After a long hiatus...

Pathetic, pathetic - no entry since 2012?? and yet, I have been reading, I have, I have.
In the last two weeks I can claim:
Books read:
The Church Mice series, Graham Oakley
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max
Leonardo's Lost Princess, Peter Silverman
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter

Books part way through:
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Stanley Lombardo)

Books gotten out of the library but not yet read despite best of intentions:
Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy

Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and read approximately three zillion times
This Little Bunny Can Bake (ceremonial burning to be held after the four zillionth reading)
Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter (why did we have to get it out of the library when we already have a copy at home? who the hell knows. Ask the three-year-old).

Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and mysteriously lost between library and home:
Lucille Camps In

Starting with David Foster Wallace - death, I think, changes the conversation about a person more than any other fact about them. You can talk/think about someone without any need to reference to their hair colour or their day job or whether they had children, but their deadness or aliveness is ingrained in the discussion, if only through verb tenses. Suicide is sort of death squared: it's impossible to not think, every time you read something written by or about DFW, "Oh my God, and to think he killed himself," and that central tragic fact adds weight and pathos to every other more peripheral fact you might learn about him. The whole way through this (quite good) biography, I was bracing myself for the awful thing he was going to do to himself, thinking ahead of time, "HOW COULD YOU BE SO SELFISH/STUPID?!" but in fact, he did many selfish/stupid things, most of them involving women/drugs; suicide was just one of them. But he also obviously had a lot figured out as well, which is the weird part: that the abandonment of his hipster postmodern ultraironic persona in favour of an open-hearted desire to forge real connections should have ultimately driven him to suicide speaks maybe to the fact that we'd all survive to the next generation a little bit better if we did more posing and pretending.

A word in praise of the Church Mice books, and Graham Oakley generally: I more or less had a baby on purpose so that I would one day have someone to whom to read these books, and I cracked them out for the first time last week, a little uncertain whether they were still a bit too advanced, and I am so happy to report that they are getting read 2-3 times a day, pictures pored over, uncontrollable giggles at favourite pages, etc. Makes all those reiterations of This Little Bunny Can Bake and Peter Rabbit worth it (am I allowed to say I do not love Beatrix Potter? The illustrations are beautiful, but the stories themselves don't do it for me. A.A. Milne can write circles around her.)

Beautiful Ruins was unusual because it was the first book that has prompted me to ever _write_ to an author. I think about doing so periodically when I've read something I really like, but I haven't ever actually going around to doing it until now. I think I am possibly biased in favour of Jess Walters because of his first name, and the fact that he looks nice on his back cover photo, and the fact that Nick Hornby said nice things about Citizen Vince, which I have requested from the library, but Beautiful Ruins was enough of a juicy soap opera (set in 1960's Cinque Terre. With movie stars.) that I actually had it propped up on my steering wheel while stopped in traffic on the Bay Bridge. (Not recommended to try this at home. Or in front of the California Highway Patrol.) I thought that any writer who can get me to read while in traffic deserves at least a thank you email, so I found his website and I wrote to him and he WROTE BACK. Perhaps I overestimate the glamorous whirlwind life that authors of moderately successful books who live in Spokane, WA lead, but it was exciting.

I am finding this translation of the Iliad alarmingly Hemingwayesque. Not my cup of tea so far, but it's definitely easier to follow than the translation I had to read for school back in the day. Stay tuned.