Life, interrupted.

The ice came down on Thursday night.  Sometime Friday morning the power went out.  And stayed out.  No episodes of Kevin or Supernatural were viewed.  No one worked a shift at Lowes on Friday or Saturday--we couldn't get the cars down the driveway.  No social life happened for Callie.  No computer time for me.  Nada.

We spent our days reading books, playing games, and huddling under covers.  Sometime on Friday the power came on for a minute or so, just long enough to bring up all our hopes...Nope.   Again Saturday morning...nope.

We managed to scrounge up enough Coleman Fuel to fry bacon and eggs for supper Friday night.  We managed to dig up enough lamp oil to have light for reading, and we had a car with a full battery charge for Nintendo DS's and phones.  Other than those, we lived as an eighteenth century family for one and one-half days.

The power came back on at about four p.m. today, although it's gone off briefly at least four times since then.  Trouble with these newfangled devices--like electricity--is a fellow gets to depending on them.  I should dig up that exact quote but I'm too cold.  Did I mention that the temperature didn't get about 26 all day?  The power has been on for three hours and its...54 degrees in here.  Brrr.

The animals want to know why the stupid humans are keeping it so darn cold--

Time for a new audiobook!

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Disclaimer: I listened to it on the IPod, but for the first time in my audiobook experience, I wish I'd read it on paper.  Because... It dragged. A lot. Before it even reached the halfway point I started muttering under my breath...waiting, endlessly waiting, to find out what "the big secret" was. At times I even said it out loud--
          "Enough already! Tell us the big secret and get on with the story!"

Most infuriating quote ever:
             "But I'll get to that later."
When he finally "got to that", the focus switched to why it was happening and how it happened and that made for an ending of shivering surreality. You'd cry for these poor kids if that wouldn't have meant admitting that they could have been real people in a real world and maybe they were and we just didn't know it!

If I'd been reading the book with my eyes on paper, my pace would have been roughly 4x the speed of the audio version, and I think I'd be giving this book a solid 4 stars--really liked it.

Wouldn't have read if it hadn't been on the list, but...

I substituted Valley Of Horses for The Clan Of The Cave Bear because I'd already read Clan and couldn't bear reading it again.  This one wasn't nearly as bad, just way...too...long.  I expect a writer to do her research but that doesn't mean every single bit of it has to be crammed into the finished work.  There are too many huge, honking descriptive paragraphs that read like non-fiction, which might have been fine if I were reading non-fiction.  Non-fiction is a different style of reading, for me--it's a whole different "attitude" about the material and how I expect it to flow.  This book kept making me switch between the two different styles of reading and it irritated me.

And--a personal quibble--there's such a thing as too many words.  If, for example, you describe a horse as a "small filly the color of hay," then do you later need to say, "...watching the hay-colored horse..."?  Is it possible that the author edited this book simply by adding a bunch of words to enhance the "color" and increase the word count?

In any rate, I more-or-less finished the book and I enjoyed a little of it.  Of the 500 or so words, I read about 300--beginning, end, and some of the middle.   Such careless reading behavior would have been inexcusable if I were ever going to read a sequel, but I'm not.  Cro-Magnum man will have to procreate the world without me.

Book #93

My diet thing is really sucking.  I've having trouble distracting my mind--I really hate the book I'm listening to and I'm not especially pleased with the one I'm reading.   Things should be better soon.
Meanwhile,

When one group of people was given six jams to sample and another group was given twenty-four jams to sample, both groups tasted about the same number of jams.  Thirty percent of the people who had the six-jam array actually bought a jar; but only three percent of the people with the larger array did.

This sums up one of the themes of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz.  Having too many choices confuses us, makes us second-guess our decisions, and makes us ultimately unhappy with our choices.  Other themes of the book deal with comparisons--how we rate ourselves against other people; memory--how we give a higher weight to the end of an experience rather than the whole of it; and adaptation--the way we get used to a good thing and learn to expect it rather than appreciate it.

There are a lot of good thoughts in this book, but I wish it had been 100 pages long instead of 200.  He repeats himself.  Sometimes what I take to be a repetition might actually be a slight alteration of the theme, but such subtle nuances are lost on me.  I keep thinking I'm reading the same thing over and over again.

A couple--but only a couple--of his themes bugged me.
In the chapter, Everything suffers from comparison, he states, "Comparisons are the only meaningful benchmark."  Huh? A benchmark is a standard which is used for comparison.  So the statement is saying, "Comparisons are the only meaningful standards for comparisons?"

He goes on to say that when we evaluate an experience, we always do so by comparing it with other experiences, and that always causes it to suffer by comparison.  Who compares a sunset?  A child's laugh?  A strike in bowling?  I, personally, have seen "the best movie I've ever seen" many times, and I see no inconsistency in that statement.  It is the best.  There are a lot of bests.

I also disagree with the statement in a later chapter:
          "The result of having pleasure turn into comfort is disappointment."

The point he's trying to make is this: buying a new car is thrilling; the first few weeks of driving it makes you happy; after that, it's just comfortable and therefore, boring.  You want a new new car.

Maybe that argument is true of movies--the third time you see a movie, the thrill is gone--but I'm not sure it's true of things you use, like cars or clothes or computers.  Maybe it's just me, but I'm pleased every time I start my car and hear the quiet hum; put on my hoodie and feel comfy; turn on my computer and see the welcome screen.  The pleasure will only vanish when the owned thing starts to wear out.

Maybe my satisfaction is a result of my advanced age. I expect that the younger you are, the more relevant this book will be.

Monday, wasn't expecting much

Seventeen Against The Dealer by Cynthia Voigt.

I'm puzzled about this one.  I know and love the Tillerman family so much that I couldn't help devouring it, but it left me feeling a little sad.  I wouldn't have expected a happy, tidy, Little Women-type of ending.  I wouldn't have been happy with one if she'd given it to me.  So I guess I got just what I expected.  But it wasn't enough.

Is she going to write another two books, at least?  To carry on Maybeth and Sam's stories a little?  I sure hope so.

Good movie alert

Catching Fire--even in the front row, thoroughly enjoyable.  Disturbing trend in movie-making to cast children as killers.






I struggled through to the end of My Sweet Audrina by V. C. Andrews.  Just for the reading challenge.

On Goodreads, one star means "didn't like it" and two stars means "it was okay."  So I'm going to give this one-and-one-half stars.  In all honesty, I didn't like it.  I wasn't interested in reading a story about a freakshow family, two messed up girls (and then a third) who'd seen so little of normal human love that they couldn't help but grow up functionally insane.  A few people showed a perverted kind of love that caused more hurt than pleasure; everyone else seemed to hate everyone and be determined to live their lives as miserably as possible.  The one person who was somewhat sane turned out to be, "a brutal, evil man when it all came down to it."

Other than the fact that I disliked it royally, it wasn't a poorly written story...if that's what you're interested in.  I suspect that most of its popularity came from teenagers who snuck it into the house in their book bags and searched out the dirty parts with flashlights under the covers.  Everyone and everything seems to be about sex, and even the most normal of couplings are a little unclean.

To sum up--if my teenage daughter were going to sneak something forbidden off  my bedside table, I'd vastly prefer she found a Sandra Brown "romance" there.  At least the sex is fun.

More Tillermans--guaranteed good

Sons From Afar

Must be read if you've read the first five books in the series and have become enamored of all things Tillerman.  It doesn't stand on its own, which was okay by me.  It doesn't really start and it doesn't really end, which, also, was okay by me.  It's like reading a diary of a good friend who is still alive--you don't want or expect an ending.  It's a...how did you get that way? novel.

Cynthia Voigt demonstrates amazing skill at portraying the adolescent mind.  You absolutely know these kids and, because you know them, you love them.  Love them the same way you do Frodo Baggins or Sam Gamgee--you've been with them to Mordor and back--you've been in their heads as they fight orcs, cower in the shadows, shiver in the cold under the stars.

I have one small quibble--with all Ms. Voigt's skill and understanding, why does she totally skip sexuality?  I'm told that the adolescent male spends a lot of time and energy on it--when I once suggested to a friend that the primary thoughts in a young man's mind concerned, "girls, sports, school," in that order, his correction was: "girls, girls, girls..." with sports maybe on the list at number 39 and school totally absent.

Don't get me wrong--I'm not wanting Cynthia Voigt to change her writing.  I'm just a little puzzled that she leaves out such a huge slice of the adolescent psyche.