Potatoes in the Mist

Hi! I woke up early for no reason. So you get a book post from me. Over Thanksgiving break, I read: Cleaving: A Memoir of Marriage, Meat and Obsession by Julie Powell. Considerably darker than its predecessor, Julie & Julia. The focus has moved off of Julia Child and onto her (real-life) affair. Unbelievably, she thanks both lover and husband in the acknowledgments. Waiting for You by Susane Colasanti. Unapologetic yet intelligent teenage fluff. If you like YA fiction, this will hit the spot. And those were all the books I brought with me...so I started reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which was at my mother's house. I'd been put off by both its length (444 pages) and seemingly hackneyed subject (race relations in 1960s Mississippi). But it's a lot better than I thought it would be. I only have 100 pages left.

So how was your Thanksgiving? A few interesting things happened on mine. First, my brother became obsessed with his deep fryer. He retreated to the basement and started frying everything he could find. His son would bring up more and more fried goodies. I couldn't bring myself to eat them. But they were fascinating to watch. He deep-fried Twinkies, a Snickers bar, a piece of pepperoni pizza (no one wanted to go near that one), and an ice cream sandwich. Apparently if something's cold, you only fry it for 35 seconds. E.g., fried ice cream. A sad thing: E was playing on the stairs at my brother's place, and although my mom and sister were watching him, he took a tumble. He got a little bump and I was really sad. Thankfully, it's all gone today. An odd thing: as Mom was pulling out of my brother's driveway, I suddenly became aware of screaming faces behind us, in a parked car. They were convinced my mother hit their car. But nobody in our car felt any impact. Mom was a...

I feel like once you have a kid, you're terminally uncool. A friend of mine on Facebook wrote that Lady Gaga and Dali are similar - "disgusting minds but amazingly talented." Now, this friend is the same age. I met him in college. But he is gay and single and hip. I change diapers. I thought, Who is Lady Gaga? I (gulp) looked her up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia helpfully told me about her most popular songs. I went to iTunes and bought one of them. Then I mentioned on Facebook that I liked it, and it came out that I had never heard it before today. Immediately my sister wrote: "Seriously? You just heard it for the first time?" Then my cousin/godmother, who is in her fifties, wrote: "Bearette, are you living underground in the Big Apple? Even your old godmother hears Lady Gaga all the time." Yup. Terminally uncool. I think I'll put on some Ben-Gay and go to sleep.

Wow, it's been a while since I've blogged. Anyway, November and December will be months filled with travel for me. Going to my mother's house for Thanksgiving (actually, I'll be staying at my mother's, going to my brother's on the actual day). Probably going to the family Christmas party, an annual extravaganza where all my first cousins and their children are gathered under one (rented) roof. And then Christmas itself. I haven't started my shopping. Have you? Am currently reading The Housekeeper and the Professor. I'll be done with it soon since it's a short, crisp 180 pages. Before that, I read The Lacuna. Now, I usually like Barbara Kingsolver, but this latest offering was seriously bloated at 507 pages. It needed an editor's judicious hand. I'd like her to go back to simple, character-centered fiction instead of Novels with a Message. The message of this one? Communism is great, the press is evil. Yawn.

So this blog is going to be booky for a bit. I finished Invisible by Paul Auster. As usual, it was elegantly written and non-linear. I first started reading him because someone recommended him to me, and now I recommend him to others. So if you haven't read him, you might want to check him out. The Music of Chance is a good one to start with. The protagonist loses a high-stakes poker game and finds himself building a stone wall in the middle of nowhere... After that, I read Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters. This was a children's book with echoes of Harriet the Spy. Not quite as good, of course, but still enjoyable. And now I am reading Knit the Season by Kate Jacobs. It's part of the Friday Night Knitting Club series. The literary equivalent of a warm blanket. What are you reading? And do you like it?