this month I ...

February 2013

By on Thursday, February 28, 2013

I read the following books:

  1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
  2. Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
  3. Mukiwa: A White Boy In Africa by Peter Godwin
  4. Breed by Chase Novak
  5. Lucky by Alice Sebold
  6. Fresh Girls and Other Stories by Evelyn Lau
  7. Two Caravans by Martina Lewycka
  8. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
  9. The Lightning Field by Heather Jessup

Best books: This Is How You Lose Her and The Lightning Field. Diaz has a schtick, but what a schtick. Jessup has no schtick at all. Polar opposites and interesting for my fiction brain since I read one right after the other.

I watched the following things:

  • Totoro
  • Ponyo
  • The Secret of Kells
  • Parks and Recreation – I am far too emotionally invested in the lives of Leslie and Ben. Creepily so. I spend my lunch hour each day watching the repeats on Netflix again and again and rooting for characters I know are going to get together. February is my obsession month for things like this. As an example, February 2003 I read Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason again and again. Get to the end, turn back to the beginning, start over. It’s something to do with the dull light and the fewer days.
  • The Wire, season four – I may also be loving this season a bit too much because of memories of Square One with Reg E. Cathey.
  • Community returned!

My writing:

  • Short story – something for Sarah Selecky’s Little Bird contest. Here’s an early draft.
  • Longer – The second draft of my longer piece (tentatively titled Come From Away) is going. I’ve typed up approximately 35 000 words, with the anticipated final length of 45 000. Still too short to be a novel, but maybe it’ll be a good novella. I keep reading articles (for the past ten years) that this year will be the return of the novella. Maybe.

    Overall, the month was: difficult. Lots of sickness. I felt really low for most of the month, but I have been feeling a bit better the last few days as the sun spends demonstrably more time above the horizon than it did last week.

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    Comments

    1. Geoff

      This is neat, I like seeing all the narrative art you’ve consumed this month. I’d also forgotten Community is back.

      In regards to Parks and Recreation, the seeming necessity of long-to-consummate relationships in comedy shows bugs me. I appreciated the “lets skip all this crap and get married” of April and Andy.

      You should also mention why you like Ron Swanson!

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      Author
      reluctantm

      Thanks. Sometimes I feel with all the narrative I’ve consumed, I should just be a narrative machine, but then I wander around and my stories don’t go very far. Oh well.

      Maybe I’ll talk about Ron Swanson in an upcoming post.

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