Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

★ ★ ★ I'm sick of Chuck Palahniuk, which is kind of too bad since I've really enjoyed his books in the past.  I like his stories, I like what he has to say, but it's so damned heavy handed.  There's no subtlety - it's all shock and awe and in your face. A few other trends I've noticed.  His characters find themselves in cars a lot.  It's like they don't belong anywhere, so they have to be mobile.  Also, they are almost universally awful.  Would it kill him to write a character I don't hate once in a while?  Finally, only batshit crazy things ever happen to them.  I find it hard to identify with individuals who are clearly nutso. I listened to this in the car on the way to SC - it took a little less than 6 hours, which is pretty short for an audiobook.  It was good for listening in that the fast pace kept me interested, but I didn't find the characters particularly compelling. The girl who read the audiobook did the best Evelyn (pronounce

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Bill Bryson rocked my world with A Short History of Nearly Everything, and this one book is somehow even better, maybe because the histories he's telling deal with our most intimate surrounds. Bryson marches through our houses room by room, answering questions most of us have never even thought to ask. It's a fascinating premise for a book, made even more so by Bryson's conversational writing style*. I stretched out the reading of this book because I didn't want it to end, but found no difficulty picking it up and putting it down and devouring it in little bites. It's like running into a particularly fascinating friend on the bus. Even better, the information turns out to be so immediately applicable all around you. For example, I read about Henry Dreyfuss and his design of the cradle desk telephone and then that day went to buy stamps and he was featured on the pioneers of industrial design stamps, and I knew why. It was oddly satisfying. Since

I debated about whether or not to blog about this bc well, it's my lady parts.  But with all the crazy legislation lately about what I can and cannot do with my bits, it seems that it's on the public table, so I mean, why not?  Also, people talk about having babies all the damned time, I can talk about not-baby-having. I had an IUD put in today.  It's not something I'm particularly thrilled about because it's a long-term birth control solution, and I don't want to believe that I need a long-term birth control solution because I'm about to turn 31 and I'm never going to have babies, and oh my god, I think I'm crying a little.  Okay, not really.  Not right now.  But I'm not thrilled is what I'm saying.  I went with Paragard because it's non-hormonal (more on that in a second) and it can be left in for 10 years.  You can have it taken out much sooner, which I hope will be the case for me.  Other non-hormonal birth control options are thin