Monthly Archives: August 2007

Setting priorities

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Where you fall in poll of U.S. reading habits
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/08/21/reading.ap/index.html

Pollyann Baird, 84, a retired school librarian in Loveland, Colorado,says J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy series is her favorite. But she has forced herself to not read the latest and final installment, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” because she has yet to file her income taxes this year due to an illness and worries that once she started the book, “I know I’d have to finish it.”

Good dog, woman! You’re 84! Should the worst happen, are you going to want to have filed your taxes or read Harry Potter?

If you don’t file your taxes, they might take you to jail, in which case you’ll have even more time to read!

I mean, really. Priorities!

The Market, She Crazy

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I don’t often follow the daily ups and downs of the stock market, but it’s been more nuts than I can ever remember these past couple weeks… it’s like passing a traffic accident, and then a nude beach, then another train wreck.

Today, nude beach.

Where Fiction meets Fact

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I am currently reading The Dark Design, third in the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer. (The First two were logged here and here)

In my log of the first book, I mentioned this:

I see from the bio that Philip Jose’ Farmer was born in 1918 in Terre Haute, IN, which is 5 years after and 20 miles from the time and place when my grandfather, Floyd Lucas, was born. I wonder if they met at a barn dance.

In these novels, there is a character named Peter J. Frigate, which is based upon the author.

I have just read a chapter where Peter J. Frigate recounts his past a bit (in Terre Haute), with great detail about his father (where he went to school, etc) and other family members. A little more than necessary in the context of the book, which leads me to believe he was spewing facts about his real history.

And then he mentioned his grandmother, Wilhelmina Kaiser. And I remembered that my grandmother, born in 1917 near Terre Haute, was a Kaiser.

So, now I’m wondering not so much whether my grandfather met Farmer at a barn dance, but rather whether my grandmother knew him from a family get together. Something to be put on a list of To Be Researched.

Book Log – Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt

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Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby

This is the sequel to The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby’s previous compilation of his Believer columns about books. I’ve extolled his columns before in a previous book log, but I’ll state it again: I love, love, love his columns about reading.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered I had forgotten I wasn’t done with this book. I was crawling around on the floor with Scout the other night and noticed it on the table beside the couch, with the built-in cover bookmark at the halfway point. “How odd,” I said to myself, “that I should have put the book away with the bookmark still in the book instead of folded back into the cover!” I opened it at the mark and read a bit and realized I’d put the book down, gotten distracted by a shiny object, and forgot that there was still some left to go.

Really, it’s like finding $20 in the pocket of a little-used jacket.

The preface is a witty diatribe against book snobbery:

But what’s proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that’s for sure.

Hornby and I have two books-read in common this time, Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation and Levitt’sFreakanomics. He’s purchased The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean, but it languishes on the shelf. I kind of don’t blame him, her essays are a little bit… I dunno. Opaque? I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.

Sarah Vowell is mentioned numerous times, largely because they are friends (“I should own up here and say that Sarah Vowell used to be a friend, back in the days when she still spoke to people who weren’t sufficiently famous to warrant animation”). Several book recommendations come from her, and when mentioned in the later half of the book, he refers to her exclusively as Violet Incredible.

Assassination Vacation is the first of the inevitable Incredibles cash-ins– Sarah Vowell, as some of you may know, provided the voice of Violet Parr in The Incredibles, and has chosen to exploit the new part of her fame by writing a book about the murders of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. See, I don’t know how good an idea this is, from the cash-in angle. Obviously I’m over here in London, and I can’t really judge the appetite for fascinating facts about the Garfield presidency among America’s preteens, but I reckon Vowell might have done better with something more contemporary– a book about the Fair Deal, say, or an analysis of what actually happened at Yalta.

He also reveals that he was the English Nick mentioned in one of her essays in Assassination. Incestuous!

High-larious. I eagerly await the next one.