Condalmo

Strong words regarding the stupidity of Democrats.

I find little to disagree with here.

You ask:

The Democrats aren't that stupid, are they?

Yes, yes, we are.  In fact, we're probably even more stupid than you can possibly imagine.  After all, we're too stupid to realize that when we worry that the Republicans say we're weak, we are being weak; too stupid to realize that when you consent to an Attorney General who won't say whether waterboarding is torture, you get an AG who says later that waterboarding is not torture if it's done to the right people; too stupid to realize that people want us to confront Bush more, not less; too stupid to realize that Hillary voted for the war with Iraq and another possible war with Iran; too stupid to realize that the Clintons both supported limited torture until the polls said otherwise; too stupid to realize that the Clintons are totally unethical (and why? because Bill is so damned charming!); too stupid to recognize that Bill Clinton sold us all out (I'm sorry, but gays and lesbians were not the only ones to give hand over fist only to be disappointed); too stupid to realize that 50% of the country will never vote for Hillary; too stupid to realize that we've got our Reagan, the reincarnate of JFK, staring us in the face; and too stupid to realize that, for the first time that I can think of, the most liberal candidate is the one that is most acceptable to independents and Republicans.

We don't deserve to win this election if we don't nominate Obama. And you'll see a lot of Democrats like me abandon the party if we don't.  Just watch.  It's hard to keep associating yourself with this kind of ineptitude.

(50% and rising.)

"Be Kind Rewind": the best/worst trailer you'll ever see.

It makes me want to hug everyone, and then hide in my house for a month.  Love Gondry.  Fear him.

Toni Morrison endorses daily exercise, deep-fried Twinkies.

Eloquently.  Twinkie? 

A Twinkie is a "Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling" distributed by Continental Baking Co., which is owned by Kansas City-based Interstate Bakeries Corporation. Twinkies measure 4" x 1.5" (10 cm x 3.75 cm) and are usually sold in packages of two (though they can be sold in packages of three) or boxed in groups of ten individually-wrapped cakes.  (via)

Also not available at libraries.

Obama.

"I believe with great conviction that Barack Obama should be the next President. I have been paying close attention to him since the Democratic convention in 2004. I feel that he is more a statesman than a politician. He was against the war when it was an unpopular position (and Hillary was for the war at that time), Obama is for energy and environmental conservation. He is for healthcare reform. Check him out for yourself www.barackobama.com.

Proceeds from this print go to produce prints for a large statewide poster campaign." Thanks. -Shepard  (via)

I don't know how to elaborate on the reasons why I'm supporting Obama without coming across as hackneyed.  I'll save that for another time.  A conservative blogger and journalist has been covering the race closely and this post is one among many that are worth reading, if you're looking at the three Democrats in contention - hell, if you're looking at all the candidates.

UPDATE:  From the same site as that last link:

"I had just been asked a question -- I don't remember which one -- and Obama was sitting right next to me. Then the moderator went across the room, I think to Chris Dodd, so I thought I was home free for a while. I wasn't going to listen to the next question. I was about to say something to Obama when the moderator turned to me and said, 'So, Gov. Richardson, what do you think of that?' But I wasn't paying any attention! I was about to say, 'Could you repeat the question? I wasn't listening.' But I wasn't about to say I wasn't listening. I looked at Obama. I was just horrified. And Obama whispered, 'Katrina. Katrina.' The question was on Katrina! So I said, 'On Katrina, my policy . . .' Obama could have just thrown me under the bus. So I said, 'Obama, that was good of you to do that,'" - Bill Richardson, currently weighing whether to back the Illinois senator.

Do you think HRC would have done the same thing? 

Today:

The problem: after Florida defied the Democratic National Committee and moved its primary to an early position, the party stripped the state of its delegates. All the major candidates, out of respect to the party and fearful of offending voters in the traditional early states, pledged not to campaign in Florida. But now that it seems that Hillary Clinton might do well in the Florida election (and now that Iowa and New Hampshire are done), her campaign is proclaiming, Honor the Florida voter.

Reporters on the Clinton call asked if the Clinton crew was trying to have it both ways: not campaigning in Florida (when doing so could have hurt her elsewhere) but now claiming its delegates should be recognized. Not at all, said Mark Penn, her chief strategist, and Howard Wolfson, her communications director. Should you be "seen as desperate"? one reporter asked. "Something unexpected happened," Penn explained, referring to the reported large turn-out in Florida.

Most of the scribes on the call appeared to believe the Clintons were taking a somewhat situational position. And on the Obama campaign conference call, John Kerry hammered this point. He claimed that Hillary Clinton had said there would be no delegates coming out of FLorida, yet now she was adopting a different stance. The pro-Clinton AFSCME union, he noted, had blanketed Florida with pro-CLinton literature in a "subcampaign." He slapped the Clinton campaign for switching its position and not playing by the rules.

 

If the Amazon Kindle is the future of reading, what is the future of libraries?

Given that the Kindle (Twinkie!) is individualized, set up for one user - and said user can download to their heart's content - it creates a small problem.  Say the user "Baxter Memorial Library" loads books onto their Kindle and puts it out, available for patrons.  What's to stop Eddie Cobra from downloading whatever sinister, anarchist books he'd like, at the Library's expense?

Since the Kindle is, legally, only supposed to be used by one user, the ordering/content-getting process was made as easy as possible. The support guy indicated that there was a way to prevent others from downloading, but I think it entails disabling your payment method in your Amazon account, which also prevents the owner from downloading content.

Okay - reasonable enough; an extra step, to enable/disable the downloading for that library/user.  Something that could probably be streamlined by Amazon.  So: will we be seeing the Kindle in libraries?

No.

Right around the time Kindle was released, I read the Terms of Service, curious to see if or how Kindle readers could be used in public libraries. My interpretation of the TOS said "NO,"

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party

...The support person was more than happy to take my general questions.

I explained that the library where I worked ordered one just to play around with, but that we had no plans to let patrons check it out, as I understood the ToS prohibited that sort of "distribution." When I asked for a definite answer, he verified that libraries who loaned the Kindle were violating the ToS.

It's not a nice thought, a future where libraries are museums.

 

Influenza.

Laid low by the flu, right when I'd planned to get writing about the new Tobias Wolff and a non-fiction book about teaching literature at West Point.  Without having finished either, I can say both are worth looking into - the Wolff has twenty-one stories from previous collections and ten new stories, and well it's Tobias Wolff, and the Samet non-fiction book is an interesting look at the minds of cadets, working to be open to literature and forming their own opinions in an environment that pretty much squishes that independent thought in every other way. 

I'll try to write more about them later this week.  All I can muster for now is a few site design tweaks and a small political endorsement.  Yes, we can.

Be prepared for anything: carry a book.

I agree wholeheartedly:

"7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.
This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never have I had the time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you." --Emma Richler, Sister Crazy

It's always when it seems the most ludicrous that there will be any time to all for reading that vast expanses of time open up.

Don't gorge on the ziti; save room for the Tobias Wolff.

I'm like a frenzied parent, elbowing you in the eye to get TMX Elmo!

• Tobias Wolff's first published story, from 1976 - I was two - Smokers.
• All of the interview with Mr. Wolff re: Old School that starts with words well spoken:  "Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that the books we read fall into one of four categories: those we don't bother to finish; those we finish because we believe for some reason we should; those we finish because we enjoy them; and those we are so consumed and overwhelmed and thrilled by that merely reading them feels inadequate—we have the impulse to inhale them, or perhaps to tear out the pages and chew them up. For me, Tobias Wolff's new novel Old School was such a book."  Burp, I say!  And it fits with my ill-chosen metaphor!
• The B.R. Myers manifesto.
• Nab-o-kov.

All for now.  These buffets, you have to pace yourself.

The Atlantic opens up the buffet table.

New Yorker, are you paying attention?

A year ago, The Atlantic’s Web site was, to put it gently, weak  —  in content, staff, traffic and advertising...

Readership will get another boost starting Tuesday, when TheAtlantic.com will abolish the fire wall that has allowed only subscribers to the print magazine to see most of its articles online. It will make its archive accessible, too.

I feel like Geraldo, about to crack Al Capone's vault, except that there will actually be something in there and it won't launch a "journalism" career for me.

"Ask me about the mechanics of writing."

A woman named Alisha, who wears a sheep on her head, wrote to Stephen Dixon to for an interview, of sorts:

Now, I repeat myself considerably in my fiction. But as I said, its easier to relive in fiction an experience I’ve already written about in my fiction, because then, to repeat myself, not only can I go deeper into the experience but by repeating myself it shows how important that experience is in my fiction. Meeting for the first time his wife is an example. In my work in progress—I really call it a page in progress, since some pages take a 100 takes and a week to write. But that meeting, that first meeting, which sometimes replicates the first meeting with the woman who was, three years later, to become my wife, is the most important meeting of my life. I am telling it in a different way this time, in my new novel, His Wife Leaves Him, where they meet at the elevator after the party, rather than at the party. But I love that experience and will probably be writing about it the rest of my life.

His reference to the repetition in his work as a deepening makes sense once you've read a number of his books, which you should be doing.

A compelling argument for the transition of textbooks to e-book format.

A pile of unused textbooks at the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository.  (via)

Happy Birthday, David Lynch.

Being a man about it.

I usually like to throw in my two cents when I excerpt an article, but never you mind.

"There's something I've been wondering about," I said. "But you have to promise me if I ask, you will tell me the truth."

"I promise," he said.

"Have you ever opened that door thinking there was a patient in here and found no one on this table?"

He laughed. "You mean does anyone ever chicken out?"

"Yes."

"No. Not once," he said. "But it's funny. About one in four—no maybe more like one in three—schedule the operation and never show up."

Yes, I agreed, that was a riot. Then it wasn't: There was a needle in my scrotum.

Unless you count push-ups with "Infinite Jest" on your back.

I know her previous book is popular with some working writers, but this one smells like B.S. to me:

Over the course of the past twenty-five years, Julia Cameron has taught thousands of artists and aspiring artists how to unblock wellsprings of creativity. And time and again she has noticed an interesting thing: Often, in uncovering their creative selves her students also undergo a surprising physical transformation-invigorated by their work, they slim down.

In The Writing Diet, Cameron illuminates the relationship between creativity and eating to reveal a crucial equation: creativity can block overeating. This inspiring weight-loss program, which can be used in conjunction with Cameron's groundbreaking book on the creative process, The Artist's Way, directs readers to count words instead of calories, to substitute their writing's food for thought for actual food. Using journaling to examine their relationship with food-and to ward off unhealthy overeating -readers will learn to treat food cravings as invitations to evaluate what they are truly craving in their emotional lives. The Writing Diet presents a brilliant plan for using one of the soul's deepest and most abiding appetites-the desire to be creative-to lose weight and keep it off forever.

"I'm a creativity expert, not a diet expert. So why am I writing a book about weight loss? Because I have accidentally stumbled upon a weight-loss secret that works. For twenty-five years I've taught creative unblocking, a twelve-week process based on my book The Artist's Way. From the front of the classroom I've seen lives transformed-and, to my astonishment, bodies transformed as well. It took me a while to recognize what wasgoing on, but sure enough, students who began the course on the plump side ended up visibly leaner and more fit. What's going on here? I asked myself. Was it my imagination, or was there truly a before and an after?"

Dissent is welcome.

Doing whatever a spider can.

In the spirit of Mark's recent airing of childhood skeletons, I offer the following.

I grew up on comic books, loyal to a very few titles - Hulk, sometimes Iron Man if it wasn't in a lame stage.  Spider-Man's always been at the top of my list, though.  Hell, I was there when he got married:

You can't see me too well in that picture; I'm off to the left, wondering why this ridiculous photo with stand-in heroes and villains is being staged. 

You've heard, right? 

Spider-Man fans are outraged that Marvel Comics has turned back time and dissolved the super-hero's marriage to Mary-Jane. While followers of the movies know the couple only as sweethearts, as far as comic book fans are concerned, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson have been married for the past 21 years.

Now, in a peculiar plot twist in Spider-Man No 545, Peter and Mary Jane make a deal with the devil-like Mephisto which sees the clock turned back and their marriage annulled in return for saving the life of Peter's Aunt May, who has been in a deep coma. Suddenly, Peter is once again young, nerdy and living with his aunt, and his marriage has been erased from everyone's memory.

Well, okay:  the marriage thing was poorly executed, over the years.  Except for a Mary Jane kidnapping by a not-particularly-villainous villain, the marriage was about as relevant as the Spider Signal.  I can't agree with the solution - Mephisto is also not especially villainous, despite apparently being Satan, and this marriage-erasure is very much a lame reset to the start.  Marvel could have chosen to cater to longtime fans, who were teenagers when Peter was a teenager, and are now adults, and aren't interested in seeing Peter move in with his 145 year old aunt again, but I can see the rationale behind feeling that their hands were tied, in terms of avenues for new stories.  Sort of.  So, I shrugged, and had no plans to post about it.

Then I read this, this morning:

Everyone in the world (as part of the deal) has suddenly forgotten Spider-Man's secret identity for no apparent reason - won't some of them find that a bit odd?

It was ballsy when, during the recent anti-climactic Civil War series, Peter Parker unmasked himself to the world.  Everyone knew who he was - for real, unlike countless other issues with covers proclaiming his secret identity revealed.  A few issues were put out dealing with the fallout - in fact, Aunt May was in a coma because she was shot, since everyone knew she was Spider-Man's aunt.  The basic thing here is that they were just scratching the surface of what could be done with the character, and the storylines, now that the secret identity thing was an issue of the past. 

I wonder why fans aren't more up in arms about this - poof, it's a secret again?  For Marvel to complain about their hands being tied, in terms of innovating with storylines, and then to just magically erase his revelation - which, to sink further into a quagmire of dorkiness, would completely unravel the entire Civil War storyline - is not especially smart, or brave.

Proust, Blanchot, and a Woman in Red.

I've been carrying around Lydia Davis' recent cahier, released through Sylph Editions, that was talked about a few sites late last year.  After reading her recent Varieties of Disturbance I've resolved to track down her other work; her writing is the most precise I've seen.  Each piece is, to borrow a phrase, an extraordinary machine.  Folks interested in translation would do well to order a copy. 

Part one is an "Alphabet of Proust Translation Problems" (her recent edition of Swann's Way has been widely praised) and it's fascinating, a real treat for word freaks - Davis' attention to the right word at the right time is explored here in process, and it warrants a release of the "full alphabet" (only a few letters, and the words being translated, are highlighted here) in some form. 

Part two is brief, but Davis discusses her difficulty - pleasurable difficulty - in summarizing, for translation, Maurice Blanchot's The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me. 

Here is one perfectly accurate summary, though a brief one: 'In a house in the southern part of some country, a man goes from room to room being asked the question 'Are you writing now?' by another character who may or may not exist'.  This summary would not be appropriate for commercial release.

Well, sold me on it.  Sounds like my morning.  She also has this to say about translating Blanchot:

The experience of translating the essays was one of the most difficult I ever had, in translating.  As though the experience were, in fact, a piece of fiction by Blanchot, the meaning of a difficult phrase or sentence would often become a physical entity that eluded me, my brain becoming both the pursuer and the arena in which the pursuit took place.  Understanding became an intensely physical act.

Marry me!  Part three has a bit of whimsy to it - a compendium of dreams, those had while asleep and awake, the awake ones being situations that took on a dreamlike quality for reasons inherent to the situation - an odd exchange, something circular, strange and odd.  They are listed and briefly described without any indication of what category they fall into.  Except from loved ones, there are few things less interesting than hearing about someone's dreams - oh, you flew last night and the ground below was covered with candy bars that were dancing?  great - but you know Davis is going to give you more than that.  Not quite stories, but not entirely unlike a little bit of literary David Lynch-manship, stripped of the horrific turns he sometimes puts out there.  Again, worthy of a publication all its own, and this cahier is worth tracking down.

The "best" in men's clothing.

And clothing for the babies/women/dogs.  Mugs and postcards and such.  By request (no, really) the store returns.  If you buy something, send me a picture of you wearing/using it, so I can experience a strange combination of elation and embarrassment.

Coming soon: actual content!

Bite the GoodReads bullet, baby - bite the bullet, heh heh heh.

I just squandered away a perfectly good morning, in which I could have been reading, breathing life into my dormant GoodReads account.  (See my widget in the right column?  Widget!)  Please, make it worth my while, if such a thing is possible.

I want you to hit me hard as you can-can.

I debated whether or not my readers would care about this news, but when that subject line came into my head, it became hard to resist.  I don't know what to think about this news; it seems a little bit apocalyptic.  Ready?

Director David Fincher told MTV.com in a recent interview that he’s interested in marking the 10-year anniversary of Fight Club by bringing his 1999 film to the stage as a musical. Trent Reznor has expressed interest in developing the music and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk is keen on the idea. Fincher has previously expressed interest in the project asking, “Can you imagine people in New Jersey paying $120 to drive to the city and watch a musical about anarchy?”

Great movie, horrid book.  I can't imagine what Fincher and Reznor are thinking. 

Search all the sites about the books.

I've been working on a search tool that is limited to searching only sites related to books, reading, and such - book blogs, lit-blogs, book sites.  Right now it's limited to some of the sites that popped into my head when I thought "sites about books" - a lot of familiar names - but of course I'd like to expand it in the future, so e-mail me any sites you go to a lot for smart, considered book discussion, book reviews, news, interviews, etc.  The search bar can be found in the left column, a short way down.

All the names.

Tried resisting; couldn't.

What Do People Do All Day?  Mailman:  One Hundred Years of Solitude.   All the Names...  No Relief.

(The) Old School   Beat Reader   Word Freak  Screams from the Balcony  A Poem a Day.

Stiffed:   Middlesex.  Who I Was Supposed to Be...   Becoming Abigail.    You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.

OK - your turn.  (see also.)

If the Red Sox played the Yankees in the World Series.

I know, it can't happen, but Obama/Clinton has the same sort of feel, no?  With lots of people scoffing at the notion that any of the Republican candidates having a chance in the general election, given the scandal-ridden Republican party, adrift with an ignoramus at the wheel, it's the Democrats' to lose.  (Of course, that was true the last two times as well, but never mind that for now.)  This Obama/Clinton (okay, /Edwards, but hold on) has a Red Sox/Yankees/World Series kind of flavor to it. 

Andrew Sullivan on the "tears" she "cried" the other day over the stresses and frustrations of the campaign:

The question to be asked is this: should women in public life be treated exactly the same as men? If so, is it not relevant to note that any male candidate who cried in public about the stresses of his campaign would essentially be finished? When we don't hold her to that standard, are we being sexist or just humane? I mean, I have long felt her to be one of my least favorite national politicians, but I can still see she's hurting, even if her bewilderment is inextricable from her sense of entitlement. I'm okay with politicians weeping occasionally in public. Churchill did it all the time.

On the other hand, I can see why Clinton can get frustrated. When she went tough on her opponents in the last debate, she was deemed "vicious" or "shrill" rather than simply aggressive. Maybe she can't win either way.

No, I suspect not.  I think she's simultaneously the first woman to have a genuine shot at becoming president, and the least likely woman to ever become president.  She's reviled by anyone within three inches of the right-side border of moderate centrism, and the media has largely bungled coverage, giving legs to cleavage stories, pantsuit stories, and now misty eyes.  And she's hated because of her husband, who also famously gave her some other reasons to dislike him; if she loses to Obama, he's partially to blame.  She's mired in the "woman for president" business. 

I would love to see a woman president, but not her.  Here's my take - the Clinton campaign is recognized as having the biggest political machine working to get their woman the nomination.  I do think she's calculating, for better and for worse, and I have to wonder if someone so controlled, so clearly intelligent and planful, would go into that diner unaware of her emotional status, unaware of the effect - disgusting as it is - that seeing her "crying" on national television will have on millions of undecided voters who haven't really thought all that much about whether a woman might be too emotional to be president.  As Sullivan said, if a male candidate got misty-eyed over the stress, he'd probably not even be allowed back on his own campaign bus.  I can't help but wonder what she was thinking, though I don't like myself much for wondering.

Edwards, for me, has pushed too many wrong buttons in recent weeks.  I like the anti-corporation message, though  he does sort of do it with crayons, but he's starting to grate.  This was a very stupid thing for him to do, on so many levels:

This is a man who has used his most private tragedies--his wife's cancer, his son's fatal accident -- in his campaign in a way that had a woman done the same she would surely be accused of "oprahfying' the lofty realm of politics. This is also the man who promoted himself early on as the real women's candidate, and who has repeatedly used his likeable wife to humanize his rather slick and one-dimensional persona. Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power. ABC's Political Radar blog reports:

"Edwards, speaking at a press availability in Laconia, New Hampshire, offered little sympathy and pounced on the opportunity to bring into question Clinton's ability to endure the stresses of the presidency. Edwards responded, 'I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business.'"

Dude, you just made yourself the anti-Obama, flushed your female voters down the toilet, and hung an "opportunist" placard around your neck.  Now who is Obama going to tap for V.P.?

 

Phone call from Mister Rogers. He has your kitty.

I note with detached yet vested interest that Sesame Street has put a large number of classic video clips up at their website.  Good on them, though no singing Ralph Nader clip yet.

I would like it very much if the Mister Rogers Neighborhood folks would do the same thing, with all the episodes.  A little bit of love can be found on YouTube, including this clip of Rogers putting the Congress of the United States in a loving, caring deadly headlock.  The man has no equal. 

Here's an entirely different Mister Rogers clip. 

Look closely at the stack of books next to your bed.*

This looks to me like a perfect way to expend an entire afternoon: 

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library's holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.

I cannot make clear enough the potential this has to completely occupy all of my free time.  (via Ms. Aulenback.)  (Speaking of whom, someone get me a copy of the new Hobart.  Please?)

*Unless you're Mr. Clean.

Link, Schlink.

Here's something I've noticed: every time I've perused a used book section at my local independent bookstore(s), there is without fail a copy of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.  Friends, is this a universal truth? I also own a copy, as I am a complete sucker for the following:

1. Books about reading
2. Books about writing
3. Books about writers
4. Books about writers reading

And, it should be noted, regardless of the actual content of the book - if it's got a picture of a book (esp. open) on the cover, it's as if the bookstore owner froze time, took money out of my wallet, and left me unconscious in a snowbank with the book. 

No, I have not read The Reader, but I note that Schlink has a new book coming out, and the cover is lovely, which gives me an opportunity to make use of my new site format.  For those many people that read my site via vanilla feed, stop by the site and sample some of the other flavor(s).  Before they expire.

Good night.

Time for some end-of-year stuff.  I started the year with the excellent Chris Adrian and his excellent The Children's Hospital and finished with Tom McCarthy's Men in Space.  Lots of good stuff in between.  I was excited to discover Joseph Coulson's fine Of Song and Water, easily the best novel I've read about jazz - though it's about fathers, sons, and boating as well.  It's a masterful work. 

Disappointments: Murakami's After Dark; Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies and Travels in the Scriptorium; Stephen Dixon's Meyer.  There were others.  Seems like more disappointing reads this year than last. 

Best surprises:  Robert Lopez' Part of the World and Simon Van Booy's The Secret Lives of People in Love, both sent to me for review; Lydie Salvayre's The Company of Ghosts, picked off the shelf on a whim, no idea why; and Jason Shiga's Bookhunter, which so-briefly made me feel like a kid again.  And of course, need I mention McCarthy's Remainder again?  (Guess so.)

I had plans at the end of 2006 to keep a more thorough list of what I read in 2007, but I know there were some gaps.  At some point I read Memories of My Melancholy Whores, but it appears on neither the books-read list in my email or the one in my journal.  There's a pretty big gap here at the end, as well - I haven't been reading much of anything lately.

---

It's been a strange year; a lot more stress, more uncertainty, more feeling lost.  Great things as well - a new daughter, new friends, seeing my first daughter go from a toddler to a girl.  She was doing some writing today, practicing writing names, asking me how to spell them.  I went in the other room for something that took longer than it should have, as many things do, and when I came back she held up her paper.  She had signed the paper "From" and then her name - not actually "from" but FMM, but the thing is that she hadn't written that word before, hadn't been practicing it, didn't have anything to copy it by.  I asked her how she had done it, and she told me that she just listened to the sounds in the word and then made the letters.  I can't imagine a better way to end the year for someone who loves words, writing, letters, and that girl.