Why I Can Never Be a Book Reviewer

City of Tiny Lights is fucking brilliant, man. And Patrick Neate is the hottest author on the planet. Four stars!

Wait, you want me to say MORE? Isn't that enough? Le sigh. Okay, but when I describe it...the book doesn't sound so great. But basically it's about a Pakistani-British detective named Tommy Akhtar who is called upon by a hooker to locate her missing hooker friend. Or, in the vernacular of Tommy boy (as his father calls him), Melody, aka exoticmelody hires him to find Natasha aka Natalya aka sexyrussian.co.uk. The back of the book describes it as a modern-day Raymond Chandler novel, which....well I've never read Raymond Chandler so I can't comment. But the mood he creates is pitch perfect, the prose is brilliant and hilarious, and the story is really good and got me through my endless nine-hour train ride back from Boston on Monday (stupid trains running over stupid shopping carts on stupid tracks...the BUS never has those problems, I tell you). And wait, did I mention Patrick Neate is fucking hot? Cause he is. If you don't want to take my word for how cool this book is, Nick Hornby blurbed him, and he's fucking published and everything (not just on blogspot), so trust him at least, right?

And I'm going to Scotland in about six weeks and I get to buy more of his books with their cool British covers. Yeah baby.

Read (some of) This

This summer I didn’t have a job, and Bill’s Evil Twin was kind enough to invite me to hang out at his house a lot while he was working. It may seem weird to read books, play the piano, and surf the web at someone else’s house instead of your own, but it did make me feel less lonely and more like I was out and having a life. Plus, he had cool books I hadn’t read, including A.M. Homes’s The End of Alice, which if you haven’t read it, is creepy as hell (but good). If you like Mary Gaitskill, which I do, you’ll like it, and her.

Anyway, so she has a new book out, non-fiction, called The Mistress’s Daughter. Basically it’s about the fact she’s adopted and her biological mom eventually sought HER out and contacted HER, and how she (A.M. Homes) struggled to form relationships with both bio-mom and bio-dad.The first half was really interesting, especially because her (biological) mom is a manipulative control freak with no sense of personal boundaries, and her bio-dad is…well, kind of an asshole. The first two sections were about those relationships, and ended when she was no longer going to be in contact with bio-mom (what specifically happened is a SPOILER, so I will spare you). I read that part really fast, and then came to an abrupt screeching halt when A.M. Homes started doing genealogical research on her ancestry. I mean really, I find my own ethnic heritage really boring and dull, so why would I care about hers? Does it really matter to me if a grandmother is Lithuanian?

I peeked ahead and saw that the fourth section has some header that implies it’s going to be about her relationship with her dad again, but I still don’t feel inspired enough to slog through the ancestry part to get there. I read another book after that one, some magazines on my trip in an effort to avoid picking that book up again, and am looking at two or three others I want to read rather than return to it, even if it does promise to eventually return to its previously engaging ways. Never has a book plummeted so quickly and without any warning whatsoever. So the moral of this story is, if you’re planning to write a story about your freaky yet psychologically fascinating family, don’t talk about your ancestral roots. At least, not if you want me to care.

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Updates on both this entry and the previous one:

I finished the book last night and even after the geneological stuff ended and it returned to "my father is an asshole," it kind of went down in flames. So I recommend the first two parts only! There were some beautiful prose lines, though. Interestingly, I didn't notice before, but one of the people on the back of the book quoted was Mary Gaitskill...I guess I'm not the only one who makes that comparison.

Also, through the miracles of being militantly diligent before going down in flames, I managed to LOSE .4 from my starting WW weight, despite the debacle that was Cincinnati (I mean really, did I NEED both french toast AND chocolate chip pancakes at the all you can eat breakfast buffet with Green and company? Just so you don't think I'm exaggerating my debauchery). So I'm hoping being militantly diligent between now and...well, tomorrow night at 10:00, when I leave for Boston, will make me stay the same while I'm there.

Finally, old habits die hard and I referred to "the professor, Gill, and the law student"...but the law student is no more! She is the law school graduate! Eventually she will become the lawyer, after passing the bar and all that...but for now she's ABE (All But Exam, cause I'm clever like that).

Hello, old friends: a story in 3 parts

1). So last week I re-joined weight watchers for two reasons. One, my pal Gill was going to try it out so I was going for solidarity, and two, I have regained a bit of weight that on the surface is not a big deal, but I wasn't immediately taking it off the way I had before and didn't want it to start becoming a slippery slope of "It's just a few pounds, I won't get too worked up about it," until a few more cycles of that suddenly turns into a 20-pound weight gain. At first it was really cool to be back in the swing of obsessively tracking everything I ate (what can I say, it appeals to my borderline-OCD side), and then I promptly fell into a dark abyss of vacationness and am depressed about my eating failures. I mean really, when I start reflecting back on everything from this past weekend? Oi. I am FREAKING OUT, especially since I am about to go to Boston and probably have another bad cycle. When I get back from Boston, I am confident I will get back on track...but I would like to a) not feel unable to control myself on vacations, and b) not have to start from even higher than I already was starting from to get back on track. I have told Gill and the law student and the professor about my desire to Be Good, so hopefully I will actually manage to...Be Good.

2). More meaningfully, I went back to Cincinnati this weekend to see my former students graduate from my former place of employment. Because I can never just do anything without overanalyzing it to death, I was scared beforehand it was going to be a sucky experience, just coming back to a city that caused me sadness. But you know what? It wasn't like that at all. One, even though I didn't like the city much, didn't fit in well, and ultimately broke up with the reason I went there (Cincinnati Boy), it wasn't a hugely DEPRESSING experience. There were plenty of good times there, and even the breakup, while yucky, did not put me into a horrible depression. It was a normal recovery process, in other words, and now that I have recovered, I visited the city and had a fine time. I got to see my friend Green and his family, and we got to play Scrabble and Boggle, and I got to shop and see 28 weeks later (my one-word review: eh) and see friends from the school and stay in a hotel, which is always fun. And then when I woke up at 4:45 this morning and said, "I just want to come home," I packed up my stuff and got on the road, getting back here at about 1:15, which was also nice.

It was weird to come back to the school, because I'm not one to look back into my past and revisit places I've left. I tend to stay in touch with people I like but not revisit INSTITUTIONS per se (e.g., I would never in a million years go to my high school reunion, and as much as I love people from when I worked in NYC, I haven't been back there). But it was good to go there, to see people I liked and cared about, and know that leaving was the right decision to make. As much as I have struggled to be back here in nova, and as horrendous as this year has been (seriously, July 2006-April 2007 or so was probably the worst 9 months of my life, except for maybe when I first moved to Boston in 1995), I have moved on from the person I was in Cincinnati and am growing, hopefully into an even better version of the parts of myself I like. I've never doubted that leaving Cincinnati was the right thing to do, but coming back sort of showed me that even when I was having hard times here, I was changing for the better. I think.

3). As part of the feeding extravaganza that comes from vacations and throwing your food/exercise rhythms out of whack, when I entered the school and was walking to the main office, I spotted an irresistible item in the vending machines. I'm talking about the Hostess pudding pie, my friends. This was something I had pretty much every day in high school. Sure it's disgustingly bad for you, but it's AWESOME. Of course I had to buy one, and even when I did the calculations and discovered it was 13 points (as reference, on WW I'm supposed to eat around 20-22 right now...so that's a lot for ONE thing!), I said screw it and stuffed myself full of it. It was fun to return to an old memory, but less emotionally gratifying than the Cincinnati visit, I think. I don't need to have another one any time soon.

Download This

I've had the Smiths Louder Than Bombs album since my junior year in high school...first on tape, then on CD. And yet, somehow last night was the first time I ever really HEARD song #24, Asleep. Song, where have you been my whole life? It came on as I was approaching my apartment complex at 10:30 at night (after I'd fallen asleep TWICE watching Heroes with Chrisshawn! I'd be more embarrassed if Shawn hadn't fallen asleep as well) and there was just something about the quiet piano, the dark neighborhood, and the glowing blue of my dashboard that made it seem like I was living a poem. That simultaneously sounds incredibly dorky and exactly is the only way I know how to say it. I then listened to it in en route to the gym this morning (at 5:45 a.m., a time when usually I don't want to hear any noise except MAYBE the BBC World News NPR runs at that hour) and then on the way home again afterwards...and now it's running through my head as I'm typing this. Sure, when you look at the lyrics you see it's kind of a song about suicide, but that's not the point. The point is that it's the most incredibly beautiful song and the one I've had the strongest reaction to since I discovered (okay, with Bill's Evil Twin's help) Neko Case/New Pornographers this summer.

I love it when that happens.

So I ran a half-marathon. Now what?

The title really says it all. I ran a 5K on Saturday, nearly threw up afterwards (that's what happens when you don't drink enough water ahead of time and run it WAY too fast in the interests of making the 30 minute goal time you've set for yourself...which I did, but AT WHAT COST?), and spent the rest of the day feeling like ass. Fortunately, rather than get discouraged and think I was doomed for Sunday, I chose to take it as a learning lesson and did the exact opposite the next morning: I drank almost two bottles of water before the race, ate a muffin AND a balance bar, and stopped at every water station along the way.

And you know what? It was fine. I had some stomach cramps at mile 2 or so, but my awesome sister helped me slow my pace (which I am notoriously bad at...see 5K results from previous day, which I ran alone) until they took care of themselves. It was a cool day and once I warmed up, I tied my fleecey thing around my waist and was just fine in my short sleeved Tim Gunn-inspired MAKE IT WORK shirt and track pants. I never felt out of breath, I never had to stop running, I never felt like I couldn't do it...and at the end while I was happy it was over, I didn't fall to the ground immediately, cramp up, or even think about doing anything close to barfing.

This is, bar none, the thing I am most proud of in my whole life. I have this annoying tendency to always qualify achievements. Anything anybody finds remotely impressive, I always downplay. "Yeah, I got a master's degree from Columbia...but it was just two classes at a time and everybody can get into their master's program." (I do still think that, and it's not just Melinda Doolittle-esque modesty trying to get people to tell me I'm wrong.) "Sorry, I'm busy tomorrow, I'm doing a half-marathon. But don't get too impressed, I'm sure I won't finish!" (And yes, I DID email that to more than one person, again in all seriousness.) But there's no way I can tear down the fact I ran 13 freaking miles, try as I might. It's an incredibly unfamiliar, yet totally awesome feeling. I can't stop smiling. And staring at the shiny, shiny medal still sitting on my kitchen counter.