A partial inventory: i.e. what's laying around my house

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is so incredible, so very very well-written and stunning, but it packs a punch. Save it for those times when you are feeling more secure in your life, in order that it doesn't sweep you away on an unwelcome tide of emotion. I'm afraid to even spoil it by telling you the premise of the story, but it got so much publicity when it came out a couple years ago that you may already know.

So I picked up another of her books: The Almost Moon. Haven't started it yet--it just moves mysteriously around the house, propping open a door for a few days, stacked on a table for another spell of time...

*****

Good poems for hard times. Also for not-so-hard times. And for good times too. 'Nuff said.

The Love Cook
by Ron Padgett

Let me cook you some dinner
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daiquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it's night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I've got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing.

*****

Now this I've skimmed, but it's more as inspiration than as a guide. I mean, look at the cover--he's going all out in Fast Runner style--speedy, efficient, driven. Nothing like what I do, which involves a lot of flailing limbs, heavy breathing and cajoling the dog to keep up--that yes, she will get a treat when we get home. Occasionally my encouragement isn't enough for her, and so there have been times in which I carried her the majority of the way home. Weight training it is, running it is not.
Needless to say, this book rests on the coffee table facedown when I'm not in need of an impetus to get on my sneaks and get outside.


*****
Also-- How to Build a House, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Good Women of China, and I Was Told There'd be Cake.

"We're burdened by the need to be cool. When I was in college, I read Kafka and Camus and tried to write like them, in flat non-American English, as if written under the influence of a migraine, until it slowly dawned on me that I was missing the basic experiences that had formed them. Enduring high school is not the same as growing up Jewish in Prague or fighting in the French Resistance. I had no solid basis for being cool in that existential motorcycle James Dean absurdist chain-smoking hero sort of way, so I gave up being cool and settled for being pleasant."
Garrison Keillor