Books Bought This Month
Books Borrowed This Month
Your Brain on Food by Gary L. Wenk
A Long Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Twice Told with drawings by Scott Hunt
Your Playlist Can Change Your Life by Galina Mindlin, Don DuRousseau, and Joseph Cardillo
Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins
Clear Away the Clutter by Susan Wright
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter Continue reading
Books Bought This Month
Katarina by Kathryn Winter
A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell
Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan
Books Borrowed This Month
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 edited by Elizabeth Kolbert
True Notebooks by Mark Salzman
The Sisters Grimm: Fairy Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley
The Academie by Amy Joy
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Until Twitter, Goodreads was probably the social networking website I adapted to (and thus made indispensible to my life) most quickly. My senior year of high school, my friend sent me an invite, and within maybe six months, I was updating obsessively and in great detail. Now, GoodReads is my best friend and my favorite social site. Though I hate being so attached to an Internet thing, I do credit it with making me feel a lot of obligation and guilt if I am not reading consistently and with critical thought and reflection, and that can only be good for my brain.
That said, like I said in my post for 50/50 Me, things on the Internet have the tendency to make me want to know something about everything, and the subjects I am interested in reading about grow at a much faster rate than I read—and that’s saying something, because I have trained myself to read, with understanding and engagement, rather quickly. (Practice makes perfect, right?) So my to-read list grows very quickly, and I have a difficult time deleting books from it, for a variety of reasons.
1. If I added it to my to-read list, something made me want to read it, and usually my memory works in such a way that seeing the title or cover will trigger a conversation with a teacher who recommended the author or an article I read that was inspired by a collection of poems, or whatever. I think I owe it to my memory to at least keep it on the list, in the hopes that someday I might get to it. Continue reading
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Tagged books, fiftyfiftyme, inspiration, learning, procrastinating, reading
It has come to my realization that I could actually have pursued a more lucrative career in the health sciences like my mom hoped I would. Oops.
So last month and over a bit of February (remember, I had vertigo, so my brain fried itself and I spent 10 days not being able to comprehend more than three written sentences at a time), I read Reading in the Brain, which, while dense, is pretty awesomesauce. 
Posted in books
Tagged books, criticism, education, neuroscience, science, wishful thinking
Books Bought This Month
The New American Haggadah by Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer
Books Borrowed This Month
The House of Djinn by Suzanne Fisher Staples
Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Cuba 15 by Nancy Osa
Ten Things I Hate About Me by Randa Abdel-Fattah
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Posted in books
Tagged books, fiftyfiftyme, monthly roundup, movies, procrastinating, school
Books Bought This Month
Books Borrowed This Month
Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber
The Future of Us by Carolyn Mackler and Jay Asher
Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer by Alloy Entertainment ghostwriters
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Posted in books
Tagged books, fiftyfiftyme, monthly roundup, procrastinating, reading, sick
The other day I explained to a friend that as soon as you meet someone else who is adopted, you instantly have a connection. Regardless of whether you later find out that the person is annoying, a Republican, has bad taste in music, or whatever, you always retain that small semblance of “I am he is me and we are one” because it’s just a thing. You’re both adopted. Obviously you can say that about any shared interest or quality, but I’m fairly sure it’s different when you find someone else who is adopted/Jewish/mixed (and that’s just for me) or shares another quality that makes you different and minority(-ish) status, as opposed to finding someone who, on that day, at least, likes the same types of movies as you do.
So I’m glad to finally see that in a novel. I just read If I Tell
Books Bought This Month
Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas by Ellen T. Harris
Books Borrowed This Month
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak
The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide by Bobbie Ann Mason
The Deep by Helen Dunmore
An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
Transformations by Anne Sexton
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I’m emotionally over Facebook–by which I mean I am no longer invested in it as somewhere I can express my identity and personality. I used to spend hours cultivating the perfect biographical statement, interests and favorites, and group memberships, but now it’s turned into a virtual version of my apartment on its worst days–namely, full of clutter and crap that might express me, but not in any sort of coherent or favorable way. Anything I find interesting–quotes, links, videos, gets posted in a place that I’d ideally like to keep for photographs and messages to and from friends that I can’t see in person. The one day I connected my Twitter account to my Facebook, such a barrage of crap that was probably rather interesting on a feed cluttered up my Timeline that I just couldn’t stand how it looked, nor could I find a message from a friend that I was looking for.
In the fall I deleted Facebook from my bookmarks, and it remains gone. That makes me visit it a lot less often than I used to, and aside from article-link-posting binges, I don’t really do anything on Facebook except play Words With Friends (I love/hate you for that, Zoraida!). I don’t plan on quitting, but it’s no longer a place that works for the way I want to use media and mediation to send messages or create the virtual costume of myself. I don’t like who I am when I spend hours on Facebook, wistfully clicking through pictures of guys I used to like or girls who used to make fun of me, nor do I like how my profile page looks like, littered with shit I find interesting and want other people to find interesting about me. I don’t know why I held out on Twitter for so long, because it’s more my thing. Continue reading
I just started reading Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, which is the first of his three seminal works on the acting process. I decided to read it when I saw a friend reading it to work on her acting career; I’m reading it because I have enjoyed acting when I’ve done it, also because I have found acting difficult when done right, and also because I thought it might be an interesting approach to writing. I think for that third thing to work, I might end up reading all three of his books, not just this one.
But I got it from the library in Tucson, which means I have to finish reading it by Tuesday night, as I leave Wednesday morning. I had trouble getting it from the Boston library. It’s quite interesting so far–somewhat fiction, somewhat like a diary, rather than just “Hi, let me teach you some shit about acting.” I think writers’ guides could take a note from that approach. But now that I’ve trained myself to be critical about fucking everything ever, I’m having trouble getting through it, and so I’m only on page 10.
This is partly because, at least for the kind of reader and thinker I am, this is a book that demands to be read with a notebook at your side for jotting down quotes you want to remember, activities you want to try, or ideas you come up with. It is not a book for bathtub reading, which is what I thought when I decided to Blanche DuBois out and take a bath this morning. Continue reading
