Booksfree.com: not exactly like Netflix, it turns out Sunday, Jul 8 2007

It is my sad duty to report many differences between Booksfree.com and Netflix

1.  They send the books by media class mail, which is super ghetto and takes an entire week to arrive.

2.  You have to send back all of your books before they send the next installments.  So instead of being able to mail back books as I finish them, so that I could theoretically never run out of books, I have to wait and send them both back at once and then wait a whole week while they send them back via ghetto mail.

3.  Some of the books have seen better days.  Wifey was particularly bedraggled looking and I swear the pages were stuck together during one particularly naughty scene.  (But did I keep reading?  Yes, because the state-sponsored blood-borne pathogen training I had to undergo for work was completely lost on me.)

But I got two books: Judy Blume’s Wifey (which I finished) and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (am in the middle of this — it has Gillian Anderson on the cover, which is kind of funny; I guess she was in a Masterpiece Theat-ah production of it).  Reviews to follow.

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Netflix for books Monday, Jun 25 2007

I just signed up with this thing called booksfree.com, which advertises itself as “netflix for books.” Now, their inventory seems fine and I would appreciate a resolution to the twin problems of not being able to fit any more books in myself and not being able to get it together to visit the library during library hours. But their recommendations are very supermarket novel-rific, so I would love any advice as to what to put on my queue. Here’s what I have so far, in no special order:

• Bleak House by Chas. Dickens. We have this already, but it is so old and dusty that I have an allergy attack every time I open it.
• Wifey by Judy Blume. I read one of her other novels for adults, which was all about hot-tub divorcees in 1980s Colorado, and found it vaguely mortifying. Still, I have high hopes for this since it is from the apex of her distinguished career and has such an awesome name.
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This was universally panned by book reviewers when it came out, and I suspect it is a reworking of short stories I’ve already read, but I am sure it is at least competitive with the Judy Blume.
• The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1660. There were funny excerpts from this in the very excellent “84 Charing Cross Road,” a book (like “Taking Care of Terrific!”) that I really enjoyed as a young lady. I bought a copy once that turned out to be abridged in this horrible way so that I could never figure out what was happening in his life.
• Persuasion by Jane Austen. I didn’t like Jane Austen in college, but figure I should give it another chance since I have developed such a taste for boring-ness in the past few years.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I don’t know, Oprah says it’s good.
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t see how I could’ve possibly missed this excellently-titled tome in my flapper and debauchery-obsessed younger years, but I don’t recall reading it.
• Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford. Another wonderful title! I binged on the Mitford sisters earlier this year; I highly recommend Nancy’s “The Pursuit of Love” and “Love in a Cold Climate” and the book of Jessica’s letters that came out earlier this year. I have high hopes for this book, which is apparently a biography of some French aristocrat.

OK, are these going to be any good? What else should I put on the list? Please advise.

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Ladies’ magazines Sunday, May 6 2007

June Lucky: The hair diaries has someone with curly hair, so maybe I should emulate her techniques; we are all supposed to want floopy, pleated tank tops; and mom jewelry is so hot right now. This issue is less derelicte than usual, but also sort of boring. Lucky needs to get its crazy back. Also, I am so tired of fashion spreads about “neutrals, the new color.” Boring!

May Allure: Lindsay Lohan spray-painted gold! (She is normal on the cover; the gold spray-painted pictures are inside.) In Scalpel News (definitely my favorite column name ever), they report on some new miracle herb, a new type of liposuction, and a study on which kind of breast augmentation looks most natural (the study was inconclusive, FYI). Also: neutrals, the new color!

May continues Bazaar’s death march, but it is still hanging on, despite having looked like the Final Months of Mademoiselle for the past few years. It even looks a little thicker, but it has been doing this retrospective feature (Bazaar in 1907, Bazaar in 1908, etc.) at the beginning that is like one of those slide shows at a funeral. And how many articles can they publish about how to wear clothes the right way even at your advanced age? And I think that they should worry about the fact that the only cute clothes are usually in the “70-years-old plus” category, although maybe that is also a problem with the way I dress.

May 2006 Elle is something I do not want to even discuss because of the whole tedious environmental focus of the issue. Also, they have an article that insults my beloved Ambien. Also: neturals, the new, natural, environmentally sensitive colors! I can’t wait for June issues.

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Hunter S. Thompson: Fear & Loathing On the Campaign Trail ‘72 Sunday, May 6 2007

This is one of Aura’s old books and has been sitting on my shelf ever since I inherited it. It’s a collection of Thompson’s dispatches to Rolling Stone magazine during the presidential campaign of 1972: strangely riveting. If, like me, you were not even born in 1972, I recommend keeping a copy of All the President’s Men nearby because that book has a whole index of the cast of 70s political characters, with photos, in the front.

My beloved magazine writing professor in college was Hunter S. Thompson’s editor at RS back in the day, and he was pretty vitriolic on the subject of HST. I kind of empathized with him while reading this book. HST’s prose is so good when it’s good, but sometimes devolves into total incoherence when he is close to a deadline (this happens to me too) and there are places where it is his handwritten notes or transcriptions of his tapes because he just did not finish on time. One chapter, and you really feel the editor’s pain here, is just a transcribed interview between HST and some poor editor, because HST must not have handed anything in.

Highlights: a limo ride with Nixon because Nixon would only let a journalist who knew about football ride with him and HST was the only one who did; HST interrogating McGovern at a urinal; HST letting some random drunk guy steal his press pass and the guy comes to a Muskie press conference and drunkenly claws at Muskie’s feet, demanding that Muskie fetch him more gin, everyone thinks it’s HST because of the press pass, everyone attributes Muskie’s implosion to the failure to control this press conference, and a footnote points out that this event was later widely attributed to Nixon’s sinister CRP sabatoges of rival presidential campaigns.

Why do I have so many books about politics of the 1970s? I have no idea. I am looking for some fiction to read but I keep missing library hours. I tried to read the chief’s Proust and it is too boring even for me. Ideas? Because I really don’t want to start in on the computer books. Or the philosophy books.

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Lovers and Players by Jackie Collins Saturday, Mar 17 2007

Back when I was on crutches, I checked out a huge stack of books closest to the check-out area at the library because it is hard to carry books with your teeth, especially under the watchful eye of dour librarians. (Shouldn’t there have been an ADA-funded valet to follow me around, recommend books, check out books for me, and waive all late fees due to my disability? But I digress.) In any event, this was not the worst book in the stack, but it was not my favorite.

This brings up several questions for me. First, how come some trash is so addictive and fun to read and some trash is boring? I adore Jacqueline Susann’s entire ouevre and I heart all Aaron Spelling shows and I read all the ladies fashion magazines every month even though I know they will give me the same dumb tips every time, etc. I do not think these things are qualitatively better than Jackie Collins, but somehow the Jackie Collins book was very boring and I read the whole thing with grim determination, as though it were a job I did not like very much.

Still, one thing I can say about this book: her characters’ names are f$&@) awesome. The first person we are introduced to is named Jett Diamond. Jett Diamond! Why didn’t I think of this myself? Then we meet his father, Red Diamond, a Sumner Redstone type. (I feel like this is one of those books where every character is a thinly veiled verson of a real person except I know too little about New York society people to get it.) And just when I was about to throw the book across the room in irritation with how Ms. Collins has a supposedly American 8-year-old girl talking like a retarded robot speaking its second language (“Lulu want ice cream! Lulu hungry!“) , she produced the best name ever: a sinister blackmailing guy named Vladimir Bushkin. So subtle, I love it. (In general, a lot of characters in the book seem to speak about themselves in the third person. Is this something rich fancy people do? Maybe I should start practicing for when I become a tycoon.)

In any event Ms. Collins taught me some valuable lessons I should apply to the Serialist. First, I should keep writing it because more than 400 million copies of her books have been sold in more than 40 countries and I am falling behind. Second, perhaps I have become too dour and, well, realistic. I think I need more hysteria and drama, possibly a knock-down, drag-out fight between two female characters, and the chief’s suggestion of a white slavery ring is not bad. (Why is it always white slavery in soap operas? I have a lot to learn, I guess.) And the names! My character names suck! I need to introduce some cool new people. Stay tuned.

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March Lucky magazine Sunday, Feb 18 2007

As with the Elle magazine and as always in spring fashion, this issue featured lots of nautical, safari, bright colors, and 1960s daywear: all of my sartorial loves, in other words.  It was a lovely day today and I was having such a nice time reading by the pool that I actually used Lucky flags to highlight items I liked.  You know, in case I am ever in the market for a pair of $400 shoes, but I cannot remember which pair I want.  Here are the highlights:

1.  Lots of “knee-skimming” pencil or A-line, kind of high-waisted skirts with chunky heels and little 40s jackets.  Yay!  This is a workday staple for me, so glad to have lots of options.

2. On related note, lovely bright yellow a-line skirt, kind of like a peacoat for the lower body.

4.  A freaking Lacoste belted (polo) shirtdress.  The only thing better for me would be a trench coat dress.

This whole experience gave me  the uncomfortable feeling that instead of expanding my fashion horizons, what I really do is just look for affirmation of what I am just going to buy or wear no matter what and what I have been wearing since I was born.

So here is my question:  I wonder if I am turning into a parody or a cartoon version of myself, like some funny old lady I would see on the bus?  I mean, we all have seen people who are sort of frozen in whatever year they came of age or when they last cared about what they looked like.   And you can look and them and think, “Hmmm, Bettie Page bangs, capri pants, I bet she moved to the suburbs in 1999.”  I wonder if I have fossilized too; if so, my only consolation is that I am probably not chic enough to have the year of my fossilization be immediately obvious like that.

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