joking):

The Battle of Burbank
A Year Without Rain (Except for a Couple Weeks in December)
Magnolia in Exile

Labels: books., childhood., tennessee., tv.

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I've been switching back and forth between Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw (Will Ferguson), Take the Cannolli (Sarah Vowell), Midnight Magic (Bobby Ann Mason), and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I've chosen these four books to alternate between because they're not in a traditional, linear format. Two are stories, one has chapters that don't really relate to each other, and Persepolis is a graphic novel...which I'll probably finish tonight. This all means that I can sample from book to book and not get confused. Not that I necessarily would, because I'm always doing this, but it makes things easier anyway.

I tried to take a picture of my knee. Yes, for the selfish, self-serving, self-whatever-other-thing purpose of putting it up here and proving that I really did bang my knee hard enough to somehow have bruises in--this is the best part--two different places. Ha! I think that's a record even I haven't set before! I'm almost kinda proud of it.

Oh... Alright. I am proud. Sort of like when I got a "heavy" tag put on my luggage at the airport. Not good either really, but a personal record nonetheless.

The pictures didn't work though. The camera kept focusing on my foot.

Labels: books.

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This morning I started reading Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson. I'm really liking it. It's funny and covers a lot of ground and time and history, but just sort of feels like it's ambling along, rather than shoving information in my face. So far it's talking about Victoria and its history and neat places...and not-so-neat places.

Isn't that a lovely thing to do on Independence Day? You know, read about the history of another country.

Of course, compared to last year, when John and I saw fireworks from Battery Park in NYC over the Statue of Liberty, nothing is going to sound that great. There's a huge chance that we will, in fact, never do anything that patriotic again. We're not even trying. There's supposed to be fireworks off the pier at this beach we like to go to, but the parking there for an event would be a layer of hell Dante could have never imagined....possibly because he pre-dates cars...no matter, the parking would have been hellish and we're used to the Disneyland fireworks. (How could some dinky Roman candles off a one-ended bridge ever compare to that?)

I did happen to catch Sarah Vowell on Book TV reading from her book Assassination Vacation. She's really funny, in a might-be-my-new-hero kind of way. And her book is about American history (you should really check it out) and is on my list of books I fully intend to read but just haven't gotten around to yet. It's right up there with Dostoyevsky. Don't give up hope Fyodor, I'm still coming for you, my long-winded, Russian darling.

So I felt like I was given a sufficient brush with the American past. Because I watched 45 minutes of Book TV. Whoever said I wasn't easy to please?

We went to see my grandmother today. After Ms. Vowell finished her reading and started signing books for people in some San Francisco bookstore, I started getting ready to go out. As I was brushing my teeth (I frequently do this while brushing, actually), I wandered across the hall into the kitchen, leaned back against the microwave and stared at our refrigerator magnets. I have a collection of those state magnets they sell at big gas station/travel center places that I got on my trip to CA with Sara in '03 and on our trip out last summer. (Incidentally, I've lost Georgia and never bought Nevada because we went through it right before stopping in LA, which meant not seeing any of the places that sell them anymore.)



As I stood there staring at my broken map, listening to the hypnotic swish swash swish swash of the brush across my teeth, I remember a puzzle my grandmother used to have. This was my grandmother in Tennessee, my dad's mom. She had this jigsaw puzzle of the US. (It alone is the main reason I know where any of the states are.) It was the kind of kids' puzzle that has a backing and you have to fit all the pieces inside it. Of course, the states don't really fit together like puzzle pieces, so there was also the outline of the individual states on the backing. I can remember lining up Tennessee and California over their respective outlines so that they looked like the only two states in a vast void of cardboard nothingness. That's how far it is to Grandma and Grandpa. That's how far it is to Fred and Patricia. And Mary Belle and Cliff. And the beach. And Disneyland.

I think Tennessee was green. And West Virginia was blue.

Labels: books.

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Sometimes John and I will be out somewhere and overhear people talking about something, like a movie, and they say something that we know is wrong. Like, for example, I don't know, they get the plot a little wrong or a character's name. It always makes me feel weird. Because I sort of want to tell them the character's name or the way the plot really goes. But I don't. Not necessarily because I think it'd be rude to say something (because sometimes it wouldn't be awkward, like, if we were all in line together at Disneyland and they can't remember Eeyore's name or something), but because I'm pretty shy.

And that feeling, that that's not quite right, but not wrong enough, nor important enough, for me to correct a total stranger feeling, was how I felt while sitting on a plastic folding chair in the very crowded Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena waiting for Nick Hornby.

I think I may have crossed the line into "weird fan."

I got there early, but not as early as I would've liked because I came from work. And most of the chairs were already taken. (At this point I happened to notice a woman who comes into the store where I work all the time...but she didn't recognize me. That was a little disappointing.) So I sat on the floor. Then this woman motioned to me that there was a free seat next to her.

The girls on my left were talking about How to be Good. And...they just didn't sound like they remembered the book...at all. I couldn't say anything though. Because they were the kind of girls that wear those flip-flops with huge flowers over the toes. And I'm the kind of girl that goes to a book signing alone and silently judges people for not knowing the...well...plot of a book they say they've read. Do you hear my judgmental tone? I'm so ashamed.

And then there was the woman behind me. She'd seen Fever Pitch, based on the book of the same name, and wondered how the ending of the book was different. Namely, whether Nick Hornby was married. And I know that he isn't. And I felt a little creepy for knowing.

The woman who told me about the empty seat was really nice. She comes to signings there all the time and lives in Pasadena.

It was a little strange. Being there alone. I mean, the three things I enjoy doing the most--reading, writing, and thinking--are things I pretty much have to do alone. But when I do things, like go to concerts or book siginings or whatever, being alone is just depressing. (For example, in May of 2002, I saw No Doubt all by myself at Riverstages. I ended up leaving early and waiting on the curb for Sara, who saw Ani DiFranco. All around bad evening.)

He was late. And when he came he had make-up on because he'd just come from filming the Late Late Show. The woman that introduced him said Fever Pitch (a memoir) was a novel. And why, why, do I care? It's not my book. And I haven't even read it.

So Mr. Hornby read from A Long Way Down, which was really funny read aloud. His voice is nothing like I thought it would be.

I got my books signed. And when he noticed I'd brought The Polysyllabic Spree, he asked if I'd read it. I said yes, and that I was surprised he asked... And he sort of laughed and put his head down. Because I made him blush.

He was really sweet and rather timid. And I made him blush.

I drove back through Pasadena, the same road I've been on every time I've ever gone to Pasadena. Because I've only ever been there to eat at the Cheesecake Factory or watch the Rose Parade. The view from the 134 heading back west was gorgeous. All those lights, stretched out for miles. And I was just coming back from a book signing of a world-famous author that I just heard about yesterday...and I just sort of remembered that I live in Los Angeles. California. As in Los Angeles.

Labels: books., me and the awesome things I like.

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Okay, so I've already mentioned that I'm reading A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, a.k.a. Funniest Man in Britain. Or maybe not. Truth is, this one just isn't that great. I mean, it's not bad really... It's just that I don't much care whether or not I finish it. After all, I have other books I could be reading that the whole world knows are good. It's a matter of loyalty, I suppose. I've read all his other novels... What if I run into him at Book Soup? (Not that I actually shop there, but I could.) Oh, sorry Mr. Hornby, I've let you down this time. I just didn't care if they threw themselves over or not. Not the most lovable characters, this lot. And I'd say the "this lot" part just to sound more British. Not that it matters anyway.



I'm in desperate need of a vacation. I've had family here and more coming soon, and that's great and all...but I physically need to move. A customer was telling me yesterday about how she accidentally left a book on a plane and wants to know how it ends. And all I could think was, Ooo. I wanna get on a plane. Pitiful. Of course, this time last year I was just about to leave Switzerland. Switzerland! Now I'm excited about maybe spending two days in San Diego!

As you may have guessed, what with the lack of entries lately, not much is going on with me at all right now. I talk about what I'm reading because that's literally (ha ha, books, literally...need vacation now) all that I've been doing. Except for laundry. Today I'm going to do laundry.

What's weird about this nothingness is that the little voice in my head (you know, the one that says things like Is that canteloupe ripe yet? and I wanna go home. I hate these people. No, we don't sell magazines. No, I don't remember who wrote The Devil Wears Prada and did you even try looking yourself at all?) it's been being very writerly lately. Sometimes I do that. My inner-monologue voice will play everything out like it's happening in a story. I'm starting to realize that this only happens when I'm really bored. As though I'm trying to point out to myself that this is the point in the story where I'd be tempted to close the book and turn on the TV.

Labels: books., travel/tourism.

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I've just finished The Polysyllabic Spree, well, basically. I have to admit, I didn't read the whole thing. The book is a collection of the essays Nick Hornby wrote for the Believer about the books he bought and/or read from September 2003 to November 2004, interspersed with short excerpts from a handful of the books discussed. And I only hesitated to say I finished the book because I actually skipped over the last two excerpts. Nick Hornby has a distinct way of writing. So much so, in fact, that he's one of those authors (like, say, David Sedaris) who shows up in blurbs for other writers' paperbacks trying to convince you that you'll like it because surely you like Nick Hornby or know someone who likes Nick Hornby or have seen a movie based on a Nick Hornby novel. What happened to me toward the end of Spree was that I didn't want to stop reading his style and start reading Patrick Hamilton for two or three pages. Would you suddenly throw your car into second gear for a few moments while going 65 down the 5? The thought occurs to me that maybe you would. My car is an automatic, after all. And besides that, when do you ever really go 65 on the 5? Perhaps I should've used a different analogy. If the thing about gears didn't make sense, and I'm not one who knows, imagine instead that you're listening to No Doubt (the early, fun stuff that most people actually like) and then there's a track of, say, Simon and Garfunkel thrown into the mix. It's not that Art and Paul aren't fantastic, but you had a certain groove going. Or again, maybe you didn't, in which case go back to the first analogy and change it around for yourself so it makes sense. I'm done with this.

The Amazon rating for this book is four and a half stars. And for some reason I'm surprised by this. Not that it isn't good--it is good. But ratings that high usually indicate run-away bestsellers like (pulling a title from a hat, so to speak) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which at this moment has 811 customer reviews and was one of the books discussed in Spree. Not to discredit Mr. Hornby's ability to pull in a vast readership, but let's face it, this is a book that hangs out in the Literary Criticism shelf with the likes of Deconstructionalism, probes into the deeper realms of Chaucer, and Harold Bloom. The people who read this book are people who are willing to read a book about books. It's quite possible that there aren't 811 of us around. Especially 811 of us who would want such a book to also be sprinkled with pop culture references and paragraphs like these:

[In So Many Books] Zaid's finest moment...comes in his second paragraph, when he says that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more."

That's me! And you, probablly! That's us! "Thousands of unread books"! "Truly cultured"! .... I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. (pages 124-125)

And yet, here I am, books on the "want" list creeping up on me like kudzu...feeling incredibly guilty for wanting to continue to bite off more than I can read. At the moment, I'm "in the middle of" (which could mean page 5 or page 100) the following books:
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Gilman
Toast by Nigel Slater
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
and ELEVEN, I've just counted, other books sitting on my shelves right now with scraps of paper poking out to say "You're not done yet, loser, get back here" that I'm not even going to list because it's been at least six months since I opened them. That's, what? Seventeen books? Do I even have enough time to finish the ones I started--not to mention all the books I wrote papers on in college without ever having read--before something drastic happens and I never read again? John and I want children eventually, after all. Can I finish all these books at the rate I'm going before there's a small child around to neglect so I can not feel illiterate for never having read Dostoevsky, who I don't even own?

Probably not. Because between now and that time, I will have no doubt bought at least 30 more books. That I won't read either.

Labels: books.

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The new thing in my life right now is that company, in the form of various friends and relatives, will be flowing in and out like waves at the beach until the middle of July. Our friend Chris got here yesterday, which was his birthday. This morning while he was reading the book we got him for said birthday, I started reading Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree.

This was a book that came in the mail a few days ago, for free, because I bought a subscription to the Believer...because I felt, I guess, that it was time John and I subscribed to a magazine. I'm not sure why, but in the moment it felt very mature and somehow solid, as though we'd be forced to not move again for a while so we wouldn't have to change our address with Our Magazine. (Why getting a CA driver license didn't give me that feeling, I'm not sure.) Also, I never seem to read as many books as I feel like I should or as many as I want to. Many of t