Last week I finished reading "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon. It seems like a lot of people who read this compared it to "Kavalier and Clay", which is a waste of time since K&C was a masterpiece. On its own merit, I thought YPU was a good read, though it did start slowly and at times it seemed to me like Chabon was showing off more than usual with his turns of phrase, and kinda cluttering up the story a little with fancy wordplay. But that's a minor complaint. I finished it on vacation, on my brother's warm back patio one morning while drinking coffee and listening to all the exotic east coast birds.

The book had a special resonance for me since my "novel" takes place in the same region of southeast Alaska. I bet most people who read it don't know Tlingit is pronounced "Clickit" for instance. True story!

At the other edge of the literary spectrum, I picked up another paperback in the airport at 5:30 am in Raleigh, NC as we embarked on our trip home. I wanted something dumb and easy for the flight, and BOY did I get it. "Chasing Harry Winston" is the third book by the "writer" who brought the world "The Devil Wears Prada", a book I did not read. The movie was okay, probably better than the book. This woman is a shitty writer, average at best.

It makes sense that the Harry Winston jewelry brand is right there in the title, since I have never in my life read a book with so many name brand mentions and product placements. In one passage, a character is described surfing the web (fascinating!!), and the author takes the time to pad the shit out of the page by spelling out each and every site she visits. First she went to MySpace.com! Then over to WebMD! Then she checked out gofugyourself.com! I am not kidding.

The story itself is ridiculous, of course. Cookie-cutter chick lit garbage. Appalling that she was paid money to churn it out. The "plot" centers around, naturally, three gorgeous, wealthy, successful New York women in their early 30s, and their search to nab equally gorgeous, more wealthy, more successful men. Everyone is very materialistic, self-obsessed, whiny, etc etc. The men are all charming and perfect. Not even a crooked tooth among any of them, surely, much less a (eeeeeek) blue collar job. One of the dudes is actually "a banker at Bear Stearns." LOL. I wonder how that worked out.

YET here I am finishing the book, probably today on my way home. It's the epitome of light reading; about as challenging as the comics page. And it reminds me with every clunky sentence and heavy-handed exposition: I could do better than this. I know it. My first drafts were better than this.

I kind of want to have or go to a superbowl party this weekend. I like the ridiculous spectacle of this uniquely American holiday, and I like chips and dip. In order for this to happen I think we'd either have to be invited by our neighbors, or do something ourselves. We've entertained quite a bit these past few weeks so I'd kind of rather not have it at our place. I have a feeling the folks on our left side will do something. Maybe.

This weekend I also plan to attempt again to devote a few hours to uninterrupted writing. LOL.

Two of my coworkers are fetching lunch for me today: humbows from Mee Sum Pastries. Nom nom. The only other food I've had today was a blueberry cake donut from Sluy's, purchased at 6:50 this morning while snow was blowing sideways through town. We ran across the street to the coffee shop for the accompanying beverage then sat in the warm car at the park and ride waiting for my bus and watching the snow blow around like dust.

Almost done with the Gay Talese book. Bit too much devotion to the Lorena Bobbitt case that he almost covered for the New Yorker, but otherwise it's really good. I still want to read the John Adams book but it weighs four pounds and that's just not something I want to drag around every day. So that might be a weekend thing.

This week I started and finished a cute little novel called "The New Yorkers." It was an incredibly swift and pleasant read. Well-written, good story, interesting and vivid characters. I guess some people might find fault; that it's not "deep" or "literary" or full of "magical realism" or "whatever", but I liked it, and as I went through my workday found myself thinking about it and looking forward to opening it up again. To me, that's a good book. There have been several other books this year touted as being so smart and great that have just annoyed the shit out of me with their dullness or pretention. The worst offenders have been short story collections that seemed to tell the same story over and over in the same irritating voice.

So the next book I pulled off the shelf is Graham Greene, "Complete Short Stories". Hopefully it will engage me.

A fun activity to do when hungry: Grab a couple of good cookbooks and slowly read them cover to cover, marking the recipes you'd like to make, even if they sound a bit adventurous. I just did this with "Bold Italian" and "Barefoot Contessa at Home."

My surgery was two months ago today... and today I'm feeling some residual old pain at the site. I'd really like this to be done now.

Took Kona for a walk today in her new prong/pinch collar and retractable leash. For the first time, she walked with a relaxed gait right at my side, instead of constantly pulling and straining at the leash. Amazing. Good dog.

I also went to a rather disappointing consignment/thrift shop in town. They had about ten million shitty awful romance novels (one series was actually called "Marry me, Cowboy!" lolz), but I managed to dig up "The Book of Ruth" and "Waiting" for a buck each.

So I'm reading "Valley of the Dolls." It's mostly dialogue and exposition, so I'm flying right through it. I can see how it was such a scandal and a bestseller -- for its time (the mid-60s) it has a ton of swearing and sex and drug use. Though for 2008, it's rather tame and quaint.

Anyone here seen the movie and read the book? Are they at all similar? I think if this movie was made today, Mad Men style with lots of attention to detail and fix all the corny dialogue, it might be an interesting film. I guess it was remade for TV in 1981. I presume both versions were crap. But I kinda want to see them.

I've seen Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Screenplay by Roger Ebert!

"This is my happening and it freaks me out!!"

I finished the $3.97 paperback romance by the way. Holy hot damn it was bad. I wish I still had it with me so I could quote a few passages. But here are a few notes off the top of my head.

+ So the first time the Girl and the Guy meet, they have this little conversation in the lobby of his law firm (of COURSE he's a lawyer! and he drives an SUV!). He's trying to get her to not leave town or whatever, even though they met ten minutes earlier and what does he care. In the midst of the conversation, he GRABS HER ARM, at least once if not twice. If some dude I just met grabbed my arm, you can bet your ass I wouldn't just stand there and not at least comment on it.

+ There's this part where the Guy is supposed to be all flustered because he's all staring at the Girl's ~*~breasts~*~ or whatever, he's a perv. To convey this, the author describes how he checks his watch and the Girl observes how fast his pulse is racing. In his wrist. Wow. Someone call 911!

+ The description was so minimal, I really got no sense of what the setting looked like, felt like, sounded like, and so on. Though the author did love describing everyone's clothes. And every time the Girl, a recovering alcoholic, thinks about booze, she licks her lips. This happened several times. "She stared at the liquor cabinet, filled with bottles. She licked her lips, thinking about having a drink." And later, "the wine bottle stood open on the table. She licked her lips." WE GET IT, SHE HAS CHAPPED LIPS. Get some Aquaphor.

+ The only two curse words in the book: damn; hell.

+ So toward the end there's the big "sex scene", aka half the reason anyone buys these books. Too bad it was one of the least sexy sex scenes ever written. To avoid naming any actual body parts (except ~*~breasts~*~) or using any offensive language, the whole thing is written in this really confusing, abstract way, with lots of bad metaphors and awkwardness. It did not get me hot. Also I didn't buy that it would happen that way anyway. Seemed forced, like the author realized, shit, I'm on page 200 and these two haven't screwed yet... Then, later on, the Girl character is reminiscing about how good this guy was in bed. Really? Because I did not get that, based on the way it was told to me.

An interesting writing exercise for me might be to take a chapter from this book, and rewrite it in a way that is vivid, compelling, and realistic. Maybe I'll give that a shot.

I found a book at my bus stop a couple days ago. It is a "Harlequin Super Romance", and cost $3.97 at Wal-Mart. Brian picked me up seconds later so I showed him the book and we laughed. On the ride home, I read him a few random passages from within, then tossed it into my bag.

Yesterday on my way home, I discovered the paperback in my purse and didn't have anything else to do on the ferry, so I figured, what the hell, why not. Maybe it would be interesting to find out what kind of writing ends up in these disposable love stories.

The answer: not good writing. I actually almost cracked up laughing a couple times at the incredibly hackneyed dialogue, plodding exposition, and groaningly overused similes/metaphors. The main female protagonist and male protagonist meet each other on page one, and on page two, an "instant attraction" develops. Didn't see that coming. I don't know why anyone would bother with the ensuing 200 pages, but I am going to anyway.

As I suspected, the male hero in these books is typically very virile, handsome, successful, confident, and muscular, with a wee bit of danger and the hint of a bad temper. I guess it wouldn't be as fun for the target reader to dream about a guy who isn't your typical "catch."

The author, possibly writing under a psuedonym to pay the bills, is quite fond of the word "breasts." I hate being titillated! -- Angela, The Office

Anyhoo, I am determined to read every page of this book, searching for at least ONE beautiful or original phrase, or perhaps a piece of clever and believable dialogue. Doubt I'll find it, and I'll just end up bitter that this hack is making a living off this junk.

+ Mountain Goats show tonight!!! *becited*

+ It's very sunny today and we even have a window open. That hasn't happened for months.

+ We close on our house this Tuesday. Good-bye, all my money! Hello, equity! Or something.

+ I haven't updated much lately because work has been so busy. I'm still enjoying my new job a lot, and unlike my last job, I actually get to be creative and use my brain. I wish I had more exciting newsroom stories for you guys, but it has been pretty low-key overall and it's not like I sit right next to the reporters or editors or anything. There's a TV hanging from the ceiling a short distance from my desk so I get to watch CNN all day. They cover some stupid stuff when nothing newsworthy is going on. The sound is usually muted, thank goodness.

+ I started reading the biography of John Adams yesterday. I bought it in paperback but it is still incredibly heavy. I am a wuss.

+ I watched some of the movie "Fast Food Nation" last night. I read the book a few years back -- this was the "dramatization" of that. It started off well, but oh boy did it slow to a crawl toward the middle, and then descended into awfulness when Ethan Hawke and Avril Levigne showed up. Alas.

+ Today we are picking up kudaspeaks and fiberpunk from the ferry and having lunch here in our town. It's their first time across the Sound. Lovely weather for it.

I finished reading two biographies of American female writers this week. One thing I found interesting was that, in a way, Julia Child and Nelle Harper Lee were living somewhat parallel lives at the time they were each working on their first (and in Lee's case, only) book: each worked throughout the 1950s on their masterpiece, finally publishing a successful bestseller in 1960 (Lee) and 1961 (Child). Each never had any children. But aside from that, they had little else in common.

Reading Child's autobiography gave me new insight into the full life she lived, her wit, her charm, and her constant love of learning, of food, and of France. She didn't really find her calling until she was in her late thirties, and didn't become famous until she was in her forties. Harper Lee was in her thirties when she became well-known, but she had been writing for her whole life. And unlike Child, she never took to fame, and never enjoyed the limelight. Reading these books back-to-back was an interesting juxtaposition of two very down-to-earth but also very different women who were basically of the same generation (though Child was fourteen years older).

Each was inspiring to me in their own way. Harper Lee worked on her book for years, hours every day, not bothering to be part of the "literati" or "networking" or submitting stories or excerpts to magazines to get her name out there. I wonder if that's even possible now, for an unknown author to publish a book. Perhaps I shall find out someday (that the answer is "no way").

Anyway, next up for me is a short story collection by Grace Paley: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

My mom got me My Life in France by Julia Child for my birthday! I am really excited to read it as I love Julia Child, I love France, and have been interested in reading biographies and memoirs lately. She also knitted me a shrug. Which reminds me, I should probably try to bang out another ten rows on those gloves today. I get to decrease the size because I didn't realize before that the pattern was for a "size medium" hand, and I am definitely a size small in most things.

Yesterday I installed a really cool project management tool on my web site. It's one of the free applications available on Dreamhost, and it will let me organize all my freelance tasks on one place, instead of just I don't know, typing notes into a Word doc or something.

The rain seems to have tapered off. I need to go running. So much rich food last night. I also need to go to the market because we have tragically run out of coffee grounds.