Life: It Goes On - October 20

Happy Sunday! It's a beautiful fall morning here - temperatures are perfect and the sun is that wonderful soft golden color. The trees are changing colors and the neighborhood is bustling with activity. 

The only down side is that those activities (including ours) are all about getting lawns and gardens ready for winter. Yesterday we pulled up the tomato, pepper, and zinnia plants so the gardens are already looking brown and sad. 

I saw a post the other day of a woman doing something in those spaces to make them less depressing for the rest of the fall and I was definitely, absolutely going to do that in our spaces...except I can't remember what it was she did. Which is a peek into the way my brain works (or doesn't) these days. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club and started Colm Toibin's latest, Long Island (which is a follow up to Brooklyn). 

Watched: Baseball, volleyball, and football (although I had to shut off my Huskers yesterday). 

Read: Grief Is For People by Sloan Crowley. 

Made: I'm pretty sure that I did not make a single thing this week...either the Big Guy was doing the cooking or I doing some version of eating out. 

Enjoyed: Book club Tuesday, getting my hair done Wednesday, dinner out with a coworker on Thursday, dinner and drinks on the deck at some friends' Friday night. I went to a class reunion last night but I can't say that I enjoyed that; got strong armed into going but the people that I would most like to see and reminisce with weren't there. It was an unusually busy week! 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I'll probably spend most of my free time this week working on the house - there are so many things I want to get done before our Thanksgiving guests arrive. Important things like cleaning out guest room closets! 

Thinking About: Was telling someone that I was getting a couple of vaccines Friday and had two more scheduled for a couple of weeks from now to which she replied "well, when you start speaking Russian, I won't be surprised." Can't stop thinking about that - it's people like her that have caused whopping cough cases to surge in my county and me to feel like I needed the vaccine. Also, if I wake up one day speaking a foreign language without having to pay for Duelingo, yea me! 

Feeling: Ready for the two days I schedule off this week just because I have time to burn before the end of the year. 

Looking forward to: We're going to see a one-man performance of Dracula Saturday night. 

Question of the week: Anyone have any good ideas as to how we get people to put as much money into doing good as they do into political campaigns? I'm so over the tv ads, the vitriol on social media, and my mail box being filled with flyers. 

Life: It Goes On - October 17

Happy Thursday! It's been that kind of week when I'm only just now getting around to a post I normally get done on Sunday! But this week's goings on are for another day...today I'm playing catch up. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: Vampires In The Lemon Grove and I started Helen Simonson's latest, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club. We also listened to some podcasts while we were on the road...but I already can't remember which ones. 

Watched: Our great-nephew play t-ball. He's six, but plays on a team of six-and-under kids, so he's playing with a lot of four-year-olds. He towers over them! Also, I'd forgotten how hilarious little children are in their early attempts at organized sports. 

Read: Guys, I'm doing such a poor job at picking up a book and actually finishing it. I keep starting things then realize I need to be reading something else before it goes back to the library or my early copy is no longer available. 

Made: My take on Molly Yeh's beans and greens with runny egg, which we both really liked but I'll need to tweak some when we make it again. 

Enjoyed: A three-day weekend trip to Columbia, MO. We got to spend Friday afternoon and dinner with our friends there; went to that t-ball game; hung out at my niece's; went to a winery on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River and then went to a landing that sits right on the river to listen to a band; stopped by Miss H's on our way home; and picked up some new-to-us dining room chairs in K.C. that I found on Facebook Marketplace. A busy, but very fun weekend! 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: Now that I have those new chairs, the two that I prepped for painting can go to Mini-him and Miss C so I need to get those painted. 

Thinking About: Politics. Part of me is trying hard not to because it's so stressful. The other part of me is wanting to get more involved. 

Feeling: Nervous. I got talked into going to my class reunion this weekend and I'm honestly not looking forward to it. Why did I do this to myself?!

Looking forward to: Several fun things that I'm hoping to do this weekend. More on that on Sunday. 

Question of the week: Am I the only one who feels like time is speeding up? We have so many things I want to get done before we have a house full of people for Thanksgiving and there's been so little time to actually get to any of it. 

Vampires In the Lemon and Other Stories Grove by Karen Russell

Vampires In The Lemon Grove and Other Stories by Karen Russell

Read by Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, Mark Bramhall, Michael Bybee, Romy Rosemont, and Robbie Daymond

9 hours, 15 minutes

Published February 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf

Publisher's Summary: 

In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" - stories of children left to fend for themselves in dire predicaments - find Russell veering into more sinister territory, and ultimately crossing the line into full-scale horror. In "The New Veterans", a massage therapist working with a tattooed war veteran discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the images on his body. In all, these wondrous new pieces display a young writer of superlative originality and invention coming into the full range and scale of her powers.

My Thoughts: 

Book two for Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.). Yea, me; although, I must admit that this was a complete coincidence. This is one of those books that I've been wondering about for a long time (a decade, actually), but it was getting an advanced copy of Russell's latest work (The Antidote) and having a break in the audiobooks I'd requested from the library, that finally had me picking this one up. 

Maureen Corrigan (NPR) had this to say about the first story in this collection: "The title story kicks off this collection by doing the near impossible: making me care about vampires, a breed more overexposed these days than Labrador retrievers." I agree, despite my major skepticism when the story began. Poor Clyde is a vampire who can no longer transform into a bat and fly; instead he spends his days and nights sitting at a table at the back of a lemon grove, where no one except one young worker, seems to be aware of what he is. He lives for the arrival of his wife, who descends nightly from a cave on high, along with thousands of other bats. It was his wife who made him understand that they could survive without blood and the two of them discovered that lemons work as a kind of analgesic for their kind. But has their marriage reached its end? And will the reality of that cause Clyde to do the unthinkable? I liked this story much more and it set the bar high. 

Like all collections of short stories (at least in my experience), not all stories are equal. I must admit that I gave up on "The New Veterans," which felt to me like it was dragging. But both "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" impressed me with their originality and twists. In "Proving Up," Russell has set her story in Nebraska (something she has repeated in The Antidote), which always makes a story more interesting to me. Each of these stories is a work of fantasy, a genre that you know I often struggle with, but here the fantasy element almost never overwhelmed the story. I mean, even a vampire just felt like a sad old man to me! 

Perhaps my favorite thing about this collection was the fact that each of the stories was read by a different reader and each felt absolutely perfectly suited to the story they read. 

I more eager than ever to get back to The Antidote and Russell's Swamplandia, which I own...somewhere (is it in print? is it on my Nook?). 

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz

10 hours, 21 minutes

Read by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathon Davis, Mozhan Marno, Orlagh Cassidy

Published May 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth-all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another-and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

My Thoughts:

Here is my recommendation to you: read the summary; read reviews of this book; decide whether or not it interests you and, if it does, add it to your list of books to read. Then don't pick it up to read for several months, until you've forgotten that summary and those reviews and only pick it up because it's on your list so you know it interested you at that time. 

To be honest, it's what I do so much of the time and it almost always works in my favor. It worked for me here. I had no idea when the book began that I was reading a book within a book. I was fascinated by Benjamin and Helen and their relationship. And then utterly startled when suddenly I was reading (well, listening to) notes written by Andrew Bevel, the man upon whom Benjamin Rask was based by the writer Harold Vanner in his book. 

Next we jump to Ida Partenza, a woman living with her out there father who had to run from Italy because of his political beliefs, who is hired by Bevel to write that memoir we just read the notes for. Ida's task is made all the more difficult by Bevel's insistence on clearing his wife's name while also refusing to include any real details of her life, much to Partenza's amazement. Neither book will yield a true picture of the real Mildred Bevel, a woman Andrew didn't seem to know well himself. Ida grows more and more curious and, ultimately, finds Mildred's diaries. And that's where readers go next, into the pages of those diaries to get to know the real Mildred Bevel. At least that's what we believe. In the end, though, we're trusting her to know that truth. But at this point, one wonders if the truth is still out there to be found. 

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and it's easy to see why. This is such an interesting and unique way to tell a story. Even more an interesting and unique way to remind readers that the truth is not easy to know. And within that unique structure is so much more. In Trust, Diaz has written: 

"...a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery..." - Oprah Daily

"A remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction." - The Boston Globe

"A rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself." - Vogue

If you're looking for a book that will challenge you, make you think, teach you something (lordy, did I learn a lot about the stock market, in particular in the early decades of the last century), that's exceedingly well written, I highly recommend Trust. Is it a book I loved? Not really. But it is one I greatly admire.