Tuesday, January 31, 2012

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

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Sunday, January 15, 2012

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

Saturday, January 7, 2012

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