Treading

Since I'm done with things that are important (taxes, Passover cleaning, failing to get a lease for my Urban Dream House) and I can't/won't do other things that are important (packing what appears to be an infinite amount of stuff, getting a lease for my Urban That'll-Do House, laying eyes on my Urban That'll-Do House), I'm focusing pretty heavily on the unimportant (Facebook, Bones, lackadaisically "organizing" my email inbox). Strangely, this has included less reading that one might think. I am not, for example, reading right now, although I could be learning more about Filipina nannies and narratorial voice from Mona Simpson. I'm not avoiding this, exactly. I just like to picture a life in my head and nestle into the picture (which is probably one reason I like reading so much, so intensely, so fetishistically); failing that, I'm having a hard time living in my own. I read the Cordelia Gray (see previous post), but I didn't really sink into it; for that matter, I struggled some with Call Me Irresistible, which serves no other purpose than the sinking. It's possible, I guess, that James' women, unleavened, are just too much; possible that Susan Elizabeth Phillips' characters are just buried under backstory now; but I think my brain just wants to have moved already, is in Chicago in spirit. Maybe it's getting some reading done.

Decisions, Decisions

Okay. Whew. I got into grad school, have a whole different cold, and am looking to self-medicate as I juggle the following:
*Moving to Chicago, including finding a house and a daycare (possibly harder than finding a house)
*Scheduling flights for my husband (whose #1-ranked doctoral program is 700 miles away)
*Cleaning the house for Passover (this is both a spiritual and a physical cleaning, involving the digging-through of closets and vast quantities of boiling water and wax paper)
*Finishing the frog-swallerin' taxes (which are due the day Passover starts, and I ask you, which of us is man enough to properly file medical bills? Including NyQuil receipts?)
*Trying to still be creative and energetic about teaching even though I'm leaving and the kids palpably don't care (IS IT SPRING BREAK YET FOR GOSHSAKES)

So, clearly I need a book over troubled waters. Here are the choices:
*Call Me Irresistible, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. SEP is the sine qua non of romance writers. She has a whole romance-verse populated by strong and sensitive men, many professional football players, which is inexplicably soothing while also being erotic and funny. Now, people, including me, might mock me for this secret weakness, but I would suggest that if a PERSON were soothing, erotic, and funny, you'd snatch 'em up! Am I right? My concern: I've been out of the SEP loop for a while and I'm not sure I can tolerate references to other characters/situations in the oeuvre, as that will make me feel both silly for having known/loved them in the first place and elitist for having left them behind. Elitist is not the word I'm looking for, but perhaps said word is in the Passover closet, in which case, fuck it.
*My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson. This is, apparently, The Help with Filipina nannies. I liked The Help, despite some political issues therewith, and I like stories about nannies. I have no objection to learning more about Filipinas.
*An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, by P.D. James. I've recently finished the last of James' Adam Dalgliesh novels, about which I'm really pretty torn up, so it seems like rounding out her British mystery list is worthwhile. But I'm dragging my heels: what if Cordelia Gray's not as GOOD? (James' female characters are not particularly sympathetic, and they're a bit uncannily self-aware). What will I do when there's no more new P.D. James LEFT? (The woman's in her eighties. Let's be real.)
*Captive Queen, by Alison Weir. I like Alison Weir all right, I don't know anything much about Eleanor of Aquitaine, and there's a nervous-looking woman in a fancy dress on the cover. What more could I need.

Please note: the choice will be paired with Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. I'm actively trying to fill in gaps, and I'm avoiding Ivanhoe and Ethan Frome with a nice Victorian fattie (although Gaskell doesn't make me swoon, and it's recently turned out that Wharton kind of does. A little bit. Mostly The House of Mirth.)

The Drought

Soooo... fast-forward 2 months. Although I can only breathe through one nostril at present, because the best part of being a high-school teacher is the germs, the never-ending ever-changing germs, I have gained admission to 3 count 'em 3 English PhD programs, with 3 heard from (moderate preening). Which means that I do not have to, necessarily, continue to wallow in 10th grade respiratory ailments.

However, said admissions process is really cramping my reading style. I have a whole shelf full of checked-out new fiction (The Invisible Bridge! Wolf Hall! Matterhorn!) and I just can't make it happen. I'm fidgety and distractible and God help me reading Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang for this new book group that I'm trying out (and let me tell you, their first choice is NOT PROMISING). I can't even cuddle down with P.D. James: I have two more Adam Dalglieshes to read and I don't want to waste them on my agitated brain, which knows that I should be starting to think about decisions -- at least making criteria for decisions -- at least not blocking out the eventual necessity of a decision -- at least not purposefully burying my acceptance letters under forms from the DMV and then taking up the brain-numbing needlepoint I'm making for my brother-in-law's wedding gift and watching countless back-to-back episodes of late Grey's Anatomy.

Don't Bother

Somehow Sideways Stories from Wayside School got knocked into the bathtub tonight, although how it even got into the bathroom is a mystery. This event is a fair synecdoche for how my life feels at the moment: hectic, illogical, all elbows, and damp. I have 8 of 11 grad school applications submitted, 22 recommendation letters outstanding, 5 days of work until a Mexico vacation, 3 snot-filled persons in my house, 17 holiday gifts to buy and/or mail, 2 cars that require inspections, 10 place settings worth of dishes waiting to be washed*, 8 books that I want to read on vacation but can't bring myself to purchase on the Kindle because I'm more of a checker-out than a buyer by temperament, 100 songs to put on the iPod for my husband becaue if I don't this will be the 2nd year in a row that I failed to really give him a Chanukah present, and 0 items packed.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this above-listed numerical impossibilities, I spent the 45 minutes I had free today during Nora's nap skimming The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. My intention was to read it fo reals, but the author, Aimee Bender, did me a huge favor by overwriting up some unfocused Los Angeles magical realism so that I wouldn't have that time commitment, at least.

*I mentioned to one of my students, in passing, that I don't always get to the dishes after dinner. She gave me a squinty look, so I said "Don't judge me." Her instantataneous response: "Too late."

Philistines

I'm starting to get really resentful of my carpool-mates due to their INEXPLICABLE refusal to listen Middlemarch on CD on the drive to and from school. It's like Valium with an accent, and it reminds me that there are in this world people capable of complex thought and copious mental retention, and it makes me feel that those 45 shoulder-tensing minutes behind the wheel aren't an utter waste of life.

Confession

I'm having some trouble quitting P.D. James. I usually like to vary my reading, hopping from popular nonfiction about condiments or unlikely professions to Victorian novels mostly of interest only to women's studies majors to the kind of unabashed chick lit that heavily features brand-name shopping, if only to keep my Goodreads followers guessing.

However, I have read almost nothing but Adam Dalgliesh mysteries for the last month and a half, and I have gone through eight of them, which I think is officially compulsive. I am kind of diffidently an Anglophile, super-excited about the royal engagement, etc., and James' mysteries are so British that she's been made a baroness by the Queen just for writing them. But they're British less in a charming, country cottage, God Save the Queen kind of way than in a deadpan, dirty Thames, National Health Service kind of way. And our hero is a lugubrious policeman/poet who is not very likable, although he's very good at figuring out what's afoot. He himself is often afoot.

This whole Adam Dalgliesh situation is wreaking havoc with my plan to take nothing but the Kindle on our winter vacation to Mexico. Only the last four are available on the Kindle, so I need to get through two and a half in the next 10 days while applying furiously to grad schools, raising a child, and stamping out ignorance 40 hours a week.

Light My Fire

So, I like to think I'm still a hold-out. I still pause to bury my nose in the smell of whatever book I'm reading, new and old alike. Bookstores both soothe me and make me slightly manic (as all the best addictions do, I imagine, at one stage or another). Some of my fondest memories of college are sitting in the absolute silence of the Grad Library stacks, getting gloriously distracted from the books I meant to find for my thesis amid the walls of books, the ranks of buckram spines, the pop of a new publication, the grab of an odd title in the corner of my eye. All this is to say that I feel deeply (if resignedly) about books as physical books. I love them in a way that I don't think they can be loved if you separate the words from the paper, glue, string, old annotations, spots, signs of care or carelessness, slow fading, decay.

However, Jake got me a Kindle for Chanukah. He likes books qua books, too, if only because he is a piler by nature, but he also makes a slight fetish of efficiency in spatial dynamics. Since the baby was born he has railed about the sheer amount of stuff that we have to pack to go anywhere for any period of time, and especially to go for a week or more (this railing is mostly inward, I should note, except in those exquisitely frustrating moments intrinsic to traveling -- which are, incidentally, the times in my life that I least want to discuss our penchant for overpacking). I generally take six to eight (to, ahem, ten) hardback library books on just about any trip that requires a plane, and Jake would have spent more than $189 to eliminate that weighty inefficiency. Also, we had a warm moment on a commuter train in New York this fall, me reading Stephen Ambrose's The Victors aloud to him from a sample on my Droid, as we rocked from Katonah back to the city, the baby asleep on the seat across from us.

So I just finished reading my first ever Kindle book: Lily Burana's I Love a Man in Uniform. I can't quite get over the fact that I've now read a book that I've never seen or touched (some distinction seems to be required now, right? A conceptual book vs. a physical book? Oy vey.) You don't really realize how much reading a book is a physical experience until you're reading a "book" (can someone please make a decent distinction here stat). It's delightful, but bizarre, not to have to hold the book open with your hand or the blanket or the edge of a plate, to be able to turn the page with the tiny motion of any smallish and reasonably coordinated body part. It's bizarre and not delightful not to be able to flip pages past your finger to find something you half-remember, and when you do find it, it's highly disconcerting to find it on a different part of the page from where you remember seeing it (I have a weird, and fairly useless, version of photographic memory where I can visualize what quadrant of a two-page spread a quote or fact I've read can be found; the last time I recall this making a major impact on my life was on U.S. history tests in high school).

I'm sure there'll be more on this later.

The Victors so far: I'm not sure Ambrose isn't plagiarizing himself, but we liked it the first time so hey.

I Love a Man in Uniform: Quick, enjoyable prose by a mostly sympathetic memoirist, writing about two experiences that fascinate me (stripping, which she writes about a little, and being married to the military, which she writes about a lot). I don't know about her "PTSD" freakout, but this happened in the book around the same time that I Googled the author's picture, and for some reason I liked her less after seeing it, so maybe I was just feeling ornery about that. Does this happen to other people? Discuss. Anyway, after reading this I would/will read her first memoir about stripping, I think.