Tuesday at work I was trying to write up a draft of a document for a community group based on notes I’d made at a meeting the previous week. I realized that I’m terrible at writing up persuasive arguments because my first tendency is to huff and roll my eyes, and tell you to just agree with me already because of course I’m right and everything I’m telling you is the way IT SHOULD BE DONE. After my little ego fit, I calmed down, finished the draft and sent it off, thinking, “Boy, I should have given myself another day on that so the rest of the arguments would have time to formulate.” Nope.

I don’t know where I’m going with that story. Sorry.

So, what have I been up to? Well, there was that shiny new toy I bought, Ivor [1]. (I barely use the cell phone I have, so why would I want to shell out for an iPhone?)

Then Julie came for what had to be the most uneventful visit ever. To wit: Friday night we sat around in the dark and talked about work because we were too full from supper to bother putting the lights on. Saturday we watched a torrential downpour gradually flood the intersection down the street. That kind of uneventful. Plans to go to the beach were discussed and discarded in favour of naps, reading and watching movies (and knitting). [2]

Also in the past month, I saw a couple of movies. Get Smart was cute and funny, like a hamster, with about as much substance. Wanted was badass, and I spent a good ten minutes playing the “Hey! It’s That Guy!” game with myself before I realized that it was That Guy From The Russian Horror Movie. Kung Fu Panda was amusing, but I will never be able to hear David Cross’s voice and not think “it’s Tobias Funke!” Hellboy II was mixed - loved, loved, loved the creatures and effects, thought the story lacked something. Like a plot. But ass was kicked, bad guys were dispatched, and what more could you ask of Ron Perlman, I mean really? He is made of awesome.

And next week I’m on vacation. Not just the home-for-a-few-days kind, but the kind where I actually get on a plane and leave the province. I KNOW! Scary! For part of it, I’m returning to the scene of many of my best crimes, Halifax, where I haven’t been in almost seven years. I am so stoked about it. From there, it’s on to the Big Larocque Clan Gathering (BLCG), where there will be much merriment, laughter, and the traditional running of the lobsters. Apparently there are to be organized games, and my sister has gone about getting our family t-shirts with pirate logos and our names on the back (to identify our family “team” from the other 10 family “teams”). Woo?

1. Worry not - Gretchen is going to a good home with my sister.
2. I was going to make up a story about a visiting rugby team and our adventures, but obviously that would be even too far fetched for me to come up with.

~ Kwitney, Alyssa, On the Couch (4)
The reviews on the back of the book go on about how it was “kinky” and “erotic.” Really? That’s what passes for “kinky” and “erotic” these days? It was just kind of vanilla, and a mild version at that. It also had an abrupt ending and a series of frustrating, unanswered questions. And boring sex, which was the greatest crime of all.

~ Hiem, Scott, Mysterious Skin (6.5)
I seem to have read a lot of books where chapters alternate between different characters and different voices. In this book, I didn’t find it very effective because there wasn’t a lot of difference in the voices - they all sounded alike. That said, I still liked the book, what with the heartbreaking “alien abduction” and the tender finale.

~ Sloan, Brian, A Fine Prom Mess (7)
For days after I read this book, something about it nagged me until I finally figured it out. The crazy prom plot and all the wild and wacky things that occurred reminded me of an early Gordon Korman novel, except there was just one protagonist who embodied both the anarchist and the uptight characters of the Korman buddy novels. Even though it was pretty implausible, it was still fun.

~ Dessen, Sarah, Lock and Key (7)
I still don’t know how I feel about this one. On one hand, it broke out of the happily-ever-after endings I’m used to, and the male protagonist was just as flawed as the female protagonist. On the other hand, the overall story was much darker than normal - child abandonment, abusive parents, alcoholism and casual drug use.

~ Peters, Julie Anne, Luna (5)
God, this book was stressful to read. There were many times where I’d put the book down and walk away because I didn’t want to know what happened next. And then I’d pick it up, read a few pages, and put it down again. The narrator, the sister of the titular “Luna,” was the most stressed-out person in literature, which is understandable considering her brother is transgender and hiding it from their parents, who are complete assholes.

Now, here it is almost 11pm, and I’m just slightly wired. Which is the story of my week - stress and running on caffeine. I had an awesome [2] work-related stress dream the other night where I finished doing up the work schedule for the next few weeks and then someone asked if I’d remembered to add the new employee in my department to it. “Of course,” I replied, knowing that I’d spent so much time making sure that everything was in order. “No, not her - the other [woman with same name].” At which point I realized that not only was I not in my library, I didn’t know half the people waiting to look at the schedule, meaning that the schedule I’d been slaving over was completely wrong.

Sunday night I dreamed that I was smoking two cigarettes at once. Just so you know, I don’t smoke, nor have I ever been a smoker [3]. I think it’s a sign I need to chill out.

[1] On Wednesday, I go into work in the afternoon and stay late, so I usually pick up a latte on my way in. It’s become a ritual, and something to which I look forward.
[2] And by “awesome” I mean “nightmare.”
[3] I have smoked cigars on a couple of occasions. That can be chalked up to two things: grad school and the awesome cigar bar in Halifax.

For now, I’ll leave you with this meme from Amanda. The bold ones I’ve read, the underlined ones I read for school, and the italicized ones are those I started and didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces (three times!)
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Today when I got to work, a book I’d had on reserve for three weeks (or so) was waiting for me at my desk. I all but threw aside the book I started reading this morning to fill the gaping void left by my want… nay, need to read this other book. I’m not too proud to admit that I spent a goodly portion of my day and all of my lunch hour devouring this book, snatching greedy moments to read a few more pages. When I got home, I dropped my purse and bag and sat down in the first chair I passed to finish reading it [1].

The whole time I was doing this, I felt like a glutton, gobbling up chunks of the story; I realized that I can be a very selfish reader and woe unto s/he who comes between me and a book I’m reading that I really like - my enjoyment of a book comes first and everything else comes a distant second. I will ignore you, along with many other things, to reread clever passages, humourous moments or all the times the protagonist and their One True Love exchange meaningful dialogue. Deep, deep down, I’m a hopeless romantic in a tiny corner of the shriveled appendage that passes for my heart.

Moving on… here’s what I read in April. When I looked back to see what I read before my 9-book marathon, I was surprised that I’d read a few. But not at all surprised that I’d forgotten most of them.

Leslie Marshall, A Girl Could Stand Up (6)
What this book really boiled down to was that families come in all shapes and sizes. No matter how weird your relatives are, it doesn’t stop them from sometimes having a profound effect on our lives, especially if they really care about you, and you care about them. It’s also about how families aren’t always about what we’re born into, they’re sometimes what we make.

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus! (8)
Colour me surprised - I really, really liked this book about a school shooting and its aftermath. It was funny in a sorrowful way, and also about all the ways hope and faith can save us. I think the part I loved the most were Jason and Heather’s little characters that acted as a creative outlet for them, as well as an emotional outlet for Jason.

Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (6)
Colour me surprised again - I didn’t really enjoy this book. It’s one of his earlier ones, and is focused more on the hocus-pocus than it is on the metaphor.

Christopher Buckley, Florence of Arabia (3)
Oh, I wanted to like this book. It seemed sort of silly and had the potential to be a lightweight sort of read, but then it started taking itself seriously, and then the shooting started and nothing made sense anymore. Also, I wasn’t sure what political lesson I was supposed to take away from it, because there was a Political Lesson You Must Learn About The Middle East and it wasn’t all that clear. [2]

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (2)
When I told my friend Lise what I was reading for book club, she confessed that she’d read this one back-to-back with Angela’s Ashes last year [3]. Fortunately, I only had to read half of that double-header - I KNOW it’s representative of a Certain Place and a Certain Time. I KNOW that various characters were just being realistic and not really cruel. I KNOW that the prejudices were a product of the time and oh, isn’t it dandy that we live in such enlightened times? But it doesn’t change the fact I thought it was unrelentingly depressing and negative - it’s not enough that this girl grows up in poverty and that her mother is a misogynist, it’s also that any time anyone thinks about doing something kind for them they immediately start second-guessing themselves and change their minds (”kindness will make them weak!”) This is my mother’s favourite book, and my reaction is the same as when we had to read Wuthering Heights for a book club many years ago [3.5] - really? No, REALLY?

Suzanne Brockmann, The Troubleshooters Inc. series (9)
‘Way back in December, one day while I was covering the circ desk in my department, someone came up and dropped a couple of talking books on MP3 at the counter and said she’d be right back. I picked up the case for the one on top, and thought, “Oh, it’s part of a series about Navy SEALs and other ass-kicking types, and this is the ‘Christmas’ story [4]. How twee.” Flipping it over, I started reading the back, which starts out with your usual “Jules and Robin are getting married, and then Jules has to go kick someone’s ass overseas, blah blah blah…” and as I was about to put it back I caught the phrase “their mutual ex-boyfriend.”

WAIT, WHAT? Let me see if I understand this correctly: someone has written a series about a group of people who regularly kick terrorist ass, break up spy rings and rescue hostages, and one of them is gay? And not the heroine’s best friend who simpers and stereotypes his way through the book? And can regularly out-think and out-kick the hetro guys? AND is getting married to another guy? Wow. Where do I start reading? [5]

It took me a while to get around to it because, to be honest, not only did I forget the author’s name, I also forgot the name of the book. DUH. Then about a month ago, it passed over the counter again, and it triggered an “oh yeah!” and I found out that my library has all but one of the books in the series. In what can only be described as something akin to what alcoholics experience when they binge drink and lose chunks of time to blackouts, I read nine of the books in the series in two weeks, two more in the following week, and the last one I finished tonight (the 12th book in the series).

I can’t even begin to figure out how I got hooked on them in the first place. Normally, my Rational Self starts reading something like this, and starts huffing about how it’s so unrealistic and implausible, and how she can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to finish the book, let alone the first ten pages. Sometimes, though, my Irrational Self - the hopeless romantic who believes that maybe somewhere out there things like this really could happen - starts reading over Rational Self’s shoulder and sees something she likes. In this case, it appears as if my Irrational Self not only took over to finish reading all the books in the series, it actually beat up my Rational Self and locked her in the bathroom while doing so.

Sometimes, there is no other way to explain why or how, other than to say I just dug it.

[1] To be fair, it’s not a long book. Under 300 pages and hardcover, which = less than 3 hours to read for me.
[2] The note I made for myself reads “eye-rollingly annoying.”
[3] I can’t be certain, but I think this qualifies her for a free pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bottle of tequila because there isn’t a more depressing combo out there.
[3.5] Being far younger than everyone else (like, by 30 years), all the other people in the group had read it as a great romantic novel. I read it as some creepy, abusive stalker who was obsessed with some flaky twit, and failed to see the romance. What can I say - sometimes I’m a little cynical.
[4] I also made a vague note to check and see if we had the rest of the series on any audio-book format, and it turns out we don’t. Still don’t, for that matter, because I haven’t had a lot of time to look.
[5] The first person to suggest “at the beginning” wins nothing.

Speaking of music, this weekend while I was shopping for an appropriate gift for my nephew’s pirate-themed birthtism [3],[4] I came across a display for the Rockabye Baby CDs. To save you the trouble of opening the link, it’s a series of CDs for children featuring lullabies versions of popular songs from bands you might not expect to have great bedtime-appropriate music. I bought The Beatles Rockabye Baby for the library, and the general consensus was that we were disappointed they chose songs that lent themselves well to lullabies in the first place. Where’s Lullaby Helter Skelter? Lullaby I Am The Walrus? Lullaby Lovely Rita? Sheesh!

I was going to write about how when I saw the Rockabye Baby versions of the music of The Cure, I almost choked on my coffee - seriously? Lullaby Cure songs? [5] Is that kind of… depressing? And then I was going to mention that if I were going to get one for The Neph, it was between this and Lullaby Led Zepplin.

However, then I looked at the complete list of bands they cover - Metallica? U2? The Pixies? Nine Inch Nails? Tool? The Ramones? Queens of the Stone Age? DUDE. I’m not sure whether to run out and buy them all for The Neph or despair that some of the most hardcore bands of our times have been turned into sleepy-time music for babies [6].

What do you think?

[1] Someday, I may enumerate the other four in my top 5 desert island CDs, and how I got almost everyone in my office at the time to write down their top 5 desert island CDs on post-it notes, which I stuck on my monitor. That I got into trouble for “wasting time” goes without saying, and is one of the top 10 reasons I left that place - having fun and doing team building was strictly verboten.
[2] Now, if I were doing taxes, chatting online with my sister and cousin, and sending a Facebook message to The Furious Redhead about my day and how I suck at everything, I’d be listening to Arcade Fire or The New Pornographers because THAT’S HOW I ROLL.
[3] I only found out at almost the last minute that there was a theme, and it was pirates. For a one-year old.
[4] This weekend was not only his first birthday but also his baptism. Hence, birthday + baptism = birthtism. Let it never be said that we’re not creative in this family.
[5] I am sort of tickled by the fact they’ve turned The Cure’s Lullaby into a lullaby. It’s so self-referential!
[6] It’s not listed, but Lullaby Henry Rollins can’t be far off.

I will give you a teaser though: in the first two weeks, I read four books. In the second two weeks, I read nine books (…really!) [2]. In the last week, I read one more and finished my book club book, which was a total drag.

Also of interest - I broke down and bought the Flight of the Conchords CD today, and it was totally worth it. And I met with some friends for coffee this afternoon, and three of us had knitting with us. The elderly couple at the table next to us were gobsmacked that us youngin’s was knittin’. Erin and I were working on socks, and Rosemary was working on a sweater.

Okay, must go locate blouse. And iron. And board.

[1] And I don’t know what the weather is like in either place, which made packing a bitch.
[2] Part of the reason I can’t do this tonight is that I have much to say about them, and it’s going to have to wait.

I get to the coffee shop, and the first thing I notice is all the people dressed in really sharp suits. Like, pinstripe-tailored-expensive looking suits. I’ve never seen that many people dressed that well in North Bay, let alone in one place, so I guessed there must be some kind of meeting going on. Turning to go to the counter, there’s a guy sitting at the table who looks awfully familiar, and he’s talking to four or five other people who are also sharply dressed. I glance away, thinking, “Naaaaaaaw.” I glance back. Yup, it’s Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario [3]. Sitting in my coffee shop. He was in town to make a funding announcement at the university, and he must have been meeting with some other supporters. Cool.

~ Lisa Lutz. The Spellman Files (7.5) and Curse of the Spellmans (7)
Two books about a family of private investigators - ostensibly they’re about solving a central mystery, but it’s really secondary to seeing how awesomely dysfunctional the family really is. (The mysteries never turn out to be very big or important or dangerous - they exist to demonstrate how the family operates - they reminded me of the Royal Tenenbaums.) I enjoyed how the story was broken down into reports and side-notes, but I can be anal and organized and found it helpful to keeping the various threads of the story straight. Warning: it’s not a linear story, so avoid if this might bug you.

~ Dave Bidini. The Five Hole Stories (6)
If I told you this was a book of hockey erotica, would you believe me? Would you read it? Eh. One point for each story, and an extra one for the thinly-veiled #99 fantasy.

~ Karen McCullah Lutz. The Bachelorette Party (8)
Basically I picked this one up because it was on the shelf beside the Lisa Lutz books, and I wasn’t expecting much at all. Much to my shock, I ended up loving it because it was funnier and smarter than I’d hoped. It’s not your typical chick lit, in that the heroine hooks up with the hot guy at the end - she *does* hook up with him, fully cognisant of the fact he’s unsuitable for her, and they part on good terms [4].

~ Max Brooks. World War Z (8)
Loved this book - the premise (zombies) and the execution (written as a series of survivor interviews in the aftermath) were well done. I gave it to my boss, and he loved it too. Except. When I finished reading it, I had trouble falling asleep for a few days, and still do if I’m tired - it sort of creeped me out. The one thing that stuck with me (and still keeps me awake) was the “moan chain” - if a zombie saw an uninfected person, they would moan, and all the zombies within hearing range would moan and then come to the first zombie, and then all the zombies that heard the second group would also moan and then go see what was up. And so on. Like I said, great book, but keeping it in the house was not a good idea - I would get the willies every time I looked at it (hence my giving it to my boss, who’s a big fan of horror.)

~ Gil Adamson. The Outlander (6)
Last night I was reading a review of this book, and it mentioned that the mother of the protagonist died of lupus. Try as I might, I can’t remember if it was ever mentioned how she died or what she died of, or even what her symptoms were, so I don’t know where they got that from. But that’s just a minor detail in the overall scheme of things. Reading it was like being back in high school, where you have to read stuff because it’s timeless and it’s good for you, gosh darn it, kind of like cod liver oil and confessing your sins to the priest before high holy days [5]. Given its locations, time, events, and cast of “characters,” it’s the quintessential Canadian novel, and reads like mental cheese-flavoured rice cakes - they’re kind of bland but with a hint of something and filling if you eat a whole bag of them, but ultimately don’t do much to satisfy your cravings for a good story.

~ Rachel Cohn. Cupcake (7)
Much better than the second book in the series, Shrimp. Cyd is slightly less obnoxious, definitely more mature, and certainly unchanged in the narcissist department. In the end, she FINALLY figured out she needs to go with what’s best for her, not what her libido wants.

That’s it for my March books. April is shaping up to be similar, although I’m stalled out on my (Sudbury) book club book. Gah.

[1] Well, tossed with prejudice across the counter at me.[2]
[2] Don’t let anyone tell you that working in a library is boring!
[3] Back in my politically annoying student days, I was a member of the Young Liberals, the youth wing of the party. As a member, I actually attended the leadership convention where he was elected head of the party. One of the best pictures I took that weekend was shortly after the announcement that he’d won, around 2am Sunday morning - he’s sitting on stage by himself looking slightly stunned and absurdly pleased.
[4] Which doesn’t normally happen in these types of books, so it was a refreshing change of pace.
[5] That had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with my emotionally scarred psyche.

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.