Well, maybe one and a half. There is masking tape residue and staining at the top, but it’s pretty localized and the tape itself peeled up easily.
I have coveted this one for a while.
Jakkou-in
I like this too.
Rock Garden
This one I wasn’t quite so wild about at first–it was part of the lot–but it’s now growing on me. Kind of like what appears to be a fungus on the upper lefthand margin.
Steve is being quite industrious in the kitchen today.
Awwww, look at that cornbread.
Emily’s mother is so overbearing that it’s no surprise that she agreed to marry Viscount Ashton to gain a measure of independence. After only six months of marriage, her husband dies on safari. It pains her to admit that she is not sorry. But as she discovers his journals and starts to explore some of his interest, she finds herself falling in love with her dead husband — even though it seems he may have been involved in some shady art deals involving ancient Greek art. Emily starts to investigate, and what she discovers keeps the reader sitting at the very edge of her chair. Add to this mix two more-than-eligible suitors, and you get a fun historical confection.
Colleen is watching the old safety and training videos her aunt Madeleine had made years before. In one, a man puts his head into an alligator’s mouth. The alligator snaps down on his head, twitching him back and forth as though he were spineless. Colleen assumes the man died. But no, her aunt tells her; he lived.
This first chapter sets the tone of Alligator perfectly; everyone in this novel has his or her own alligator. Colleen is trapped by rage, her mother by grief. In fact, all the characters in this Newfoundland town are yearning for something, for more, and they are all trapped by one thing or another. Moore conveys such rawness; she makes us, too, want more for her characters.
That was where she became who she was, Madeleine thinks, in that solitude. Everyone becomes who they are in a stark landscape of undiluted solitude and bad weather. It’s possible to go through life without becomin who you are, but it is better, in the long run, to come across yourself in an insanely ordered forest where nothing has been left to chance. She wishes every twenty-one-year-old girl a Black Forest of her own.
Or this:
At the Salvation Army that day in January he had filtered through a carboard box of junk for a lid to the sugar bown, he knew it should have a lid, and was surprised by how much he wanted a lid. He did not want to be someone without the lids to things. He wanted whole sets of whatever he had, or nothing at all.
He wanted, when he went to the pain store, to get the trim they suggested went with the burnt sand colour he had chosen. he wanted, when he looked into the eyes of the idiot they had workin there, who said he coudln’t mix that colour but he could mix one pretty damn close, to grab him by the front of the shirt and shout in his face that he didn’t want close.
This is the best book I’ve read in a long, long time.
I like to take Harry on his tromples late at night, usually around 9 or 10. We drive to different (read: better than ours) neighborhoods; I slip on my podcaster and away we go. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Here on Earth. And that’s where I heard an interview with Steven Rinella. He was so enthusiastic that I placed The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine on hold. I read it over the weekend, while we were in Soap Lake.
Basically, the premise is this: Rinella has always been what he calls a scavenger. He hunts, fishes, and lives pretty close to the land. He gets ahold of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, and decides to spend a year gathering the ingredients for a feast, which will be held on Thanksgiving. The book is the story of that year.
It was an entertaining read. Rinella writes as one would expect; his prose is vigorously and colloquially straightforward. He writes about trying to catch pigeons and sparrows, hunting for antelope and sheep, frog gigging, and, most of all, trying to convert his vegetarian girlfriend into a carnivore.
It was this last bit that finally did Rinella in for me. Because frankly, I liked his book just fine — but I thought he was a jerk. Like when he takes his girlfriend home to meet his folks for the first time and his father automatically takes them out fishing. Diana looks ill, but Rinella says nothing. She does it. She’s served up a huge plate of fish at dinner, and Rinella says nothing. She eats it. And all he says is, “Goodie, she’s changing her ways for me.” Finally, at the end of the book, he realizes that it’s fine if she’s a veggie. Of course, by the time he was on the radio, they had broken up altogether.
But jerkitude notwithstanding, I still enjoyed reading this.
Steve left at 5 this morning as usual, but was back within an hour and a half. The freeway was shut down. Yay for snow days — we went for a quick jaunt around Kubota.
