Well, we made it through February! Since we’re in a remote session, I’m not making my commute down to Carson City, which is good from the sense of weather but bad from the sense of cutting into my audiobook time! The 40-minute commute each way makes for speedy progress through my listens. And in other news, today is my mother’s birthday! Happy birthday Mom!
In Books…
- The Secret Life of Bees: I don’t read a lot of what might get categorized as “chick lit”, but I found this story about a 14 year-old girl who finds family and community in a place she might never have imagined to be sweet and an easy read. It wasn’t challenging, and I didn’t find it especially moving or lovely, but sometimes something nice to read and satisfying hits the spot.
- Shuggie Bain: This book is definitely depressing, but it’s also definitely incredibly good. The bond between young Shuggie, whose sexuality already marks him as different even from a young age, and his beautiful alcoholic mother Agnes in Thatcher-era Scotland is beautifully, heartbreakingly rendered. It’s not just tragedy porn, there are little nuggets of hope in there too that keep it from collapsing in under its own weight.
- The Leftovers: This book is ostensibly “about” the world after a Rapture-like event, but is actually about the differing ways in which a family deals with trauma. It was interesting enough but never really captured me in the way I was hoping it would.
- The Eyre Affair: This fast-paced genre hybrid kind of confused me, but it entertained me quite a bit while it did so. It’s difficult to explain, but essentially our heroine is detective-type Thursday Next, who lives in an alternate history world in which jet propulsion was never invented and dodos have been restored through genetic engineering. When a supervillain threatens the titular character of Jane Eyre, she’s off on a quest to protect one of England’s most beloved heroines. Fforde doesn’t do a great job of fleshing out his world, but it was fun enough to read that I mostly just kept turning pages without asking questions.
- Vivian Apple at the End of the World: Another Rapture story, but so different than The Leftovers that it didn’t feel like too much of the same. This one is really more of a young adult novel, in which the titular Vivian finds herself on the road with her best friend and a boy she likes after it seems like the world might be ending on the schedule predicted by a powerful preacher. It’s charming and engaging.
In Life…
- The beginning of my fifth session: It seems hard to believe that I’m on my fifth go-round with a Nevada Legislative Session, but here I am! In this case, there “here” is at home…like I said, we’re not making the commute down to Carson. It feels very odd to be trying to do this job from a distance, and I miss my session friends, but man being able to work in sweatpants is not the worst.
One Thing:
This is where I usually talk about something I like or find interesting, but this month I’m switching it up to talk about something I didn’t find interesting…namely, the new Tiger Woods documentary on HBO. Tiger has lived an interesting life, and something looking at his experience through the lens of child stardom, or the invasiveness of the paparazzi during the era in which they were at their peak, or his self-destructive spiral would have been compelling. Instead, it tells a story immediately familiar to anyone who has ever watched a bio-pic: there’s talent, and hard work, and a skyrocketing rise. Then a self-inflicted fall, followed by another rise. It was like watching a movie of a Wikipedia entry.
Gratuitous Pug Picture:
