Blog
January 17, 2005
Reading Italian (Grisham Style), Tsunami Aid (Author Style) and Celebs (Without Style)
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Warning: Do not read John Grisham's new one, THE BROKER, if you are hungry. I made the mistake of doing that this weekend. As his character, Joel Backman, travels around Italy, he eats. And Grisham does great descriptions of the food that he eats. And every time you read about the food, you will want to eat. I found myself salvating for panini and yearning for a warm mushroom salad, and let's not talk about both tortellini and tortelloni (he spells out the difference). Keep a pad and pen next to you as you read so you can note what foods you need recipes for!
Last night I went to a screening of Hotel Rwanda. People who had seen it had urged me to see it with a quiet intensity that I rarely hear connected to a film. (I think the last time I heard this was when people were talking about Life is Beautiful.) Everyone told me to be prepared to cry; no one told me to prepare to be stunned by what I was seeing on the screen.
All the holiday decorations are stored away --- and I have yet to find a stray piece around that we missed. I am sure that you can relate to that --- you think you are done packing things up and then bam there's an overlooked piece of "Christmas celebrating" stuck on a shelf somewhere and it looks really out of place in January.
It's early Saturday morning. Today I need to take down the Christmas decorations that have been up since Thanksgiving weekend --- and yes, I am procrastinating as I write here. In the busy-ness of this week I forgot to mention the latest turn in the Andrea Yates case in the newsletter. Last February I read Suzanne O'Malley's book, ARE YOU THERE ALONE, The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates. We also interviewed O'Malley as part of this feature. Her comments about the non-Law and Order episode from both the book and her interview stayed with me.
Yesterday they were calling for snow here last night. This triggered a flurry of emails in my box cancelling every event in town last night due to weather. This always humors me since I live in a town where 90% of the people drive SUVs. I guess they drive them because of the cargo space instead of road handling. A couple of years ago one of my friends was debating whether to buy an SUV or a minivan. Her line was a classic --- "I have my master's degree and now I am debating whether to drive a bus or a truck." By the way, mere flakes of snow arrived, but hey, we were prepared!
Happy New Year albeit a couple of days late. We had a dialup connection when we were on the Outer Banks, which can make it a bit difficult to get much done online! I am amazed at how much I am dependent upon the Internet for information and communication. I will be away and look up recipes on Epicurious.com, the news at NewYorkTimes.com and I always am researching things that I hear about as we travel. The creeping dialup had me wanting to hurl the laptop on more than one occasion.
Yesterday I went to visit friends who are staying here on the Outer Banks. They had celebrated Christmas here and thus all their presents were under the tree. Soooo, I being a book voyeur started taking toll of what was there thinking that books tell so much about a person. I am sure you have done this. I was trying to match the gifts with the recipient.
It's just about 7AM the morning after Christmas and folks already are headed to the after-Christmas sales. I find it very interesting that bookstores stay open late for the on-sale dates of Harry Potter, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton's books, but I cannot recall any opening early for the release of a book. What book would you get up at dawn to go by at 50-60% off? Good question, eh? After all, there are millions of people heading out to buying wrapping paper at 50% off right now. Now that is a concept that completely bypasses me.
As promised in our December 17th Bookreporter.com newsletter, here is my new blog. I was stuck when we were naming this, but I clearly knew it was was going to be musings about books, authors and life, thus this is the title we came up with.
