Reading with Mom

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As I’ve been reading and writing about auto insurance quote all week, and today is Mother’s Day, I thought I’d spend a moment talking about reading with my mother.

When I was very young, before I was entirely comfortable reading long novels without pictures, my mother used to read to me, doing all the voices. I especially remember reading Fletcher and Zenobia with her, and I blame this book for my dark tastes, because the illustrations were done by Edward Gorey.

A bit later, she began to read Little Women to me, but by then I was a voracious reader, and our “chapter a night” system was beginning to chafe. That was the last book she read TO me, but several years later, when I was nine or ten, she began to read WITH me.

One book I remember reading together was a collection of Katharine S. White’s garden essays from the New York Times, a year of them, one for each week, I think. It was thick with a lovely color, and we would take turn reading the essays aloud to each other during a hot Colorado summer – there was actually a drought that year, but I didn’t realize it til long after. I’m not certain, but I think the title was Onward and Upward in the Garden. (Katharine S. White, btw, was married to E. B. White, who gave us Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan.)

That was the year I began stealing her Ms. magazines and reading them before she could. That was also the year I discovered Judy Blume.

We haven’t read together since then, I don’t think, though we’ve often passed books back and forth, fought over who was going to read one first, or spend lovely Saturdays going first to the library, and then out to lunch or a cafe.

While I can only handle my mother’s forceful personality in small doses, those sorts of days, where were together, but not necessarily engaged in conversation, are very comfortable, and one of the things I miss most when she goes home to Baja Sur, where she retired about seven years ago.

IF you’re reading this, I’d like to know when you stopped reading with your parents, or when they stopped reading TO you.

Booking through Thursday: What Do You Do?

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Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

While I don’t own cats, I have enough friends who do to know that being alone without a book is somewhat akin to feline friends being locked in a house without a scratching post or cat tree…not a pleasant situation.

Since I have my wallet, I’d probably hit the airport bookstore and see what was on the best-seller list, or indulge in a few girly magazines of the sort I generally only read at the salon, because it makes them special, and they seem to GO with the salon.

Failing that, I’d look around for a stray newspaper or cast-off book – airports are popular drop points for Book Crossing, after all.

(And yes, I know, yet again, I’m participating on Sunday. Guess I’m not much of a joiner these days, is all.)

Rocket Tunes – MP3Rocket.com

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MP3Rocket.com

Okay, so I just got a stylish new RED iPod NaNo, my first real foray into true iPoddy goodness, and now I have to fill it.

My 30 GB Zen is mainly full of free podcasts and Napster tunes, but Napster to Go, their subscription service, doesn’t work with Apple products (why can’t we have ONE standard for this stuff?), and iTunes has never been my favorite service.

This is why I tried out MP3Rocket.com for free music downloads. Similar to Limewire, it’s a subscription service interface for Gnutella, but it’s a lot more robust, and user friendly – I didn’t even have an issue running it in Vista, which is notoriously twitchy.

Top Five Downloads

Downloading the software is a piece of cake, and searching for songs is simple – type in the track name or the artist, and, if you really want to limit your finds to mp3s, and not videos or other media, specify “audio” before you start the search function.

The basic version of the software gets you instant access to music but for a more robust connection, quicker searches, and different file types, it’s better to join the service. Membership ranges from 1.64 / month for a year to $34.44 for a lifetime subscription, and an additional $14.95 gets you access to downloadable DVD movies as well.

It’s a pretty sweet site, offering services like the top five downloads, as well as a user forum, and a way to meet other music fans.

Goes well with an mp3 player and dancing shoes.

Listing

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Six years ago, I had Lasik surgery on my eyes, and went from not being able to see the big E at the top of the chart to 20:20 vision, though it wasn’t instant – it takes time for eyes to settle.

People always ask what having the surgery impacted the most, and they generally expect grand answers like, “I can scuba dive without a special mask,” but the reality is, it’s the little things that you really notice, things like being able to see to shave your legs in the shower, or put on make-up, being able to read the numbers on the alarm clock when you wake in the middle of the night, and being able to read in bed without fear of rolling over on your glasses, or forgetting to remove your contacts and harming your eyes. (Ditto falling asleep on planes)

It is with this in mind that I present the following meme, in honor of the first 48 hours after surgery, in which I was forbidden to read anything at all.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as unread by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Firefly Lane, by Kristin Hannah

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Firefly LaneFirefly Lane
by Kristin Hannah
Get it from Amazon

When you were a teenager did you ever feel like a ram of your head against the wall might be more productive than a conversation with your mother? If you are a parent, have you ever felt that way about your child? If so, this novel is for you.

Firefly Lane is a tale of the lifelong friendship between cool, breezy and somewhat broken Tully, daughter of a strung out leftover hippie, abandoned to her grandmother most of the time, and average, suburban Katie. Their friendship is formed accidentally when they become neighbors, but ends up becoming a sustaining force for both girls.

As they grow up, Tully is the one who knows what she wants and pushes everything out of her way to get it, dragging Katie along in her wake, until, finally, Katie ends up with what SHE really wants – a home and family, and loving husband.

Set against the television news industry Katie and Tully’s friendship follows a timeline from the early 1970’s, when they meet, until present day, when Katie has to face a devastating challenge and needs Tully, estranged in recent years, to help get her through.

While Firefly Lane is not, ultimately, a feel-good novel, it is a strong portrayal of women’s friendships, and the characters drawn by author Kristin Hannah are complex and believable.

Goes well with an ice cold glass of lemonade, an Adirondack chair, and a soft cotton blanket.

Virtual Journeys

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A friend’s writing about her “bicycle going nowhere” reminded me of the Eowyn Challenge – a virtual walk through Middle Earth to keep you motivated to keep up with daily use of your elliptical or exer-cycle or whatever. Four of us are beginning the journey on Monday, and I’m looking forward to our imaginary, 478 mile, trek from Bag End to Rivendell.

I’m reminded also of a scene from one of my childhood favorites, Little Women in which Jo talks about sewing sheets, and making a tedious task less so by dividing up the seams into continents and talking about the countries and cultures they were likely to meet on a journey through whichever place was being discussed.

The imagination provides not only virtual journeys, but also the “spoonful of sugar” we need to make our own hated activities into fun and games.

Two Announcements

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Attention, shoppers.
Or…readers.
Or…y’all.

I have a couple of announcements.

No, I’m not suddenly going to share the details of my use of Orovo, because while it seems like an interesting product, I haven’t actually tried it.

First, to those who have left comments: the part of WordPress that is supposed to mail me your comments…isn’t. I’m not ignoring you, it’s just that all of a sudden I only see comments from UNAPPROVED readers.

Since the comments aren’t being emailed, it’s really difficult for me to respond.

I apologize. I’m not intentionally ignoring anyone. It’s a technical glitch.

And speaking of technology.
(Well, we weren’t but now we are)

I’ve succumbed! I’ve made my first podcast. Actually this is a mini-cast, only five minutes, but it’s a start. It’s rough, but I’ll improve.

The podcast is called Midnight Tea, and the blog it’s attached to is Midnight Teas. Go forth and enjoy.

Or, you know, mock and laugh.

Either way it involves giving it a listen, right?

Nostalgia with a Side of Butter

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When I was in college, I worked in the snack store, a fro-yo and candy store that also had one of those big commercial popcorn machines like the kind you see in movie theaters.

One of my favorite things to do on rainy weekends was to make a batch of popcorn, and sit there with a good book, letting the scent of buttery salty goodness entice passers-by. In that way, not only did I sell a lot of stuff, but I also got to meet a healthy cross-section of my campus-mates.

Last weekend, and again on Monday and Tuesday, I disconnected from the web, popped some popcorn (alas, the microwave kind) and curled up with the last two books in the Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy. The only passers-by were my husband and the dogs, but the combination of a great read (two actually), and a crunchy snack were all I needed to spend some blissful time away from the glare of the LCD screen.

Of course, now I have to review those novels for ATG, and prep the interview questions for Ms. Carey, and so I have to pull my head out of my virtual life in Terre d’Ange and back into that of a working writer.

I might need more popcorn for this.

Apartment Hunting

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There’s a line that I remember reading in one of the Anita Blake books, “Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.” I’ve been moved via self and via mover, but the line keeps running through my head in search of a connection, and today that connection is fictional dwellings.

Five of my favorites?

  1. Nero Wolfe’s brownstone: I could live without the orchid room, I guess, but I like brownstones, and always dreamed of living in one.
  2. V.I. Warshawki’s apartment: It’s not the largest on earth, of course, but there’s room for a piano AND she has a real tub. As in cast-iron and claw feet.
  3. Plumfield. We’re first introduced to it as the stately home of crabby old Aunt March in Little Women, but we get a better tour during it’s second incarnation, as a home and school for stray boys in Little Men. It always seemed like a place I’d love to visit.
  4. The Harper Hall from Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books. I’m not so fond of her work now as I was when I was thirteen and fourteen years old, and unaware of some of her social attitudes, but I’d have loved to study music at Harper Hall. In retrospect, the trilogy set at the Hall was very much a Pern-ish version of a classic boarding school story.
  5. The Murray House. I love the image of an old farmhouse where Mom is admonished for boiling stew in one beaker and conducting an experiment in another. Madeline L’Engle’s own home, Crosswicks, is very much in evidence in the Murray manse. I’d love to stay in either.

So, what are your favorite literary residences, from childhood, or from more recent reading?

Schuyler’s Monster by Robert Rummel-Hudson

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Schuyler's Monster Schuyler’s Monster
by Robert Rummel-Hudson
Get it at Amazon.

Sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, I stumbled across the blog of one Robert Rummel-Hudson, and quickly became engaged. His writing style is upbeat and candid. He’s funny, but isn’t shy about using the word “fuck” when it’s appropriate, and he’s clearly completely devoted to his young daughter, Schuyler. At the time I first “met” his words, he’d just sold his book, and was beginning the long path to publication. When I re-encountered his work about a week ago, sparked by watching Autism: the Musical on HBO, I found that not only had the book been released, but I’d missed the signing in my local bookstore. (We both live in the same metro area, but my end of it is a good hour or so from his end.)

I was disappointed, but vowed to buy the book anyway. That weekend at Borders, among all the new non-fiction about romance, modern philosophy, and diet pills, I saw the book, Schuyler’s Monster, and it was even an autographed copy. I grabbed it, stopped at Jamba Juice, and headed home to read the entire book in one sitting.

I’m not a parent, nor am I particularly interested in children, and I’m generally one to avoid disabled-kid stories like the plague because they tend to be over emotional and / or horribly fluffy. Schuyler’s Monster is neither. Rather, it’s a love story from a less-than-perfect (and therfore more than perfect) father to his (in his word) “broken” daughter.

Why broken? Because Schuyler, for all she’s a bright and mischievous child, has a neurological disorder that not only compromises her fine motor skills, but also makes her unable to form intelligible speech.

The book is as much about Rob’s reaction to his daughter’s disability, and their journey toward helping her work around it as it is an ode to playful and loving father-daughter relationships. Who wouldn’t want a dad who let you watch monster movies, even if you were really too young? I know I would.

This book was moving, yes, but it’s also funny, sweet, nostalgic, and triumphant. Like Rob’s blog, it’s upbeat and blunt. Unlike Rob’s blog, the word “fuck” isn’t used terribly often, if at all. (I should note, I don’t judge blogs by whether or not people curse. I just believe that if “fuck” is the most appropriate expression of frustration, joy, whatever, cheating on it’s use is, well, cheating. I don’t believe people should ever be afraid of language.)

(And actually he doesn’t use it that often in his blog, either).

Seriously, though, it’s a great book. You should read it for the writing alone, even if you don’t like disbled-kid stories, either.