leave me alone, I'm reading

Child star grows up to become a drunk, using the re-run royalties to bankroll her drug addiction, goes to rehab, relapses, rinse and repeat a few times, adds nothing new to the cliche, and lives soberly ever after (so she says).

There. Now you don't have to read the book.

You're welcome.

2 stars: More than my normal amount for romance novels because at least it was well structured, well written, and the characters were developed and believable.

Not 3 stars because... well... the story sucked.

Another mark against the romance genre. My month-long gorge is giving me digestive problems.

I've always been a sucker for old men. I know that sounds strange, and there's really no rational reason for it. They just make me feel safe.

One of my late grandmother's favorite me stories is about me and my grandfather. I was about 3 years old when my mother dropped me off at their house, and I was inconsolable when she left. My grandma said her heart broke for me because rather than screaming and throwing a tantrum, I curled myself into a ball and silently wept, folding into my grief into myself. She said she had never felt so sorry for any pitiful creature as she did for me that day. No amount of hugs could console me, no tsk-tsking could calm my gulping sobs. She eventually brought me into her bedroom where my grandfather was sleeping, and laid me on his huge mountainous belly. There my sobs finally subsided and I fell asleep to the rhythm of the rise and fall of his breath.

This may be the genesis of my lifelong pull toward making lasting friendships with old, white-haired men. Whatever the reason, I've always made quick mentors of the old men in my office, have always scored higher grades with my old male professors. I tend to gravitate towards them and seek their wisdom and kindness.

This could be the reason I've always also been a sucker for the classic child-grandparent-figure stories. Karate Kid is one of my all-time favorite movies.

This is one of those books. The housekeeper who has only a son for a family connects with the old neglected professor, who then becomes a grandfather-figure for her father-less son. This is really the heart of the story.

The twist on the classic tale is that the lesson that family is where you find it and where you make it is tempered by the fact that the old professor has a memory that lasts only 80 minutes long. How do you form a bond with someone who cannot remember you? Is it real?

This book argues that you can and it is. The housekeeper cares for the Professor because of who he is - because he has a beautiful mind and because even though he can't remember her son from one day to the next, he loves children and accepts her son anew with open arms each time they meet. His affection for her is reciprocated only when they've had a long enough interaction where he can tell what kind of person she is, and he happens to like her. The beautiful, and frustrating, thing about this is he has to discover this over and over, but at the fact remains that he does.

The use of math in this book is used as a statement on the nature of family and love. In math, there are truths, but many of those truths are mysterious. So there is the truth that there are prime numbers, but the mystery is that there doesn't seem to be a pattern of when you can expect to find them. Family is the same way: there is the truth that family bonds are strong enough to overcome huge obstacles, but the mystery is in why we love the way we do, and who we love the way we do - it's not explainable, it just is. Why was I consoled as a child by my grandfather when my grandmother could not? Who knows? It's not explainable, it just is.

This is a beautiful book, one that I will treasure and probably read again.

I loved this book.

I loved the layering of the sub-plots and stories and how they all highlighted the main story of the found baby. All of the stories are about the bond in parent-child relationships and how almost nothing can break it - not time, not lack of biological linkage, not death. It's about the joy of that bond, and, of course, the pain of it as well.

Le sigh.

I've recently been on a romance novel binge, having read not many in my lifetime, and I am sure that I did nothing to further my interest in the genre by picking up this book as a representative example. During my recent hairdresser appointment, I figured I could knock out at least half of this short book while getting the grey colored out of my hair.

This is a retelling of the Beauty & the Beast fairy tale, and while I appreciated that the author ensured all of the essential plot elements were accounted for, the forced nature of the love story settings were laugh out loud terrible.

For example, when Bella decides she is going to convince Max to allow her access to his grounds so that she can get his 'magic' basil, she sneaks into his kitchen to cook up her tomato sauce to serve to him as an argument, which, by the way, apparently falls flat on its face for the want of.....BASIL! (whatever).

She happens to have snuck in while he was showering, and when he hears noises and goes to investigate, he happens to only have thrown on a pair of jeans.

So here's Max, standing bare chested (which is chiseled, of course), wet, and presumably raring to go, though he hadn't expected to find a woman in his kitchen, and Bella is blithely cooking away, not thinking of bare chests and glistening skin until she looks at him.

At this point, I started chuckling under my breath, which of course prompts my hairdresser to ask about my apparently clever book. As I read out loud this ridiculous scene to her, she can't help but join in my merriment, and by the end of the scene, she, I, and the woman in the neighboring barber chair had tears rolling down our cheeks.

I suppose it didn't help that I and my neighbor had complimentary glasses of champagne already halfway down our gobs, but still, the book really isn't any good.

Le sigh again.

I miss my memoirs....

I think I expected more from this book. But then again, my expectations were probably too high to be fair.

I expected concrete answers on how I can make my life fulfilling and satisfying, but like the culture that I live in that expects a pill for every hurt, I was probably expecting too much.

This book is one person's experimentation on how to maximize one's happiness within one's natural happiness spectrum. Fair enough, makes sense. Some of the truths the author discovered is that getting enough sleep makes you happier. That makes sense too.

And herein lies the problem I have with this book. While I am fine with reading about results that I already know would be true (like getting enough sleep makes you happier), I would at least have expected a deeper delving into the experience itself (though, to be fair, how deep can you really get about the difference enough sleep has on your general well-being?) However, the deepness level in this book are safe enough for the author's mother to read without raising any eyebrows.

For example, when she describes her fights with her husband, they are of the pick-up-your-socks variety. And to have less fights with her husband, she decides to not nag him. None of this is very deep or very interesting.

Now, if the author had described some drag-down, kicking screaming match between her and her husband, and if she then discovered that getting her full 8 hours of sleep brought the arguments down an octave, that would have been more interesting. And probably would still have been true. Seriously, who doesn't have all-out fights with their spouse? I refuse to believe that there is any couple that have never ever ever gone beyond the you-never-take-out-the-garbage tersed statement.

Having said all that, the book was ok. It is full of the things we always need reminding of: be nice, get more sleep, do the things you're passionate about. These are all good pieces of advice, and the more reminders we have, the better off we'd all probably be.

"Sleep (1963) is a film by Andy Warhol which consists of long take footage of John Giorno, his close friend at the time, sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes. The film was one of Warhol's first experiments with filmmaking, and was created as an "anti-film". Warhol would later extend this technique to his eight-hour-long film Empire.

Sleep premiered on January 17, 1964. It was presented by Jonas Mekas at Film-makers' Cooperative. Of the nine people who attended the premiere, two left during the first hour.[1]"

This book is the equivalent of an Andy Warhol film: highly pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, and it doesn't work.






(See how boring that is?)




(Sleep synopsis copy/pasted from wikipedia)

Good book, for all the obvious reasons.

We are different people than our parents. Due to the basic fact that we, by definition, are of a different generation than our parents, we can never fully and completely get each other. Times change - that's a fact, however slowly - and the changes in political atmosphere, pop culture, economic times influences the difference in view, however subtle, held by different generations. In this book, the obvious difference in backgrounds between father & son is that the father had been deaf since very young, and the son had full hearing capabilities, but there were subtle differences in their backgrounds as well: the father grew up during the Depression, the son during World War II, the father grew up in a relatively religious Jewish family, the son's religious upbringing included a bar mitzvah and nothing more, the father was a manual laborer (basically) and the son went away to college.

I think any one of us can identify with the small and large eureka moments when we realize that our parent's worldview is different than our own and coming to understanding why that is. The process of having those realizations, I think for a child in particular, is difficult. When growing up, your parent is your whole world, and the beginnings of the realization that you think differently than they do is the realization that you and you parent are not a single being. Of course when you grow up, this is interesting, and even fun sometimes. But when young, it's bewildering and scary; it's a new experience from knowing that your parent is always right. It's time to eat, it's time to sleep, these are the right answers, you know your parent knows what to do; this is different from this is the college to go to, this is the right career - here you are going forward with advice, not answers, and that's scary.

In the end, this is a book about love - parent/child love. It is a beautiful ode from a son about his father. He describes the frustrations of being his deaf father's interpreter with the hearing world, but it's also very much a book about what the son learned from his father - the lessons he was taught about people and how to live in the world and how to carry oneself.

As an aside, I also loved this book's descriptions of growing up in Brooklyn. As a Brooklyn native myself, though now living in Iowa, I had a happy nostalgia spread through me with the descriptions of stickball, subways, butcher shops, mothers calling their children in from playing 'on the block' from 2nd and 3rd story windows. I can clearly see my own mother leaning out of our 2nd story apartment window, calling to me & my sister to come in and eat. Reading this book, I could hear the waves of Coney Island, the smell of the Atlantic, feel the bustle of the busy avenues. It made me smile.

This is one of those books that deserves an animated-gif-laden review, though I can't be bothered to build one. The characters were under developed, the romance barely there, and nonsensical besides, and the twist ending existed merely to enable the book to be categorized as 'twisty'.

The 'witch', the brother, and the bartending friend existed only as a way to provide a match for the earlier incarnations of characters, though their soul pairings seemed incidental and emotionally unfulfilling. I would expect a witch to provide much more than a pat on the head and a maternal "buck up, girlie" morale booster. Shouldn't witches provide magic, or advice, or at least some insight? Her strongest advise was to (oooh, spooky) "complete the circle", (complete with ghostly finger wiggling and a classical music interlude).

And if the brother turned out to be a soul-pairing, then who the heck was Geoff's prior incarnation? And how does Julia's love so suddenly turn off for him and immediately light upon Iain, merely because she understood his reincarnation? If they were true soul-mates, wouldn't she have fell in love with him at first sight? And if Iain knew he was Julia's soul mate all along, couldn't he have done more to woo her than to uncharacteristically not criticize her gardening skills? And whatever happened to the evil Jabez (or whatever his name was)?

Well, at least it was an easy read: I finished it in a day. I did enjoy the potential of the book, but the author should've spent less time gratuitously twisting and more time on character building and emotion-injecting.

Conclusion: read this book if you are traveling and are in danger of having to lighten your load by tossing something in the bin.

Somewhere buried deep in a box in my memory somewhere is a very -VERY- short story written by my Dad or my Mom or my sister, or someone (I know it was someone I know since in my mind's eye, the story I read was hand-written on one of those yellow stenographer pads) that goes something like this:

Two men in spacesuits hop out of their spacecraft.
"Do you really think there is intelligent life here?" asks one with a wondering voice.
"No. There is no intelligent life to be found here on Earth" says the other.

And that's it.

Yeah. That's what Wool is like. Except Wool adds a paragraph with a description, and then adds that when they get back into the spacecraft, they're headed back to Australia or something.

Worth the read, for sure.

The first half of this book is like watching one of those teen high school movies. And Catherine is Cher from Clueless. It's a delightful girlie romp through dances and muslin, replete with boy crushes, gossiping, and even has the bitchy popular girl. While I'm sure this book is supposed to be LiteraTor (complete with a pinky waving cockily in the air), only the most obvious of Austen's satire of the popular trash novels of the time made it through my haze
of [author:Nora Roberts|625]-fed reading comprehension. Yet, it was really kinda fun and I was mildly miffed when Catherine left the social hub of Bath and entered the faux-horror portion of the book.

While I did pick up on the fact that Jane Austen was making fun of the trash novels where there is a mad woman locked in the attic (was Rebecca a contemporary novel?) and every family had a skeleton (some literally) in the closet, the rest of the book, once we moved away from the Carrie Bradshawery fashion show, was kinda dumb. Just coming off of the high provided me by [book:Gone Girl|8442457], the twists and turns elicited from me the exclamation of 'meh'. BUT, while I saw it coming from a mile away, added to my general Trivia Pursuit knowledge that all of Austen's heroines end in blissful marriage, I still felt happy with her hastily wrapped up ending.

Nice read. I liked it.

Once, in high school, I went on a date with this really cute boy. People told me to stay away from him; he had a long Sid & Nancy history with our pretty classmate. They were forever dating, fighting, screaming, making up, rinse & repeat, and while it was great fun to watch, it didn't make for a stellar review of this boy's dating aptitude.

Nevertheless, youth holds beauty in much higher esteem than other assets, like an ability to manage one's temper, or, you know, sanity. And this boy was cute, and that was reason enough to accept the invite. So we went on our date. At least, we started our date.

He picked me up in his mother's car and we went to the diner and had a nice, uneventful shared plate of fries, talked about whatever 16 year olds talk about, and then sat in his car deciding what to do next.

I remember the next moment vividly. It was warm out, the windows were rolled down, I remember the smell of cut grass, Public Enemy was in the car's cassette player (Don't! Don'tdon't, don't believe the hype! Hooah, hooah, hooah), the car idling. We were holding hands; his were sweaty, but his grasp was firm. He was smiling at me, his face close to mine. I was thinking that I liked the smell of his shampoo. I was smiling at him too.

All of a sudden, something shot across my vision, and the next thing I was conscious of was his longish brown hair wrapped around a skinny hand -long nails, painted rose red, rings on three fingers- and that hand was yanking - hard! And not just pulling, either, that hand was flinging my date's head from side to side, like a dog does to a chew toy, back and forth, using centrifugal force.

It's funny how your mind processes surprises like this, my eyes stepped its way along the attached wrist, skipping up the arm, left to right like reading a page. Each new segment entering my vision was very curious to me: hmm, that's an arm, and that arm is reaching through the window from my side of the car, how curious; that arm is attached to a bare shoulder - oh, a pink tank top - ok, the bare shoulder makes sense now. Blond hair. Screaming - oh, ok, it's the girlfriend, and she is screaming, calling him a cheating asshole, and telling me that he has a venereal disease (this, of course, was when AIDS was yet-to-be-named). I processed this, matter of factly, and without thinking, calmly shifted the car into drive and reached my left foot under my date's oscillating head to the gas pedal.

The girlfriend hung on as long as she could, running alongside the car, pulling my date's head against my chest while i reached around the left of him, as if consoling him, but instead grabbing the steering wheel and steering, until finally, she could hold on no longer. She lost her grip, but kept a clump of her beau's hair as a souvenir, and my date sat up and took over the driving., shoving my left foot off the gas pedal. Here I am, 24 years later, and I admire the girlfriends tenacity, and marvel that we didn't get into an accident.

He never did kiss me, and the next week at school, he and his girlfriend, were back to making out behind the garbage cans and continuing their alternations of screaming break-ups and pregnancy rumors.

So, yeah. I don't think of him often. But I remembered him at the end of this book . Some people are toxic together. Everyone knows one of those couples that make you wonder why in the world are they together? Do they like reciprocating tortures? Do they enjoy the screaming-kissing cycle? I think some people do. I mean, they must. Why else would my one-time date shove his girlfriend into her locker after catching her kissing a jock, and then grab her into an embrace, crying into her hair, while she slowly wrapped her arms around him and stroked his hair, ignoring the jock, who looked bewildered? There must be something that is soothed by this constant seeking and attaining of proof of would-you-love-me-ifs.

My first reaction when I completed this book was "Whew!" I felt like I had just completed a chore that I could check off my list. Truth be told, I didn't really read the last 3 chapters, but skimmed every third paragraph or so to see if she was saying something interested. Of course she wasn't.

This book is in 3 Parts, apparently each written at separate times and intended to be separate books. Word to the wise: read only one of them - whichever one piques your interest. I'll break it down for you:

Part I
This is ER's family history and early life. It is written very matter of factly, no introspection, no observations or opinions. Just the facts. She skips from one event to the next with little to no bridging. For example, she recounts having a baby, it getting sick and dying, and a brief description of her feelings of guilt all in less than 1 page! Watch how she goes from describing her feelings of guilt straight to a very brief description of the birth of her next child:

"I even felt that I had not cared enough about him, and I made myself and all those around me unhappy during that winter. I was even a little bitter against my poor young husband who occasionally tried to make me see how idiotically I was behaving.
My next child, Elliot Roosevelt, was born at 49 East 65th Street on September 23, 1910. I left Campobello early that summer to await his arrival in New York City. The other children returned to Hyde Park with my mother-in-law. She was in and out of New York and so was my husband, who was making his first campaign for state senator.:

The rest of that chapter is about her husband's campaign.

I suppose if all you're after is a catalogue of the events of her life, with very brief reaction sentences thrown in, this would be the Part to read.

Part II
This section is more detached recounting, this time of her husband's political career and her involvement in it. There is less emotion in this section than there was before. When asked about her reaction to her husband's contraction of polio, she was like "meh. Whatever."

Again, if you're only interested in the events of ER's life during the FDR years, this is the section to read.

Part III
I personally enjoyed this section more than the others by far. ER actually gives her thoughts and opinions of the things she does, the things other people do, what her government does.

See how different this is:
The future will be determined by the young and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American Dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it."

I don't know about you, but that shit's inspiring, yo.

ER finally brings it home with what she really thinks and states flat out that she isn't as interested in giving a linear account of events, but prefers to tell her story in a way that makes more sense to giving her thoughts that are generated by the events in her life.

Admittedly, I did skim the last 3 chapters, but it was a long fucking book, and inspiring as ER could be at times, I was just plain tired of her story and ready for some fiction. Finally, I am freed up to read Gone Girl!

If you skip every page that mentions Jondalar, this is the best book ever!

Minus one star for Jondalar's existence.

Sigh. Shakespeare plays are hard to read. They really are. They're olde English, they're poetry, AND .. well, they're PLAYS. Plays are hard to read when they're in modern English. So are poems, sometimes. And then to top it off with having to do mental translations, and sometimes having to rely on an edition with extensive footnotes, makes his plays just plain old work, if the play isn't worth it.

A lot of times they are worth it. I mean, come on, who hasn't fallen in love with the passions in [b:Romeo and Juliet|18135|Romeo and Juliet|William Shakespeare|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327872146s/18135.jpg|3349450], who can't relate to [b:Hamlet|1420|Hamlet|William Shakespeare|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351051208s/1420.jpg|1885548]'s existential angst, or gotten a thrill from [b:Macbeth|8852|Macbeth|William Shakespeare|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327866505s/8852.jpg|1896522]'s Weird Sisters, not to mention the [b:Rogue Trader|1526336|Rogue Trader|Nick Leeson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348632647s/1526336.jpg|1518278]-level stress and guilt of Lady Macbeth. Now those stories make the mental gymnastics worth my while.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace day to day...." Brrr! These are passages that just give me the chills. I want to lick these beautiful words up, I want to eat them and touch them and have them. They're beautiful, they express thoughts I've had so succinctly, so elegantly, that I don't need to make the effort of expressing myself at all - I can just borrow Shakespeare's words.

But, alas, The Tempest is just not worth the efforts. Here, you try deciphering this crap. Gonzolo, speaking of the Boatswain (yeah - boatswain. whatever.) while the boat they are on is tossing and turning in a storm:

"I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he
hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is
perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his
hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,
for our own doth little advantage. If he be not
born to be hanged, our case is miserable."

It takes about 3 reads through to interpret this as the meaning of this passage: Gonzolo is not afraid that the boat will sink because he thinks the boatswain is destined to be hanged, that his destiny is not to die by drowning. Then he tells Fate to use the boatswain's hanging rope, which is their savior, since that means none of them will drown, as their saving rope, because the rope they are currently using to try and stabilize the boat isn't doing them any good.

I say again: sigh.

While this is certainly poetic, is it really worth the mental exercise to get the story out of this? For The Tempest, the answer is no. It's basically about a usurped Duke who uses magic and a ridiculous spirit to wreak revenge and find a suitable marriage for his daughter. No passionate romance against all odds, no existential angst, no wonderfully Weird Sisters. It's just not worth it.

About halfway through, I decided that sometimes our tomorrows don't creep at a petty pace, sometimes they race, and life is too short to read Shakespeare just for the sake of reading Shakespeare. Only good Shakespeare is worth reading, and if it ain't good, I'm moving on to my next book club selection!

Oh!, oh, my, that Little Black Dress! While some would enjoy this book because they like movie-making, or Audrey Hepburn, or the book [b:Breakfast at Tiffany's|251688|Breakfast at Tiffany's|Truman Capote|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348380967s/251688.jpg|2518209], for me, the best part of this book was the accident of the delectable, the sensuous, the dress me up, make me beautiful, nothing else matters but my Little Black Dress.

While the hyperbolic title (insinuating that the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's had something to do with the acceptance of modern woman's return to the workforce/sexual freedom/have it all/what exactly is this book defining as a modern woman?) is over the top, and the story of the making of the movie is cutely broken into chapters with movie-making names (from "Coming Attraction" to "End Credits"), the star of the show for me was the story of my beloved Givenchy LBD.

Poor Edith Head was obsolete the minute the clock turned the calendar page to 1960. The idea of rejecting trends in order to allow the movies to be timeless was smart - very smart. This is a working gal with an eye on the end-product - the movie. She was company-man enough to insist her products were not fashion, but costumes, fakely modest enough to ensure the actors shone, not her designs, and stupid enough not to understand the power of fashion and iconotry. Edith Head would have completely missed the point of Sex and the City.

Poor Edith was smart enough to know, though, to be nervous when the studio sent silly little Audrey to Paris to shop for her own outfits. Sure, they said it had something to do with keeping costs down. Sure, Audrey's character in Sabrina would've naturally worn haute couture. But, come on, Edith. You didn't really think that tall, thin, mannequin-shaped Audrey, left to wander aimlessly around Dior's boutique in Paris, wasn't going put your what-era-is-that-from shifts with waist-widening belts and clavicle-hiding necklines just a little into fuddy-duddy old age, did you?

That Audrey was clueless and Givenchy too busy to properly guide her makes this story so much the more delicious. How can we deny that there is a watch-maker? I know the answer to Robert Frost's question in Design (What but design of darkness to appall?--If design govern in a thing so small.).

Yes, yes, there is a God! God Himself put that fabulous black dress on her, accenting her bony collarbone, celebrating her splendid wide shoulders, pulling in her tiny waist, blooming out into a ballerina skirt. God himself gave us the symbol of woman's burgeoning rebellion, our restless and soundless creeping crawl out of our kitchens; God Himself gave us our symbol of our tentative steps toward freedom to acknowledge sex; He gave us our first step and gently pushed us on our way toward feminine strength in beauty that also depicts independence.

Ok, I know I'm waxing poetic, but what else can I do when I'm looking at that beautiful dress, that fabulous 'do, those gorgeous jewels, with dreamy, floaty Moon River playing in the background?

"The dress must follow the body of a woman, not the body following the shape of the dress." Quote by Givenchy

And, also, since the book tantalized me with the story of how the poster was made, but didn't give us a picture of it, here it is. Enjoy!