Book 77: Where Angels Fear to Tread

A classic by E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread explores the differences between society in post-Victorian-era England and in Italy. The English 20- or 30-somethings in this novel struggle with their uptight, snotty, heavily-ruled society. They are bored out of their minds, wishing to shake things up.

A trip to Italy adds much-needed excitement, but Italian society turns out to have its own drawbacks. A major flaw is that the women only socialize with family members. If you're sick of family intrusions, you'll just sit alone, forbidden to go outside alone, while your husband gets drunk in town.

The plot is that a young widow travels to Italy with another woman as a chaperone. While there, the widow meets and falls in love with a young Italian man. Scandal!

The best, funniest detail of the novel: the Italian man is socially beneath the English family because he's merely the son of a DENTIST! They look down so ironically on the profession of dentistry.

Great little book. My favorite line: "The train reached Charing Cross, and they parted -- he to go to a matinee, she to buy petticoats for the corpulent poor."



In other news, we have moved to a new apartment and are loving it! We still have boxes and messes and piles to be sorted and put away. We've made quite a big pile of things to donate (too bad we didn't have more time to sort BEFORE we moved it all over here, but the important thing is to get rid of the extra stuff that's dragging us down).

It feels great to lighten up and let go of stuff we don't need. This is the perfect time to be unsentimental -- when we just hauled SO Much stuff around and now are realizing that there's no place for it. My mantra: Let It Go. Let It Go. Just Let It Go.

Still Packing!

The garage is half-full of packed boxes and it feels like we should be done, but my office looks nearly untouched!

Francis The Cat just found a long-lost toy and proudly showed it to me before batting it around and losing it amongst packing supplies. It used to be a white ball, but now it's pretty dark grey. Nasty!

Imagine if humans had to carry everything around in our mouths. How hard would moving be THEN? I've got it EASY and should just stop typing and get back to work, feeling grateful for hands and opposable thumbs.

We're Moving!

Oh, we're so excited to leave our current place. We are overrun here with little kids and their nosy parents, especially the busybodies next door. The Rat tail family didn't end up moving, so their 5 kids are still here, still clickety-clacking their scooters up and down the sidewalk for hours on end, screaming at each other, "stop following me!"

The crayon drawings on the sidewalk and our driveway have faded a bit, but I believe they will still be visible in 2010.

Our new place is another townhome, but the neighborhood is a lot less crowded. There is a lot more distance between our door and the sidewalk (here, it is 2 feet). I have not seen any kids or noisy people at all near our building. I'm sure there will be plenty of surprises there, but at least the Rat tail family and the busybodies won't be there!

The experience of meeting with the landlady yesterday at the new place gave me lots of ideas for scary or mystery stories:

* The landlady doesn't really own the place, but is having us move all our stuff in and she'll steal it. She has a lot of personal information about us which she will use to steal our identities. (The fact that she's a scam artist explains why she has no idea which mailbox is ours, or what day is trash day!)

* The landlady is actually the last, bad, dirty tenant! She and her common-law husband will kill us in our sleep, like they did the landlord & landlady.

* If you crawl far enough into the crawl space, you'll find the real landlord and landlady's bodies.

I better stop daydreaming and get back to packing now. I might be back with more scenarios later.

Book 76: Shakespeare's Trollop

Another one of Charlaine Harris's Lily Bard mysteries from the library. Lily is a super-tough cleaning lady in a small town in the South. She accidentally gets embroiled in murder investigations quite often. This time, the town tramp is found murdered -- found by Lily, of course.

This one's pretty well-written. And you can't guess who did it until it's almost over.

I had burned out on Charlaine, but when the library notified me that this was in, I hurried to pick it up and read it in two days. I guess I'm over being over her. Now I have to figure out how to use inter-library loan to get the rest of the Aurora Teagarden mysteries (also by Charlaine Harris).

Book 75: Every Secret Thing

Another mystery! I think that without this two-books-a-week challenge, I would read fewer mysteries. But they are such quick reads, and I have keep up with my own dare.

Every Secret Thing is by Laura Lippman, and she is a great writer. She tells the story from several characters' perspectives, and she develops all the characters well. The two criminals are 18-year old girls who killed a baby when they were 11. Children doing really bad things is always scary and uncomfortable in our culture, because we pretend that kids are inherently Good.

The mother of one bad girl slowly reveals her side of the story to us.

The murdered baby's mother is another major character. She wants vengeance, of course.

There are two more women who share their perspectives with us: a police officer and a reporter.

Everyone has their own past problems which make them unreliable witnesses. Each woman has her own reasons for wanting to reveal the truth (or keep it hidden).

It's a fun read, and very well written.

Have I shrunk?

I've been 5 ft 10 in since I was 14 -- or I've assumed I've been that tall. I realized that I haven't been measured for maybe 15 years. When I go to the doctor's office, they weigh me (usually) but they just ask me how tall I am... even though they use that scale with the height measurement thingy on it.

So I measured myself today, old-fashioned-style. I drew a pencil mark on the edge of the bathroom door (so I could stand on the flat tile floor rather than on carpeting). Then I used two different tape measures and a ruler to see how tall I am.

5'7" (weight-loss measuring tape)
5' 8 + 1/2" (sewing measuring tape)
5'11" (ruler)
5' 9 + 3/8" (hardware store tape measure)

Wha?? Next time I go to the doctor, I'm having them measure me!

Book 74: Running With Scissors

Running With Scissors is a memoir by Augusten Burroughs. It's in the same vein as The Glass Castle: the writer had a horrible childhood but basically turned out okay as an adult.

I liked the humor of the beginning, and then the middle became too awful. I think the detailed description of a 14-year old losing his virginity non-consensually to a pedophile was just too much for me. Aside from that section, I could endure that Burroughs's parents abandoned him, and that he faked a suicide attempt just to get out of going to school (with the help and advice of his doctor), that he was surrounded by insanity and fortune-telling poop.

He tells his story with humor and from the perspective of having made it out alive. He can laugh at the past, and we can laugh with him (at least some of the time), because he escaped.

Probably not for sensitive readers.

33 is just like 32, so far

My wish didn't come true yet, but I neglected to wish for it to happen Quickly or Soon or Immediately. Dang it!