I read:

Thoughts:

• Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi: I’m going to forget I read this novel. It just isn’t going to stick. Like right now, I’m trying to remember which is Snow and which is Bird and I can’t. I remember Boy though, and her father. So some stuck I guess.
• The Enchanted Wood and The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton: I know these books are considered declassé, but I still love the Faraway Tree books, probably because I read them so often when I was younger. There’s not too much questionable content in these two; there are brief mentions of golliwogs, but no pictures and I can just say gnomes or something else when I read it aloud.

  I have the old English versions, not the new releases that Americanize it all. So lots of biscuits and jumpers and the like. Expand Tesfa’s vocabulary.

• A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock: I reviewed this book earlier this month.
• The Series of Unfortunate Events Books by Lemony Snicket: Whenever I come across what seems like a misprint or an odd word in the books, I keep thinking that it must be a Verse Fluctuation Declaration and I wish I’d known about it sooner so I could make a note of all of them and see if it actually is a code, but some of the books have gone back to the library, so I can’t.

  I’m not sure of the ending. In some ways I appreciate it, but in others, I am quite unsatisfied. I feel a little cheated, like Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler made this whole universe, and then, rather than resolving anything, just said Yep and put down his typewriter.

  I still like these books far more than Harry Potter though.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson: I am going to take some words I wrote in an email earlier about this book and put them here:

  My views might be tainted, since I haven’t been feeling great (physically or mentally) the past few days and I kept falling asleep when I was reading it. I thought it would be more approachable then it ended up being – some critic wrote that Marilynne Robinson is religious for the formerly religious, or something like that; that if you had once been religious, it would warm you up again. But I didn’t find that very much. There was a level where I thought the book didn’t even need religion, except for the character’s struggle with forgiveness, especially towards John Ames the younger. I guess I thought it would put me back in the mind of being really religious, as really religious as one can be at 18 and in the United Church. But it didn’t do that. I don’t know why I thought it would really.

• Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing by May Sarton: I reviewed this book earlier this month.
• A Book of Canadian Animals by Charles Paul May: Ignoring the educational aspect, in one way this book is great since all animals are it unless specifically discussing male or female behaviour, and so we avoid the dogs and smurfs phenomena. On the other hand, this is a book from the sixties, so all the people discussed default to male. Can’t win.
• Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor: I reviewed this book earlier this month.
• All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu: This book was far too similar to The Dissident for me to really enjoy it. Also, there were parts that reminded me of a story I tried to write, vaguely about Ethiopia. Do you think Dinaw Mengestu found my old drafts online and then used them as a starting point?

  I don’t either, but it is nice to dream.

• Caught by Lisa Moore: A book club book.

  I’d been reading about point-of-view right before I read this book, so that ended up being what I focused on while reading. I can never remember all the terms, but the narration was third-person, but with little internalization from any of the characters. So everything felt floating and distanced, unreal, which was, I suppose the point as the situations all felt unreal to the people involved.

• The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice: 1. I’ve read this book before, but not since 2010. It is one of my favourites.

  2. I bought a copy to give someone this year as a Christmas present. But the book is hard to find in Canada, so it ended up being used. I hope that goes over all right with the recipient.

  3. Not that I’m planning on telling them this, but I read the copy I am giving them because I wanted to read this book again and it isn’t in the library.

  4. Eva Rice, the author, also wrote a book about Enid Blyton. I haven’t read it, but I hope she would approve of my month’s earlier Enid Blyton choices I shared with Tesfa.

Favourite book of the month:

As opposed to last month, I had a more pleasant book month. Lots of 4.5 or 5’s out of 5’s (Enid Blyton’s, Capital, Lemony Snicket, Olive Kitteridge, Interpreter of Maladies, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets). But, of course, best was:

See my review for glowing praise.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I watched:

Thoughts:

• Happy Endings: Meh. Still not seeing why everyone was so upset it was cancelled. Not an awful show, but it’s gone from my mind now. I watched all the episodes and now one to something new.
• Office Space: TPS reports. Hee hee hee hee hee.
• Happy Valley: Half-way through. So far, the portrayal of violence isn’t as problematic as, say, The Fall. Maybe it will end up being so and then I’ll be annoyed.
• Cosmos: Why do they make it all cuts and green screen and nonsense in an attempt to make the content interesting? Science is inherently interesting. It hardly needs to be gussied up. Only watched one episode so far. Don’t know whether to continue.
• Zodiac: American movies are too long.
• The Secret in their Eyes: I have a hard time understanding Argentine Spanish accents. Paint-by-numbers thriller set in South America.
• The Wizard of Oz: Geoff rented this to watch with Tesfa, I think not knowing that it was a musical. Tesfa can remember one line from all of the songs, We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, which she sang over and over and over again, off-key and loud, until I felt like clawing my ears out. She has since moved on to practicing Christmas carols for the school concert. The universe is guaranteeing that I will go crazy before Christmas I’m sure.

I wrote: Did I finish typing my Log Driver’s Waltz story in October or November? I don’t recall, but it’s done typed. I wrote a story about Chagall paintings. I wrote some of a story about a glass of spoiled milk. I fiddled around with my faerie story. I got rejection after rejection, including one saying mine was one of the stronger stories submitted, so maybe it got to the last round of that contest and Margaret Atwood, the judge, read it? Maybe December will be full of acceptances.

And now, where do I put Serial, as I neither read, watched, or wrote it. Listened? I listened to Serial.

I read:

Thoughts:

• Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey: Reviewed earlier.
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Talked about here.
• Sideways Stories from Wayside School: As funny as I remembered it being, although I wish that there was less calling of things stupid and ugly. I don’t like either of those as pejoratives in children’s books, especially tied together (i.e. being stupid implies ugly, and ugly implies stupid, and being both somehow makes one less meritorious of respect and love).
• 10:04 by Ben Lerner: Reviewed earlier (although I initially typed Reviewered earlier and I kind of like Reviewered better than Reveiwed).
• Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love by Xinran: I didn’t find it as affecting as The Good Women of China.
• And Home was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji: Reviewed earlier.
• The Son by Jo Nesbø: So, here’s a quote from this book: “The male brain’s innate understanding of three dimensions.” Yep, just going along swimmingly and then BAM unnecessary gender essentialism. But then, so close to that, he quotes Leonard Cohen – Oh I am torn. Otherwise, typical übermensch thriller, each shot our hero takes is on target and bullets seem to deflect from him like he’s doing that whoosh whoosh whoosh that Neo does in The Matrix. I felt smart because I figured out (some of) the plot before the big reveal. Yay me!

  Bonus: Writing this mini-review has given me a good mental review of the alt-codes for accents.

• Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe: Reviewed earlier.
• Battle for WondLa by Tony DeTerlizzi: Last book in a trilogy. I wasn’t sold on the first book, was happier with the second, and back to being displeased with the third. But I’m not the target audience, not being a YA science-fiction fan.
• Scatter is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer: Reviewed earlier.
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness: I’m pretty sure I heard about this series from the author of Every Other Moment. And I tried. I tried so hard. And I hate it. I just have such a brain that cannot stomach 99% of the fantasy books out there. Why does no one in this book act rationally? It isn’t even endearingly irrational, like that Vorksagian Saga book I read that made no sense, but was somehow amusing in the nonsense.

  Plus, I was looking forward to reading it, and then it became a slog, so I got angrier. At least I had the sense to read synopses for the next too books in the series, rather than forcing myself to read them via some obsessive need for completeness.

• The Sorrows of An American by Siri Husdvedt: And then more ugggghhhk. Read for book-club. Typical, naval-gazing American novel that likely appeals to Americans (see 10:04). Parts seemed to be farcical (the cross-dressing stalker) without any amusement. Everything doubled like each character had a mirror for whatever aspect was happening at that point (two widows, two single people, two stalkers, two psychiatrists, two fatherless children, etc.). The lone bit that interested me was the movie that gets talked about – it was like a James Incadenza sort of film. They should have just made a movie of that and put this book far away from me.

  Although, like A Discovery of Witches, someone I know loves this book, completely adores it, can’t get enough of it. I do think if you are working through loss, especially that of a parent or spouse, then this book might be more appealing to you.

Favourite book of the month: This was a strange month. Of all the new books I read, none got five out of five stars. In fact, I feel really angry at books this month. Most got around three stars. Some got put down to one, one and a half. I read a book I didn’t like, followed by another one I didn’t like, and it made me grumpy (well, grumpier). So I don’t know. I guess Wayside School. It reminded me of being a kid.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I don’t even remember how I found out about this, probably CBC or The Globe and Mail. I read, right after we moved here, When Alice Lay Down With Peter, just picking it randomly off the shelf of the library, and wondered why I’d never heard of it before. When Tesfa and I go to the library, she often “chooses” a book for me, and always chooses When Alice Lay Down With Peter, something about the spine of green mixed with purple I suppose.

So I will read Margaret Sweatman’s new novel whenever I find myself a copy.

I watched:

• Parks and Recreation: Reruns. On Netflix.
• Happy Endings: I’m not seeing the reason for the love, but I’m also not not seeing the reason for the love either. It’s fine; that’s about all the enthusiasm I can muster up. I haven’t got to the last episode. Maybe it’s a cliffhanger and everyone is upset there’s no closure? I don’t know. I like Adam Pally best, but am much happier he’s on The Mindy Project now.
• Thomas the Tank Engine: We watched a bunch of PBS in a hotel room before we trashed the place. Maybe not the trashing part. But the PBS part is true. And is there anything that says American Cultural Imperialism more than the fact that in the American versions of Thomas the Tank Engine, they overdub all the voices so that they are American accents. They even change the song at the end so that it has a country and western twist. I want my Ringo Starr reading me the story and all the accents from all over the UK for the trains!

  Next time we are in a hotel and Thomas the Tank Engine is on PBS, we will watch something else. I’ll have Tesfa watch the ones with British voices on youtube here at home.

I wrote: I had a story published. I typed an end to the faerie story. I did some thising and thating of typing up other pieces from the summer. But overall, nothing. I don’t even have stories I work on in my head as I go to sleep lately.

I read:

Thoughts:

• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket: Tesfa and I are continuing to enjoy these. Perhaps me enjoying them a bit more than Tesfa, but still, I think they’re pretty clever. Plus I learned the difference between nervous and anxious, so I’m expanding my mind.
• The Waking Dead Compendium Two by Robert Kirkman: I think I’m done. I’ve got my fill of male-dominated, zombie adventures where the same thing keeps happening over and over and over and over again. Maybe I’ll just read the synopsis for Compendium Three on wikipedia.
• Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet: Oh my, this is an overly busy book. In three hundred pages we have high school bullying, drunk driving, infidelity, evangelical Christianity, failing family dynamics, class difference, and then because clearly that isn’t keeping enough balls in the air, there’s also a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

  I’m not kidding. There is a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

  Too many balls in the air.

• The Wanderer by Fanny Burney: There’s a comment on this book’s goodreads page that forms a rather apt description of this book:

  A book filled with good intentions and characters who made me want to climb into the book for the sole purpose of slapping them.

  So 19th century melodramatic filled with enough coincidences and fainting fits to last a lifetime. That said, it was so much more engaging than Pride and Prejudice. So there! I’ve read a 19th century British book about women and marriage and middle and upper-class places in society and I enjoyed it. There is hope for me yet!

• Malarky by Anakana Schofield: Like most experimental novels I read, at first I slogged, forcing myself through. But then, after a little while, when the logic of that, particular, fictional universe start to make sense, and I began to enjoy myself, as much as you can enjoy a novel about a slide into dementia and an unhappy marriage and the way reality can fracture at any second. Double bonuses too for the use of the name Philomena, which I adore. It’s so Catholic sounding, perhaps because the only people I’ve ever met with that name are Irish or Filipino Catholics.

  So, if you start and aren’t sure whether to continue, my opinion is to keep going and try it out. What have you got to lose?

• Such Bright Prospects: Short Stories about Asperger Syndrome, Alcohol, and God by Tessie Regan: Reviewed here.
• Meatspace by Nikesh Shkula: Reviewed here.
• The Unenviable by David G. Mirich, PhD: I got this book to read because I thought it would be good for me, like eating kale. But then I couldn’t put the book down and read it all in two sittings (had to go pick up Tesfa at the bus stop so I had a break).
• My Real Children by Jo Walton: Being released so close to Life After Life and with similarities in plot, one can’t help but compare these two books; unfortunately My Real Children is the one that ends up lacking simply because Jo Walton cannot write as wonderfully as Kate Atkinson. Most people can’t.

  This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy My Real Children; I’d rank it four out of five, but I had the same problem with My Real Children as I did with the other Jo Walton book I read, Among Others: it was close, but not quite.

  I feel kinship with Jo Walton. Like me, she is an above average author (although Jo Walton could likely be classified as far more above average than me, like I am epsilon above average and Jo Walton is some number far larger than epsilon, like when you use $$>>$$ rather than simply $>$ in functional analysis and all that area of mathematics that I don’t like). There are times when the writing is so good. Then there are times when the writing isn’t. Maybe she (and I?) just need a really talented editor to help us out.

  She’s also Welsh and I’m part Welsh so I think we could hang out. She’s probably read Dylan Thomas and How Green Was My Valley though, so maybe we’d talk about non-Welsh things.

• The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: Reviewed here.
• The Rescue Princesses: The Lost Gold: I’m pretty sure y’all could figure out that this was not so much a Meghan choice as a Tesfa choice. Geoff despises these books but I don’t know – they have POC princesses, the princesses are the protagonists and do things (figuring out solutions as to how to save animals), the princesses (at least in this book) stood up against adults. Sure, these books aren’t going to win any awards for writing, but I’m not going to be too down on a series of books of multiracial girls solving their own problems.
• The Little Stranger: I kept thinking something more was going to happen in this book, that there’d be a big reveal like Endless Night by Agatha Christie, but it didn’t, so the novel sort of flatlined.

  And now, so any of my ultra-literary readers can have a laugh: I first read Endless Night by Agatha Christie when I was in high school. In high school, I also really liked The Doors and their song End of the Night has the lyrics

  Some are born to sweet delight,
  Some are born to endless night.

  And I thought, Wow, Agatha Christie was in her sixties when she wrote Endless Night and here she is quoting The Doors in the book and for the title. What a hip old lady Agatha Christie must have been.

  Yeah, both The Doors and Agatha Christie were quoting Auguries of Innocence (1803) by William Blake. I didn’t realize that until I was like 25 years old. I’ll still assume, however, that Agatha Christie was a hip old lady.

• X’ed Out: A unlikable male protagonist stumbles through dream after dream! It’s like Charles Burns put everything I hate into a graphic novel. I need to make a tumblr or something of books that have lengthy dream sequences because I hate dream sequences so much. It’s not as bad as the long, drugged out dream sequence in At Play In The Fields of the Lord but any description of a dream over three words is too long for me. And X’ed Out has pictures of dreams, so that’s just too much for me to handle.
• Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great: Wow. I did not remember (a) how whiny and unlikeable Sheila is, (b) how much fat shaming this book contains, and (c) the liberal use of the word stupid to describe pretty much everything.

Favourite book of the month:

I read this book constantly when I was a kid. I was always so impressed at the chutzpah Willo Davis Roberts had that when Katie, the protagonist in The Girl With The Silver Eyes is talking about what books she likes, she lists The View From The Cherry Tree, another Willo Davis Roberts book. This blew my ten year old mind that authors could self-promote.

I read this book again in my twenties and was disappointed, but now, reading it in my thirties with Tesfa, this book is awesome. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I read it at 24. I must have been stupid that day or something.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

New David Mitchell!

I watched:

Thoughts:

• The Mindy Project: I have now watched every Mindy Project episode probably like three times. I am sort of obsessed with The Mindy Project right now (and The Hunger Games movies, which I think I like better than the books).

  There’s a comment on IMDB about The Mindy Project which, when I read it, realized made so much sense to me as to why I like the show. The link is here and I’ll quote the comment too, even if the spacing ends up weird and thin (ignore please the gender essentialism the commenter throws in):

  There’s two things about The Mindy Project I can’t deny – one, is I can’t stop watching it. I got through season 1 in a week and it makes me laugh and ship characters and hate and love characters and it’s all the experiences you’d expect from any guilty-pleasure TV show. The other one is that it annoys the pants off me. It screams Vanity Project, it’s literally let’s watch Mindy Kaling’s savy-stylish-doctor-in-NYC fantasies, it literally feels like watching the daydreams of a part-time nursing student on a crowded 6am bus. She’s surrounded by impossibly handsome men, most of which she has slept with and/or are in love with her, she’s witty, great at her job, independent super woman who never wears the same outfit twice.

  But then I realised, that’s the reason why I like this show so much. It is the female version of a geeky boy living out his fantasies through Transformers. It is a show where every single male character is defined by their relationship to Mindy, which is the most unsettling and fascinating role reversal I have EVER seen on TV. We are so used to seeing female characters defined by how men see them, we take it for granted. We are so used to having a geeky/loser/relatable MALE main characters, just think of every movie you’ve seen. Peter Parker. William Miller in Almost Famous. Heck, the dude in the Lego Movie. And they’re all surrounded by these invariably gorgeous, invariably flirty women and we just accept that. All Mindy Kaling did was turn that to HER advantage in her TV show. It strikes us as narcissistic, but boy is she catering to the fantasies of gazillions of women besides herself along the way. Including mine. Danny Castellano is the best implementation of the good-hearted grump fantasy I’ve ever seen. No it’s not realistic, but are movies ever? Why does it have to be realistic just because the main character is ‘outside traditional beauty standards’? This series is no political statement, it is a series written to get women hooked and it does just that. And I’m loving it.

• American Horror Story: I’m still not done Season One. I keep getting bored and only watching for ten minutes at a time.
• Bojack Horseman: The show amused me. I can’t really quantify how or why, just that I enjoyed it. Maybe because of Arrested Development associations in my mind.
• Happy Endings: This is my new HIMYM show, in that I watch it and think Why am I watching this? I do know why (because Adam Pally went to The Mindy Project after this and I’m all about The Mindy Project right now) but I need to stop. A lot of internet people told me Happy Endings was a good show. It is a passable show. I’m not going to go any higher than that.
• Parks and Rec: Just rewatching the old episodes on American Netflix. Mindy might be pushing Parks and Rec out of my number one position though right now. Time will tell.

I wrote: At Geoff’s suggestion, I am not working on anything in particular right now. I’m doing writing exercises and plotting the dénouement of my faerie story, trying to get better before I attack some new plans later in the season.

Geoff pointed this out to me yesterday, I forgot his favourite part of my month-ends: the best book, for whatever arbitrary and always-changing definition of best I’m using at the time. So, here it is, August’s best book:

It was not a very winning month for grown-up literature and, more and more, it seems I’m enjoying books that I can read aloud to Tesfa more than I am enjoying books I am choosing to read to myself.

I read:

• Izzy, Willy Nilly: 80s YA written by someone who I don’t believe has ever actually met or was ever a teenager, or, when they were a teenager, were a teenager like me, quiet, studious, asleep each Saturday night by nine to be awake for church at eight. Every character has one trait and one trait only. No one has depth. But the book is a hardcover from the library and smells the way old hardcovers from the library do (the rotting bookbinding glue) so I breathe it in. But then the story is full of girls who only care about being pretty and popular, so I am sad again. Why is Izzy so concerned with giving Rosamunde a makeover? Rosamunde doesn’t want one. Being pretty isn’t everything.
• After the Fire, A Still Small Voice: A so what? book, i.e. I got to the end and thought so what? Beautiful writing doesn’t make up for characters whose change is so subtle that I guess I missed it. The same at the beginning, the same at the end.

  Also, this is very, unapologetically Australian novel. I spent much time on http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html to decipher what was going on. Australians. Reminds me of Costa Rica and the Australians I worked with, people who have faded from me in the ten years since then. There are days when I would give anything to go back to that. So I think of this book and I yearn for nothing that this book even touched on, other than people who live in another hemisphere where summer and winter are reversed, people who get long summer breaks over Christmas.

• The Language of Flowers: A book that kept raising my hopes, but then would veer into melodrama and over-explanation. So I’d get frustrated and want to quit, but it was for book club so I kept going. To be fair, I would have kept going anyway. Books like this make me wonder what happened to editors.
• The One and Only: Each time I complain about Jane Austen, I always say that I feel like I’m reading the 1810’s chick-lit. Then I wonder if the chick-lit of today is going to end up classic 2010’s novels of manners in the same way. I hope not, especially since that would mean books like The One and Only will stick around for ever. I didn’t mind the other Emily Giffen books nearly as much as this one, which I’m close to despising. Perhaps its the very-and-obviously-so photoshopped author’s photo (although this may be a marketing decision). I don’t care what my author’s look like. Maybe it’s the issue of the week feel with the domestic abuse/violence in sports situation, which, rather than natural, feels like someone told her to pick and issue to lend your book gravitas and manipulate your readers into thinking that this is a serious novel. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I liked Emily Giffen better when she was writing silly books about people in farcical situations.
  
  In any case, I think this will be the last Emily Giffen book I read.
• Secret of Grim Hill: Some children’s books are enjoyable for adults (like Roald Dahl). Some less so. This one is less so.
• Walking Dead Compendium One: You know how you read about cults and fringe groups how they normalize the crazy. Everything starts out normal and then small changes and more small changes until you are in all the way and don’t realize it. I keep feeling that The Walking Dead is kind of like a MRA-misogynistic version of that, like it’s trying to nudge your thinking that way. Or maybe I’m overthinking it and Robert Kirkman is just a dick.
• The Westing Game: I hadn’t read this in a long time. It’s still engaging, but maybe I stayed engaged because I remember a world without cellphones. This is one of those novels where a lot could have been solved in minutes with cellphones.
• School for Good and Evil: Probably fitting that a book about being either good or evil ends up being neither with a bunch of muddled motivations and characters. Tries to subvert fairy tale essentials, but then ends up reinforcing them (most glaringly the good/beautiful evil/ugly dichotomy) alongside a heavy-handed subplot with GLBTQ overtones regarding love. Plus the endless italics and ambiguous pronouns getting in the way. Verdict: One of those books that I want to just take and fix it by rewriting it myself. It’s like How did this ever get published at the same time as I’m so jealous I didn’t think of this first.
• Lemony Snicket #1: The Bad Beginning: As I mentioned before, I am really liking Lemony Snicket. I always think of the writer/storyteller divide. Some writers are writers and some are storytellers (yes, I know it’s confusing that a writer could not be a writer. I’m used to this nonsense considering a did a PhD in Combinatorial Game Theory where game means a set of mathematical objects that satisfy some certain conditions, the ruleset for a specific game, or a position within a game depending on the context). Some are both. J.K. Rowling is a storyteller (I think, I haven’t read Harry Potter in years): you’re reading Harry Potter for the plot, not for the language. But Lemony Snicket, I’m reading for both. It amuses both me and Tesfa.
• Niko: Q: How does a five (out of five) star novel become a three (out of five) star novel? A: Have a protagonist suddenly be struck with amnesia on page 143. We’re not a novel in from the 1800s. Amnesia as a plot device has been thoroughly played out. Then have the last twenty pages have dialogue that sounds like it was written by a computer AI from the 1980s. This seems to be the month of book disappointment for me. Maybe it’s less the books. Maybe I’m just sour this month.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

I’ve read some good reviews. So there it is.

I watched:

• The Mindy Project: I am rewatching The Mindy Project is a very obsessive way.
• Southcliffe: I watched one episode. I might watch more when Tesfa is back in school.
• The Hunger Games: Oh my this movie stressed me out, even though I’d read the books and knew what would happen. I’m still stressed out now, a few days later. I need to stop getting so emotionally involved in movies.
  
  Right before we started watching, I saw our DVD of The Princess and The Warrior sitting on the shelf of DVDs that we have yet never watch. Maybe it was because of that glimpse, but I had the same feelings about the male protagonists of both movies – I would never see how he could be attractive, but by the end, I was like “Yeah, I can see it.” So yeah, I would totally, in an age-appropriate way, see how Peeta would be attractive. I think, even if I hadn’t read the book, I would have got the subtext, that Katniss is convincing herself, at some level, to play the audience in regards to her and Peeta. I remember reading articles about that when the movie came out. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Who knows. Yay movies!

I wrote: Nothing. See here.

But, my chapbook, which I submitted to The Rusty Toque Chapbook contest got an Honourable Mention (I got an email about that this morning, will link to announcement when it goes public). Any publishers looking for a chapbook, I’ve got one with an honourable mention all ready for you.

I read

Thoughts:

• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid: Discussed here.
• Bound To You by Christopher Pike: Discussed here.
• A Hero for WondLa by Tony DeTerlizzi: I liked this book better than the previous one in the series. Maybe I’m softening when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy? Possibly a good series to suggest to Tesfa when she’s older. Points for having a female protagonist in a sci-fi book too. It would be nice if it was more of a fifty-fifty gender split though.
• Lemony Snicket All The Wrong Questions Series by Lemony Snicket: Discussed here.
• 419 by Will Ferguson: I spoke briefly about location scouting here. Other that that, I’m not quite sure why this book won the Giller. It’s a well-paced thriller sure, but other than that? It was up against The Imposter Bride and won? That makes zero sense to me whatsoever.
• Geronimo Stilton Some Adventure I Don’t Care About Enough to Even Look Up the Correct Title: What is the purpose of these books? As I said in an email last week, the stories are saccharine, there is no character development, the language is uninteresting, and Geronimo is whiny and incompetent, yet always manages to do everything irrespective of his bumbling and lack of ability. Why doesn’t he make an effort to learn how to do even the most mundane of tasks? He’s so boring. There is no need for there to be sixty thousand books about him. One would have sufficed.
• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton: Discussed here.
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: The librarian in town seemed really happy I was taking this book out. It’s funny, looking at it now, how controversial it must have been when first published. I spent some time thinking about what books would be controversial now. The best I could come up with was an old article I’d read on cbc entitled What’s with all these filthy European novels? Still, however quaint Giovanni’s Room may seem now, it’s a testament to the strength and beauty of the writing that such a navel-gazing novel held my interest.
• The Land of Long Shadows by Muriel E. Newton-White: I bought this book at Master’s Book Store in Haliburton, Ontario when I was eleven or twelve. Has anyone else read this basically self-published book other than me? If you have, tell me! It’s a cute story, a bit too religious and a bit too essentialist regarding the various tree-folk’s “race”, but I can edit those bits out as I read the book to Tesfa.
• Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates: Okay, confession number one: for an embarrassingly long time (let’s say into my late twenties), for some reason I thought Joyce Carol Oates was a man, irrespective of the Joyce and the Carol, two female names right there for me to see.

  Now that that’s out of the way, why do I read Joyce Carol Oates? I’m always pulled in by the premise, enjoy the first fifty and the last fifty pages, but then everything in the middle, there is no way to make the groaning sound I make whenever I get to the middle of a Joyce Carol Oates novel. It’s like a Zombie whose stood in line to buy Christmas presents on Christmas Eve and then finally gets to the cash to find out he’s left his wallet at home. That’s the noise I make in the middle of a Joyce Carol Oates novel. The middles are always so tediously boring and plodding along and I just want to quit every single time. And the middle is always like four hundred pages long, yet I keep reading Joyce Carol Oates novels for the premise and the one hundred pages I actually think are kind of good. Make me stop. Someone make me stop.

  Even yesterday, when I’m reading the middle, bored out of my mind so I’m actually surfing the internet on my iPad instead, I’m like Oh, she wrote a book about Jeffrey Dahmer (I can’t really recall why I was looking up stuff on Jeffrey Dahmer. I read a lot of books about serial killers as a tween, in my house, alone, after the sun went down. I probably shouldn’t have been doing that, but I did. I assume looking up things on Jeffrey Dahmer yesterday is some sort of rippling after-effect of those years.) Maybe I should put it on hold at the library.

  Someone needs to save me from myself.

Best book:

So good. Lots of little stories revolving around Métis and Aboriginal characters. And I mean lots – gives me hope that maybe one day I too can publish a collection with lots of little, perfect stories in it.

Most promising book put on my wishlist:

I don’t know if I can get this shipped to Canada affordably. Maybe an ePub will come out soon and I can get it that way.

I watched

:

Thoughts:

• The bunch of Disney XD shows: We were at a friend’s house. These were on in the background. If I was doubting my decision to not have cable, let’s just say that I am doubting that decision no more.
• The Mindy Project: On Canadian Netflix! I enjoy shows about pudgy, random doctors, such as myself, although this show is about an OB-GYN rather than someone who has a somewhat useless PhD in Pure Mathematics. But that’s still fine – pudgy, random doctors unite! I watch this while I do jigsaw puzzles on the floor.
• Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal: New Sailor Moon Episodes! I went to pick up Tesfa at camp one day and one of the counselors was drawing a picture of Sailor Moon. None of the kids knew who that was. I did. I was pretty much like Oh my goodness! You’re drawing Sailor Moon! There’s going to be a new Sailor Moon series did you know that? and the counselor looked at me like I was a reprehensible idiot and told me that they’d already aired the first episode. She probably watched it in Japanese without subtitles but I don’t care. New Sailor Moons! The majority of my Japanese comes from Sailor Moon catch phrases. If I ever need to punish someone in Japanese, I’ll be ready.
• MLP: FiM: We watched all the new episodes. Why is Pinkie Pie now batshit crazy rather than just ebullient? I have a MLP:FiM post I’m getting around to writing. Maybe next week.
• American Horror Story: Like so many dramas lately, I get really involved, but then by episode three I lose interest. The only thing this show has going for it currently is the over-the-top, hormonal driven love between Violet and Tate. So teenagery, like the world is going to end. Sometimes I miss the intensity of teenage feelings.
• Orange is the New Black: Am I the only one who has no interest in the Daya/Bennett subplot? Daya just sulks and Bennett just flails. Still love Poussey, especially her wearing those earrings in the flashback. There’s no way they could shank Piper and make the whole show about Poussey, is there?

I wrote: Not a whole lot. I’ve been down about writing. A string of rejections will do that to a person, especially a person like me who tends to live in the negative. I have one more short story to finish up, which will bring me to seven short stories this year. I think in the fall, I’m going to focus on finishing the faerie story, then go back to short fiction.

In any case, a few nibbles, but mainly no’s. The same criticisms – I don’t say enough. So now I’ve got to decide: write what I want or write what will get published. Although, that’s a lie. It’s not even a decision. I’m always going to write what I want, which is why I am a small time short story writer and not Alice Munro.

I read:

Thoughts:

• In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa: Discussed earlier.
• Roost by Ali Bryan: Sort of a funny novel. Irreverent maybe. It takes place in Halifax, but it didn’t have that much of a Halifax feel until the end (with a shoutout to KOD). Sometimes I wish I could write (intentional) humour when I read books like this, but other times, absurdity in fictional life feels overdone, which it did sometimes here too. But it’s a first novel, so there are always rough spots, and it isn’t as if I have a first novel or anything so maybe this is all sour grapes.
• Wildwood by Colin Meloy: Reel Girl has some good complaints about this book, but overall, Tesfa seemed to enjoy it. We finished it near the beginning of the month and yesterday Tesfa started talking about a little, inconsequential scene in the book, so clearly the plot sticks in kids’ heads.
• The Ramona books: I am surprised by how much I remember from these books. I wish they wouldn’t call people stupid in it though. Yes, I am one of those very very politically correct freaks.
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: Ugggg. The Great American Novel bores me. The middle is such a slog. I wish Franzen committed to the Aslan subplot as deeply as David Foster Wallace did for The Entertainment in Infinite Jest. I didn’t really need the love triangle. I didn’t really need the long sentences. I did warm up to it near the end and the Lithuania subplot, but most of the other subplots just ended up dragging and dragging and dragging. But I’m not a fan of The Great American Novel in general, so it’s sort of a mystery why I decided to read this. So far I’ve got two conflicting pieces of advice for Freedom: Freedom is so much better than The Corrections versus The Corrections is so much better than Freedom, but I have a copy of Freedom so I’ll probable end up reading it eventually.
• The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker: Discussed earlier.
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie: I think I’m going to buy this book as part of my nephew’s birthday present. Quality YA.
• The Dinner by Herman Koch: Discussed earlier.

Best book:

Here’s another Halifax book I read this month that is completely, overwhelmingly, achingly Halifax, but a book that seems to have come out and vanished without making much of a splash. I wish for more people to read it. If nothing else, it demonstrates how great books from small publishers about POC get forgotten quickly.

Most promising book put on my wishlist:

I read a review of this book that talked about it being literary fiction and a mystery. I keep searching for books like that (as evinced by, for example, The Harry Quebert Affair). I keep trying to recreate when back in the late nineties when I picked up a Minette Walters book (The Dark Room I think it was) and read for what seemed like the first time, a well-written, non-pedantic mystery novel. Maybe Viviane will be it. The library only has it in the original French. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to try to read it or just wait until the library purchases a translation.

I watched:

• Les Revenants: Yay, I love spooky shows that haven’t let me down. But there’s only one season so far, and maybe there will never be another one, and then it will have let me down. Time will tell.
• Portlandia: I finally finished Season Three. Liked the other seasons better, but did appreciate Matt Berry being there for an episode.
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Oh thank you sweet Deities, Netflix has new episodes. Not that Tesfa wants to watch them. No, she wants to start back at Episode One and work up to them. Why does my child want to have me lose my mind?
• Game of Thrones: The show doesn’t seem to be making an impression on my brain this season. I thought and thought and thought just now about what happened in the final episode. I finally remembered a little bit, then I thought some more and remembered more, but this was a non-trivial amount of thinking to remember.
• Frozen: I have decided that no, I do not want to build a snowman. Or ride my bike around the hall. I don’t even own a bike.
• American Horror Story: All I am eager to watch right now is spooky and horror. I just want to watch this nonstop because I suppose horror and fear are the best escapism I have right now. Of course, doing the single parenting thing means that I have to wait until Tesfa goes to bed. Tesfa is not going to bed at appropriate times. So I’ll have to wait until Geoff returns to watch more. I’m so jaded that I’m already expecting to be disappointed.
• Maleficent: So in one of my moments of stellar parenting, I decided Tesfa and I would go to the movies and we would see Maleficent because if I was paying twenty dollars for us to go (ten dollars each), we were going to see a movie I had at least some small interest in seeing (the other option being How To Train Your Dragon 2 and I just don’t want to spend that much money to see it). So we saw Maleficent, which is the first time I’ve been to the movies since The Trailer Park Boys Movie.

  Tesfa did well – a few jumps and closed eyes, but no nightmares. The trailers before the movie however – whatever Transformers junk movie they are on now and Jupiter Ascending – they frightened her far more badly (loud explosions and random screaming and fighting). Even the trailer for whatever that Chris Pratt movie is (I looked it up – Guardians of the Galaxy) seemed unnecessarily violent. Uggg.

  But then we watched the movie and I have sort of a soft spot for it. I was just nice to have a movie about women that wasn’t a rom-com or had plotlines about pairing off happily ever after. I also think I may be in love a bit with Sharlto Copley (somewhat worrying as he was a horrible villain in this movie) but as he is dating a supermodel, I doubt things are going to work out between us.

  Bits from the movie keep popping back into my head now and then. But, and I felt the same with Frozen, which is one of the few other newer movies I’ve seen recently, the story seems so fast. Movies just rush by. Maybe because I’m reading long books and watching long television shows, I’ve lost my short-attention span for movies. I could have watched so much more of Maleficent. I could have sat there for hours.

I wrote: Minimal faerie story work. Proof-read fan story and IRA story. Working on another magical-realism story, similar to fan story, about breathing underwater. Submitted to some contests and publications – haven’t heard back from any. A story that was accepted in March was published (Ana’s Cupcakes). A difficult month to work since Tesfa was off school for large parts of it and Geoff was/is away. I can write longhand somewhat with Tesfa around, but typing it up, don’t even bother. I have to wait until she sleeps, and then I’m too tired to type. I don’t have much hope for accomplishing much writing this summer, but perhaps a creative break will do me good.

I read:

Thoughts:

• Come Barbarians: A lot of people really liked this book. I just thought it was too schlocky, which I think was the point, like an homage to action movie schlock, but I don’t like action movies anyway so it was not the book for me.
• Acts of God: A simple and plain collection of short stories, where neither simple nor plain is meant in a disparaging way. The stories are written and presented without ironic detachment. They just are. It was a nice break from clever and winding and difficult stories.
• Howl’s Moving Castle: Here is fantasy that I enjoyed.
• The Last Unicorn/Two Hearts: Here is fantasy I did not enjoy, although I thought Two Hearts was loads better than The Last Unicorn.
• Beezus and Ramona, Ramona The Brave: It’s funny how both dated and relevant Ramona books are, and also how much of the plots I remember, especially in Beezus and Ramona. Tesfa enjoys the two we’ve read so far. We bought the box set from Scholastic for the summer, so look for more Ramona books in my Read column over the next few months.
• You Are One Of Them: This is so a first novel. It is a great first novel, but so much unnecessary backstory and explanation. Not that I’m great at cutting either myself, but sometimes it’s easier to see our own faults in someone else’s work.
• Hyperbole and a Half: The God of Cake cracks me up every time.
• Shards of Honor: A surprisingly engaging sci-fi, especially considering the characters have no depth and act in ways that I don’t think anyone would ever act ever in past, present, or future.
• Magic Treehouse #29: Christmas in Camelot: Tesfa loves these books. Personally, I find them tedious, but this one wasn’t as tedious as it could be.
• 7 Ways To Sunday: Look, look everyone! I read the book I put as my most promising wishlist book last month! This was a difficult collection, almost the polar opposite to Acts of God. The stories here are immovable. They don’t give an inch. They’re brave and unapologetic. I guess it’s like kale. Kale is good for you, but hard to be enthused about. I wish I’d had more of an emotional connection with these stories, but maybe they’ll grow on me over time. I think I’ll likely remember individual stories from this collection more than from Acts of God.

Best book:

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I was cleaning out my bookshelves (I have five Ikea Billy bookcases and they were full and I need more space for more books) and found two Christopher Pike novels. One I think is my sister’s. Actually, both are probably my sister’s. So that got me thinking about Christopher Pike. See You Later was my favourite Christopher Pike book way back when I was twelve. It’s probably awful now. I put it on hold at the library, so I’ll let everyone know next month how deliciously awful the book turned out to be.

I watched:

I watched:

• Mad Men: I’m a season behind in Mad Men (watching Season Six on Netflix) and this is the first season I was really interested in watching. I would set up my day so that I’d have time to watch an episode. Don failing gives me too much schadenfreude for words.
• Portlandia: I was watching Season Three on Netflix and I just sort of stopped one episode from the end. I don’t even know why.
• Les Revenants: I enjoy exercising my French (although I have subtitles on too since my French has decayed spectacularly over the past ten years) and I think I enjoy the show. It’s the right level of spooky for me. But I keep thinking Maybe I should just go read the episode synopses, which would take a lot less time. I seem to have lost patience for television (see previous point at simply abandoning Portlandia). I can still read books, even long books (The Heart Broke In was over five hundred pages and I didn’t even enjoy it that much and I finished), but television I can walk away from without a backwards glance. I do hope to finish Les Revenants though. I’m going to try to get my television patience back.

I wrote: Worked on faerie story. Wrote a story about Schnitzel Haus. Wrote a story inspired by Jean McConville. No new publishing acceptances. Lots of no’s.

I read:

• The Snow Child: This was a novel that could have been a novella, that maybe could have even been a short story. One of those books with too many words dragging it down. Not that it was bad, just wordy. I could get away with reading maybe three words per paragraph and still know what was going on.
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making: I read the first third of this book while on prescription pain medication and it was awesome. The it in the previous sentence is key. It might have just been awesome to be on prescription pain medication since I’m not one hundred percent sure I just didn’t make up what happened in the first one hundred-odd pages. For example: I put a marker in for a page with a wonderful quote, and now have read and re-read that page off medication and cannot find any quote there that really needs marking. And I didn’t enjoy the last two thirds at all. Morale: to enjoy fantasy, I need to get on drugs.
• A Marker to Measure Drift – This is one of those write the books you want to read; this is the book I want to write, the ability to write about monstrous happenings without exploiting or trivializing them and without using horrible events as a shortcut for emotional or character development (see my earlier complaints about Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us).
• Harriet the Spy: Discussed here.
• The Bear: The shtick of the five-year old narrator becomes grating around the fiftieth page. Then I got annoyed. Then I stopped enjoying it.
• Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: This I enjoyed reluctantly since it was obviously google-porn. The google stuff was so aspiring to be Microserfs almost it was funny. Maybe I’ll dig up my copy of Microserfs and read it again. It’s much more interesting to read about a tech company with a critical and satirical eye rather than a fawning one (Seriously, does the the author of Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore work at google? Did they pay him or something?)

  Now spoilers (highlight to read):
  I’m not sold on the code being anything more than a simple substitution cipher, even if they try to present it as notches on the letters rather than the letters themselves. For instance, the example they give is that lower case X has four notches and four notches corresponds to something (say T). But then, if all lower case X’s have four notches, than that’s just the same as lower case X corresponding to T. They’ve just run it through an isomorphism. Even if, as they say there are some more complications, like certain double letters (example in book is ff) having notches corresponding to other letters, there are some really complicated code breaking techniques that can still account for things like that, even some not so complicated ones, like frequency analysis and doing it over things like single letters, pairs, triples, etc., that might catch things like that.

  Unless every single letter in the typeset was different each time, I don’t see how this isn’t anything other than a substitution cipher.

  And that’s all my cryptanalytic complaints laid out in full.

• Tiger, Tiger: I continue to read more about pedophiles, this one a memoir.
• Plain Jane: Talked about here
• Hollow City: Another book, like The Bear, that had a shtick, but while the photos were sort of novelty in the prequel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, they seem forced here and overdone.

Best book:

I still love this book as much as when I was a kid. I read it to Tesfa. She thought it was all right.

Most promising book put on my wishlist:

And since I won a copy from goodreads, I’ll actually for once read my most promising book put on my wishlist promptly.

I watched:

• 30 Rock: I got to the end. It took me a week to get through the finale, which was the only reason I started watching the show because of a clip from the finale (Thank you, America, that’s our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the joke’s on you, ’cause we got paid anyway, which I thought was kind of cheeky and piqued my interest). Even after all of the episodes, I feel nothing. I cried in the finale of The Office and I cried when Ben and Leslie kissed in the smallest park in Pawnee and I even felt a little bad when Ted got left at the altar, but 30 Rock made me feel no feelings at all.
• Parks and Recreation: I don’t know how they’re going to come back from the season finale. It seems so perfect for an ending. Maybe I’ll just end up hating the final season.
• Silicon Valley: Discussed here.
• Mad Men: Mad Men is like comfortable slippers that remind me of last year when Tesfa was still in Montessori and I was still a bit more hopeful than I am now.

I wrote: I worked on my post-modern story about a fan and some faerie work. Zero publishing news, unless rejections count.

I read the following books:

• We Are Water: I think I give Wally Lamb a pass on a lot of things because of reading I Know This Much Is True in hotel room in Harar which, instead of walls in the hallways, just had curtains tied down that billowed out like balloons in the wind and kept none of the dust out, so were completely useless except for imagery purposes. I was disappointed in Harar and I Know This Much Is True is a novel about disappointment and what good can come of disappointment. But this book, We Are Water, it just annoyed me. Plus, much like Tampa last month, what is with the gratuitous depictions of rape and sexual violence? Is that a thing now? To prove how brilliant a writer one is, one has to write as base and degrading as possible? Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t really need page after page after page of child rape. I’m fine with a brief sketch to get the picture.
• The Ocean At The End of the Lane: I’ve never really understood the thing with Neil Gaiman. I think he’s an okay writer but I don’t get why so many people adore him. I always find when I’m reading his stuff, even Sandman, that nothing captures my attention and my mind wanders so much. Like if you ask me in a month what happened in this story, I doubt I’d be able to tell you. Maybe other fantasy writers (I don’t read much adult fantasy) are so much worse that Neil Gaiman seems masterful in comparison? I don’t know. I also wish his female characters weren’t just tools for the male characters to emotionally advance. They’re always just mysterious faerie-like creatures with minimal depth.
• Everything Is Perfect When You’re A Liar: Why is there so much CAPS LOCKING GOING ON with multiple explanation marks to emphasize how funny things are?!?!? The writer needs some more confidence to just let things be funny rather than to tell me where the funny occurs, but I’m one to talk. I have no confidence either and I almost never write anything meant to be intentionally funny.
• The Lifeboat: This book had too many characters. To remedy this, I wrote my own lifeboat story with only four characters.
• Little Women: We already discussed how this book might have made me a worse person.
• Pippi Longstocking: For some reason, I thought this book was more racist than it was. Maybe the later ones are the really racist ones? I only had to make minimal changes when reading it to Tesfa to modernize it.
• They Were Counted: Discussed here.

Best book:

I wasn’t initially going to read this book, because I remember not liking The Antagonist (although I rated it quite highly so I don’t know precisely what’s going on with my memory). But then, for reasons I don’t understand, I put Hellgoing on hold at the library and it was really good. My non-lifeboat, post-modern story I started this month is inspired by Hellgoing. It isn’t as good as any of Lynn Coady’s stories, but it’s a start.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

New Dinaw Mengestu. Yay!

I watched the following:

• Breaking Bad: By now everyone knows that Breaking Bad is not my cuppa anything. Initially, the show stressed me out so badly I could barely watch it. By the end, it just made me so angry, not that I think the creators were going for this, but I couldn’t help watching it and seeing like a racist, MRA’s dream, “nice” guy dream: geeky white guy gets hot chick then outsmarts a whole variety of POC and women to get what he wants, only to go out in a, literal, firefight of glory. I would have much preferred Walt to end up one of many in an orange jumpsuit, interchangeable and forgotten because he’s far from being the hugely important kingpin he imagines himself to be. He’s a jerk. I don’t get the veneration.
• Community: I watched the pilot episode again while sick, then one of the newer episodes. And yeah, I’m pretty sure that Community has britta’d Britta. She was so much more compelling in the pilot and then she just ends up a lame parody of the humourless feminist by the later seasons. I wish they’d kept her strong throughout, rather than playing her convictions off for cheap laughs. The latest two Community episodes are up on hulu and I haven’t gotten around to watching either of them. Maybe I’m sorting of cooling off towards Community.
• 30 Rock: Once upon a time I knew someone who knew a lot about feminism and called herself a feminist and urged women to stick together but who, at the same time, flirted with my boyfriends and gossiped behind my back and told other people things I told her in confidence, and I never really could reconcile what she said with how she acted and whenever I tried to say something to her about how her behaviour hurt me, she’d brush it off and say more feminist-sounding things and I’d get confused. It still leaves me feeling punched in the gut, even fifteen years later. That’s what 30 Rock is: it spouts some progressive sounding theory, but then used gay as an insult and puts people in blackface and seems just really like a sleazy sort of show that really, isn’t that good. But, on the plus side, watching it reminds me of Beetlejuice because of Alec Baldwin (who is another problematic issue right there).
• Trailer Park Boys: I miss Halifax. Sure, I live two hours away, but even the trees here are different in New Brunswick. I watch Trailer Park Boys and it just looks like home. Rewatching the episodes in anticipation of the new season coming to Netflix.
• Despicable Me: More tedious the second time around. What does it say that the most interesting characters in your movie are little yellow pilltubes that don’t even speak English?
• Howl’s Moving Castle: I know I’ve seen this movie before, but I forgot most of it. Or maybe I didn’t see it. I still can’t tell if I like it or not.

I wrote: Lifeboat story, post-modern story, some faerie story work. Considering that between March Break and snow days, Tesfa had ten days off school, and I started the month with food poisoning and ended it with a sore throat/cold/general misery at being sick, I feel that this month I accomplished more than I would have thought possible. I’ve now also written, although only typed up two, three stories of my anticipated twelve short stories total.