twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?"

Category: Books

  • vintage horror

    Running path

    The running path by our house looks like it might be good for mushrooming. And I'm pretty sure The Big Bad Wolf is wearing Grandmother's nightgown and glasses and waiting for Little Red Riding Hood at the end of that path. 

    And look what came in the mail today! 600 pages of Annotated Dracula, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman! I'm excited. Creeped out, but excited. 

  • frumpy attempt at an old-fashioned floral

    Q: How many notes can you shoehorn into the drydown of Allure? A: One to many.

    Good-bye brunch today for Emily at Richard's, otherwise known as St. Richard. (Say Ree-shar, in French.) Emily is our lovely, lovely National Hospital Fistual Clinic worker–I've been trying to post my Embassy newsletter article with pix on the Niger photo-a-day site for days, but I'm having issues. Richard is full of hilarious stories, remind to tell you the one about him being robbed in Brazil on Christmas Eve. 

    I was feeling completly out of my league story-wise and perused his bookshelves and ran across Perfumes, the Guide. They describe perfumes with all these fabulous metaphors, like, "as shocking as Dylan going electric." They review maybe a thousand perfumes in the book, and the long detailed love letters are wonderful, but the disses are probably better.

    Kenzo pour Homme Fresh: I'm not saying there's nothing charming about the orange-spice oriental lurking in the this fresh woody flanker…I'm just saying that's it's basically soap that doesn't get you clean.

    And this about Kouros, (Peter won a bottle as a door prize and we gave it, without opening, to Leopold, our cook): It smells like the tanned skin of a guy stepping out of a shower wearing a pre-WWI British dandified fragrance: citrus, flowers, musk. It has that faintly repellent clean-dirty feel of other people's bathrooms, and it manages to smell at once scrubbed and promissory of an unmade bed.

    And about Creed's (Creed! I thought they could do no wrong!) Vetiver: Deserves some sort of prize for managing to make whatever vetiver it contains mostly imperceptable.

    They give five stars to only twenty perfumes, one of them being 100% Love, which I have never heard of, and Timbuktu, of which I am going to start ordering a case, based on the discription.

    One of the delightful properties of intelliegence is its ability to counter dumb questions with smart anwers. This is how they describe a perfume! Yeah, this book is cheering me up. 

  • what the fulbrights are up to

    Jennifer_margulis

    Jennifer and James, our former next door neighbors here in Niger, have written a new book. Walk don’t run to Amazon.

  • revisiting camazotz

    Wrinkle1big_2My fifth grade teacher read "A Wrinkle in Time" aloud. I loved this book and read it over and over again. Now, I’m reading it aloud to Camille. It’s a little bit of  a slow start for her, but I love the cozy east-coast life the writer settles us into before we take off for the Andromeda galaxy. Today is Madeleine L’Engle’s birthday. From the writer’s almanac:

    Madeleine L’Engle was born in New York City (1918). She struggled to find any success as a writer with novels about ordinary families and ordinary situations, but after reading about the ideas of Albert Einstein, she wrote a science fiction novel called A Wrinkle in Time (1962), about a group of children who have to rescue their father from a planet where individuality has been outlawed. The book was rejected by 26 different publishers, who all felt that the book was too difficult for children but too fantastic for adults. But when it came out in 1962, the novel won the Newbery Medal, and it sells about 15,000 copies a year. L’Engle put a clause in her publishing contract that gave her publisher the rights to A Wrinkle in Time in perpetuity in the whole universe except for the Andromeda galaxy. She died this year.

    Madeleine L’Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

    My copy had a much scarier cover. I like this one by Peter Sis much better, but it has its detractors. What was your favorite book in the 5th grade?

  • seeing suns and stars

    51f2xhsxahl__aa240_Amazon gave it’s top 100 reviewers advance copies of Khaled Hosseini’s new book A Thousand Spendid Suns and it mostly got five stars. They are saying it’s even better than The Kite Runner. Can it be possible? Looks like we’ll have to buy this one in hard back.

    Meanwhile, me and the CaSt are at my parent’s house: going to Curves with my mom, following them both around to doctor appointments, messing up the house with trains and dominos, playing cards with a tablefull of eighty-year-old faces I love, cooking enchalada dinners, buying peaches from a 100-year-old farm down the street, and enjoying the cedar-scented air.