books, books, books, books, books

Tonight I stopped by Borders to see if there was anything I wanted to use a coupon on. Conclusion: no. I am all about libraries these days. But I also needed to do some book research, so I poked through the science and history sections for a while.

My goal: to find a wildly successful book of recent years that is similar to my book idea, so I can mention it in the proposal and editors will say, "What?!? *We* could have the Seabiscuit of hot air ballooning? Why, that's fantastic news! Give this woman a giant advance today!" I found a number of books that seemed a little bit similar in different ways, but mostly I had fun using my cell phone to take pictures of book covers. I have a lot of pictures like this:

I've been meaning to read Cod for ages. (No, really! I blogged about it!)

more knitting patterns online

Look, Weasley sweaters! I totally want to make these now. Except for the aforementioned problem - wool costs money. I guess it's time to start making sweaters out of wool unraveled from sweaters, but the problem with that, of course, is if you run out of wool, that's it. You're done. You can't go back to the store and buy more, and that sweater's just going to be missing one sleeve. So I'd have to plan really, really, really well. And only unravel giant-sized sweaters.

cross-stitch scarf

Here's another knitting project:


A few weeks ago I was admiring a cool sample scarf in a stitch I'd never seen before at a store in the neighborhood. The woman who had knitted it wandered by and told me what book she'd gotten it out of. I considered buying the book, but it was $18 and I'd just been laid off, and, well, it seemed like a dumb way to use my savings. So imagine how clever I felt when I checked the local library catalogs and found out that D.C. and Montgomery County each had dozens of copies! This is the book, if you want to try it yourself. You knit it by crossing stitches over - you reach around the first stitch on the needle, knit the second stitch, knit the first stitch, then pull them both off. It makes more sense in the book.

I was really very pleased with myself for thinking of the library thing. I normally don't get library books, because I find they lead inexorably to fines. Now that I have lots of free time and can actually make it to libraries during their opening hours, I'm giving the library another try.

I gave this scarf to my older stage kid and made another one out of the same yarn for his stage little brother. So as not to incite inter-kid jealousy, we're supposed to sneak presents to the parents, not give them directly to the kids. I did that, being a good rule-follower, but it does kind of take away the fun part of the gift-giving, you know?

books, books, books

So in addition to my only-in-my-brain knitting memoir, I'm actually working on pitching a real live book idea. And I just sent a link to this blog to the editor I'm working with, so everybody wave! Hi S.Stra! If things go according to plan, I'll start a brand-new blog on the book topic soon. You all have to come read it and leave funny comments, ok? Extra exciting: That blog will be under my REAL NAME. I KNOW. SHOCKING.

ideas, ideas, ideas

I have about 10 million ideas for things to do next, from an Arctic cruise on an icebreaker to tracking down the source of this awesome yarn in Japan. I actually wasn't kidding in the last comment thread about writing a memoir with the subtitle "How I Lost My Job And Became A Better Person Through Knitting."

Somewhere early in that memoir, I would like to use Coloradan's line: "I'd be sadder if you guys didn't suck so much."

I'm in the market for suggestions on titles, better subtitles, and knitters I should talk to. I want someone in Norway to teach me how to make a proper sweater. I totally want to talk to someone who made socks and stuff for her family all her life and is perplexed by all these younguns who buy expensive yarn and think they discovered knitting. And of course I will need to talk to about 10 million hipster knitters. I should probably also get all these people to teach me to make things, too.

the inimitable jeeves

I have a number of books I consider suitable bedtime reading: books I know so well that there's no particular suspense and I can close them at any time, but that I like enough to keep reading over and over. Right now I'm on a P.G. Wodehouse kick, and bits like this are the reason why:

"I worship her, Bertie! I worship the very ground she treads on!' continued the patient, in a loud, penetrating voice. Fred Thompson and one or two fellows had come in, and McGarry, the chappie behind the bar, was listening with his ears flapping. But there's no reticence about Bingo. He always reminds me of the hero of a musical comedy who takes the centre of the stage, gathers the boys round him in a circle, and tells them all about his love at the top of his voice.

Man. That Wodehouse really knew how to put a sentence together. Also in rotation right now: a well-worn copy of The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts that probably belongs to my brother. Ok, ok, you can have an excerpt from that one, too:

NARRATOR It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance - on the planet Earth Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

Other books I can read over and over at bedtime: the Harry Potter books, although less so when they start getting depressing; the James Herriot books; James and the Giant Peach. You?

moby-alternatives

Two possible activities for people who are afraid of reading Moby-Dick:

1. Read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. This incident was part of what inspired Melville to write Moby-Dick. In 1819, a whaling ship set out from Nantucket. Late the next year, the weak, rotting old ship was looking for whales in the middle of the Pacific when a sperm whale rammed it. The crew rigged their little whaling boats with masts and sails and set out for the Chilean coast. It was not a pretty voyage. The book gets you to thinking: well, if you're in a rowboat on the open ocean, and you're starving, and a guy dies, what are you going to do - throw him overboard or eat the meat? It's a great read - it was a bestseller a few years back.

2. Listen to this episode of Studio 360. (The links to listen to the whole show or download it as a podcast are at the top left of the page.) It's way shorter than either book - just under an hour. Studio 360 is a great public radio show about the arts. In this episode, the host talks to a bunch of smart people who love Moby-Dick, including Tony Kushner and Ray Bradbury. Here's your random fact of the day: Before Ray Bradbury was famous, he wrote the screenplay of the 1956 movie, which starred the spectacularly miscast Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. I love me some Gregory Peck, but he's supposed to play romantic leads and noble lawyers, not revenge-obsessed amputees.

public service announcement

If you ever find a copy of this book in the free pile in your apartment building, please, keep on walking. (Ok, it's Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani. I hope she doesn't google herself. If you do, Ms. Trigiani, it's nothing personal - I just didn't like your book.)

Sample problems: characters appear to read each other's minds and possess knowledge they can't logically have; it's set in the 70s, apparently only so that Elizabeth Taylor can pass through town; and the narrator, who I think I'm supposed to care about, does completely inexplicable things all the time.

And it's written in present tense. There are conventions for novels, people. If you're going to stray from past tense and first or third person, you had better have a DARN good reason. Part of the problem is simply breaking the convention - it distracts the reader. But, worse, it severely limits what the narrator can do. She can't look back and reflect on events, she can't foreshadow, she can only tell you what is happening now. And you know what? That's boring.

Worst of all, I can't stop reading the damn thing, because I'm at least 2% committed to the story lines and I find it really hard to give up on fiction. Argh. At least I'm almost there - 50 pages left.

I feel kind of bad putting it back on the free pile, but I'd feel worse recycling it, so there you go.

whale of a tale

This weekend Miss Shirley and I are taking a little road trip to New England. Basically, she's tagging along and helping me drive on my trip, since the major stops along the way are the New Bedford Whaling Museum and a Norwegian-dance-related party in Vermont. (Miss Shirley knows the dances but hasn't done them in ages. Possibly years.)

I've done a bunch of stories about whales and whaling recently, and gotten really interested in the history of whaling. Then there was singing about New Bedford, and I kept hearing about the museum, and I was thinking about going to this party, so I thought, why not? It's all New England.

Well, as I was looking up New Bedford online, I kept coming across references to Herman Melville. I thought, ok, I'll get Moby-Dick out of the library and at least take a shot at it. I figured he'd pretty much blow through the New Bedford stuff in the first couple of chapters and I could quit any time after that. I mean, that book is famous for being boring.

Here's the thing: I love Moby-Dick. I'm about halfway through the 500-some pages, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Ok, it's confusing sometimes, and yes, there are sentences that are over a page long. But it's also funny and it's such a cool window into the past.

It occurred to me a couple of days ago: what I'd heard was so deadly about it was Melville's long digressions about whaling and ships and harpoons and the descriptions of how stuff worked, like the layout of the little boats they'd put out to chase after the sperm whale. Well, I LOVE that stuff! For someone with a minor whale obsession like mine, this book is basically perfect.

nerds

Today the new guy at work (who's been there six months, but he's still newer than me) made a subtle Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference in conversation. (Not quite as obscure as this, but still obscure.) It's nice to be among my people.

Oh, you want to know what the reference was. It was about a guy's job being the kind of job where you'd sit behind a door labelled "Beware of the Leopard."

why do people talk so much?

I was trying to recall a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for Miss Shirley a little while ago. After I got off the phone, I remembered where I'd stuck my five-books-in-one set (it's holding my jewelry drawer together). This is actually in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."

His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.

After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this - "If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working."

bahnhof zoo

Remember the memoir I was reading, about teenage heroin addicts and prostitutes in Berlin in the 70's? Well, I went to the main location of the book - the Zoologischer Garten train station, known as Bahnhof Zoo. So, yeah, it's just a train station. (And considerably cleaned up in the last 30 years.) But it was a handy place to buy my ticket to Poland.

Also, this is the "Zoo Station" of the U2 song - it used to be where all the trains came in from Western Europe, but they've built an awesome new main train station a few miles away.



I wanted to go see the housing project where the main person in the book grew up, too, but by the time it came up on my list o' tourism, the subway was on strike.

I'm about halfway through that memoir now, and I've learned lots of sex- and drugs-related vocabulary, but I don't think I'm going to finish - it's gotten where she's using heroin a couple of times a day, and I just can't handle all the needles.

stupid dilemma of the day

Ok, so I started All Quiet on the Western Front and it's actually going ok. It's not going *fast* - I've read nine pages - but there's hope, and I've learned a lot about the bathroom habits of 19-year-old German soldiers in the First World War.

But today my used copy of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo arrived from the nice Amazon seller. It's about the adolescent heroin addicts and prostitutes and whatnot who lived in Berlin's Zoo Station in the 70s or something. (Semi-actual facts here.) So it's about, like, sin, and it's set in the city where I'm going to be in three weeks. Do I drop the other book and read this one?

Yeah, I think I do. Ok, time to learn some new vocabulary!

German literature

Nerdy awesomeness: Tonight I went to Borders and bought Im Westen nichts Neues (you may know it as All Quiet on the Western Front), a book of poems by Goethe, and a big new German-English dictionary (time to suck up and start learning the reformed spelling).

I'm going to give All Quiet on the Western Front the old college try, although I really don't think my language skills are up to it...I'll probably be able to follow the plot, but you might not want to question me too deeply on how the narrator feels about events.

The Goethe book has German on the left side and English on the right - I actually wish it didn't have the English, because it's so tempting to look over at it. Even though I don't understand every word (ok, sometimes I don't understand most of the words), it's fun to read the poems and follow his rhyme and meter. I already know two of them - I had to memorize "Der Erlkönig" in 11th grade and I sang a Schubert setting of "Heidenröslein" in college.

(Bonus video: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing "Der Erlkönig." Awesome. I did *not* sing this in college.)

books! books books books

I have spent lots of time on airplanes in the last week and a half, and that means I've made SERIOUS book progress. Ok, I don't think any of these books were actually on my unread book shelf. But they were all books that I wanted to read.

1. Mansfield Park. When I was about 20 I realized I only had one Jane Austen book to go, so I decided not to read it - I wanted to save it for later. Then PBS started The Complete Jane Austen, so I wanted to read it before I saw the TV version. I'm glad I did save it - I think I read it really differently than I would have 10 years ago. However, it was a mistake to read it immediately before watching the TV version, because all the changes they made just annoyed me. Collapsing the plot, sure, that's necessary for an hour-and-a-half-long version of a 19th century novel. But they messed with Fanny Price's character a lot, too, and that was annoying.

2. The Joy Luck Club. I had to talk to Amy Tan for work and felt bad that I'd never read any of her books. I had actually only read about half of it by the time I talked to her. In case you're wondering, she is so cool. (The book is also most excellent. That Amy Tan, she knows how to write.)

3. The Children of Men. I read this in 1992 or so and I loved it, but I'd mostly forgotten it by the time the movie, which I also loved, came out last year. So I wanted to go back and see how much of the movie was in the book. The answer: not that much. I think this shows the advantage of adapting a book that is *not* a much-loved classic. There just weren't that many fans to piss off. So instead of having to glue themselves to the book, they started with the basic idea, rearranged the characters a bit, borrowed a bunch of scenes, gave it a whole new ending, and modernized heavily. Good stuff.

So, I can heartily recommend all three books. I haven't seen the movie of The Joy Luck Club, but for the other two, my vote goes to the book of Mansfield Park and the movie of Children of Men. I mean, it's a great book, but the movie was freaking awesome.

hax-approved picture books

If you have presents to buy for small people, Carolyn Hax (the Post's awesome advice columnist) wrote a very funny guide to some books she tested out on her little boys. And if you don't have presents to buy for small people, you should read it anyway 'cause it's funny.

antarctica

I finished another book! Unfortunately, this got me nowhere on my progress through the shelves of unread books, because I borrowed the book from Alsho. It's Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, a memoir by a writer who got one of those totally sweet NSF deals where they send writers and artists to Antarctica. I'm going to get one of those. Just you wait.

Ok, so, a lot of it just sounded exhausting. Sara Wheeler, the writer, was mostly based at McMurdo (the U.S. base), and did a lot of rushing out in helicopters to join scientists at their field sites. She also hooked up with a seismologist, did a lot of cooking, and slept in some very cold places. It just sounds perfect. I mean, ok, you can die really fast and they make you learn how to do emergency tracheotomies, but it's so beautifully empty.

I think this quote near the end, after she spent a few quiet months sharing a hut on the sea ice off McMurdo with a nice artist lady, sums up the appeal for me: "It's as though God has given me a gift, once in my life, to step off the planet for two months and listen to a different music." I've occasionally caught myself (as described in this historic blog post) wondering if there's some other planet I could go to, because this one just seems really crappy sometimes. Maybe Antarctica would be close enough.

Anyway, I was already dying to go to Antarctica - it's the only continent I have left - but this book made me want to go even more.

Huh. I just looked at the list of former participants in the NSF program. I have read unedited copy by some of these people, and...well, if they're only going on raw writing skills, I'm doing ok. Unfortunately, the NSF is probably also interested in such things as Ideas and Grit, but I can develop those later, right?

blog news (not mine)

Friday on my favorite blog, the blogger said she had big news but couldn't tell anyone what it was yet. And everyone posted comments saying "You're pregnant!" And I, yes, me, alone among the masses, said, "You got a book deal!" And guess who was right? Oh yeah. I am awesome.

z for zounds, that was a nasty war

Finished another book yesterday! It was Z for Zachariah, which belongs to the fiction subgenre I think of as "post-apocalyptic young adult." In fact, yesterday I was reading it on the metro when I ran into E.Sto. He said, I loved that book! It was my post-apocalyptic phase!

A teenage girl is left behind in a valley that escapes nuclear destruction because of some inversion effect or something. Everything outside the valley is dead, including her family and the neighbors - they survived with her but went off to look for other people, and never came back. A guy appears with a radioactivity-proof safe suit, he gets sick, he recovers, things get ugly. It's not great. The story is told clunkily through her diary entries.

So what is it about post-apocalyptic young adult fiction? I loved this stuff. E.Sto remembered one where the adults had all been killed off in the nuclear war and there were good kids and a gang of bad kids who kept attacking them. An after-school special showed a future where the sun never comes out, then it comes out one day but this one girl misses it because her mean schoolmates locked her up, then they all feel bad. (Clearly, this stuck with me.) One of my favorite books circa 6th grade was The White Mountains, about the world after aliens descend and control our minds and, yknow, ruin everything.

It's pretty standard in children's literature to take away the parents. The kids in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe were sent to the countryside to escape the Blitz, and in Over Sea, Under Stone, someone sends the kids to their uncle in Cornwall for the summer. And all the really good books are about orphans (The Secret Garden, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Harry Potter). But none of these are post-apocalyptic; they're just parentless.

So is nuclear holocaust just another literary trick for wiping out the adults? Or was there something particular about our Cold War upbringings that made us want to read about what happens after the apocalypse? What was *your* favorite post-apocalyptic young adult book?

mystery

Hey! I finished another book! After a bunch of memoirs and other non-fiction books, I decided it was time for a change and picked up For the Sake of Elena, a mystery by Elizabeth George. It's an Inspector Lynley mystery - they've put a bunch of these on TV, but I've never seen one.

I had, it turned out, read this one before - I recognized a scene on p. 73. So I actually had a little dilemma about whether I should go on, since my whole book quest is about reading books I haven't read before. But clearly I didn't remember it - this took 73 pages to realize - so I kept going.

Anyway. It was pretty good. I definitely had no idea who the murderer was. The parts about the elderly mother with dementia were totally depressing (and were some of the few bits I remembered). My main problem with it was, so, I read one of the other Inspector Lynley novels earlier this year, and I could *not* figure out the chronology. Which came first? I thought that one character was married to that other character? Wait, she likes him now? And so on.