People, sometimes I look at this poor sad lonely blog, and I get weighed down by how much I haven't said here. Like how I moved and what I'm doing and where I'm living, and how I actually did last month's 12 of 12 but was too busy to upload it until it sort of seemed too late. It's so hard being me!

I can't do those things, but I can tell you about some things I'm pretty into these days, because if there's anything I enjoy, it's making others love the things I love. Here are some of those things:

- The Hemlock Ring
When you're a new knitter, there are certain projects that you think, if this is what knitters do, knitters must be crazy people. Things like, I don't know, lace blankets based on doily patterns from 1942? That said, a good stern blocking and extra-pointy bind-off edge make me feel like a fiber arts badass.

- Espinacas con garbanzos!:
Aha! You wouldn't click if I said "spinach with chickpeas," but this is not just spinach with chickpeas. This is tangy, and spicy, and Spanish, and totally deserving of a gratuitous exclamation point. I make it without the bread, but with a link or two of the orangest, most Spanish-like sausage I can find, and it shocks me every time with the depth of its deliciousness.

- The Civil Wars:
I went to a couple of their shows around LA in December and January—my roommate and I are tangentially acquainted with Joy Williams, having worked with her family and occasionally with Joy herself at summer camp—and fell instantly in love. Now their new album is number one on iTunes (just ahead of Mumford and Sons' Sigh No More, which is also pretty great), allowing me to be both thrilled for them and insufferably smug for knowing allllll about them, like, a month ahead of time.

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I KNOW. I'M SUCH A REVOLUTIONARY.  But no, really, the entire reading world is not lying to you about this series. I may not sleep until it's finished. (I also just finished Life of Pi, which I loved for completely different reasons; perhaps someday I will read something not from the Book Club Favorites! shelf, or whatever.)

See? Was that so hard? Let's do this more often, shall we?

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius

I just finished a second read-through of my favorite book from 2008, Haven Kimmel's The Solace of Leaving Early. (Side note: Who has parents awesome enough to come up with the name "Haven"? Especially in 1965 in Indiana?) Actually, it was just the second half--I had finished The Flame Trees of Thika and needed a palate-cleanser before Cryptonomicon, and remembered that I'd wandered through the first half a few months back and gotten distracted. I picked it up again. This is the joy of comfort reading: come and go as you please.

I liked Leaving Early the first time around; I loved Langston Braverman (Ph.D. drop-out, impossible, lover of orphaned girls and her dog Germane, as in "germane to the conversation") and Amos Townsend (minister, doubter, constantly getting tangled in tree branches). But I don't think I saw it and I know I didn't get it. I'm not sure I have a proper grasp now, either, but it's starting to take shape, the mass of mothers and children and loss and gain and belief and backwardness, plus the Virgin Mary (Kimmel went to seminary; she's allowed). I almost want to pick it up again now, as it's fresh in my mind, and try to figure out exactly how it's made, how we get from A to B and end with a scene so unexpected and romantic I almost had to put it down this time around. I wonder if I could get it if I just read it one more time? If I could see the strings twisting together?

In the mean time, I continue to not read Cryptonomicon and have started The History of Love, of which I do not know what to make.

Goodnight, not goodbye

I packed up my books today. The books are always the first thing to go when I move, empty shelves the first sure sign of leaving. I'd like to say it's because my library is emblematic of my very presence, but really it's because they're an easy first step--I can box up my books with only half a brain, and suddenly a third of my possessions are taken care of before I've wrapped a single dish or even emptied out my closets.

It's different this time, though, because most of my books aren't coming with me, and it was a strange kind of parting as I pulled them off the shelves, like burying a time capsule. As I sorted and stacked and fit them all into rows, I imagined the moment when I'll re-open those boxes, like a reunion with a whole crowd of old friends (...whom I've stuffed into a box and placed in a non-climate-controlled storage facility for a year or two). I could practically see them smiling at me, showing their pages like teeth. I don't even think they'll hold a grudge for the whole storage thing.

Not everything's staying here; I allowed myself one box of books I just couldn't leave behind. The Austens are coming, and Middlemarch and Jane Eyre; so are 84 Charing Cross Road and Girl Meets God (for emergency comfort reading). I also packed a supply of books I have yet to read--basically my takings from the San Francisco Library book sale, plus a few future book-club selections. I'm still debating the wisdom of leaving The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty here, and can't promise I won't sneak it into my suitcase at the last second; I haven't read much Eudora here, but somehow the move has motivated her. Take me with you, she's saying. You'll want me later. I don't doubt it.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

Treasures from the Friends of the San Francisco Library book sale:

Angels on Toast, Dawn Powell
My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell
Second April, Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Light of Faith, Edgar A. Guest
Last Tales, Isak Dinesen
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris
Local Girls, Alice Hoffman
A Girl Named Zippy, Haven Kimmel
The Archivist, Martha Cooley

The Edna St. Vincent Millay isn't nearly as gorgeous and pristine as last year's copy of The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems, but I figure the two of them can be friends, and it can live out its golden years in peace (I bring home books the way other people bring home stray animals). The Edgar A. Guest can join them--I don't exactly know who he is (oh, now I do), but it was only a dollar and I liked the inscription on the flyleaf: "To Al, Hearty congratulations and all good wishes from the Marquarns. February third, nineteen twenty-seven."

Other than that, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy anything I definitely won't read, which is always my book-sale mantra. I was psyched about the Powells, after striking out on her last year, and I've been meaning to check out A Girl Named Zippy since I fell for The Solace of Leaving Early, and I am nearly always in the mood for the Alice Hoffman's crazy, sensuous magical realism. My relationship with David Sedaris is a complex one, full of potential and disappointment and hope and NPR, but I am feeling generous towards him these days, and am hoping for a reconciliation. And as for The Archivist, that book and I have been shadowing each other for years. I am psyched to read about love among the stacks, especially since I've always hoped to meet my dream guy when we both want to read the library's only copy of The New Yorker.

What's most interesting about the book sale, I think, is what books do and do not make it there in the first place. It's all about what people are giving away: recent book-club selections and classics they'll never read again. Last year was big for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, which has now been replaced by Songs in Ordinary Time and an absolute heap of Jan Karon. Last year Powell was nowhere to be found; this year she practically leaped off the tables. On the other hand, I was surprised and disappointed to not find a single Jasper Fforde book lying around, nor a copy of the newest Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policeman's Union), or even a plain old David Copperfield. They must be good--people are hanging onto them.

Now what? I guess I should go read. I've got my work cut out for me.

Two great tastes that taste great together

It always kind of surprises me that I've never been in a book club. I'm a book-club kind of girl, right? I read a lot. I talk about reading a lot. So, reading + talking about reading = right up my alley, right? And yet somehow, I'm always a little bit too fickle in my reading moods and habits, not quite willing enough to submit to the schedule and the whole "other people telling me what to read" thing, to join a group.

Well, Glenna asked me this week if I'd like to co-moderate a 20th Century Book Club on Ravelry, the idea of Ravelry book clubs being that one reads and discusses the chosen book and, if the spirit leads, knits an item corresponding to the theme of that book (Example: Dante's Inferno = flame-y leg warmers). How well she knows me. Although I am a semi-contrary reader and a leisurely knitter at best, my love for early/mid-20th-century novels (we'll say 1915-1950) knows no bounds. I may choose my reading material according to the phases of the moon and the color of my socks, but that (Teddy) Roosevelt-to-Eisenhower period is nearly always on the roster. Besides, how could I say no to a book club for which I get to (help) choose the books? I said I'd do it.

The group hasn't started yet, but Glenna and I decided to each compile a list of 20 possible books, then compare notes; I spent this afternoon searching my mental to-read list and my collection of books about books (when in doubt, consult Nancy Pearl), and came up with not one, but two lists: Books I Haven't Read But Should/Would Like To, and Books I've Read and So Should Everybody Else (because I am nothing if not a literary imperialist). The results are as follows:

Books I Haven't Read But Should/Would Like To

1. Native Son, Richard Wright
2. The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
3. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (What a title!)
4. A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul
5. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
6. The Flame Trees of Thika: Tales of an African Childhood, Elspeth Huxley
7. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
9. All the Names (or other), Jose Saramago
10. Foucault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose or The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco
11. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Locusts Have No King or The Golden Spur, Dawn Powell
13. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
14. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
15. Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
16. Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin
17. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
18. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
19. Amsterdam (or other), Ian McEwan
20. A Word Child (or other), Iris Murdoch


Books I've Read and So Should Everybody Else

1. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
2. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
3. 84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff
4. Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier
5. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Portable Dorothy Parker
7. Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson
8. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
9. Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh
10. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
11. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
12. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson


So, bring on the semi-enforced reading and associated knitting!

(Ravelry is still in beta and therefore is by invitation only; however, signing up is both simple and free, and I believe the waiting list is moving quickly at this point. If you'd like to read and/or knit (or crochet!) with us, check it out. The more the merrier.)

Everyone's a critic

I went to the library after work the other day. I'm in the middle of something thick and fairly engrossing these days (Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl), so I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I don't even think I was looking for anything in general, really. I just like going to the library, especially the tiny branch by the lake, and especially when it's a sunny day and I can park a few blocks away and walk.

Anyway, I was in the fiction section, trying to balance my own instinct to loiter with the librarian's instinct to close the library and go home, feeling pressured to choose something fast, even though I knew I didn't really need anything to read. I sort of panicked and shifted into search-for-interesting-cover-colors mode, pulling the prettiest books off the shelf as I waited for "last call." And then I opened up a certain book--I don't even remember what, exactly--and a little piece of paper fluttered out of it and onto the floor. I picked it up. It was a note written in blue ink on a little square of plain note paper. "This book is terrible," it said. "Don't bother."

I love this. I mean, I'm not sure how I feel about the unsolicited non-recommendation--it makes me feel like the person who wrote it had just a tiny bit too much time on his or her hands, or is kind of judgmental, or maybe it just really was that bad--but it's like some kind of literary vigilante justice! Zorro for the Oakland Public Library! I wonder, if I were to pick up and shake out all of the other books in the OPL system, how many more notes of this kind (and others, I suppose) I'd find. And are there recommendation notes? If I were to open a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, one of those books that pretty much everybody agrees is wonderful and brilliant, would I find a little sheaf of notes telling me I'd made the right choice? Who is that Post-Itted man (or woman)?

Anyway, I put the book back, but now I kind of wish I'd brought it home with me.

It really is a place where dreams come true!

To be filed under "Things I Wish I'd Thought of First" and "People I Want to be Friends With":

The Dairi Burger

GENIUS.

The Wind-Up What?

I just finished the book I've reading since the dawn of time Christmas, and I have to say: bzuh? I threatened to give up over and over, and every time I'd decide to go just a little longer and a little longer--I didn't not enjoy it, and I had this idea that everything would click into place in the end. Fast-forward 600 pages, and...no. Not really. You see, there's this guy in Tokyo, and he's unemployed, and his wife's cat runs away, and then his wife runs away, and he meets some people and he sits in the bottom of a dry well for awhile, and then his brother-in-law meets a distressing but much-deserved end (I won't say how). There are psychic sisters named after Mediterranean islands, and a mother-and-son team named after spices, and a man whose job it is to skin people alive. I can tell you that much. And that's about it. Something about emptiness, because of the dry well? Or maybe we're talking about gender roles, because everyone in this book is either female or might as well be? The New York Times Book Review blurb on the back cover says it's an attempt to cram all of modern Japan into a single work of literature, and maybe that's the problem--maybe the flood of cultural references is just over my head. I don't know.

Again, I didn't not like it. The writing was pleasant enough; the characters were fun (Malta and Creta Kano! Yay!); the climax was gripping. I'm just at a bit of a loss. What just happened?

A bird in the hand

I went to the west coast's largest book sale last weekend. I bought a whole stack of books. They're sitting in a stack on the floor of my living room, waiting for the day when I find them spots on my shelves (pending the eternal and theoretical organization of said shelves). That's a lot of reading.

I'm also nearing the end of Lost in a Good Book. So what did I do today? I went to the library.

I was watching the pilot ("Pie-lette", because they're cutesy like that) of Pushing Daisies and reflecting on how much that show feels, to me, like the strange televised love child of Roald Dahl and Alice Hoffman. And all of a sudden, Alice Hoffman was IT. Lush, thick, magic-realism fiction, weird and sweet and just about perfect. And so I'm ignoring the stack of perfectly fine volumes I just acquired and lugging around a hardcover, thick-papered, big-type copy of The Probable Future (why are library books always the biggest books possible? Do none of these people carry books in their purses?). And it's totally exciting. I figure the stack's not going anywhere.

The spoils of victory

From the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Annual Big Book Sale:

The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll (intro and notes by Martin Gardner)
Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan
Good in Bed, by Jennifer Weiner
Winner of the National Book Award, by Jincy Willett
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon
The Best of Adair Lara (for my mother)
Love, Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli (for a friend)

Being a book vulture is hard work, you guys. So much standing! So much scanning of tables and tables and boxes and boxes of books! Everything was organized by genre but not by author, which was doable for everything but fiction--thousands of volumes, completely at random. There was also a surprising lack of pre-1970s 20th-century fiction, which is my favorite book-sale genre; we seemed to skip from around Anna Karenina straight to the Oprah period. It was surprising. I guess that's the stuff people give away, though: classics and pop lit they're never going to read again (SO many copies of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason!). I also didn't see a single copy of David Copperfield, which isn't 20th-century, obviously, but I was looking for it just the same.

I'm pretty pleased with my takings, though, especially the Edna St. Vincent Millay--it's a perfect, clean little hardback from 1928, clearly old but not cheesy. I love it. I was in the poetry section looking for that bright pink book of Pablo Neruda's love poems--you know the one I mean? I've been eyeing it for years but I'm always a little embarrassed to buy it, being...a bright pink book of Pablo Neruda's love poems--and there it was. I also ditched quite a few books I was on the fence about, but I feel pretty confident about what actually made it into the final collection.

Books aside (!), today was essentially the perfect day in San Francisco. I get that California doesn't have seasons like other places have seasons, but I wish everybody could experience October in the Bay Area just once, just to see how fantastically beautiful it is--we don't really have the changing leaves, but there's a quality to the light and the air that is clear and warm and golden and just about perfect. After the sale, my friends and I went next door to Greens for lunch, and the Golden Gate Bridge was right there, and the water was all green and Alcatraz looked like it was within spitting distance (not that anybody spits at Greens; it's genteel like that). You couldn't make up San Francisco in the fall. Or the "fall." Whatever you want to call it.

Now I'm going to go make some shelf space for the new collection. Welcome, books!

Booklessness

I'm out of things to read.

Usually, I get to the last fifty pages of one book and I'm already eyeing something else, but somehow I was genuinely surprised to finish The Portable Dorothy Parker even as I was counting down the pages. Now I'm feeling kind of disoriented--I think there were books I was planning to read after Dorothy, but I don't really remember what they were. East of Eden, maybe? Anyway, they all sound wrong.

Now I'm carrying around a bunch of books about books, because if I can't find something appropriate, I can always read about other people's reading. In the past two days I've been dipping in and out of 84 Charing Cross Road, The Polysyllabic Spree (Nick Hornby's collection of his book reviews/essays on reading for The Believer), and Book Lust, Nancy Pearl's eminent book of book recommendations. It's nice, light reading, but I have to say that it kind of emphasizes that I'm uncommitted at the moment. I find this unnerving.

Christine's going to bring me her copy of Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book, even though I didn't love The Eyre Affair. It actually sounds pretty appropriate right now, though--it's quick, it's fiction, and it's about the books I was meaning to read before I forgot how to read (Miss Havisham! I love Miss Havisham!). After that, I have the vague idea that maybe I should read David Copperfield. So maybe that's it. I'll keep you posted.

Just don't know what to do with mysel-el-elf

I was on the couch after work today, reading Dorothy Parker's letter to playwright John Patrick, when I turned the page and found...the index.

I finished The Portable Dorothy Parker.

I never intended to read this book all in one go; it's so big ("portable," ha!) and so long and so short-fiction-y that I thought it would be a dip-in-and-out kind of read. But then I found myself taken in by the short stories--a rare thing for me--and zipping through the verse sections, and here I am six weeks later, done already. And it does feel like an "already"; I know I've been reading the same book for a long time, but it still felt like a bit of a surprise to actually finish. I was enjoying the leisurely read. It was like she was telling me all about herself.

In fact, what surprised me most and touched me most about TPDP is the sense of her as a character--as a woman--that develops in her work. I first read Parker in ninth-grade English, when we read some of her sarcastic poetry. Her verses ("I cannot say poems," she says later on) establish her as a great wit, and they're good for sucking people in: they're short and sharp and accessible. But I was surprised to find Dorothy Parker the person in all of it: she's boy-crazy and disturbed by her own lack of will power; she's smart but sees the liability in being a "girl who wear(s) glasses." Men distress her, but so do women. (The men in her stories are cads, but I was surprised and pleased to find that the women aren't any better; they're flighty and uncertain, and they let the men act the way they do.) Sometimes she's heartbreaking (and heartbroken); sometimes she's hilarious; often she's both at the same time. It all comes together into a surprisingly unified portrait of a woman who's a little bit disgusted, not only by the people around her, but by her own tendencies.

The last third of the book is a collection of DP's work for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, along with a few other magazines. My feeling about this section can best be summed up by her review/rant on Dashiell Hammett: "It is true that he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn," she says. "And it is also true that he is a good, hell-bent, cold-hearted writer, with a clear eye for the ways of hard women and a fine ear for the ways of hard men, and his books are exciting and powerful and--if I may filch the word from the booksy ones--pulsing. It is difficult to conclude and outburst like this. All I can say is that anybody who doesn't read him misses much of modern America. And hot that sounds! Dashiell Hammett is as American as a sawed-off shotgun. He is as immediate as a special extra. Brutal he is, but his brutality, for what he must write, is clean and necessary, and there is in his work none of the smirking and swaggering savageries of a Hecht or a Bodenheim. He does his readers the infinite courtesy of allowing them to supply descriptions and analyses for themselves. He sets down only what his characters say, and what they do. It is not, I suppose, any too safe a recipe for those who cannot create characters; but Dashiell Hammett can and does and has and, I hope, will."

Isn't that fantastic? She is passionate and specific and she's so well-spoken that it kind of makes me want to never write a review again (she says, as she types away at her review. So meta!) The reviews in the last section are reviews of people who are still famous, without the filter of history. She's writing about her contemporaries and her friends, and it's fantastic. They're lighter than the fiction, but still with a very specific voice. They make me want to use "I" in (non-blog) reviews, just because she does. She shares a little more of herself consciously in her non-fiction writing. And she is, of course, charming and clever on a constant basis. In all, a pleasure.

I feel like I got so much more out of TPDP than I expected; she feels a bit like an old friend now, and I suspect I'll have to come visit her every now and then. She's not particularly joyful, but I'd consider her a joy.

Now. What next?

Shelves of Glory

After looking at this and this, I've been thinking a lot about how I organize my books. Or, rather, how I don't organize my books.

You'd think that somebody as list-happy as I am would have an organized bookshelf, but for whatever reason, I'm pretty much about the Shelves of Anarchy. It kind of bothers me--list-happy, remember? Maybe I should decide on something and do it. There's alphabetical, which actually doesn't sound so bad, but it's kind of boring. Some people organize by color, which actually appeals to me, except that it makes me think of my Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which are green, purple, orange, and yellow, respectively. I can't separate them; they're a series! And the by-color scheme seems pretty rigid. Anything mis-filed or granted an exception is going to be pretty obvious, and we can't have that! Some people put books together whose authors they believe should be friends, but that comes across as a whole lot of speculation (though potentially entertaining). I've also given some thought to the John-Cusack-in-High-Fidelity model, organizing autobiographically (starting, I suppose, with the copy of The Sneetches I got for my fourth birthday and ending with my new Portable Dorothy Parker?). I would love to be able to pull that off. I'm just not sure it would work. It certainly wouldn't be low-maintenance (which is actually kind of cool--an ever-shifting reflection of life, right there on my bookcase!).

I guess I do have some organizational guidelines. For as long as I can remember, the bottom shelf of my big bookcase has been reserved for the books that won't fit anywhere else: my (sizable) horse-book collection, my Calvin and Hobbes, anything by Dr. Seuss (The Sneetches, again), and the reference section. For awhile I had a "girly classics" shelf, where I kept my Jane Austen books, my Charlotte Brontes, my Louisa May Alcotts, and the like. (L.M. Montgomery would go there, but she has her own spot on top of the bookcase.) But those are all organizational whims more than systems, attempts at keeping things clean or making the books more sociable. In reality, I use the "I moved recently and might move again at any moment" scheme, which is not a scheme at all.

Coming soon: Photos of the shelves in all their freewheeling glory!

Pottermania

Done!

I spent most of this weekend sprawled out on the couch (or curled up in my grandmother's old chair, or spread out on the floor or on my bed, or sitting at a table at Bay Street) reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I'm finished! I won't say anything at all except that I thought it was pretty great. Not perfect, but...pretty great.

Now would normally be the time when I would break out a true-crime book--I like true crime after something big and fictional; there's something about it that cleanses the palate nicely--but instead I'm reading Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli, which I started a few months back and then put down when I got distracted by something else. It's actually perfect post-Potter reading: a collection of essays about America. It's funny and pop-culture-y and modern and concise, or everything the Harry Potter novels aren't. And it's not that I don't love Harry Potter; I do. I love the whole Potter universe and the fact that it makes me want to sit on the couch for days at a time and do nothing but read. But a girl's got to move on sometime, and I think Sarah Vowell is just the person to help me do that.

"The worst thing about prison was...the Dementors."

I have Harry Potter anxiety.

First of all, to pre-order or not to pre-order? Or, really, to buy or not to buy? Normally I wouldn't. I've managed just fine begging, borrowing, or stealing the last four books a few days after the fact. Even now, the only Harry Potter book on my shelf is a paperback of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, and I haven't felt the burning need to buy the rest of the series. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows much--I've been planning borrow it from a friend or from the library (when it's available, in 2015) and call it good. But now I've been thinking: if pre-release angst is any indication of the way people feel about this book, spoilers are going to break faster and in more mainstream places than I can possibly keep up with and avoid. If Harry dies, for example, we won't even need to turn on the news, let alone read the book. People will be riding through the neighborhoods of America, shouting it from bullhorns: "Extra! Extra! Harry Potter dead on page 856! The Boy Who Lived kicks the bucket!" Mark my words. Pre-ordering would lessen my chances of being spoiled before the proper time, because I wouldn't actually have to, you know, encounter any human beings until after I've finished. So there's that.

I'm also discovering, weirdly, that I am deeply and profoundly concerned about the contents of the book, mainly who lives and who dies. I'm not the only one--the release date is two weeks out and my office is already talking about it--but I didn't think I was emotionally involved in this way. What if Harry dies? What if--even worse--we lose Ron and/or Hermione (who clearly are meant to live happily but argumentatively ever after, or J.K. Rowling is stomping all over my sad little heart)? What if it's Neville Longbottom, whom I'm afraid is destined to die a heroic death? I love Neville. The death toll in this last book has to be devastating; after the events, or Event, in the last one, it's the only way to go. And I think that knowing the carnage is coming but not knowing where it's coming, exactly, is stressing me out.

Check, check, double-check!

I was a machine this weekend, my friends. No lounging about for me; I Got Things Done, in that gratifying "I am an active and contributing member of society" kind of way. If I'd had a to-do list, I would have crossed a very many things off of it. Very exciting!

What I've been up to:

- Watched the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice and remembered how completely gorgeous it is, despite not being the MOST complete and faithful adaptation and also having a truly appalling "closure" scene tacked on to "satisfy" our 'merican sensibilities.

- Admitted my own lameness and applied nose to grindstone; started writing my spec script. Me: 1; Cold open that has now been moved to after credits: 0. Woot! (Also, dialogue is so much easier than brainstorming. MUCH BETTER.)

- Walked to library, ATM, used bookstore, and farmer's market and came back with a pretty and fairly priced copy of Atonement and a million pounds of peaches, cherries, asparagus, raspberries, and mixed baby organic greens.

- Made raspberry-peach pie from scratch

- Mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors. Since my mother reads this blog, I'd rather not say how long it's been.

- Somehow ended up with some friends cramming into my living room for a Pirates of the Caribbean catch-up party. Have I mentioned lately how much fun those movies are? I'm so pleased with how the trilogy turned out. Anyway, I can't believe they sat through essentially six hours of movie time, but pizza, wine, pie, and pirates makes for a fine gathering, if I may say so. Only just avoided a late-night showing of At World's End to round out the evening. Instead, we made silly videos featuring an origami crane, filmed with a masterful eye on Luke's phone.

- Picked up two new books (The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, and Take the Cannoli, by Sarah Vowell) to supplement The Complete Stories of Eudora Welty, which I'm reading in dribs and drabs and will probably only finish if I'm buried with it. Three books at once! Oh, the liberation! I am a WILD and UNPREDICTABLE WOMAN.

- Finally accepted the fact that my shower is incredibly lame; bought Water-Pik massaging shower head that promised to fix my water-pressure issues forever, only to install it and make the problem WORSE. Will return Water-Pik if possible and (grudgingly, with much muttering) go back to shivering and shaking my fist at the original, crappy shower head. D'oh.

- Went to IKEA alone in a show of tragic miscalculation; bought shelving unit and then realized I had no way of getting it off of the shelf, onto my cart, into the car, and up the stairs into my apartment. Made use of fine IKEA employees for the first three; called Luke and flattered him into helping me with the fourth. Shelf space! I love shelf space! Now I can arrange my stuff in a casually charming and eye-pleasing manner! Excellent.

- Rearranged bedroom furniture into a configuration that makes far more sense, unless I get a sewing machine for my birthday, in which case I'll have to move it back.

Things I am pondering for the near future:

- What else happens in my spec script? Ack! (Okay, that's an exaggeration. I do know what happens, kind of, but the whole thing feels very slippery right about now. Surprise!)

- Assembling the shelving unit. I may have gotten the wrong color--black-brown may not go with my stuff as well as I thought--but there's no way I'm taking it back down the stairs, into the car, out of the car, and back to the store, so it's mine now. And anyway, far be it from me to decrease the amount of shelf space in my apartment.


This post brought to you by the couch, wireless, and the letters N, R, and M (for Not Ready for Monday!).

"I forgot to feel the President's glands."

Ugh, I hate being a blog slacker. Busy, busy, etc.

Except not, because I took a sick day on Monday, and slept all morning and then spent the afternoon crashed out on the couch with the first season of Bones (Hey, don't mock; at what point does cheesy and obvious outweigh pretty and charming? We shall see). I felt fantastic all day yesterday, but woke up this morning with my throat scratching and my lungs wheezing in a not-very-amusing way. Not cool, body. Not cool.

So maybe it's less "busy, busy," and more like "boring, boring." Which isn't really any better.

I did give up on a book recently, which is pretty unusual--the first hundred pages of Broken For You were fine, but I was reading on my break one day last week, and I reached the end of a sentence and said to myself, "I can't go on." It was all very swoony and dramatic, but I'm much happier now, having picked up The Best American Non-Required Reading 2006, an anthology of essays, short stories, graphic short stories, excerpts from scripts, and all kinds of non-categorizable writing excellence from, well, 2006. The most thought-provoking piece I've read so far is the Iraqi Constitution, which I admit that I a) didn't actually expect to finish, and b) am finding so dense that I'm reading it in five-page spurts. I'm finding it both hopeful and kind of depressing--hopeful because it lays out what sounds like a pretty good proposal, where everybody is treated well and the government functions for the good of the people, but depressing because I know that's not what's happening. It also brings up issues about the United States Constitution, and about Constitutions in general--where and when did we as people decide that a single document meant authority, and what is it that makes us (mostly) recognize that authority today? Why do the U.S. and Iraqi Constitutions cover so much that sounds so basic to human civilization? (I think I know the answer to that one--implication and natural decency just aren't enough for us.) It's a really interesting piece of writing, if you're into that kind of thing.

Odds; ends

- I finished Pants 4 yesterday, and couldn't help giving it a little hug as I put it back on the shelf with its buddies. I'm naming it my second-favorite Pants book: not quite as true and honest and heartbreaking as #2, maybe, but still willing to do some heavy lifting character-wise. I loved Tibby and, surprisingly, Bridget--I think the Vreeland family (or what's left of it) is the final frontier for Bee, and I liked the way she finally had to deal with the people she'd left at home all this time. I would have felt good about the outcome of Lena's story either way, I think; I was ready for her to be content by herself, and I liked the ways in which she grew in this book. But I also feel like I can be gracious to Lena and let her have her happy ending, so it's okay. The ending as it currently stands works for me. In short, I'm really impressed with Ann Brashares and what she's done with herself as a writer since the early days of the original Pants book--this final book in the series is so much more complex and mature than I would have expected from her in the beginning. Well played.

- I've now picked up Broken For You, by Stephanie Kallos, which Katie gave me for Christmas with a note that she thought I "really needed to read this book." So far it's pretty readable but also a little heavy-handed and self-consciously quirky in the way that first novels often are. *shrug* I'll reserve judgement.

- The urge to work on my spec script has flagged this week. I think it's related to the lack of TV--not a single one of my shows is on, so my TV is pretty much sitting there silent, taking up space and failing to inspire me with displays of brilliance by people who are writing. So I'm taking this as a break in the belief that my voice will come back soon. In fact, both The Office and 30 Rock come back tonight, so I'm thinking "soon" might actually mean "today." Bonus: 30 Rock has been renewed for a second season, which means it's technically fair game for spec-scripting. Wooot!

- I am not in the mood to write, but I am in the mood to knit, and knit prolifically. I made it through most of the length of Sleeve 1 (10 reps of a six-row cable pattern; increase at row five, twist the cable at row three!) and am getting up to the shoulder shaping. Very exciting! I'm also about to hit the part of the pattern that's full of things I haven't learned about yet, so I'm trying not to read too far ahead, or I get overwhelmed. One new skill at a time, I say, and soon I will have a sweater! Or, actually half of a sweater. I'm having fun with it, but I hope it goes quickly, because I'm dying to wear it.

- Which brings me to my new favorite thing: podcasts! The point of the podcast escaped me for a long time--if a blog is self-indulgence, written and published for all the world to see, do we really need to add the human voice to that?--but now I'm hooked. It's like having a talk-radio station that only talks about what you want them to talk about! My taste in podcasts is typical and typically nerdy: so far, writing and knitting. I like listening to the Creative Screenwriting magazine podcast, in which a vaguely obnoxious host interviews working screenwriters, at work--something about it has that tantalizing "yes, I'm a waitress, but what I really want to do is direct" quality to it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is nothing more inspiring than writers talking about writing, and this principle has gotten me through many a long afternoon of edit entry lately. When I've had it with the self-centeredness of writers, I switch on one of two knitting podcasts: Stash and Burn or Cast On. S&B features two San Francisco knitters talking about...well, knitting. Knitting projects, knitting yarn, knitting stories, knitting road trips, knitting books, knitting jokes. Cast On is a little different in that it's a podcast meant to be heard while knitting, and I've tried to reserve it for that purpose. There's indie music to knit to, a weekly essay on knitting (deeper than you'd think), knitting news (more than you'd think), and a segment in which the podcaster shares the backstory on a sweater she's made. It's a little NPR-ish in its soothingness and its vague more-liberal-than-thou quality, but I find it strangely addicting. Now all I need is a good literature podcast, and I'll be good to go! KLIZ, now broadcasting on a laptop near you!

- That is all, except that today is Maundy Thursday. I've never been to a Maundy Thursday service, and I won't be going this year, either. I am very much looking forward to the Good Friday service at my church tomorrow night, though. Good Friday is such a strange day--something to be *commemorated* but not necessarily *celebrated,* which is a tricky thing, I think. Anyway, I loved the service last year, and this year my choir is performing--we get to hang out in the balcony, behind everyone, and sing a Renaissance-era monks' chant. A capella. In Latin. Not that we're the point of the service, or anything, but we sound GOOD.

- That really is all.

Things of which I am a fan

1. My computer, obviously. I still haven't gotten it together to close out the old PC and transfer my files (mostly music and photos, with some writing thrown in for fun), but I did install Word and Excel, which actually feels like a bit of a betrayal to the Mac mindset. Until we're all using InCopy, though, a girl's got to have something on which to process words, no? Anyway, the nameless laptop is light and quiet and seems determined to not be a hassle in any way. It is the Charlie Young of the computer world, if you will. This pleases me. We are friends, my computer and I.

2. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood: I'm re-reading Traveling Pants books two and three in preparation for a first read-through of four, Forever in Blue, which I got for Christmas. For whatever reason, #2 (I hate the title, so I always call it Pants Two) is my favorite by far--the last time I read it, it resonated with me on a level that probably was not strictly normal. This time, I think the moment had passed, but I still love it more than all the rest. It's the darkest of the books, not in a juvenile melodramatic way, but in a "these characters are badly behaved in ways that are totally recognizable" manner. It's the girls generally at their worst, which is always interesting, I think. Also: Carmen dating Porter, the penguin. Hee.

3. Yarn stores: I "stopped by" (read: spent an hour in) the yarn store on the way home from church yesterday, checking out my options for the cabled shrug I want to make. Article Pract is not my favorite yarn shop--it's expensive, carries too many earth tones, and has occasionally obnoxious hipster employees--but it's conveniently located and I had some store credit there, so I spent a good chunk of time wandering around, squeezing yarn and checking gauge and price. Mostly, I think I like doing just that: I don't always buy anything, but petting the yarn and soaking up the knitterly gossip is nice. I ended up getting some yarn-substitution help from the store's owner (this is the key, I think; she was very nice and very helpful), and came away with nine skeins of Rowan's Soft Baby in Cloud. I also found a good yarn candidate for the log-cabin blanket I'm pondering, which I left in the store for the sake of my debit card, but I'm glad to know it's there. Anyway, this means I can start swatching for the shrug, which I think will break my brain, but maybe in a good way.

This weekend I was also a fan of babies, What Not to Wear, corned beef and cabbage, westerns, sleep, black currants, dinner parties, Trader Joe's, running errands with my mom, and mint-chocolate frozen yogurt. Good times, good times.

Haiku Friday

Pleasant evening
browsing bookstore in twilight,
then mashed potatoes.