I swear to you that I was a good student in high school. Let me just start there. I went to class, did my homework (albeit often at the last minute), I didn't give my teachers much sass except for those times that sass was well-deserved (I'm looking at you, 10th grade English teacher from hell), and every summer I made my way through my assigned summer reading lists.
Except for the summer of '85, apparently, when I spent a month with my good friend EB with her father's cousins in England. The summer before junior year, which in New York, is the year of English literature in English class. I mention this because one of my big gaps in the list of 100 books is good British classics. As a Jane Austen fan(atic), it surprised me that there were so many British authors I'd just glossed over. I remember having a conversation with my parents in high school in which they both assured me that I'd love Thomas Hardy. But in the summer of 1985, while walking galumphing labs on Lord Bath's private roads and visiting Liverpool and Kew Gardens, the summer reading list sort of slipped my mind.
I took it with me to England, along with a big suitcase of good intentions. But when I actually brought it out to show my lovely hostess, she patted my arm and said we could probably find most of them on books on tape so I could listen to them on trains. And so it was that I listened to about two thirds of a Tess of the D'Urbervilles so abridged that it took up only two cassettes, and called my reading list done. The shame.
But now I have a second chance to make things right. While I have not yet read Tess, the second book I read on my Kindle was another of Hardy's novels, Far from the Madding Crowd. The first was A Tale of Two Cities, which won the Christmas straw poll for everyone's favorite Dickens' novel. Both of these classics were on the unread portion of my list. And now they've been read and enjoyed and given a star on the printed list that I've been toting around since Cima House. I'll never look at people knitting in public the same way again.
But it's not just classic English novels that have been crossed off the list. The first vacation rental had an eclectic, but very interesting collection of books, and I managed to read Memoirs of a Geisha and Notes from a Small Island while we were there. Memoirs is one of those books that make you wonder how a member of one sex can get inside the head of a member of the other sex so well. (Although I think Wally Lamb does that almost better than anyone else.) I enjoyed Small Island, too, but none of Bill Bryson's books have captured me quite as much as A Walk in the Woods and its discussion of bear-human treaties, or lack thereof.
I thought there was another book that I was able to cross off at the second vacation rental, but it's not jumping out at me right now. I did, of course, read the Dickens there, but it wasn't thanks to the owners, who mostly had mystery-thrillers on their copious bookshelves.
Right now, I'm in the midst of a mad rush of reading. I'm rereading Pride and Prejudice for its 200th birthday, reread all of the Hunger Game books and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornets Nest over the last week, and I'm going through all of Laurie King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books two at a time from the library. I didn't love the first one when I read it, but I love all of her non-Mary Russell books so much that I thought they deserved another try. It was the right decision.
Some of the most exciting reading I'm doing these days, though, is the slowest reading. Most of my rereading happens at the rate of a book a day or a day and a half, in the case of Hornets Nest, but each evening, we are reading about half a chapter of the first Harry Potter with Darcy. We'll pause for a long while between each of the books so she will be old enough by the time we get to Book 4, but it's exciting to introduce her to that world.
And what are you reading?
For anyone reading this who does not already know, we finally have a house! It's a townhouse, which wasn't really what we were looking for, and it's a rental (also not exactly what we had planned), but it is ours and it has all our stuff in it. After the almost-three-months of being what is classified as "warm" homeless, it is wonderful to come home to the same place every day and not feel like we're living out of suitcases.
The reality took a while to settle in: four or five days after we'd taken delivery of way too many moving boxes, I noticed my phone charger plugged into a not-very-obvious outlet and thought, "Oh! I'd better move that now so we don't forget and leave it here." And then I realized that we're not leaving! Whew!
I have a blog post planned about my recent reading. Between the book collections at the two vacation rentals we dallied in and my Christmas Kindle, I've made some progress on the infamous list of 100 books. It's all very exciting, but I'll wait to tell you about that sometime in the next few days. Tonight, I'll just present some pictures of Darcy and how she has entertained herself and us over the past few months:
During one of our stays at a comfy Staybridge Suites (we stayed at this particular hotel three different times, once for about a week and a half), we got some real snow. Darcy and I made a snowman. Really, I made it, because Darcy wouldn't wear gloves or mittens and so her hands were too cold to handle the snow. It was, according to Darcy, just about "Theo sized". It hung around for several days, even after the snow around it had mostly melted away. This photo was taken almost a week after we made it, when it had devolved into a snow cat. The next day, Darcy declared it was a snow turtle.
Sticking with our theme of winter fun, we had overnight park service friends as guests while at our first vacation rental. There was a large puddle/small pond that we had to drive through to get to the pedestrian bridge that led to the house. For several of the days we were there, it froze over with about 3/4 inch thick ice every night. Four adults and a six year old spent about 20-25 minutes breaking and playing with the ice. Because we really know how to show our guests a good time. Here are J, S, and Darcy with ice balanced on their heads, walking back to the bridge and house.
This has nothing to do with winter fun. We made a day trip to an aquarium to give our ocean-addicted child a fix in mid-November. Here, Darcy and Michael are in a bubble in a reef tank. The ocean addiction, by the way, having lasted longer than her usual obsessions, is waning. It's replacement: the Beatles!
There were weird trees in the community that held our second vacation rental. This one is growing over and around this leaning rock. Others grew straight out of seemingly solid rock. And at the entrance, two trees were hugging each other. One had grown completely twisted around the other over the years -- and they were not small trees!
That vacation rental happened to supply Darcy-sized snow shoes and we had PLENTY of snow, so she took a couple tries at that.
And then last weekend, Michael and Darcy went to see the New York Philharmonic for one of their Young People's Concerts. It was my brilliant mother's idea for Michael's Christmas present. I walked up Broadway from Lincoln Center almost back up to Columbia, window shopping, and actually shopping at Zabar's and a couple other foodie destinations while they were concerting. Darcy got to compose a short melody during the pre-concert Kids Zone time, and a violinist came by and played it for her when it was finished! We ate bagels and rode the subway (a lot). Other than the joy of being with family and friends for the holidays, this was the first weekend that reminded me why we wanted to live on the east coast for a while. After the concert, the music-lovers detoured over to Central Park to indulge Darcy's newest obsession:
