Thursday, April 2, 2009

Reading, reading, getting caught out and reading some more

Sorry about the continued Janet Evanovich stream but I do have to just say - after I'd picked up that first one and read it in Claremont, I went looking for more in the Ontario (California) airport when I was on my way up to Oakland - and found lots, in all the bookstores. Several of them had one, two, and three in the series (One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly . . . !) and then the most recent and then apparently she's written a bunch that are outside the numbered series.

But I only bought One and Two because I thought . . . oh well.

And then after I read number One and was a little underwhelmed; but then read Two and had such a fun time reading it - then I thought, well, I'll try reading something else I bought at the airport - Confessions of a Shopaholic. Maybe it'll be a blast. And I went out with my red shopping cart in my right hand and the book in my left hand and my blue-rimmed glasses turning dark in the sun under my black cap to the grocery store and bumped into not one but two neighbors who asked, What are you Reading? And I was mightily embarrassed, because I had to confess I was reading such lowbrow stuff and I realized, I didn't even like it, in fact I couldn't actually stand to continue reading it after a few pages.

So then I decided to go back and get more Janet Evanovich for my quick-read fixes, and started looking around for the book group book, which had been supposed to be delivered to me here in Berlin by an Amazon subsidiary but hadn't arrived yet (Paradise Reclaimed, by Hallday Lexness) and the other one I ordered at the same time (Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, which I had gotten for Cynthia and Diane in the Bay Area and recommended for Claudia in Chicago but had not yet read myself!) - anyway, long story short (or anyway, not quite as long as it could go on) - I ended up ordering a bunch of books through the library service here, so I'm very excited to see what comes. Little Girls, another book by wonderful Elizabeth Bowen who wrote The House in Paris which I read on the plane on the way back to Berlin, came the very next day. The book group books aren't here yet and Evanovich may never come - but I've got plenty to read. I've also got my Les Murray Translations from the Natural World, wonderful amazing book of poetry recommended to me to give hubby at Christmas by Don Berger, our resident poet here - I pick it up and read a poem here and a poem there - and Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, which I haven't quite dared to start yeet.

And fabulously, there is always another New Yorker coming.

1 comment:

elena said...

The Little Girls is quite interesting...a late Bowen – I'll be very curious to see what you think! An odd and wonderful book, in my view, about time passing, the compression of memory, and what people DON'T see, due to their self-focused vision. Object relations. I especially like the (mortifying and misleading) ads placed in the newspaper to find old friends: a precursor to facebook.