I read:
Thoughts:
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordechai Richler: I still and will always love this book and I love my 1970s copy with its Removed from the Surrey Library stamp on the cover.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 edited by Laura Furman: Reviewed here.
The Hope Factory by Lavanya Sankaran: I took this book out from the library solely because of the neon yellow and purple cover, which doesn’t really come through in its tiny thumbnail above, but the cover is quite quite quite quite quite quite loud. An all-right story inside too.
Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn: Reviewed here.
A Royal Pain by Ellen Conford: I’d totally forgotten the lovesick teenager subplot of this story. If I’d remembered, I don’t think I would have read it to Tesfa. It doesn’t add anything to the overall plot, Abby falling in love with the reporter. Boo!
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton: Tonnes of people, most notably Reading in Bed, have told me to try Edith Wharton. Finally I did. And she’s good — she’s really good! She doesn’t feel dated at all and I was super interested in the story, even though one can see what’s going to happen from a mile off. Okay, so take away from this month: will read more Edith Wharton.
Birdie by Tracey Lindberg: I thought I would like this more.
The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien: reviewed here.
Troublemaker by Leah Remini: I have a fascination with Scientology. It has science in the title — why is it so wacky? I used to walk by a Dianetics office all the time. I always wanted to go inside, but figured that with my very suggestible personality, doing so would be a horrible idea.
The Search for Vulcan … and too much extra junk after the ellipses title: Reviewed here.
Gutshot by Amelia Gray: Lots of little, short, grotesque, pieces that I couldn’t connect with even a tiny bit. The first page of the collection, I was blown away, but obviously too far away like an over-dry leaf in a hurricane, because I couldn’t get back into it (figuratively, since I did read the whole book) after page number 2.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams: We listened to an audio-recording of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the car driving around for the past while, and when that finished, I took The Restaurant at the End of the Universe off the shelf and read it to Tesfa. I have a feeling that this is a parenting decision that other parents are going to think badly of me for doing. I think all the sex stuff was mild enough and over-her-head enough that there probably wasn’t any lasting damage to Tesfa, except for the fact that in my copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, it still says six times nine is forty-two.
Favourite book:
So, we all know that in a creative writing course I took, one of the little, cute and puny, undergrads said reading my stories was like doing a hard sudoku (which I still, perversely, take as the greatest compliment I’ve ever received regarding my writing) and no one wants to do a hard sudoku (which is just incorrect because if I were to do a sudoku, I would totally only do hard ones and last I checked I fall into the category of one).
But Kate Atkinson is like a hard sudoku. She never molly-coddles her reader. I love her for it.
And of course, I also love her because she’s one of the smartest, most engaging, brilliant writers around and I wish I could even write one one hundredth as well as she does. She is on my list of people I am friends with that don’t know it yet (along with Vin Diesel, Amy Poehler, and Mindy Kaling).
Most promising book put on wishlist:
Creepy Japanese Manga!
I watched:
I wrote:
Wolf Children is done. I wrote a story about Magda building a tower. I thought about some stories about old people. I came up with an ending for faerie story and wrote it down. The End.
Like Billy Pilgrim, I have become unstuck in time as I have noticed that this month, I often forget the ed‘s on the end of words, putting what happened in the past into the present in both my fiction and my real life. Is that strange? Why won’t my cold fingers (it is now winter here and alternates between damp and cold as appropriate) type those two letters?