Your Vacation Destination

Dude! Where are you going on vacation?


Say hello to Al Franken while you're there.


Can absorb cares.


Dressed up for you!


The most interesting state.

Reading Chris Walken's Thoughts

I think he's marvelous. (photo by Yang)


The cat inspired the question mark?


I can't take zoos at all either. Depressing no matter how fine they are. ( Cat hairs on this post are courtesy of Eddy.)


Chris Walken is one of my favorite actors --ever. ever. He's up there with Marlon Brando and Gary Cooper in my favorite list. He's my favorite thing in the movie Annie Hall (it's a small scene but wonderful)

Poor Unread Books!

Just one small group of books on the endangered shelf.


Some gems can be considered losers... this explains why our local thrift shop gets withdrawn books that got loads of great reviews from The Guardian and Kirkus, and are like ... unread! Very sad.





Blimey! I read bits of this in the library and thought... Geeez! Obviously inspired by Jane Austen, but a bit too much~ Filled with run-on sentences that are packed with information.


This person wrote a number of books too, is she familiar to anyone? I'd rather re-read Jane than spend time on this one. Now I feel bad for saying that, and should give it a go.

Bookstores, Blurbs, Beginnings

I was at a bookstore and saw these "If You Lived..." books. If you lived in Colonial times... or if you lived back when Martin Luther King was still alive. Makes you think.

I finished all of the books I was reading sort of all at once. It felt that way. Now I started 3 new books, Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, and An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott. I'm finding less time to read, I'm on the road more, so I was smart enough to get all three books on Kindle where I can keep them all in one place. (In the past weeks I was carrying a lot of books around, or it felt like I was, I would forget I left Stargazey in the car, and would hike someplace and have to read something else, and I was worried about losing or damaging a library book since all the ones I checked out were in pristine condition.)

I found two more novels at the thrift shop: The Concrete Pillow a mystery by Ronald Tierney and Coast to Coast by Frederic Raphael ... and I almost passed on Coast to Coast until I saw a blurb on the back:

"Bleakly enjoyable, and filled with some really terrifically hateful conversations." ~ The Guardian

You don't see that kind of blurb everyday.

Once I got the book home I saw that the the author also wrote some screenplays and this book is sort of a companion to his 1967 dialogue for the Audrey Hepburn film "Two for the Road" - a film I like a lot. I haven't started on this novel yet. I can juggle many books, but not too comfortably if I start them all at the same time.

It's weird enough to be at the beginning of 3 books, without starting 2 more. I usually stagger things so this doesn't happen. Summer slows me way down too, lots of activity and pleasant distractions. Winter is my prime reading time.
One of the reasons I started the blog was I noticed I was reading a lot less last summer. I'm glad for the Virtual Book Club, too.

Messy Reading

I got a postcard with a picture of P.G. Wodehouse on it, so I made a little shrine to reading - the candle was too bright so a put a bottle in front of it. I really enjoyed the banana book and the Sedaris essays. Coal is interesting too (half done with that one.) I haven't started the Edith Wharton novel yet, but it's hard to leave a library empty handed. I have a mess of books to finish and am currently reading one I found in a dusty pile at a thrift shop. "I am Mary Dunne" a novel by Brian Moore. (1966.)

I found a typo in my copy of Stargazey... can you see it?
Typos used to really bug me when I was a teen, now I just shrug them off. I don't care. In my early twenties, I caught a typo ( one that everyone missed and it cost the company much $$$$$$$. ) I came back from vacation, glanced at a series of ads I'd had nothing to do with, and saw the same typo in the body copy of each one. I said "Er, in this sentence it says Pam Am Airlines instead of Pan Am!" To make matters worse / funnier, the head of the copy department was a woman named Pam. Ultimately, she was responsible. A dozen of her people had proofed that ad, and she had too. Proofing is not that easy.
That was the turning point for me, I began to think typos were funny little gremlins and was no longer outraged by them.




I prefer to read about crazed spring cleaning days rather than actually having one myself. Thankfully I'm married to a person who finds those super obsessively neat women boring. We like neatness, but we also like pillows and hairy pets and book piles and people hanging out. My neighbor is obsessively neat and just thinks the world of her sanitized self. It is kind of VERY uncomfortable over there, but then I'm sure she disapproves of my casual approach to cleaning and defense of certain germs.

Reading Others

Read this most interesting book on Kindness. Seems like I'm surrounded by opportunities. People are always misunderstanding others - it seems we cut people little slack anymore. I learned that whining and ranting are extremely popular nowadays, and that they are kind of dead ends if overdone. Revenge is a very scary dead end. I once asked an acquaintance what he would do with a million dollars and he said "First off, I'd have my enemies dealt with!" Yikes. And he was serious. Am I old fashioned for not having any enemies? Is someone out there eyeing me as their enemy? Does someone perceive me as a self centered, rude, unkind jerk? Am I just a couple of blue funks away from being denounced?




Things I never knew about O'Connor. (From The Financial Times Book Section.)



It was an eye opening book. Just when you think you have some subject figured out... you realize you don't at all.


Ants in America



The Library has one small sex shelf, but not an entire sex section. Shouldn't there be a whole room full of books on the subject? A lot of people out there doing it ~ they may need books!



The Old Paris Review Interviews are interesting.

Almost Thursday Reading

" I do not know how to express the admiration I feel for this wonderful book without seeming to be extravagant. I am usually not lavish with my praise, but indeed the book impresses me as among the very greatest novels I have ever read. It is wholly beautiful; it is saturated with wisdom and humor and tenderness." ~ H.G. Wells


Poor Contemptible Knut Hamsen (born Knud Pedersen in 1859 ) He wins a Nobel Prize in 1920, has written a couple of great books (Hunger, The Growth of the Soil) and then at about seventy years of age begins to act out in both violent and demented ways. In his eighties, frail and nearly deaf, he meets with Adolf Hitler and sees Hitler as a really nice guy. He sends his Nobel Prize to Goebbels as a gift, and angry Norwegians burn Hamsen's books. I read a bit of a biography of Hamsen and had to put it down--it was too depressing. Clearly he had become unhinged and paranoid in his golden years, but people didn't see it as mental illness back then. He was simply a traitor. I didn't know about Hamsen's craziness until I'd read and enjoyed three of his novels. My Norwegian friends tell me he was a great writer who suffered from early onset dementia and appeared to be both lucid and angry at times. Others argue he simply took on a whole new personality, believed himself to be reborn, and was quite sane. Max Von Sydow, who played Hamsen in a film said that the writer was both naive and pitiable. He had isolated himself and lost touch long before he became a contemptible fellow.

I hope I die before my brain crumbles and I do something really terribly horribly stupid.

I still can't believe he gave Goebbels his Nobel Prize for Literature... that just freaks me out.

~~~~~


The Appalachian Trail book: This is just a guidebook to tramping through... not that I would ever want to walk the entire trail. I'm happy enough to spend little bits of time on it here and there ~ so far I've walked a few dozen miles of it in Pennsylvania and New York. (not counting the miles of it I've traveled over & over again in New York.)

I haven't kept track, and I'm not always up for a hurried scramble either, although I have hiked with groups that do that, and will definitely hike with them again. I prefer to stop and observe a lot of little things, but sometimes with the group it's more about how many miles you can go in eight hours or so, especially when some of the people have to get home by a certain time. I'm a little less enthusiastic about crawling and climbing through places nicknamed the squeezer or the agony than I was when I was a kid, but then what I consider a thrill has changed a bit since I was ten years old.

I take a book with me, since some hiking groups like an hour long lunch stop / rest period. I usually take a novel.


This film is coming to my town and I hope to see it. A kind of domestic horror movie -- an eerie call from beyond the grave. Creepy.



Note:
To find out who wrote the description of New Orleans in the last post, I discovered through another blogger that all you had to do was google the first line! It was a page from Bob Dylan's memoir.