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 this explains why our local thrift shop gets withdrawn books that got loads of great reviews from The Guardian and Kirkus, and are like ...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.

Places in Reading

I go through definite phases in my reading, where I might read several books sequentially. I went through a travel book phase once ~ mainly books on France. France is an endlessly fascinating place. But I also enjoy reading about places like Antarctica.



But there's always something else going on ~ even as a kid, I would read a variety of things. I pretty much indulge in this type of reading every week. A classic, a memoir, something spiritual, a big adventure story, a fun book, a food book, a how to book, some sort of travel guide, plus assorted newspapers and magazines. Once I've gotten a good start into each book and decided, yes, this is something I want to spend time with, then I know I'll finish the book. I could read them one at a time, much in the same way I can sit in one place and watch a half-dozen episodes of the Twilight Zone back to back when they have the marathon on television. I keep my place in each book, and when I settle back into it, I usually re-read a page or two to get back into the flow.


I've read the back of the postcard many times over the years, and always wonder what the Underhills are studying. I usually end up guessing art history, or picture them in chef togs. I just don't know what those Underhills are up to. They give no clue. But the postcard reminds me of a E.M. Forster type of novel in which Underhills have some exciting and some unfortunate adventures in Paris, which leads to some great and sudden change in Mrs. Underhill. It's 1928 and the Underhills don't know that they'll lose their fortune in the upcoming stock market crash. They meet Gertrude Stein and Mr. Underhill strikes up a friendship with Picasso that goes very sour. Mr. Underhill will sigh a lot and wish they'd never come to this place! He will perhaps return to Maryland alone.


I always like it when a memoir includes descriptions of a place. Can you guess who wrote it?


The best place to read this book is at a table with a nice cuppa and a biscuit or cookie. I'm overly familiar with the biscuits listed in the book, as well as many other kinds of tea biscuits, cakes, and cookies. I have a number of favorites, but like with books, need to taste them all in the span of a year. The book is perfect for the biscuit enthusiast, and there is a cake/bread/cracker/cookie/biscuit Venn diagram ~ always fun to add to the confusion with a Venn diagram. There's also a chapter on dunking, which brought back memories of some fabulous dunks of yesteryear, and made me wonder why I stopped dunking. But the book reminded me ~ bottom sludge and breakage were factors.

A slice of cake, a piece of toast, or a biscuit with your tea or coffee is grand. Add a book, and it's heavenly.

Do You Read ...Outdoors?

The WPA guide to NYC has been a great read... and it's filled with maps and illustrations too. The wonderful thing about this Works Progress Administration Guide is that it can still be used, all these years later. The old neighborhood has hardly changed. Bodegas and newsstands may move, change owners... but generally my old neighborhood ...the landscape... looks just the same as it did way back when.


Met a man on the street ~ sitting on a bench, reading. He said the book he was reading was very good. He said he didn't want to be photographed reading outdoors, because he is against looking like a person who would be reading on the street. He said he didn't normally read on the street, but usually read inside a Starbucks.

"I don't want to project that image" he said.

I was confused. He explained that people look homeless when they read on the street.


I haven't been reading a lot of new fiction since I've been putting loads of free classic books onto my Kindle. Re-reading some very excellent Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe.) I find if I take my Kindle everywhere, I end up getting a lot of reading done. Much more than if I lug around a selection of books. (Which I used to do.) I no longer have to carry a huge handbag or tote to hold all of my books. I'm back to reading as much as I want wherever I want, but not much new fiction.







I've started to read Stargazey too, so far so good!

A Little Ray of Sunshine

I've been reading up a storm, and mostly away from home ... so blogging has been difficult. Someone recommended A Little Ray of Sunshine by Lani Diane Rich, which they called a smart, funny chick-litty type of book. I haven't checked it out yet. Chick Lit usually lets me down, but I've been told this one won't.


I've been reading a huge mix of things and am enjoying re-reading The Wind in the Willows which is marvelous.



Reading labels. This one was interesting, but American Absinthe? Really?


Interesting article on cruelty. It reminds me of a short story I read where this kind nurse (who imagines she has monumental healing and mystical powers) often feels depleted after being so wonderful, and to regain some energy (or her edge) does little cruel things to people that she usually fawns over. It gave her a little kick, like a sip of champagne to cause a little pain. I wish I could find the short story anthology it was in. It was a weird story, and twisted.

Stuff and Nonsense

A Jamaican deli near my home has added this chair. I'm tempted to sit and read there.

My Current Reading

I'll be hiking a lot more this spring and summer since I joined a couple of outdoorsy groups. This is part of my reading material. I doubt if a bear would actually eat me--a bear would probably just eat my arm and maybe part of my face. Still, I wouldn't care for that.

Diagrams and Charts

I drew this diagram to help me understand why I don't read much in these three areas anymore. The central red area (area #1.) represents an author G.K. Chesterton, new to me, but his writing got me thinking... In the past I wouldn't have included mystery in my diagram, and I would have had a simple venn diagram of sci fi and fantasy. Not all fantasy includes sci fi though.


G.K. Chesterton’s the Man Who Was Thursday( a Nightmare) is a wild mystery story filled with strange yet entertaining twists. The story begins in the Saffron Park neighborhood of London. The hero of the story, Gabriel Syme rebells against the status quo and refuses to be zany. He speaks out as a normal person. Being a regular guy, the crazy world he lives in seems even more surreal. As I read the book, the thought popped into my head -- Vonnegut must have liked Chesterton -- then my mind wandered to Douglas Adams, Tolkien ... so I began assembling a list of other authors that might appeal to Chesterton fans. I had put Orwell down, but later did a little online research and discovered that while Orwell read everything that Chesterton wrote, he had declared that G.K. was the worst sort of anti-semite. (Orwell defended his friend P.G. Wodehouse when Wodehouse was accused of playing footsie with Nazis.)

More research showed other people creating what looked like sky maps of authors. One author in the center of the reading universe with others hanging in the blue space around him.

My primitive chart was going OK until I decided 1. to add Poppy Z. Brite (which lead somehow to adding Kafka ) and 2. I didn't know enough mystery authors to make the chart work. I started this chart awhile back and now I can't figure out how it works. Should have made notes.


My charts lead me to other subcategories. I'm reading a good Forensic Mystery by Kathy Reichs now. The chart could grow and grow... subcategories abound. I researched Vonnegut, who seemed to say no other author had influenced him, but great socialist leaders did. That didn't sound right to me, since Kurt was a great reader of fiction as a child and young adult, so... how can you not be influenced by the creativity in stories you devour? Maybe he was misquoted.

I was in line once at a post office near Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in NYC, reading a paperback-- The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I heard people whispering behind me somewhere. It was a long inefficient line, so typical. I thought I heard a writer's name being whispered, and some book titles. I finally turned a little to see what the strange muttering and whispering was about. Directly behind me, looking really exhausted, was Kurt Vonnegut, holding a large box. Too dumbfounded to speak to him, I just smiled-- there was eye contact, but I couldn't think of anything to say. My thought might have been Me Friend, Me not talk about you as if you not here. I looked beyond him to the jerks whispering about him in line. Maybe I should have offered to let him go ahead of me, but I didn't think of that. I turned back and stayed facing forward as people in front of me turned and gawked at him. Who is He? someone asked in a loud whisper.
Now I was sorry I had turned and looked at him. He was in this long line with people and no one said "Hi Kurt" or anything, they just mumbled stuff, and explained who he was to others standing in line. It felt awful to me, and I'm sure it had some kind of depressing affect on him. The line was stalled, we had maybe a dozen people ahead of us and a half dozen behind us. The slowest postal worker ever was doing something in slow motion behind the counter. Outside it was a brilliant breezy spring day, lots of daffodils in planters, budding trees along the avenues. Inside it was overheated and airless. We stood and waited.

The New Animal

When I was a kid we had the How and Why books. Flimsy and inexpensive, they were pretty much replaced by the Eyewitness series.