I read the following books:

Thoughts:

• The Closed Circle: This is, of course, the sequel to one of my favourite books and a book I’ve read before, although the first time I tried reading it, I tried reading it before I read The Rotters’ Club and the little message in the front, probably tongue and cheek, probably wry British humour, instead feels arrogant – talking about how like there’d be any reason you’d forgotten what happened in the previous book, the implication being that the previous book is so great that one couldn’t forget what happened. Issue is, the previous book is great. Still, I hate the little forward telling me so.
• Savage Love: Recommended as “fucking brilliant” by someone who passed on my work and I can see why if he thought this was fucking brilliant why he passed one me because we’re totally opposite styles. I guess I’m just not a post-modern, non sequitur style person, although I did write a post-modern type story immediately after finishing this collection to submit for the Bronwen Wallace award (no chance of winning, but good to have goals). I can see how technically good the stories are, how well-crafted and theoretically brilliant they are, but in actual fact, I just didn’t like them much at all. And whenever I do start to like a story – the last one in the collection for example – it does a sharp turn and I end up annoyed again by the end.
• Accusation: Catherine Bush wrote one of my all-time favourite books and she’s hardly prolific and this book has Ethiopia in it, so everything was coming up Milhouse! This isn’t as great a book as The Rules of Engagement, but it’s still pretty good and full of little details of things that I’d forgotten I knew (such as second-hand stores being called Opportunity Shops in Australia) and another one of the nails in the coffin of Come From Away because I’ll never get all the tiny details as right as this book does.
• Sexing the Cherry: I always like Jeanette Winterson (and since I keep talking about favourites, my favourite Jeannette Winterson is Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal) but man, you have to read every single word. Her books require focus. This book is only 140 pages long and it still took me four or five days to get through.
• Tampa: Why is the font so large? To trick me in thinking this book is far longer than it should be? This is a novella-length idea stttreeeecccchhhheddddddd uncomfortably into a novel. Why does it take until after the half-way point of this novel for something other than predatory and pornographically detailed statuatory rape to happen? I know all happy stories are the same, but I’m done with reading about rapists and Nazis and pedophiles and looking-for-humanity-in-everyone. I think somewhere along the line we’ve started to confuse complex with repugnant. Being a horrible person doesn’t make anyone particularly more interesting. This book underlines that quite well, probably not on purpose.
• Juanita Wildrose: My True Life: A friend lent this to me, saying It’s weird, so you’ll probably like it. I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment. I never know how to rate experimental novels. They’re like the far-end of the bell curve, not enough to compare them with. I did appreciate the poetry here was not italicized. After reading one of the Tolkien books (the second one? I don’t know) in one day at a very long sporting event I was dragged to as a child, I tend to ignore any poetry in italics, assuming it is (a) not very good, and (b) not relevant to the actual plot.

Best book:

Tesfa and I read this last month too, and likely will read it in March, possibly April, possibly all future months. I change the few lines about Cowboys and Indians to being about Spies (the book is from the 1960s so I can’t expect too much) and then we’re good to go.

Edit: Now, on further consideration, I wonder if my favourite book of the month wasn’t:

This is a tough call.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

Sleeping is not my strength. I read books about other people’s trials with sleep and feel a little better about life.

I watched:

Thoughts:

• 30 Rock: Sometimes it says “xciting jazz music” in the intro, which I’d like to think is some sort of secret message I just haven’t figured out yet.
• Room 237: Some people have a lot more time on their hands then I do. It reminded me of all the people who bend-over backwards to figure out secrets in House of Leaves where I am like Eh, it’s just a thing I watched and then move on.
• The Magic Schoolbus: I’d forgotten, from my babysitting days, how annoying the theme song was.
• The Croods: I feel rather bait-and-switchy on this one. The movie starts off with narration from Eep, the female teenager, then drops that and the story morphs into more about her father and Guy while Eep becomes a secondary character just mooning after some boy she doesn’t even really know.
• Breaking Bad: Another one where I’m starting to feel that the line between complex and repugnant has been smudged out. When I first started watching this show, it stressed me out so badly because the tension was so well played and now, in the dying end of the final season, I’m just annoyed with everyone involved. Some of it, I know, is personal distaste, having dealt with many “brilliant” men who use their intelligence as a shield to be assholes (I think most women in STEM fields and/or academia have run into their fair share of men like that), but at this point, Walt is the least interesting person on the show, yet it’s still about him and I don’t care about him. He’s an asshole and I read a spoiler so I know what happens, yet I keep watching because I’m a sucker for completing things and it’s nice to have something to do with Geoff in the evenings before Tesfa goes to bed.
• Arthur: This is one of those shows where most of the kids act really bratty and I hate shows like that. We only watched one episode and Tesfa didn’t seem to care for it either, thankfully.
• Community, Parks and Recreation: Watched these with my parents. My dad usually watches TVO and The Food Network. My mom watches Duck Dynasty and Storage Wars. I do not think they will be letting me pick what we are watching on television together again.

I wrote: Much faerie story, both longhand and typing. I wrote a short story about a psychic in a building I used to pass by on the bus in Calgary. Come From Away falters more. I thought I’d be sad about that, but I’m not. It’s just gone.

Nothing new published. One rejection letter, actually maybe two because I can’t remember whether it came at the end of January or beginning of February. I don’t have too many stories out there for consideration right now. Need to start rewriting and/or starting some new ones.

I read the following books:

Thoughts:

• Bone and Bread: Ignoring the fact that I keep calling this book Bread and Bone, I feel angry about this book. Cheated. It’s so cluttered and so long that it obscures the potential for something so meaningful. It’s a beautiful two hundred page story somehow stretched out to five hundred. Uncertain, I guess. This book is uncertain as to how to shine brightly.
• Kristin Lavrandatter: Discussed here.
• Choose Me: Discussed here.
• Night Film: Why did I read this? I didn’t particularly enjoy Special Topics in Calamity Physics and horror books/movies/etc. are almost always a letdown in the dénouement, and the italics, oh god the italics. But I read it because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t be great and then when it wasn’t great, I felt dumb for wasting my Saturday afternoon in bed reading it.
• The Hundred Foot Journey: One of those books with no conflict or antagonism, just going forward in a twee-like fashion. I don’t like books like that. Maybe it’s jealousy because nothing I write is warm or happy and the warm and happy books I do end up reading are always bestsellers being turned into a movie, whereas nothing I write will likely ever be turned into anything else.
• How Should A Person Be: There is really only one thing worth taking away from this book, something I will remember to tell Tesfa when she is older (adjusted for sexual attraction if necessary), which is never be with a man who wants to teach you something. I did grow to care about the characters by the end, but basically, 90% of the time, I was just angry with this sort of shitty book.

Best book:

I still love this book. It’s a pretty odd children’s book and dated, but my love for it is endless.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

Is it cheating if I put on a book I’ve already read? I read this book over and over again when I was about ten or eleven years old, but forgot what it was called. I spent a morning last week thinking about it, long and hard, searching through librarything and goodreads and amazon, cross-referencing with other memories of who could have written it (for a long time I thought Judy Blume), then remembering I had a copy of A Royal Pain on my bookshelf and that I had read all the Ellen Conford I could check out of the library after that. And it is – it is an Ellen Conford novel, not Judy Blume. The book isn’t in the New Brunswick Library System, and I am anti-buying things right now, but if I find it somewhere, in the used bookstore on Bridge Street or the Frenchy’s next time we go, I’m going to buy it.

I watched:

Thoughts:

• The Station Agent: Why can I tolerate, even dare I say, enjoy heartwarming movies like this one, yet when faced with a heartwarming book, often chosen for my bookclub, I get disgusted at the thought and end up having to force myself to read it? A mystery meghan puzzle I suppose. Also, I think I’m a little bit in love with Bobby Cannavale now.
• Despicable Me: Watched from (Canadian) Netflix while Tesfa was sick. I don’t know what I was expecting, except to say, I was expecting more. The movie isn’t bad, but it isn’t anything other than inoffensive, and even then, can I say that? What’s with the huge NBC product placements? Like for MSNBC – kids aren’t going to watch this movie and suddenly think Maybe I should be getting my news from a left-leaning all-news station like MSNBC, adults aren’t going to be like Well, if they’re advertising in the movie I brought my kid to see, I better go home and make sure to watch MSNBC all the time now. So I don’t understand. Tesfa slept through most of it too, so I can’t get her opinion to share either.
• 30 Rock: There are many things I like about this show, the number one being the uptempo jazz music as Netflix subtitles call it of the opening and I like Liz Lemon has some of the laziness I recognize in myself. But I am weary of everyone constantly commenting on how unattractive and fat Liz Lemon is. There’s a scene in the last episode I watched where Tina Fey is facing the Jane Krakowski and Tina Fey actually seems far skinnier. I don’t like the constant product placement. And I don’t like how Frank is in the opening credits but not Twofer or Cerie. And I don’t like how the other female staff writer (the one with frizzy, dirty blonde hair) doesn’t even have a name. I don’t like how tokenistic the inclusions of race and feminism are, just enough that I’m supposed to feel, I guess, appeased. I don’t want to feel appeased. I want to feel intelligent and not just like Here’s the bare minimum so you don’t complain. But the upbeat jazzy music! How can I stop?

I wrote: Same as always – time split between Come From Away for my course and my faerie story for my sanity.

And I’ve been put up by a journal to win the Journey Prize. I don’t anticipate getting past the first round, since this is my first time, but I’m still tickled to be considered.

I read the following books:

Thoughts:

• Franny K. Stein: Lunch Walks Among Us by Jim Benton: Tesfa enjoyed this book. There will be more in the series over the next few months, especially since I bought the box set for a surprise on our trip to Ontario next month.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: I have already detailed my unhappy thoughts about Austen earlier this month.

I’m not super chatty about the books I read in December.

Best book:

Considering I put it as my best book of the year, The Rotter’s Club by Jonathan Coe.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I have no memory of putting this book on my wishlist: The House On Sugarbush Road, so I’m thinking that it’s an inspired choice.

I watched:

Thoughts (and I’m far more chatty about movies and stuff than books this month):

• Homeland: I’m sorry. This show is just plain dumb. Geoff and I watched until half-way through Season One and then looked at each other and said We have better things to do. Here’s an alternet article about the stupidity of Homeland to back me up.
• 30 Rock: In my quest to find something to watch while eating lunch, I tried this. I guess it was funny, but I watched three episodes and haven’t gone back.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Tesfa is finally tiring of the episodes on Netflix. She hasn’t asked to watch in weeks.
• How The Grinch Stole Christmas: TV special, not the movie.
• Searching for Sugarman: Geoff: I just heard the craziest thing on the radio about this singer that no one knows here but is super huge in South Africa!
  
  Me: The Sugarman movie?
  
  Geoff: How’d you know about that already?
  
  Me: The radio is behind the times man! Behind the times!
  
  Somewhat relatedly, I have a huge, nonsensical hatred of the radio and anytime I can smack down radio, no matter how tenuous, I must do it.
• Timecrimes: Me: I don’t know if the film was believable.
  
  Geoff: You mean the time-travel timelines?
  
  Me: No. I don’t care about that. I just don’t think Spain has enough money to run such an advanced research station. Especially with the Euro crisis.
  
  Geoff: Really? That is your problem with the movie.
  
  Me: I mean, it’s just not realistic.
• The Music Man: Tesfa was really into the Flim and Flam episode of My Little Pony, so I thought she’d enjoy this movie. That was a mistake, not because she didn’t enjoy it, but because she sings the songs from the movie all the time now. I learned my lesson. No more musicals.
• The Sopranos: My DVDs do not have subtitles on them and I am forced to listen. Also, the DVDs are like the first DVDs ever made and the menus and the screens and pretty much everything other than watching the actual show is embarrassing because clearly no one had any clue what do with a DVD menu back in 1999.
• peg + cat: New Tesfa show, except there are only twelve episodes, and even if it is a girl and her cat solving math problems, I don’t know how long it is before I got peg + cat crazy. Also, this was a hassle to get and PBS really doesn’t like Canadians giving them money. That’s all I have to say about that.
• From Up On Poppy Hill
• How To Train Your Dragon: I wish there were more girls in this movie, but considering the book has zero, I guess having two or three in the movie is already supposed to be a win for equal rights *sarcasm*
• Troll Hunter: Oh Netflix, you came and you gave me Trollhunter. That almost makes me feel okay about you again after trying to push Homeland on me.

I wrote: My big file of stories all put together. Come From Away revisions. Antrim Nec Time Travel Compliance Officer rough draft. Typed up some faerie story. Basically, exactly what I did last month.

I read the following books:

• The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out A Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson: I read it for book club and totally, 100% not the book for me. I gave it to my mum though and she really enjoys it. The book is heart-warming, which makes me shudder. I am not a heart-warming sort of person.
• Doll Bones by Holly Black: I continue my pre-vetting of books I could conceivably read to Tesfa.
• George’s Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl: Doesn’t need me to pre-vet it, Tesfa loves it. We’ve read it a bunch of times and Tesfa loves making potions afterwards, although the last potion we left in a closed mason jar on the porch, the temperature dropped, and broke the mason jar open and I’ve been too lazy to pick up the pieces of broken glass just yet.
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken: More pre-vetting. Nice that there were two female characters, a female baddie, and then a smattering of men about, but very much a British Children’s Novel To Recall A Very Specific Era. I don’t know if Tesfa would be that interested.
• There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
• Little Children by Tom Perotta
• Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland: As I said in my librarything review of the book, the blurb on the dust jacket presents this novel as if we’ve never seen an unlikable male narrator before, like we’re going to surprise ourselves by rooting for the anti-hero. Except literature and media is chock-full unlikable characters – Hamlet, for example, or Rabbit Angstrom, who is far more unlikable than Raymond Gunt, the protagonist of Worst. Person. Ever., and we’ve also been inundated in the past fifteen years with male anti-heroes that we end up rooting for as well (Tony Soprano, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, etc.). Since Raymond Gunt is rather a benign character, the “shockingness” of his conversations and spiraling downwards isn’t really shocking at all. It’s pretty tame.
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: Review here.
• The Last War by Ana Menéndez
• Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell: Do you think the author’s first name is really Rainbow? This was a total YA book. If I’d been a twelve year old girl, I think I would have been swooning while reading this.
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Finished my second classics club only two weeks after finishing my first. Yay me!
• Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne: I lost this book and tore about the house looking for it and gave it up as lost and my mother-in-law sent me her copy because I had a melt-down on facebook. Then I found it on Tesfa’s bookshelf, which makes sense except after I tore the house apart and rearranged all the books, I’d taken a picture of Tesfa’s bookshelf and examining the picture, the book wasn’t where I found it. So something is fucking with me.

Best book: It was going to be Little Children, another interconnected story type of book (like last month’s The Juliet Stories). I’ve really got to put Come From Away behind me and do interconnected stories instead.

But then I read The Scarlet Letter and was really impressed. The language is, obviously, archaic, and my copy seems to be missing a cover and sort of water-logged, but it had one large check in its plus column: all the Hawthorne spew was confined to the first forty pages! But apart from the Hawthorne spew, it was a really moving book, which I wasn’t expecting at all. I had been prepared for a slog, and the first forty pages, which have nothing to do with the story, were, but then I was furtively reading whenever I had a spare moment.

I watched:

• Portlandia: Hee hee hee. Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. I’m just going to keep laughing. Please Netflix, add more Portlandia for me. Actually, Season Three is on US Netflix. Maybe it isn’t on Canadian? Maybe the Netflix app on my iPad is being mean to me again.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: When will Tesfa find a new show she wants to watch? I am so tired of this.
• Top of the Lake: I finished it. Don’t really know if it was worthwhile.
• Homeland: I am willing to believe that the CIA is pretty much incompetent, but I have a really hard time with the bad op-sec that I see in every episode. Are they really yelling classified information into their personal cellphones in the middle of the airport? Does Carrie really have all that classified information just sitting around in plain view in her house next to the big picture window? Do they really let people just wander around the CIA office unescorted? Or let people without the proper security clearance just randomly talk to extraordinarily rendered prisoners? This is not what people with security clearances generally do without getting fired soon thereafter. I love how every now and then, someone says “Oh, I can’t tell you for security reasons” and then three scenes later yells out some secret information whilst in the middle of a crowd. Ridiculous. Geoff and I are going to stick it out to the end of Season One and then decide whether to proceed. Neither of us really understands why people are gaga about this show.
• Freaks and Geeks: I watched the pilot and thought This isn’t bad, but then didn’t watch anything further.
• Parks and Recreation: I am so happy you are back. I am so sad that you will probably be cancelled soon. And just so you know Ben Wyatt Fictional Character, Geoff would totally play The Cones of Dunshire with you.

I wrote: The endless Come From Away revisions, started rough draft of Antrim Nec, Time Travel Permit Compliance Officer, put all my short stories in one file and proof-read that, tiny proof-reads of first chapter of faerie story.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist: A Mighty Girl recommended A Duck Princess. I really want to get it for Tesfa but Tesfa has about a million presents already, but I might get it the next time we go on an airplane for a new book to help make the time go by in a less awful way for myself..

I read the following books:

• In the Land of the Birdfishes by Rebecca Silver Slayter
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Already talked about a little bit here.
• Echo Year by Casper Silk
• The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison: What a dumb book. I probably should have realised I wouldn’t enjoy it because of all the It’s like Gone Girl, which I also thought was ridiculous, but The Globe and Mail was all rah rah rah and it had a Kate Atkinson blurb on the front, and maybe I need to read fewer books that are taut, psychological thrillers and just go back to reading my even, lit-fic stuff instead.
• The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta: Talked about in one of my Reading Around the World entries.
• The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder: I came so close to being completely in love with this book, but couldn’t get there in the end. Like those people you should be friends with but aren’t. I really liked it, but there was no chemistry between me and the book, but I’m inspired to write a whole intertwined story book lately, with my last published piece as the starting point.
• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto: On the recommendation of someone at my book club. I think me and Japanese novels just aren’t friends.
• And the unending quest to finish War and Peace. Perhaps November will be the month I finish.

Best book: There were no four and a half or five star books this month. I’m wanting to read the next Dan Vyleta book (The Crooked Maid) – perhaps Giller winning (check back tonight). Maybe if it does win the Giller, the New Brunswick Library will actually buy it so I can read it.

I watched:

• The IT Crowd: I tried turning it off and one again one last time by watching the series finale.
• How I Met Your Mother: Ugg. I am done. If I am ever cleaning and need to have something on Netflix on in the background to distract me while I do it, I don’t know, I’ll stream Golden Girls or something and then re-read again how rape culture-normalizing the entire stupid show is. Edit: Golden Girls is not on Netflix. Boo.
• Parks and Recreation: I am still not clear if Parks and Recreation is on hiatus or not. I am also sad for the day (likely soon), when there will be no more Parks and Recreation.
• Mad Men: After six months, I finally finished all the Mad Men that are on Netflix. I’m not sure if I care or not.
• The Office (US): Trying to find something to watch on my lunch hour now that I’ve finished Mad Men.
• Beezus and Ramona: I am trying hard to find quality movies with female protagonists in it for Tesfa. I use Reel Girl a lot, but even then, it’s still hard. So I picked this one for all of us to watch with popcorn in the basement on weekend. I can’t remember most of the books, but did Ramona’s aunt really end up marrying Howie’s uncle in the books? What was with the tacked on romantic subplot with Beezus? In fact, why does every kids’ movie have to have a tacked on romance subplot for the female characters? The Miyazaki movies we have don’t. Maybe we’ll just stick to Miyazaki, although Geoff was lent Wall-E and I have a coupon to see Frozen so we may be trying those this month too.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Geoff’s favourite character is Gummy. My favourite character is I’m going to claw my eyes out if I have to watch this one more time we are on our fourth run through the Netflix episodes.
• Top of the Lake: Easing into my post Mad Men world with a show that has an actress from Mad Men (Elisabeth Moss). So I am going to Spoiler away here: What is with the modern trope of Strong Woman Who Has Been Sexually Abused? This is in no way denigrating survivors and victims of sexual abuse but I am tired of the current way to code vulnerability now seems to be to have them raped. Is it some thought process like No worries gents if she gets a bit feisty with you – just hold her down and stick your dick into her! See, she’s not really that threatening at all. It’s become lazy, clichéd writing and I’m tired of it. I have two episodes of Top of the Lake left and I don’t know if I’m going to bother finishing it. Also, I don’t know why people keep saying New Zealand is so gorgeous – a lot of Top of the Lake looks like around here or parts of Alberta.

I wrote:

• Submitted my Jersey Cow story to The Antigonish Review. Then did the big push of a bunch of recently rejected stories to other spots.
• Faerie typing.
• Rewriting Come From Away for my new mentor.
• Came in second in The Puritan‘s Thomas Morton Writing Contest. Spent some time working with the editors fixing everything up.

I’m also going to start adding a new category for my monthly wrap-up. So here is my new category:

Most promising book I put on my wishlist

I’m always putting books on my wishlist, so maybe I’ll have some accountability and stop being like Oh – the name of this book popped up randomly when I was looking for something completely unrelated. It must be amazing!.

So, for my inaugural most promising wishlist book, I say: Adios Happy Homeland by Ana Menendez, which has such a happy and colourful cover that I just want to frame it and put it up. Of course, this book is not in the New Brunswick Library so unless it shows up a book sale for a dollar or less (currently, the only place I am allowing myself to buy books until I finish at least one hundred of the unread books I have), it may be awhile before I get to this one.

I read the following books:

• We by Michael Landweber
• Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
• Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume: I was having a low mental state for a lot of September. So I read kids books.
• Ru by Kim Thúy
• Anastasia Again by Lois Lowry: The children’s books continue.
• Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahloo
• The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

My reading has slowed down with the addition of War and Peace to my reading repertoire. Basically, I read one chapter of War and Peace, then a contemporary book, then back to War and Peace. But most of the contemporary books I’m reading, I don’t have much interest in either, so it’s going slow.

Best book: Anastasia Again by Lois Lowry. I read all those books when I was a kid, and even then, especially some of the earlier ones, were dated, but reading dated books I read as a kid is comforting now. I remember wanting to be Anastasia Krupnik when I was ten. I still do. I’d love to have a house with a tower and parents who read and painted and an annoying but lovable little brother and have that whole part of my life to live over again.

I watched:

• Community: Caught up on Netflix, even after Netflix sent me an email saying Yay Community! and then took down Season Four for six days.
• Breaking Bad: But not the second half of the last season. I watched the first half of the last season on Netflix. This show winds me up too much. I get all nervous watching it and then I can’t sleep. I’m actually not sad it’s over. And I read the spoilers for the finale so I don’t even know if I’m going to watch the second half of the last season whenever it makes it’s way over to Netflix. Maybe I’m just not that interested in egotistical masculine anti-heroes who treat their wives like shit.
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Dear Netflix, please take My Little Pony off your service so I can convince Tesfa it is now time to watch something else. We are on our third run through.
• The IT Crowd: Watching it with Geoff, who waffles back and forth as to whether he really likes watching The IT Crowd with me.
• How I Met Your Mother: The more I hate myself, the more I watch this show, which makes me hate myself more, which in turn encourages me to watch more of this show. Why am I watching the most insidiously rape-culture enforcing show on television?
• Mad Men: I like the theory that Annie Edision is Pete and Trudy Campbell’s granddaughter a little too much.
• Parks and Recreation: I like Leslie Knope too much to actually let my feelings of disappointment about how much I did not really like the season premiere bubble up to the surface. But I did not enjoy the season premiere. Sorry Leslie.

I haven’t watched a movie in ages. I don’t have the time or patience lately. Actually, I might have watched Totoro this month. We watch Totoro so often that I can now tune it out and read a book while Tesfa is watching. This in now way impugns how awesome Totoro is. It just simply says that after the eighteenth time watching Totoro, I feel like doing something else.

I wrote: As I have said, my mentor is not digging Come From Away. I tell myself that this is good because it means I have a critical set of eyes helping me to overcome some of the serious structural flaws (if my story were a building, it would have those Do Not Cross Unsound Foundation signs they put on condemned buildings all over it). But, actually, I feel like why does no one love my story? and the dreams I have of getting up there at the the Governor General’s Awards and going to bookstores all over New Brunswick sticking those stickers on the cover that say Award Winner, those are proving very difficult dreams to let go of. So I’ve been in an awful mood, compounded by the amount of How I Met Your Mother I watch, the constant rain, and the fact that every day at the bus stop, I have to talk to a one-upping mother who is PERFECT and has UNIMAGINABLY PERFECT CHILDREN and who offers me unsolicited advice that I would need a time machine and an infinite amount of money to fulfill.

I also typed up some of the faerie story and wrote in longhand a story about Jersey cows.

On to October with my favourite holiday: Hallowe’en! No familial obligations, just eating candy until I vomit.

I read the following books:

• Expecting Adam by Martha Beck: I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry at a book as I was at this book. Reading it, I couldn’t fathom what the author’s point was. Purportedly, it was to encourage everyone to accept and welcome the magic in their own lives as she did via the birth of her son Adam, who has Down’s Syndrome. But it’s so facile, like if you just accept the universe, your life will be better without any work on your own. What about people who accept the universe in the hopes that the supernatural will better their lives and then nothing comes of it because the universe doesn’t work like that. Why should the universe somehow care more to stop Martha Beck’s placental abruption (it just stopped magically) than Syria (read the linked Washington Post article – it is really good), Darfur, Guantanamo Bay, or Russia’s anti-gay policies . Oh, that’s right. It’s because Martha Beck is white, American, and was (at the time of writing) Christian. What an awful book.
• Carry the One by Carol Anshaw.
• Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee: Since the vast majority of ARC’s I get on LibraryThing are not my taste, I think sometimes of quitting the reviewing program. But then, always, I get an amazing book like this one for free and it has everything that I love about fiction and, at the same time, depresses me because it is so much better than I could ever be. What a beautiful collection of stories.
• By Blood by Ellen Ullman: When I was about eleven, I started reading “grown-up” books, which were mainly those sort of literary potboilers from the seventies that baby-boomers tend to have kicking about (early Stephen King, Ira Levin, John Irving, Irving Wallace). This book was just like one of those – completely engrossing and not insulting to my intelligence. And it had my go-to-bad-guys, Nazis. I loved it.
• World War Z by Max Brooks: I read it thinking I’d hate it, like Robopocalypse hate it, but I didn’t! It’s actually really well done.
• Dear Life by Alice Munroe: I know, as a Canadian short story writer, I’m supposed to fawn over Alice Monroe, but these stories weren’t what I was expecting, nor did I enjoy them, especially after the Rebecca Lee I read earlier in the month.
• May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes: The fast-paced, frenetic, flippant tone of the first two-thirds completely undermines the more conciliatory and warm tone of the last third.
• Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska: I read books about bad mothers. Lots of them. Bad parents too (like the Crack Dad one). It helps me know other people struggle with parenting too.
• Ivy and Bean by Annie Barrows: For Tesfa. Still haven’t found great, modern kids books. It’s not bad, but it isn’t classic. No one will remember it in fifty years. And so we’ve reverted to rereading Matilda.

Best book: I liked so many books this month. Basically, I either loved or loathed books in August. Probably not great – extremes usually mean unhinging for my mind. But I loved Bobcat and Other Stories, By Blood, World War Z, and Drunk Mom.

I watched:

• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Now that we’ve watched them all, Tesfa has established we can start at the beginning and go to the end again. While I am happy that MLP:FiM is not as asinine as say, Power Rangers, I have grown weary of the trials and tribulations of Ponyville.
• Orange is the New Black: I laugh so hard at the Let’s talk about health care Mackenzie bit. I am totally one of those white, liberal ladies Taystee and Poussey are making fun of.
• How I Met Your Mother: Now I think I am watching it to annotate all the horrible, rape culture, heteronormative things that go on on that show.
• Breaking Bad: Man, can’t Walter just die already? I fail to see why people root for him. Or anyone on that show really. Maybe Holly is all right.
• Mad Men: My enjoyment of the show has increased now that there’s a Megan (only an h away from me). Also, they’re getting into the fashions I like, all the white and black dresses and cute A-lines.
• Community: Season Four on Canadian Netflix now. It’s October 19th everybody.

I wrote: A big rewrite of Come From Away for my course. I’m hoping to get to fifty thousand words by the end of September. Small typing up of my faerie story to share with my online writing group. Minor proof-edits of a variety of short stories in another submission-push-trail-of-rejections.

And my course is starting! I got the first email from my mentor yesterday and will be sending her the beginning of my story later today. Of course, one of her points to me is make sure you know the difference between a list of events and a plot, which has become a huge problem with my novella. To me, as it stands, it reads like and then this happened and then this happened and then this …. Geoff disagrees, but I feel like I have a whole, unspooled skein of yarn here and need someone to help me tidy the whole thing back up.

On to the autumn.

I read the following books:

• The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan: reading it for my Humber course starting in September.
• All My Friends by Marie NDaiye
• Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua
• Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose: I get angry reading books lecturing me on how I should write. This person doesn’t know me so how can generic advice apply universally? You know what I need to do to write: write. I did take some pointers on dialogue and pauses though, and I’m going to copy out her reading list. And she’s writing a book about writing prose, which is her last name, so I was tickled a bit.
• No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July: Once someone told me that a short story should end with something irrevocable happening and nothing being the same again otherwise all you have is description, etiher of people or of an event. These were all description. That isn’t bad, but it is different.
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
• Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu
• The Western Light by Suan Swan: which is sort of a prequel, but in an alternate universe to The Wives of Bath.
• The Meaning of Children by Beverly Akerman
• Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

Best book: Sorry Please Thank You. If I could write sci-fi that was better than sci-fi like Charles Yu does, I would. I am jealous, which was my overwhelming feeling for most of the month anyway.

I watched:

• Mad Men: but then I stopped somewhere in Season 4 during the first week of July and haven’t gone back.
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: with Tesfa
• Orange is the New Black: One of the few times when the adaptation is better than the book. I started watching the show, then I read the book, and the show is so much more nuanced and funny, neither of which was the goal of the book, so I suppose this is like comparing apples to screwdrivers.
• The Secret of Nimh: Almost the exact opposite of Orange is the New Black, an adaptation so poorly done that the entire experience is cringing while remembering how much better (and with no bizarre paranormal stone-of-levitation) the book was. At least having watched the film, Tesfa is now sitting down with me while we read the book together.
• Sandbaggers
• How I Met Your Mother: On in the background while I replaced all the brass-with-big-white-bulb-in-the-center kitchen cabinets with basic, skinny, black ones.

I wrote: Worked on faerie story. Wow. That is all I did this month.

And I joined an online writing group too, which should help keep me more on track.

July’s are hard months for me. Generally, I bottom out twice a year – February and July. But today is August and sunny and the turkeys no longer seem to be standing in the middle of the road causing traffic worries, so everything should be great from now on (until February).

I read the following books:

• The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman: I did not enjoy this book. As I put in a review the execution so poor that any goodwill towards the story is effectively squandered by a few pages in. The characters are flat and their voices barely differentiated; there almost seems no need to have four separate voices since the voices are identical. The situations are melodramatic. The writing is plodding and the book too long. The love others have for this book completely confounds me.
• The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor: A gentle novel. I can’t think of another novel I’ve read recently that is as gentle as this one.
• Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson: A book I really wanted to love but couldn’t because this book is sloppy. It has the forward momentum thrust and the cute humour, which I will admit are aspects anything I write lacks, but the book is rushed and reads juvenile in many places. This book, much like the revolution within it, is about potential rather than anything realised. Maybe someday.
• The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: Unfinished (that is, the book is – I read all of what is written) by still I liked.
• Ten Good Seconds of Silence by Elizabeth Ruth: Another novel of potential unrealised. I read it and worry that if I ever write a first novel, it will end up over-muddied like this one and then lost and forgotten. There is a lot of good stuff here, but then there is a lot of unnecessary stuff as well as big coincidences. I don’t know. I don’t buy it.
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White: With Tesfa.
• Matilda by Roald Dalh: Geoff had a conference. Tesfa and I spent most of a weekend reading this book instead.

Best book: The Pale King. What else am I going to pick? I didn’t have a very successful book reading month.

I watched:

• How I Met Your Mother: *hangs head in shame* This show is awful.
• Game of Thrones: I guess I was supposed to be sad some people died. I wasn’t. Geoff, annoyed, asked me why I even watch this show if there is nothing I like about it. I thought and came up with the following: I like Bronn, Ja’quen Haagard, oldest Lannister, and the grandmother because they actually do things rather than whine and sulk about their situations. I hope Ja’quen Haagard becomes king.
• The Fall: Although somewhat suspicious of Gillian Anderson’s inclusion (I liked how they didn’t even bother having her try a Northern Irish accent and just let her be from London), this wasn’t bad. It skirted the line on being exploitative though – the length of the scene murdering Sarah Kay in particular. I watched this over a few weeks, and in the middle watched Bridesmaids and thought to myself I can see why everyone watches television now rather than movies and thought of this show in particular.
• Mad Men: I guess this is one of the leading I can see why everyone watches television now rather than movies television shows, but I’m really losing steam watching lately. I think I only watched one episode all month.
• Community: I watched some episodes on an airplane and, relatedly, fuck you Air Canada that you have seatback television on Halifax-Montreal flights but shit all on Moncton-anywhere ones.
• Arrested Development: I’m disheartened by how cruelly the writers/producers/directors/Mitch Hurowitz/whoever treated so many of the characters. I guess in the earlier seasons it didn’t seem so mean-spirited. Oscar pretending to be George and having sex with Lucille was also uncomfortable – that whole subplot removes consent, so is rape. So I am not happy with any of this.
• Sandbaggers
• Superwhy: With Tesfa
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: which has eclipsed all other shows in the Tesfa-universe. Gone Fraggle Rock. So long Dinosaur Train. Superwhy? What’s that? She found this on a blurry television screen in Costa Rica, in Spanish, and sat there entranced for the whole half hour. Now that she knows it is on Netflix, her whole life revolves around five o’clock when she gets to watch My Little Pony. I try to be positive: lots of females with differing skills and interests, not many romance subplots, not much mean competition, but sometimes I watch an episode with Tesfa and wonder how much marketing psychology is going into the shows and how many times I’m going to have to say no to cheap, plastic merchandise with a variety of My Little Pony tie-ins affixed to them.
• The Debt: I thought that by watching the Israeli original it would be cool. It wasn’t. I should have stopped twenty minutes in but kept going.
• Bridesmaids: Bitchflicks had an article on Why We All Need to See ‘Bridesmaids’, so I watched it (quasi-illegally – why can I not rent this movie online?) and did not get the appeal. I am getting the appeal less and less of everything that other people like. I think I need to take drugs to make me happier and ensure that I enjoy something, anything, each month.
• Upstream Color: Okay, having said I dislike everything, I liked this movie. I didn’t find it as terrifyingly baffling as the internet suggested I would, but then again I didn’t find Shane Carruth’s earlier movie Primer difficult to follow either (at the same time, I didn’t actively try to analyse Primer and its timelines; I simply passively accepted what was happening). So this was good. I watched it with a migraine, so maybe that made me care less about understanding.

I wrote: A story about a laundromat that might be the starting point for something more. Worked on a longer story about faeries for Tesfa, probably end up being YA since YA is hot right now and I am nothing if not a slave to the whims of popular culture (this is a joke – popular culture rejects me like a pretty girl does a whinging boy asking her on a prom date). Submitted some stories. Had an earlier accepted story published in hard copy.

I read the following books:

• Far From The Tree by Andrew Solomon: One, why do people have to put themselves into nonfiction pieces? The weakest parts of this book were Solomon discussing his homosexuality and trying to tie it to severe autism or deafness, etc. Secondly, what was with constantly prefacing POC with their race, i.e. African-American parents Name1 and Name2 but never saying Caucasian parents Name1 and Name2? The science was interesting, but there is some privilege that needs to be addressed in this book.
• The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Man Who Sold Prayers by Margaret Creal: The initial and namesake story was really good, the sort of good that maybe should be read in schools. But it has a Christian bent – in high school, my almost-retired OAC English teacher complained that they couldn’t teach “Christian” stories unless they made a point of also teaching Jewish fiction, Muslim fiction, Hindu fiction, etc. He was incensed at how political correctness (his term) had overtaken literature. His impressionable youth were supposed to agree, but all I could think (although as a timid student didn’t say) was why don’t we include lots of fiction from lots of different points of view in English rather than sticking with Shakespeare and nothing else? I think it would be awesome to read in school books that aren’t all by white men. In my high school, we read one book by a woman (To Kill A Mockingbird), only two books by Canadians, irrespective of us being Canadian (Shoeless Joe and Fifth Business), nothing by POC, nothing by outwardly non-heteronormative folk, etc. Sometimes I talk to Geoff about becoming a subversive high school English teacher and slipping in lots of great non-standard stories, to which he reminds me that I’d be fired very quickly for violating the school board rules of what I was supposed to be teaching.
• The Interpreter by Suzanne Glass
• From the Angry to the Sublime by Earl T. Roske
• The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits
• Tenth of December by George Saunders: Already had a diatribe here.
• Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust: I am proving to Geoff that I will read all of Remembrance of Things Past.
• Superdad by Christopher Shulgan: I like to read books about parents who are subjectively worse parents than me.

Best book: The Bean Trees. A friend lent this to me for reading material while I was waiting around. I have to send it back to her in the mail with a note on how much I really needed to read a book like this.

I watched:

• Jiro Dreams of Sushi
• Parks and Recreation
• Community
• Mad Men: I don’t really like this show, but I keep going out of stubbornness. I read to take it as character studies rather than plot. I’m still not getting the hate on Betty. I hate self-centered, arrogant, smug Don way more than I hate Betty, trapped in a system where her only value is beauty and demureness.
• The Awakening
• Game of Thrones: I also hate this. I watch it because it is popular and I need to not be as snobby as I am, but I am angry all the time. I love Meghan Murphy’s (and yay for spelling her name my way) article Just Because You Like It Doesn’t Make It Feminist: On Game of Thrones imagined feminism. I think there’s a lot of people justifying why Game of Thrones is good because they like it and ignoring all of the problematic bits.
• White Teeth: I found this on Netflix. I’d watched it way back in 2003 when it was broadcast on W. I actually think I watched the miniseries before I read the book, and it’s been driving me crazy that I can’t remember if that’s true. I know I bought White Teeth (the book) at Old Goat Books, but I know I learned about White Teeth from reading an article in the TV guide about the miniseries and then deciding to watch. I can’t handle my memory not being perfect. So there are a lot of famous people in this miniseries (Russell Brand, James McEvoy, the guy from Life on Mars, etc.). I appreciate of Irie’s sense of agency sending out invites to ruin Marcus’ event, which I don’t recall happens in the book. But, of course, the book is better.
• Cabin in the Woods: What a dumb movie. Maybe the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
• Ponyo: With Tesfa.
• Kiki’s Delivery Service: Again with Tesfa.
• Totoro: Still with Tesfa. When it rains, which it does all the time living by the ocean, we watch Miyazaki movies.
• How I Met Your Mother: In an episode I watched, Barney talks about how ashamed of themselves women look in the morning after sleeping with Barney. I know that look. It’s the same look I get after watching HIMYM. This show is every single fucking thing that is wrong with society: the heternormativeness, the erasure of POC, the ridiculing of anyone who leaves strict gender roles, Barney as the epitome of rape culture. I had it on in the background with exercising and it makes me sick, except, I really like Marshall. He seems like such a decent guy. I have no idea why he’s hanging out with such horrible people all the time. Maybe, all his friends being assholes, maybe Marshall is an asshole too and I’m just not seeing it. I do hope that in the final episode, Marshall tells them all to fuck themselves and leaves for greener, more loving pastures.
• Arrested Development: New eps. Going through slowly. Sort of happy, but sort of unhappy so far with what’s there.
• Baby Mama: I would really love it if Amy Poehler would be my best friend. I love you Amy.
• Sandbaggers: Again, another show I’ve seen before. But now, after my old job, I watch it and yell at the television WHY ARE YOU DISCUSSING TOP SECRET WALKING AROUND IN A PARK RATHER THAN IN A SECURE FACILITY? and Geoff tells me to shut up and calm down because he can’t hear what Burnside is talking about.
• Dinosaur Train
• SuperWhy: One can guess these last two are also Tesfa related.

I wrote: I finished a short story called BFF. I finished the big first proof-read of Come From Away. Geoff read it and declared it A-OK, best thing I’ve written. I’m head-working (i.e. having written anything down yet) on a story about going to a laundromat. I spent hours submitting stories to journals, contests, websites, etc.

And, big news, I got into the September 2013 start of Humber College’s Creative Writing by Correspondence Course, whose goal is to work on a book-length manuscript. I have my mentor assigned and everything. So, starting in September, I’ll be talking a lot about that.