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I've just returned from a busy trip to Florida where I had to empty out my aunt's home after it sold so that it could close in February. These are the two books I took along to read:
The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar
and
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Neither book was boding well with dead child and high school shooter subject matter, but I had nothing more compelling at hand. It's just as well. There was so much to do, that having books I didn't really want to be reading didn't distract me from the task at hand.
The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar was a dnf (did not finish). I loved Thrity's The Space Between Us for so many good reasons, but especially for the glimpse into the lives of everyday women in India. The Weight of Heaven is about an American couple whose 7 year old son died. They move to to India with the husband's company in an effort to revive their failing marriage. I don't even know what else, because halfway through I put this down and started on the Kevin book.
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - Here's a downer. For the first time I'm going to be a plot spoiler in order to save you. Here's how I read this book: Read one fourth of the way through and was going to put it down except then I'd have nothing to read when I fell into bed physically exhausted but unable to sleep right away. So I skipped the middle half of the book and started somewhere in the back. I'd only missed that now Kevin had gone from being an only child to having a 6 year old sister. The author writes the book in a series of letters to her husband who is no longer in the picture after their son did what he did. The author/narrator is a sarcastic judgmental woman who writes travel books. She's critical of people, but doesn't have an evil streak; still she is quite remorseless. I don't know whether her son was born with his predilection for mean acts and remorselessness or whether his mother gave that to him with the attitudes he picked up from her. That is the great question of this novel. Nature or Nurture? There are some unexpected twists at the end. Near the end of the book, I was angry with this male author who dared to write as a woman and mother. At the end of the book there are author discussions, and it turns out that Lionel is a woman, albeit childless, and she is very like her narrator. I will concede that this could be an interesting read, but not for the prurient reasons that the author espouses. I wouldn't want to do it again, and I can't wait to find some wonderful and compelling story to read next.
Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More - I'm listening to this CD as I write today, and I like it. Mumford & Sons is an English folk rock band formed in 2007 from what Wiki tells me. I first heard them on WXRT a couple of months ago, and it's an album I want to listen to until I know the words. I don't learn the words to songs like I used to. There is so much variety today. With iTunes, you listen to different music rather than the same thing over and over like we used to do with records and CDs. With everything new, you lose the catharsis of the familiar, to quote Peter's track coach who is also an english teacher. In that case, I'm going to fire up Sigh No More once again.
Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese - What a story~ It's about Africa and surgeons, and twins, and India and family, and love, and personalities, and immigrants, and family secrets and it sprawls, even though it's the small story of one person's life. As the narrator says, though, the stories of the others become part of our story because without those people and their stories, we wouldn't be here. I just finished it this morning and even went back to the beginning to catch the foreshadowing of events that were later explained. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. I'm not sure that I can write any more without giving something away. This is a book that you want to go into with no clue as to what it will be about. I wondered at the title, Cutting For Stone, and right away I guessed at its meaning, and although I was close, the real meaning came almost at the end of the book.
I've not accomplished a whole lot on the sewing/crafting/organizing fronts. There has been a lot to do this week outside our home, and the little tasks took a lot of time. Also logged more time on the telephone than usual, and it all adds up. Nothing got any worse though, so that's a new kind of progress, and I'll take it.
How can it POSSIBLY be 3:30 on Sunday afternoon? I've hardly done a thing today, including showered or washed my hair which I have to do since we're going to Nancy and Johan's for a Superbowl Party any time after 4:30. I was awake early, read Cutting For Stone and am now halfway through it, but must take an intermission to return it to the library and read Books 1-4 of The Odyssey for a Parent Book Group at school on Thursday night. Our freshmen are going to be reading it, so this is an opportunity to read what they are reading, which I often do anyway. I think I may have read it ages and ages ago, and am looking forward to it, especially since the moderator is passionate about this book, as well as being Peter's Track Coach. DIGRESS! (Does anyone remember Holden Caulfield's digress rant?) I once dated a guy whose last name was Caulfield, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that his last name was a major attraction to a very nice but non literary person. Steve is not literary, but he reads the Tribune every day, and he loves to read his BMW magazine as well as schematics. DIGRESS!
What else did I do today? I made this Chocolate Tart
from Wednesday's Tribune Food Section. Nancy asked if I would bring a dessert, and I am always happy to oblige with a dessert. 99% of the time it will be a chocolate dessert. I think it will be really yummy. I substituted Rum for the Cassis or orange rind, and only used 1 Tablespoon of unsweetened cocoa rather than two. I made a regular graham cracker crust rather than the chocolate wafer crust or plain graham cracker crust that was indicated. I also changed the cage and fed Pretty Bird,
and took a few pictures of her. Played 10 games of Scrabble, and all my partners must have much more interesting lives than I do, because none of them has then taken another turn. I read yesterday's mail, talked on the phone to my mom a few times and Michelle once. This is extremely lame, so now I am going to make at least a modicum of progress (can progress be measured in modicums?)(or might it be modicae?) DIGRESS. OK, I'll get the pictures of the tart and Pretty Bird on here and go to the guest room. I started to title this post Sunday Afternoon Rationalizations, but have changed it to Sunday Afternoon Ruminations, since I haven't rationalized anything. I have no excuse or rationalization for wasting my time today. DIGRESS. I love chocolate.
It's that peaceful middle of the night time (only about 1:30) and I enjoyed TV night in my chair with a nice line up of the Thursday night NBC comedies and Detroit 1-8-7 (I love that show). I fell asleep nearing the end of the Joan and Melissa show where Joan Rivers moves from NYC to LA to live with her daughter. Melissa is pretty together and down to earth, and Joan is just all over the board. On the one hand she's pretty much fun, and on the other she has no boundaries. I know that you know this, but to see their mother daughter dynamic is comforting somehow no matter how crazy it gets, because my friends and I have some of these same mother daughter issues. Not the issues, exactly, it's more the way they communicate with each other. There's this nice love and respect between them, but the daughter has to be VERY patient, VERY loving, and VERY forgiving. I suspect that I'm not the only daughter who relates. I love reality TV. My grandmother and dad would have loved it, too.
I came upstairs to go straight to bed so that I could read a little. However the computer beckoned, and I thought there couldn't be any harm in checking my email. There wasn't any harm. There were six emails including one to buy the car I'm selling on Craigslist in Florida. Then I checked in and played 3 Scrabble games on facebook. I had a Bingo in one of them, PROBATE, but there was absolutely no place to play it on the almost empty board. Bummer. While waiting to see if any of my Scrabble partners were up and taking turns, I got rid of the "messages" that I'd been ignoring, changed my profile picture from snow Dianne to summery Dianne,
and checked Scrabble again. No one was on, so I came over to my blog to report that I'd gotten started in a big way on the office/guestroom organization. The reason I might not be able to sleep is the same reason I didn't fall asleep in the chair earlier than I did. I've been night eating in a big way. Whole grain Tostitos, first with melted swiss cheese, and then right out of the bag when the healthy snack didn't do the trick. After that I needed something sweet, and brought the bag of Peanut M&M's into the room. I'm all salted and sugared now. And I need my sleep because there are a million places to go tomorrow. omg, I forgot to wrap Peter's present. His birthday is tomorrow. Here I go. I'll put it in his room so that it's there when he wakes up in the morning. I love that boy.
Moonstruck - Before it's over, I'll probably review Moonstruck 25 times! I woke up this morning to check the weather on TV, then did some flipping, and Moonstruck was playing on AMC. That was it for plans for getting up early to face the day. This is one of my top ten all time favorite movies. Charming, quirky, watchable, characters, dialog, it's all you could want in a movie, and if you've never seen it, please go out and rent it to watch this weekend. You'll fall in love with Loretta Castorini and Ronnie Cammareri. It's the kind of movie where I'm glad I'm not them, but still want to be them. Just for a while.
In the meantime, my office/sewing room and our guestroom are once again an unacceptable mess. Right now I'm going to start making inroads on this. I've already completed the ironing, so there are not distractions to keep me from the project. Let's take a look at the situation:
Well, we can't. The browse for photo isn't working now. Yea! Maybe I'll just post after pics later on. I also have before and after of the kitchen counter stools ready to go. OK, enough avoidance. First thing is to empty the bottom shelf out in the guestroom and put all the dining room linens there from their former months long spot on a chair in the living room ever since I sold our big dresser. The clothes that were in the big dresser were put in the dresser that formally housed the dining room linens. Stop writing and get to work, Dianne!
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin - This book was so good that I've read it in a burst of passion over the last three days. It's about an Irish girl named Eilis (I've been pronouncing it I-lis with a long I at the beginning and short i for the second syllable). There are no jobs in her small town, and she gets the opportunity to travel to America to work so that she can send money home to her mother and sister. She goes to Brooklyn, lives in a small boarding house run by an Irish woman, and works at a small department store. It takes place after World War II in the late 1940s. This is a charming story, about Eilis' life as a single woman alone on her own across an ocean. The story develops into a love story, and the last chapter absolutely gripped me as Eilis had to make an impactful decision that would affect the rest of her life. Not only did I love the cover art, but there was a small blurb on the cover "Twice Shortlisted for the Booker Prize". I love the Booker Prize books.
