Yesterday I sat down with one of Dave’s t-shirts and my workshoebox and this came out of The Brain. Yes, that is an angry pea with an uplifted fist, like he’s, all, PEAS UNITE! At first, I couldn’t decide between giving the angry pea legs or a banner with the word “PEAS” on it.
In the end, I went with the banner:
Both Dave and The Brain thought it was pretty funny. I did, too--though I didn't find it as funny as The Brain did, possibly because it was me and not The Brain who had to spend several hours embroidering said pea.
READ!
So in my quest to spend less time on the internet (as if), I went to the bookstore with the intention to buy a few easy reads as a way of shoehorning myself back into reading instead of surfing. Here’s the thing though: I have a degree in English literature, so easy reads are. . .I don’t know. I don’t quite know how to put this, but what I mean to say is that I think that people who don’t have degrees in English literature are perfectly happy with easy reads and--
Okay, I’ll just admit it, I’m a snob. There, I said it. I’m a reading snob. I’ve read the hard stuff, the stuff you’ve been meaning to read and haven’t. I’ve read all the Melville anyone should be forced to read. All the Shakespeare. All the ancient Greeks. All the Hemingway. All the Faulkner. I may be done reading it, but I’ve read it. There is no way I can unread it.
As further evidence of my ridiculous reading snobbery, I don’t like much non-Serious Literature. I don’t like most science fiction. I don’t read romance or horror novels. I’ve never made it through a mystery. And westerns? The one time I tried to read a Louis Lamour novel, I felt like I was trying to rinse an eyelash out of my eye using sand. It hurt and it seemed wise to stop. Not that I had much choice; The Brain threatened a rebellion after about ten pages. (Nine pages if you don’t count the dedication page.)
It is not wise to unnecessarily aggravate The Brain.
What’s left? Well, there’s the great forest of nonfiction. Luckily, The Brain is endlessly amused by nonfiction, and has almost a complete disregard for the subject matter.
Last winter for example, The Brain was endlessly fascinated by books about Mt. Everest. We read every every everything we could get our hands on about climbing Mt. Everest, about Sherpas and Sherpa culture, about the mountaineers associated with Mt. Everest, about the freak storm in 1996 that killed a large handful of climbers. The Brain spent months and months happily slurping up all things Everest. It was one big Everest love fest.
Somewhat along the same lines, The Brain once whiled away a long weekend reading book after book of what I eventually came to call Bear Attack Horror Literature--that is, true stories of people who had been attacked by bears (grizzlies, black bears, polar bears, teddy bears, you name it), followed by advice to people on what to do if attacked by a bear. (Short lesson: Your strategy depends on the kind of bear. Black bears are pretty timid and can usually be easily frightened off. Grizzlies are fairly aggressive. Maybe playing dead will work, but pretty much no. Polar bears are both aggressive and fearless. You’ll likely have to kill a polar bear if you want to break off an attack.) For what it’s worth, the Bear Attack Horror Literature was the one bright spot in a long, anxious, sleepless weekend spent with Dave and his parents at their cabin in Colorado. The books were Dave’s mother’s. She checked them out of the library after she had encountered a bear while jogging in the mountains near the cabin.
The Brain is also unendingly fascinated by the true crime genre and, by extension, almost anything having to do with mass and spree murderers, sociopathic killers, and the psychology thereof. As a result,I probably know more about Ted Bundy than I do about any former US president. A lot more.
My point is: The Brain has a hard time reading--or even choosing--“easy” fiction books. When let loose in the bookstore yesterday, The Brain immediately headed over to the nonfiction section and chose Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum, an approximately 600 page book about the infamous Russian prison system that more resembled German concentration camps than, say, our own current prison system. Dave urged me to choose something a little less heavy, so I found a copy of short stories by Leo Tolstoy that included “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Since that was still too heavy, I picked up a copy of Peter Pan, which I’ve never even seen onstage or on screen, much less read. I hear it’s about yet another boy who refuses to age, like The Picture of Dorian Gray for children. We’ll see.
So far, I’ve read a little more than half of Gulag. It is one of the most depressing books I’ve read in a long time. (It certainly has that in common with Serious Literature. It’s all so damned depressing.)
But here is some more craftzy stuff to cheer you up!
This is a preview of my next project, a cross-stitch, now in the planning stages. (I had to buy graph paper and everything!)
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