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One thing I forgot to mention in my write-up of Long Way to a Small Angry Planet yesterday was how much the book is about violence and the ways in which cultures and individuals deal with it. I mentioned Dr Chef’s species the Grum who had destroyed themselves in a war and the survivors had decided it was not worth rebuilding their society, they had ruined their right to exist in the galaxy and so the species is going extinct.

I also mentioned the captain of the ship, Ashby. As an Exodan human he is a pacifist. When humans were still on Earth and doing their best to destroy it and each other, the wealthy picked up stakes and moved to Mars, creating a colony there but only for the people who could afford it. Those left behind on a planet that was no longer hospitable to human life, made a last ditch effort to survive by building ships and launching out into the unknowns of space with no real destination. Some of them survived because they were found by one of the species of the Galactic Commons. As a result of their experiences, the Exodan humans developed a culture of pacifism that is often so extreme they refuse to even defend themselves when attacked.
 
All of the various species in the book have stories of violence and war in their collective histories. The Galactic Commons itself is a kind of galactic UN. How each culture came to terms with their violent past makes for an interesting examination of responses to violence. One culture goes in for communal orgies while another becomes so rule-bound that spontaneity is not heard of and would probably get you thrown into prison anyway.
 
Then there are the Toremi, a species whose whole existence is shaped by the continuous wars between the clans. They all believe the wars are sanctioned by the Pattern, the belief system by which they live. The violence doesn’t just exist between clans but within one’s own clan as well. It is a kind of dog-eat-dog existence and the more you kill the more respect you garner. Any offence no matter how slight, might get you killed or prompt you to kill someone else.
 
One of the great things about the book is that while all of this is there, it is never posted with flashing neon signs nor does the author make any intrusions and tell us what to think. We are being offered options, different ways of being and the reader gets to choose and decide for herself.
 
And this is why blogs are so great for talking about books – we aren’t bound to one review and done, we get extra innings.
 
While perusing the Baileys Prize longlist I spied The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie. This is the book that has the tête-à-tête with the charismatic squirrel in it that I am waiting my turn for it at the library. I have moved up to 27th place. Alas I was hoping I would have that book and the next Squirrel Girl comic about the same time but it is not looking likely. I am already up to number 8 for Squirrel Girl.
 
Since I am on the topic of books on prize lists, The Vegetarian is on the longlist for the Man Booker International. I’m sure all the books on the list are good but I can’t imagine that any of them could be as good as Kang’s. I hope she wins!
 
Another unsolicited distraction arrived in my mailbox yesterday. This one is by Janet Todd. That would be the same Janet Todd who has written biographies of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and many others. Except this book is a novel, A Man of Genius. Because of the cover (a Venice canal) and the cover blurb rapturing on about love, obsession and “decadent glory,” I was in the process of moving it to the pile of books to get rid of when Bookman stopped me. You know who Janet Todd is don’t you? The name was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. Then Bookman connected the dots for me and suggested I might want to not be so hasty in getting rid of it. He was right. So now it is on my poor reading table.

The book is historical fiction featuring a woman who makes a living writing cheap gothic novels. She meets and becomes the lover of Robert James, supposed poetic genius. They go to Venice. Spies, intrigue, madness, revelations ensue. Sounds like a potboiler and not my typical choice of reading but I will give it try. Just don’t know when yet. But that probably surprises no one.

I was planning on blogging last night but I got distracted. I know, it’s mind boggling, right? After all these years of dedicated and regular blogging what could possibly distract me from the task at hand?
 
Why books of course!
 
I haven’t had anything to review from Library Journal for months and I was beginning to wonder if they were trying to quietly forget about me and that would be totally cool because I was also really enjoying not having any books to read and review on their short 2-week deadline. But then in my mailbox arrived a book from them to review. This one is called Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby Dick by Michael Sheldon. The title makes it sound kind of cheezy but Sheldon is a Pulitzer Price finalist in biography and the book is based on some fresh archival research. The muse in question is Sarah Morewood, a married woman with whom Melville had an affair around the time of his writing of Moby Dick. Racy! This might be interesting.
 
I also received an unsolicited book in the mail, The Miner by Natsume Soseki. Written in 1908, the book is a modernist classic in Japan where Soseki has the literary fame equivalent to Charles Dickens. Haruki Murakami also claims it is one of his favorite books. I have no idea when I might be able to read this book, but I put it on my reading table, the one with the pile of books that doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
 
And then I had to download some books to my Kobo because, do I need a reason? I got them all from Project Gutenberg for some classics yumminess. I had been thinking of rereading Jane Eyre and since I am reading A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman , a biography of Charlotte and her messed up family, it seemed like a good time to make sure the book was at hand. Very likely I will start reading it in the next day or two. Then I also got several “forgotten classics” by women that I culled from a list I can no longer remember from where. Today being International Women’s Day, you can possibly add them to your ereader or TBR list too:

• The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard. Published in 1862, the novel follows the education and development of Cassandra Morgeson, a middle-class American girl. Supposedly it challenges the religious and social norms of the time.
• Moods by Louisa May Alcott. This was Alcott’s first novel. Published in 1864 and revised in 1882, tomboy Sylvia Yule goes on a river camping trip with her brother and his two friends both of whom fall in love with her. She marries one of them but discovers too late she chose the wrong one. What’s a girl to do?
• American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa. This is a collection of childhood stories, fiction and essays. Zitkala-Sa was Dakota Sioux and born on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. She was taken away by missionaries when she was eight and sent to a Quaker boarding school in Indiana.
• Hidden Hand by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth. First serialized in the New York Ledger in 1859, then twice more after that before appearing as a book in 1888, it is the story of Capitola Black and her various adventures.
• Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson. Woolson is the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper. This was her first novel, published in 1880. The story deals with the emotional and spiritual conflicts that arise when the young heroine leaves her home in Mackinac Island for a future in the Northeastern U.S. It was a bestseller in its day.

How are those for distractions?

With all this, before I knew it, my blogging window had closed and I spent a few minutes puttering around and psyching myself up for a hard bike workout – forty minutes of “sweet spot” training. That translates to pedaling just below my FTP (fitness threshold power) for the whole time. It also translates to forty minutes of playing mind games with myself – you can do it, no I can’t, yes you can, I’m going to quit, no you’re not, and on and on. I made it to the end and felt better for it, but ugh, sometimes working out is more of a mental game than it is a physical one.
 
Anyway, books, very distracting. Tomorrow I should actually have a review of a book that I did not want to end. Isn’t that a good tease?

Into the pile of books I am in the midst of reading I managed to spare an hour or so to read Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. This is the second volume in the series. I very much enjoyed the first volume not long ago. This second volume was fun but not quite as fun. It suffered from second child syndrome. The characters are established, the storyline is in motion but things just sort of swirled around and didn’t go anywhere.

Oh, yes, Scott fought evil ex-boyfriend number two but it was too easy. Scott knew who the guy was ahead of time, was expecting to fight him, actually set a day and time to fight. When the fight came he won the battle with hardly a hitch. The best part was the unexpected fight between Scott’s recent ex-girlfriend Knives Chau and Ramona, his current girlfriend whose exes he is having to fight. The fight between Knives and Ramona took place at a library. It was a draw so they will be meeting again another time I’m sure.

There is nothing else to say about this one. Light, fun fluff.

So let’s pad out the fluff with the titles of a couple books I recently acquired from doing a little bookstore shopping.

• The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. I love Murakmai so there was no way I’d pass this one up. I already acquired Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage back in October. Have I mentioned that? I think I may not have. I was hoping to read that one over my vacation but *embarrassed shrug* some things just don’t happen like we want them to.
• A new cookbook, Mayim’s Vegan Table by Mayim Bialik. You may recognize her as Amy from the TV show Big Bang Theory. She has recipes in here for kugel and even challah. Yum, yum, yum! I will be keeping Bookman busy in the kitchen asking him to make me this and make me that.
• The Martian by Andy Weir. Bookman actually got this one but I told him to. Ulterior motives? Yup, I want to read it too. A mission on Mars goes wrong and the crew is forced to evacuate. They think Mark is dead and leave him there. But he isn’t dead. Now he is stranded alone with damaged equipment and supplies that will run out long before a rescue mission could reach him. Sounds tense, doesn’t it?
• The Canterbury Tales “translated” by Peter Ackroyd. Back in college I had to read some of the tales in the original old English and it was like reading a foreign language. I enjoyed the stories but man, I was certainly never going to read any more of these than I had to. Ackroyd’s update is written in prose but from the beginning passage I read in the bookstore it seems like he does a fair job of keeping it updated but close to the original.
• My friend Cath in the Netherlands and I regularly exchange poetry through the mail. We have decided for 2015 to each make a study of two poets. I chose John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop. I will be starting off the year with Keats since I already began dipping into his letters. But that was a library book. I wanted my own copy to keep and mark up and refer back to. The Selected Letters of John Keats is out of print so I had to track down a copy online. It promises to be like new and is working its way to me through the postal system.
• Since I will be reading all of Keats’ poetry, I thought perhaps it was a good idea to actually own it. I have some of Keats as part of a huge college textbook of Romantic poets from a seminar I took back in the day. But it doesn’t have everything. Sadly, none of the bookstores had Keats on their shelves. I’d cry unbelievable but it’s really not given the minuscule size of poetry sections these days. So I have resorted to ordering the Penguin Complete Poems edition from Barnes and Noble online. That too is making its way to me through the post.

A Bit of a book buying binge for me. Haven’t done that in a while. What fun!

As if my reading life weren’t busy enough right now, I’ve just added three more books to the pile. It’s gotten so bad I should really quit blogging altogether until after the holidays and dedicate myself full-time to doing nothing but reading. As lovely as this sounds, I am sure my boss would not agree and after a week I would likely start to get a bit restless and long for something to break up the reading.

Even knowing that over a month of doing nothing but read would sour, I still can’t help but imagine that it would be wonderful. But what would be wonderful is all that time in which I could decide to read or not, when and for how long. Because isn’t that really what we dream of? Not so much doing nothing but read all day but the luxury of being able to make that choice. Like today. I was reading Emma at lunch and I was enjoying myself so much, I was comfortable and happy and wanted to keep reading. I had to return to work though. So what I want when I imagine a month of nothing but reading is to be able to say, I will stay here and keep reading Emma and I’ll go back to work when I feel like it. Instead of fitting reading around everything else, I want to be able to fit everything else around reading. If only.

But back to those three books I just added to my pile. Two are library books that I jumped into the hold queue for a month or more ago and I didn’t expect either of them until at least mid-December. But here they are. Women In Clothes is an “exploration of the questions we ask ourselves while getting getting dressed every day.” Edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and Mary Mann, it includes photos and interviews and stories and essays long and short and who knows what other sorts of surprises await in the pages?

I have a love/hate relationship with clothes. I like clothes that are just a little different in some way, quirky. At least that’s how I like to imagine my “style” if I had a style. But because I hate shopping for clothes a large portion of my closet is filled with items I did not buy for myself but others bought for me as presents. I am pretty decent at sewing my own clothing but it is so much work and fabric is so expensive that it is just easier and more cost effective to buy a dress off the clearance rack at Target or accept whatever my mother gifts me with at Christmas. But there is a discount fabric store that recently opened near me and I am in the process of setting up my sewing machine and locating all my long unused supplies in order to make myself some fun skirts and dresses. All that explanation to justify why I would be interested in a book on women’s clothing and fashion, as if I need a reason. But I feel like I do because part of why I hate shopping for clothes is this feeling that it is frivolous (and yes I have seen the movie of The Devil Wears Prada and would absolutely love some of those outfits in my closet but I cringe over spending $50 for a pair of jeans so designer clothes are not going to happen).

Well, did I ever go far afield there. Now that you know all about my fashion sense, or lack there of, the other book from the library is F by Daniel Kehlmann. I’ve seen a few blog posts about this one that left me intrigued especially since what the “F” stands for is never actually explicitly revealed. It seems the reader is left to make her own decision about that. It is the story of a man named Arthur who abandons his family in the middle of the night and eventually becomes a famous author. Part of the novel is also what his abandonment does to his sons.

The third book just added to my pile is a review copy of a book being published in January called Dirty Chick by Antonia Murphy. It Murphy’s story of how she and her husband, both urban dwellers, decide to move to New Zealand and become farmers in order to provide a slower, safer place for their five-year-old son who was diagnosed with a developmental delay. Neither Murphy nor her husband knew a thing about farming but they figured it couldn’t possibly be all that hard. They find out otherwise, of course. I hope it will be something fun and light to read so I can forget about the cold and snow for awhile.

Now fingers crossed that I get a respite of at least a few weeks before any additional books I have hold requests on come round to me!

Yesterday I was away celebrating Bookman’s birthday. He says he turned forty-ten. Sure, why not? We went out to breakfast at our favorite cafe, spent some time in the garden, went for a walk at the lake and went to a bookstore. I also made him a cake so chocolatey that it is a good thing we have been building up our chocolate tolerance for years otherwise we might have overdosed. Also, it is just as well that I don’t cook very often, especially when it comes to things like cake. As I was mixing up all the ingredients I was overcome with horror — how much sugar? How much butter? OMG, MORE sugar?!!! Of course when it came to eating cake I still had a piece, though maybe not as big as I would have had if I had been ignorant to the sugar and fat content. It’s a good thing Bookman has a birthday only once a year!

One of the things Bookman decided he wanted to do was go to a bookstore. So we did. We went to Half Price Books. It has been a really long time since we have been there and we had even vowed to never go back after some bad experiences there, but it is close to our house and we decided to check it out.

They must have had a sale recently because there were large gaping holes on their shelves where I would have expected books. And browsing, it seemed like there just wasn’t much of anything. However, I still managed to bring home three books.

• Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag. Leslie Jamison mentions Sontag and this book in Empathy Exams and I have seen it crop up in other places. It seemed like it was about time to get a copy.
• Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, the NYRB edition. I’ve heard good things about Taylor but I rarely see any of her books turn up at the secondhand shop so when I saw NYRB and Taylor together, I couldn’t pass it by.
• Vita Nuova: A Novel by Bohumil Hrabal. I do love Hrabal and his books are hard to find in bookstores either new or secondhand. This one is the second in a trilogy of fictional memoirs but it seems I don’t have to read them in order. At least I don’t think I do. It is written from the perspective of his wife and depicts their life in Prague from the 1950s to 1970s.

Not bad, huh?

We also found Doctor Who salt and pepper shakers that we are attempting to repurpose. We are in the midst of a little setback on that project but hopefully we will be able to figure it out and I can make a happy reveal of it soon. In the mean time you will just have to imagine what one might use salt and pepper shakers for besides salt and pepper. Hmmmm.

At the end of April I came across an essay by Rebecca Solnit that made me so very excited. Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable made me say wow! And then I saw it was going to be in a soon to be published new book by Solnit so I immediately ordered the book because I had to have this essay!

The book has arrived. I have not reread the essay or begun reading the book yet. I am buried beneath no-renewal wait-listed library books at the moment and I have been given another Library Journal review assignment. But the book is on my reading table and at the earliest opportunity I am looking forward to diving in. I especially want to reread the Woolf essay with a pencil in hand. It sparked all sorts of thoughts when I read it online and I hope it does so again when I read it on paper.

I am very close to being done with Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers which is good since it is due Friday. And I have begun reading The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon. I’m enjoying it very much so far. It is Graedon’s first book and the narrative is charging along. I will be curious to see if she can keep up the pace.

So I know you’ll understand when I say, gonna go read now.

Hope all of you are in the midst of a good book or two or three!

I was a bit grumpy Friday when my copy of Margaret Atwood’s newest book MaddAddam did not get delivered. Well okay, fine. Saturday. It will arrive Saturday. Saturday came and went and no book delivery. I checked the tracking once again and it was supposed to be delivered. Grr. Not that I was going to read it right away mind you, but that is beside the point. I have a suspicion that my mail carrier does not like us. He leaves us notes on our junk mail sometimes if a garden plant has flopped over into the walkway to the house and we haven’t had the chance to tie it up yet. And he isn’t always so very nice about the way he puts magazines into the mailbox, sometimes cramming them in so they get ripped and mangled. I have no idea what we could have done to be worthy of his postal scorn but a pattern has developed and has carried on long enough to prove we are definitely disliked. So I was beginning to think the mail carrier was up to no good.

But the book got delivered today. Finally! And opening the box and removing the book, grumpy all over again because there was a page inside the book that had gotten folded over. But then a happy surprise to discover that the book was signed! Nice. Turned all the grumps into mild annoyance and even that is fading fast.

While I’m on Margaret Atwood, have you all heard about the new project from Hogarth Shakespeare, which is part of Penguin Random House (I wish when those companies merged we had gotten a more interesting name like “Penguin House” or “Random Penguin”)? The project is to have well known writers retell Shakespeare plays in prose. All you Bard fans, don’t get your undies in a bunch no one is trying to replace him only have a little fun. I look upon the project like the Canongate Myth series, same basic story, modern take. If anything it might make people to read more Shakespeare.

Atwood is going to take on The Tempest. Howard Jacobson has chosen The Merchant of Venice. Anne Tyler will be doing The Taming of the Shrew. And Jeanette Winterson picked The Winter’s Tale. That’s it so far.

Thee series will launch in 2016 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The director of Hogarth Shakespeare has not found anyone who wants to try their hand at any of the big tragedies. Can’t say I blame anyone for not stepping up to those. However, if you could wave a magic wand and choose an author to do any of the plays, who might you choose? I bet Julian Barnes could do a good retelling of King Lear or Hamlet.

I’m in the midst of Bookman’s birthday weekend. Tomorrow is the official day on which there will be presents and cake (chocolate cherry), but today we went out to the used bookstore. Bookman found a book for himself and I found two for me. A little lopsided since we went for his birthday but, hey, he had his chance. The two books I brought home are:

• The Poems of Marianne Moore. It is a complete collection of all of Moore’s poems. Apparently when she prepared her own complete collection in 1967 she excluded nearly half her work. Penguin has kindly collected all of them. I’ve not read much Moore so this will be fun to dig into.
• ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound. I tried to borrow this from the library once but couldn’t because it had been lost. At the time it was out of print or at least very hard to find. The copy I found is in decent condition and is the 1934 edition. New Directions just reissued the book in 2010 which will make it easier to come by new, but there is something special about an old copy.

Now, on to something decidedly unbookish I thought I’d share. Back in the spring Danielle participated in a mail art exchange, The Elevated Envelope. I decided to give it a go and signed up for the summer exchange.

The prompt for the exchange was “sweet” whatever that means to the participants. I received the prompt and the four people I was to send an envelope to in mid June. I spent the first two weeks figuring out what I was going to do. I have spent July, an hour here an hour there, creating the envelopes. The postmarked by deadline is July 31st and I finally finished them up today.

I decided to go with “sweet dreams” as my theme. Acquired different colored paper with stars on it. Drew a sleepy moon on the front and on the back “sweet dreams” in blue and silver.

We are also to include a little something inside the envelop; nothing big just something to go along with the envelope because while getting arted up envelopes in the mail is cool, it is even more fun when there is something inside. Included in my envelopes are a tiny envelope of “stardust” (aka gold glitter), a bookmark that says “sweet dreams till sunbeams find you” and a couple packets of bedtime tea.

The folks in my group must be going to the wire like I did because I haven’t gotten any envelopes from them yet. When I do I will share them with you.

If you think this looks like fun and have been wanting to try your hand at mail art or are looking for a creative outlet, you can sign up for the fall exchange. The prompt is already posted so you have lots of time to come up with an idea. The prompt for fall is “malicious surprise.” Halloween fun!

Now I have to go try and finish reading Ragnorok by A. S. Byatt for the Slaves book discussion on Tuesday. Good thing the book is short otherwise I’d be in trouble since I just started reading it yesterday.

Yesterday Bookman and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. Has it been 20 years already? It seems like we just got married not that long ago. We’ve been married for just shy of half my life and I’ve known him for over half. I am both amazed and comforted by that.

So we spent the day celebrating. We have never been ones for doing anything fancy and this was no different. We went out to breakfast at our favorite vegan cafe. I had a “super green tofu earth,” which means hash brown potatoes, onions, tofu, broccoli, and soy cheese with a slice of toast that had tahini on it. Bookman had a super red tofu earth, which is the same but has salsa instead of broccoli. And coffee. More coffee than I should have had, but it was a special ocassion. We puttered around the house a bit. We read and relaxed. We went to a bookstore. Bookman found a biography of Bram Stoker by Barbara Belford. He somehow ferreted out a 1981 printing of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts from Hogarth Press that has a cover using the original design created by Vanessa Bell. I found a NYRB Classic copy of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. And we both agreed that we needed a copy of Jose Saramago’s The Notebook. And that was our celebration. Oh, we slept on our new mattress from Ikea. Our old mattress was over 20 years old (we lived together before getting married) and we figured it was about time for a new one. We got a latex mattress from Ikea and some new bedding to go with it. Oh, it is heavenly!

It only seems appropriate that I mention a little book, essay really, by Ann Patchett called What Now? Richard from Marks in the Margin was flabbergasted when I mentioned to him that I had never read Patchett. He suggested I read What Now? given my recent library school graduation so I borrowed it from the library. The essay is derived from a graduation speech Patchett gave at Sarah Lawrence college a number of years ago. And while it may have been intended for new, young graduates, it is an essay that is a good reminder for anyone really.

She talks about how when she was graduating from high school everyone would ask her “what now?” and it infuriated her. She went off to college thinking no one would ever ask her that question again because how do you answer it when you don’t know? She wanted to be a novelist, wasn’t that good enough? But as college graduation drew near people began asking her again, what now? And here she is all these years later and people still ask, what now? But she has come to terms with the question and her uncertainty because when you stop asking what now? you stop growing as a person. Not knowing the answer is not a bad thing. “Even if you have it all together you can’t know where you’re going to end up,” she writes. And even if you have a plan, just because things don’t go like you wanted or expected them to, just because you end up at point D instead of point B, doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gone all wrong. Sometimes what seems like the wrong place turns out to be the right one after all.

I moved to Minnesota because I was going to get a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. I never even took a class there but moving to Minnesota turned out to be better than we ever imagined. I never guessed that I was good at computers but when my boss at the time asked me to take charge of the office’s technology I discovered a whole new interest and talent and learned a lot not just about computers but myself too. And library school? Until about five years ago the tho

Here we are approaching the end of July already. I thought time just went fast when I was in school because I was always working on something. But no, time, it seems, goes just as fast, maybe even faster, now that I am not in school. Oh for when I was a kid and had three months of summer vacation and those three months seemed to last forever and my sister and I would complain in that whiny kid voice at that annoying pitch only kids can make, “Mom, I’m bored!” And my mom would usually say something like, “Go be bored outside.” In other words, “get out of my way, I’m busy doing laundry/cooking/cleaning/paying bills/etc., and I am sick and tired of hearing you whine.” My sister and I would usually go mope in the backyard until one of us decided we should roller skate or ride our bikes or our skateboards or play ping pong or some other game and when we’d get called in to dinner, or boredom long forgotten, we’d get mad about being interrupted. Those were the days.

There were books too. There were always books. My sister and I each had our own room and we both had our own bookshelf in our rooms with our own books and sometimes when we were bored we would play “library” and visit the other’s room and “check out” a book which usually was lent with great fanfare, rules more strict than any public library, and the threat of physical pain in lieu of a monetary fine should the book be lost, damaged or returned late. We were always careful with each other’s books but it was less from the threat of violence to our persons and more from the concern of what the other might do with the borrowed books in her possession as revenge. It was kind of like our own personal Cold War with its mutually assured destruction.

That was a nice trip down memory lane.

My current reading seems to be going very slowly, but that is only because I haven’t finished a book lately because I am reading big books. I am about 63% through Bleak House on my Kindle. Esther has discovered her parentage and while I get the feeling that it was supposed to be a huge shock and surprise, I had it figured out by a third of the way through the book. One of the plusses of being over halfway now is that some of the seemingly unconnected storylines are starting to merge into the main story. The book is typical Dickens and quite enjoyable, funny touching, sweet and gently satirical.

Game of Thrones is getting on well. I could so easily devour it but I am forcing myself to read it slowly. I love the direwolves in the story and in my reading last night one of them became collateral damage. I feared for the wolves from the start and now they and the children they belong to are being dragged into the adult world of power politics and intrigue.

Ulysses is also coming along. But more on that tomorrow.

I picked up two books from the library Friday that I had been waiting in line for. The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai seemed like it would be a perfect book. The main character is a children’s librarian and she is in cahoots with a ten-year-old boy who loves to read but whose parents are super religious and would be very unhappy to know the contents of most of the books their child reads. How can this not be a good book? I read the first 25 pages and will be returning it to the library. It is not for me, though I am certain others will find it very good. I can’t get over the fact that the main character does not have a library degree. And the head librarian at this small town library is more concerned about appearances and not ruffling any parent’s or patron’s feathers that if one of them said that The Very Hungry Caterpillar should be banned because it promotes overeating she’d immediately pull it from the shelves. Four years ago in pre-library school days I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about these characters but n

Bookman and I have had a Barnes & Noble gift card begging to be used for well over a month now. It is not that there aren’t any books that we want, it is that there are so many books that we want that for each of us to get just one book and to decide what that one book will be, well you know how it is! Searching online was proving to be too much so yesterday evening we decided to go to the bookstore.

As much as we dislike the Mall of America, that is the store we usually go to because it is a good size and fairly well stocked. However, this being a holiday weekend the Mall of America was the place to avoid. We went to a two-story store in one of the upscale burbs that tends to have a good and various selection. We hadn’t been to this particular store in quite awhile and I had good memories of it from when we were last there so I was looking forward to a good browse and the pleasurable agony of choosing a book.

First bad sign: there were fewer books than there used to be and more racks of non-book items. Second bad sign: some of the books on the new fiction shelf had come out at the end of 2010. China Mieville’s new book was hiding in the science fiction section and wasn’t even discounted. In fact, not many new books were discounted. Is this because Borders is no longer around? Or is it because they are pushing for people to become members (10% discount)? Maybe something else is going on?

So I decided that I’d look only at paperbacks. The scifi/fantasy section was a big disappointment, filled mostly with the tried-and-true and long-running series. The regular fiction section was equally disappointing. I ran through author names in my head that I had been thinking about lately. Ali Smith. All they had was The Accidental and I thought I had it already; unread but still owned. Turns out I don’t have it but I didn’t know that then. I managed to recall a few names that had come up as innovative or interesting folk of late (don’t recall who they were now) and not one of their books was on the shelf. It was getting kind of depressing when finally I picked up David Mitchell’s Number 9 Dream and J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. I tracked down Bookman, expecting I would have to choose between one of the books in my hand. But it turns out Bookman was having worse luck than I was. I showed him what I had and he liked the sound of both of them, especially the Mitchell (he liked Cloud Atlas quite a bit), so that’s what we left with. Gift card spent.

On our drive home we complained to each other about the store. I complained about how horrible the selection was. Bookman, who worked for Barnes & Noble for 10 years, complained about the service. No one greeted us when we walked in or when we wandered by employees working on the floor. Bookman had asked one person a question and after taking a bit of work to get to the answer, the guy asked us if we had a Nook yet. Not, sorry we don’t have that book in stock would you like me to order it for you? But do you have a Nook? If you do you can get it for the Nook.

It became quite clear when we were at the checkout paying for our books that Barnes & Noble is really pushing the Nook when the cashier asked us if we had a Nook yet. I really shouldn’t have been surprised because when we went out the door we came in, we had to walk around the Nook counter to get out of the store. I hadn’t noticed that we walked around it to get in because I was too busy looking past it to where the new fiction was hanging out.

We should have felt really happy going home with our new books but all we felt was sad because the bookstore wasn’t what it used to be. We are Barn

Borders Book Haul

From top to bottom:

• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. This was Bookman’s selection. Neither of us have jumped on the Sarah Waters bandwagon (please, no heckling or throwing of fruit), but I must admit that this one does look like it might be creepy and perhaps make a good RIP Challenge read come autumn.
• Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith. I couldn’t resist this one because it’s essays and some of them are about books and a good many of them look interesting even when they aren’t about books.
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Bookman really wanted this one and I’d like to read it too. I love it when we both want to read the same book. It means we can talk about it with each other and we only have to buy one copy so it’s like a two-for-the-price-of-one deal, except if we both decide we want to read it at the exact same time. Then it gets a little complicated.
• The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. I like his books and I like that he writes about such a huge variety of things.
• The Alchemaster’s Apprentice by Walter Moers. This was a Bookman find. Bookman actually gave me a book by this author for my birthday a number of years ago, The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Blue Bear, which I haven’t read – yet – and looks really funny. This one is supposed to be really funny too.
• Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History by Adam Nicolson. Bookman laughed when I saw this one on the shelf because I squealed, grabbed it, and then hugged it. Nicolosn is Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s grandson. The book is part family history, part Nicolson’s quest to restore the working farm and gardens at Sissinghurst. I love Vita, I love gardening, I’ve read Vita’s own words about creating her gardens and living at and running Sissinghurst, so this book was squeal-worthy for me.
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and translated by Lydia Davis. Bookman and I both feel like we got a big score on this one.

There were a few things the store still had quite a few of, Twilight calendars, posters, DVDs, and of course the books. Nobody was buying Sarah Palin’s book or Nicole Ritchie’s. There were quite a lot of books left in the romance section as well. To do my fellow Twin Citians credit, the art section was practically empty, there were less than a dozen books on the poetry shelves, all but a couple Shakespeare plays were gone and almost all plays in the drama section were gone. The lit crit section was pretty much empty as was the cookbook section and the travel writing section.

The people staffing the registers were pleasant, which was impressive given the circumstances. It really must suck to be working there right now. There are three stores in the Twin Cities that are remaining open and I hope at least some of the employees at the four stores that are closing will have moved to the other stores. The ones that did

About mid-February I was a little worried because I hadn’t felt like book shopping for quite awhile. I can happily say that I don’t have to worry any longer. What a relief!

Bookman and I ventured out in the rain, yes, rain not snow, to Half Price Books for a little look around. We didn’t find much but enjoyed browsing. Bookman brought home a Mary Oliver book he didn’t have and I found a book by Stanley Cavell called The Claim of Reason. I’ve seen Cavell’s name popping up lately and he’s got a couple books about Emerson I am interested in, but this is the only one of his books that was on the shelf. Nonetheless, it looks like it might be interesting reading. He uses literature to illustrate his philosophical discussion.

After HPB we went across the street to Barnes and Noble and used a 15% of one item coupon to get One of Our Thursdays is Missing and because we didn’t have it yet, we got Shades of Grey as well, recently out in paperback.

Hooray for new books!

And, why, you may ask, is there a Kindle in the photo too? Well, it is an early birthday present from Bookman. My birthday isn’t for another two weeks but he didn’t see why I should have to wait. So there is it. Now Bookman and I don’t have to share anymore. Not that sharing was a problem, but it was kind of like joint custody. He got it during the day and I got it on nights and weekends. It will be nice to not have to worry about interrupting each other’s book.

It has been a pleasant no school weekend. Of course I haven’t read as much as I had planned. I had a sort of tidy-up fit and then I got caught up on email and then, oh look, where did the time go? But there is still a little weekend left so I should go take advantage of that while I can. Just have to figure out what I want to read. Hmmm…

• Bookman surprised me with a copy of a new poetry book by Adrienne Rich. I surprised him by being completely clueless about its existence which made him quite giddy because as the years of blogging go by it gets increasingly more difficult for him to spring books on me that I don’t already know about. Rich’s new book, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Poems 2007-2010, promises to be marvelous as usual. I have only read one poem thus far and it is printed on the back of the book. It is the titular poem and it concludes thus:
  

  Syntax of rendition:

  verb pilots the plane
  adverb modifies action

  verb force-feeds noun
  submerges the subject
  noun is choking
  verb   disgraced   goes on doing

  now diagram the sentence

  It is a slim book so I will parcel it out in single poems here and there.

• Waldo has been at the pet hospital all weekend. He went in Saturday morning for what turned out to be feline cystitis. He had a blockage and has had an IV and a catheter to help clear all the naughty crystals from his bladder. We have all been rather bereft without him and Dickens has been stuck to me like glue. Bookman has just left to go pick him up from the hospital and bring him home. He’s in for lots of snuggling and loving. Poor guy.
• School is going pretty well. This class (information architecture) is a curious one because it seems to be pulling in elements from lots of other classes I have already taken so in some ways it seems like I already know everything but just not through this particular lens. The material is not difficult but applying it differently is the challenge. It is kind of like transposing a song you know from one key into another.
• I finished reading the next Slaves book already. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. There will be a blog post about it on January 31st and group discussion. It is a slim book that reads fast even when you try to read it slowly so there is plenty of time for anyone who hasn’t already decided to read it to do so and join the discussion if you feel so inclined.
• I am almost done with Alberto Manguel’s A Reader on Reading. Almost.
• In spite of starting and finishing The Summer Book in less than a week, and in spite of almost being done with Manguel, I have been feeling in a bit of a reading slump. Not the kind where there is nothing good to read, I am not having a problem there. No, it just feels like I’m not getting anywhere, that my reading is constantly interrupted by something and if it isn’t being interrupted I worry about it being interrupted which of course causes an interruption. I need to find a way to carve out some time soon where I know I really won’t be interrupted so I can sink into a book and feel better.
• I’m also a little stressed about searching for a new job. Now is the time to start looking even though I won’t be graduating until early June. But I just haven’t been able to bring myself to do it yet. It is all a bit overwhelming when I think about it, especially when I think about how few jobs there are likely to be and how many qualified applicants there are. I am lucky enough to have a job working in a library so I can apply only to jobs I am truly interested in. But I also feel like I am avoiding the whole thing so I won’t be disappointed that I can’t find a job working as a librarian. The whole thing is silly and I’ll get myself worked ’round the right way eventually, but at the moment the thought of it just makes me really, really tired.

There is my weekend in bullet points. Waldo will be home in a few

It’s so fun to get books in the mail unexpectedly especially when they are free and even better when they are actually good ones.

Someone at Vintage sent me The Vintage Book American Women Writers. Edited by Elaine Showalter, it is inspired by her book A Jury of Her Peers (which I have but have not read yet). The Vintage Book of American Women Writers is an anthology that ranges from Anne Bradstreet to Jhumpa Lahiri. Thank you nice Vintage person whoever you are!

Some nice and unknown person at Algonquin sent me three books in the mail. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow is one I have had my eye on. A biracial girl, family tragedy, race and class and social justice. Sounds like a possibly good read.

Book number two is Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers on the City of Light. I’ve never been to Paris but who wouldn’t want to go? And perhaps this will be a good armchair travel sort of book come February when the cold and the snow get to be too much and all I want is to look out my window and see something green.

The third book is Pictures of You by Carline Leavitt. It seems like a well-written book but not really my cup of tea. Here’s what the back cover says:

Two women running away from their marriage collide on a foggy highway. The survivor of the fatal accident is left to pick up the pieces not only of her own life but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman left behind. As there three lives intersect, the book asks, how well do we really know those we love and how do we open our hearts to forgive the unforgivable?

If Pictures of You sounds like it might be your cup of tea, I will send it to you. If there is more than one person who is interested in it I will draw names on Sunday.

I’ve received a few review copies of new books in the mail recently and since it might be a couple of weeks before complete mention of any of them appears here I thought I’d mention them now just, you know, so they are noted.

The first book is SoulPancake by Rainn Wilson. If you watch the American version of The Office you know who the guy is. The book appeared in my mailbox unannounced and I thought it would be really stupid but after browsing through it I have decided to look at it more carefully. It is not a read cover-to-cover kind of book but one to dip into. The book has some interesting artwork throughout to accompany the text that asks “the big questions” and includes quotes and blank spaces to encourage rumination. The questions are ones like “What does art have to do with the soul?” and “How do you know when to call it quits and when to forge ahead?” and “Why do we hate?” You get the picture. I’ll try to get to this one soon because it seems like it would be great for getting together with friends or even a book of journal writing prompts.

The second book I have received is Wicked River: The Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin. This is a nonfiction popular history book on the Mighty Miss and some of the crazy things that happened on it. Things like river pirates, temporary floating cities for gambling and drinking, weird weather disasters and more. Since I regularly cross the Mississippi I thought it would be fun reading about some of its more colorful history.

The third, and last, new book I have recently received is How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish. This one seems like it is part how-to, part grammar lesson, and part enthusiastic examination of what a sentence can do. I hope it turns out to be as fun as it looks. The fact that I am excited about a book about sentences says just what a geek I am.

Now for some books everyone can look at. Europeana has a new exhibit called Reading Europe: Literary Gems Online. It has 1,000 books selected and curated by the European Library. Highlights include 18th century English bestsellers, medieval cookbooks, an early print of Don Quixote and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. I did a little browsing and found some beautiful books of Yeats poems along with some books in various languages with wonderful illustrations. I get all drooly and dreamy when I see stuff like this because I start to think that maybe someday I will get to work on a similar digital library project. If I ever do, you can be sure I’ll be crowing about it from the rooftops.

Bookman and I have taken today and Tuesday off from work. Tomorrow (26th) is our wedding anniversary so we thought we’d do some celebrating, nothing fancy. After 19 years you realize you don’t need to do anything fancy. Just spending a couple days together doing the things we like to do is enough.

This morning was my coronation. The temporary crown was popped off and the permanent crown after much adjusting was fitted on and cemented down. The dentist didn’t even have to numb me up. This is not to say that the process didn’t hurt, only that the hurt was bearable and fairly short lived. Now I am officially a queen.

I had been hoping we could do some end-of-season gardening but the weather is windy and rainy and tomorrow even windier and rainier. Only appropriate really since on our wedding day it poured rain from the reception onward. We decided, therefore, that this afternoon warranted a trip to Barnes and Noble and Half Price Books. Somehow we managed to show remarkable restraint:

From B&N where we had a coupon for an extra 15% off, Bookman selected The Windup Girl and I chose The Children’s Book while we each eyed the other’s selection with plans to share.

At HPB Bookman scored a copy of The Passage in hardcover for only $10 while I discovered a like new copy of Night Train to Lisbon.

There are four additional books we bought at HPB that are not in the photo. They had volumes 3-6 of Virginia Woolf’s letters. I could not remember what volumes I had at home. I was sure I had all of her essays but only volumes 1-3 of the letters. Not wanting to risk the loss of such a find, we bought them all. When we got home Bookman went to go look at the library shelves. Guess what? I have all of them. It is the essays of which I only have three volumes. Silly me. But no problem. We saved the receipt and will take them back.

On a lark this afternoon since I just finished reading May Sarton’s The Small Room I started reading e.e. cummings’s The Enormous Room (mine is a nice, old Modern Library edition). Two very different books. Cummings is so far enjoyable.

I can hear the cold rain against the window. Time to go snuggle up and have a cozy reading evening.

Weekends, especially three-day ones never last as long as you want them to. The three days were to celebrate Bookman’s birthday and we had a lovely time. In spite of schoolwork and errands and chores, heat and humidity, we managed to enjoy a bike ride, several walks, a delicious vegan pizza from Pizza Luce, and a trip to Half Price Books where Bookman managed to find plenty to supplement the books I gifted him. And there was cake too baked by me, the one who does not cook (because I don’t like to not because I can’t). The cake was chocolate molasses deliciousness and we had vanilla hemp nondairy ice cream to go along with it. We had never tried hemp ice cream before and it was on sale so why not? It was pretty tasty.

I did come home with two books from HPB. I finally got a copy of Elegance of the Hedgehog and I snagged a nice copy of Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones off the clearance shelf.

Bookman has been diligently weeding our library collection on the shelves in an attempt to provide a suitable home for the books currently living on the floor in front of the shelves. When we went to HPB we took a huge doublewide tote filled to the top with books to sell back. Granted we came home with some books but it was far less than we took with us. And even so the shelves are packed and there are still books living on the floor.

The weeding has been of books we know we don’t want anymore and will never read again or were ARCs Bookman mindlessly acquired during his many years working in a bookstore. In essence the weeding has been of the easy choices. Now we are to the point where we will have to make some actual decisions. To forestall the pain, Bookman is making plans to put some shelves in his attic man cave. After that, unless we win the lottery or the librarian of Unseen University comes for a visit and works some multi-dimensional magic on our library, we are filled to the gills.

Perhaps there being no more room is what is making Amazon’s announcement regarding Iris Murdoch’s books sound so appealing. Many of her early works are out of print and Amazon has, so they say, been getting many requests from Kindle owners for her books. So they’ve got Open Road Media to issue ten of Murdoch’s books on Kindle. I have yet to buy an ebook for the Kindle but this is tempting. But the fact that I have no time to read any of them and could get all of them from the library is boosting my willpower to resist. For now. Bringing out of print books back into print as ebooks though, brilliant. And if Amazon and publishers start making this a regular occurrence, my willpower is going to eventually crumble.

Yesterday my Bookman and I both had the day off to celebrate the summer solstice. We had plans to bike over to the bird sanctuary and have a picnic but the weather didn’t cooperate. It was warm and humid and rained off and on all day. We went for a leisurely bike ride around our neighborhood lake and got rained on for our troubles. We didn’t get a picnic but we did enjoy lots of delicious organic fresh from the farm food from our first CSA farm box.

How did we while away a rainy afternoon? Bookman came up with Plan B: Half Price Books. It was a marvelously NYRB-licious outing:

• Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. I loved the movie way back and have been keeping my eye out for a decent used copy for ages and finally one appeared. This is the only book in the pile that is not a NYRB
• Morte D’Urban by J.F. Powers. This won the 1963 National Book Award. The main character is a clergyman who is banished to the Minnesota hinterlands by his order when he becomes a bit too nationally popular on the religious circuit. How could I resist that? Plus the title is awesome.
• Wheat that Springeth Green by J.F. Powers. This one is the author’s last novel and is about a priest. I wasn’t going to take this one but Bookman said we had to.
• Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke. I couldn’t resist the “seedy atmospheric noir” description nor the sheer silliness of the plot: young German arrives in America hoping to get over his failed marriage. Ex-wife appears and starts pursuing him across the country. Is it love or vengeance?
• Born Under Saturn by Margot and Rudolf Wittkower. This is nonfiction and supposedly an art history classic in which the authors exam the idea that “artistic inspiration is a form of madness.” Intrigued? I was.
• Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters by awesome writers writing to each other about their lives and art during the course of one eventful year. How can you go wrong?

It might not have been the original celebration plan, but hey, book shopping is a great way to celebrate any holiday in my opinion! Now I’m off to do homework. Summer quarter has begun. More on that another time.

I have shown massive restraint in the last month and half not buying new books or going on a library binge but one can only hold back for so long especially when other people send you books! I’m still reading Oblomov on my commute and during my lunch break, I have a deadline for that of June 21st, but these books are now all vying for attention. Some have gotten it and others will be meeting my eyeballs very soon.

On the pile from top to bottom:

• They Were Defeated by Rose Macaulay. Emily had a blogiversary a few weeks back and I was one of the recipients of her largess. Emily is a marvelous book selector and so I asked her to please choose what books to send me. This is one of them and I am so excited about it because I’ve been wanting to read Macaulay for ages.
• I See by My Outfit by Peter Beagle. Another Emily pick. I have a special place in my heart for Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and have a feeling I will love this one too. How can I not look forward to reading a novel about a cross country road trip on motorscooters? And of course, it’s not just about the road trip.
• The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales by Richard Garnett. Another Emily selection! This one is a book of fantasy short stories that has reached classic status. Not sure why I have never read this but it looks so awesome I can hardly wait.
• Grange House by Sarah Blake. The final Emily pick (aren’t I so lucky?). A family saga. A love story. A ghost story. Atmosphere. This one is going to be yummy.
• Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon. I read and enjoyed his book about diaries a number of years ago and I have been waiting for this one about letters to become available at the library for a while and it has finally arrived. I cracked it open the other night before bed, very dangerous because I was immediately sucked in and didn’t want to go to sleep. There is also a nice bibliography at the back of the book.
• Graphs Maps and Trees by Franco Moretti. I read an article recently about digital humanities stuff going on at Stanford University and some of the research Moretti, who is a professor there, is trying to do with digital texts. The article mentions this book as a basis for the research Moretti is doing as well as an interesting way of looking at literature. It is quite slim but very dense. Someone else must have read the article too because the book has a hold on it. However, since I got it at my university library and I am staff I have the book for two full months before I have to return it. I’ll probably need all that time to understand it!
• Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie. This is going to be a horror story that is going to make me go on a rampage through my house to get rid of as many toxic things as I possibly can. The book is about how all the toxic chemicals we come across in everyday life affects our health. I read the introduction and the first chapter today and I am already angry at corporations and the government and the book hasn’t really gotten started yet.
• The M-factor by Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman. After I blogged about the presentation Stillman did on generations in the workplace at a conference I attended and moaned that I didn’t get one of the books that were given away, the author emailed me and kindly sent me a copy. What a nice guy! I will be digging into to this in the next week or so.

It’s a good thing that spring quarter is done on Sunday and I get a 2-week schoo

Well, we didn’t get any snow like the forecast threatened but we did get frost. We have decided to hold off on putting our new plant sale plants in the ground until next weekend when we will have reached the average last frost date for Minneapolis. We did, or I should say, Bookman did, some weeding and started to generally prepare the beds for the plants so that’s something. I spent too much time working on school and was still feeling blah so some bibliotherapy in the form of a visit to Half Price Books was called for.

While it didn’t completely blow away the blahs, it did help. Here is what I came home with (from bottom to top):

• Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman. This is her brand new just published book that someone sold to HPB in mint condition. My Bookman saw it first and scooped it up for me. At half the cover price you can’t go wrong.
• Nomad’s Hotel by Cees Nooteboom. I am interested in his fiction though haven’t managed to read any of it yet. This is a collection of travel essays that look like fun. The book has an introduction by Alberto Manguel.
• All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani. This is a NYRB book described on the back as “wildly funny and wonderfully bizarre.” How could I not bite?

I also brought home a near pristine copy of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace only to discover that I already had a pristine copy on the shelves! I have no recollection of ever buying it. My Bookman bought two books that he already has and he’s even read them before too. This is what happens when a person owns a large number of books. In our case, over 3,000. It becomes impossible when out and about buying new books to squeeze onto the shelves to remember what we own. If we were gadget owners we could have pulled out our mobile device and looked up our catalog on LibraryThing and be reasonably assured (reasonably because we’ve not quite got everything cataloged yet, you know how it goes) whether or not we had a given title.

Alas, the books will be returned later in the week. But this will also afford me the opportunity to get the copy of Elegance of the Hedgehog I didn’t bring home because Bookman was certain we had it when we didn’t.

Now, while I would love to use books as an excuse to get a spiffy mobile device, particularly of the iPhone nature, I will refrain. Instead we have decided to take the Kindle with us next time since it has free wifi. While the internet on it is slow and ugly, it will be sufficient, we hope, to check books in our catalog. I’ll let you know.

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. I am coming to the end of having four days, yes count them, four days off. I am not Catholic, but I do work at a Catholic university so have the pleasure of a four-day Easter weekend even though I don’t celebrate the holiday myself. I celebrated my own holiday yesterday – my birthday! Nothing was open because of Easter so we didn’t go anywhere but the weather was gorgeous and my Bookman and I took advantage of it by spending some time in the spring garden.

The forsythia has burst into full yellow glory so bright when the sun hits it you’d better have sunglasses on!

That is not a flash from the camera lighting up the flowers but the sun. If I hadn’t taken the picture myself I’d say it was fake.

These little scilla siberica were planted by someone who lived in the house before we did and they come up every year in a patch of grass in the backyard.

I keep meaning to buy more of the little bulbs in order to create a proper swath of blue across the yard but the actual work of digging them all in is too daunting when it comes right down to it so I just smile at the little patch every year.

The witch hazel is blooming too.

Supposedly this native shrub blooms in October but it never has since I planted it as a wee stick some ten years ago. It always blooms in spring. No hard feelings about that though. I wouldn’t want to bloom in October either!

This year I am anticipating having our first batch of nuts on our American hazelnut. We planted it about five years ago and last fall it got these catkins on it:

They came on in late September and I worried about them all freezing but then I googled it and found out that all was going as it should. The catkins are the male flowers (snickering allowed). They appear in late September and patiently overwinter waiting for the appearance of the female flowers who all take their time and probably won’t be seen for another few weeks. Then, cue euphemism, the male and female flowers have a party. If the party is a success then I should be fighting the squirrels for nuts by the end of summer/ beginning of fall.

My Bookman also outdid himself in the kitchen in my honor. We had made-from-scratch gingerbread waffles for breakfast. For dinner we had homemade vegan sausage sandwiches and a yummy green salad. Oh, and the cake! Chocolate cherry. Since Bookman started with a chocolate cupcake recipe and made the rest up he was surprised at how delicious it was. I wasn’t, I knew it would be good.

As if all that wasn’t enough, he gave me Anthill by E.O. Wilson. He miscalculated shipping time and one or two more surprises will be arriving soon. I am sure they will be wonderful, but really nothing can compare to sharing a beautiful day together.

My Bookman and I have been suffering from the winter blahs so he and I made it a point to do a few things this weekend to lift our blues. Friday night we thought we had a ballroom dance lesson and appeared promptly for it, wondering why there didn’t seem to be as many people at the studio as there usually are, in fact, the place was practically empty. When we got inside we were asked if we had come for salsa. Uh, no, we came for our usual lesson. At which point apologies began flying. Our teacher is currently in Cancun on the studio’s annual dance cruise. They had told us about it back in early January but we had completely forgotten. What creatures of habit we are.

Conveniently, our favorite Half Price Books store is nearby and we had put a bag of books to sell in the car on the off chance we felt like stopping after our dance lesson. There being no dance lesson at all, it was a no brainer that the evening was to be spent at HPB. They gave us a good price for our books this time and a 10% off our next purchase coupon. Bookman and I went off in different directions to begin the browsing. Inevitably we meet up downstairs in the fiction where we yell across the shelves at each other, “Hey did you see this one?” or “Do we have this already?”

After we are browsed out we spread our books out to see what we have. Sometimes we’ll grab a book that looks interesting and that we want if nothing else better is found. So we look the books over and decide which ones we want to take home. Then we add up the total. We always try to stay within the amount that we got as a credit for selling books we didn’t want so depending on the total we may decide a book or two doesn’t make the cut after all. Finally, we head to the cash register and depending on our success we either complain as we walk out to the car or chatter excitedly. This time we got to chatter excitedly. Here’s what I brought home:

• Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis. The back cover describes the book as “Fifty-seven rule-breaking short stories, in which Lydia Davis proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, gets lost in a foreign city, and addresses common anxieties regarding etiquette, work, taste, the fourth grade, death, and conversation.” When I opened the book up, this is the story I read called “Tropical Storm” : “Like a tropical storm,/ I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.’ ” How could I resist this book?
• The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt. I’ve never read her but she appears with general good reviews on blogs and Verbivore recently read and loved this book so when I saw a like-new copy I couldn’t resist.
• After Dark by Haruki Murakami. The back of the book says it is “a gripping novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the hours between midnight and dawn.” I prefer to be asleep during those hours and can’t imagine why anyone would be awake if they didn’t have to be. And because it is Murakami it will probably be delightfully surreal too.
• The Wise Virgins by Leonard Wolf. I always forget that Leonard was a writer too. I’ve never read anything of his. This is his second novel and it was p
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