Category: books

I am sooo, like, you know, literate!

For my recently celebrated birthday, The Good Man scored me a most awesome present.

I gots me a Kindle!

Oh my stars and bars, how I love that Kindle.

We’d had a lot of philosophical talks over Sunday morning breakfast about iPad vs Kindle and what did we *really* want from such a device.

I thought it was all idle chatter until a Kindle showed up under all that wrapping paper.

Fabulous!

So, being the cheapy cheaperson that I am, I immediately went to the free section of the Kindle store on Amazon, and began downloading my bootie off.

I did pay for a couple books that’d I’d wanted, like the new Jeannette Walls book, “Half Broke Horses” (a five star recommend from me! This and her first book “The Glass Castle“), but mostly I downloaded the free stuff.

There are a few for free trashy romance novels in there. I downloaded a couple but I doubt I’ll get to them.

The biggest portion included in the free section are books that are in the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired.

I guess anything published prior to 1930 is now public domain. There are quite a few of the classics in the free collection.

Let’s be honest here, I wasn’t exposed to a lot of the classics during the course of my education. Ok, some of the basics. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was on the list. “Grapes of Wrath” (haaate it!) was a forced read. And there was also a lot of bits and bites, but not full books. No “Scarlet Letter” or “Moby Dick” made it across my transom.

On the other hand, The Good Man has read almost all of the classics, many more than once, and it’s no wonder he’s so much more well spoken and intelligent than me.

But! The Kindle may just even out the game.

I have things like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Jungle Book” and “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Pride and Prejudice” to name just a few that are loaded up and ready for me to get into.

I also have beautiful classic books that I have already read like “Red Badge of Courage” and “The Secret Garden” and “The Velveteen Rabbit” on the Kindle. They are like old friends, lost to the sands of time, who have returned to me.

My only issue is that sometimes I have a hard time reading the classics. The language or style can be tough.

I do love the Kindle’s in line dictionary that makes looking up tough words a snap.

But all the Oxford English Dictionaries in the world can’t help me get around some of the archaic language.

Right now, The Good Man and I are taking on our latest book club title. It is just us in our book club. We read together and then discuss.

Currently we are reading “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. The Good Man is a confirmed Wilde fan. Until I got the Kindle last month, I’d read zero Wilde. I started with the play “The Importance of Being Earnest” and really enjoyed it.

But I’m finding ol’ Dorian Gray to be a bit of a slog. All the reasons that The Good Man likes it, the deep thought and philosophizing…well, that just makes me ape sh*t. I want some story to move the thing along!

I’m doin’ it. I’m chugging though the pages. Currently about halfway done. The story part of the story is really fascinating. Well drawn characters and quotable pithy sayings.

But the expository pieces that run for pages and pages are about to make me insane. I *know* that’s why people love Wilde and I *get* that he was a great thinker and artist of his time.

But damnit! I’m just a girl who likes a little Louis L’Amour sprinkled in her day. There is a cowboy, he fights another cowboy over stolen cattle or water rights, and then gets the girl. The end.

I know, I know. This high-minded literature stuff is good for me.

And I really am enjoying it.

Tell me, what do YOU make of: “But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.”

I spent a while working on just that one sentence. I get it now, but my brain is tired.

Maybe wearing out the ol’ brain on classic literature will help stave off dementia. It’s a nice thought, anyway.

The Power of Evaporative Cooling

You know, growing up in the high desert, the weather gets hot. Real hot, like high nineties and occasionally slipping up over 100 degrees.

And people joke all the time about, “well at least it’s a dry heat!”

And inevitably someone will make a scoffing noise and say that “dry heat” doesn’t matter.

I’m here to say…it matters.

It matters to me, anyway.

About three weeks ago, I was in Las Cruces.

The temperatures hovered in the high eighties, touching 90 at one point. The humidity was 7%.

It was fantastic!

I basked. I was like a salamander on a rock. I looooved every moment of it.

Yesterday, in the part of the Bay Area where I live, it topped out at a bold 77 degrees.

Yes, just a small 77 degrees.

With 84% humity.

I almost died.

Well, ok, no. I didn’t almost die. But I felt like I was gonna.

Look, the human body was made to be an evaporative cooling device.

You sweat, either the wind blows across the sweat or the air evaporates it, or, ideally, both, and your body manages to maintain a good temperature.

Add an indoor a/c unit and a glass of iced tea into the mix, and those warm summer days are quite tolerable!

At almost eighty degrees with NOTHING helping me dry the sweat and every frappin’ place I go (including my own home) has NO air conditioning (zero, ziltch, nada)…well, I had only a cool glass of iced tea to get through the day.

It wasn’t enough.

I. Was. Miserable.

I actually was *grateful* for the fog rolling in around 4:00. Thank gawd for that Bay Area temperature inversion that I usually curse!

As sweat poured off of me, I could feel the wind ahead of the fog and the temps dropped fast and I enjoyed the peace I hadn’t been able to find all day.

Today promises much of the same. I shall position myself directly in front of a fan and not move around much.

The Good Man likes to tease…..”Oh you, my Woman of the Desert*…where’s your heat tolerance now?”

It’s back where it might be very, very hot…but at least it’s a dry heat!

*That’s a reference to the book “The Alchemist” which I found neither spiritual nor interesting. The main female characters says that about herself…a lot. “I am a Woman of the Desert”….yeah. Whatever, sister. I am a Woman of the Red Couch. Hear my Cheetos roar.

Things you learn about yourself when you travel

So, this past weekend, The Good Man and I made a whirlwind trip to Southern New Mexico to celebrate my best friend’s 40th birthday.

There was bbq brisket and tender ribs and homemade ice cream with homemade german chocolate cake on the menu.

Of *course* I was going to be there.

It’s not a bad trip from San Francisco to Las Cruces, but it does take a skosh of effort sometimes.

So while riding planes, trains and automobiles, I learned a few things about myself.

Here’s some of the top thoughts while on the journey:

The speed of the girl, while in motion, is variable depending on geography.

New Mexico, the land of mañana, moves very, very slowly. San Francisco, on the other hand, moves very, very quickly.

I do ok going from the super fast pace to the nice slow moving pace.

I have one hell of a time coming back from slow motion into 90 miles per hour.

In fact, I think I stripped a gear.

The sort of person you are becomes self evident after sitting for an hour on the tarmac.

San Francisco was having bad weather yesterday, so our connecting flight was delayed by a couple hours. Then they said, “hurry up and let’s get loaded” so we complied. The plane backed from the gate, rolled toward the runway, and stopped.

And there we sat.

And sat.

They were having a hard time getting a window for take off. They said we could go at any minute. So we all had to stay seated and buckled in.

As we waited.

You really get a sense of a person under these sorts of circumstances.

The lady behind me started making ever more angry calls to her husband. The people in front of us who started out as strangers quickly became friends, trading stories about delayed flights in their collective past.

A lady across the aisle angrily flipped pages in her magazine and sighed. Loud, frustrated sighs.

Me, I read. I had a really good book, so that helped. But after a while, I was getting grumpy and frustrated too. So then I put down my book and started fidgeting. And then it seemed a good idea to start annoying The Good Man because isn’t that what husbands are for?

I guess I’m the sort of person that can be patient…but only for a little while.

Southwest Airlines open seating policy makes people rather aggressive.

Seriously. It’s a seat. It’s not a gold medal event. Find a seat. Sit in a seat. If you have to sit in a middle seat, it doesn’t mean you lost the contest. It just means you have to sit in a middle seat for a few hours. Get over it.

Airports will go to great lengths to get you to buy their overpriced food.

I’m almost positive Auntie Anne’s pretzel place was piping hot cinnamon sugar odor into the terminal. Gooey tasty cinnamon suguar. It was damn near irresistible.

I saw another guy with three Popeye’s boxed meals walking by. He was by himself…

And then there’s Starbucks. Evil place. They suck you in.

I *might* have to succumbed to some of these delights, but the food in the airport is NEVER as good as it is at a real stand alone shop.

But they manage to sucker in almost every weary traveler, prisoners of TSA policies, too weak and famished to resist paying seven dollars for a soggy hamburger.

It ain’t right.

Millions of years from now, archeologists will describe us as a quaint nomadic tribe so attached to our possessions that we dragged them around with us in small wheeled wagons called “samsonites”.

Honestly. Have you ever seen people so damn attached to their suitcase full of crap?

Ok. Well. I am way guilty on this one.

But at least I’m willing to check my rolley bag and not have to clutch it to my chest, and cram, shove and heave-ho it into the overhead compartment.

Ah well, as the old saying goes, all’s well that ends well. It was a fantastic trip to New Mexico, much green chile was consumed. Many wild college era stories were told and fun was had.

Now back to our regularly scheduled insanity….

Plot devices that no longer work

So, in the middle of the night last night, while I was *not* sleeping, I got to thinking about, well, phone booths.

And how there aren’t any around anymore.

Phone booths were such a key element to the plot lines of a LOT of books and movies.

For example, where would Superman be if not for the phone booth!

Where does mild mannered Clark Kent put on his blue tights these days?

Probably the bathroom at a Starbucks, but that’s not the point.

The point is, there are no phone booths on every city street corner anymore. Where are you supposed to take that random and creepy phone call? Where are you supposed to wait for the kidnappers to give you your next clue? How do you have an angry confrontation with a guido over how long you are on the phone? You don’t. Not anymore.

The movie “Crazy Heart” had a scene with a phone booth. It was by the side of a desolate road in New Mexico (playing the part of Arizona). It felt odd even in the context of the movie. It was in a weird location and had no wires leading to or from it.

It just didn’t work. The era of the phone booth is dead.

How many of our great stories told over the years involved a phone booth?

Or for that matter, payphones in general?

It’s just not the same.

The lonely cowboy with a stack of dimes trying to get his lady on the line, rain pouring outside the glass phone booth, operator intoning “fifty cents please” in a nasaly voice. That’s literature!

Cowboy flips open his mobile device and curses the low signal strength just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi, ya know?

And so then I thought about another lost plot device. The lockers in bus stations, train stations and airports. (ok, I already lamented their loss here, but I’m going there again.)

You know, the bad guy stashes the loot to cool it off, inserts a quarter, takes the key and no one is the wiser? Until the bad guy is bumped off and ANOTHER bad guy takes the key and tries to figure out where it goes so he can get the stash?

Oh yeah. That’s good suspense!

The movie “Desperately Seeking Susan” centered around the Rosanna Arquette character getting Madonna’s locker key that held her valise and that really cool jacket. Remember?

Yeah, we really don’t have those anymore, the quarter to rent a locker places. A few gyms have ’em and a local nature preserve has a few near the walking trails, but mostly people leave their stuff in their car or carry a backpack anymore.

Another good plot device, dead.

Oh, and how about meeting people at the gate at the airport!?!

How many great, dramatic scenes involve someone stepping off a plane and a loved one, bad guy, limo guy, complete stranger, detective, etc. is there waiting?

It’s just not quite as dramatic to have the waiting happen down at baggage claim where you hope you find the right person.

Or heck, really going back, how about waiting out on the tarmac while the starlet decends the metal stairs. Nope.

I won’t EVEN start down the road of the loss of manual transmission cars (I covered it here), but do you think Steve McQueen’s hot little green fast back Mustang in “Bullitt” was an automatic? Oh no, I don’t think so.

I know, I know. I’m being a fuddy duddy and time must always march on. But as a writer, I lament the loss of ANY good device to keep a story moving along….

And there you have it.

You know, sometimes it is, in fact, easier to tell a story with a photograph rather than words.

This past weekend, I wandered into my bedroom to grab my iPod off the bedside table. It was then I saw, laying there, the perfect explanation of my relationship with The Good Man.

It just says so much about who we are, how we’re alike, and how we’re different.

It is thus:

I’ll give you two guesses as to which book is the one I’m reading.

Hint: it’s not the one about Oscar Wilde.

And there you have it.