O pardon me while I procrastinate Sunday’s blog post by listing books I’ve read so far this year, this 2010 stuff-of-life year, here. Right here:
Parenting Without Stress, Marshall
The Lightning Thief, Riordan
The Informers , Vasquez (yep. for book club. yep…almost didn’t survive that one…)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz (I survived, I definitely survivied—barely…)
Finding Wisdom , Bleyl (first 4 pages and then I just———————-)
The Help, Kathryn Stockett (just started for book club)
Parenting Without Power Struggles, (powerless to start)
Dearest Creature, Amy Gerstler (the cover of this book is creepy and wild, the first poems especially thrilling in a thrillingly dark manner that gets under your skin and simmers, even if you’re not sure you want to be so affected…too late!)
New Yorker each week (thanks, Pater)
Toddler Bistro , Schmidt (almost every day, despite regularity of cooking many of the recipes—I should know them all by heart by now! But I don’t sleep much—synapses/firing mechanisms on the fritz—how I love this book, it’s baked tofu and baked chicken strips and baked squash and all those other things I can’t remember, but that are so easy to bake…)
Moving on to:
The Pioneer Woman
Finslippy
The Women’s Colony (I like their rooms)
Facebook (doesn’t count, really—like calling The National Enquirer literary canon fodder)
Tea leaves (actually coffee grounds—not that I discern much from them except horrible-tasting-coffee-crunch bulls*** with my morning Joe)
Multiple lists scribbled on torn-from-crap bits: grocery, daily, weekly, life lists, most mildewing in my infernally bottomless purse with the month old goldfish crackers that spilled there and joined the 1/2 eaten and the wadded and the stuff Suze Orman would chastize me for and the simply too, too scary to ever bring to daylight again—better to throw purse away, into a dumpster with ghastly non-plumb-able depths).
The Sunday LA Times, sometimes–and then mostly the Arts and Whatever section and crossword and——inserts…
And then of course I’m always reading, trying to read, hoping to interpret, obsessively returning to this endlessly fascinating subject that I couldn’t, in my wildest dreams, make up on my own. He’s so, so aliiiieeeeeeve! Dancing around the house with thumps and vocals! Concocting hysterical sentences! Experimenting with spitting! Waking up at 5am! HUGGING me spontaneously! I’m part reader, part fan, part interpreter, part author (!!), part plagiarist (this blog), part editor-in-CHIEF, part cheerleader, part extremely important authoritarian figure trying to get it right, a part of his burgeoning novel. Little guy! S*** he’s heavy.
photo by Rachelle Mama, who is about to have her second baby. Taken in Joann Mama’s back yard, where she has trouble with eagles attacking her kiddie pools.
