good reads, or not

If you look to the right you will see the horribly adjusted frame or some such old website patheticness that shows the books I have been reading. My current listed and listed for way too long is the Anthony Keidis bio or autiobio Scartissue. This post is only here to explain why. This summer I had free tickets to a concert festival in Indio. I went without Michael and bought him this book in the tent city Virgin store. It made sense at the time. He loves biographies, he loves music, and in high school or for baby him possibly in middle school, he loved the Chili Peppers. He read it and said it was okay, possibly to make me feel good for purchasing said book. I was desperate recently and found no other unread non school related books in the house.
This book is ridiculously awful. In the same way that reality tv from E! is awful and yet I still watch it. Anthony Keidis is every guy I hated in high school. So me, I'll continue reading because I cannot stop. But that book is lame. For the record.

impressed you say?

While you may have been impressed (or even skeptical) about my supposed reading list below I present for you this month's reading.
hmmm.
nothing.
wait some magazines --
O-thanks to Amy
Some free copies of Body & Soul
some random articles in
Electronic Musician, ReMix, Mix
and the ever classy Hollywood Life also free
as well as the ubiquitous...blogs.
Yeah, I am so smart S-M-R-T. But it is okay because Michael loves me. He went to the school library today to try to get a copy of In Cold Blood (misshelved, no luck) and The Jungle (both misshelved, no luck) (and yes, I read those two also), and while he was there he picked up books for me. Little Women and My Enemy, My Love:Women, Masculinity and the Dilemmas of Gender. This selection is very perfectly me. A nice reread and a smart person piece of non-fiction. However it also paints me as a very confused girl who will once again be crying over Beth's death scene while pondering the "Dilemmas of Gender".
And Michael got Uncle Tom's Cabin because he's apparently spurred onward by the reading bug and catching up on classics.

books meme

I found this here and I am just lazy enough to continue using memes for posts instead of anything original.

Anyway here are Krissa's instructions.
Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole (I've got books I've READ that I wish I had used a 10 foot pole to avoid, thus they are both BOLD and STRICKEN, -KC), put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

I am adding that this list seems very random to me. Keep in mind that I read most of the books I will deem smart people books when I was forced to for smart people English class in high school before they decided I was not smart enough and no longer ivy leauguey enough for their ranks (do you think it was the use of the rogue -y to make things descriptive? I wish I did that in my papers then) Many times I reread the good ones for actual enjoyment because I am strange that way. Also I don't really own any books. This seems strange when I think of how my tall bookshelf overflows. However, it is full of textbooks, art books, and Michael's scores. Also, I am a library girl at heart but when I do buy books I enjoy I pass them on because I want everyone I know to read it too. Also my ten foot pole rule gets broken if I am stuck in a house with no other reading material. Then I would read anything printed.


1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. +To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling) read it with the U.S. title Sorcerer's Stone
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom) I think I read the abridged version of this that Michael got as a gift. That was more than enough.
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. +The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) tried once never finished, gave up
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. +The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving) this is everyone's favorite book except me
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. +Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. *Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

the weekend debriefing

I feel like I should do a boring weekend recap. Partly because I have been posting pretty regularly and partly because I am on the "left" coast. (a quote from one of Michael's many high school friends) and I feel that I should try to keep in touch with any east (or right) coast friends that read this.

So, the obligatory bullet point weekend retrospective:

Friday afternoon

• ADR work for some random crime movie (this entails doing silly voice overs for crowd scenes of movies to sound like the crowd) Hooked up through Michael's dad's childhood friend (said in a Long Island, New York Italian accent "from da neighborhood") received checks (woohoo! not quite as poor)[I don't know what ADR stands for, though Michael tells me the R stands for Recording and I told him I thought the A stood for Audio, and he said no)
  
• Dinner with friends-lots of yummy food, an apartment that is gorgeously decorated, and a glass of red wine unceremoniously dumped on my linen beach pants (picture this: me and a good looking young man, a camera comes out and someone wants a picture of us we move together and he moves to swiftly run his fingers through his hair, swings his arm around abruptly and slams the bottom of my wine glass, the glass goes flying into the air--along with its newly poured contents all over the apartment (and my pants) with itty bitty shards of broken glass. Lucky me, these people are so cool there was a quick clean up, and a pair of drawstring replacement pants, as well as a new drink. Yay!)

Saturday

• I am lazy; Michael goes to a recording session.
  
• We both attend a children's community theatre production of Annie! (doesn't it deserve the exclamation point, just like E!)
• Go out for Mexican food, and a show break down (synopsis: cute kids, glad we went to see the one we know, Daddy Gaybucks may have some actual talent if he can lose the sibilant S)

Sunday

• I am still lazy; Michael goes to another recording session.
• Grocery shopping, laundry, bill paying
  
• cable television (including the movie The United States of Leland--quite intense, lots of names)
  
• preparation for tomorrow: lunch making, mapquesting, paperwork preparation

In complete retrospect:
Oh, my, god, Sunday was boring, why did I even include it?
I am obsessed with commas and parentheses (am I not?)
I need to learn how to make stories like the wine incident sound funnier (I mean it isn't often you go home from a dinner party wearing another man's pants.)

I finished a really good book A Child in Time, by Ian McEwan
I really didn't want to start this book because my stress was begging for a Devil Wears Prada, type of cushy girl reading. Instead I got desperate and ploughed on through as is typical for me when I am short on reading materials. (of course my copy is from the library)

Here is my favorite quote:

"To have a destination, a place where you were expected, a shred of identity, was such a relief after a month of game shows and Scotch. To show his pass to the familiar taciturn guard, to saunter across the marble hall among well-dressed, self-important people, to penetrate deep into the building, knowing without giving the matter a thought which staircases and corridors to take, to arrive at just the room and make small talk with colleagues, to sip coffee from the plastic cups bearing the ministry's stamp, bought from a machine in the corridor that dispensed onion soup down the same nozzle -- it was for little repetitions like these that people kept their jobs, however dull. It was all Stephen could do to refrain from bursting into song."(p. 155)

In one paragraph, my life, the last month full of television and wine versus the previous years of alarm clocks and office work, summed up. I can't wait to be back to the bored me that knows how to get places and who will be there when I arrive. Then I can add my own drama through weekend trips around the city or out of town.

quiet again

two quiet nights in a row. but tonight michael is in north carolina, and I am back to my usual free library movies and a book and wine.
my only problem is that I have watched all of the new movies worth watching...and available at the corryville public library, and occasionally I have to move towards foreign films. I like foreign films and subtitles do not bother me. But it becomes a problem when I have a less than good movie. I want to be able to read my book during the movie and the stupid subtitles make this impossible.
well that is boring. but so is my friday night.
I have not set up anything interesting with this yet. no pictures or connections to other sites. But in my blogaholism this summer I know the things I do like. One of those things is connecting to cool books, blogs or music from other sites.
So here is what I am reading: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon by Kaye Gibbons.
not my favorite of hers (Charms for the Easy Life) and not as good as the one I just finished Divining Women but still I enjoy her writing
(I only get NBC so movies are my only choice)So I rented Whale Rider. I knew it would be a nice movie to watch again...alone....that way I could cry the way I did last week when I read The Lovely Bones and I got to the part where her father smashes the ship in a bottle collection. It is so nice not to have to explain how good that kind of cry is.
My current obsession is Angelique's new blog. it makes me so happy and connected to her. And it may even save me money on long distance...but it will problem just make me want to talk to her more often.
(I am a library girl ---the amazon links are just so you can see exactly what I am talking about-- angelique put divining women on hold at zach's library or charms you will enjoy at least one of them)

also check out michael's site when you have time and high speed. He is going to add a bunch of new live Mp3's and if I have anything to do with it he will also clean it up a little and make it presentable. You can tell him I said so. www.michaeljohnmollo.com