What I'm Doing Besides Reading

I just finished The Aeneid! Wow, that was hard to get through for our Classics Club. If I weren't here with Emily in the hospital most of the time I don't think I could have made it through. But now it's under my belt and I am less confused, which is the goal of our Classics reading since it's impossible to really grasp it all. One more book and we are done with Part I (Homer through Aurelius) of V. (Time to plan our trip to the Mediterranean!) While I've been here I've also read The Guernsey Literary . . . Society, finished Vanity Fair, and am making headway in the wonderful Pickwick Papers.

What else do I do here in this unique situation? Here's a list:

fill Emily's mug and pitchers with ice and ice water from the machine down the hall; she's supposed to drink gallons

make food at Emily and KC's darling house in their lovely kitchen with her great cooking stuff and bring it hopefully in appetizing-enough combinations and presentations in plastic containers for me and KC and Emily sometimes too who is now mostly sick of hospital food (the breakfasts and lunches are okay, but not the dinners so much)

store the food in hospital fridge (limited space) and heat it up in the hospital microwave down the hall

take an occasional walk to the second floor cafeteria where they have really good lemon meringue pie and cornbread and soups sometimes (better food than Emily gets!)

do laundry, a little housework, and grocery shopping when I'm at the house

pack stuff back and forth in huge IKEA bag

take runs and walks in Cheverly and on paths in beautiful park next to hospital

Do stretches and arm weights when I'm at Emily's

watch leaves slowly change

go with Emily to sonograms down the hall

chat with Emily about monitoring and hospital food and having to be in bed and stretch marks and pregnancy and miracles and God

take Emily on wheelchair rides to the hospital "healing garden" where there are birds and a fountain and flowers and she gets to be outside for a little while. She loves it.

play Bananagrams, Quiddler, Farkle, and Password. Any suggestions? (We're pretty picky about our leisure activities. We haven't been up for Phase 10.)

visit with nice nurses

walk to store and do a little shopping (there is a Staples, a drugstore, and a small specialty mom-and pop grocery store/deli named Snyder's about 15 minutes' walk away, also a scary "Beer-Wine-Deli" hole-in-the-wall where I bought a great dill pickle) and buy only what I can carry back: fruit, cheese, fancy trailmix, yummy sandwich

make paper chain, drape it along the wall, and rip one link off each night to help us rejoice for every day that goes by and Emily is well and growing the babies

drive myself to and from hospital on the country's most notorious freeway: the Capital Beltway!!!

occasionally paint toe nails, shave legs, and braid hair

take naps on couch

do on-line shopping, blog, read and write emails

work on book if I feel like it

watch birthing shows (horrors!), Jeopardy, Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, and King of Queens on TV. Also an occasional DVD. For some reason a movie is too big of a commitment maybe or we don't have any good ones we haven't seen. (Except I watched the Horatio Hornblower series by myself at Emily's house.

talk to my husband and other loved ones on the phone a lot. Thanks everybody!

Who's Horatio Hornblower?

Good video ahoy!

A friend of Emily's brought over a basketful of books and videos for her to peruse while on bed rest gestating her fast-growing triplets. On the nights I've been at her house, as opposed to the hospital (KC and I trade off), I've started on a set of DVDs which I'm really enjoying. It's a series called
Horatio Hornblower. He's the fictional hero in the novels by C. S. Forester. More than great high seas adventures, the stories are full of drama and conflict and moral dilemmas inherent (no doubt) to the lives of dutiful and noble-minded British naval officers in the late 1700s. So far, the movies are riveting!


Ernest Hemingway said, "I recommend Forester to everyone literate I know."

A Slow Carriage Ride Through . . .

I've done it! I finished William Makepeace Thackeray's LONG novel Vanity Fair. It took me all summer (although I did read other books besides). The second volume seemed to go quicker than the first. It was great! Everyone should read it. It's just as applicable now and it was in the 1800s. Thackeray was a genius. And it was not nearly as heavy as I imagined it would be. It was light and funny. Hilarious names like Dickens's, as in Lord Bareacres and Lady Stunnington. Ha-ha. Even the tragedies were not really sad because it was all so tongue-in-cheek. What a rollicking in-depth study in all aspects of human nature! Perhaps everyone can identify with some part of some character. Personally, I kept finding myself in the fearful, weak, selfish Amelia Sedley, but not, thank goodness, in the unscrupulous, conniving, selfish Becky Sharp!

Now to watch all the Vanity Fair movies.

P.S. No wonder my Grandpa Ellsworth loved this book.

Am I the Only Person Who Did Not Love This Book??

I am staying with my daughter who is expecting triplets and saw a fun-looking book on her dresser, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. So I read it. It seems like everyone loves it. But I didn't. It was clever and all but the more I read the less I liked it. Which sort of annoys me because of the time invested. Here are some of the problems:

1. Oversentimental. I don't know why I hate this. Maybe it's just bad writing. The word maudlin comes to mind.
2. Exploitive. It uses the tragedies of wartime as the setting for a cutsey book. My dad was a veteran of WWII and POW. He saw what it was like. And he didn't think Hogan's Heros (the TV comedy about a Nazi prison camp) was at all funny. Alongside the humor, the authors use fictional (?)war atrocities to manipulate the reader. I don't know. This bugged me, too. And yet I like historical fiction. This just didn't sound genuine. It sounded opportunistic.
3. Unrealistic. Try contrived. Stretched. Predictable. The little hints the authors dropped along the way added up until . . . how convenient! The perfectly wonderful childhood friend/editor guy is homosexual and THAT'S why the perfect couple will never marry. Duh. I'm pretty sick of "the most wonderful guy turning out to be gay so the most wonderful girl can marry the unassuming underdog" scenario. It's just too neat. And phony. The whole phony gay thing is used and overused because it gives greedy authors a whole new direction to twist the plot. It's getting mighty old. And that's just ONE of several too-convenient little twists in this book. Sort of like how kids in junior high always write fantastical stories that -- Surprise! -- end up being a dream all along. Which brings me to--
4. Anachronistic. As in historically incorrect. This story is happening in 1946. I'm pretty sure that in 1946 having a child out of wedlock and homosexuality were pretty much looked down upon by practically everybody as social ills. Even the people acting out. Hello! I really hate it when people assign the social trends of today to characters and events that happened in a completely different time, as in assigning an acceptance of sexual immorality to a time when mainstream society upheld traditional values. It makes me think such authors are misled, uneducated, have an agenda, or all of the above.
5. Demonizes religion. This is another trendy tactic that's getting really old. This book would have you think that one of the very few bad, crazy, hateful characters in the story was, you guessed it, a CHRISTIAN. Never mind the NAZIS who happened to be occupying the island and oppressing its inhabitants. The authors made the only openly religious character a horrible person whom everyone couldn't stand and made fun of. That's not only anachronisitic but pathetically politically correct. I personally have never known a single hateful Christian (hateful because of their religion). Have you? They simply are not as commonplace as our modern culture would have us think.
6. Shallow, unbelievable characters. Yes. All the good guys and girls are way better people than everybody else, so good as to be perfect except of course for their adorable, endearing, trite little eccentricities which are supposed to make us love them all the more. Gag. Perfect characters end up being predictable, flat, and boring. We don't remember them or learn anything from them.
7. Self-Serving. This is a book written by writers about a fictional writer/heroine, obviously glorifying her for all that she is: smarter, better, more observant, and just plain more wonderful than any other living being. Ugh. Oh, what a noble existence and calling! it says between the well-penned, name-dropping, literary snob-tainted lines. Ordinary people -- strangers--, at the mere thought of a writer being interested in them, write her effusive personal letters for her writing project and cannot contain their joy when she condescends to visit their island, whereupon they roll out the elegantly quirky and homey red carpet. And then they all fall even more in love with each other and the islanders give up the unbelievably darling, quirky (of course) orphaned child for her to legally adopt. Yeah. Sure.

"Please, no," I found myself muttering out loud here and there.

What I liked about the book? It was written entirely in letters. I like those. They are clever and fun. I just finished rereading Daddy Long-Legs which was delightful. My daughter Cami and I play book games sometimes. Once we tried to name all the books we know written in letters. Too bad this book was made of letters that felt forced and predictable.

Here's something funny. One of those adorably quirky characters actually mentions that good books ruin you for bad ones. Well, yeah. Too bad the authors stuck that in there, never supposing from their perceieved ivory tower that some reader might think THEIR book was one of those bad ones. Oops.

Okay, I'm done. Sorry if I was harsh. But people who write books open themselves up to criticism. And I do wish readers would think more critically.