Facebook and Friendship

What are Facebook and Twitter doing to our friendships? Check out this USA Today article.

Booking It--Discussion

Do you have friends and family to share books with? Discuss them with? Does it matter to you?

It does matter to me.

My oldest son is the only other reader in the family, and we do talk about books, but we are not often reading the same one. So, earlier this year a friend and I decided to choose one book a month to read. On a certain day each month, we drive to Little Rock to have a nice lunch and discuss the novel. Afterwards, we go to Market Street and see a film. Then, we discuss the film on the drive back.

It's a great system. We used to say, "We need to go see a movie sometime" or "We ought to have a book club," but it never happened Having a particular day set aside for it causes us to put it on our calenders and take it seriously. We're discussing our third novel this week--Home, by Marilynne Robinson.

Movie Day Book Club

This past Spring, a good friend and I started what we hope will be a new tradition for us--a monthly Movie Day. Actually, we could call it our Movie Day Book Club. We choose a book that we both want to read. Then, once a month, we go to Little Rock, discussing the book we read on the drive there and during a nice lunch. Then, we see a movie at Market Street and discuss it on the way home. (Sometime during the day, we usually manage to drop by a bookstore or two and visit Whole Foods.) You're jealous now, aren't you?

Part I:

This month's novel was Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed. We both had a love/hate relationship with the book. We thought it was well-written, loved the literary allusions, and liked the questions it raised. However, we found the novel somewhat depressing, the mixture of relatively current real-life events and fiction troubling at times, the PhD thesis interpolation interesting but distracting, and sometimes we just didn't like the main character very much. But overall we were pleased with our choice--lots to think about and to discuss. This next month, we're going to read Marilynne Robinson's Home.

Part II:

Independently, we check out the movie schedule before we go, and, so far, it's been kind of funny--we've each settled on the same movie before we even discuss it. Is this a great friendship, or what? This week we saw City Island. I won't spoil it for you, but I will say that it's a really good movie. It made me sad, but at the same time, I couldn't stop laughing. Out loud. The movie explores how hard it is to be real with the people we know and love best and how our actions are like stones thrown into a pond--they plunk down into our own lives, changing them forever, and they ripple out and touch the lives of our family and friends. Yet the film also affirms the power of love. It's not a depressing movie; it's a life-affirming one. Two thumbs up. Or maybe I should say four.

Booking It--Influence

Are your book choices influenced by friends and family? Do their recommendations carry weight for you? Or do you choose your books solely by what you want to read?

I don't read only books that have been recommended by friends and family, but their recommendations have often led me to some of the best novels I've ever read. I hate to think of books I'd have missed if someone hadn't steered me in their direction.

So, what book(s) do you recommend that I read? I'm open for suggestions.

Where Are You?

Where are you politically? Not sure?

On her blog the other day, a friend posted something really neat. It's the Nolan Test, a political test which, based on your answers to 10 questions, will classify you as either Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Statist, or Centrist.

If you're interested, you can give it a try HERE. Oh, and check out her blog too. It's a great read. It's called Lost in Arkansas, and it's also linked in the sidebar.

Reading Circles

Becca loaned me the book I featured in my post yesterday, Hungry. She does something really interesting with books she enjoys. First, she reads the book, underlining and annotating. Then, she passes it around a circle of friends, each doing the same in her turn. When Becca gets her book back, there's a whole conversation included in the pages of the book.

This is the first time I've ever done anything like this, and I loved it. I've always written in books. But it's so different knowing that someone else will be reading your comments, that you are adding to their experience of the book. I felt freer to underline, agree, argue, make connections, add personal experiences. Things that would seem redundant or even ridiculous to write in my own book seemed so necessary in this one.

I'd like to start doing this with some of my own books, but I've always been very possessive of them--probably because of bad experiences involving loaning books to "friends" and never getting them back. I guess there should be some rules to the game.

1. Choose only people that you are confident will return the book (or that you know well enough to ask for it back if they don't).


2. Choose only people that will read and return relatively quickly.


3. Choose only people with whom you can freely express your ideas, opinions, and experiences.

Can you think of any more? And thanks, Becca, for sharing!

An Important Question

How are you supposed to take it when you run into someone you haven't seen since high school and the first thing out of her mouth is, "I would never have recognized you!"

The Rabbit or the Turtle

I've really been battling Dissertation Burnout lately. All through the process, I've set daily goals--read a certain amount, take notes and develop an organizational plan today, write X number of pages--and for the most part I met them. I was submitting chapters regularly, and that stack of typed pages was growing steadily higher.

Until I hit the last chapter. Then my brain turned to mush. Instead of writing several pages a day, some days I'd sit and stare at the computer screen and, by the end of the day, be lucky if I'd finished a whole paragraph. Aaaarrrgggghh. I couldn't hold a train of thought, I wasn't sure if what I'd written made sense, and I'd have to keep reading the previous pages to make sure I was going where I intended to. Very frustrating.

But I talked to an old friend who's been through the process, and he gave me some great advice. He said to remember that getting a PhD is like a marathon, not a sprint. By the end, it's not about speed. It's about not quitting. This really made sense to me because I've run a marathon. And I remember at about mile 20 really just wanting to walk over and sit down on the curb. But instead, I kept putting one foot in front of the other and repeating in my head "I will not quit, I will not quit, I will not quit . . ." And I didn't.

And I won't.

Running with Cows

I ran into a friend from my old hometown last weekend, and she mentioned how much she missed our walks. We had been faithful walking partners for a long time. After one or the other of us drove our kids to school, we’d walk three or four miles a day, five days a week, hot weather, cold weather, and anything in between. We talked about our kids, our husbands, our diets (usually about how they were not going according to plan), our friends, our families, our farms, how hard it was to get jeans that fit. We even talked sometimes about politics and religion. That’s what kind of friends we were. Oh, and we laughed. A lot.

There were two major things that made us so compatible. We walked fast, and we had plenty to talk about. We’d both had other walking partners, but what they called walking we called strolling, and what we called walking they called running from a fire. Walkers and strollers do not great exercise partners make. And then the conversation . . . One of our neighbors once told us that he knew when we were coming even if he couldn’t see us because we sounded like a gaggle of geese.

Well, now that I’ve moved away, I have new exercise partners. Now, I run with the cows. I live about six-or-so miles from town, and much of our country lane is bordered by pastures. But my new exercise partners are not nearly as motivated or as friendly as my former one. In the early spring, during calving season, many of them are skittish and dart away as soon as they see me. In the summer, when it’s hot, they just stand along the fence and stare at the stupid human running and sweating while they try to be as still as possible. In winter, they’re fickle. Sometimes they won’t even look at me—it all depends on which way the wind is blowing.

I guess the cows and my ipod are okay company. But, I really miss walking with you, too.