We just got the results of the book group vote on the next year’s worth of books and I WON MY BET WITH MYSELF, dammit: The Fault in Our Stars got voted in. AND of the ONLY two books that I had already read, guess what? One of them got voted in. And it’s the stupid Satanic Verses, which WHY would anyone want to read now?? Why? GAH.
Sadly, only one of my recommendations made the list, though 3 others were one vote short. I don’t care, I’ll read them anyway. Here’s what got voted in, in no particular order:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Circle by Dave Eggars
The Mockingbird Next Door by Marja Mills
Magical Thinking by Augusten Burrows
Not that Kind of a Girl by Lena Dunham
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Fault in our Stars by John Green
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One of the families that we invited to Thanksgiving next Saturday has sent me a message today to let me know that they probably won’t make it because their kids have swim competitions that day. I can’t believe they didn’t know about this earlier and really think they could have let us know much much sooner so we could have invited someone else. Now I feel like if I invite someone less than a week from the dinner that it’s pretty obvious they weren’t on the “first” guest list and it feels rather bogus. Sigh. Oh well, more stuffing for me!
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That lovely book I was reading yesterday? How the Heather Looks? It’s been on my to-read list for years, so I was thrilled to finally get it. It was a little dated (started in 1958 about experiences that happened just before that and published in 1965) but really fun to read. The family included a charming 2-year-old girl named Lucy and a bright, inquisitive intelligent 9-year-old boy named Ian and her historian husband, John. In the afterword, written much much later, the author mentioned something about her husband’s illness, their subsequent divorce and her daughter’s diagnosis. What? I thought…so I went and looked her up. Only to discover that Lucy died of a brain tumor at age 7, the husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia and the marriage collapsed in 1966, and Ian was also diagnosed with schizophrenia later and took to leaving with no notice for long stretches of time as a teenager, eventually disappearing for years. Her second husband died of cancer in 1985 and Joan herself died of colon cancer in 2001 (though at least after a long, busy storytelling life). What a tragic end to the tale! 🙁
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Bad News that’s Bumming Me Out
There are only 6 white rhinos left and elephants could be next
The world is running short on chocolate and bananas
GAH