(in the mornings) (since the holiday ended) 1. Abandoning the use of my alarm clock. Who needs ’em? When I set my clock, I only hit snooze a zillion times because I don’t want to get out of my warm warm bed. So I’ve got my clock set for the latest possible time I could get up and still make it into work with my hair and teeth brushed (around 8:30), and I find I’m getting up around the time I had set my clock for originally (around seven). 2. The last three mocha chocolate drizzle biscotti from Madame Grand…
14 CommentsReading the End Posts
House of Leaves put me in the mood for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I can’t account for because they are two wildly dissimilar books. House of Leaves is terribly modern and American and all sort of up in your face, and Jonathan Strange is set in early nineteenth-century England (alternate England, but still) and is much with the fairies and book-learning and wry gentility. Anyway I fetched out my convenient three-volume box set of paperbacks, and I read it starting in 2009 and finished in 2010. There should really be a word for a book you start one…
37 CommentsEveryone else in the blogosphere seems to keep track of their reading stats far better than I, but I have stolen a meme from Savidge Reads. Check it. How many books read in 2009? 200. More or less. I counted from my books read page – some books I didn’t finish, and some I reviewed all at once (like Fables), and some I read but didn’t review. 200 is a nice friendly number, isn’t it? I’m sticking with it. Hooray for approximations. How many fiction and nonfiction? This was trickier to count than I was expecting. Do Noel Streatfeild’s autobiographical…
27 CommentsHello to experimental fiction. One of my roommates in college loved this book, and kept telling me to read it, and I went on the internets and found this interview with Mark Danielewski where he said something about how older readers would probably not like his book because they’ve been taught to have certain expectations of what books look like, and he doesn’t conform to those expectations because he thinks books can be so much more. And it’s not that I disagree with him on any particular point, but his tone aggravated me, and the book looked all crazy and…
11 CommentsI usually read The Seagulls Woke Me when I have just finished Greensleeves and cannot bear to leave it absolutely behind right away; they are both books about girls who get away from (or find?) themselves. The Seagulls Woke Me is a good transition from Greensleeves to, you know, regular life. It helps me to be less disappointed in other books. I am always pleased when I find a book that makes this nice transition for me. Tam Lin for Fire and Hemlock; Rebecca for Jane Eyre; if I ever find one for The Book Thief, that will be a…
21 CommentsHaha, at last I have my hands on some books from the Bloomsbury group, and all because my mother is a difficult person to buy for. Not one but three of these lovely books did she receive – Miss Hargreaves, A Kid for Two Farthings, and this one, which is the one I very much most of all wanted to read. It is purple, you know. Says Bloomsbury: As growing up in pre-war London looms large in the lives of the Carne sisters, Deirdre, Katrine and young Sheil still share an insatiable appetite for the fantastic. Eldest sister Deirdre is…
9 CommentsPhew. Nearly didn’t make it. Actually I am not absolutely convinced I did make it – I was planning to read Daughters of the Sunstone (a trilogy) for the YA/juvenile fiction book of Jeane‘s DogEar Reading Challenge; I thought it was juvenile fiction because when I looked it up in the library catalogue, it was shelved in the children’s section. So when December rolled around I placed a hold on it (it was checked out), and I waited and waited and waited, and it never came in, and eventually I gave up and just checked out the first book of…
9 CommentsAll these past weeks, when everyone has been deciding on their challenges for the New Year (is anyone else totally ready for 2010? This has never happened to me before, but I find myself wanting to write 2010 as the year for everything, and then when I have to write 2009 instead, I feel cranky and cheated), I’ve been saying, I am not joining any. No challenges for me, I have said. I’m not joining the Women Unbound Challenge; I’m not joining Haloes and Horns, or Alyce’s Time Travel one, or the Graphic Novel one that Chris and Nymeth are…
28 CommentsIn 1935, a mother wrote in to a British motherhood magazine saying this: Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbors. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house….Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking’ and cost nothing? In response, a group of women formed…
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