I really do have blogging on the brain - I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning with the thought of Oh no, I forgot to put the weekly count up yesterday.
So here's what the count was as of yesterday -
For the week:
CHAPTERS - 129
PAGES - 1,551 (It's been a slower week than usual.)
For the year so far:
CHAPTERS - 1,027
PAGES - 14,739
Today's book; "There was always one girl at camp whom everyone hated"--to her conclusion about the inner lives of truffle pigs, actress-monologist Kaplan consistently amuses while cutting surprisingly deep. Never content to be merely clever, she probes, in these professed "true stories," the reasons why we manage to attach so much importance to self-justification without ever questioning it. Each story presents another element that in one way or another has shifted or reinforced Kaplan's view of people and their relationships."
This description was yet another over-the-top description that I don't think was very accurate. - I'm not sure why this continues to surprise me, but it always does. I'm like a toddler who keeps putting their hand on a hot stove. I just can't seem to accept that it's going to be hot EVERY TIME.
The book was okay - not terrible, but not remarkable either. I did enjoy how the pages smelled like wood, which reminded me of a new house. Which reminds me, in yesterday's entry I said I was going to try to use the word waft more, and today I managed to fit it into a conversation (although not without considerable effort - it's not the kind of word that easily fits into everyday conversation).
The part of the book I enjoyed the most was the story the author told about her grandfather who once gave her his shirt after she complimented it (with a note attached that said, You can always have the shirt off my back.) - Reading that chapter filled me with pleasant memories of my Grandmother, who would respond to every compliment her children or grandchildren made with, "Take it, it's yours." Those are heady words to a ten-year old - which lead to me testing to see just how far her generosity would stretch, with comments like, "You know Grandma, I've always admired that big screen TV of yours - and that's a really cute pile of money sitting over there on the counter." Just for the record, her generosity did not stretch quite that far. But hey, I had to take a shot right? No self-respecting ten-year-old would ever have let an opportunity like that pass them by.
I would highly recommend skipping over pages 130-133 if you're not a fan of bodily-function-humor (which I'm not). I wish I had skipped over it, because I have some really unpleasant mental images that I'm currently trying to wipe from my brain while typing this (I'm a multi-tasker - spellcheck keeps insisting to me that multi-tasker is not a word, but I'm using it anyway).
I remember seeing this book at the airport once, so every time I look at the cover I have a Pavlovian response (I'm not even sure if I used that word correctly or not - so now my blog has a third purpose, entertainment, to remind you of upcoming religious holidays, and to make you feel smart if you're better at punctuation and grammar than I am) - and I want to go to the airport. I love airport bookstores.
Okay, that's about all I have to say about the book, because I didn't find it terribly interesting. I usually get so caught up in the magic of books that I will say that any book was good, or okay, even if it wasn't (I do the same thing with movie theaters) - so you can never trust my judgement when it comes to recommending books. The best way to tell whether I liked a book, usually, is the length of the entry I write about it. Yesterday's book was one of my favorites (maybe even my favorite for the year so far), hence the really long entry about it. Today's blog entry was a bit of a struggle since I didn't find it as interesting. And now I feel guilt for saying I didn't enjoy some one's book in print, so I will say something nice about it to alleviate my guilt: I enjoyed that the inside cover had pictures of the author's family on it. It's always fun after reading non-fiction to see how the characters' pictures compare to the way I was imagining them in my head.
