Unseasonable.

So it has been 80 for the last 3 days. In DC. In mid March. I've had to put the A/C on at night and have shorts on. I'm as tired of winter as the next person, but 80 just feels like too much too soon. I like a few weeks of mild temperatures before we go straight into full on summer. Plus, if it's 80 in mid-March, I fear what August is going to be like.

Ismail Kadare's Broken April is a fantastic novel. So apparently in the mountain regions of Albania, there are these blood feuds. The Kanun, the local code, permits murder to avenge murder if certain conditions are followed. So what winds up happening is that families engaged in a blood feud take turns killing members of the other's family. The hero, Gjorg, kills a member of the rival family to avenge his own brother's murder. This takes place in mid-March. The Kanun provides for a 30 day truce before Gjorg is allowed to be murdered by the other family. The book is about this last month, where he travels around and basically gets ready for his death. I loved reading about the customs and traditions of the people, and the descriptions in this book were just so beautiful. You could feel the end of winter chill and the little warmth that was beginning spring. The book seemed unseasonable to me because usually spring is the time where new things start to grow, but Gjorg is getting ready to die. He's dreading mid April when the truce ends and the other family is allowed to ambush and kill him.

I just loved this book. I'm surprised that my local library didn't have it. I would recommend this to anyone.

Life's a beach.

When I was little, I always thought it would be pretty much the best thing ever to live in a beach town or a ski resort town. The vacation fun never stops when you live there year round, right? Right? While on the vacation, I used to imagine the house my family would live in and what our day to day existence would be like. Fortunately (though perhaps unfortunately for 11 year old me) my parents knew better and dutifully returned all of us to our non-beach, non-ski resort town at the end of every vacation.

The characters in Brighton Rock do live in a resort town. It is nothing like a daily vacation that I used to dream about when little, though. They are gang members in a mob of young thugs that is falling apart. They continually try to consolidate their power against the rival (and much better funded) Colleoni gang, only to be thwarted at every opportunity. Basically, they kill someone, then to cover their tracks, they keep having to kill other people, until there are like 2 gang members left. Plus the head of the gang figures he has to marry a local waitress who has a clue to the murder so that she cannot testify about what she saw. The book is dark and sad. I couldn't help feeling bad for Pinkie, the mob leader, and Rose, the young woman who he marries. They are just sad, sad people.

I liked this book though. I liked how it was set up with the gang members constantly trying to outwit Ida Arnold, who has seen something and is out to discover the truth about the original death.

Crazy, but fun.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut was pretty cool. It started off kind of slow (but with a lot of amusing social commentary). As the book progressed, it got more and more frenetic. The author inserts himself into the action and actually becomes a participant in all the crazy nonsense that is going on. You know how usually the narrator is kind of invisible and describes the action? Here, the narrator pulls up beside one of his characters and explains that he created the character and is in control of him. The character is a little astonished by this. The narrator is on the outside, looking in, but also on the inside, looking out.

I liked this book- it was amusing and pretty cool. Sometimes books from this time period are a little too crazy for me. For example, the book with a hole in the middle of it. This one was nuts, but in an interesting, fun way.

A visit with Brideshead Revisited

As is usual, I'm typing this blog entry one handed as Fuzzy nurses and Peabo plays around on the floor telling a story with some playsilks and Playmobil characters. So I have a lot going on. I read Brideshead Revisited in quick bursts. 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. It wasn't a great way to read this story. I think I missed a lot of the nuances.

The story follows a young man and his interaction with a Catholic family in the early 1900s, just before the war. He first befriends his classmate, Sebastian, but then pretty much abandons him once Sebastian becomes an alcoholic. Later he remeets Sebastian's sister Julia and they are planning to get divorces and marry each other. It is a good story and an interesting commentary on the time and the Catholic faith. Each family member has his or her own level of belief and observance and I was interested to see how that weaved through the story. This was also a LONG book for some reason. Only 313 pages, but type was small and it just seemed long to me.

Time to go burp the baby!

Books 111-120

Here are the next 10 books on the list:

111. The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric (1945)
112. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938)
113. Broken April by Ismail Kadare (1980)
114. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
115. The Buddah of Suburbia by Hanif Kurieshi (1990)
116. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901)
117. Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton (1916)
118. Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer (1979)
119. Burmese Days by George Orwell (1934)
120. The Busconductor Hines by James Kelman (1984)

Boobs, boobs everywhere.

Nursing a baby can take a while. When they are little, they aren't very efficient yet, so they often hang out at the breast and nurse for sometimes 30 minutes at a time. It's a good idea to be relaxed and read a good book or watch TV or just enjoy bonding with your new, snuggly infant.

That is how I got a lot of reading done in the early days of this blog. I had a baby that loved to hang out and snuggle and nurse. Now, with baby #2, I still have toddler #1 to look after, so it isn't as easy to curl up with the baby and a good book and nurseathon. I still do have some good chances to read, though.

The Breast was a very odd book. I know I'm totally missing the point. I found my own humor in the fact that I was primarily reading it while nursing.

So basically, this guy turns into a breast. I'm not sure if it was the time in which it was written (early 1970s, I think) or what, but the breast's essential function as a food source was quite diminished. Roth spends pages upon pages dealing with the sexual nature of the breast, the guy has his girlfriend come over and stroke his new form, etc. Only at the very end was there any discussion of the fact that breasts make milk and that this guy did not produce milk, and even then it was very brief.

Anyway, weird, weird, weird book and I definitely missed the theme of this one.

9/11 fiction.

I knew that eventually there were going to be books about September 11th. The horror of it is imprinted on every American who was alive to remember it. Even 10 years out now, it seems too fresh to be fictionalized, though. Claire Messud does a nice job with The Emperor's Children of coming up with some likeable characters and an interesting story. So I did like reading the book, even though it is difficult and sad to read about such a horrible day. You can see how things are leading up to the events and you almost don't want to keep reading because you don't want these people to be affected by the terrorism. But you know the fictional characters will be affected, just like we all were.

The cultural references in the book are great - very 2001. It's amusing to look back at them now just 10 years later. The author really captured what 2001 was like in a very clever way. I'm glad I read this Best Book of 2006 for sure.