Book #4

Under The Dome, by Stephen King

Every time I go to the library, I check the Stephen King section because I have a backlog of his books that I need to read. I would reserve them, but then I'm never able to make it to the library in time, and they get put back into circulation. But this time I managed to find one I hadn't read, and Good Lord, it is a large one, over 1000 pages. And it figures that it took me the least amount of time to read it of the books I have read so far this year. But I read most of it on the plane to Vegas and the drive to AZ, so that's why I finished it so quickly.

Not much to tell about this one, it's not one of my favorites of his, but I didn't hate it like the Tommyknockers (bleah). It's typical Stephen King, supernatural tales filled with endless description (which I do like). It was kind of like putting on an old pair of jeans, comfy and familiar. For awhile there he kind of got away from horror/supernatural, and I really enjoyed those novels very much (Hearts In Atlantis is probably my second favorite of his). I think all I have left of his is two short story collections and whatever he just released. The most exciting news is that there will be another Dark Tower book! It's supposed to come out next year, but I most likely will not be in line the day it is released. I'll wait a year or two until I find it in the stacks.

Book #3

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

Quite a few years ago (before we got an iPod), I began to take a lot of audiobooks out of the library. I started with a few that I had already read, but then I began to listen to books that I hadn't read yet. At first I thought it was cheating, but I soon changed my mind. I think I was less lazy around the house back then, and I was always doing things, so I didn't have time to sit and read. The only time I ever sat down to read was on my lunch break at work (still true to this day, for books at least). But since I got an iPod and Sarah got me into podcasts and I have grown fat and lazy, all of that has changed.

When I was into audiobooks, there was one reader that I really liked, named George Guidall, and I would get books that I never heard of before just because he had read them. One of those was I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, a sprawling book about twin brothers and the mental illness that affects one of them. At the end of the audiobooks, there's usually a section where there are other books you'll enjoy if you liked this one are mentioned, and She's Come Undone was listed there, so I got the audiobook for it. My audiobook reading comprehension is just as bad as my regular reading comprehension, because I did not remember that I had listened to this book when I found a copy at Sarah's lending library at her work. It wasn't until halfway through that I thought that I MAY have already listened to it. It was nice though, because it was mostly new to me again.

The story is about Dolores, a girl who comes from a broken home and is raped by a neighbor in her adolescent years. She can't really find comfort in her family, so she turns to food and television, and eventually has to spend time in a mental institution. After her constant therapy there, she leaves and gets married, which ultimately fails when Dolores realizes she is married for the wrong reasons. After her divorce, she has some ups and downs and also meets Thayer, who is smitten with her and willing to wait until Dolores is ready. They eventually marry and at the end of the book, Dolores is seemingly at peace with herself.

I guess this didn't have the same affect on me as I Know This Much Is True because I didn't remember it at all. It was a good book though, the most amazing part of it being written by a man from the first person perspective of a woman. But of course, I am a man too, so I only have second-hand info to go on. It's written very well and keeps you engaged. Like I mentioned, I normally only read at work, but I read this at home too because I wanted to know all the things that were constantly happening to Dolores.

This was an Oprah Book Club pick in 1996, 4 years after it was released. I didn't know she was doing the Book Club in the 90s, I'm not really an Oprah follower, but I assume that it did a pretty good business after that. I have only read these two books by Wally Lamb; don't be put off by their length, they are both well worth the effort. I do recommend this book to any reader, but I would read I Know This Much Is True first.

Book #4 was supposed to be Uncle Tom's Cabin. We were reading that for Classic Book Club, which Sarah runs at the library. We both started reading it, but neither of were able to finish it. So of course, a complete stranger showed up for the first time at Classic Book Club, so we talked about the book a little and also about Civil Rights in the 50s and 60s. It turned out to be a very interesting discussion.

The actual Book #4 is Under The Dome by Stephen King, because I have to keep up with the literature, right? :/

Book #2

My Turn At Bat by Ted Williams and John Underwood

This doesn't bode well, I finished the book over a week ago. Oh well.

I of course knew of Ted Williams and his best season average record (mainly because George Brett came close however many years ago), but that was about it. As a Yankees fan growing up, I was supposed to hate the Red Sox, so I didn't really look into any of their history, other than Babe Ruth and the Curse. But I digress.

This book showed up at Sarah's lending library that she has at work, so I picked it up, hoping it would get me excited to watch some baseball this year (I read Jim Bouton's Ball Four around this time last year, but it didn't work). It was definitely an interesting read. You get the feeling that however much Ted Williams loved and intently studied baseball, he had more fun fishing. The book goes through his not so great childhood and his playing career and his stormy relationship with sportswriters and fans. He definitely hated most sports writers, but he seemed kind of ambivalent about his fans. He apparently only tipped his cap to the fans once, and refused to do it ever again, despite their love for him. I really didn't understand that, but what do I know? Maybe he just wanted to go fishing.

I did not know that he was in WWII and Korea and lost 5 seasons of playing time. It makes you wonder how many more records he would have had, as he hit over 500 home runs during his career. It also is puzzling that the Red Sox never parlayed a World Series win during Williams' tenure there (they only made it once, and Williams only went 5 for 25), but I suppose that one player does not a team make.

The impression I had of Williams before I read the book was that of an excellent player who wasn't a team player and was mean to fans. From reading the book (and since he had a co-writer, you really don't know how much was embellished or cut out), this idea didn't really change very much for me, but he was pretty self-effacing. He was his own hardest critic, even more so than the sports writers he loathed. He spells out in the book that the reason he was so good is that he was constantly practicing and striving to be better. His one goal was to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, and I think he came pretty close to succeeding on that front.

I highly recommend this book to any baseball fan, especially if you like the glory days of baseball, when substance abuse meant drinking a lot and eating a ton of hot dogs before the game. The names he rattles off almost second-handedly in the book are like a Who's Who of baseball greats from the past. The book was written in 1969, after he had retired as a player and was about to start managing the Washington Senators (I had no idea they were still around in 1969). Since I finished the book I have done some Googling and found some unsavory info about Williams' cryogenically frozen head, which I won't go into here.

I am currently reading She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb, which I also found at Sarah's library. I picked it because I listened to the book on tape of I Know This Much Is True (also by Lamb), and I loved it. I have since discovered that I may have listened to this one also, but I barely remember it, so it will still be a surprise. I stopped listening to books on tape when I started getting into podcasts a few years ago, so therefore I read less, if you count that as reading (I do).

Melon

I realized that I have been errant in keeping up with blogs about our cats, so here is another in a continuing series that I will try to update more frequently.

In 2004 Sarah and I started doing cat rescue. We had a feral mom and her kittens in the downstairs bathroom (which we weren't really using at the time), and four cats in the spare bedroom upstairs. These cats were on their way to the SPCA to be put down by their annoyed owner until Sarah stepped in and brought them home. More on them later.

In the midst of this, we thought it would be a GREAT idea to have another cat of our own, as we only had two at the time (those were the days). We were taking our rescue cats to the Delaware Humane Association because they had a very inexpensive spay/neuter program, compared to the local vets. We were looking through their website one day, and they had a photo gallery of all of the available animals for adoption, and we saw this photo of Melon:

Sarah and I both fell in love with Melon from this picture. The caption said he was a sweet boy and that he had FIV. Both of our cats also had FIV, so we figured what's one more cat? Sure.

I took a trip up to DHA to meet Melon. The first thing I found out was that he was a she, they assumed that Melon was a boy because she was an orange tabby, which is apparently rare in females (score!). They kept the sick cats out behind the main building, I don't remember if it was another building or just a shelter, but whomever was sick and contagious were kept out there. One of the staff took me out there and went inside and brought Melon out, into what I guess was the foyer part. There were other cats there walking around, seemingly starved for attention, and it did make me kind of sad and I wanted to take all of them home. The woman gave Melon to me and she was very small and very sweet, and let me put my face up to hers, which hardly any of the cats at home let me do. I decided that I wanted to take her home, and I thought Sarah would agree.

The director of DHA had gotten wind that I was there and was looking to adopt an FIV positive cat. He came out and asked me a lot of questions, I guess he wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to perform experiments on Melon or something like that. I assured him that we had FIV cats at home and just wanted to add to the party. He seemed assuaged by that and I made an appointment for Sarah and I to come back and pick her up.

Our other two cats at the time were male (incidentally, they both still are male), and Melon did not get along with them at all. She was always growling at them when they walked by her, and they seemed to give her a wide berth (the year before, we had acted as a sort of hospice for a terminally ill female cat who acted pretty much the same as Melon, more on her later). She also was very standoffish to us. It took her about 3 years before she would sit with us on the couch or tolerate petting from us. Our poor dog Niffler really got the short end of the deal, as he was never hostile to any of the cats, but they always were to him (not for long, more on that later, probably much later).

Melon eventually ingratiated herself to us and the rest of the cats, and will play with some of them, but not all of them. She really enjoys ripping up carpet, especially when she has a freakout and rips up the carpeting on the stairs. She's really done a number on those stairs.

A few years ago she got sick and she needed exploratory surgery. When she came home she had to wear a collar (which she was VERY happy about, as you can see) and stay in our room by herself for close to a month. She made a divot in the carpet by the door, always trying to get out. Later on, after she was better, she made another divot on the opposite side of the door trying to get back in. Cats.

Luckily the vet couldn't find anything, but after the surgery she... changed, a little bit. She gained a lot of weight, which is weird because she chases the other cats around quite a bit (we call her Melon Ball). When she lays on the floor on her side her legs almost stick up in the air. She also meows differently. I don't know how to describe it, maybe it sounds scratchier than her meow used to, but it's definitely different. She also has this weird tic with her tongue now, like she's trying to clean herself but failing. She's still a sweetheart though, maybe even moreso than before the surgery. She's a very good sleeping companion, she's not one who is trying to get you to pet her when you're trying to go to sleep. She stays near the foot of the bed and observes personal space rules. She will come to you if you call her to get some pets, but then she will go back to the foot of the bed when she gets tired of it. She also likes sitting on our lap or by our feet when we're on the couch watching tv. She makes the recliner go back down when she jumps on it though. She is a very sweet girl and even though we had too many cats at the time we got her, I'm glad we did.

Book #1

As I mentioned in my last post, I will be writing about all of the books I read this year, and perhaps every year. I don't know how good it will come out because I'm not that good at reviewing any kind of media, other than "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." Perhaps I will get better as the year progresses. That would be nice.

Enemies and Allies, by Kevin J. Anderson

This book was given to me by my friend Adam for my birthday last month. I love Batman and have for a long time, but my exposure to Superman has only been through TV and movies, and of course general pop culture. I was looking forward to reading this book because I have a few Batman short story books that I read and enjoyed very much. It's kind of nice to read a story about Batman and not have to look at a lot of pictures. I know this is practically blasphemy to comics fans, but I have always been more of a story person. I catch myself quite a bit reading the story in a comic and barely glancing at the art.

The book is set in the 1950s and revolves around how Batman and Superman met and had to unite against their common foe, Lex Luthor. The basic tropes of each character are added along the way, and some of the aforementioned pop culture tidbits relevant to each character are mentioned. I did like that, and I didn't think it was overused to the point of corniness.

This being a superhero book set in the 50s, you can guess the outcome. It was an easy read and I enjoyed it very much. I usually only read books during my lunch break at work; what I read at home is usually just Entertainment Weekly or other magazines. But I did manage to get a few chapters of Enemies and Allies in at home as well, so that's usually a sign of a good book for me. My only complaint is that there seemed to be more chapters based around Superman than Batman (each chapter was headed by the Bat symbol or the Superman symbol, so you knew who the main focus of the chapter would be). Anderson really plays up the differences in the two superheroes; the almost goody-two-shoes alien Boy Scout Superman, and the dark, law-breaking Batman. That's probably why I prefer Batman, because he could actually exist, but in this day and age someone would be able to find his secret identity very quickly.

I would not hesitate to recommend this book to a comics fan or a Batman/Superman movie or TV fan. You don't really need to know the backstory of each character to enjoy the book, as Anderson basically gives all of that to you during the book. But if you're not a superhero fan, you should probably read something else.

Wow, this was a lot harder than I thought. I'm definitely not a book reviewer, so I'll have to come up with a different method of writing about the books I read. The next book is about the baseball player Ted Williams, so that will be interesting. I don't know much about him aside from the fact that he is one of the greatest hitters in the history of baseball. And he's angry.

Recycled Blog Idea/Adulthood Dream Come True

Happy New Year!

I was looking at a friend of a friend's blog, just out of curiosity, and she had posts relating to books she had read during the year. For example, the first book she completed was posted as Book 1, etc. I thought this was a cool idea and that I would try to copy it this year. I'm not a book reviewer by any means, but I will share my thoughts on said book and give it a thumbs up or down. I just started a new book yesterday about Batman and Superman, that I got for my birthday from my friend Adam. It's pretty good so far. Before that I read Blockade Billy by Stephen King, which I had not heard about until I saw it on the shelf at my library. It's more like a short story, it only took me a few lunch breaks to read it. Stephen King loves baseball, and it comes through in this story. It was kind of weird too, because King wrote it as if the character telling the story was telling it to him. I have a lot to catch up on with Stephen King, so you'll probably see me write about some of his books this year.

A few years ago, we went to a local restaurant for the first time, and they had on the menu something called pineapple bread pudding. I had never had it, and it sounded good, so I ordered it. It turns out that I had had it, and quite often when I was a kid. My paternal grandmother always made it, and I had totally forgotten about it. It was exactly like the scene in Ratatouille where the critic is instantly transported back to his childhood (this happened before I saw the movie) after taking a bite of the ratatouille. I thought I was going to start crying right there in the restaurant, but I managed to hold it together.

After I had this experience, and I saw the movie, I started to hope that one day I could do the same thing for someone else. As I have mentioned, my dad was a baker when I grew up, so we had a lot of bakery stuff around the house. Christmas was my favorite time because there was a lot of different stuff that you didn't get the rest of the year, stollen being my favorite. When I got to my current job I started to experiment with it at Christmas time. I started it maybe 5 or 6 years ago (my manager looked at me funny when I asked for a bottle of rum), and I could barely give it away. This year, I had an order for 2 before I even started making them, and people came in and asked for stollen specifically. I'm not making hundreds of stollen every year, but it's a far cry from that first year.

The day before Christmas Eve was a pretty emotional day for me. I was tired as my schedule ramps up around the holidays, and the store ran out of propane, so all of our ovens were down, ruining some of the stuff I had made. I actually threw a bucket in the back room and put a hole in the wall that day, which I feel bad about now. After we opened and had put the stollen out, one of the managers was walking out to the store when a customer stopped him and asked him about the stollen. He referred her to me (I'm the only one who makes it, my co-workers are afraid of it). She told me that it was delicious, and that it made her husband cry because it reminded him of the stollen his mother used to make. I don't remember what I said to her because I was concentrating hard on not losing it right there in front of everyone (I managed to bottle it up until I got home). But whoever you are, that was best compliment I ever could have gotten and probably ever will get. Thank you for making the holiday better for me.

John Lennon and George Harrison

Today is a bad day for Beatles fans, quite possibly the worst. As we know, John Lennon was murdered on this day in 1980 by Mark David Chapman (many Beatles fans won't mention his name, which I think is ridiculous, it's not going to change what happened and never will). This is just my thoughts about that day and also November 29, 2001, the day George Harrison died.

I wrote in one of my November blogs last year about my friend Steve coming over the morning after. We were in 5th grade at the time, and I think he knew more about them than I did, he certainly had more of their records than I. At one point during the school day we switched classrooms (there were 2 fifth grade classes, and they switched us a few times a day, to make us woefully unprepared for class switching in middle school). The other teacher (Mrs. Cooper) asked us if we knew what happened last night, and I clearly remember my shouted-out answer: "Some jerk shot John Lennon." I don't remember exactly what we talked about after that, but Mrs. Cooper seemed a little angry about it, like Steve did that morning.

The radio of course was filled with Lennon and Beatles music. I made a few tapes of some of that, I think mostly from WNEW-FM out of NYC, but they have been lost to time. I know I played them quite a bit after the murder. There were plenty of TV shows as well, and I remember taping a few of those too, but they met the same fate as the radio show.

That Sunday was the vigil in Central Park that Yoko asked for. People gathered there at 2 pm and had 10 minutes of silence. That morning I went with my dad to get wood for the stove that we had, but not because I wanted to. I brought a radio with me because the stations were still playing all Beatles and Lennon solo stuff. We went back to my dad's friend's house before 2, and my dad's friend put on his stereo so I could listen to WNEW. I sat alone in that room while everyone else was in the kitchen getting ready for lunch. The vigil started and WNEW was silent, but I didn't realize that the rest of the house was also silent. A few minutes later my dad came in and tapped me on the shoulder and gestured for me to come with him. There was a room in front of the house where they had a TV, and everyone was gathered around it, watching live coverage of the vigil. No one said a word until it was over.

I was sad about the murder, but I didn't cry, because I didn't really know what I had lost. After that, I jumped into the Paul sucks because he's still alive camp (which a LOT of people are still in, sadly) and read as much about the Beatles and John Lennon that I could, and I became more aware of the loss over time. A few years ago I was watching the Lennon Legend DVD (a collection of videos for his songs), and after a few songs I found tears streaming down my face. I think it was more for what could have been, which is a bit selfish.

George Harrison's death was a different story, although it was as much a surprise to me as John's death was. Despite my internet obsession in 2001, I really didn't know he was that sick, and when I saw his death mentioned on a news site, it was a shock. What was also a shock was the amount of coverage that his death received. It wasn't nearly as much as John had, even in the pre-internet days, but it was more than I expected. I remember watching various news channels on Saturday night (he passed away on Thursday) well into the night, and they all had extended coverage about George and broke away occasionally for other news. I also watched A Hard Day's Night and Help! that night too, I was home by myself and I was doing a cross-stitch project that I had to finish by the next day, so I was up very late.

I did cry a little that night for George. I was into the Beatles more than ever at that time, the mp3 was fairly new and I was finding a lot of Beatles bootlegs online that I had never heard before. George is definitely the unsung hero of the Beatles. I was also getting into George's solo stuff more too, my child- and early-adulthood being dominated by John and Paul, and even Ringo, since he was putting out albums where George wasn't. The year after George's death, the Concert for George happened, and that was hard to watch without crying. I still haven't watched the whole thing, despite being a celebration of his life, not a remembrance of his death.

And I guess that's the thing, we can be sad that these two men are gone, but we still have and will always have their music to listen to and enjoy, and that makes me happy.