My mother is a fish.

Seriously.

Trends

Have your book-tastes changed over the years? More fiction? Less? Books that are darker and more serious? Lighter and more frivolous? Challenging? Easy? How-to books over novels? Mysteries over Romance?

My first impulse was to say yes, my tastes have changed considerably over the years, but then my eyes fell on a book that I checked out from the public library over the weekend--Charlotte Bacon's Split Estate, which has a gorgeous photo of a grey horse on the front cover--and now I'm not so sure if I'm anything more than a grown-up version of the child-reader I once was.

I lived and breathed horse books throughout my childhood, preferred the Trixie Beldens to the Nancy Drews because the characters were much more fully developed and enjoyable all the while knowing I didn't really care one way or the other about the actual solving of mysteries, and, although I wasn't exposed to more than a handful of classics before I was a teenager, took to the type of book studied in English class like a duck to water. I took an intro to fiction class my freshman year of college that focused on contemporary literary fiction (the Anne Tyler and Margaret Drabble I read there still count as all-time favorites) and contemporary literary fiction has remained my default setting ever since.

Ways I've changed: I read a lot of Zane Grey, Alistair MacLean, Emilie Loring and Grace Livingstone Hill when I was an early adolescent because that was what the relatives foisted onto me; other than an interest in reading the Zane Grey that's set in Torey, Utah, at some point, I can't see ever returning to these authors. I read a lot of science fiction when I was right out of college; I have no interest in returning to the planet of Pern although I did give dragons a try a couple years back with Naomi Novik and I read far more Animorphs books with S. than I ought to admit to, so I haven't completely turned my back on that type of thing. I was slow to warm to Jane Austen--I thought those characters lived awfully tedious little lives the first few times I tried them--and now I like her quite a bit.

Booking Through Thursday

Poor Claudie. He has a uti.

Poor us. He let us know he wasn't feeling well by peeing all. over. the. sofa.

Mourning dove

This little fella was practically underfoot yesterday afternoon while I hung out laundry (our heat pump died on Saturday, and I'll not be running the dryer until we have air conditioning once again) and he helped L. water the plants in the front yard in the evening.

Today he was m.i.a. and I worried about him, especially after I saw the hawk scoping out the back yard on one of his fly-overs--he's reduced many an adult dove to a dusting of feathers who should have had more of a sense of caution about him than this little one has had a chance to develop.

Finally, well after supper, I spotted him doing that little head bob that he does back in the woods.

Whew.

Now, if Ellie would just be a better sport about having to stay inside. . .

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

The problem is I don't ever learn anything from learning experiences. In fact, I make a special effort not to learn whatever it is the learning experience is supposed to teach me, because I can't think of anything drearier than being somebody whose character is formed by learning experiences.

~~~

People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind.

~~

The main problem was I don't like people in general and people my age in particular, and people my age are the ones who go to college. I would consider going to college if it were a college of older people. I'm not a sociopath or a freak (although I don't suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don't enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don't have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it's interesting or absolutely has to be said. I had never really been aware of how difficult these feelings made things for me until an experience I had this spring.

A horrible experience.

--Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You

What fun: Truth to Power.

I used to wish everyone in Congress would read The Grapes of Wrath. I'll ponder what the individual presidential candidates should read on my trip to the library to pick up holds.

What books would you recommend?

Prince Rupert's drops

They "let it off" on the steps of their hut. It was early, with the sun just slanting through the cross-crossed needles of the casuarinas which lined the creek. There was dew on the grass and their boots were wet from it. The larme batavique caught the light and gathered it in like molten metal straight from a glassworks' glory-hole. It withstood her father's hammer and her mother's axe. And then Lucinda--it was her birthday, after all--took the needle-nosed pliers and snapped--it took a grunt to manage it--the tail.

Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.

There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

--Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda