Manifold Motion's Miscellenea II Wraps Up Tonight
Around The -Ists This Week
Seattlest Pix 09Nov24
Seattlest Pix 09Nov23
Can't Miss It: Monday
International travel is a challenge for a book whore like Seattlest--how many titles can we cram into our carry-on and still have room for at least a few necessary items? (Our journey began before the foiling of the London plot, when we liked to carry toiletries with us in case our checked luggage got lost.) True, we have an iPod and we did load a few goodies of the bookish variety onto it, but in all honesty, the iTunes book offerings are still immensely dissatisfying. And expensive: $50 for the newest Harry Potter, are you fucking kidding?
The book needs turned out to be more dire than we'd initially anticipated, as almost half of our two weeks in the "Portes Du Soleil" region of the French/Swiss Alps were spent indoors staring out at the rain coming down sideways for days at a time. Doors to the sun, our ass. So we tried to ration our book reading (and luckily snagged some DVDs from the ex-pat Brits in the chalet next to us), but we ran into a snag. The beefiest book we'd brought with us, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, was becoming a bear to read and was, quite honestly, giving us disturbing dreams.
Thankfully, we'd learned a valuable lesson from a favorite book from 2004, Nick Hornsby's genius collection The Polysyllabic Spree. Hornsby relived us of our liberal-arts guilt when we didn't like a book, or discovered that we were simply trudging through it just to get to the end like a good intellectual soldier. (Sadly, the last time we did that was Neal Stephenson's Trilogy--we could have used Hornsby's help a little sooner with that one...). It wasn't going to make you any smarter, he reassured us, and there he was entirely right. In this short article, he recounts his adventures writing his column for the Believer that eventually got folded in to the book:
...because here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do.
So we put Middlesex down and read, in mere hours, both of Gideon Defoe's witty little swashbucklers Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, and Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab. We had no idea what to expect, we literally grabbed it off the stand at the store and marched to the counter to buy it on merit of the title alone. Plus it was one of those double books like Seattlest had as a kid, with one story on one side, then you flip it over and upside-down and read a different, but related story. But mostly: Pirates.
The Pirates did the trick. We laughed so much while reading both that the husband had to come upstairs to make sure we'd not switched out the Ambien for something with a bit more of a punch. The bad dreams ceased, and we were happy. Eventually, we actually picked Middlesex back up, and the book itself has picked up to the point where we're nearly certain we'll finish it.
As for the iTunes audiobooks? We decided on David Sedaris' Naked, but lacked the courage to actually give it a listen. Seattlest is no ingenue when it comes to audiobooks, but for some irrational reason we feared the experience of having David Sedaris reading directly into our head. It seemed we'd be behooved to dedicate 100% attention lest we offend; it loomed as too personal, too close.
In our next installement: Seattlest! In An Adventure with Swiss Cows and Mountain Biking in 6-inches of Mud.
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