Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

Yes kids, I'm drunk. And in vino veritas. I may even turn off comments for this post as I know ya love me and you'll be all supportive and whatnot. Thing is, I realized tonight, walking home alone, stubbornly alone, how truly alone I am. How truly alone we all are. How I am likely to die alone, more so than most, simply bc I'm kind of a weird girl. It's fine. It is what it is, but every now and then, when I'm three sheets to the wind, it really pisses me off.  How unfair life is, how random, how twisted and sick and in control of all of us it is. Dear Life, Drunk Denise says to hell with you.

I was talking to someone the other night, someone who used to be married and isn't anymore.  I'm almost at an age where, sadly, my own divorce is less interesting novelty and more shared experience.  The CDC tells me that when women get married between 20-24 (I was 23), the likelihood of divorce after 72*  months is 19%.  That was according to data gathered in 1995.  I wonder if the rates are even higher now. It was interesting how he spoke about marriage and life after marriage.  He said, "I was very happily married."  I find that sentence both beautiful and tragic.  Because really, how many people say, "we" are happily married, all the while forgetting that each of us is a universe unto ourselves, an entire separate reality?  Even after the confrontation and the loss, our own reality is slow to change.  He still thinks of himself as part of a pair, but his other half is missing. My marriage having ended long ago, I'm not sure I re...

★★★  Not much to say about this one.  I really like T.C. Boyle, but I'm used to reading things of his that are a little weirder.  He tends to take normal situations and twist one thing about them and then see what the effect might be.  That's how non-Euclidean geometry works - you change one thing, like saying parallel lines can intersect once, and then you see how it changes everything else about the system.  T.C. Boyle does that with life.  In this book, one of the characters is deaf, and it profoundly changes the way she interacts with the other characters, but there's nothing supernatural about the strangeness of this novel. I liked that it didn't end the way I thought it would - it was a bit more unusual than that, which I appreciated. It was also funny because as soon as I read this, I heard T.C. Boyle on NPR and the next day read an article by him in Smithsonian.  It's like meeting someone in a small town and then you see them eve...

★★★★ This book was so deliciously good, and I've hesitated writing about it because I'm conflicted about a few things.  I've thought about the book repeatedly in the past couple weeks, and had two great conversations with people about it.  That's more than I think about most books I read, so in that sense, the book is a smashing success. Little Bee is a Nigerian refugee in England who has survived through her mastery of language, and Chris Cleave has written her in a voice that rings so true* it's like you can hear her speaking.  I have no idea what intelligent Nigerian refugees actually sound like, so I guess I'm trusting Mr. Cleave quite a bit here, but regardless, I loved her.  When she is the narrator, the story moves along briskly with a steady stream of observations, imaginations, and remembrances.  A couple of examples of things I loved: How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This ...