Larocque and Roll

March Madness

My parents are coming up for a visit tomorrow. I was on the phone with my mother tonight, telling her that I’d almost finished cleaning the house. The last thing I had left to do was the sweeping, which takes less than 15 minutes but that I always leave until the last minute. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” says my mom. “It doesn’t really matter.”

No, I think I’m actually going to worry about it. There are dust bunnies under my dresser that have gone feral and are threatening Bing. There is enough human and cat hair to create some kind of hybrid were-feline. So I think that sweeping is pretty important, and that I should do it.

(And have done. It took 10 minutes. Bah!)

March was truly a mad month. I don’t know who put what in my coffee, but I read something like 13 books last month. I’d plow through one and immediately pick up the next one. Some were good, some were sublime, some were hard slogs that felt more like work than pleasure. The books in that last category made all the others worth it.

~ David Gunderson. Snow Falling on Cedars (6)
The pacing of this book is positively glacial – the cedars grew faster than the characters in this one. It felt like a homework assignment to read it, and reminded me of the Oates book in that respect. However, it was a beautiful story, and the locations sounded wild and lovely, the back story was both mythical and sorrowful, and the resolution was satisfying. I think this is going to be my first library book club book.[1]

~ Ellen Cook. Unpredictable (5)
The heroine of this book works in a book shop which can also special-order books for you, as well as providing research services, both for reasonable fees. Wow, that sounds an awful lot like… a library, where they do those things FOR FREE. I couldn’t get past this fact, so I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I could have (except for the adorable Scottish geek, who became the love interest. Le sigh.)

~ Rachel Cohn and David Levitan. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (9)
Oh, how I love this book. It’s the second time I’ve read it in two years [2]. It’s about two teenagers who meet randomly in a bar when one (Nick) asks the other (Norah) to pretend to be his girlfriend, and it alternates back and forth between the two. I was hooked from the line on the first page: “I am punctuating and I am punctured and I am punching the air with my body as my fingers press hard into the chords.” I seem to remember having gone to a concert around the same time I read this, and it having impacted on how I read that line, how it wasn’t just about listening to the music but also about feeling the music and being moved by the music.

~ Cohn and Levitan. Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (9)
There was a moment in this book – almost an aside – where they name-dropped the band or a club or something from the previous book, and it made me happy. I like continuity, and I like books that take place in the same fictional world as other books I’ve enjoyed. Like Nick and Norah, it’s written from different viewpoints, but because the characters and the story were more complicated, there were more viewpoints. It wasn’t as lyrical or seamless as N&N, but I really liked it, even though I sometimes wanted to smack Naomi (while somewhat sympathizing with her.) [3]

~ David Levitan. Boy Meets Boy (7)
It’s a very short book that feels like a Grateful Dead/Phish acid trip gone wholesome. Lots of weirdness, but weirdness you’d let your mother read (Hi Mom!). Its idealism is kind of cute – can you imagine going to a high school where the star quarterback is a drag queen? – but I’d still like to visit there.

~ Levitan. How They Met (8)
So… yeah. I went on a bit of a Levitan/Cohn binge this month (there was another Cohn towards the end of the month). This was a book of short stories about fly fishing in Argentina and cheese-making in Cape Verde, and there was absolutely nothing about chance encounters in airports, dance classes, hallways and coffee shops that lead to romance. Nothing at all.

Okay, this is running long, and it’s late and I want to be able to get up in the morning. I’ll continue this later.

[1] OH YES. I’m starting a monthly book club at the library in September. There’s going to be two sessions a month, both doing different books and then switching the following month. Because being the lead on several technology projects, on a conference planning committee, on an advisory panel, keeping various displays in the library up-to-date and participating in a virtual reference service in addition to the regular day-to-day stuff ISN’T ENOUGH TO KEEP ME FROM BEING BORED.

[2] According to my records.

[3] See, Naomi is in love with Ely, but despite the fact she knows he’s gay, keeps hoping that he’ll fall in love with her. In high school, about 2/3rds of the guys I developed crushes out turned out to have the same taste in men as I did, so I kind of know from where she’s coming. Although I never for one second ever believed that I could convert the objects of my misguided affections – my response was usually, “Oh… huh. I hadn’t noticed… anyways…” Yeah, I was kind of clueless.