Olive Kitteridge

In my post fluff summer, I’ve decided to read some smarter books andhave decided to read the Pulitzer winners that I haven’t read. I just finished the most recent Pulizter winner, Olive Kitteridge. This is a book that’s about this old woman who lives in a small Maine town and several of the other people in the town. It’s a little like a short story book without actually being  a series of short stories. There are 13 different mini-stories in the book that sort of relate to Olive, whose story is told throughout the book.

This book talks about issues of marriage, parenting, dealing with death, family members who are disabled, children who move away, children who are angry with their parents and Olive’s aging process and her withdrawal from society. What I like about Olive is that she’s messed up. She has real problems and doesn’t think warm and fuzzy thoughts and she feeds her dog donuts. She felt like a real person. I also liked that this book wasn’t so much a story with a beginning, middle and an end, but more of a picture of a portion of peoples lives. Usually in books peoples lives have a story that starts, gets mucked up and then gets resolved. As if that ever happens in real life. As if we are ever only dealing with one storyline at a time and that they ever get completely resolved. I liked that his book dealt with the stories that way. I would finish a chapter and think, “I wondered what happened next? I wondered if that girl ever got a job? I wonder if that guy left his wife?” and I liked that I didn’t know, that I only got part of the story. However, I can see how this might bother a lot of readers, so use caution before diving into this book.

Right now I’m reading a collection of the O. Henry short story prize winners from 2008. Stay tuned.

 

Scratching

Okay, this is again about the book I just read. Sorry for those of you who skim over the book-related blogs as this is the third one in a row.

In the ninth grade, our World History teacher, Kim Pennington, told us that there was a queen who didn’t like knocking and insisted that people scratch on doors instead. Immediately, classmate Jayson Kennedy raises his hand and says, “But what if you’re vaccuuming?” Needless to say we found this very funny since they didn’t have a lot of vaccuums in Queen Victoria’s time. For most people, that’s where the story would end, but not with me. Amber and I decided to start using the scratch when knocking on one anothers doors when we lived together. This is actually a handy technique because if you are asleep, you don’t typically hear the scratch. This is handy if you’re just checking to see if the other person is awake without having to open their door or knock and wake them up. When I moved in with Meghan, I introduced this to her and she uses it like a champion. So, we have long been proud to carry on this Queen Victoria tradition. Is it funny that this is the take-home lesson I took away from 9th grade World History? Probably.

Anyway, in the Know It All in the V chapter, what does the author tell me he learned but that Queen Victoria made people scratch on doors instead of knock. I should probably let him know that it’s not a long-dead practice, but frequently used on the Upper West Side.

 

The Assassin Bug

Let’s flashback to 1998, when Zak and I were sophomore’s in high school. Zak had driven to our house in his dad’s super cool orange/tan van. Maren and I were walking Zak out to his car when we noticed the strangest bug on the antenna on the front of the van. Rather than comment on how odd it was and moving on with our life, we decided to trap it in a jar, transfer it to a ziploc bag, and freeze it for further examination the next day.

So, the next day, we looked at it in depth the next day and decided to take it with us to the University of Oklahoma library to look it up in some insect identification books. What we found was rather upsetting. What we had captured and frozen was the Assassin bug. The assassin bug has a long projection on the front of it’s face that it uses to inject lethal saliva that liquefies the insides of the prey, which are then sucked out.  The South American variety, often called the kissing bug, bites humans on the lips and can cause a fatal heart disease. All of this we learned on our scientific investigation that day 11 years ago. Needless to say, we have long been more afraid of the assassin bug than most normal humans. Luckily, we don’t see them very often.

So, we haven’t done much thinking about this long-ago researched bug, until I was reading my book The Know It All and discovered that the assassin bug can also shoot it’s saliva up to 12 inches. That means that it doesn’t even have to be on you to hit you. This I found alarming and immediately called Zak to report this new assassin bug detail.

This is what I love about reading. Random information in a book that might have been glossed over by any other reader, brought back a memory of an adventure that Everyone had 11 years ago. I love that for each reader of any book, different things have different meanings. So for me, this book brought back many great memories of funny things, but for someone else, it might have reminded them of bad things, or happy things, or something completely different. Reading rocks!

 

The Know It All

I just finished reading a really fantastic book that Meghan picked out for me in the Portland, Oregon airport. And she did a great job! This is a book written by a man who read the Encyclopedia Brittanica cover to cover in a year. It’s the true story of what he was reading at the time and what happened in his life. It’s written in a great way with each chapter being a letter of the alphabet and it’s not written in paragraph/narrative form, it’s written like an encyclopedia with entries for each letter. There were some really great ones, allow me to list them for you:

Bell: The world’s largest bell was built in 1733 in Moscow, and weighed in at more than four thousand pounds. It never rang-it was broken by fire before it could be struck. What a sad little story. All that work, all that planning, all those expectations-then nothing. Now it just sits there in Russia, a big metallic symbol of failure. I have a moment of silence for the silent bell.

Casanova: The famous 18th century lothario ended his life as a librarian. Librarians could use that to suck up their image.

Berserkers: Savage Norse soldiers from teh middle ages who, it is said, went into the battle naked. Hence “going berserk:. So to truly go berserk, you should take off your pants. Noted.

Climate and weather: Lightning goes up. It shoots right up from the ground and into the cloud. This is what the encyclopedia says in the section on climate and weather. I reread this passage a couple of times to make sure I hadn’t gone batty-but no, lightning goes up. To be technical, it does first go down-there’s an initial bolt called the “leader” that zips from the cloud to the ground. But the bright part, the part that flashes, is the “return stroke”, which goes from the ground back to the cloud. This is profoundly unnerving. When I didn’t know the history of canned laughter or the existences of a sexy Confederate spy, that was mildly vexing. But this is unnerving. This is a while new level of ignorance. I’ve been looking at lightning all my life, and it’s sky-to-ground direction seemed about as certain as the slightly asymmetrical nose on my face. To be confronted with this totally counterintuitive information-it makes me paranoid. What other incorrect ideas do I have? Is the sun actually cold? Is the sky orange? Is Keanu Reeves a brilliant actor?

Death: A Russian nobleman patented a coffin that allowed the corpse-if he regained consciousness after burial-to summon help by ringing a bell. Another good idea. Because that could really screw up your week-to wake up and find yourself in an airless coffin. I guess nowadays they could put cell phones in there.

Divorce: The easiest divorce around: Pueblo Indian women leave their husband’s moccasins on the doorstep and-that’s it-they’re divorced. Simple as that. No lawyers, no fault, no socks, just shoes.

Garrick, David: Famed 18th century Shakespearean actor who also managed the Drury Lane Theatre. He fought to “reform” the audience, discontinuing the practice of reduced entry fees for those who left early. I don’t like this guy. His reform in terrible. We need to go back to the old system: You stay an hour at a movie, you pay half price. You stay a half an hour, quarter price. Leave after ten minutes, the theatre has to pay you for your trouble.

Greenland: A mystery solved. I’ve always wondered why Greenland-which is basically a massive sheet of white ice-is called Greenland. Turns out the country’s name was coined by and Erik the Red, who had been banished from Iceland in 982 A.D. for manslaughter. He called his new home Greenland in order to entice more people to join him there. In other words, it was all a shady PR ploy by a felon. Shady, but smart. No doubt he got more takers than if he’d gone with something more accurate, like Bleakland or Depressingland or Youllstarveland.

Hollywood: This was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, “a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles”. Well, I know that a lot of Hollywood types are in AA. But other than that Mr. Wilcox would probably not be overjoyed.

James, Jesse: The greatest robber of the Wild West died in 1882. He was shot in the back by a gang member while he was at home “adjusting a picture”. That doesn’t seem right. Being shot in the back is bad enough, but while adjusting a picture? A notorious bandit shouldn’t end his life engaging in interior design. Well, at least he wsn’t crocheting throw pillows.

Urine: Dalmation dogs and humans have strangely similar urine (they’re the yonly two mammals to produce uric acid). This could be useful if I ever smoke pot, apply for a government job, and have access to Dalmations. REgardless, the unexpected connections continue to amaze.

So, there you have it. Some of the many things I learned while reading this book. Next up, the most recent Pulitzer winner.

 

Back to Good

Thank goodness for the first day of September since it means that my summer of fluff reading is finally over. Allow me to list for you the books I read this summer.

1. The entire Sookie Stackhouse series that is published so far. This is the series that the True Blood HBO series is based on about a woman and vampires. Classic trashy summer reading. (9 books)

2. The entire Artemis Fowl series. Really great children’s book series about a bad kid named Artemis and the havoc he wreaks on the hidden underground world of fairies. This was the best of my summer reading. (5 books)

3. The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. These were much better than I thought they would be and certainly inspired a lot of thought about religion and conspiracies which is all very interesting. (2 books)

4. The 15th book in the Stefanie Plum lady bounty hunter series. Now, I admit that I read this series whenever a new one comes out anyway. Autumn got me hooked when we were in college and it’s the only trashy reading I do. (1 book)

5. Lipstick Jungle by the woman who wrote Sex and the City. It was also a short-lived show on NBC with Brooke Shields. This book followed 4 women as they lived their lives in a year in New York. The problem was that I think you’re supposed to like all the women and I did not. (1 book)

6. Goodnight Nobody and Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner. Not bad. Girly and a little over-dramatic. Like watching a romantic drama. (2 books)

So, that’s it. I read 20 fluff books this summer and am glad to have finally finished all the books that Maren has bought me over the years. Fall of reading award winning books, here I come!

 

Another Confession

Once upon a time I told Maren I would have an all-fluff summer of reading. And once upon a time I tried hard to follow that rule. And once upon a time I failed.

The first two or three fluff books of the summer were entertaining and light and fun. And then the next 3 and the next 3 and the next 3 and I started to go a little book crazy. Because they are so easy to read, I have read 16 fluff books this summer but have never been so displeased with such a long string of books. It’s not the books fault. I’ve enjoyed the childrens books and even the others as well, but I missed learning. I missed being shocked by events in a story. I missed stories. And so I decided that I cold read one non-fluff book per month of the summer. So, in June I read Jane Austen’s Persuasion just because I was watching so many BBC films that I found I was yearning for some good ole Austen. Then in July, I decided to read the Anti-Fluff. And what could be more anti-fluff than Ayn Rand? Absolutely nothing.

So I read We The Living, which is her first novel and one that she claims is as close to an autobiography as she will ever come. I loved this book (as I love all Ayn Rand that I have read) and was sad to see it end. And, it was only 400 short pages long as opposed to the behemoth 1000 pagers she likes to write (Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) so it didn’t take long at all to read.

Please find below my favorite quotes from the book:

1. I was thinking about the streets. The streets of a big city where so much is possible and so many things can happen to you.

2. To a life which is a reason unto itself.

3. Don’t you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: This is mine? Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it?

For her first novel, I was a little shocked to find that it was much darker and less hopeful than Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I mean, many a person died in this book in bad bad ways and life just sucked. That seemed to be the moral of the story and yet I still loved it.

My secret anti-fluff book for August is For Whom the Bells Toll by Hemingway. I have only read one Hemingway so far in my life, The Old Man and the Sea, but I loved it so much that I have read it twice in the last year and made Zak read it as well. I think Hemingway, much like Ayn Rand is an author that you either love or hate. Very few people feel just so-so about either of them. I like that. I like Ayn’s dramatic and strong women and her I’m-not-saying-the-word-communism-but-that’s-what-I’m-writing-about style. I also love what the New York Times calls Hemingways “terse prose”. The back of my copy of For whom the bell tolls says this as part of a mini-bio on the author: “Hemingway was an aficianado of bullfighting and big-game hunting, and his main protagonists were always men and women of courage and conviction, who sufferd unseen scars, both physical and mental”. Who woudn’t love that?

Speaking of anti-fluff. When August ends and I can start reading like a real person again, I’ve decided to do the award-winning tour. I think I’ll read some of the Pulitzers that I haven’t read, including the giant, Lonesome Dove. Then I’ll read the 2008 O. Henry prize winning collection that I bought just before the summer began and read one story in before having to take up the summer books. That one story was great, however, so I’m looking forward to the rest.

In case you are wondering what I am reading now in the fluff category I am sadly reading a book called “Lipstick Jungle”. Oh the horror. I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson this summer. If your sister buys you books, you should just read them when you get them and not let them accumulate over years until you have to do your penance by having an all-fluff summer. Note to selves.

 

BBC to the Rescue

In my continuing summer of fluff reading that has been killing me softly, I have had to find other ways to try to enrich the brain with literature and thus I have discovered the BBC mini-series based on classic british novels.

And thanks to Netflix and their watch instantly program, when I am yearning for actual literature I can watch some. It’s not the same, but it’s been helping a lot. So far this summer I have watched a Jane Austen, an Emily Bronte and a Charles Dickens novel. They have all been great. And since I love all things victorian and any movie/book where people visit one another for months at a time and women die of colds and people say “tis and twelvemonth and michealmas” I have been happy in my viewing.

Let me tell you about my favorite one so far called “He Knew He Was Right”. It’s based on a novel and is about this man who is jealous of his wife’s godfather who visits her everyday. He gets so jealous that he demands that she never see the man again and she yells at him for not trusting her. Things deteroriate so much that he sends her away and tries to take their child from her and then runs away with the child to Italy. Then when she finally tracks him down, he’s dying and still won’t believe her. But she finally convinces him to come back home with her and on his deathbed he tells her he believes her that she did not cheat and then she kisses him and he dies! How great is that? I mean, can you imagine reading that and how mad you’d be when you got to the end?! I so wish I had discovered it in that fashion, but seeing it was pretty awesome, too!

I can’t wait to get back to reading great books like this one. September 1st cannot get here soon enough for this reader! I think soon I will make a list of the book I am going to read when I can read good ones again. I’m thinking of doing an award month like on AMC when they only show Oscar winning movies in the month of August. I think that September might need to be Pulitzer, Mann Booker and National Book Award month for me. Or perhaps it should be classics month and I should read Crime and Punishment and For Whom the Bell Tolls and Madame Bovary and  A Tale of Two Cities. Oh dear, I’m getting excited about both of these options and I still have four weeks of reading hell to go through.

 

The Da Vinci Code

As the fluff contines:

I read the Da Vinci Code this week. Having seen the movie for the first time about a month ago I was pleased to find that the book was much better. It’s nice to find that even in less than intellectual fiction, the book is still better. I’m glad to know that this is a universal truth.

The thing I enjoyed about reading this book was that it took place in the parts of Paris where Zak and I spent a lot of time and so I could vividly picutre where they were and what things looked like. The only things that was negative about this was that I felt a little guilty about spending about 10 minutes in the Louvre instead of the many days it deserves.

This book also reminded me how interesting the history of religions is. If you haven’t read Under the Banner of Heaven which is a history of the Mormon church, you should. After the summer of fluff, I think I’ll do some non-fiction reading and look into the history of more religions. It’s all so very very interesting and sneaky and sometimes very bloody. I mean, more blood has been shed in the name of religion than in the World Wars combined and then some. Those crusades were pretty brutal and in the name of religion. I think I could read about this stuff for a long time and not tire of it. I’ll be sure to let you know how that goes.

I can’t wait for my summer of fluff to be over. There are so many books that I want to read. My amazon.com wish list is growing by the day and it’s starting to wear away at me. What if I’m getting dumber by the second. What if that part of my brain that is used to read better books atrophies during this summer and I have to do some sort of physical therapy to get it back in working order. I mean, what if I have to start with really good children’s books like the Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are and then work my way up to the Pulitzers and Mann Booker winners of my past. Oh dear, this summer could cost me a lot more than I originally anticipated. Maybe to make up for summer of fluff, I’ll read all the books on Time Magazines top 100 novels of the 20th century. I’ll have to look up that list and see what’s on it before I commit to it.

Oh, that reminds me. In 1998 AFI (American Film Institute) came out with a list of the top 100 movies of all time. Zak, Maren and I decided to watch all of the movies on the list starting with the last one and working our way up. We made a little progress in high school but haven’t worked on it since then as we were separated for a long time. But, now that we are back together, we are starting the list up again and we are pretty excited. Up next #85 Duck Soup and then #84 Fargo. I’ll keep you updated on our work through the list and I can almost guarantee that after we are done with all 100 we will make our own list and pass that along as well. I know, you can’t wait. In order to give you a hint of this, I can guaratnee that while Willow does not appear on the AFI list, it will definately appear on ours. In case you weren’t sure, this list is less about great and moving films and more about our favorites of the past.

 

Fluff Positives

So, I’ve just finished another of my Summer of No Substance books. It’s called (take a moment to prepare for the sheer ridiculousness of this title) “Dead Until Dark”. Yes, that’s right. It’s the first book in a series of books about vampires. Yes, vampires. It’s the series of books that the HBO show “True Blood” is based on. Amber got me the series for Christmas, but I had yet to read them.

And, of course, as will all the other fluff so far this year, I liked it. I mean, vampires, small towns, mystery deaths, cemeteries, fangs-what’s better than that? I’m hard pressed to come up with anything right now. I’m really starting to understand the benefit of seasonal reading. I have always seen Pride and Prejudice as a spring book and I read Winters Tale in the winter, but other than that, I have never read seasonally the way many people do. I think I finally get it. I mean, when it’s so humid here in the summer that I fear my hair will suffocate me in the night, I can see how I wouldn’t want to use up too much more energy with thinking about heavy literary topics.

I have found thus far in my reading of nothing of substance that there are some positives to this endeavor:

1. you can read one of these books in a day. if that.

2. i have yet to cry for any of these characters

3. i think i might be sharpening my csi: crime solving abilities as every one of the books i have read so far (even the childrens books) have involved some sort of murder/mystery.

4. now when the rest of the world talks about reading the DaVinci Code, I can join in this book conversation-this ability to communicate with the masses is useful in that i don’t seem to do a lot of things that the rest of the world does. i don’t do facebook, i don’t listen to the radio or watch mtv, i don’t watch american idol. There are people on the covers of magazines that i couldn’t pick out a line-up, let alone guess why they are famous. Point being, maybe having a little something mainstream to discuss isn’t so bad.

Yesterday I was watching this video about this old man who had contributed a lot to special needs children’s education in NYC and he said something that has gotten me to thinking. He said that he has always read everything he can get his hands on because that’s the best way to learn. And damnit, I agree with him. However, in my acquiescence to this point, I think I may have to stop being such a book snob. That’s a terrible thing to let go of and I think it will be difficult, but I’m going to try to broaden my reading horizons. I don’t think this will ever involve a lot of the overly popular books, but I will try not to judge a book before I have read it. I mean, it’s hardly fair. Books in and of themselves aren’t bad. And I certainly don’t want the repuation of being someone who would throw books into a fire if given the chance. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I can think of a great many I’d toss in if I had to make a list.

So you see, dear blog readers, even thought I didn’t plan on it and didn’t mean to, I think I have accidentally learned something from reading fluff.

I think this is a good lesson for us all. After all, what is my blog but pure fluff. There aren’t great discoveries made here or world problems solved and it’s hardly fantastic prose, but if you keep reading, I bet you’ll learn something. I mean, who knew about that guy with his 888 kids?

 

Fluff Continues

After reading Angels and Demons, I went back to the children’s book series, Artemis Fowl. I just finished book two in this series where the main character is an evil, scheming pre-teen. What I love about these books is that while I like all of the characters, I don’t love them the way I do the Harry Potter characters. Nor do I often feel the need to cry or yell or run screaming from the book the way HP often makes me want to. The other great thing about this series is that you can read a book in a day if you wanted to. But it’s not so light that it’s not entertaining. I even occassinaly laugh out loud.

My summer of fluff is going okay except that I keep seeing other books that I want to read that I have to add to an ever lengthening list and I’m starting to yearn and I mean yearn for some weightier books and I’m only two books into my summer of fluff. Oh dear, I fear this will not end well.