Sunday

So. Last night the local weatherguys said it would rain this evening. Of course, it's raining this morning. It was a fairly light rain, though, and it's mostly stopped now. Need to make a very quick run to the store (a Sunday newspaper) and do laundry. Maybe make banana bread. Mr. N's stint in Southern California has been extended, at least for a couple of days. Maybe another week. We'll see.

Finished The Possessed, started on Jeannette Walls' Half Broke Horses, which is a "true-life novel," as she calls it, about the life of her grandmother. It's also surprisingly ... disappointing so far. It's well written (I loved her autobiographical The Glass Castle) but it's also really flat and (mostly) emotionless. I know that could be regarded as a defense mechanism against the hard life she had growing up, but it also makes her appear something of a Mary Sue, which is very much not good.

Anyway. More later, with a little bit about The Possessed and one last quote from it.

Sunday Night

Went to the grocery store for a paper (the Sunday ads, the TV thing) ... it rained lightly just about all day and is supposed to rain all day tomorrow. The useless Bradford pears are starting to bloom.

Watching the Academy Awards and oh my God Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) is so frickin' beautiful.

So. Really enjoyed reading The Possessed. There were whole pages I totally admit I just scanned because my brain eyes were glazing over at the thicket of linguistic-theory-speak. The best parts were Elif Batuman recounting her summer in Samarkand and the visit she made to St. Petersburg. She's got such a great eye for the small detail and the mordantly funny, and I really wish she'd write another book about her travels and about her family. Solid, solid A.

This quote is from Samarkand -- Habib is a friend from the university there, and Eric is Elif's boyfriend (they're pretending to be husband and wife so they can live together):

We began to walk back to the university. Habib asked how old I was. "Twenty-four? You're only two years younger than my wife, and you don't have any children! I thought you were seventeen or eighteen! Are you sure you're twenty-four? ... I have to have some words with your husband. Don't worry, I won't say anything bad. I'll just explain it to him, as one married man to another, what he has to do." Suddenly bethinking himself, Habib lowered his voice. "Does he know what he has to do? And when he has to do it?"

"Well, I think so ... "

"I'll talk to him anyway," he decided. "You wait here and look at the flowers."

Eric didn't speak Uzbek -- Habib did talk to him, but he didn't understand a word. *g*