Tweet Reviews Redux

Back by popular demand (and by that I mean a couple of comments and the fact that I enjoyed doing them last time): 140-character reviews of the books I read this past year. It’s a fun excuse for me to revisit my books and my blog posts. Enjoy.

The year in pages, in tweets

The Phantom Tollbooth — Norton Juster
My 09-10 transitional read. Brilliant, bouncy little book club book. Full of imagination, whimsy, and a final call to live a full life.
Blogged about it: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/

Freakonomics — Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
Examines experts, motivation, connections. Inspires “balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea.”
Blogged about it: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/

The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien
A+ Nonfic. His subject is ugly but his content is beautiful. The book crosses my mind throughout the day…it’s like i have a book-crush on it.
Blogged about it: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/
Twice: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/

Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote
Not just for 90s pop songs. Lovely little novel. “A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.” Plus Holly says, “oh balls!”

Eating Animals — Jonathan Safran Foer
Really did change my life. My tipping point to vegetarian. Might reframe your thinking, too, if you gave it a chance. Plus the cover is gorgeous.

The Secret Life of Bees — Sue Monk Kidd
April Book Club. Power of grief, womanhood, friendship, forgiveness. Pick it up, and buy a copy for your mom.

Enduring Love — Ian McEwan
Creepy, quick read. I enjoy I.M. If you haven’t read Atonement yet, what are you doing with your life?!

My Life in France — Julia Child
Girl meets boy; meets France; meets food. Bon Appetit!

An Unquiet Mind — Kay Redfield Jamison
Expert on manic depression is also a patient. Those who can do, teach. First read for senior honors project. Helpful memoir/manual.

Eat Pray Love — Elizabeth Gilbert
Reread pre-movie, post-breakup. Perfect timing. Literary CPR. Just flipping the pages and seeing the typeface is comforting to me.
Blogged about it: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/

The Diving Bell & The Butterfly — Jean-Dominique Bauby
Life-giving. Homeboy wrote the book with his eye. With his EYE, people! It and the movie remain among my absolute favorites.

The Creative Habit — Twyla Tharp
Practical, get-to-work advice from dancer/choreographer. Cool to see creativity from a new, while also familiar, perspective.
Blogged about it: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/

Your Erroneous Zones — Wayne Dyer
An early self-help book (’76), and therefore a little cliche. Found him bc his words narrate Pixar’s short Day & Night. So inspiring.

The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
Devoured in four days. Loved (LOVED) the writing and the story and the ideas they inspire. love/loneliness, men/women, identity/society.
Blogged about it: http://whatsarahisreading.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/

Poetry 180 — Billy Collins
Marginalia: “Poetry 180 is slowly changing my life.” I think BC would be glad. Poetry is yoga for the mind. Inverts, twists, restores.

Gift From the Sea — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
6th reading since 2005. Absolute, always-inspiring staple of my book diet. A compact and timeless guide to abundant, wholehearted life.

Broken Open — Elizabeth Lesser
I think I liked this Oprah-fav less the second time around. Maybe needed it less. Worthwhile for its many Rumi quotes alone.

Full 2010 Book Club slate:

The Phantom Tollbooth (Heather)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Amanda)
The Secret Life of Bees (Sarah W)
Princess Bride (Courtney)
Same Kind of Different As Me (Emily)
Twenties Girl (Allison)
On The Road (Deanne)
Diving Bell & The Butterfly / Gift from the Sea (Moi)
The Mysterious Benedict Society (Heather)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Amanda)

Though I didn’t read as many as in 2009, I’m still pretty proud of this list. (The diehard among you will have noted that I made it through ROYGBIV 3 times…) 

*Chin-chin salud* Here’s to books.
Happy 2011 reading, readers!

 

Loneliness is S-wordy…

Disclaimer: S-word‘s about to get real personal and confessional, folks. Turn back now, while you still can.

(“S-word” is my favorite way to swear at work. Office culture is totally kosher with saying things like “s-word”, even the occasional, well-placed actual s-word is tolerated.)

My high school english teacher gave us this exercise for writing poetry (It’s a tool that i’ve used to get unstuck with writers block, too.) where you take an inanimate thing like an emotion and then flesh it out through the five senses. Goes a little something like this:

For loneliness, say:

sounds like…a song you can’t quite remember.
looks like…the sock that’s left behind after laundry day.
smells like…someone you used to know, in a magazine cologne sample.
feels like…listening to jeff buckley on your car stereo while you drive in the rain. empirically.
tastes like…(for the life of me, I can’t think what loneliness tastes like. Maybe that’s ’cause food is my friend, so I can’t feel lonely while I eat. ha.)

So you can guess what’s on my mind tonight, readers.

I had the idea over the weekend that one huge perk of marriage must be that there’s always somebody there to listen to your stories and care about your shit. (s-word.)
(A perk of being single, no doubt, is having good stories to tell…)

Brace yourselves. I’m going to say the thing that I’m not supposed to say; that our mothers fought so hard in the 70s so we wouldn’t say it, etc.: sometimes it’s really hard work to be alone.

Some nights it just sucks, y’all. You sit in your house and cry while you watch The Daily Show and your cat looks on, concerned. Hypothetically.

And some nights it’s not so bad, true. If I weren’t single I wouldn’t have finished The Handmaid’s Tale in 4 days. (You guys! I finished The Handmaid’s Tale in 4 days!) And I wouldn’t have all this free time to train for my race and write and do all the other good stuff with my time (e.g. watch hulu).

I really, really liked Handmaid’s Tale. (Book Club discush coming Dec 2.) I read this little bit on Saturday morning at Einstein’s Bagels:

You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.
Even if there’s no one.

My mind perked up a bit, bc I’d just had that thought about marriage and stories on my way in. (I like little moments when life connects like that. It’s what we writers live for, sort of.)
And then five minutes later, kid you not, in walked some ex-couple-friends with their adorable kids. (You know, we hung out when I was in a couple. They were his friends. Now we aren’t a couple. So we’re ex-couple-friends.) And I honest to god wanted to hide. I plotted escape. Is there anything more lonely than seeing ex-couple-friends when you’re out alone?
Out alone on a Saturday morning, reading a book?
I don’t think it gets more tragic.

But I was nice and said hi. We chatted.
Then I went back to my book. And they went back to their kids.
And I felt grateful, sort of, that at least I didn’t have to tell anyone to sit on their bottom, please.
And no one was telling me where to sit and when. So there’s another perk.

Welp. Sorry you had to be the victims of my loneliness, readers. At least maybe I’ll keep writing more. Writing is good company.

(This post brought to you by Edy’s Slow Churned Mint Chocolate Chip and too many repeat viewings of You’ve Got Mail.)

I’m Beat, son.

Wednesday night was book club. 06.09.10.
Our very first meeting, to discuss Reading Lolita in Tehran, was 06.10.09.
that’s kind of cosmic, right?

This month’s book may be my favorite so far…and I’m not even a third of the way through. (Finishing books by an assigned date is sooooo 4th grade, daaahling.) I’m told that I may change my mind longabout 2/3 through. We shall see.

We read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I never got around to it during college…English majors have a lot of ground to cover, people! And frankly I don’t know whether I would’ve cared too much for it then. But something about it now (“it” being JK’s style and rambling poetry-prose, his passion for life and the open road, the-un-I Love Lucy-50s aesthetic, all of the above) gets me right where it hurts.

I’ve pretty much decided mid-century was the time for me. Between decorating my house & getting to know graphic design this year, plus:

*  **

***

…you can just slap me in the 50s-60s and call me dollface. Just get hip to this, for a taste, daddy-o:

Belief & Technique
For Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac

List of Essentials:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

***

If I could marry a concept, this one would be it. I’m the future Mrs. Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.
We are registered at Target.

* pretty sure Beat writers were early hiphop artists, calling each other “son” and the like.
** this Otis Redding cd is a delight. Dude was MY AGE and at the top of his game. Just try not to chair-dance if you listen at work. Try it.
*** i haven’t yet even seen an episode of Mad Men, but i love the look of it so much. Don Draper could smoke in my cubical any day. Not a euphemism.