Currently

Time // 6:20 pm.

Place // My messy, messy upstairs study. I ordered new bedroom furniture and a rug in August, which necessitated the removal of a popcorn ceiling, refinishing a hardwood floor, painting, and, oh yeah, moving tons of stuff that had been allowed to accumulate over the years in the bedroom. Lots of it is still in the study, although the bedroom is mostly finished. Must do something about the excess very soon. 

Consuming // Ginger ale and Imitrex. It's the beginning of migraine week.

Reading // This past week I finished Christopher Priest's The Adjacent and reread Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves for book club.This was my pick, and I'd worried that the Fowler would not go over well with some of the readers in this group, but like it they did, and many seemed to have actually followed my advice and not read reviews and flap copy beforehand, and were surprised when Fern's identity was revealed. I've started Nancy Milford's Zelda: A Biography and James McBride's The Good Lord Bird.

Blogging // As you might can tell, I am trying to kick-start myself into blogging again. Last night I posted the same photo of the Prague astronomical clock that I used nine years ago when the blog was a mere week old. I wonder if there are any old-timers still reading?

Watching // We've been rewatching Breaking Bad. I think "Fly" is the last episode we've seen.

Listening // We went to an Eileen Jewell show last month and I've been listening to a lot of her cds ever since. Plus, someone put a Monkees cd in the car and while I like it, I think that someone should switch it out for something else really really soon.

Loving //  That we now have a bed that it's not only comfortable to read in, but it's possible to read in. I broke our old bed years back trying to shift it around to clean under it and it would collapse if you put any pressure at all on the headboard.

Hating // That we're still waiting on bedside tables and a dresser. I want to stack books on them all!

Making // Last minute phone calls to my crew for tomorrow evening's set up at the precinct. There's an election Tuesday!

Anticipating // My trip to Maryland next Sunday to visit Wendy. 

Don't forget. . .

. . . to set the clock back tonight

Breaking Bad is like a sprawling Russian novel come to your flat screen, or an epic film allowed to unfold at its own pace rather than edited down to three hours so the theatre can cram in an extra showing every day. By saving its best for last, Breaking Bad is quietly pushing the boundaries of this evolving genre.

We can watch “Ozymandias” in a way that generally wasn’t possible in 2008 when Breaking Bad’s “Pilot” first aired. We have virtually instantaneous access to the new episode on demand and on-line. The days of waiting for a re-run are history. We can, if we so choose, watch Breaking Bad like a giant film. Or have random access to any page just as we would in a novel.

 --Allen St. John, "Why Breaking Bad is the Best Show Ever and Why That Matters"

Dwight. . .

 

performed in Cherokee last night. We had pretty good seats.

Scotland, here I come!

Back in a week. Taking a very much needed vacation..

And hoping to become a more frequent blogger on my return.

What I"ll be reading on the plane: Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood. I'm midway through and it fits in my purse and it seems a shame to set it aside for the larger and heavier The Interestings, which is what I'd been intending to take. But I've got two hours before I leave for the airport. Maybe I'll decide to take both.

And both Kindles.

Bye.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

--Claire Messud, talking about anger, the books she loves, and oh, yeah, her latest, The Woman Upstairs.

My copy arrived this afternoon. Can't wait to start.

Paltry reading

This is sad. The entire first quarter was sad and the sluggish reading pace continues. Unless things change I'll probably finish out 2013 having completed fewer books than at any time since 1994.

I think I'm going to have to rethink all social reading commitments until I get a handle on the other obligations that have to take precedent--I'm still back at the Jean Rhys section in Stet and I never even started Doctor Glas for the Slaves back in January. And I think I'm going to need to restrict my reading to books that wholly engage my attention or else I won't get through them at all.

Anyway.

The last few weeks' meager few finishes:

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. James Lasdun. I had a one-night stand on the Double Dog Dare with this one and I do not feel guilty; if I'd known about it beforehand, I would have caveated it in, for reasons I won't go into. I take issue with Lasdun's insistence that Nasreen must be sane so that he can have a "morally engaging antagonist" for "interesting," "literary purposes," but otherwise, I have great sympathy for him for what she's put him through.

The Waterworks. E.L. Doctorow. I read somewhere that this was a tribute to Poe. I enjoyed it more for the period details and was perplexed by the narrator's overuse of ellipses. I don't believe this was a newspaper convention of the time and C. assures me that Poe wasn't overly fond of ellipses either, so I don't know what effect Doctorow was going for here. Read this if you want something literary for Carl's RIP Challenge.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. Ann Patchett. This was a Kindle single, really more of an essay than a book.

Good-bye to All That. Robert Graves. Dare I attempt The White Goddess now? Er, not anytime soon.

The Imperfectionists. Tom Rachman. For book club. I was the only one who truly enjoyed it, I'm sorry to say. Crazy sad newspaper people amuse me.

The Burgess Boys. Elizabeth Strout.Although I can find where Anne Tyler has recommended Elizabeth Strout, I cannot find confirmation that Strout has ever mentioned reading Tyler. Nevertheless, to me The Burgess Boys reads as if Strout has internalized all the Anne Tyler novels over the years. Spotting these influences, or intentional nods, as I went through this made me deliriously happy. I realize this book isn't working as well for the very people who originally turned me on to Strout back when Amy and Isabelle first came out (i.e., the old Readerville crowd), but I really loved this book.