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Melissahttp://www.missmeliss.comWriter, voice actor, dog-lover, and bathtub mermaid, Melissa is the Associate Editor-in-Chief at All Things Girl. To learn more about her, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter (@Melysse) or Facebook. You can also listen to her podcast, "Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub" at Bathtub Mermaid or on iTunes.

Reading Moods

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A blog-buddy of mine posted an entry, recently, in which she stated that she’s not having a good relationship with books right now. I know what she means – I go through stages where I’m just not in the mood to read anything, and when I try I end up wanting to fling the book away from me and spend a week in a Hawaii bed and breakfast doing nothing but sunbathe, swim, and sleep. No books, no computer….well…no books.

Except of course that travel makes me want to read. I don’t know what it is. We went to France a few years ago at Christmas, and what I remember most (other than the gay potters who adopted me) are the long evenings in the 2nd floor lounge, curled up near the radiator, reading and sipping tea. I’d brought seven novels with me, intended for my mother to bring home with her. Instead, I re-read all of them while we were there, handing each to her as I finished.

One of those books was a favorite of mine, Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks. I reviewed it here a while ago, I think, but I can’t be bothered to look up the link at the moment. Reading about bread making in a funky house in France is the height of literary romanticism.

Although Hawaii would be warmer…

Bookish Bathrooms

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I confess. I read in the bathroom – a lot. In fact, a frequent admonishment when I was a kid is one I now use with Fuzzy when he’s taking forever (thankfully with three bathrooms this doesn’t usually affect me in anything but an annoyance sort of way.): Put the book DOWN. I know we’re not alone in this – there’s a reason people nickname this room the Reading Room.

This has me thinking about bathroom decor, and literary bathrooms. We know that Laura in Little House on the Prairie used an outhouse, and that when she and her family were in hiding, Anne Frank was limited to sponge baths and a pull-chain WC, but what about more modern, luxurious fictional bathrooms. I’m offering four of my favorites, but feel free to add your own.

  1. V. I. Warshawski’s bathroom. I don’t recall specific descriptions, but I know she has a tub big enough to soak in. In fact, this is one of the things that draws me to her creator, Sara Paretsky’s work: yes, her heroine gets dirty and bruised, but at the end of the day, she gets to listen to opera and soak in a bubble bath. Or at least at the end of the case. I see her tub as a vintage cast iron claw-foot thing, with one of those trays across it to hold soap.
  2. Jean-Claude’s bathroom. Big, white, lots of tile, and a tub large enough for one of my favorite fictional vampires and many friends, or just Anita, who has spent many many hours in his tub. For that matter, she’s spent a lot of time washing off monster goo or just taking relaxing soaks in her own tub, but even if Laurell K. Hamilton didn’t specify it, I’m pretty certain her tubs are of the modern, pre-fab, variety.
  3. The Multidimensional Bathroom aboard the Gay Deceiver in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast. This book isn’t the best literature – I mean, Heinlein is fun, but hardly arty, you know? And he can be more than a little sexist, but in this book he did introduce us to the concept of “world-as-myth” aka “pantheistic solipsism” which Wikipedia.org defines as “the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them, so that somewhere even fictional worlds are real.” In any case, the Gay Deceiver is a sports car space ship, and after her crew makes a pitstop in Oz, they find that their bathroom has become a pocket of Oz, with a huge tub, lots of space, and separate sections for “boys” and “girls” – because we all know Oz is a place of innocence.
  4. The Prefects’ Bathroom at Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling may like to tease her readers, even after the series has ended, with tidbits about the characters, but the woman also knows how to build a bathroom. A tub deep enough to swim in, a pesky mermaid portrait, and taps with bubbles and scents pouring forth. Sadly she wastes this bathroom on Harry. I mean, I like the kid, but this is a bathroom that really needs a woman – or Draco Malfoy – to appreciate it.

So that’s my list.
Any thoughts?

More on the Dream Library

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When I wrote about what I wanted to do with our library the other day, I neglected to talk about where I wanted to get the shelving we need. Now, please understand, I have no problem with discount furniture, especially for things like shelves and tables – stuff you don’t sleep in – because furniture is expensive, and shelving especially so, I think because it uses more wood.

My dream library has built-ins, rather than free-standing shelves. A good friend of the family had a shelving-and-entertainment console built when she and her husband moved into their “retirement” home, and I fell in love with it. It was sturdy enough for Fuzzy’s big gaming books (which I still think should be in his office) and pretty enough to be, well, nice to look at. It also had lighting built in, which is great for highlighting nick-knacks, as well as for discerning titles.

I figure, as long as I’m planning the dream library, I should be specific.

Stacks…

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Writing about cabinet hardware on my main blog has me super-aware of the fact that our house is filled with stacks of books, not because we’re making a decorating statement by making piles of paperbacks or covering the floors in acres of hardcovers, but because we still haven’t bought enough shelving.

We want the library to be more functional, but we can’t commit to actually doing something about it.

Well, no more!
I’m declaring open warfare on the Stacks, and by the end of January 2008, we will have a library that isn’t an embarrassment.

I want it to be a sunny open space. I want a faux mantle and an electric fire on the one short wall, and shelves floor to ceiling around the rest of the room, leaving space for the couch and coffee table. I want throw pillows. I like the fact that the room is carpeted, but in truth I’d rather have it have the same cherry laminate as the rest of the house, with a lovely area rug.

And plants. Even if they’re plastic. I want plants.

NO TV. Maybe a small computer desk large enough for a laptop. Definitely some kind of music machine (radio/cd player). And I want all the junk cables that Fuzzy refuses to part with out of the closet so that guests could actually store stuff in there, if needed.

Or at least…

No More Stacks.

The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue (Again)

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Last week, I wrote about my frustration with the book The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue, by Barbara Samuel. I’m please to report that we’ve worked out our issues, and I’m in a place of enjoyment with the book.

Any frustration I had is partly my own fault. The cover art features a cafe table with a lovely blue tablecloth, and a bunch of coffee mugs and glasses, a couple of desserts, and many women gathered around, sharing the food. We don’t see their faces, but we can see that they are friends.

I bought the book in flagrant defiance of the “Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” rule, because I liked the picture, and then, I became frustrated when it wasn’t a happy cozy cafe book, but a deep look at fractured relationships. Just because I’m writing a happy cozy cafe book, I expect everything to be like that.

Anyway, I’ve set it aside while I finish a Trek novel for review later this weekend, and will review it formally sometime next week.

A Little Mystery

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We went shopping on Saturday night, not for diamond rings, but for books and coffee, and while I went in looking only for a pair of Vampire Romance novels by Carol Gleason, I left disappointed – they’d just returned them to their distributor (I’ve since grabbed them from Amazon) – and a little excited, because even though I didn’t have the books I went to find, there was a buy-two-get-one-free sale on mystery novel, and I do love a good mystery.

I also bought Keith R. A. DeCandido’s Q & A, which is both poignant and hilarious. I’ve put off posting his interview until I finish it so look for it on Tuesday.

Reviews of these titles will come eventually. I post about every book I read, but sometimes it takes me a while to catch up.

Snapshots Untaken

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It was a cool wet day today, so the dogs and I raced around the house playing fetch and dog-tag, and other indoor games between bits of my job, but when I went out to check the mail, I saw one of the neighbors’ teenagers chatting with her young man. He was driving a vintage ragtop – in the rain (!) and was snapping a tonneau cover onto it, because apparently it’s okay to drive in the rain, but not to park…

What does this have to do with books, you may wonder? Well, both young folks are college students – I’ve met them on brief occasions, and they’re both well-spoken and polite, as well as reasonably intelligent, which is why, I had to laugh when the young man unsnapped only one section of the cover to retrieve a book.

The image of him, sweatshirt clad, trying not to lean on the car, but fishing blindly for his books, made me smile.

If only I’d had a camera…

The Junk Room

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I’ve been thinking a lot about our library lately. Not the library around the corner, which has a reading porch, rocking chairs and free (if not particularly good) coffee, but the fourth upstairs bedroom in our home that was clearly designed to be a second living area (the closet is a token space, but technically its presence makes the room a legal bedroom) and that we’ve designated our library.

Right now, it doesn’t feel very libraryish. Oh, our old couch is there, and shelves of books, but it’s also got boxes and bags left over from Christmas, and piles of miscellaneous stuff we’ve never quite found room for, and I swear it’s all illuminated by one of the most hideous light fixtures ever seen in a real house.

I originally wanted the big L-shaped space as my office, because it doesn’t have a real closet, and it does have huge floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the side street, while all the other upstairs bedrooms have “normal” windows, and yeah, it’s still carpeted, but I kind of like having carpet under my bare feet while I work.

I’ve tried many times to convince Fuzzy that he should let me move my things into this room, and he keeps reminding me that we agreed on the rooms we have because they’re about the same size.

To which I say, “who cares?” I work from home. He doesn’t. He has a couch in his office, I don’t.

Meanwhile, the most beautiful room upstairs has become the junk room.

And it bothers me.

Branching Out

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Every generation has one. The Book Aunt. The person you can always count on to send you fascinating things to read at Christmas and your birthday, with the corners of the dust covers cut off so that you can’t see the price, and a warm message scrawled in peacock blue ink on the inside cover.

For me, the book aunt is my mother’s younger sister, Patti. For our nephews and nieces the book aunt is…me. And I’m cool with that. Fuzzy’s family is big on reading, though they’ve never really had much exposure to the classics, and my step-brother’s kids are becoming readers as well.

But books seem anticlimactic when compared with iPods and jewelrey and pictures of dead presidents, so I’m wondering if I should do theme boxes… like, when I give my young nephew a copy of The Jungle Book I could throw in some animal print bedding, a copy of the movie, and a box of animal crackers. (As an aside, I love animal crackers.)

Or when we gift a young niece with Black Beauty maybe we could include a horse figurine, a charm for her bracelet, and perhaps donate to her riding lesson fund.

I like theme boxes. I like small presents wrapped with great love. I like making reading something more than words on a page.

This idea has potential.

Five for Friday: Magazine Rack

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While I generally prefer books, especially thick novels with vivid characters, I have a special fondness for magazines. I only indulge in really girly magazines in the salon, I try to avoid things that feature ads for cigarettes or incontinence products because neither fits into my life, and I don’t have any more subscriptions (must fix that), but I do buy them at stores – they’re great for reading during lunch when I’m spending it out by the pool, because I don’t care if I forget to bring them in.

This, then, is a list of five magazines I read often.

  • Mary Englebreit’s Home Companion: Yes, it’s a little bit kitschy, but it’s artistic kitsch, and even though I have zero talent when it comes to painting and drawing, I grew up with a mother who was always making, sewing, crafting, and I have a deep appreciation for it. Besides, after looking through some of the houses featured in her pages, my house seems decidedly uncluttered.
  • Writer’s Digest: While I don’t generally use the prompts, and have considered, but never managed to actually submit an entry to, their contests, I love to read this, because it always leaves me in a writing mood. Also, I compare my writing to some of the people who do win, and feel good, because frankly? I’m better than a lot of them.
  • Discover: This is really Fuzzy’s Christmas present from my parents, but I always steal it when I think he’s done, or when I think he’s had enough time to be done, even if he isn’t. I confess, this is one of my favorite bathroom reads, because there are lots of short filler items, but I do read it all, cover to cover.
  • Real SimpleSunset doesn’t seem to have a Texas edition (their Southwest edition covers Arizona and New Mexico, I think) so I’ve switched to Real Simple since moving here, three years ago. I like the recipes and some of the organization tips, and when I’m done reading it, I leave it in the guest room for my mother to read on her annual visits. Well, when I remember.
  • Ms. I started reading this when I was about eight, and my mother would leave her copy in the bathroom, or I would check the mail and get to it first. It’s both extremely candid and extremely educational, and while I realize that feminism is no longer popular, especially among gen xers, I don’t really care. I am who I am, and my choices are my own, but we are all influenced by our parents’ beliefs, and in this, I am totally my mother’s daughter. I’m lucky to have grown up in a household of free thinkers, and constant encouragement to read, explore, experience.