It turns out that if you liked Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife, you will not necessarily like Her Fearful Symmetry. I didn’t like the title, first off: it’s awkward and hard to say. Every time I said it, I added a question mark at the end to imply that I didn’t understand it either. I’m reading Her Fearful Symmetry? I also hated the spindly font on the cover.

Edited to add: ohhhh, it’s a reference to Blake’s “The Tyger.” Whatevs.

There are ghosts in it, but Niffenegger handles the ghosty elements pretty rationally: they do NOT SEND EMAIL or throw buckets of water on people or try to make out with their nephews with one rotting eyeball hanging out of their skulls like in some books.

However, if you like rationally ghosty books involving characters you don’t really like because there’s nothing to like about them, go read this book!

In related reading news, have you read Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard? Holy balls, these poems are fantastic.

In closing, here are two vanity tags I saw recently that totally fail:
PEECE
MYBABBE

I am always excited by the prospect of the New Year’s resolutions — not adhering to them, exactly, but making the list. I love making a list! This year I am sticking close to the obsolete definition of “resolution” that means to satisfy one’s desire (thanks, OED), and not the traditional New Year’s Resolutiony resolutions. Sure, I should eat better, probably exercise too, but I have no desire to do so. I do have a desire to do the following:

learn to knit
be able to make basic sauces without having to drag out a giant cookbook
paint the bathroom
get an orchid

I would write “massively clean out closet” but I’ve already done that. I also insanely organized my stuff by type of garment. Then I went nuts and did Larry’s side, too. What? He has rediscovered a pair of pants he’d forgotten! I have discovered that I own 17 cardigans. (I’d done all the laundry and picked up the dry cleaning when I counted, so that number is accurate. Oy.)

As for knitting, look: I’m old, I have cats, I have 17 cardigans to choose from: I might as well knit. I do not exactly predict that I’m going to be super good at it, as I tried once before and made a lumpy, misshapen circular thing that was supposed to be a hat but I never finished it and thus it was just “hey look I made this lumpy, misshapen circular thing, which I will now wear on my head around the house sometimes, even though it has a skein of yarn dangling behind it because I don’t know how to finish this.” I just want to make a scarf. And, if we’re being honest, I want to knit lumps of coal for Christmas next year. That is my official goal.

I also have reading goals, as usual, and this year I am ramping it up to 100 books. (Will I make it? Probably not, but as Joy Behar says, so what? who kez?) I’ve already read two: the Kathy Griffin book (which I loved) and The English American by Alison Larkin (which was good in that I read it in two days, but perhaps not the most literary book in the world; still, a good story that sucked me in enough that I read it in two days).

Hey, what’d you get for Christmas?

I got lots of stuff, including lots of books. Earlier today I was typing to someone that I got a load of books, only I typed a LOAF of books, and thus, I am calling it that from now on. Anyway, here are the books that make up my loaf:

Ballistics by Billy Collins
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Official Book Club Selection by Kathy Griffin
The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

You know I’m reading the Kathy Griffin book first.

1. My new washer and dryer are all fancy and digital and thus show you how much time is left on the load. This is awesome, especially when they’re neck and neck — currently, for example, the dryer has 38 minutes and the washer has 37 minutes left. Sadly, I know from experience (i.e., running in there every few minutes to announce the time situation to Larry and ask him yet again which one he’s rooting for) that the dryer is going to win.

2. So, to recap our animal situation: there is Pete, o he of the murderous nature towards everyone on earth except the inhabitants of this house; Bob, Larry’s former office cat; Icky, the crusty outside cat who JUST WANTS TO COME INSIDE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE; and Lulu, the long-suffering dog. Pete sleeps wherever the hell he wants to, either on one of Lulu’s beds or on my shoulder, Bob sleeps in the laundry room, and Icky sleeps outside in the shed. On a heating pad! It is luxurious! But yes: we are assholes who throw poor Icky outside every night.

The other night, however, it snowed. And apparently my cat-inspired assholery has a limit, and thus everyone slept in the house at the same time, and I didn’t even put Bob in the laundry room, and no one clawed anyone else’s eyes out, and Icky got to wind his long black tail around my neck all night. The moral of the story is this: for years we have tried to make stupid Pete happy by keeping the other cat(s) away from him, but screw that. Nothing is going to make Pete happy! With that knowledge, the other cats are now much happier. As I type this, Icky is asleep beside me in the bed and Pete is perched atop a piece of furniture I will call a dresser but which we call “the yellow thing” because it’s really a weird, possibly Scandinavian kitchen cabinet thing with doors and drawers and a pretty glass detail and also: vents for hot pies to cool. It houses stationery and old videotapes. Bob just walked through to get a snack. No one growled, fought, or died. The end.

3. So I finished A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book last week, and whoa, what a ride. Do I sound like Keanu when I say that? It was, though: lots of characters, lots of time passed, lots of historical events [that occasionally I skimmed when it became clear that one of the 10,000 characters wasn't going to interact with someone famous in that passage], and near the end, everyone’s fates were sealed and reported and it was tragic and awesome. Oh, and then I tried to go immediately to sleep. Didn’t work.

4. I also read Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked — finished it last night. It is good: maybe not as good as About a Boy but better than How to be Good and A Long Way Down. I think I would like to come back in another life as Nick Hornby’s career. Stable, entertaining, straddling the line between art and pop.

5. Yesterday during Spike’s nap I decided I would wrap all of his presents so I wouldn’t have to keep shooing him out of the guest room. So I did that, and then moved on to Larry’s presents. Still asleep. People, at the end of Spike’s almost three hour nap (!), I had wrapped all 46 presents. The tree looks lovely.

It is rare to be 60 pages into a book and be 99% grateful that there are over 600 more pages to go, but I just started A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and whoa: it is fantastic. The only thing that’s tripping me up (that’s the 1%) is that every single person referred to in an offhand remark has a full name, which means at this point there are roughly 9 million names but only a handful of people I’m supposed to remember, and unless they have unusual names (not so, Phillip, Tom, and Julian), I have to think really hard to remember who is who. This is a small price to pay for general awesomeness, though!

1. This morning while I was blowdrying my hair, I accidentally picked up a hammer instead of my brush. What? They both have handles, although the hammer was, unsuprisingly, ineffective.
2. I braved Wal-Mart on Saturday and could have submitted several things to People of Wal-Mart had I been quick or clever enough. I saw a 6 year old with a very pronounced mohawk (I mean shaved bald on the sides; totally not a faux hawk) and a lady with maybe 30 tiny bubbles and stars tattooed on the backs of each calf.
3. I’m reading Almost There by Nuala O’Faolain, which might be the weirdest memoir ever. She wrote a bestselling memoir, Are You Somebody? and a novel, My Dream of You, and this memoir is a memoir of writing the first two books. It sounds incredibly boring, and in a way it is, but she has a very easy voice to read, and now I am almost finished. I was going to write “I am almost there HA HA HA” but decided against it.*
4. Larry and I went to Oxford last weekend to see David Sedaris. Guess what: he is small and hilarious.
5. In a meeting where I had just told her I thought her line of reasoning was weird (weird being the nicest word to describe “ABSOLUTELY EFFING INSANE” that I could summon), my boss told me not to cry. People: I wasn’t about to cry. Apparently my about-to-cry face is the same as my your-line-of-reasoning-is-absolutely-effing-insane face. Who knew?
6. I keep having the urge to write inappropriate things as my Facebook status, such as:
Sally Nordan just realized she only peed once today. It was true!
7. I have a large amount of Christmas shopping already completed.
8. Spike has this awesome new habit of saying “ow,” then pinching me or Larry.
9. We went to the state fair on Saturday and I finally got to eat a fried Snickers! Years ago I saw an episode of Nigella Bites where she fried a Bounty bar and it was dark brown and crispy and made a satisfying crunching sound when the person bit into it. The biter also said it was like Christmas and your birthday all wrapped into one. That is what I wanted, but instead I got a warm Snickers wrapped in a thin, non-crunchy layer of batter. Sigh.

*I just Googled her to see if I spelled her name right (almost) and discovered that she died last year. It’s a bit of a shock to be reading someone’s memoir and imagining her alive the whole time, only to discover that she’s dead. I feel kind of weird.

• Overheard in J. Crew:
Lady: What do you think? Could I get away with wearing this scarf?
Teenage daughter: Do what you want. I don’t care.

• Today at the corner of Fortification and Greymont, I saw a well-dressed man cross the street with something in both of his hands. Upon closer inspection, I saw that he had three lightbulbs in one hand and two in the other.

• At the same intersection, I saw a lady put on deodorant in her car. Oh wait! That was me.

• I have a few product endorsements for you for no particular reason than these products have brought me great joy lately:

1. Woolite One Step Carpet Cleaner. This is the carpet cleaner that I would’ve waited my whole life for if I were the sort of person who waited on carpet cleaner. The can specifically says it takes out fruit juice stains, and as some little baby has dribbled his apple juice all over my precious living room rug, I really needed this promise to be true. So you vaccum your carpet, spray this stuff on it, let it sit for 15 minutes, and then vacuum again. And people: the stains, lo, they are gone. There is no scrubbing. The stains magically disappear. Also, the stuff is like $3.

2. Revlon ColorStay eyeliner. I’m a big fan of eyeliner in general, but have always had a problem finding a perfect one that wasn’t too smeary or wasn’t too hard. This stuff is rad: it’s not an actual pencil, so there’s no sharpening going on (and therefore no shards of wood to accidentally jab into your eye): you just twist and more magic, glide-on eyeliner comes out. It stays put and doesn’t rip off your eyelids upon application.

• I read that potato peel pie book. You know the one. You know what? It wasn’t bad. Not the best book I ever read, but it was enjoyable, a quick read, and had the added bonus of letting me learn something else gross about World War II along the way. While I wouldn’t have sought out the book, it literally arrived on my desk and so I took that as a sign and read it. (My sign reading is very subjective, as I did not read the other books that arrived on my desk.)

• Attention anyone who misses the Doag Loaver! The house across the street from hers is for sale. You’re welcome.

• While it is every parent’s responsibility to teach their children the important things in life, I have apparently chosen to teach my tiny baby (who is now a big boy of 16 months!) the dumbest things ever, such as: (1) that if he points at me, I will touch my index finger to his and say “ding,” and then he will say “ding,” and then we will do this over and over; (2) instead of putting the nice stacking rings on the little post like you’re supposed to, we shall instead put them on our heads and wear them as hats; and (3) when eating crunchy things, it is important to squint, show all one’s teeth, and go hi-ya-ya-ya-ya while chewing quickly. You should try the last one. It’s fun.

Yesterday I picked up Tori Spelling’s Mommywood at the public library. While public libraries have many valuable roles in a community, for me, letting me read terrible books that I don’t have to buy (and therefore, own) is at the top of the list. I didn’t read her other book, and I don’t know what I was expecting. But people, are you ready? Are you sitting down?

TORI SPELLING’S BOOK IS TERRIBLE.

I guess I thought because this was the follow-up, that meant the first one wasn’t so bad. Oh, how wrong I was. It’s not that it’s poorly written; it’s that it’s incredibly uninteresting. Don’t get me wrong, when she talks about how people say she has a horseface or when she rips into her mom, it’s kind of interesting — interesting like it’s interesting to read someone that you don’t like much’s Facebook status — but the rest is a blog entry. No: the rest is a Livejournal entry. From 1999. In this passage, Tori and family have gone on vacation:

There was room service. There were TVs. A full-sized pool. Beds. And a bomb shelter’s worth of supplies from Target. [Note: there was a whole paragraph detailing all the stuff she bought at Target on the last page.] The first few days flew by. I had an okay massage. We rented bikes — Dean’s had a little seat for Liam up front — and rode around the resort while Patsy and Stella followed behind in a golf cart.

(The part that gets me the most, and which sounds the most like a blog where you hear what people eat for lunch, is “I had an okay massage.”)

People, this is not exposition. This detailed account of how she spent her days on vacation is not intended to contrast the next passage, WHEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, A MONSOON FLOODED THE HOTEL! or AND THEN I REALIZED I HAD FORGOTTEN OUR OTHER CHILD AT HOME or OH MY GOD ANYTHING INTERESTING AT ALL. The whole book is like this!

In related news, I read every word.

I HAVE SOME BORING THINGS TO DISCUSS!

First, let us get this one out of the way, as it’s the most boring: remember how a few months ago I was whining about my contacts? (I also whined about them a few years ago, and a few years before that.) I had tried 7 or 8 different brand of gas permeables (which I usually wear) and then tried soft lenses, but none of them worked. Within 5-10 minutes of having them in, a film would appear on the lenses. I kept going back to my opthalmologist — who, remember, is a medical doctor — and he had no idea what to do. He finally referred me to a contact specialist, who within 15 seconds of meeting me, flipped my eyelids and discovered that I have a form of conjunctivitis. Which was causing the film to appear. For FOUR MONTHS my stupid doctor never checked for this (apparently, according to Dr. Google) common problem. Ok! I’m done now. (Although I am still in glasses.)

Secondly, this week I presented the presentation with the presenter (I just wanted to type those all in a row) who changed my slides to the dreaded Comic Sans. Oh, girl. For awhile I refused to believe that the great Comic Sans Caper was the reason he seemed to hate my guts, as that is lame, but as it’s the only transgression I committed against him, it’s all I got. So during the presentation, he stood way ahead of me, thus not able to glance over and let me jump in. So I used a microphone. Ha ha! Take that, Comic Sans! He also didn’t laugh at any of my jokes. I can forgive that, though, as my jokes had to do with the following:
–Bell’s palsy
–spying on the salaries of corporate CEOs
–cat poop

They all made sense in context!

Thirdly, I keep finding myself defending Lady Gaga. Not Lady Gaga as an “artist”; Lady Gaga as a Spectacle of Pop Culture. I enjoy that she just arrived, fully formed, insane persona completely intact, with the Altoids of bad pop music (“curiously strong”) clutched in her hand. Or maybe clutched in her bare buttocks, as they are on display often. It is popular these days to be unaware of popular culture. Have you noticed this? Sometimes when my real worries start to bore me I begin to worry about the future of radio — how iPods insulate the world against the cruddy music of the world, but y’all: you need to listen to the cruddy music of the world, at least a little — you need to be annoyed by bad things; you need to know that Lady Gaga wants to ride your disco stick; and you need to be able to read the bullseye feature in Entertainment Weekly and not have to ask someone who all those people are. (Which reminds me of this article that my friend from kindergarten posted on his Facebook page a few weeks ago.)

Fourth, I am still reading Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, which is not the laugh-a-minute riot that Stiff was, but has inspired a few snorts here and there. Finally, finally, on page 183, came the footnote that made me (excuse the expression) laugh out loud. Roach has just mentioned the patent for a product called Men’s Underwear with Penile Envelope, which sends us to this footnote:

Close to but not quite the world’s most embarrassing underthing. First prize must go to the Deodorizing and Sound-Muffling Anal Pad. The patent’s background material details the sad decline of the human anal sphincter muscle, whose gripping capacity fades as we age. The absorbing layer is said to “trap the sound of a flatus,” as though one might later drive it to a less populated area and release it.
The Anal Pad should not be confused with a prior invention called the Anal Napkin, which, in turn, should not be confused with the dinner napkin.

MARY ROACH I WORSHIP AT YOUR ALTAR.

1. Overheard in Jackson:
Lady on cell phone examining cans of peaches at Kroger: “They’re about to pull the plug on him and I can’t even get there!”

2. The other day I had some warm laundry that had just come out of the dryer and thought Pete might like lounging in it. Stupid. What he enjoyed doing was pooping in it. Oh, and THEN I didn’t notice the turds and threw a quilt over the laundry because I didn’t feel like folding it and DAMN MY LAZINESS because then Pete peed on the quilt. So, to recap, Pete pooped and peed in my laundry. Which, incidentally, was on the guest bed.

3. So, The Wire. I made it through season one, but I don’t think I can proceed. Sometimes shows do things that are JUST TOO MEAN FOR ME. And there was this character that they went out of their way to portray as a good guy and he took care of all the little abandoned project children and gave them juice boxes and bags of chips for lunch (which is tragic in its own right) and then OH YEAH HIS FRIENDS JUST SHOT HIM DEAD. I just — I can’t go on. Who else are you gonna kill off, The Wire? Huh? HUH?

4. If you thought a book was pretty good until the end, does that make it a good book or a bad book? Here, let me explain: I read The Ghost Writer the other weekend (my in laws were in town, thus I had time to read an entire book), and while it was kind of good there for awhile, I found the ending so awful, so STUPID, that the whole book is totally tainted now.

If you have any interest in reading this book, look away! ‘Cause I’ma telling you all about it now.
So there is this little boy named Gerard who lives in Australia, and while his mother is asleep he sneaks into her bedroom and finds this photo of a woman and a short story. Mom comes in, finds him, and beats the crap out of him. Several years later, he finds the story again, which the reader gets to read as well (I love that conceit). When he’s 13 or so, he gets a letter in the mail from a penpal service. He signs up. His penpal is named Alice. She is also 13 and is an orphan whose parents were killed in a car accident that paralyzed her. She and Gerard become best buddies. Years go by and Gerard wants to visit her, but she keeps putting him off. He goes to England for some reason or other, doesn’t visit her, but does read two more short stories by the same author as the secret one. It turns out the author is his great-grandmother, who raised his mother. His mother, btw, never talks about her past. So ok, more years go on, and Gerard has become a librarian who lives with his mother. She has cancer but actually dies by falling off of a stool in her room, trying to get something out of a cabinet. Another short story!

Gerard places an ad in a London newspaper asking for info about his mother and her family. An old lady named Abigail writes to him and says that she is his aunt Anne’s best friend. (He didn’t know he had an aunt.) Apparently there was a big scuffle and his mother was cut from the will. Abigail fears that Gerard’s mother killed her sister. Abigail also tells him where to find the keys to the family estate, and asks him to see if he can find anything there that might explain what happened 50 years ago.

Ok, so if you are the kind of person who likes stories like this — librarians, short stories, family estates, family secrets — this book is rocking along at this point. Gerard goes to England and explores the spoooooky family estate over the course of several days. He continues to write to his penpal, Alice, throughout (they have graduated to email by this time) and as he learns more about the family secrets, he tells her about each day’s find.

AND THEN (are you still reading? bless you) comes the big moment. Gerard is creeping through the house. He gets locked in the basement. He starts a fire to keep warm, but of course that is a terrible idea and fire rages and the smoke overtakes him and he passes out. When he comes to, the fire is out, he is sopping wet, AND THERE IS A BUCKET NEARBY. What? There’s someone here! He never did explore the third floor of the house, so something compels him up there after his brush with a fiery death. He goes into the bedroom, and instead of a crusty dusty bookcase like in all the bedrooms, there’s. . . a computer? Wha? And there are folders and folders full of. . .his emails to Alice?

So, reader. If you are thinking what I was thinking, it is this: his auntie Anne has been creepily writing him letters under the guise of being a girl his age. She responded to the ad in the paper and there is no such person as the elderly Abigail. Well, you’re part right! They are one and the same. EXCEPT THAT AUNTIE ANNE/ALICE/ABIGAIL IS A GHOST. Ghosts can move things around, but friends, ghosts can’t write letters, pour buckets of water on your flaming body, or send fucking email. I have never been more pissed off than when it’s revealed that it’s a FUCKING GHOST. A ghost! To add insult to injury, the ghosty person traps Gerard in the room and tries to make out with him! And it is then that he sees that the ghosty person has ONE ROTTING EYEBALL IN HER SKULLY HEAD.

I can’t tell you how angry I was. After all that time! Come on! Gerard and the stories and the penpal and the cancerous mother and then YOU GIVE ME A ONE-EYED ROTTING SKULL GHOST WHO SENDS EMAIL? So angry. SO ANGRY.

I think I’m still angry.

(However, if you like books like this [but without the fucking one-eyed ghost emailer], you should read Possession and/or The Thirteenth Tale.)

There is a special item at Long John Silver’s right now, according to the commercials, people! It’s called the Baja Fish Taco. For a moment, let us imagine what a Baja Fish Taco might be, even at a fried fish emporium. Most fast food places now offer fake healthy items (KFC grilled chicken, anyone? Oprah?), so I imagined it would be a fish-shaped object with fake grill marks wrapped in a tortilla. OH NO. It is a FRIED fish-shaped object, “crumblies,” and “baja sauce” wrapped in a tortilla. Why do I think that’s so funny? Funny enough to write down, then type out to tell you about?

Spike is fond of pulling books off the bookshelf, and almost every day, even if he isn’t in a particularly book-pulling mood, he pulls one particular book off the shelf and throws it on the floor. It’s Our Town by Cynthia Carr. Is he trying to tell me something? I haven’t read it, but…maybe I should.

So I got my hair cut at a new place last week, which was good because my usual hairdresser tends to give me a good haircut approximately every third time I come to see her. Anyway, we all know that hairdressers tend to lavish compliments on their customers, as this results in higher tips. (Once I was at the Gap and there was this girl stationed at the door apparently assigned to compliment the customers as they came in. I heard her tell someone her hair was cute, that she liked another person’s purse, and then she said this to me: “I like the way your jeans fit you.”) However, my new hairdresser took it a little far, as these are the compliments I received:

1. “That’s a cute outfit.”
2. “You’ve got great style.”
3. “What? You have a baby? But you’re so thin!”
4. “You remind me of Scarlett Johanssen. Do you get that a lot?”

The only compliment I was willing to believe was number one. Number two feels generic, number three is obviously disingenuous, and number four…oh, number four. I was going to say that I was the opposite of Scarlett Johanssen, but the exact opposite would be, say, Urkel. However, I am not disparaging myself by saying I HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON WITH SCARLETT JOHANSSEN, ESPECIALLY IN MY BRA.

So I was correct: bragging about Spike’s food consumption was just asking for him to throw all his dinner on the floor. I keep threatening to throw all my food on the floor, too, just to see what the appeal is, but as I will also be the one to have to mop it up, I just can’t bring myself to do so.

In Facebook news, yesterday I defriended someone for the first time. Oh, what fun! I would consider defriending the author of the following status messages if I didn’t find them so irritatingly entertaining:

Jenny McHappy Elation is gonna DRINK SOME ICE TEA!!!!!!!!!!!!! ~~WOOOO~~and then I’m gonna TAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jenny McHappy Elation LOVES CAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Watch out b. crocker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jenny McHappy Elation is gonna cook up some SKETTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Yum!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then her friends comment that she is such a good cook, can they come over for dinner, et cetera. I can only hope that somewhere, Jenny McHappy Elation has an exclamation point-laden blog where she is writing the following:

Y’ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have the most BORING facebook friend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She doesn’t use ANY EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I bet if she ate my sketty she would!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL Gotta go drink some KOOLAID and jump in da pool OH YEAH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I made this the other day. It was worth it. I ignored those stupid berries, though.

Can we just forget I said I was going to read Lolita? Thanks. I just read Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel. Do you like tiny memoirs where people pretend to be sorry for the things they did but are really very proud of their work because their forgeries are hilarious? You’ll love this, then. Here’s some stuff about it.

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait; just be quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

–Franz Kafka

Hey, I read a couple of mediocre books this week! Want to hear about them? Ok then!

Many years ago I read all of Alice Adams’ books. I don’t know why; I barely liked her, but after the first couple, they were familiar. And they’re not bad, just not awesome. (I should write blurbs on the back of books.) Anyway, I saw an Alice Adams book at the public library that I hadn’t read (Medicine Men), and so I did, and lo, it was mediocre. Here is why: there is a character who has been having an affair with a married doctor for several years and decides to break it off. He is not happy about this. She gets her housekey back from him, but when she returns from a trip, she finds that her bedroom is filled with tulips. Creepy. Then each night, she hears her back yard gate squeak open and hears something watery hitting the leaves of some plants. She guesses that it’s the doctor and that he’s peeing in her yard. Almost every chapter ends with the yard and the peeing and the creepiness. It’s obviously building to something, right? (Even though my question is: if you can hear pee hitting a leaf, aren’t you close enough to the yard that you can look out the window?) Anyway. She gets a new boyfriend, who puts a garden bench in front of the gate, and that night after they do it for the first time they hear the squeaking gate and a yell and find the doctor laying in the yard with a broken ankle. What? No ominous murder scene? So after CHAPTERS and MONTHS of thinking the doctor is peeing in her yard, we find out that. . .the doctor is peeing in her yard! Wtf, Alice Adams.

The other was Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man of My Dreams. Look, I love the Sittenfeld. I loved Prep and I adored American Wife. But The Man of My Dreams feels like a book she either wrote quickly or in a writing workshop. And I wouldn’t say it was mediocre, but it is definitely not as good as her other two books. One bonus: no creepy peeing doctors.

In related news, I am going to try to get all the way through Lolita next. I don’t usually feel guilty for not having read books, but I feel like I should’ve read it already. I mean, I read Twilight. I should balance that with Lolita.

I think there is a rule — ok, fine, I made up this rule — that if you’re browsing the Daedalus Books catalog and find items you’ve been wanting for years, it’s totally ok to buy them because they are now $5. Who cares that you ran out of bookshelves years ago? (I just ordered The Selected Letters of Martha Gelhorn and The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld.)

Speaking of books, this has been a great reading year so far. I just updated my book list here (mostly for my own purposes, but you’re welcome to look at it, too) and am impressed at how few duds I’ve read this year (uh, can you guess which ones I had to read for work?). Sunday I started reading Wesley Stace’s by George and ohmygod it is awesome. I kind of approached it with a sneer and a sigh because it concerns itself with — prepare yourselves — a ventriloquist dummy, but literally two pages into it I was won over. I loved his first book, Misfortune, and I should’ve trusted that the second one would be just as good. It’s better, in fact. I am at the point in my reading where I’m slowing down because if I keep going, it’ll be over too soon.

In unrelated news, I started making this list the other day:
Things That Are Boring, Internet-Style
1. Blog posts about your blog, including a list of the search terms that led people to your site.
2. Tweets about Twitter.
3. Facebook statuses that are this:
Jimmy McGuggenheim is.

In further unrelated news, are you people watching Make Me a Supermodel? If so, did you cry big tears when the beautiful Salome got booted last week? I can’t believe grody Branden is still there but SALOME is gone. I am rooting for Jonathan, if only because he always refers to his son as his “baby boy.” Also: The Fashion Show is a perfectly fine replacement for Project Runway. Apparently I just need a tv show where people are flamboyant, hate each other, and have 15 minutes to make a dress out of a pile of pencil shavings. I don’t care who the host is. Bring on the claws/goofy challenges, people!

Also: American Idol. Who saw that coming? It’s funny: I spent the whole season not understanding why people liked getting their eardrums burst by Adam’s shrieking, but then was kind of devastated that he didn’t win.