and I thought it was pretty great. I specifically want to hit Wes Anderson in the face with it. It’s around this time last year that I was subjected to The Darjeeling Limited. I enjoyed that SM was a movie about people who live in India, and not a movie where Indians are an exotic construct that white people use to put themselves into context.
Take from this what you will. I’ve never had a passport.
I wasn’t sure that I would ever see this day. Our long national nightmare is over! PS Dick, I don’t think karma is through with you.
I’m back, bitches. Watch this space. At the very least, I ought to catch up on all my meme tags.
but I’ve been thinking about the Democratic nomination a lot lately. I read this on Salon, and it was perfect.
I promised myself I wouldn’t read a gardening book in 2008 until March, because that is pretty much all I read in 2007. Clearly, that didn’t work out. I’d been looking for this book for two years, and I found it used at Bookland, which was such a surprise, since it is out of print. (I am aware of my egregious abuse of commas. I am hooked on commas, and commas are hooked on creating a natural pause in sentences.) Of course, once it was in the house, I couldn’t keep out of it. I was actually pretty disappointed in it. I read their 20 Minute Gardener a few years ago, when I was just starting to get obsessed, and it was terrific. I did a few of the projects out of it and took a lot of their advice. I don’t know if I have read a lot more, or if it is the limitations of keeping the book to vegetables, but I felt like a lot of the information was redundant and unhelpful. Oh well. It can go on the shelf next to the 700 other garden books. Also, Tom Christopher is obsessed with the cucuzzi gourd (three chapters in two books!), so here is a picture to add visual interest! 
Dr. Thompson had a very interesting life that was very sad at the end. I am not entirely glad that I read this. I have read and enjoyed many, if not most, of Dr. Thompson’s books, but I wish I had remembered that there was a time that a body of work stood on its own merits. Now we offer up the bodies of our idols for consumption. Thanks, Wikipedia.
I made this lovely hat! (Can I call something I made lovely?) (Actually, fuck that. It is super-lovely.) I am terribly excited, as I have traditionally been a miserable failure at the making of things! I’ve read a couple of books while I’ve been knitting, though, so there will be more entries eventually, now that all the yarn ends are woven into the hat.
LOVELY HAT, ME!
Wow! Who’s Chatty Chattertons today? (I am)
SO. Chris asked me if The Year Of Magical Thinking was hard to read. Chris, I don’t know if you have read any other Didion, but her prose is very clean. Death is a hard subject to write about, but the book is not dark at all. It is easy to read but sticks with you.
Jeremy asked if I thought We’re All In This Together would have gotten published if Owen weren’t related to that other King writer. I think it probably would have been, but stores would not have ordered so many copies that ended up on bargain racks, and therefore, I never would have read it. I’ve tried to read Tabitha, but I never seem to get through them.
ALSO: What is the What was written by Dave Eggers. Please do not let this concern you, as it is not at all cute, like Dave tends to be. I do enjoy Dave Eggers even when he is trying to be Very Clever, but he let that go in this book, and it is so powerful and wonderful that you will not think about the author at all.
Finally, I took this up because my mother in law gave me Bookswim membership for Christmas, and I’ve been using it to get a lot of books I’ve wanted to read but haven’t. It is essentially Netflix for books. I am not entirely impressed – my number one and number two books in my queue have been the same since I started, and I haven’t gotten them yet, and I’m on my second batch of books. To save costs, they use media mail, so it takes FOREVER to get books, and then return them. On the plus side, I get to borrow books, which is novel, since I am not allowed at the library anymore.
There. All wrapped up, not so bad.
I’m sort of cheating with this, because it’s a collection with a novella and short stories, and I read the novella in 2007 and just picked it up to read the stories because I was looking for something short until my next selection came from Bookswim. I thought the novella was really sweet and well done, but the stories felt like someone trying too hard to write LITERARY FICTION for an MFA workshop. He’s Stephen’s offspring, but I still can’t give him a pass for that.
Really lovely and quiet book. So much water! Her next book, Gilead, was written 23 years later, and it was dusty and dry. This book is all about wetness and water and lakes and the fluidity of memory. Gilead is a book about fathers and sons and this is a book about women and mothers. I hope I do not need to wait until 2026 for her next novel.
