Booking It--Now or Then

Do you prefer reading current books? Or older ones? Or outright old ones? (As in, yes, there’s a difference between a book from 10 years ago and, say, Charles Dickens or Plato.)

Yes.

:-)

Just For Fun

Smart Girls at the Party

Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker and Amy Miles celebrate girls who are changing the world by being themselves. Check it out here.

Natural Look?

My New Listen

You may wonder why I've got two back-to-back audiobooks listed here. Well, it's because I'm in the middle of another do-it-yourself project, and audiobooks are helping me get through it. You know, of course, that you'll be treated to before and after pictures as soon as the project's completed.

Middlesex

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

Narrated by Kristoffer Tabori

Macmillan Audio

20 hrs. 58 mins.

Publisher's SummaryI

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutation - and a guilty secret - that have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.

Spanning eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

What the Critics Say

• Pulitzer Prize Winner, Fiction, 2003
• Audie Award Winner, Fiction (Unabridged), 2003

My Last Listen

Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Narrated by Cynthia Nixon

Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Length:10 hrs 18 minutes

Publisher's Summary

Tessa Russo is the mother of two young children and the wife of a renowned pediatric surgeon. Despite her own mother's warnings, Tessa has recently given up her career to focus on her family and the pursuit of domestic happiness. From the outside, she seems destined to live a charmed life.

Valerie Anderson is an attorney and single mother to six-year-old Charlie - a boy who has never known his father. After too many disappointments, she has given up on romance - and even, to some degree, friendships - believing that it is always safer not to expect too much.

Although both women live in the same Boston suburb, the two have relatively little in common aside from a fierce love for their children. But one night, a tragic accident causes their lives to converge in ways no one could have imagined.

In alternating, pitch-perfect points of view, Emily Giffin creates a moving, luminous story of good people caught in untenable circumstances. Each being tested in ways they never thought possible. Each questioning everything they once believed. And each ultimately discovering what truly matters most.

Cougar Approval

Last week, I did a post called "Beauty Bias," which led to a discussion with JGR about the Cougar phenomenon and his assertion that reactions are also negative to mixed-age relationships when the older person is male. I don't doubt that negative reactions to both types of relationships exist, but our conversation reminded me of a funny event, and you know us bloggers--we're always looking for something to write about.

Before we moved to Searcy, my oldest son and I were both active in community theater. Leading up to one production, he and I would often stop in at a local sandwich shop before practices. Some time later, my husband and I stopped for lunch at the same sandwich shop, and the woman behind the counter just kept smiling at me. I mean really smiling. I smiled back, but I couldn't quite figure out her ear-to-ear grin. Then, when my husband left the counter to go get our drinks, the woman nodded and winked at me. And I got it. She could tell that this guy was probably my husband and thought she was in on the secret that I'd been cheating on him with a younger guy.

The real fun started when, a week or so later, I came in with both my husband and my son. Her eyes were big as saucers, then.

Booking It--Signature

Do signed copies excite you? Tempt you? Delight you? Or does it not matter to you?

Of course, signed copies are nice to own, and I have a few I'm proud of. I've got an autographed volume of Billy Collins' poetry, for instance, and an signed copy of Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel. If I have a choice between a signed copy (that I can afford) and an unsigned one, I'll take the autographed one any time. That's one neat thing about Square Books in Oxford. Signed editions by notable authors are often available, at no extra charge. You can be browsing the shelves and, all of a sudden, run across one. But I don't purchase a book for a signature alone. I wouldn't care about a signed copy if I didn't already want the book and/or admire the author.

Degrading

What I'm Reading Now

Sarah Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a natural spinster by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion.