So I brought this thing home.yesteday

What am I going to do with it?
The thing has consumed most of my morning and is now taking a nap on Winston's chair.  Do cats truly have no noses, like dogs think, or does he find Winston's smell comforting, like a big brother's?

I also finished reading

                        I Think I Love You
                        by Allison Pearson

Don't read reviews of this.  Even the most careful review will give away too much of the story.  I didn't know anything about it when I plugged it into my car speakers and started Chapter 1.  And  I was delighted by everywhere it went. 

Let's just say that it starts in 1974, in Wales, with a pair of teenage girls who were--like most teenage girls--madly in love with David Cassidy.   And it starts in London with a man who takes a writing job for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine.  Two sides of the same teen craze--two people trying to figure out where they fit into the world--two could-have-been-true stories.

For all of my love of the printed word, I don't recommend you read this book.  If you're not Welsh--or even British--you won't be able to pronounce the delicious dialect and have it flow trippingly off the tongue.  British accents are so adorable!  Get the CD sound recording and plug in for three hours of auditory delight.

Yesterday Edward and I ventured to the Angelika to see
Twelve Years A Slave

I was under-impressed.  I think a good director could have made a really good movie out of this material.  Sigh.

Makes me want to read the book.

The Runner by Cynthia Voigt

I thought Cynthia Voigt's other Tillerman books--The Homecoming and Dicey's Song and A Solitary Blue--were the most painful and joyful young adult literature I would ever read.  Guess I'm still reading.

major spoiler follows:
Suggestion: do as I did, wait a few months after you read Homecoming before you read this book.  Assuming your memory is as weak as mine, you'll be halfway through before you realize who the main character is.  And if your memory is really bad, you'll have forgotten how it's going to end.

I wonder if nowadays, when people can freely choose to have or not have a child, if there are fewer atrociously bad parents in the world?  Probably not.  Who really knows what they're getting into when they choose to have "a baby"?  We're going to have "a baby."  "Some kids."  "My daughter."  "My son."
In the phrases above, prospective parents should replace "have" with "make."  Replace "my" with "a."  And replace "we" with "I".

They should say: I'm going to make a unique individual with likes and dislikes and needs and demands that aren't the same as mine.  Someone who's just as likely to inherit my faults as my virtues, and sure to invent a few new faults all their own.  If I try to make them be like me, I'll fail, every time. 

I read science fiction--my daughter reads yaoi manga.  I love making things--my son loves playing video games.  I say potato--they say po-tah-to.

Babies are kittens, so adorable, so wondering, so curious...and so doomed to become cats.  Cats shred the furniture.  Cats kill small animals and eat them and come back in the house to puke on your carpet.  Cats wake you up in middle of the night, yowling to be fed.  They kill and fight and mate and make more cats.  Cats will be cats.

But I like cats. And sometimes, if you're patient, they'll sit on your lap and purr.

Book #88 and only one more "old fashioned" to go

A Little Princess

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

1905


Somewhere in my sobbingly sentimental heart there's a deeply buried yearning for works like this.  Yeah, the story is contrived; dated; a little short in the action department; and not something I'd recommend to anyone who hadn't bawled her eyes out when Beth died.  But it's got that certain timeless something.  The secret in the attic.  The games of let's pretend that lighten the day-to-day toil.  The certain reward for true virtue.

All of the books in this chapter of Shelf Discovery  are kids' books, and that, I believe, is the first fatal flaw in my whole "teen classic" project.  The subtitle of the book was wrong--it should have been young adult classics, not teen classics--but I've already complained about that.  It was my fault that I didn't catch what Lizzie Skurnick was saying in her reviews.  A year ago when I first read Shelf Discovery, phrases like "eight-year-old brain" and "fourth grader" didn't register with me.  They do now--now that I'm looking for them.

The second fatal flaw in my project is that the booklist is so very jumpy.  It hops from a coming of age novel (Forever) to a young adult thriller of the seventies (Happy Endings Are All Alike) to a childrens' classic from 1905.  Both books can live in my mind, but they can't coexist on my bookshelf.

Lying Awake by Mark Salzman

Warning: spoilers below.
This quote that seems to define the book,

If I serve Thee in hopes of Paradise,
    Deny me Paradise.
If I serve Thee in fear of hell,
    Condemn me to hell.
But if I love Thee for love of Thyself,
    Then grant me Thyself.

I think this quote sums up the basic conflict in the hearts of all those who seek to know God.   But even if I'm wrong, it still makes you think.  The whole book does.

I came to the book as someone who'd read a great deal about the orders of contemplative nuns and The Rule, so nothing in the text shocked me or puzzled me--but I doubt if that would be true of many readers.  I wonder how strongly he borrowed from other works of fiction, especially In This House of Brede and The Nun's Story. But it's okay if he did.  It is NOT a rehash of the same questions they ask, not at all.  It asks a much more serious question.

(not telling what!)

You don't say

What You Wear Can Change Your Life
Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine

They nearly had me convinced on that.  Fun, funny book by a pair of fashion favored Brits; full of tips on what to wear and, more importantly, what not to wear.  It also includes makeup and miscellany, such as how to shape your eyebrows and pose for photographs.

I enjoyed it thoroughly and probably won't take one wink of their advice.
But it's worth reading for the chapter on vacation photography alone.  Bad vacation photos can sour a memory, they say--do what you must to ensure good ones.  Their tips may not change the positions in which I, myself, might pose, but they'll certainly be considered when I photograph my friends.

Catching up on books

Last week I finished Belles On Their Toes by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.  87 on my list of 100.

It was much better than Cheaper By The Dozen and I almost liked it.  I might even recommend it...maybe.  It's like a newspaper article--a lively recitation of who, what, when, where, and how--but never why.  There's no depth in it.

Apparently the two books were semi-biographical, written by two of the children of the family of a dozen.  I wonder if they were written while their mother was still alive?  If not, then I don't fault them for lack of depth; but if so, I wish they'd asked more questions of her.  She's a woman who had so much to tell--did she never get a chance to tell it?

Me give up

I'm struggling with my current book,   
                 America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.
 It's hard to read--either
(a) the writing style is inconsistent, or
(b) my brain is too old and decrepit to follow such an erudite discussion.

I think the correct answer is (a).  Sometimes his sentences flow smoothly along, but other times they run on and I get halfway through one of his huge, fat paragraphs and realize I've gotten lost in stuff that doesn't fit together.

Half of good history writing is research--getting the facts.  But the other half is reporting the facts, with a flowing narrative or a convincing argument.

I'll stick it out.  It only has 22 chapters, so if I manage 5 chapters a week it will be done with one renewal.

In other news, I pulled a stupid yesterday. After airing up two of the three flat tires on the lawnmower, I decided to start it, then back it up a couple of feet and air the third (front) tire.  The front tires don't carry much weight, so that would be a safe maneuver. 

Since I'd had to jump start it the last twenty times I'd used it, so I wasn't surprised to find the battery dead.  I hooked up the jumper cables and...

And nothing. It thumped a little, clicked a little, then went silent and stayed that way. I reseated the jumper cables four or five times.  Continued silence.

Enough.  It was high time to buy a new battery.

I put the jumper cables away.  I put back the car I was using for a power source, got out a socket wrench and started to remove the battery. Immediately I noticed that the nut on the negative terminal was very loose, barely making a connection.

So that was that.  I'd been applying current to the battery but not to the starter.  Too late--I was halfway done removing the battery by then.  Bah!  I quit.  The battery is in the garage, the lawnmower in the shed, and the sopping wet grass is drooping in place.  It's going to rain all night and all day tomorrow.

Current Conditions.