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..