Adventures as a gay adolescent.

Merry Christmas! My first Christmas as a mama of 2 was wonderful. I even had a little time to get some reading done. A Boy's Own Story is a pretty sensitive account of growing up gay in mid 20th century America. A lot of topics I never thought about or considered in there. It wasn't light holiday reading by any means, but certainly gave me some things to think about. For example, how a gay young man looks at marriage, not as an inevitability but more of a far fetched aspirational thing. He wanted to get married, but he wanted to marry a man. Not possible then.

Now we are in the process of unpacking from our trip, finding homes for all of this stuff (including a big jar of 108 miniature plastic frogs for Peanut, which she adores and are currently all over the living room carpet), and I will start Brave New World. I read it in high school but remember next to nothing about it.

From the depths of under my bed...

I found my paperback copy of Adam Bede. I thought it was gone forever, so I got it for free from the iBookstore since it's in the public domain. And I'm still not done. It's a great story, but I get so tempted by all the books around the library. Maybe I commit to finishing it before the year is out? Marissa

It has been a busy busy month. To say the least. I noticed this same fuzzy headedness and utter lack of attention when I had just had Peanut too. But it seems even more pronounced this time around with Fuzzy.

Bouvard and Pecuchet was not a great book to read when fuzzy brained. It was a long, difficult slog. These two guys get together and basically amble through knowledge as it existed in 1840. Not much of a plot here. They have no attention span either, and it's not because they just had babies! I'm glad to be through this one and hope to be back reading a little more regularly once the fuzzy headed fog lifts!

A real story...

So I started reading Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan at the end of October. Then I had a baby! So it took a while for me to finish this one. I do enjoy reading while I nurse but the first couple of weeks are so chaotic and I just couldn't focus on anything.

I really liked this book, though. It is a story of a young IRA soldier caught in Great Britain and sentenced to juvenile prison, and the adventures he has there. It was not, as I anticipated, depressing or violent, just an interesting story. It is an autobiography so that aspect of it is cool too...I could really get interested in the characters because they were really real.

Anyway, good story. Time to take the little guy on his first outing to the library to return it!

Mildly interesting...

So it has been a while. Because I was reading a very long, slow book.

I didn't dislike Born in Exile. Really, I didn't. At times I found it to be very dated. And at other times I found the commentary woven through about church vs. science and evolution to be a little tiresome. But I thought it was a really nice commentary on society in the mid to late 19th century. I particularly liked how well some of the ironies were crafted. The characters all were rather believable and I liked them. I liked Peak for all his faults. I could see why Buckland and Sidwell each acted as they did. It was definitely fairly interesting.

So I guess I feel mildly about this one. I'm not exceedingly disappointed that it's done, but it was OK!

The unfairness of it all...

I recently finished listening to The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, and it was a downer. Newland Archer sped up his engagement and wedding in order to quell feelings he had for his fiancee's cousin, but to no avail. He was still in love with her to the very end, at which point he was old and sad and couldn't even bring himself to go visit her. The cousin, Ellen, was persona non grata because she had left her husband but couldn't divorce lest it shame the family. It was, in short, a book about obligations vs. desires. I enjoyed the book very much, but it left me feeling sort of bummed. Luckily, things are a little better these days in terms of marrying outside one's class or race, but there is still a lingering stigma.

Marissa

Looking for a book to help me sleep.

First of all, I would like to say that i really dislike pregnancy insomnia. Usually I can sleep just fine. Not lately. However, being up this late did allow me to finally finish The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. This book has been annoying me for about a week and I am glad to be through with it.

It doesn't seem to be a novel at all. Rather, it is this collection of stories and recollections. Some are in the first person and some are clearly fiction. They mostly deal with the struggle of the Czech people throughout recent history. And also sex. It all seemed so random and disjointed to me.

Unfortunately though, as tough as this material was to slog through, it didn't help me get to sleep!