Keeping Busy

Here’s a glimpse of the few thoughts I’ve had about topics other than the baby:

I’ve posted a new book review!  The bad news is, the book stunk.  The good news is, I’m able to read while I feed and hold the baby during the day, which gives me much-needed mental vacations from laundry and diaper-changing.  For some variety, I keep a little portable CD player next to my favorite spot on the couch.  I am listening to an audio book and also a sermon series on Ephesians by Tommy Nelson (one of my top three favorite preachers ever).

I try to only indulge myself by watching TV during feedings at night time, when I am too sleepy to do anything else.  I’ve been speeding through seasons of Friends.  Season 8 is definitely my favorite!  The one with the story about backpacking through western Europe is maybe the funniest episode of all time.

 

Not Music to My Ears

From the failing economy to the threat of swine flu to the true pandemic of ignorance and incompetence seeming to surround every aspect of our current government, current events pretty much make me want to drive my car off the side of the road.  So my normal commuting diversions, talk radio and NPR, have not been as appealing to me lately.

Music on the iPod can’t hold my attention for an hour on the road, so I raided the podcasts Stephen has been collecting on our iTunes.  He is a true seminary nerd, and so he had a lot of John Piper sermons, in addition to weekly sermons from young and hip Christian celebrities Mark Driscoll and Matt Chandler.  Desiring to become more young and hip myself, I loaded up on a couple of selections from the latter two.

Now overall these guys are not bad.  They both preach for about 50 minutes, so I get one full sermon per day’s drive.  I’ve listened to both of them talk on Easter/Resurrection themed topics, as well as two sermons from Driscoll on marriage.  And, like I said, they’re not bad.  But they’re a little overrated, as celebrity preachers often are.  We visited the Village Church two years ago on Easter, and I have an overall good impression of Matt Chandler, although after a couple more sermons by him, I think he talks about his kids too much.  I’m less inclined to be lenient toward Mark Driscoll, because he really irritated me the first three times I encountered his teaching (twice in preaching, once in a book he wrote) by playing what I considered to be fast and loose with calling people heretics.

Although I’m now at the point of grudgingly acknowledging the positive things that Driscoll is doing in the church world at large, I still have one major complaint about him: he does not handle opposing viewpoints in a way that gives him much credibility.  He oversimplifies and deliberately mischaracterizes alternate opinions in a way that makes them easy to dismiss with sarcasm, non-sequitur arguments, and/or the brand of heresy, as I mentioned before.  This is SUPER IRRITATING, especially when I think that the opposing person or idea actually makes a legitimate point.

It’s been almost a full week, and I am feeling young and hip enough for now, so I stopped by the library to browse through their audio book selection again.  Hooray- I found just the thing I wanted–another pseudo-historical, slightly smutty novel by Phillippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl.  Variety is the spice of life, after all.  I’ll indulge my lazy brain for a week or so, and then I’ll find something substantial and important to think about again.

 

Easter Mental Break

I didn’t take any work home with me over my extra-long Easter weekend, and it was wonderful!  By Monday night I felt like I had been away from school for a month.  I allowed myself a rare indulgence over my days off– hours and hours on end of ignoring all relationships and responsibilities and READING, just for fun.  I finished off the last two books in the Twilight series so that I could have some closure before the whirlwind of end-of-year responsibilities consumes my time.  Plus, I know that my days of leisure are numbered and that after August it will be harder to find hours and days to devote to reading vampire love sagas.  So I am taking advantage of these opportunities as I get them, and I’m not feeling guilty!

Now that I am finished with the series, my judgment of the story is not very changed–very enjoyable, light reading, with compelling a plot and characters, but TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE for young girl readers.  I did appreciate very much that the story ended with a “happily ever after” that affirmed marriage and family as the ultimate fulfillment. So I’ll give Stephanie Meyer props for that. Similarly, I did see the Twilight movie recently, and I did not like it very much at all! I am not planning to see any of the sequels.  The important casting was off, and all of the romantic scenes just seemed creepy.  Some things are just better left to the imagination!

 

So, I finally read Twilight…

Hello, we’re back! I’m in the middle of sorting through a million vacation photos and recovering from a week of missed work, so I thought that for your reading pleasure I’d give you a review of my in-flight reading. Normally I’d just post this on the book blog, but I thought that this might be of general enough interest to go here first. Here you go:

You’d have to be dead to not have heard about the latest book craze (now a major motion picture) that is causing the hearts of tween girls (and their mothers) to go pitter-pat. As I like to think of myself as a more sophisticated reader than your average Jonas Brothers fan, I put off reading Twilight until now just to prove my indifference.

But, having read three meaty books in a row and faced with the prospect of two ten-hour plane rides, the timing seemed right for me to meet everyone’s favorite vampire for myself. Did I like it? Yes. Just like everyone else I know, I read the first two books in about a day each. Since then, have images of the godlike Edward Cullen danced in my head? Of course. Am I now filling my Facebook cork board with flair proclaiming my love for sexy vampires? Well, not yet…but I do still have two books to go.

Lest you take this as an unequivocal endorsement, hear this loud and clear: this book is girl porn! Read it, even enjoy it, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s anything more than that. This plot hits every girl’s vulnerable spots–a brilliantly handsome and desirable man desperately treasures a girl who considers herself plain and unworthy. He’s charmingly misunderstood by his high school peers, he’s athletic, musical, devoted to his family, rich, and, did I mention?–completely consumed by adoration for his lady love. What’s not to love? For pages and PAGES Edward and Bella find themselves locked in passionate gazes, expressing their smoking desire in tracing each others faces with their fingertips and nuzzling each other’s necks. But, amid all of this, “nothing” happens, keeping this romance from falling into just another teens-fornicating novel, and making Edward That Much More Desirable as a paragon of virtue and restraint. Top it all off with a little dollop of exotic danger (Edward is a vampire, after all, and could kill Bella in a second of indiscretion), and most of all, the idea that this love will last FOREVER (vampires don’t die), and, well, you can see why more than one girl closes the book with flushed cheeks, a loudly beating heart, and an urgent desire for an Edward Cullen of her own.

It is precisely this mix of sensuality and wholesome virtue that makes this book so potent (if I were to find my own teenage daughter reading it, I’d be tempted to send her to a convent faster than she could say “silver Volvo”). It provokes all of the emotion and breathlessness of romance and sexual desire (and then some!) without any of the squeamishness that a more graphic romance would provide. I wouldn’t know how to direct the passions of a girl who had just read Twilight. Telling her that she will find this experience in marriage seems a little like an oversell–while falling in love with an ordinary mortal can certainly be wonderful, marriage is a little more complicated than eternal, smoldering, eye-gazing with Adonis. At the same time, advising her to satisfy her passion by falling in love with Jesus seems a little creepy.

Bottom line? You’ll like it if you read it. (If you’re a girl, that is. I don’t see how guys like it at all.) But read it for what it is, and when you’re finished, pick up Pride and Prejudice for a REAL love story!

(P.S.- The second book is definitely more boring than the first. If the whole point of reading is to live vicariously through Bella’s love affair with Edward, it seems stupid that they’re apart for the first 200 pages. The whole Jacob thing seems like a too-long distraction. But I’m told that Book 3 picks up the pace now that–SPOILER ALERT–Bella and Edward are back together.)

 

A list I can feel better about

Thank you, Facebook!  This is one of billions of tags floating around.  So maybe I haven’t been on my favorite TV show or gotten a word into the dictionary, but, dang it, I can read books!  Apparently the BBC published this list, thinking that most people have only read 6 of these.

I’m happy to be ahead of this curve!  An “X” next to the title means it’s one I’ve read.  An “A” means I started it and didn’t like it enough to finish it. I’ve read 41, and attempted 6.  I love how diverse this list is–I can get credit for reading Jane Eyre and Bridget Jones’ Diary.  This is my kind of reading!

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – A
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee -X
6 The Bible – X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens -
11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott – A
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks -
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – X
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell -X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams -
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh -
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – X
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame -
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia (all books) – CS Lewis- A
34 Emma – Jane Austen – X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – A
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne -
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown –
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving – X
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – A
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan -X
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel -X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zifon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens -X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – A
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas -
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses – James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal – Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession – AS Byatt – X
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens -X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – X
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl -X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo -X

 

Trends in hot pink books

In elementary school, it was very cool to be in a club.  Most of the clubs I was in were started by Abbey and included the two of us and sometimes another friend or two.  We had the Paper Clip Club, the Take it to the Max Club, and clubs for people who could perform certain acrobatic feats on the playground.  I read all sorts of books about children who form clubs, from the Babysitters’ Club to the Saddle Club to the Christian “Best Friends” series.  Club-forming seems to be a generally accepted developmental stage, but I always thought that it was a stage that was eventually left behind in preadolescence.

The other day I was browsing the chick-lit at Golden’s, my favorite used bookstore, and I became amused at the number of books written for women, by women that are about clubs.  I actually wrote down a list, but I lost it, so I searched “club” on Amazon.com to see what came up.  Excluding my search results that turn up books about teenage clubs (“The Tiara Club” series), books targeted toward legitimate clubs (Oprah’s Book Club), and classics/serious fiction (The Joy Luck Club, The Dante Club, The Club Dumas), look at what all came up:

The Yada Yada Prayer Group Series

The Potluck Club

Sisterchicks series

The Friday Night Knitting Club

The Book Club

The Mother-Daughter Book Club

The Chocolate Lovers’ Club

The Hot Flash Club

The Adultery Club

The Mrs. Club

Okay, so here is my question-  Are adult women’s clubs really this ubiquitous?  I know some people who are in book clubs, but other than that it seems like this is some sort of alternate universe that is being created by authors of hot pink paperbacks.  Most of the women I know are too busy taking care of kids, keeping the kitchen clean, juggling work and family, and/or hanging out with friends in unorganized social events to sit around forming clubs.

My suspicion is that the plethora of books about clubs is an attempt to re-create the success of the Ya Ya Sisterhood series.  But beyond that, I think that clubs are attractive (to preteens and grownups alike) because it creates the illusion of security in friendships.  If we’re just friends, we may grow apart as our lives change.  But if we’re members of a club, we have a guarantee that in fifty years we will still be in touch and meeting regularly.  After all, we pinky swore and became blood sisters over it!

Maybe I’m wrong and clubs are really all the rage.  In that case…Abbey, do you want to resurrect the Paper Clip Club?  I still have all the materials to make our signature bracelets.

 

Always Improving for Your Reading Pleasure

I have been inspired by Teresa, and I’m making my “Recent Reads” sidebar more up-to-date and more informative. First of all, I’ve cleared off the books that no longer qualify as “recent,” so there went the whole bottom of the list. Second, I’ve decided to add more information so that all of you kindred spirit book-lovers out there can actually use this feature as a helpful tool. Because some of the books on there aren’t even very good, I would hate to have you waste your time on them because you thought I was recommending them.

Next to the title I would like to place stars like a real critic, but I don’t know how to work pictures into this template, so you will have to settle for a boring 0-5 rating. I may or may not provide further explanation, depending on whether or not I have anything to say. I figure that amazon.com is a great place that you can go on your own if all you want is a plot summary.

Ratings are as follows:
0- This book should count itself lucky if I use it to stabilize a wobbly table.
1- I read it. I am pretty sure it had a plot and some characters.
2- Not a bad choice if you’re stranded in an airport and the only other choice is a car magazine.
3- A good story, but nothing overly memorable…this is the literary version of “wait for it to come out on video.”
4- Pretty dang good. Worth reading at least 3 times, but not consecutively.
5- You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…you’ll start back at the beginning as soon as you finish it just so that you don’t have to say goodbye.

 

Mice and Men

One of my favorite poems is Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse.” It’s a really sympathetic poem about a mouse who has planned for winter by building a snug little house. The speaker is a farmer who has plowed through the mouse’s nest, destroying it, and it’s too late in the year for the mouse to build another one. So, despite the mouse’s careful preparation, he is still left out in the cold for the winter. The poem is timeless and classic, not because it’s a sad animal tale, but because Burns connects himself with the mouse in the last couple of stanzas with his famous summary, “The greatest plans of mice and men often go awry/and leave us not but grief and pain for promised joy.”

As my careful planning for the future is often thwarted by circumstances beyond my control, I really bonded with this poem. The poet doesn’t offer any sort of solution, but he is very sympathetic to both mice and people who are left wanting despite their best efforts.

Now this post is not as sad as it could be, but I’ve been thinking about Burns’ little mouse for the past couple of days as we’ve gone back to school for our work days. I vowed at the beginning of the summer to use my time off productively so that I would be organized and prepared for the new year. And I did work, pretty steadily, all summer.

Yet, here I am, one week and counting from the first day of school, in panic mode. My room is not ready, my lesson plans are not finalized, I need to choose reading lists and order books, and I have school supplies strewn across my floor. There are parent letters to write, a classroom webpage to build, worksheets to create, and meetings to attend.

This is the time of year that I love to hate. Right now there seems to be more to do than I can possibly accomplish, and the hours of the day race by. But I know that somehow it will all be finished on time, and that when my room fills up with hopeful little faces, I will know what to do with them. And even if I don’t, I know they can’t tell when I’m bluffing.

 

Mmm, facts

I love knowing stuff. I’m not determined enough to accumulate knowledge that is actually complicated, like quantum physics or microbiology or fourth-dimensional mathematics, but I do love to stuff my mind with simple, fluffy facts. I am pretty good at Jeopardy (depending on the category), I am almost always smarter than a fifth grader, I can get the pies in Trivial Pursuit, and I could hold my own in a discussion with a member of the paparazzi regarding celebrity comings and goings. (This last wealth of knowledge is because I’ve recently become hooked on a celebrity gossip blog that is often trashier than my old standby, People magazine, and almost always funnier.) Oh, and I always know the right answers on “Jaywalking.”

I’ve recently been challenged to employ myself in more scholarly fact-gathering than what I happen to glean from quiz shows or late night television. Here are my three inspirations:

1. We are living in a house with an incredible study. It is a room with a big window on one wall that lets in natural light. The other three walls are filled with built-in bookshelves, which are full of heady books, some of which do not interest me (The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Yugoslavia as History), some of which I wish had a movie version or Cliff’s Notes (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Vols. 1-3, A Manual of the Writings of Middle English), and some of which I like to pretend will interest me some day (all the works of T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and most other authors of note).

The pile of things that I brought to read while we were living here includes In Her Shoes, Harry Potter, and my Real Simple magazine. It’s a little humbling for a person who imagines that she is smart.

2. We just spent a weekend with my friends John and KarenD. John is the type who reads Wikipedia and listens to NPR for fun, and we could always count on him to revive a lagging conversation with his favorite words, “You know what I just read/heard?” This question was always followed by some sort of trivia usually concerning fractals, technology, or what small percentage of the brain is utilized by the average human. As if I needed mathematical proof of how mentally lazy I actually am.

3. I am totally digging my latest book, as I’ve listed in my “Recent Reads.” The Know-It-All is a surprisingly hilarious memoir of a guy who decides to read the Encyclopaedia Brittanica from A-Z. The first chapter is titled “A,” the last chapter is titled “Z,” and it’s a witty commentary on the funniest, most random, or most interesting facts that he stumbles across along the way.

The story begins when the author, who is wanting to become a parent, pictures himself being asked a question like “Why is the sky blue?” by his child, and he realizes that he doesn’t know. Now for a man who imagined himself to be smart and well-informed, it is sad and shocking to realize that that he could have told his child the names of Julia Roberts’ children, but that he could not satisfy little Junior’s first query about the world around him.

This story really hit home for me, and when I have not been waking Stephen up in the middle of the night by laughing out loud at this book, I’ve actually been contemplating delving into the EB myself. So if you call me and I don’t pick up, or you notice that I’m a little slow to blog, it’s probably because I’m engrossed in a scholarly article about the use of symbolism and irony in eighteenth century French literature. Unless I’m reading up on which celebrities attended the Beckhams’ “Welcome to America” party. It would be a tough call.

 

Bibliophiles, Unite!

I’ve been gratified by a decent number of comments on my previous post, and so I’m feeling like indulging myself in a little nerdy online wallowing in my favorite topic: books. My friend the Crazy Squirrel has invited his readers to make up the first sentence of a debut novel. I couldn’t think of my own brilliant sentence, but the idea got me thinking about some of my favorite first lines from books that I have loved. I’ve decided to share them with you here. Bon appetit!

“Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or gotten any worse.”

“For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence.”

“I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.”

“No one in Shiloh saw it coming.”

“James Gould’s eyes stung from the heat of the fire he had tended through two days and nights in the strange house at Petersham; his blistered hands stung too, and for the first time in almost twenty years, he didn’t know what to do.”

“The Opera Ghost really existed.”

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself–not just sometimes, but always.”

“The book was thick and black and covered with dust.”

“An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.”

“My mother did not tell me they were coming.”

“Ugh. The last thing I feel physically, emotionally, or mentally equipped to do is drive to Una and Geoffrey Alconbury’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Buffet in Grafton Underwood.”

“Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose of out Chaos.”