palace of winds

Voila! The new furniture:

I started this entry — over a week ago now, I think. I’ve been bad about using my physical journal to jot down thoughts-on-books, but apparently I’m just as bad about using this one.

Recent books:

Marley & Me, by John Grogan - I borrowed this from Jo this summer, very shortly before my dog died. We both agreed I should definitely not read it for a while and, having read it now, I can see why. It was lovely and funny and utterly heartbreaking. I sobbed through the last fifty pages or so, during the author’s recounting of his yellow lab getting older, and his hips giving out, and the decision they faced to put him down when — I can’t really spoil a book like this, but I’ll just say the thing that happened to my dog, a yellow lab/golden retriever mix, that same thing happened to Marley. Marley who snatched things he shouldn’t have and then danced away. Marley who scrubbed his face along the side of their couch. Just like Buddy. So: great book; heartwrenching. Also, strangely, the day after I finished reading it I met my mom for lunch. She was telling me about how she’d finally gotten an audiobook from the library (I’ve been extolling their during-commuting virtues forever), and I mentioned having just finished Marley & Me — and she said she had just gotten it out of the library, after being on the list for it for months and months, and was planning to read it over the weekend. So I told her that no, no, she really shouldn’t read it yet, and really it was all just strange and fortuitous timing. Because it’s a book she’d like, I think, but not yet.

Summer Crossing, by Truman Capote - My first Capote book, and how much do I love this man’s prose? Very much. Very very much. Bryce and I have In Cold Blood earmarked for a read-along, but given our track record (we’ve been reading The Hound of the Baskervilles since November) we may never get to it, which seems a shame. Note to self: magically make life less busy.

A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby - Katie was reading this when she visited this summer, and I remember being intrigued and then forgetting about it entirely. I came across it again a few weeks ago on a great stock-up search for audiobooks from my library, and put it on the list. I’m a good way into it and enjoying it — great concept, quirky characters. I like it on an audiobook level too; they’ve got a different person doing each of the four main characters (the book switches between their points of view), and it really works here. I especially love the dimension you get hearing one character imitate another, and the changes between narrators keep each from getting tedious or irritating. So far, so good.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson – Yay! I have this one in the car right now and every day some new slew of science facts and/or anecdotes delights and astounds me. It’s one of those where I keep wishing someone were listening/reading right alongside so we could exclaim over the cool- and/or strangeness of the world together. It’s reminded me how much there is to love about nonfiction (which I tend to shy away from, since in my head it’s so associated with homework). Also, it’s read by Richard Matthews, who did Animal Farm, which I listened to (and enjoyed) this past fall.

Incidentally, there’s this quasi-meme thingie floating around, where you’re meant to go back in your Amazon history to see the first thing you ever ordered. Mine was way back last century (heh), in November of ‘99. I ordered: The Catcher in the Rye, which I’d missed reading in school, I think somewhere in my district shift; The Poisonwood Bible, which I adored and went on to read again for Literary Society, a little book group Carrie and I started our freshman year of college, which was fabulously fun and involved a lot of hanging out having snacks and not talking about books; and The Pilot’s Wife, which I remember liking okay but being sort of disappointed by, because it’s that sort of book that’s nice enough to read but sort of unfulfilling — it’s not total fun fluff but there’s also not that extra dimension, that edge.

I read somewhere (I think it was in Cunt, which is a fabulous book, one of my favorite of 2006; everyone should read it, truly) that for women there’s a particular time of month when you’re super-clumsy (and what a delightful word, clumsy, all bumbling and warm, like chum and daisy have met and become a puppydog) — some hormonal thing, I guess. Anyway, I’d never noticed it before but today I’ve spilled like six thousand times, which is unusual, and I figure it must be that. I really shouldn’t be allowed the tea currently steeping beside my keyboard, but the ache in my throat is whimpering for peppermint, and so peppermint it shall have.

Speaking of books, I’m currently listening to The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, and it’s exquisite. I’ve never read grief described so exactly right. (It’s especially wonderful coming at a time when I’m also trying to listen to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which I’m not enjoying at all. Which is embarrassing to admit because it’s the sort of book I’m supposed to like. I don’t know if it’s because I’m listening to it instead of reading it myself [a disadvantage, I find, with books that take a lot of thinking, because it’s much harder to pause and go back, to reread passages, and this book is chock full of time jumps — jumps so abrupt I more than once paused while cooking or washing dishes to inspect my ipod to make sure I hadn’t somehow messed up the track order when making the playlist] or if I’m just not in the frame of mind or if it’s because I haven’t read the synopsis so have no clue what I’m supposed to be expecting or what, but it’s hard, and I find I’m frustrated. I’m usually such a fan of subtlety, the submerged truth; I’m not used to it kicking my ass.)

Work’s been making my head spin around lately. The saving grace of last week was Monday off, and Tuesday half-off (thank you NASD & cohorts), but there’s no such reprieve this week, and it doesn’t feel like Tuesday. It feels like a day that doesn’t exist, something out beyond Friday, the work week stretched to infinity, and I feel a thousand years old. It’s hard to conceive of managing anything beyond driving home and dragging myself straight to bed.

One day to The Talk. Thirty-eight to San Francisco.

So I’m exhausted, but feeling strangely complacent. I’m coming off a very successful shopping weekend: I finally have things on my living room wall, and fabric to attempt a dress, and two new necklaces (which are hard to describe exactly — one’s painted metal, all shades of plum and darkest turquoise, a square nearly half the size of my thumb stamped with a tree, with a little pair of golden leaves hung over it, by Kevin n Anna; the other a Kathy Loewenstern piece, a reversible necklace made of silver and Japanese Chiyogami paper, one side with small pink blossoms and the other an orange goldfish swimming in blue [though I see now if you go through the site you can customize your own, wah! I wish I’d known]; they are nearly enough to make up for the piece I really wanted, the necklace that was over $100, inset with pale blue silk and bordered in tiny exquisite beading).

And it’s taken me half the day to write this (sad indeed), so I’m going to give up and get fully back to work.

Because I do not get sick, I did not spend yesterday feeling horrible. Aching everywhere, with a headache wrapping a superman hug round my whole brain and poking at the backs of my eyes, and a sort of dizzy feeling upon moving too fast, and I did not snivel like a little baby the whole car ride home, nor spend the evening sweaty and woozy and the night in fitful dreams.

So it is for no reason at all that I pampered myself with dinner of wine-braised broccoli and mushrooms over crusty broiled polenta rounds, followed by Allison’s dark chocolate pudding and a big bowl of cherries. If I had been feeling bad, I would’ve felt a little better after eating (or at least told myself I did), and believed that one should always soldier on through such things. I cleaned a little, in a wobbly sort of way, and got a little more ready for my trip to San Fran this weekend. I also watched the Crocodile Hunter. There was this great reptile out in the red wilds of Australia, a teensy little thing all blunt unreal spines with a smug sort of smile and a deliberate but blindingly fast way of eating ants. Steve and I were very excited about it.

If everything hadn’t been just peachy-keen yesterday I’d be feeling much more mobile today. I am finally going to try Galactic Pizza tonight, and I sorely hope the months of waiting haven’t built my expectations beyond all possibility of fulfillment. I wish I could get a little square of every kind, because I just can’t decide what sounds best. The Galactic, with the hemp pesto sauce and mushrooms and sundried tomatoes? The Paul Bunyan, with its native Minnesotan toppings of morel mushrooms and wild rice? Maui Wowie, sundried tomato pesto with pineapple and jalapenos? The Alamo? The CSA? The Mexicali? Thailander?! Too many! Best of all, the delivery persons come dressed in spandex superhero costumes, driving in tiny three-wheeled cars. Will the fabulousness never end?

No. Because while eating said pizza, I will be showing the Smile Time episode of Angel to Jo, and oh lordy. The only thing that would be better is if she didn’t know ahead of time the…transformation that occurs. Because that moment? Beautiful.

I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell this morning, and still give it resounding endorsement. I’m a little afraid no matter what audiobook I start on next I’ll be disappointed. Simon Prebble was a brilliant narrator, and the story is fantastic, and it’s wonderful to find those two things together. The only thing worse than a great story with a bad narrator is a bad story with a bad narrator.

It’s testament, I think, to Arthur and George’s new hold over me that I forgot my purse at home this morning. I realized it only after I’d parked my car at work, half-turning toward the passenger’s seat with this sense that something was not quite right. It’s such an absurd notion, yet this is the second or third time I’ve done it in the past two years. It’s like forgetting to wear pants, or leaving a limb behind. Coming to work without one’s arm. I am id-less, wallet-less, key-card-less, library-card-less. It’s disconcerting.

I actually started reading Arthur and George this past winter; it was a new release, which the library lets out for two weeks instead of its usual three, and as a Booker Prize finalist its waiting list is rather long. I couldn’t get very into it at the time, so I returned it and got back on the list, and it finally came back up last week. And Wednesday I finally pushed myself to open it again, and now I find myself at last pulled in. I think I had so much trouble in the beginning because something terrible is happening to the main character that he is helpless against, and it twists me. I am sick and dreading and outraged and I feel the futility of his plight perhaps even more keenly than he himself does. It’s torturous, but now I’ve gotten far enough into it that it has caught me and I must now see him through it. (Or I hope to see him through it, anyhow. I can’t dwell on the thought that it might just continue, or I’ll never be able to open the book again.)