Tuesday, July 22, 2008
the memory keeper's daughter
the memory keeper’s daughter by kim edwards.
i finally read this after several people nagged me about it. it was okay. but honestly, i cared more about caroline’s life than i did about david and norah’s and the book mostly focused on them. also “redemptive power of love” was in lots of reviews and the bcc. i really hate that shit. it prejudices me agains the book. and no one really seemed to have been redeemed. perhaps reviewers need to learn the meaning of the word?
posted by sarah on 07/22/2008 at 03:53 PM
Monday, July 21, 2008
the hammer is my penis
eh. this weekend was kind of a bust. i got a hair cut and a pedicure and went to acupuncture. also worked a bit on a quilt top, but i think i’ve decided i hate sewing. i don’t have the patience and i can’t cut or sew in a straight enough line.
and i’m very frustrated by work. as always, my youth is working against me (28 is youthy?).
posted by sarah on 07/21/2008 at 04:30 PM
Friday, July 18, 2008
the awesomest awesome that was ever awesome
posted by sarah on 07/18/2008 at 11:47 PM
three books
i finished john scalzi’s ghost brigades a couple of weeks ago.
i really enjoyed this book and tore through it.
*spoiler*
my only quibble with it was that i don’t think they would have let jane go so easily at the end. from their perspective it was risky letting her live, so i don’t know why they let her.
/*spoiler
black rain by Masuji Ibuse was good. it was about the aftermath of the atomic bombing in hiroshima. it was fiction, but based on the journals of a real man, and i’m sure the author’s own experiences of the time. it talked about how people reacted to the bombing, the immediate effects, and the lasting effects years later.
one of the main story lines was that a woman kept getting rejected for marriage because she’d been affected by the radiation and was therefore “damaged” because she might give birth to a defective baby. this was several years after the bombing. mostly the book illustrated how people just kept on with their lives, because there was really nothing else they could do; they had to live a hard life because everything they owned was destroyed, their government was gone, and they were occupied.
while i was still reading black rain, i stumbled across john hersey’s hiroshima at the book store, so i bought it. this was published as a series of articles in the new yorker (i think) the year or so after the bomb dropped. hersey is a journalist and the book is based on his interviews with actual real people who survived the bombing.
obviously, this covered some of the same themes and topics as black rain, but it delved much more into the the radiation and what happened to people if they were X meters from the epicenter and stuff like that. it got more into the nitty gritty details of how the bombing affected people’s lives, as well as the immediate aftermath and how absolutely fucked up things were. if you had to pick one of the two books, i’d go for this one first. it was pretty amazing.
posted by sarah on 07/18/2008 at 12:00 AM
Thursday, July 17, 2008
the teal eye
i would like to point out that i did this back in 2003 and got mocked. but now it is fashionable.
i guess i’m just fashion-forward?
posted by sarah on 07/17/2008 at 04:37 PM
excitement presympathized chipper novelty
i am meeting a friend for dinner tonight. this is a girl i know through metafilter and have only hung out with a couple times, and in group situations. she’s cool, and i like her, and i’ve wanted to hang out with her in a smaller setting.
so we’re gonna get dinner tonight at a place by her house. normal, right? completely unintimidating. but this is me we’re talking about.
i’m not wearing the right thing. i’ll be greasy after a 10 hour day. i’ve never eaten vietnamese before and who knows what tummy troubles it may give me. i’m fat and huff and puff if walking super fast and talking and she’s skinny and walks fast and it’s embarassing. and i might be too fat for the chairs/booth at the restaurant (yes, it is a concern, and yes, it has happened before. i am that massively large.).
plus, i don’t have anything interesting or normal to talk about. who wants to talk about apocalyptic sci-fi or hiroshima or how annoying it is when people can’t meet a damn deadline? i am a very negative person and i complain a lot, and i really try to rein (reign?) that in when i’m meeting new people or hanging out with people who haven’t known me for YEARS.
posted by sarah on 07/17/2008 at 03:29 PM
reality television
as a general rule, i loathe reality tv. loathe. but i’ve found myself watching more and more of it lately.
halfway through last season, i discovered america’s best dance crew. i know, right? but it is AWESOME. i’m sad that phresh select went home last week (philly what what!), but i’m really rooting for super cr3w because they are fucking amazing.
i also really enjoy project runway. it started last night and we watched it almost-live. i am SO glad that asian dude got voted off first; he was way too arrogant. i am already annoyed by the tanning dude, but i love the guy with the blue faux-hawk, the dude from SLC, and the biker chick (even though she was super whiney last night). and i was SO thrilled that christian won last season!
how clean is your house on bbca is super fun, yet gross. we discovered this about a year ago, and i think we’ve watched all the episodes that have ever aired. kim and aggie are hilarious and the show has lots of tips about “cheap and cheerful” ways to keep your house clean and uncluttered.
we also really like true life. some of the episodes are annoying, but many of them are really good. over the fourth, they ran episodes about soldiers just being deployed, soldiers coming home, and soldiers in iraq. they were really good and kind of eye opening. and i of course love the train wreck episodes about people addicted to whatever or who have binge drinking problems.
so, what’s your favorite reality tv show?
posted by sarah on 07/17/2008 at 12:46 PM