Monthly Archives: November 2008

On Reading

Posted on
15

Kissing Games of the WorldI’ve spent my life reading fiction and poetry — anywhere from an hour, two hours, three, even six hours a day.  I’ll bet a lot of us are like that:  we’re the back-of-the-cereal-box readers, when we were kids, we walked home from the library while reading a book, we were late into the night readers with a flashlight under the covers (or, like my friend, C, the kid who read in the closet with the door closed after lights out).  Some of us were driven to book stealing when we ran out (will my brother really notice I’ve taken his Captain Underpants book?)

And then we became adults and found even more things to read — Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Dickens, you know big fat wonderful books.  Not to mention short stories and poetry.  

Anyway, that’s what I was like until about four years ago, when I went from reading War & Peace in a week to reading a dozen books a year.  It was writing that led to this stunning change in my relationship with words.  There’s only so much time in a day, and the little time I had to devote to reading became the time I devote now to writing.  

But you know what?  Something great happened last week.  I finished my novel edits.  (And Barack Obama — oh how great is that?  I still feel incredibly moved every time I think about him.)  And I had time to read.  With impeccable timing, Sandi Shelton’s new book, Kissing Games of the World, came out on election day, and arrived in my office, with the help of Amazon, the very next day.  

You know, if you know anything about her, (that’s a link to the interview she did for this blog), that it’s a great book, but it’s made even more wonderful by the fact that Sandi has been such a lovely, approachable, encouraging presence — on her blog, on mine, and in my life.  She writes me e-mails every once in a while; wonderful, inspiring, funny, interesting ones that give me heart and make me think I can actually accomplish things as a writer myself.  

The great thing about Sandi’s book is that it’s both fun and beautifully written.  You never feel like you’re being cheated when you’re in her generous hands — the characters are interesting, full of life, troubled, funny.  And my goodness, that woman can pull you in.  The book’s about a single mom whose life is turned upside down when the older man she lives with, a man who’s raising his grandson, dies and his son returns home to kick her out of the house and take his son home with him.  

Now, that’s not the kind of book my husband ever reads (if they were on a boat while this was happening, maybe this would be different), but he picked it up the other night and he loved it.  He laughed more than he ever has reading those books about grim sea voyages.  And he e-mailed Sandi without even telling me, to tell her he really liked her book.  He’s in good company.  The book is getting terrific reviews, and rightly so.  

So.  Go out and buy it.  Give it to people for Christmas.  We need to support each other’s endeavors!  Even more, we need books like this, books that remind us of what it was like to walk home from the library, glancing occasionally at the ground to make sure you aren’t going to trip, but mostly feeling like you are the luckiest person in the world because you’ve found a great, interesting, fun book and it was taking you to a different place, a place you liked being in.  That’s how it felt to me, for the first time in a long time, and I’m so grateful to Sandi for her terrific timing and her wonderful book, which have reminded me again just how much pleasure there is in a story well told.

The Big Vote

Posted on
12

What a great day to vote!  It’s been raining for days here in California and it just stopped, abruptly, this morning, just in time for people to go to the polls without their umbrellas.  Apparently, the League of Women Voters was put in charge of today’s weather by whoever runs that kind of thing.  

I was in Oakland all day, at the courthouse downtown, where — in a tsunami of service to my country — I had jury duty.  In the cafe I went to for breakfast you could just hear how excited people were.  It’s a great day to be an American.  A great day.  (And no, they didn’t want me to be on the jury.  All you have to do is say this sentence:  ”I’m a lawyer and I work for a judge” and you suddenly become The Woman No One Wants on Their Jury.  Go figure.  You’d think they’d look at me and think, “Well, at least she’d understand the law when I tell it to her.”)  

Then I headed over to the library and handed in my absentee ballot.  I never did mail it in — I guess I wanted to get my “I voted” sticker.  They gave me two, because when I got there, the crowds had already come & gone and they had a lot of extras.  

Did you vote?  Was it a happy experience?

Me and Barack

Posted on
16

Oh, it’s been an exciting month.  Mostly for Obama, but for me too.  I’m a few chapters shy of being done editing my novel for the FINAL time.  In fact, I’ve set myself a goal:  I’ll be finished by the time Obama is elected President.  If he loses — well, he isn’t going to lose, that’s all I can say about that.   The time to get stuff done is right now.  Not four years from now.  

Nothing like hitching your very small wagon to a juggernaut.  I regret that I am unable to come up with any better metaphor for my slightly ridiculous and possibly unlucky goal — it’s the best I can do while I’m whacking away at my keyboard, trying to make sure that I didn’t call people by one name in the beginning and a different name in the end.  I’ve wiped out one entire relationship and replaced it with a far, far better one, even if it doesn’t seem to be about to end happily.  People are having more sex than they did in any other draft of this novel.  It is suggestive, rather than anatomical sex, I’d like to assure you, in case you’re worried I’ve taken a month off to write porn.  The minor characters are now, officially, a lot more real, even if they don’t get to be real for a lot of pages.  The weather changes more, as do the points of view of some of the chapters.  People drink an awful lot of coffee and ice water and beer in this book.  They eat sausages and candied peanuts more than any other kind of food.  (Brown bread and leberwurst make an appearance.  So does a cake.)  An adolescent appears and re-appears.   Spelling?  Check.  Grammar?  Check.  German words?  Check.  Czech people?  (sorry, that’s not really funny — but there are a lot of Czech characters. ) 

So that’s it, then:  I’m typing, typing, typing.  I’m also eating Halloween candy and hoping I didn’t jinx the entire presidential election by confidently predicting that both Barack and I will be finished with the thing we’ve been working on for a long time by midnight tomorrow.  I think hope is a great thing — and I’m going with it today.  I know many people feel it is best to be restrained and concerned today, and some are even spinning out scenarios in which McCain will somehow snatch this victory from Obama.  That strikes me as terribly unlikely.  This feeling that good things won’t happen, that people won’t vote out of the best in them, but instead will go into the voting booth and suddenly become racist and fearful makes a lot of sense given the nightmare that has been American politics in the last eight years.  But bad things aren’t going to happen tomorrow.  It is Obama’s singular achievement to have made that unlikely to occur, and it is one reason he is going to be a great president.  So, while I am not celebrating something that hasn’t occurred yet, I think it’s equally important to go into the next day or so paying attention to something that’s so new and different it’s hard to believe it’s happening.  But it is.  Obama marks a paradigm shift in American politics, an enormously hopeful one.  And that is something to be proud of and confident about, for the first time in a long time. 

And how have all of you been? 

(Wednesday I have lots of exciting writing news about OTHER PEOPLE to report.  Interviews to post.  Books to write about.  It’s so lovely to almost, almost, almost be where I want to be.)