someday i'll make it all up to you

I love how Jess tags and tracks the books she reads and I really loved her Top 10 at the end of the year. Hila has book reviews and M. has begun writing reviews as a way of thinking about what she's read. I've never tracked the books I read. My GoodReads shelf is more a mashup of books I've read, bought, bookmarked, heard about, thought about, whatever. And I buy (like Andrew Sean Greer says) many, many more books than I read. My bedside table reflects books I've started, not books I've finished, so I'll start tracking books I've finished here:

January 2012

Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick

Looking for Alaska, John Green

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway

Where She Went, Gayle Forman

Fighting Fire, Caroline Paul

The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sacred, Elana K. Arnold (Random House, Fall 2012)

Photo: Tegan wearing my favorite T-shirt from

Cali DeWitt and Blood is the New Black

i wasn't actually in love

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a kind of tender curiosity. The Great Gatsby

Photo: Rolf Henke, Freunde von Freunden

my imaginary self

is wearing this dress right now.

Mara Hoffman at Bona Drag

bread and butter

She loves bread and butter and wine and innards and cannot abide fussy eaters. Madhur Jaffrey on Judith Jones in Saveur

The Pleasures of Cooking for One, one of M's favorite cookbooks

a matter of infinite hope

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. The Great Gatsby

Photo: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel's flat in Freunde von Freunden

contents may have shifted

A new book from Pam Houston is due out next month.

Photo from: Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

you have to take the dive

Maurice Sendak via Big Other

whatever the scenario

I'm bringing it up because I want to talk about rejection. I'm not saying Happy Baby is a great book, but it tries to be. If you want to create something great you have to be willing to make something that people dislike, that's the only way to find an audience who is in love with you. If someone loves it then someone else will want to tear it down because it puts certain conventions on display and there it is, what we think we know, sitting uncomfortably on a pedestal, as if under a searchlight, scratching at her neck. Stephen Elliott in The Daily Rumpus, January 8, 2012

Painting: Fathom No. 1, 2010, by Olive Jeffers

where since once we are

When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off

From "Poem: A La Recherche de Gertrude Stein" by Frank O'Hara via Books vs. Cigarettes

Photo: Built in Suffolk, England by Haworth Tompkins via Cabin Porn