today, from GoodReads

Source: thatkindofwoman.tumblr.com via Lauren on Pinterest

"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future."

(Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, was born on this day in 1939.)

8. book that scares you

[Real quick, guys: I just got off of work and, after a block or two of vacillating, decided to come to Starbucks and do work instead of going home and eating dinner/watching Grey's Anatomy.

I had no sooner opened up my computer than one of the baristas came up to my table and, without a word, handed me a latte.
Sign: accepted!]

*

Hello, friends! Long time, no see.
If you've been following along with this li'l books series, you know by now that sometimes I have difficulty making decisions. Today's post illustrates another situation where, much like the Favorite Young Adult Book post, I'm probably just getting hung up on semantics.

7. book that you can quote/recite

I thought this was going to be easy.

But then I realized that Shakespeare plays don't count as books (I have a theory that people who hate Shakespeare do so because they were forced to experience him the wrong way; if you learned about hot chocolate by having it shot up your nose, I bet you'd hate that too), and neither do musicals (I was all set to say Les Miserables! but then I was like, oh, wait...), and then it got a heck of a lot harder. I spent several days trying to come up with something interesting and unique, but the truth is, the only real book that I can quote/recite from is the Bible.

Yep...I was a King James kid. Which actually came in really handy while
learning to decipher Shakespeare.

6. favorite young adult book

This was a tricky one. Not because I don't enjoy young adult books, but because when I look at my  Favorite Books with the YA genre in mind, I realize that, Oh Wow, I have lots of YA in here...

(I would segue here into some proclamation about how this proves that I am SO not an adult, but when it comes to books, I can't really make that claim - two of my recent-ish favorite reading experiences have been The Brothers Karamazov and Memoirs of a Geisha. But then, who makes the rules about what age you have to be to enjoy those kinds of books? I first read Memoirs, as I'm sure many people did, when the movie came out. That was in 2005, and I was 15; a Young Adult by any standards.

Anyway...I think we'll save the age-appropriate-books rant for another time.)

After a great deal of dispute with myself and the internet (what do you mean, Phantom Tollbooth is a children's book? That s*** is deep!), I finally settled on Mara, Daughter of the Nile.

Man, this brings back memories.

5. book you wish you could live in

Enter Stage Left: the best thing ever.

(more or less) everything you need to know for your trip to the border. 

This is only one of the most recent books in the great grand shared-world anthology series that is the Bordertown books, but it's the one I got started on. First book I ever contemplated stealing from the library, as a matter of fact (I didn't). Now that I'm older and have something resembling a half-decent income, I've moved on to collecting them in (usually) more legitimate ways.

4. book that makes you cry

All right, so I've put this off for long enough. Here's the next post in the on-again, off-again books series - no doubt the post that will make you all think that I am a crazy person who gets waaaaaay too attached to fictional characters. All I can say in my own defense is that this sort of thing rarely happens with me and books - I think the last time was The Hobbit, when I was, like, eight.

You suck, George.

things are looking up!

Happy Saturday, everyone!

This blog post brought to you by: I GOT A JOB.

Source: mizozo.com via Paige on Pinterest

Starting sometime next week (or whenever Human Resources contacts me about training), my days will be spent selling eco-friendly clothes to hipsters in Lincoln Square. I'm excited to start; my new boss seems like a pretty great person, one of the few that didn't look confused when I said "Yes, and I'm also a stage manager," in the job interview. Plus, the store is about 15 minutes (ten minutes walking, five on the bus) from my apartment, and it is surrounded by: a coffee shop next door, two bookstores across the street, a frozen-yogurt place down the block, and a Payless around the corner. And if you walk down far enough, there is also a movie theater. Across from the Starbucks. Because there's always a Starbucks.

(Sure is a good thing they aren't paying me in cash.)

sending up a quick signal

"Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more."

-Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Oh, hi.

Remember me? I blog here. It's true! I may tend to go AWOL when life stops being fun to write about (I mean, I like to think this is an Amusing Blog, and it's hard to find much amusement in the endless job applications, money challenges, self-doubt, and tear-inducing levels of exhaustion that have been filling my life of late), but I do still exist!

I don't have much in particular to say, except that I'm still searching for a day job, Piccolo's official run of Six Dead Queens is officially underway, and it has just started to get cold here. It was pretty sudden, too - one day it was all hot and sticky like usual, then that night, boom  - cold front. Somewhere, there is a trusty scarf that I really need to dig out and start wearing when I go out at night.

3. book that makes you laugh out loud

Once upon a time, I wished my Dad was Bill Cosby.

(Sorry, Dad. For what it's worth, I think you are at least as cool as Bill Cosby. And definitely better-looking.)

Then, I realized my father is Bill Cosby.

(At some point, we should talk about that whole sweater-vest thing.)

Several years after that, my boyfriend (who does a fairly decent Bill Cosby impression, although thankfully sans sweater vests) introduced me to a book written by Mr. Cosby, called "Cosbyology: Essays and Observations from the Doctor of Comedy."

In what was, for him, a remarkably poor judgement call, he decided to read to me from this book while we were driving home from school one day. Well, I was driving. But pretty soon I was laughing, so hard my face hurt, so hard, in fact, that I was gasping and crying actual tears and could not see at all and very nearly killed us.

(Sorry, Josh.)

It's a really good book. You should read it. But probably not while driving.

2. least favorite book

This is a hard one. I’ve started a lot of dumb/boring/time-wasting books, but two in particular come immediately to mind, and I can’t decide which one I detested more. Both of them were things I had to read for school. Both have clueless, indecisive protagonists with bad attitudes. And they were both – to use my best, most thought-out literary academic language – incredibly lame.

Catcher in the Rye…do I even have to explain this? Cool cover art aside, Holden Caulfield is the proto-hipster (no offense to any hipsters in my audience, but seriously, this guy makes y'all look pretty bad). He doesn’t stand for anything. He doesn’t care about anything. He knows nothing about the world he lives in, and he drifts through it with a complete lack of motivation to do anything but take up space and smoke cigarettes. Just having to spend an entire book (albeit a fairly slim book) riding around in his head pissed me off so much, I had to go have a lie-down. I have a hard time putting up with useless, apathetic people. Especially when I have to write papers about them. 

1. favorite book

Surprised?
Me too! But this has been one of the most important books in my reading history for so long, I thought it deserved some recognition.

booksssssssss

Hello, friends! Happy Monday.

tt's been a little slow around the blog of late, largely due to my writerly stuck-in-a-rut-edness. Happily, after having trawled the internet for inspiration, I have stolen something from tumblr (bwahaha) that should keep us all entertained for awhile.

Source: goodreads.com via Mary on Pinterest