tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-266376942024-03-14T00:29:04.804-07:00Some Untidy SpotA Rock, Not an IslandPetrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.comBlogger284125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-33799624063125443882015-12-31T15:34:00.002-08:002015-12-31T15:34:14.290-08:00My Favorite Books of 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Oh, 2015: this was a year of upheavals for me. I left a job at Facebook, a company I loved, and started a new job at Stripe, a company I’m still getting used to. (Can I be that honest, in a lighthearted note like this? I like Stripe and don’t regret my choice, but the adjustment has been harder than I anticipated.) I traveled, with trips to Ireland and England in the early part of the year and Africa in the late spring, visiting Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Lesotho, passing through sand dunes, tropical jungles, and snow-capped mountains, plus some short trips to southern California and Utah. I set some goals at the beginning of the year, as I usually do, and achieved some of them: quit my job and travel (yep), finish a quilt (yep), do another triathlon (yep, twice ), be able to do 10 pushups (yes!), write creatively (yeah), write in a journal at least once a month (giant nope).</div>
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I didn’t set a goal to read a truly absurd number of books, and yet, in the midst of change, it’s what stayed constant. I typically read somewhere around 100-150 books in a year, already an unusual number, but this year I outdid myself: 285, plus my habit of every article in every issue of the New Yorker. I finished my goal to read every book that’s ever won the Booker Prize (silly, given how few of them I liked, but I am an achievement-oriented person), and I got 65% of the way reading every novel that’s ever won the Pulitzer Prize (much more fun, aside from the paternalist racism of the 1920s and the dude-dominated 1970s and 80s). </div>
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The books I read were, as always, a mix of everything, from books that friends had recommended to books whose covers were pretty to nearly every book that made any “best of” list from 2014. (From that, I learned that I share NPR’s taste much more than Slate’s.) Shamelessly copying from a friend, I also analyzed my reading list for gender and racial diversity: 54% of the books I read were by female authors, and 21% of the books were by non-white authors (with 40% of those women). I’m pleased with that gender breakdown, but I could probably up my game on non-white authors. In 2015 I wasn’t trying on either front—being interested in women’s issues and going through all of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s and Helen Oyeyemi’s books really helped me out—but now that I’m tracking it in 2016 I might make a conscious effort. </div>
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<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">Top 10 Fiction </span></div>
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In no particular order:</div>
<ul class="_5a_q _5yj1" style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px auto 32px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px; width: 700px;">
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;">The Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St. Aubyn. I’m going to cheat here and count all 5 novels in the series as one. One would think that every novel about the English aristocracy has already been written, but these still felt fresh and new, a take far darker and more vicious than Evelyn Waugh or Oscar Wilde. These were sharp and sardonic should-I-be-crying-or-laughing tragicomedy, and I loved them. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Submergence</span>, by JM Ledgard. I’m not sure that I can describe what I liked so much about this one, or for that matter, what it was even about: a British spy captured by Somalis. Oceanography. Love. Death. It was quiet and serious and unexpected but pulled me in and stayed with me. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Tenth of December</span>, by George Saunders. This was my introduction to George Saunders and I don’t know how I missed him before. A short story of his caught my eye in the New Yorker and so I sought out this collection, and found it satirical, imaginative, and all-around fun. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Beauty Is a Wound</span>, by Eka Kurniawan. Magical realism typically isn’t my thing, but somehow it worked for me when set in Indonesia, maybe because everyday life in Indonesia always seemed to fall somewhere between magic and realism. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Skippy Dies</span>, by Paul Murray. It seems odd to say that a book that begins with a major character dying could be funny, but this was funny despite its topic, full of living characters and pitch-perfect sentences I wish I could have written. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Sympathizer</span>, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I guess I gravitate towards funny books for my favorite novels, because this, like <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Skippy Dies</span> and <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Tenth of December </span>and the Patrick Melrose novels, tackled weighty topics—in this case, the Vietnam War-- with a satirical eye and a generous sense of the absurd. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Station Eleven</span>, by Emily St. John Mandel. I’m a sucker for books about world-ending epidemics, and this hit the spot. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Whiskey Tango Foxtrot</span>, by David Shafer. I hear they’re making a movie of this. It won’t be as good as the book. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Clever Girl</span>, by Tessa Hadley. No frills here, just a straightforward account of one woman’s life, starting with her girlhood in the early 1960s, told with forgiveness and an eye for detail, with prose to die for. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Life</span>, by Alice Munro. Two short story collections in my top 10? What is the world coming to? Alice Munro is clearly a master of the form, though, with vivid imagery, fully-realized worlds, and not a word out of place. </li>
</ul>
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Bonus! I can’t help but mention Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series; after reading everything Agatha Christie ever wrote in a few heady months back in 6th grade, I’m still burned out on mystery novels and rarely read them, but these were gorgeously written and featured actual character development in addition to good plot twists. </div>
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<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">Top 10 Non-Fiction </span></div>
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This time, in order of how much I liked them: </div>
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<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Looming Tower</span>, by Lawrence Wright. This was by far and away my favorite book of the year, of any category. I liked it so much that I paced myself, interspersing my reading of it with two or three novels at the same time, just so it would last longer. It’s history made as gripping as a novel, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what would happen next. (Spoiler alert: 9/11.) I also read and liked <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Going Clear</span>—so I guess I’m a Lawrence Wright fangirl now?—but thought <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Looming Tower</span> was better. Perfect, actually. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Between the World and Me</span>, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah, yeah, cliché, but sometimes the crowd is right. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Half Has Never Been Told</span>, by Edward Baptist. If you’re looking for a (bitter, sardonic) laugh, read The Economist’s review of this book, a detailed history of slavery and its economic impact on the US, which complained that “almost all the blacks in his book are victims.” If you’re looking for an education, read this book. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families</span>, by Philip Gourevitch. Rwanda was one of my favorite places we visited in Africa, and I came home hungry to know more about the genocide, and this book did not disappoint. (Also, if I were making a separate list of the best titles I read this year, this would win.) </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Seasons of Trouble,</span> by Rohini Mohan. This was another read inspired by a trip: after we visited Sri Lanka last summer, I wanted to know more about its civil war, and this was a great way to learn. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">How Not To Be Wrong</span>, by Jordan Ellenberg. Math! Interesting anecdotes! Humor! I’m in. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Hiding Place</span>, by Corrie Ten Boom. How did I not read this as a school assignment, like everyone else? I really liked it. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Soldier Girls</span>, by Helen Thorpe. There are so many stories that deserve to be told, you know? </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again</span>, by David Foster Wallace. I think you could probably present any sentence from this book to me, chosen at random, and I’d gasp at its perfection. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters In the End</span>, by Atul Gawande. I love Atul Gawande (who doesn’t?) and now dread aging (who doesn’t?). </li>
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*****</div>
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And now, for fun, some miscellaneous categories. </div>
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<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">Funniest</span></div>
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Or, how to cheat to get to mention more books I liked: </div>
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<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">One more Thing: Stories and Other Stories</span>, by BJ Novak.</li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">After Birth</span>, by Elisa Albert.</li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Committee Members,</span> by Julie Schumacher.</li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Seven Good Years</span>, by Etgar Keret.</li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Letters Of a Woman Homesteader</span>, by Elinore Pruitt Stewart. </li>
</ul>
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<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">I’m the Wrong Kind of Nerd: Popular Sci-Fi I Disliked </span></div>
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Why do I even keep trying? </div>
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<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Martian</span>, by Andy Weir. The only parts I found interesting were the scenes of NASA’s bureaucratic infighting. I can’t imagine anything more boring than calculating water needed to grow potatoes on Mars. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Ready Player One</span>, by Ernest Cline. Maybe I would have liked this better if I had played more video games in the 1980s. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore</span>, by Robin Sloan. This just felt like a first novel, you know? </li>
</ul>
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<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">Books I Re-Read Without Realizing It </span></div>
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This is why I keep a list. </div>
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<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Kindred</span>, by Octavia Butler. How could I have forgotten reading this? (My list tells me I read it first in 2003.) I don’t regret reading it again. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Ghost Road</span>, by Pat Barker. My list tells me I first read this in 2010. I do regret reading it again. </li>
</ul>
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<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">What Am I Missing? </span></div>
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All these books were critically acclaimed and…fine. Just fine. </div>
<ul class="_5a_q _5yj1" style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px auto 32px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px; width: 700px;">
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Lila</span>, by Marilyn Robinson. I should have just re-read Gilead. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">My Brilliant Friend</span>, by Elena Ferrante. I have the second book on hold at the library so maybe I will start to see the magic then. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">H Is For Hawk</span>, by Helen MacDonald. Am I just not as into birds as everyone else? </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Nora Webster</span>, by Colm Toibin. I found this almost as boring as <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Master</span>. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">All the Light We Cannot See</span>, by Anthony Doerr and <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Narrow Road to the Deep North</span>, by Richard Flanagan. For years, I’ve had an anti-South policy, in that I’m sick of novels about the South and try to avoid them unless there are mitigating circumstances (i.e. the author is William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor). I’m close to instituting a similar World War II policy: is there a point at which we can all agree that enough WWII novels have been written and authors can start creatively mining other historical settings? Because I think that point was 10 years ago. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing</span>, by Eimear McBride and <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">How To Be Both</span>, by Ali Smith. I want to be the sort of reader who gets really into cool experimental works and can enthuse for hours about stream-of-consciousness prose, but I am not. I like punctuation. Lots of it. Used properly. </li>
</ul>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #141823; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
<span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">I Have the Whole Rest of My Life Ahead of Me Now</span></div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #141823; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
At one point this year I was complaining about having to finish a boring Pulitzer Prize winner (Independence Day, by Richard Ford, if you’re curious) and Mike interrupted my whining to say, “Just think: after you finish this book, you have the rest of your life ahead of you!” That’s how I felt about these books. </div>
<ul class="_5a_q _5yj1" style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px auto 32px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px; width: 700px;">
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Rabbit Is Rich</span>, by John Updike. The Rabbit books are full of prose I admire, with an attitude towards women I just can’t stand. At one point I was telling Mike about it and summarized the main character’s take on women as "Rabbit thinks about how sexy that woman over there is. Look at her breasts. He wishes she would shut up and stop asking things of him. She's probably going to get fat." Ten pages later, I came upon this sentence: “Women. They are holes, you put one thing in after another and it’s never enough...”, and, later in the same paragraph: “Sometimes when he looks at her from behind he can’t believe how big she has grown...” Turns out I wasn’t exaggerating: the mid-century misogynists don’t need it. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Rabbit at Rest</span>, by John Updike. </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">The Red and the Black</span>, by Stendhal. I bought this at a used bookstore years ago because we had read an excerpt once in a high school French class. Why did I think that was a good reason to read a book? </li>
<li class="_2cuy _509q _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0px auto 12px 24px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap; width: auto; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">Gravity's Rainbow</span>, by Thomas Pyncheon. I mean, I get it, <span class="_5yi_" style="font-style: italic;">fine</span>, you’re clever, but now can we all just move on with our lives?</li>
</ul>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #141823; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
Happy 2016, everyone. Go forth and fill it with books.</div>
</div>
Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-63501721660729764782014-12-31T14:56:00.000-08:002014-12-31T14:56:18.841-08:00This Blog Is Dead Except For Book Lists<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
At this point I've taken up posting them to Facebook first, but for tradition's sake, here's my 2014 list.<br />
<br />
I think I began last year’s note by saying that 2013 was a good year
in reading because I had finished 115 books, but this year I read 145,
so I guess I should start by saying that 2014 was an even better year in
reading. (As a side note, since I finally got around to transferring my
book list to Excel a few months ago, it was also an even better year in
counting. Pivot tables, baby!) <br /><br />I don’t remember spending that
much more time reading, so I attribute this partially to some book-heavy
vacations, in Sri Lanka and the Sierras, but also to discovering that I
could check out ebooks from the library and read them in my browser
instead of my Kindle, which means I could read on my phone while waiting
in lines or sitting on a bus instead of just idling around on the
internet. I really dig the 21st century. <br /><br />I should insert some
commentary here about any themes in my reading this year, but I just
scanned through the list and can’t really find much to say; the theme,
as usual, was “whatever I can get my grubby little hands on.” I was
pretty mixed between fiction and non-fiction, like last year, though
this year I liked the fiction more, probably because I read my way
through most of 2013's "best books" lists. <br /><br /><b>Fiction Top 10, in order </b><br />1. <i>Redeployment</i>,
by Phil Klay. This was easily my favorite of the year. Last year I
commented positively about “The Yellow Birds” almost entirely because I
wanted more fiction coming out of the war in Iraq, and this book
delivered exactly what I wanted. I laughed, I cried, I recommended it to
everyone.<br /><br />2. <i>Americanah</i>, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Part of what I like about fiction is its ability to take me inside
someone else’s world, and this did that brilliantly. I loved the view of
the US through the eyes of an immigrant, I loved the insights into
dynamics of race and class and nationality, and I loved the story. There
was so much going on in this one, and all of it was perfect. <br /><br />3. <i>The Luminaries</i>, by Eleanor Catton. Join me in being surprised that I liked a Booker Prize winner!<br /><br />4. <i>Vampires in the Lemon Grove</i>, by Karen Russell. I'm a fan of Karen Russell (I also read and enjoyed <i>St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves</i>, and <i>Swamplandia</i>
was one of my favorites of 2012). I love her prose, but mostly I love
her weird, weird brain; the story premises she imagines are just too
strange for words, and yet she always makes them work. <br /><br />5. <i>Bring Up the Bodies</i>, by Hilary Mantel. I can’t even describe why this and <i>Wolf Hall</i>
are so good; they’re slow and don’t always have much in the way of
plot, and it’s not like I’m a Thomas Cromwell fangirl or anything (is
anyone?), but they just catch you, and you fall down. Yet another reason
to eat my words about the Booker Prize. <br /><br />I have less to say
about the next five because I don’t want to trap myself into writing
mini reviews of everything; they were all excellent fiction: <br /><br />6. <i>A Brief History of the Dead</i>, by Kevin Brockmeier<br />7. <i>The Goldfinch</i>, by Donna Tartt<br />8. <i>The Signature Of All Things</i>, by Elizabeth Gilbert<br />9. <i>We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves</i>, by Karen Fowler<br />10. <i>Frog Music</i>, by Emma Donoghue<br />
<br />
****<br /><br />On to the non-fiction! <br /><br /><b>Non-Fiction Top 8, in order </b><br /><br />(I couldn’t come up with 10 that I thought really deserved to be there.) <br /><br />1. <i>Consider the Lobster</i>,
by David Foster Wallace. Can you believe this was the first David
Foster Wallace I ever read? Everyone has told me he’s brilliant and
amazing and all that, but for some reason I never got around to him,
partly intimidated by all the hype. About 30 pages into this, I called
my dad (one of the main purveyors of the hype) and told him he was right
and I was sorry I waited so long. <br /><br />2. <i>The New Jim Crow</i>,
by Michelle Alexander. I think everyone who’s interacted with me in the
past few weeks has heard me talk about this one; I’m seeing everything
differently because of it, which is all I really want from a book. <br /><br />3. <i>What It Is Like To Go To War</i>, by Karl Marlantes. His novel, <i>Matterhorn</i>,
was on my list in 2011, and this one was just as good. This is Tim
O’Brien, all grown up; so many war books are written 5, 10, or even 15
years after the war, so it was new and somewhat startling to hear about
war from someone with an additional 40 years of reflection and wisdom
(at least if you can look past the Jungian theory). <br /><br />4. <i>Moneyball</i>, by Michael Lewis. This made me care about baseball, at least for a few hours, which is impressive. <br /><br />I have no more commentary. The next 4 were good too: <br /><br />5. <i>Men We Reaped</i>, by Jesmyn Ward<br /><br />6. <i>Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World</i>, by Shereen El Feki<br /><br />7. <i>Brain On Fire</i>, by Susannah Cahalan<br /><br />8. <i>It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens</i>, by danah boyd<br />
<br />
****<br /><br />And now, my favorite part, some honorable (and dishonorable) mentions:<br /><br />
<br /><b>Worst Classics </b><br />These deserve to be remembered as historical events, not works of art:<br />
<ul>
<li><i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i>, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.</li>
<li><i>Ishi In Two Worlds</i>, by Theodora Kroeber</li>
</ul>
<br /><b>Best (and Worst) Jane Austen Fan Fiction </b><br />
<ul>
<li>Best: <i>Longbourn</i>, by Jo Baker. I thought this was a clever re-imagining that also held up as an independent story. </li>
<li>Worst: <i>Death Comes to Pemberly</i>,
by PD James. I thought this was neither clever, nor really a
re-imagining. I may be biased against it because I listened to it--I'm
almost always harsher on audiobooks because I spend so much more time on
them--but the plot was a fairly standard (and therefore dull) murder
mystery and I thought the characters were cheap stereotypes of their<i> Pride and Prejudice</i> selves. </li>
</ul>
<br /><b>Best Books With Feminis* In the Title </b><br />
<ul>
<li><i>Feminism Is For Everybody</i>, by bell hooks </li>
<li><i>Jesus Feminist</i>, by Sarah Bessey</li>
</ul>
<br /><b>Best Nostalgia</b><br />
<ul>
<li><i>Doomsday Book</i>,
by Connie Willis. I first read this at 14 and, according to my list,
have read it 3 times since then. I’m a sucker for the Middle Ages, and
I’m a sucker for time travel (review of <i>Outlander</i> above notwithstanding). This is my ideal book. </li>
<li><i>Venetia</i>, by Georgette Heyer. There’s nothing like Georgette Heyer for a light, fun read when you have a head cold. </li>
</ul>
<br /><b>Most Forgettable</b><br />I
read these two books less than a year ago and gave them both 3 stars on
GoodReads but literally can’t remember anything about them: <br />
<ul>
<li><i>Necessary Lies</i>, by Diane Chamberlain</li>
<li><i>The Maid’s Version</i>, by Daniel Woodrell </li>
</ul>
<br /><b>Most Irritating, Dave Eggers Edition </b><br />Why do I keep reading Dave Eggers? Seriously. <br />
<ul>
<li><i>Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?</i> This is such a fantastic title, and such a disappointing book. </li>
<li><i>The Circle</i>.
I’m so vain, I’m pretty sure this book was about me…but I still didn’t
like it. (Someone who lives in San Francisco should be able to write a
better book about tech. This was a lazy cliche from start to finish.) </li>
</ul>
<b>Craziest</b><br /><ul>
<li><i>The Lost Empire of Atlantis</i>,
by Gavin Menzies. This was the book equivalent of getting trapped in
the corner at a party with a conspiracy theorist: uncomfortable, but at
least you can laugh about it later. </li>
<li><i>Outlander</i>, by Diana
Gabaldon. The Wikipedia page mentions that Gabaldon intended to write a
historical novel, but the character of Claire got too sassy, so she
changed her mind in the middle, made her a 20th century woman, and
decided to figure it all out later. That could have worked in the hands
of a better writer—by all accounts, the TV adaptation is pretty good—but
this was Gabaldon’s first, and to me it read like an early draft,
before she figured it all out later. </li>
</ul>
<br /></div>
Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-78093090236517282222014-07-29T19:26:00.002-07:002014-07-29T19:26:45.328-07:00Those Were the Days<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Remember when we all blogged? That was fun. </div>
Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-79380371063055948742014-01-01T18:19:00.003-08:002014-01-01T18:35:00.550-08:002013 In Books <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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</style><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> I guess I only
use this blog for best books lists now. Part of me misses blogging--it was
probably good for me to write something other than Facebook posts or work
emails--but then the rest of me remembers that I don't actually like writing
very much. </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">This was a good
year in reading, at least by count, even though I continued my <i>New Yorker </i>subscription
(and obsession). I read 115 books, many of those on buses and trains during our 4.5-week vacation in India and Nepal. I
hate to admit this, but the count is also high because many of those books I
read in India were--gasp!--romance novels. I don't typically read them, but for
a few days in India we were riding trains and buses in Rajasthan in 115-degree
weather and I was sick and surviving solely on orange-flavored rehydration salt
water and I desperately needed something to distract me from my misery but couldn't concentrate because of nausea, and,
well, Nora Roberts was there. I tore through nearly 15 of the romance novels my
mom had on our shared Kindle account, and was thoroughly sick of them by the
time we got back to more reasonable temperatures. I'm not sure I'll ever be
able to look at a Fabio cover again without feeling hot and uncomfortable. (And sorry, Fabio, not even in the way you'd expect.)</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">As usual, I
read more fiction than non-fiction, but once again I was surprised by how much
better I liked the non-fiction. I don't know for sure why that is, but here's
my speculation: I've been a fiction reader for so long that at this point I've
read most of the truly great novels out there, and plus I have a much higher
quality bar from my wide experience. I'm still newer to non-fiction so I get to
choose (and enjoy) the time-tested greats. This year the effect was probably
also exaggerated because for a while over the summer and early fall I
concentrated on my goal to read all the Booker Prize-winning novels (I only
have 8 out of 46 left). I continue to think Booker books are mostly pretentious
and unreadable (William Golding? Give me a break!), so the fact that they were
heavily represented in my fiction doesn't speak well for the category. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Anyway, on to
the lists. Top non-fiction is a pretty crowded field this year, so I added some
sub-category breakdowns to make sure some good books get mentioned. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Top 5 Novels</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Schindler’s
List</i>,
by Thomas Kenneally. I should take back all my Booker Prize criticism for this
one. It deserves to be a classic. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Orphan
Master’s Son</i>,
by Adam Johnson. I have no idea how accurate to North Korea this is--can
anyone?--but it had me hooked anyway. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>A Short Stay in
Hell</i>,
by Steven Peck. The premise sounds like a gimmick (and maybe it is), but it was
still genuinely thoughtful. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Telegraph
Avenue</i>,
by Michael Chabon. This wasn't in the same league as, say, <i>The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay</i>, but I have to put it on the list just for
being set in my neighborhood. (Literally: the main characters lived about 1.5
miles away.) It was an odd (and awesome) experience to read a passage about the
MacArthur BART station while walking home from the MacArthur BART station. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Fault in
Our Stars</i>,
by John Green. I don't read much YA but this got such rave reviews that I
couldn't resist. I can point to plenty of flaws here but I was still touched; I
knew a book about teenagers with cancer was going to be sad, but I didn't know
exactly how much I was going to cry. (It was embarassing.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Fiction
Honorable Mentions</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Gone Girl</i>, by Gillian Flynn.
A twist! And what a twist; I can see why everyone on BART has been reading this one. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Yellow
Birds</i>,
by Kevin Powers. This was beautiful, and I'm happy to see literature start to
come out of the Iraq war, but it wasn't stayed with me the way I'd expect. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Testament
of Mary</i>,
by Colm Toibin. Maybe I'm terrible, but I enjoyed how bitter Mary was. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Top 10
Non-Fiction</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I read of lot
of depressing history: </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>King Leopold's
Ghost</i>,
by Adam Hochschild</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Rape of
Nanking</i>,
by Iris Chang </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Bury My Heart
At Wounded Knee</i>, by Dee Brown</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And a lot of
feminist history: </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Mother Nature:
Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species</i>, by Sarah
Blaffer Hrdy</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Century of
Struggle</i>,
by Eleanor Flexner </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And even some
depressing feminist history: </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Unnatural
Selection</i>,
by Mara Hvistendahl</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Occasionally I branched out:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Thinking, Fast
and Slow</i>,
by Daniel Kahnemann. This successfully explained the concept of
"regression to the mean" to me, a real achievement. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Signal and the
Noise</i>, by Nate Silver. This successfully
explained Bayesian statistics to me, another achievement. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The
Philosophical Baby</i>, by Alison Gopnik. This had the most persuasive argument
about why to have children I've ever read. (It boils down to "they're a
great psych experiment," but that's more persuasive to me than
"they're cute.")</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Places In
Between</i>,
by Rory Stewart. This was just the most British thing I've ever read, and I've
read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse. (Note: my parents know him, and apparently he
really <i>is</i> that British.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And now, a
whole bunch of assorted categories--basically, books I'd want to mention under
"best non-fiction" if that list were 25 books instead of 10. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Best Memoirs</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Bad Indians</i>, by Deborah
Miranda. Poetic and eye-opening. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Wild</i>, by Cheryl
Strayed. Okay, so this was the world's most incompetent backpacking trip
(bringing jeans!??!), and animal lovers should probably avoid this, but Strayed
is a really, really, really beautiful writer and managed to make me sympathize
with and then even admire her crazy, stupid persona. I also loved <i>Tiny
Beautiful Things</i>, so consider this a plug for both. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Funniest</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>How To Be a
Woman,</i>
by Caitlin Moran. Look! I read funny feminist stuff as well as factual feminist
stuff and depressing feminist stuff. (And I'm not even including all the
radical feminist stuff on these lists; Germaine Greer's work hasn't aged very
well.) </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Gulp</i>, by Mary
Roach. Gotta include a Mary Roach on here. Maybe it's just that I've suffered
from digestive ailments, but I thought <i>Gulp</i> was one of her
funniest. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Sleepwalk With
Me</i>,
by Mike Birbiglia. I think his stand-up is funnier, but I was still reading
nearly every other line out loud to Mike. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Mapheads</i>, by Ken
Jennings. I'm easily amused by nerdiness, apparently. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Best Books By
Someone I Know</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I don't usually
even have a category for this, not to mention three books in the category, but
2013 was an embarrassment of friend riches. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Lean In</i>, by Sheryl
Sandberg </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>How Will You
Measure Your Life?</i>, by Clayton Christensen </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Elders</i>, by Ryan
McIlvain </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">And finally, <b>Most
Racist</b>: </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Empire of the
Summer Moon</i>,
by S.C. Gwynne. This was really disappointing, since I had read some other
wonderful books about Native Americans this year, and this was a highly praised
Pulitzer Prize finalist, but despite the fascinating story I found it really
hard to stomach the author's attitude towards the Comanches, which appeared to
be lifted wholesale from the nineteenth-century white sources he was using. I'm
no expert on Native history or race relations, but it doesn't take an expert to
realize it's ignorant and racist to unironically describe Native Americans as
"low-barbarian" or "savage" or "dark-skinned
pariahs" or a "backward tribe of Stone Age hunters" or even to
call their languages "primitive." (He clearly doesn't know anything
about Native languages.) What's even more shocking is that the vast majority of
reviews--and, apparently, the Pulitzer Prize nomination committee--don't even
mention this.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-17382469892888228712013-01-01T21:29:00.002-08:002013-01-01T21:29:12.225-08:002012 in Reading<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was worried that this year I wouldn't make my typical 100 books a year. (Why was I reading so little? I'm not really sure, but finishing two quilts and still reading every article in every issue of <i>The New Yorker</i> might have something to do with it.) However, when I counted just now the number was 103, so I guess all those long backpacking trips this summer, with nothing to do in the evenings but read, paid off. That's a relief. <br />
<br />
In any case, I know I haven't posted here in forever (um, hi! I still exist!) but I love combing through each year's book list and feeling nostalgic over the really good ones, so ta-da! You get a list. <br />
<br />
<b>Top 10 Fiction</b> (in no particular order, I promise)<br />
<i>Game of Thrones</i>: I'm going to count the first book here as a stand-in for the entire series, which I read on buses in Ethiopia and could not put down. I'm not generally a sci-fi/fantasy gal, and nor am I a rape/violence gal, but this was just really, really compelling. It also made me understand that <i>New Yorker</i> article from a while back about fans being angry at George R.R. Martin for taking so long to finish; I'd be pissed, too, if I had been left to wait for so many years after the fourth book. (After the third, maybe, but the fourth? Mutiny.)<br />
<i>Swamplandia!</i>: A book about a family running a failing alligator theme park in Louisiana just seems too precious for words, but I promise you it's much, much better than that sounds. <br />
<i>We Need to Talk About Kevin</i>: If you've read this, we need to talk about it. I was hooked. <br />
<i>The Cat’s Table</i>: I generally find Michael <span class="st">Ondaatje's books about as</span> impenetrable as his last name (look me in the eye and tell me you understood the plot of The English Patient, I dare you), but I really liked this one, a relatively straightforward memoir about a young boy's ocean voyage from Sri Lanka to London. <br />
<i>Zone One</i>: it's ostensibly about zombies but really about cities. And it's worth it. <br />
<i>The Stranger’s Child: </i>I'm surprised by this one's presence on the list, given how much I disliked <i>The Line of Beauty</i>. It was good, though. <br />
<i>Sweet Tooth</i>: I'm not at all surprised that this one is on my list. Ian McEwan does it again. <br />
<br />
However, if you know my reading tastes, this is surprising: three (!) books of short stories on my best-of list. Has the internet just killed my attention span or something? <br />
<i>This is How You Lose Her:</i> I recognize that some of what Junot Diaz is doing is cheap, or at the very least repetitive, but I can't help it. <br />
<i>What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank:</i> This one makes the list solely for the title story, which was published in <i>The New Yorker</i> and which I read in church, leading to some awkward moments when I gasped aloud in sheer surprise and delight. <br />
<i>You Know When the Men Are Gone:</i> I listed to several books on tape this year, finding it a pleasant way to entertain myself while tidying the apartment, driving to work, doing the dishes, etc. The only downside is that books on tape are so much slower than actual reading; since I spend more time with them, I'm far more critical of books I listen to. <i>You Know When the Men are Gone</i> is one of the few books on tape that stood up to my harsh feelings. Plus, it's got a great title. <br />
<br />
<b>Honorable mentions:</b><br />
<i>Alif the Unseen</i>: computer hackers + 1001 nights; thoroughly, thoroughly entertaining. <br />
<i>The Marriage Plot: </i>I liked this even more than <i>Middlesex</i>, but it hasn't stuck with me in the months since I read it.<br />
<i>The Satanic Verses</i>: It's embarrassing that this 20th century classic is only an honorable mention, especially given how much I loved <i>Midnight's Children</i>, but I think maybe I'm just over Salman Rushdie's one plot. <br />
<br />
<b>Top 10 non-fiction</b> (also in no particular order)<br />
<i>Behind the Beautiful Forevers: </i>Non-fiction reporting that reads like a novel. <i><br />Team of Rivals: </i>I knew how it ended and I still cried. <i><br />Operation Mincemeat</i>: Is this real life?!?<br />
<i>Holy Ghost Girl: </i>Honestly, this might have been the best of the year, and certainly the most unexpected. I listened to this one on tape, and, honest to goodness, I rewound several times just to bask in the prose again. (Note: that's an analog metaphor for a digital action. Of course I was listening to an mp3 on my iPod and I just skipped back in the track.)<br />
<i>Unbroken: </i>I kept turning the pages of this one expecting the protagonist to die any page now; this was a literally unbelievable story. <br />
<i>The 10th Parallel: </i>I'm a sucker for books about contemporary Islam, and I loved the international compare-and-contract deal here. <i><br />The Possessed: </i>I'm also a sucker for anyone who writes for <i>The New Yorker. </i>(See how many times I've mentioned it so far in this post?) I was pleasantly surprised at how this book turned from deep ponderings on Russian novels to a chatty, lightly funny yet profound memoir. <i><br />Born Round: </i>Food memoirs are practically their own genre now, and this should be the prototype. <br />
<i>My Life in France: </i>I could finally see why everyone loved Julia Child so much--her personality came through in the writing, and how could you help but love her? <i><br /></i><i>Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010</i>: I didn't agree with everything, but if the point was to make me think, well, it succeeded. <br />
<br />
<b>Top 5 most irritating </b><br />
<i>The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother</i>: I felt insulted, not necessarily by the book's child-rearing philosophies (I don't have a dog in that fight yet), but by the fact that the supposedly ambitious, hard-driving, high-standards-of-perfection author thought I would accept this self-centered, stream-of-consciousness first draft as good enough. The arrogance! If I were her mother I would make her go back and rewrite it until she can do it right. <br />
<i>Farm City</i>: Look, I'm as into the idea of urban farming as any other late-20s Bay Area resident, but can we <i>please</i> not be so obnoxiously superior about it? Your Oakland backyard chickens are producing delicious eggs, not saving the world. The Thoreau-worship in the introduction should have been enough of a warning to me to avoid this one. <br />
<i>The Finkler Question</i>: Has there ever been a Booker Prize book
I've actually liked? Answer: yes, but rarely. This was incredibly
overhyped (see: Booker Prize) but just seemed to me to be Philip Roth
with more British people and less masturbation. It's not like I love Philip Roth, or masturbation scenes, but wow, this one was boring to me. <br />
<i>Three Cups of Tea</i>: I can't decide if it was a mistake to read Jon Krakauer's <i>Three Cups of Deceit </i>at the same time as listening to this, but it certainly, er, added some layers to the experience. I'm not sure I'll want to look in a mirror after saying this, but think I actually enjoyed the book more when I could chuckle cynically at Mortensen's supposed heroic do-goodery. <br />
<i>The End of Men: </i>Don't.even.get.me.started. Without veering too far into <a href="https://twitter.com/feministhulk">feminist Hulk</a> territory--because I really am open to the idea that certain aspects of our modern mores have been bad for men, and I was intrigued by her hypothesis that women are more flexible, while the rigidity of performed masculinity leaves men unable to adapt to societal changes--the "end of men"? <a href="http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/really-with-seth-and-amy-birth-control/1386256/">Really</a>? Based on, what, an <a href="http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/tag/hanna-rosin/">overly narrow slice of entirely misleading wage data</a>? Men are ending and women are taking over, see, because childless women in their 20s in urban areas out-earn childless men in their 20s in urban areas...nevermind that urban areas are heavy on white college-educated women and Latino men, and if you actually sort the data by education level and race men outearn women in every category. (Oops. I think I just got me started.) If all it takes these days to write a bestseller is some snazzy prose, a doomsday headline, and some misleading, misinterpreted, or made-up statistics, I should go ahead and quit my job now to start working on that book I've been planning, <i>We Are All Doomed. </i>(Page 1: 100% of us will die someday!)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-45568713267443543462012-09-04T13:17:00.000-07:002012-09-04T13:17:08.634-07:00Ethiopia Diary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I tried to keep a day-by-day account of our Ethiopia trip way back in January, in the hopes that I could turn it into an awesome blog post. Because, of course, I excel at writing trip reports. Like the great posts about the Vietnam trip where I got arrested, or our trip to Turkey in 2010, or our trip to Indonesia in 2011. Oh wait--I didn't blog about <i>any</i> of those? Sigh.<br />
<br />
In any case, I kept decent notes this trip, hoping to craft an amazing post, complete with all our best photos, one that might make up for all those other failed posts...and then, since that just seemed exhausting, I did nothing instead.<br />
<br />
So let me tone down my ambitions, for once: this is not an amazing post. This is just my scattered notes, and some scattered photos. But look, ma: I'm actually posting!<br />
<br />
**** <br />
<br />
<i>Ethiopia, December/January 2012</i><br />
<br />
Day 1: We arrive at the airport in Boston. We take family photos--the airport is a surprisingly good backdrop for this--and then change into our hiking clothes for the trip. I am too fat for my hiking pants (thank you, Christmas) and must buy Vaseline to stop a developing rash at my waistline. (Yes, I had to grease myself up to get into pants.) Meanwhile, Mike meets an Ethiopian woman at the airport who is surprised to hear of our destination. She then promptly asks him if he knows Jesus. This bodes well. <br />
<br />
Day 2: Still in transit. Does air travel always take this long? My Vaseline is taken away at customs in London, except for what I can fit into a plastic baggie. (Note: a plastic baggie of Vaseline is disgusting.) Not surprisingly, everyone on our flight from London to Bahrain is Indian. We have way too long at the airport in Bahrain, and so we spend our time aimlessly wandering in circles because it was too noisy to sleep. The flight to Addis Ababa was entirely women, all of them were enthusiastically talking at the top of their lungs...at 3am. Pleasant!<br />
<br />
Day 3: We have a flight on a prop plane to Gonder, which Mike spends enthusiastically taking pictures out the window. We meet some South Africans at airport who had come for a supposed "luxury" lodge in the mountains. It must not have been as luxurious as they thought, since we later saw their note in the national park's guest book: "visiting but never ever coming back again." Too cheap to share their "luxury" transport, we take a bus to the national park's departure town, which is 4 1/2 hours on a dusty road, after 33 hours on planes. We are crammed in me at the back, practically on our neighbors' laps, with everyone on the bus surreptitiously turning to stare. I can't stop humming that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ztr96RbMW8">Shakira song</a> for the last World Cup: waka waka hey hey, this is Africa! We make arrangements for backpacking at the park office, where the guy has a very proper British accent. Much to our disappointment, the national park officials insist that we have to take a tent.<br />
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Day 4: The first day of our trek. We leave from Debark and arrive at camp to Sankaber what feels like a lifetime later: we covered 14 1/2 miles all told, at 10,000 feet, and me with food poisoning, puking the entire way. (Here's some travel advice: don't eat at a place called the Semen Park Restaurant.) We are accompanied by a scout, complete with an antique rifle, who speaks absolutely no English. (He knows "yello," which I think he thinks is "hello.") From him I learn the Amharic names for animals, but not much more than that. We're passing through foothills mostly populated by goat- and cowherds, plus lots of baboons. Mike stalks them; I lie down. In Sankaber I collapse before the tent is even set up and sleep fitfully for the next 14 hours.<br />
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Day 5: Sankaber to Geech. We pass several villages and are always, always invited in for a coffee ceremony. Our climb to a nearby peak is amazing--even Scout sits down to appreciate the views. (Scout is an iron man, we quickly learn. I'm not sure what he was eating on the trip--no, seriously, I'm not sure if he even ate at all--but someone should seriously market it.) The landscape changes to the Afro-Alpine zone, which, as far as I can tell, just means lots of lobelia. An old woman follows us some of the way, probably impatient with our slow, fat Western pace. (Scout is equally impatient and terrible at hiding it. All day long, he says "yello! Yello!" I think in this context it means "hurry up, fatty!") We camp that night at 13,000 feet. A British girl in a nearby tent gets altitude sickness and is heard vomiting loudly all night. I am sympathetic.<br />
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Day 6: Geech to Chenek, December 31. I'm having a sluggish morning, so I begin counting my steps: 2.186 is the highest number I reach before we pause for some views. The British girl is also afraid of heights; why is she here again? We try to buy a sheep for dinner in camp but it doesn't work out, so we're stuck, again, eating cold rehydrated backpacking food. I don't recommend it. Lots of climbing; the gelada baboons here are skittish, probably because there are far fewer people around. Mike stalks them anyway, while I laugh in delight every time they move because they are just. so. shaggy. At camp that night, a large European tour group (Czech, maybe?) stays up late drinking and singing for New Year's. We still fall asleep almost immediately after dark.<br />
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Day 7: Bwahit (from Chenek): We wake up in the morning to see walia ibex, one of the park's most endangered species, frolicking just outside our camp. We stay at last night's campsite at 13,000 feet and aim to summit a 14,500 foot peak as a day hike. I'm too exhausted/altitude weak to go far, so I climb back down, find the world's most scenic bench, and spend the day reading. Heaven! Mike races Scout to the peak and loses, but gets his revenge by practically sprinting down. (He hears a lot of the other Amharic word we learned: K'uss! Or, slowly!) Since the day hike takes less than a day, we spend the afternoon reading, playing cards, and chatting with the other tourists at the campsite. We are the only people who came to Ethiopia specifically for these mountains. Even I have to admit they're gorgeous and we got our money's worth.<br />
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Day 8: Chenek to Sankaber. I suddenly feel marvelously strong; hiking along, I think I was born to do this! This is our last day, though, so it's mostly hiking out on a road, trailing Mule Man, who is leading the mule carrying our big backpacks. We pass lots of villages, and lots of small children tending goat/sheep, all of whom have enormous balls. (The goats, not the children.) We pass priest; everyone else genuflects and kisses his cross. When we reach an intermediate campsite, we decide we don't want to walk all the way out, so instead we wait by road and waylay some grumpy Germans, persuading them to give us a ride out. We stay in the town of Debark again that night, where we get to take showers and eat real food. (We tried the Semen Park Hotel again, because we are crazy.) We explore the evening market, where some local children follow us around. When we hold their hands and swing them, they are sold on us forever.<br />
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Day 9: We take an early morning (5:30) bus to Gonder. I fall asleep on the bus (I really can sleep anywhere). We stay at the Circle Hotel, which is very circular, and discover a cafe with fatira to die for; as a result, we spend the rest of the day overfull and lethargic. We eat there for dinner, too, but it's less delicious. (Tuna fish on spaghetti?!?) Gonder is full of castles, which were super cool but also super hot. Gonder also has one of my favorite sites, the Debre Birhan Selassie church, whose roof is painted with hundreds of angel faces; it's adorable, trust me. We spent the afternoon walking the city streets, where Mike noticed a teenager carrying a physics textbook and offered to help him with his homework. The double take was tremendous.<br />
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Day 10: Bahir Dar. We take another early morning (5:30) bus to Bahir Dar. (Are you seeing a pattern yet?) This city was full of touts; even a guy from the restaurant we ate at offered us a "great deal" on a boat; is everyone in this town in the tourist business? (Answer: yes.) We walked out to Lake Tana, the main attraction, and caught a papyrus reed boat across the river. (Most tourists take a motorboat around the lake to visit the monasteries, but given that women aren't allowed in most of them I wasn't about to overspend on just a motorboat ride.) After seeing a small church on the lake, we hired a tuktuk driver to take us to the Blue Nile falls. The falls aren't very impressive now thanks to a dam, but it was still hilarious/insane to spend two hours in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk on a dirt road. We were entertainment for every single villager along the way.<br />
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Day 11-12: Lalibella. The more I enjoyed a place, the worse my notes are. Lalibella, Ethiopia's main pilgrimage site, was spectacular, full of rock-hewn medieval churches. Apparently I was not dressed appropriately for a pilgrimage, as some young girls chastised me: "skirts are for females." (Their word, not mine.) It being Ethiopian Christmas, Lalibella was also incredibly overcrowded. There was no room at any of the inns--fitting for a Christmas visit--and so we stayed at the family home of a young man we met on the bus. (Yes, this is sketchy.) The room was above the stable--also fitting for a Christmas visit--and Mike got fleas.<br />
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Day 13-14: Axum. We loved Axum, but that might have just been because we found a pleasant hotel. Again, my notes are spotty since we actually kept busy, touring obelisks, museums, ancient ruins, and staring at the church that supposedly houses the Ark of the Covenant. It was fun for me to discover that I could immediately hear the difference between Amharic and Tigrinya; I am still a linguist at heart. Axum also featured some great old military propaganda, apparently left over from the days when the military wore short shorts.<br />
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Day 15: On this day, Mike got to climb a goatskin rope up a cliff to a 6th-century monastery. I got to sit at the bottom and watch him because women are not allowed. And no, I'm not bitter about it at all.<br />
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Day 16: Addis Ababa. We flew to Addis Ababa and were hoping to catch a bus to Harrar immediately but the buses were all full, so we had to stay the night. Meanwhile we were relatively near the museum with Lucy's bones, so we walked there with our backpacks still on, assuming the museum would have a bag check area. It doesn't.<br />
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Day 17: We take a bus to Harrar. We have lots of time to observe the scenery: lots of cows, goats, and donkeys, and, as we get further east, camels. The oil here comes from Libya, as all the stations proudly announce. China is building roads everywhere. The language here, Orominya, is also noticeably different from Amharic, though for a while I wondered if it was just English doubled, thanks to all the signs saying "hootteella." <br />
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Day 18-20: Harrar. This is too long to stay in Harrar but too short to go anywhere else. We try to negotiate a trip to an elephant park, but fail, repeatedly; the guide we arrange never shows up, and meanwhile everyone tells us conflicting stories about how great the park is (or isn't). We hang around Harrar instead, eating at our favorite restaurant multiple times per day. (Ethiopian food is delicious, but by now I'm getting sick of injera, which is in absolutely everything. One popular dish is torn-up pieces of injera in sauce...that you then eat with a side of injera.) We take a bus out to a nearby town to visit its camel market. We also go hiking in some rock formations near the town; while Mike scales a steep slope, I wait at the bottom, out of sight, and am possibly threatened at knifepoint. (It wasn't really clear what the guy was trying to communicate by pulling out his knife and drawing it across his throat, but I didn't like it.) This is the closest I've ever been to Somalia (about 100 miles) and, after my friend with the knife, the closest I ever want to be to Somalia. We tour Harar's old city--it's legitimately cool--and, get this, we <i>feed hyenas</i>. <br />
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Day 21-24: We take a bus back to Addis Ababa to catch our flight. We sleep terribly the night before thanks to hyenas rooting through the trash pile next to our hotel and barking all night long. On our way back we pass two different crashes of long-distance buses just like ours. At this point we have run out of books and have only one Kindle between the two of us, so we trade off between reading and playing cards. I keep track of how often I win or lose solitaire; mostly I lose. After getting off the bus in Addis we walk to the airport; it's fully 5 miles away but we have time to kill. When we arrive at the airport we find out that our Saturday night flight was cancelled and there isn't another one until Monday morning. We kick ourselves for not going somewhere other than Harrar, now that we have an extra day on our trip. Mostly, we want to kick the airline for canceling our flight and not telling us until the day before. (When we get home, I begin a campaign of furious--and constant--emails to the airline and eventually get us a $250 apology.) We hang out in Addis Ababa for another day, mostly walking around doing nothing, and have an uneventful trip back, arriving home two days later than planned. ("I'm trapped in Addis Ababa" turns out to be a very good excuse to miss some extra work.)<br />
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Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-86059869061815320402012-06-08T20:33:00.000-07:002012-06-08T21:34:43.177-07:00The Year of Skills: Part Whichever-Part-Is-Last<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>October: Aikido</b><br />
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At the beginning of the year I made a list of the skills I might like to learn, the further out of my comfort zone, the better. (Scuba diving? Shooting a gun!??!) One of the items I put on the list was "martial arts"--yes, that's right, the generic kind--because I've never tried anything like that before, and doesn't that seem like I'm missing out? <br />
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(Martial arts must be the one-and-only childhood activity I never tried: at various points before my parents finally gave up and just let me be a shut-in, I did T-ball, swimming, gymnastics, ballet, horseback riding, ice skating, piano lessons and drama. I excelled at nothing, dreaded them all, and--yes, I'm an ungrateful brat--quit as soon as I could.)<br />
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In any case, I happened to pass an Aikido Institute a few blocks from my apartment in mid-September, and when I looked into their schedule, by pure serendipity, I found that they were offering a $50 adults-only introductory month of twice-a-week classes. Bingo! Adults-only was ideal (I didn't want to be a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t8xwpW8gJQ">Kramer</a>) and Aikido was as good as anything else. (Who doesn't want to be Steven Seagal?)<br />
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I had a blast in my four weeks of classes, as much as that surprised me. I got the classic white uniform, much too large for me, and learned very quickly to kneel and say "ohayo gozaimasu<a class="spell" href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Jps&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=X&ei=JMLST-aOD-3k2wXLtsWWDw&ved=0CAgQvwUoAQ&q=ohayo+gozaimasu&spell=1"><b><i></i></b></a>." I even learned a few basic chops and throws, though, surprising no one, I vastly preferred to get thrown than to throw others: when you're the thrower, you have to have timing, strength, and confidence. When you're the throwee, you just have to go limp. <br />
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There are no pictures of me in my uniform. It was embarrassing. <br />
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<b>November: Drawing</b><br />
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I'm not particularly good at drawing…or rather, not particularly good at drawing anything but horses. Thank you, nerdy childhood. <br />
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Speaking of my childhood--gosh, I love smooth transitions--I remember my parents taking a drawing class together where they used a book called "Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain" that claims that anyone can learn to draw. Anyone? Yes, anyone, and so I decided, in November, to put this to the test. <br />
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(My parents really enjoyed this drawing class, they say, but it didn't last long, because my dad only wanted to draw naked women.)<br />
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So for November I bought the book and started working my way through its exercises. I've only gotten halfway (one of these days I'll finish!) but I believe the book, I really do: in only a few weeks, I learned to draw a halfway-decent depiction of one of the chairs in our living room. Dream big, self. <br />
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<b>December: Arranging music</b><br />
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Frankly, by this point in the year, I was exhausted. Also, work was crazy--CRAZY--and we were leaving on a nearly four-week trip in the third week of December, so I didn't have much time for anything other than working and packing. However, true to my obsessive nature, I had to pick something, and I had been wanting some new music to play on my harp for a while, so voila: arranging music. <br />
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This, too, is something I've dabbled in before, though it was as long ago as high school, when I was taking harp lessons and music theory classes, both of which were natural breeding grounds for experimenting. (As an aside, I graduated from high school ten years ago. TEN YEARS! I can't believe it.) It seems fitting to start and end the year with something I had tried before, though, as nice bookends to a satisfying and interesting year. <br />
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I still don't have a piece fully arranged for the harp, of course, and as much as I tell myself that I'll finish it someday, I probably won't. I did work on something for a while, though, starting in December, so it totally counts. For the curious, it was a transposition and adjustment of the piano + viola duet medley of "If You Could Hie To Kolob" and "Adam-ondi-Ahman" found here. If I ever finish it, it will be lovely. <br />
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So that's the Year of Skills. A little bit crazy, a little bit interesting. I'm glad I did it, no question, but for 2012 I have made no such ambitious plans; I'm a little burned on huge resolutions, to be honest. I still read <i>The New Yorker </i>every month, a la 2010, and I've rotated quilting and drawing into my roster of relaxation activities, and I'm confident I can scuba dive again the next time I need to, but this year I've got nothing to prove and nothing to strive for; my written resolutions at the beginning of the year were things like "blog more" and "go to the dentist." Resolution 1? Check. Resolution 2? Time to find a dentist. </div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-18925483208741162372012-05-20T21:56:00.000-07:002012-05-20T21:56:03.401-07:00The Year of Skills: Part 3<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>July: Bike Repair</b><br /><br />
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July was positively lame compared to June. I know, I know, I'm sorry, but I can't keep up that level of glamor forever. <br /><br />Another thing I can't keep forever--check out that smooth transition--is my bicycle. While we were in Ethiopia over Christmas, our next-door neighbor who never locks the doors (we live in Oakland: who doesn't lock the doors?!?) failed, yet again, to lock the door, and our bicycles, which we kept in a hallway closet, were stolen. Let's take this moment to mourn my bicycle, which I <a href="http://purplepetra.blogspot.com/2008/06/bicycle-bicycle-bicycle.html">loved passionately.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pxZppY5JGY8/T7nHBUjotUI/AAAAAAAABEY/I9fVL4R9cFE/s1600/DSCN2656.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pxZppY5JGY8/T7nHBUjotUI/AAAAAAAABEY/I9fVL4R9cFE/s320/DSCN2656.JPG" width="320" /></a><br /><br />Isn't it beautiful? Also, heavy.<br /><br />In any case, in July I saw an advertisement for free bike repair classes offered at a chain of bike shops around here, and I thought that was the perfect skill for the month, especially as I was taking my bike into the city (and by the store) anyway to get to the pier for a sailing offsite for work. (OK, I can keep up that level of glamor forever, or at least for a long time.)<br /><br />I expected the bike repair classes to be, you know, classes, but instead I was the only one who showed up, and I got a free hour of individual bike repair instruction from an expert. Not a bad deal, I say, even though the main thing I learned is that I'm not strong enough to pull off or put on a bicycle tire. Clearly if I plan on ever getting a flat, I should do some finger workouts first. <br /><br /><b>August: Programming</b><br />
<br />The company where I work is incredibly engineering-oriented; the company exists for them and by them and the rest of us are just auxiliaries. I'm not complaining, mind you, but it does mean that I'm intrigued by their skills. As I see it, I file a request for something to happen to the site or to one of our tools, and bam! some time later (occasionally some <i>long</i> time later) it's fixed. It's like magic! (Slow, slow magic.) I wanted in on that magic myself; not that I'd ever get good enough to be able to fix the site myself, but at least with some grounding in programming I might not be so incredibly bowled over by what our engineers can do. <br /><br />There's not much more interesting to say about this one, and certainly no pictures. I started out teaching myself PHP with some tutorials online and books from the library, but I then expanded my repertoire to JavaScript because that's what Codecademy was teaching. It's fun, but I'm nowhere near confident enough to actually build anything myself. This, after quilting, is the skill that I continue to work on the most, mostly because, with the enthusiastic approval of my manager, I now get to use work time to practice. (Should I mention, yet again, how much I love my job?)<br /><br /><b>September: Canning</b><br />
<br />Mike's parents are impressively self-reliant people: they grow the majority of produce they eat, they built their own house, they even barter with friends who have sheep and bees. (Mike hates it when I say that because it makes them sound like they're hunter-gatherers in some pre-currency economy. So let me clarify: they trade cash for fresh honey. But from a friend! Someone they know!) Needless to say, I, the citified useless intellectual child of citified useless intellectual parents, think this is <i>incredible</i>. <br />
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With touching faith and optimism, Mike's mother thinks I could someday be the kind of homemaker she is, and, knowing how much I love her homemade jams, last Christmas she gave me a canning kit: mason jars, tongs, etc etc. I thought I would never use the kit--I like to eat <i>other people's</i> homemade jams, see; all of the joy but none of the work--but hey! It was the Year of Skills and I needed something to do in September, so I canned some heirloom tomatoes.<br />
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The canning process itself was fairly easy--chop up some tomatoes, put them in jars, boil away!--but because of that, I'm suspicious: what if I did it wrong? How am I supposed to know? I'd really rather not get botulism.<br />
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And thus, we have three small jars of tomatoes sitting in our kitchen still, waiting for the day that I give up entirely and throw them away. It was fun while it lasted. </div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-43276889374284204282012-05-14T11:18:00.000-07:002012-05-14T11:18:03.544-07:00The Year of Skills: Part 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>April: Driving a Stick Shift </b><br />
<br />I didn't have a car when we got married, but Mike did, and it was a stick shift. It's really embarrassing that it took me a year and a half of marriage to get around to learning how to drive our car, but Mike never seemed to mind giving me rides, and I didn't mind biking or taking BART when he couldn't. In any case, the Year of Skills was the push I needed to learn, and I spent several Saturdays in April out at the abandoned naval base in Alameda--flat, empty, and perfect for shifting gears--or at the cemetery in Piedmont--perfect for practicing hills--and now I can now confidently drive our car around town, and once I even drove it on the highway! When I say that with such pride I suddenly feel sixteen again, slowly turning circles in a parking lot with an anxious parent slamming on the air brakes. <br /><br />(This was also a small cheat, since a friend in college had tried to teach me to drive a stick shift before. He gave me several great lessons but I never got as high as third gear and I never actually drove his car on the road, just in a parking lot. By April 2011, I had been out of college for five years (!) and had essentially forgotten all of his lessons.)<br /><br />No picture here, either. It's a 1998 blue Honda Civic. Try to imagine it. <br /><br /><b>May: Making Cheese</b><br /><br />I didn't plan a skill for May until the third week, and I had no ideas for one until I posted about my goal on Facebook and solicited suggestions from friends. Nearly 100 comments later, a friend said that she and her husband had a leftover cheese-making kit they were trying to get rid of, and, in case I wasn't intrigued already, their homemade ricotta was delicious. Sold! So in May I tried to make cheese. Unlike the other skills so far, I tried to teach myself this one using the internet (oh, thank you internet!) and the instructions in the kit. Mike was in New York for most of May and June so I had plenty of time alone in our apartment to waste milk. I'm sure there are more efficient and fun ways to waste milk, but still, this wasn't so bad, even if it never resulted in proper cheese. (My first attempt ended in rubbery and unpalatable lumps and my last attempt ended in delicious curds that never really turned into a solid. I smeared some on a loaf of bread (homemade, of course--that's one skill I actually do have) and called it good. <br /><br /><b>June: Scuba Diving </b><br />
<br />Despite having lived in the tropics for years and despite being a passionate and dedicated snorkeler, I never learned to scuba dive. My youngest brother has heart trouble and my father has lung trouble, so obviously scuba diving was right out for our family. Also, I'm a total wuss and scuba diving seemed scary. Mike, however, loves scuba diving, and so with a trip to Indonesia planned for our summer, he insisted that I learn. I spent late May and early June reading all the books to prepare for the written certification test, and then at the end of June I did the initial pool work with a friend of Mike's in Davis, who is a certified instructor with a backyard pool. <br /><br />(Side note: his pool was only 4 feet deep. This was a good way to keep me from being terrified of the whole endeavor. This also meant that we had to use his neighbor's pool for the final portion of the training, and so we dutifully trooped down the street--wearing wetsuits, flippers, and air tanks--in search of a deeper backyard pool. It was like I was living in a Wes Anderson movie.)<br /><br />I just needed two more days of certification once we got to Indonesia, and, of course, Indonesia having no real rules, we persuaded the instructor to shorten that to one day. I'm now a card-carrying scuba diver, and getting over my fears paid off: we dove around and through a sunken World War II ship, and we saw sharks. Sharks! I can die happy now. <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aTaWFJz_Akg/T7FMNlp6pOI/AAAAAAAABEM/39UgUT6j-ao/s1600/scuba+diving" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aTaWFJz_Akg/T7FMNlp6pOI/AAAAAAAABEM/39UgUT6j-ao/s320/scuba+diving" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Two very white people about to enjoy a wreck dive with sharks. </span></div>
<br /></div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-79814870761062820092012-05-10T21:18:00.003-07:002012-05-10T21:18:44.335-07:00The Year of Skills: Part 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>January: Yoga </b><br />
<br />I started out with a small cheat, since I had tried yoga before. When I was in grad school, I very occasionally did Bikram Yoga with a friend, but stopped going when my friend's bring-a-guest-free coupons ran out. When a Groupon deal for a yoga place near my apartment came up, I snapped it up. I went a few times, sweat copiously, got ever-so-slightly more flexible, and stopped going when my Groupon visits ran out. I sense a theme. <br /><br />(As an aside, I find the idea of "hot yoga" as a specialized brand hilarious: in India, they just call that yoga.)<br /><br />I have no pictures here. You wouldn't want to see them even if I did. <br /><br /><b>February: Quilting</b><br />
<br />I've never been a big crafter, or at least not in the cutesy-things-on-Pinterest or craft-activities-at-church senses, but when I was in middle school I spent many happy hours in my room knitting, cross-stitching, and needlepointing, usually while listening to oldies radio, and one summer when I was in high school I spent many happy hours in my room making colorful collages out of pictures I cut from magazines. (Yes, I was a loser, but <i>such</i> a happy one.) In February I wanted a new skill that could take me back to that childhood tranquility, and when my aunt presented us with a beautiful quilt she had made for her wedding the answer was obvious. My aunt very graciously agreed to teach me the basics, and I launched into working on a baby quilt for my cousin, who, luckily, was not even pregnant at the time. (I don't need extra deadlines in my life.) <br /><br />I think this was my favorite skill for the year, and one of only a few that I've kept doing into 2012. I was right that quilting brings the meditative, time-slows-down sense I craved, and I love thinking about matching and contrasting fabrics; it's also a good outlet for the batiks I've been collecting since I lived in Indonesia. Any day I can find a few minutes to cut or sew or even just browse quilting blogs is a good one. I've got three or four quilts in progress at the moment, and now I just need to learn to actually finish my quilts, as I'm still working on the baby quilt I started last February. (This taught me another important lesson: don't hand-quilt. If you're a sub-par seamstress like me, it takes forever.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PxuYw8OH2IY/T6yQtQ7LciI/AAAAAAAABDw/iotVQHyhtxQ/s1600/photo.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PxuYw8OH2IY/T6yQtQ7LciI/AAAAAAAABDw/iotVQHyhtxQ/s320/photo.JPG" width="239" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Sometimes I take over our entire living room with a quilt. </i></span><br /><br /><b>March: Shooting a Gun</b><br />
<br />Yoga is so Bay Area, and quilting is so feminine, that I decided March was time for something completely different, and luckily, the universe cooperated. The team I had worked for half-time was invited to spend an afternoon at a private shooting range used by...a government agency, let's say, with a shooting instructor there to help us explore the guns. (I forget what I'm allowed to say to say here so I'll just be vague. Sorry) <br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bYCF_mORjQM/T6yRja7vxeI/AAAAAAAABD4/qs6OcI6Trao/s1600/172889_871336023465_406977_45921092_3885506_o.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bYCF_mORjQM/T6yRja7vxeI/AAAAAAAABD4/qs6OcI6Trao/s320/172889_871336023465_406977_45921092_3885506_o.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>I am not that badass. I am mostly just terrified. </i></span><br /><br />I had shot a gun once or twice before--usually at shooting ranges in Idaho with my grandpa, an avid hunter--but this still counted as new, because I had never gotten any actual gun training, not to mention from a government instructor, and I had never shot an original 1920s Tommy gun. (They are surprisingly heavy. I now know why 20s criminals shot from the hip.) <br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-R68ek9wo2nY/T6yRlsXfXsI/AAAAAAAABEA/gVmLpzZzteM/s1600/191782_871337894715_406977_45921112_5635306_o.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-R68ek9wo2nY/T6yRlsXfXsI/AAAAAAAABEA/gVmLpzZzteM/s320/191782_871337894715_406977_45921112_5635306_o.jpg" width="212" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>This is not a Tommy gun. I know that. </i></span><br /><br />My job situation ended up changing in early March (adding another newish skill, resume crafting and interviewing), but since I stupidly never abandon a goal (see that bit about <i>still</i> reading every article in every issue of <i>The New Yorker</i>), I stuck with the Year of Skills. To be continued!</div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-3824563273792577812012-05-08T21:02:00.002-07:002012-05-08T21:02:16.476-07:00The Year of Skills: Intro<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In 2010, my goal for the year was to read every article in every issue of that year's <i>The New Yorker</i>, and so for 2011 it was understandable that I'd be interested in doing slightly less reading. (I still read every article in every issue of <i>The New Yorker</i>, though; what can I say? I'm an obsessive personality.) Looking back at 2010, the beginning of the year was filled with instability, since in the course of about six months I got married, applied to law school, quit grad school, and got a full-time job. I think I was seeking something constant and familiar, and if you were raised in my house there is nothing more constant or familiar than <i>The New Yorker</i>. <br /><br />Looking back at 2011 now, I can see that I was facing exactly the opposite situation: my job, which I still loved, was promising to be become a little more stable and routine, as I had just finished working half-time for another team and was returning back to my original role after three months of being totally overwhelmed and learning challenging new things every day. I had just been asked to visit Austin to train a team there on doing my work, since after only a year, I was the second most senior member of the team (!). I was feeling like an expert, like I knew it all…and I hate that feeling. I need constant change and learning to be happy, and it was looking like my job was just going to let me coast. <br /><br />And so I set a different sort of goal for 2011: learn a new skill every month. The basic parameters were pretty loose: it had to be a <i>doing</i> skill, not a knowing skill; I had to start the skill during the month but didn't have to master it (either during the month or ever); and the definition of "new" was either something I had never tried or simply something I had tried but never succeeded at. I didn't choose all my skills beforehand, though I made a list of things I was interested in, and so many of the year's skills represented what was going on in my life at the time. If I were a better or more dedicated writer, I'd turn this experience into one of those A.J. Jacobs-style books, but alas, "writing a book" was not one of the year's skills, and instead, I'm going to turn it into a series of blog entries. Stay tuned for (dum dum <i>dummmmmm</i>) The Year of Skills. </div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-56982560452673742812012-04-06T22:17:00.003-07:002012-04-06T22:17:42.148-07:00No Fear of Flying<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Dallas has a lot of swimming pools. I mean, it makes sense, but still--as you fly over almost every single house has a bright blue dot in the backyard. This is what I've observed as I've flown through the Dallas-Forth Worth airport three times in the last three months. Also, the airport is enormous. <br /><br />That's all I know about the city of Dallas, since my layovers have never been more than an hour. The first time, in January, we were flying home from Ethiopia on a marathon of flight legs--Addis Ababa to Bahrain, Bahrain to London, London to Dallas, Dallas to San Francisco. Add to that the fact that our layover in Bahrain was nineteen hours long, and that we had walked two miles to the airport in Addis two day earlier only to find out that our flight had been cancelled, and you can imagine how exhausted we were.<br />
<br />(The trip to Ethiopia was really good aside from the canceled flight at the end. More on that later, I hope.)<br /><br />Four days after I got home from Ethiopia, I flew to Austin for work--passing through Dallas, of course--and I just flew home from Austin yet again today. I love traveling for work: I'm a nerd, I know, but the prospect of working 12 hours a day and then heading to a fancy hotel to exercise at a gym and watch TV until way too late at night is intensely exciting. <br /><br />I also love flying. Like, really really love it. Long flights get exhausting, of course, but most flights are like a little bubble of time that I'm totally free from distractions and my to-do list. I go into a strange fugue state of idle pleasures, because nothing you do on an airplane counts: I can read uninterrupted, I can listen to music and actually focus on it, I can stare out the window at swimming pools, I can even do the crossword and sudoku puzzles in the in-flight magazine, and I don't have to feel guilty about any of it! Even layovers don't bother me; airports are such interesting microcosms of the real world, like mini cities where the residents are from anywhere and everywhere (especially India) and the restaurants are all bland and overpriced but the chocolate is fabulous. <br /><br />(What, that's not a selling point for a city?)<br /><br />Really, though, my love of flying goes deeper than just the time wasting: air travel makes me proud to be human. Stop and think sometime about the coordination and logistical planning that goes into running an airport, but not for too long or you'll get a headache. It's like a complex hive of activity, except there's far more to do than just find flowers and make honey, and I love watching the hustle and bustle of thousands of people heading someplace different. Every time I pass through an airport, I make sure to stop in front of a departure board and imagine the possibilities, and I feel like an astronaut looking up at the night stars.) <br /><br />And, of course, I love the feeling of takeoff and landing; as far as I'm concerned, it's magic, and I feel proud of my species for figuring it out. I always try to get a window seat when I travel so I can look out the window as the plane goes faster and faster, speeding by the airport and the control tower and the empty land around, and then, just when I think the plane can't possibly get any faster, whoosh! We're in the air! And I pause for a second thinking about how much the airplane weighs and why it shouldn't be able to fly and then I think, "Ha! I'd like to see a chimpanzee do <i>that</i>."</div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-10781886517986889312012-01-23T17:58:00.001-08:002012-01-23T17:58:11.053-08:00Reading Roundup 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I read far, far fewer books this year than<a href="http://purplepetra.blogspot.com/2011/02/which-is-chinese-zodiac-year-of.html"> last year.</a> First of all, my commute changed (to become much shorter; hooray!), but second of all, my New Year's resolution for the year meant far less reading time than usual. (More on that later.)<br />
<br />
So it's hard to write a "best books" post when I have only 88 books to choose from. I should change the rules to include <i>New Yorker</i> articles--I'm obsessive and read every article of every issue again this year--but that would require me to have a list somewhere of <i>New Yorker</i> articles. (I really liked the one about George RR Martin and how he took a really long time to finish the 5th book of his fantasy series. That was interesting. Oh, and the one about the virus hunter was really cool.)<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, I spent part of a boring work meeting today looking at my book list and choosing my favorites for the year, so here we are. Another strange thing about this retrospective is how little fiction qualifies for my "best of" list--I did read and enjoy some novels this year, I swear, but apparently I spent more time on non-fiction. This must be the first time ever, because I've generally been a die-hard fiction fan. I must be growing up.<br />
<br />
<b>Fiction Top...Few </b><br />
<i>Room</i>, by Emma Donoghue<br /><i>Freedom</i>, by Jonathan Franzen<br /><i>The Surrendered</i>, by Chang-Rae Lee<br />
<i>The Bonfire of the Vanities</i>, by Tom Wolfe<br />
<i>The Name of the Rose</i>, by Umberto Eco<br />
<br />
Yeah, that's it. I read lots of other stuff I enjoyed, but it was mainly returning to my roots by reading authors I've long loved--Connie Willis, Sharon Kay Penman, A.S. Byatt--but I can't really call those books great fiction in the same sense as the above. I also listened to a number of classics--<i>Portrait of a Lady, Ivanhoe, Sister Carrie</i>--and enjoyed them far more than I thought I would. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Non-Fiction Top 10</b><br />
<i>American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us</i>, by Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell<br /><i>The Warmth of Other Suns</i>, by Isabel Wilkerson<i></i><br /><i>Cadillac Desert</i>, by Marc Reisner <br /><i>The Emperor of Maladies</i>, by Siddhartha Mukherjee<br /><i>Bossypants,</i> by Tina Fey<br /><i>Black Hawk Down</i>, Mark Bowden<br /><i>A Singular Woman</i>, by Janny Scott<br /><i>A Midwife’s Tale</i>, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich<br /><i>At Home</i>, by Bill Bryson<br /><i>Wild Swans</i>, by Jung Chang<br />
<br />
<br />
This is where it got at least a little competitive. Honorable mentions to <i>The Price of Motherhood</i>, by Ann Crittenden, <i>Infidel</i>, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and <i>Cinderella Ate My Daughter</i>, by Peggy Orenstein--all three were flawed but thought-provoking. <br />
<br />
I should do a companion list for the 10 worst books I read each year. I've got a small side gig as a book reviewer that would provide endless fodder. </div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-68769228634915974402011-12-15T19:10:00.001-08:002011-12-15T19:10:23.611-08:00I get all my life advice from pop songs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Watching SNL over the weekend, I was exposed for the first time to Robyn and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ImxY6hnfA&ob=av2e">this</a> song. Yes, I know, I live under a rock. A rock with a Radiohead-themed Pandora station. Watch the video if you want to see someone wearing what appears to be the shrunken pelt of Muppet dancing even worse than me, but I want to talk for a moment about the song. It's called "Call Your Girlfriend," and according to <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/12054-call-your-girlfriend/?utm_campaign=tracks&utm_medium=site&utm_source=related">Pitchfork</a>, it's a "soaringly tuneful electro-pop ballad" with Robyn "tell[ing] her boyfriend exactly how to break it off with the other woman to inflict the least emotional damage."<br />
<br />
Sure. So I listened to the song several times after I first heard it, because apparently a soaringly tuneful electro-pop ballad really hits the spot right now. I was really enjoying the lyrics like "Call your girlfriend/
It's time you had the talk/Give your reasons/Say it's not her fault," and it took me 3-4 listens before I realized the actual scenario was that Robyn was the new woman. Before that, I just heard it as a song full of helpful life advice, as if this particular Swedish pop star is just honestly invested in seeing other people end relationships with grace and maturity. I was so tickled by the idea of a Top 40 pop song about something other than the singer's own heartaches that I instantly started of thinking of other sorts of solid life advice that could make great songs in this genre of "pop music for responsible grown-ups":<br />
<br />
Wash The Dishes (..."it's time you took your turn")<br />
Stop Speeding ("...it's time to obey the law")<br />
Stand Up Straight ("...it's time to see a chiropractor")<br />
Pull Yourself Together ("...it's time you dealt with your issues")<br />
<br />
And, of course, Call Your Mother ("it's time she heard from you"). <br />
<br /></div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-32343972184240440092011-11-29T18:56:00.001-08:002011-11-29T21:13:51.900-08:00I'm giving thanks I survived Thanksgiving<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
We drove down to Southern California for Thanksgiving: a day and a half in Riverside, two days in Irvine, and a day in San Diego. It feels like we (okay, Mike) spent most of the vacation driving, but it was worth it: we hung out with family, ate impressive amounts of decadent food, and even did some hiking. Also, this was the first Thanksgiving I spent with my nuclear family since 2003, so that was lovely. All in all, it was good.<br />
<br />
Except for when our muffler fell off.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_cMSZg--Des/TtWcfPSytjI/AAAAAAAABDo/fHsecsLw3ZE/s1600/319583_10100216095310239_17826092_44218768_1311437565_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_cMSZg--Des/TtWcfPSytjI/AAAAAAAABDo/fHsecsLw3ZE/s320/319583_10100216095310239_17826092_44218768_1311437565_n.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
<br />
It was midnight and we were driving away from my aunt's house when we heard a funny dragging noise and then, just a minute or two later, a loud thud. We all jumped out to investigate and I took a picture, of course. That's the muffler, rusted clean through.<br />
<br />
We didn't feel like getting it fixed right then, so we did the drive back from San Diego with no muffler. The car had been noisy for a long time (that's the thing about a rusty muffler, you see), so that wasn't a problem. I was worried about the carbon monoxide issue, though--would it kill us and HOW WOULD WE KNOW?!?<br />
<br />
(I know with most newer cars there's not really as big a risk, but my dad had a friend who died of carbon monoxide poisoning, many years ago, so I'm probably more paranoid than the average bear about this.)<br />
<br />
So I'm sitting in the car, six hours into the drive back, and fretting more and more about carbon monoxide, so much so that I finally decide to look up the symptoms. Here's the list I find:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Irritability</li>
<li>Headache </li>
<li>Loss of focus</li>
<li>Nausea </li>
<li>Shortness of breath</li>
<li>Claustrophobia </li>
<li>Unexplained panic</li>
</ul>
I read the list of symptoms and realize I have <i>every. single. one. of. them</i>. I am going to die! Quick, quick, roll down the windows! And then I realize I was premenstrual (irritability), under-rested (headache), working on something really boring (loss of focus), eating only pretzels and Bugles (nausea), while sitting (shortness of breath) in a car (claustrophobia) that might be killing me silently (unexplained panic). Oh. <br />
<br />
How clever of carbon monoxide, generated by a car, to mimic so precisely the exact symptoms of a road trip!</div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-894264346602651432011-11-21T21:18:00.001-08:002011-11-21T21:21:25.250-08:00"Poker Face", the early drafts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face<br />
(Mum mum mum mah)<br />
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face<br />
(Mum mum mum mah)<br /><br />
I won't tell you that I love you</i>
<i><br />
Kiss or hug you<br />Cause I'm... </i><br />
<br />
Shakin' with my bacon?<br />
Doing kegels with my bagel?<br />
Feeling awful about my waffle?<br />
Wanting to boast about my toast?<br />
<br />
<i>Bluffin' with my muffin<br />I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning </i></div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-6148876169068133382011-11-05T19:45:00.000-07:002011-11-05T19:45:46.196-07:00And that's why you always leave a note<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was just looking through the draft posts in my queue--I've started
far more blog entries than I've finished, alas--when I came across one
called "Note To Self." The entire draft was the following three lines:<br />
<br />
<i>Remember that time I set off the fire alarm in the HBLL?</i><br />
<i>Make up and out</i><br />
<i>Why should the hippo be denied the intimacy of the modern dental experience?</i><br />
<br />
I can vaguely remember what each thing referred to--I accidentally set off the fire alarm in BYU's library once; "make up and out" is a great example of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma#Syllepsis">syllepsis</a>, one of my favorite figures of speech; and the line about the hippo is something I once wrote down and then found, three years later, unable to figure out why--but I can't remember for the life of me what the connection between the three was, or why the draft was a "note to self." Man, I really wish I had finished that post.</div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-38460505313774844272011-10-30T18:52:00.000-07:002011-10-30T18:52:05.099-07:00Abyssinia, I'll be seein' ya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
What I've just read: <i>The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears</i>, a novel about an Ethiopian immigrant in Washington, D.C., and <i>Beneath the Lion's Gaze</i>, a novel about an Ethiopian family during the political turmoil of the 1970s. Oh, and a series of long Wikipedia articles about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie_I">Haile Selassie</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derg">Derg</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez_alphabet">Ge'ez</a>. <br />
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What I'm reading right now: <i>Eating the Flowers of Paradise</i>, a travelogue about a trip through Ethiopia and Yemen in search of qat.<br />
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What I'm going to read next: <i>Cutting for Stone</i>, a novel set in India, Ethiopia and New York.<br />
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My grandma always said that pleasure has three parts: looking forward to it, experiencing it, and remembering it. From my recent reading habits, you can guess I've got a trip to Ethiopia coming up (in late December/early January, just in time for Orthodox Christmas). I don't know what the actual experience or the memories will be like, but I'm thoroughly enjoying the anticipation.</div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-50280705208461707732011-10-24T08:58:00.001-07:002011-10-24T08:58:31.827-07:00The Phony King of England<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
These past few weeks I've been rediscovering some old loves--blogging, I guess, but also Modest Mouse and Sharon Kay Penman's historical fiction and cottage cheese. I could eat cottage cheese all day long. When I was little and my family went out to eat at Ruby Tuesday (we were high-class people, clearly), I would order the salad bar and then load a plate full of cherry tomatoes and cottage cheese. Yum.<br />
<br />
The biggest rediscovery, though, is audiobooks, specifically a little site called <a href="http://librivox.org/">Librivox</a>: free audiobooks in the public domain, read by volunteers. It neatly combines my love of reading, multitasking, and free things, with a tiny dash of the ridiculous, since the volunteers are often trying to practice their English: with Librivox, I used to listen to <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i> read by someone with a heavy Chinese accent while I ran endless miles training for a half marathon. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.<br />
<br />
Fast forward to now. I have a whole shelf of books I've bought but never read, and since Mike is obsessed with seeing the "finished" stack grow, I've promised that I'll actually work on my shelf. (It needs no more description, in this house: "my shelf" is enough.) Since I haven't been reading as much this year due to a certain New Year's resolution, Librivox is a great way to catch up on my backlog and, little by little, clear the shelf.<br />
<br />
So I'm listening to <i>Ivanhoe, </i>a book I bought at 13 and have been meaning to read ever since, and I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how entertaining it is, considering how many times I've started and rejected it in the past. The prose is pretty florid, but there's a decent adventure story under all the 19th century romanticism, and besides, who can resist a good Robin Hood reference? I didn't know before how many of the current Robin Hood legends came from <i>Ivanhoe</i>, and I was pleasantly surprised to suddenly be hearing the old stories about Prince John and King Richard the Lionheart and Robin of Locksley trouncing all challengers in a shooting contest. I found myself picturing the scenes in my mind's eye, more than I usually do: Prince John, wily and incompetent, with his crown falling down around his eyes; King Richard, big, bluff, blond, and lionlike; Robin Hood, a brilliant archer but somewhat wobbly on his long, spindly legs...<br />
<br />
Wait. Spindly legs? Lions? Prince John's crown falling over his ears? As it turns out, all of my images of the Robin Hood story are taken <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6qelAsOV9w">straight from Disney.</a> Not that that's a bad thing: Disney's version is a lot funnier than Sir Walter Scott's, and I have to admit to mild disappointment when <i>Ivanhoe</i>'s tournament scene didn't end with rhino guards running wild. That scene always cracks me up. <br />
<br />
(A note on the video, if you click through: it's in Danish. This is partly because it's the best version I could find, and partly because of a game that I got from my friend <a href="http://allmygettings.blogspot.com/">Alea</a>, where you try to find clips from Disney in their "original" language. You know--<i>The Jungle Book</i> in the original Hindi. <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i> in the original French. <i>Hercules</i> in Greek, <i>Mulan</i> in Chinese, <i>Pocahontas</i> in Algonquian. I couldn't find Robin Hood in Early Middle English, so Danish, being the original homeland of the Jutes, will have to suffice.)<br />
<br />
So there I am, listening to Ivanhoe via Librivox and imagining one of my favorite childhood movies. It's like a smorgasbord of old loves! Next time I'll throw in some cottage cheese as a snack.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-57792782453412149582011-10-17T17:42:00.002-07:002011-10-17T17:42:48.965-07:00I'm not dead. I feel fine. I feel happy!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm still alive, and I still, in some sense, have a blog, though I have to admit I was a little surprised when my Blogger login credentials worked.<br />
<br />
(That is, until I remembered that I can just use my Google account. See how long it's been since I've blogged?)<br />
<br />
It seems like every blog I check in on these days is dead or dying. Maybe that's
the way of the world, but it makes me a little sad. Reading back through some of my old posts, I think--oh yeah, this was fun. So let's keep doing it, ok? <br />
<br />
Outside my window right now is a neighbor shouting, "Where are you?" She repeated it several times, louder and slower each time, until she finally spelled it out: Where W-H-E-R-E are A-R-E you Y-O-U? I hope she learns where her interlocutor is, because I'd like to go to bed soon.<br />
<br />
So where am I? We're living in North Oakland these days, not far from where I lived when I wrote<a href="http://purplepetra.blogspot.com/2009/02/there-there.html"> this </a>post. Unfortunately, we're on the wrong side of the tracks through an already transitional neighborhood, which means lots of noise. Noise and pot smoke. But hey, rent is cheap, and who doesn't love a contact high on a Saturday night? <br />
<br />
I'm still at working at my unnamed Internet company, and it's still fantastic. Not just the perks and benefits, though those are pretty great, or even the people--awesome, every last one--but the work! I moved to a different role at the company about six months ago, and now I'm an internet payments fraud analyst. Doesn't that sound like a real job? It totally does, and so corporate, too. Who would have thought I'd enjoy any sort of corporate work? Not me. And yet I still wake up excited every morning for the problems I'm going to tackle that day. I'm like a recruiting informercial or something, but I swear I'm not joking. Clearly, I'm not leaving it for law school anytime soon. <br />
<br />
I'm still married, and it's still fantastic. You know, just to make sure I don't rave about my job more than my marriage. Marriage has its own perks and benefits, I guess, though it's pretty hard to beat three gourmet meals a day. <br />
<br />
Not much has really changed for me in the last, oh, year or so, and in general I just feel far more boring than I used to be. I still read a lot. I've convinced Mike that traveling is a good thing (we just went to Singapore and Indonesia, and we're planning a trip to Ethiopia this winter) and he's convinced me that I can tolerate backpacking. (The California coast is beautiful, so much so that it's almost--dare I say it?--worth hiking!) I'm not an early morning seminary teacher anymore, thank goodness, though my new calling comes with its own irritations. (Meetings, meetings, meetings! I'm definitely not corporate enough yet to enjoy endless meetings.) <br />
<br />
So that's me. What about you? <br />
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<br /></div>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-33107511273461042582011-06-11T21:04:00.002-07:002011-06-11T21:19:24.392-07:00All I Really Need to Know I Learned From "Clueless"<ul><li>Old people can be so sweet.</li><li>Don't date a man who dresses better than you. What would you bring to the relationship? </li><li>That Polonius guy, not Hamlet, said "To thine own self be true."</li><li>Sitting with your legs crossed towards someone is an unequivocal sex invite. </li><li>Street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking but not necessarily misogynistic undertones.</li><li>Don't bother learning to park--everywhere you go has valet.</li><li>Anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good. </li><li> It is one thing to spark up a doobie and get laced at parties, but it is quite another to be fried all day. </li><li>It does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. </li><li>'Tis a far far better thing doing stuff for other people. </li><li>Do a lap before you commit to a location. </li><li>As if!</li></ul>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-36441209270005169742011-02-23T20:25:00.008-08:002011-02-26T00:01:36.501-08:00Which is the Chinese zodiac Year of the Bookworm?<span style="font-size:100%;">Lots happened to me in 2010--I got a job, for one, though I think we've already been over that--but I'm pretty sure I will always remember it as the year of reading. I typically read about 120 books a year, so it's not like 2010 was the year I learned to read for fun or anything, but still, having a job did wonders for my reading time, and my 2 hour daily commute certainly didn't hurt. (I read new book every day for the first two months at my job, a reading pace that eventually had me looking around for new hobbies.)<br /><br />After that introduction you're probably expecting some amazing stat about books completed, but really, I only finished 150 books in 2010, and I didn't even come close to completing my life goal of reading every novel that has ever won a Booker prize. (29 down, 15 to go.) I did, however, complete my goal of reading every single article in every single issue of my year's subscription to </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The New Yorker, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">which, frankly, was exhausting: it's a </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >weekly</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> magazine. Weekly!<br /><br />(On the plus side, I can add "I read a New Yorker article about that once" to my list of most-spoken phrases; whenever I say it now, Mike just laughs and replies, "Of course you did.")<br /><br />I can't name a favorite New Yorker article, besides "anything by Anthony Lane or Adam Gopnik," but since I keep a list of all the books I read, I thought it would be fun to look back at what I've read and play favorites; plus, I'm obsessed with end-of-year lists and wanted to clutter the internet with my own version...even if it doesn't happen until February. Without further ado, then, I give you the best books I read in 2010, with no particular order to the lists, as that would be too hard.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" >Fiction Top 10 </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Matterhorn</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Karl Marlantes<br /></span> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by David Mitchell<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Sacred Hunger</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Barry Unsworth<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >A Visit From the Goon Squad</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Jennifer Egan<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Let the Great World Spin</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Colum McCann<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Lonely Polygamist</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Brady Udall<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Post-Birthday World</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Lionel Shriver<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Robert Olen Butler<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Believers</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Zoe Heller<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >March</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Geraldine Brooks<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" >Fiction Honorable Mentions</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Geoff Dyer</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >Then We Came to the End</span><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >, by Joshua Ferris</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Sectio</style><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The White Tiger</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Aravind Adiga<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Cloudsplitter</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Russell Banks<br /><br /></span><p style="font-weight: bold;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Non-Fiction Top 10 </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Rebecca Skloot</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Kitchen Confidential</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Anthony Bourdain</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Game Change</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin</span></p><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Big Short</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Michael Lewis<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Delusions of Gender</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Cordelia Fine<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Bonk</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Mary Roach<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Complications</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Atul Gawande<br /></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Manhood for Amateurs</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Michael Chabon </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Zeitoun</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by Dave Eggers</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">John Adams</span>, by David McCullough </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >Non-Fiction Honorable Mentions</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Wisdom of Whores,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by Elizabeth Pisani<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >The White Man’s Burden</span><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >, by William Easterly</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >How Women Got Their Curves</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, by David Barash and Judith Lipton</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;">Discuss </span><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >amongst yourselves.</span>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-20684772531122673172011-02-20T22:01:00.004-08:002011-02-20T22:06:23.976-08:00Yeah, I GuessI secretly love it when the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/internet/21blog.html">describes my life</a>.<br /><br />Or do I secretly hate it?<br /><br />Either way, this article is clearly me, drifting off to Facebook. (In my defense, I have to keep myself in a job, right?)<br /><br />My apologies, dear readers. Someday I will blog again, I swear.Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-11669865812162609912010-09-29T15:59:00.003-07:002010-10-09T13:23:43.108-07:00When September Ends<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">September has come and and, for the first time since I started preschool in 1987, it didn't mark the start of a school year for me.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Not that it really feels like fall here in the Bay Area, with 90-degree weather hitting us hard (remind me why we don’t have air-conditioning again?), but still, listening to so many of my friends talk about the start of school, you’d think I’d be feeling some small amount of nostalgia for the erstwhile meaning of September—homework! books! teachers’ dirty looks!--but the only thing I can bring myself to miss is the textbooks,<span style=""> </span>and I’m trying devotedly to avoid thinking about that; I’ve already got a stack of books in our living room roughly the height of the Space Needle, so why would I want to add more books to fail to find time to read?<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Instead of nostalgia, though, all I feel is…nothing. Nothing with a small side of relief, that is, which makes me think, phew, did I hate grad school that much?<span style=""> </span>Yes and no: I don’t regret my time in grad school at all, and I still believe it was the right thing for me at the time, but it’s just so much nicer, right now, to have a job, especially when that job gives me free food, laundry, and transportation; a flexible schedule; and a workplace full of really smart, motivated, and totally kick-ass people. I was always told the real world was a drag, but I’m having a blast.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Is Silicon Valley not the real world? Is that the answer? In any case: goodbye, September. I'll see you again next year. Goodbye, school. I'll see you when I see you.<br /></p> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style>Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26637694.post-61275290027647645012010-07-15T22:07:00.006-07:002010-07-15T22:47:56.166-07:00Fragments, shored and otherwise<span style="font-style: italic;">Let me, right away, express regret that my writing skills have regressed to bullet points only. I'm corporate now; what do you expect?</span><br /><br />In some unspecified order of importance:<br /><br />-I applied to law school (<a href="http://purplepetra.blogspot.com/2010/02/turn-and-face-strange.html">remember</a>?) and got into Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. I turned down Harvard and Stanford and chose Berkeley because that's the only place Mike was accepted, and yes, I fully intend to use "I turned down Harvard for you" as a fighting tactic for the rest of our lives. I think that's well worth the $75 application fee, don't you? In any case, I've deferred law school for another year to hang out and mooch free food and laundry services from work. (They ironed my jeans last week. Hilarious.)<br /><br />-Mike finally, on his third try, got accepted to a Berkeley Ph.D. program. They initially rejected him, but after he won an award from Army (a three year fellowship, plus a seal for marksmanship), Berkeley was persuaded to take him on. (Apparently you really can get anything in this world for money.) He'll be in the Materials Science department, so if you ever want to know anything about tulle, gingham, or silk, you know who to ask.<br /><br />- We're leaving next Tuesday night for an Epically Amazing Trip to the Middle East (EATME2010, since I love travel acronyms) and, as usual, I have woefully underplanned. Last year I left for a month in Vietnam without ever once opening a guidebook, and this year I'm only slightly better about details--I've skimmed a guidebook, at least, if not acted on any of the knowledge. Last year's trip was fine, though, aside from the arrest, so I'm comfortable adopting "winging it" as a travel strategy since I don't plan on doing any illegal research. We'll be in Turkey, Egypt, and Israel, and I fully expect to have that damn "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv-KcF3Rkv8&feature=related">Istanbul, Not Constantinople</a>" song in my head for at least the first full week.<br /><br />-On that note, in one of our many planning conversations that have led to few or no actions, we discussed the possibility of renting a car to explore Mount Nimrod in Turkey and I realized that of all the adult things I've done this year--getting married, getting a full-time job, having a subscription to <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker</span>--renting a car makes me feel the most grown-up. After all, the minimum age limits on those other things are much lower. We'll see how the car rental goes before I commit to giving up my "poor student" bus-oriented travel style.<br /><br />-I always used to joke that since I already had short hair I was guaranteed not to be one of those girls who gets married and cuts all her hair off. Instead, I seem to be doing the opposite: I haven't cut my hair since the wedding and, even more frighteningly, neither has Mike. We--meaning mostly Mike's beard--are <span style="font-style: italic;">out of control</span>. As it turns out, gaining weight is not the only way to let yourself go.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Hn8232S4j1E/TD_sdgK1N0I/AAAAAAAAA-8/lJi6KITc9ic/s1600/faebook+picture+sailing.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 166px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Hn8232S4j1E/TD_sdgK1N0I/AAAAAAAAA-8/lJi6KITc9ic/s200/faebook+picture+sailing.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5494370062011021122" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Yes, we are dressed as pirates. Pirates with hippie hair. Make love not warrrrrrrr. </span></span><br /></div><br />-Since I seem to just be rehashing all my recent Facebook status updates in this post, I'll continue: I'm obsessed with Trivial Pursuit, even though I can't answer any of the sports questions; I've been reading a lot lately (93 books so far in 2010, plus every single <span style="font-style: italic;">New Yorker</span>); I've been running barefoot and my feet are horribly cut up; I fell down the stairs a while ago and hurt my foot; I make terrible puns; and I felt gypped when we spent 4.5 hours at the San Francisco Opera's production of "Die Walkure" and didn't see a single fat lady in a horned helmet. Gosh, I'm boring on Facebook.Petrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15454911336796743360noreply@blogger.com5