2013 Begins

I'm finally getting close to being caught up!

If you read my last post, you know I had just read The Hunger Games to my kids in December 2012. So of course I read Catching Fire and The Mockingjay to them in January of 2013. Although my daughter had read them, my son had not. The kids made lots of time for evening reading for those books and even asked me to read while they cleaned their rooms during the day. Gotta love good stories.

I meanwhile read Halldor Laxness' Iceland's Bell. It was recommended to me by an author friend who knew I was writing a story set in Norway. What an incredible, thick and wandering story! I loved it for the bold, quirky and snarky characters, so flawed and so wonderful. I only kept one quote from page 18:  ...her involuntary smile dwindled into a look of panic. But the writing was exquisite and I just didn't keep other quotes because they were so contextual. I would've had to quote several pages!

February I read another MIL book, Little Bee by Chris Cleave. Oh my, oh wow. The same story from two women's very different points of view. Excellent read.
Page 95: It is a peculiar sensation, as a woman with a very good job, to be pitied by men with tatoos and headaches.
Page 123: It isn't the strong sleepers that sleep around.
My daughter gave me Christine Harris' Undercover Girl. Then I read The Paris Wife, which a friend had given me for my birthday before I went to Europe and I just hadn't gotten to it yet. I was glad I'd waited as I could see Paris better. The first two quotes are Hemmingway speaking.
Page 127: "The waiting helps you boil it down."
Page 186: "You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through. You have to live it with your eyes, really."
Page 259: His silence was as much as an admission that he was in love with her, but somehow he'd turned it all back on me so that the affair wasn't the worst thing, but that I'd had the very bad taste to mention it.

I borrowed How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely from the library in March and was glad to find it less a "how-to" and more a fun, fast paced novel. I read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman to the kids. Love that book!

I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera, the English translation, and was so captivated by the story and the phrasing that one of these days I'll find a copy in Spanish to compare.
Page 7:  ...an envelope... sealed with so much sealing wax that it had to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out.
Page 62:  "Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can." (Florentino's mother, giving advice on love and the pain of passion.)
Page 69:  ...his hair in an uproar of love...
Page 71:  "Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant."
Page 116:  Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea. 
Page 155:  ...soggy with champagne...
Page 197:  ...and left her to wander the limbo of abandoned brides.
Page 221:  If anything vexed her, it was the perpetual chain of daily meals.
Page 224:  ...she would wake to find her nightgown soaked by the endless tears of Petra Morales, who had died of love many years before in the same bed where she lay sleeping.
Page 234:  ...growing fatter and rougher as he sank into the quicksand of an unfortunate old age.
Page 345:  ...love was always love, any time and any place, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

In April I read The Subtle Knife to the kids, the second in Pullman's Dark Materials series. I also plowed through Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as it'd been years since I'd read it. Fun to have my brief Paris visit to draw from. Also read two borrowed from my MIL: The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani and Anita Shreve's The Weight of Water. I've read a couple of Shreve's books before and am always transported.

Yesterday we picked up our Thai exchange daughter from the airport. I wonder if she'll have some books to recommend.