Out of touch

I’ve been a little out of touch the past few days but I will be back with style this afternoon.

On a happier note, my twin cousins were born today. Aren’t they perfect?

 

Silliness or why I love young adult fiction

Call me crazy. No really, you can. I totally accept the fact that reading books that would normally be reserved for fifteen year old girls crazy. But I love them.

Lately I’ve been captivated (or re-captivated as I read all these books before when I was actually fifteen) by Louise Rennison’s series of books on a mad British teenager named Georgia Nicholson. What I love so much about the books is that they’re very well written (not high literature or anything) and they actually resemble a real life. If I wanted to watch oversexed teenagers romp around I could turn on Gossip Girls or pretty much anything on MTV. Frankly, eh.

The Georgia Nicholson books resemble most closely to me my love of Gilmore Girls. I loved that show. Aside from the witty dialogue, it was a show about a smart and fairly normal teenage girl trying to figure her way through a rather bizarre thing called your teenage years. It made you feel like a normal person. Hell! She didn’t even contemplate sex till college and her best friend waited to get married before she had sex. And this is all supposed to take place in current times! And it was believable! (Well, most of the time.)

Anyway, I’m hooked. I’m working my way through the series at a feverish pace (another perk of YA – it flies by) and before you know it I’ll be back to reading about women who travel to Lapland to find their long-lost fathers (who they didn’t know existed) only to find out that they’re the product of a rape. You know, adult stuff. (I’m reading Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name which I absolutely adore, don’t get me wrong, and I will post on in a few days.) For now though I exist in the land of the fabbity fab! Which if you think about the depressing stuff that goes on most days, is kind of preferable.

 

Quote du Jour

“I saw a stationary store move.”

~Jay London

 

Mygazines

It seems that I tend to favor books most of time over magazines. Some of the most engrossing things I’ve read in the past year have been magazines but somehow between the cost of buying the magazine and getting a new one every month or week I just get snowed under and end up with a long list of articles to read in addition to my usually long book queue.

Which makes Mygazines a fabulous addition to my perusing pleasure. It’s already earning the ire of magazine publishers everywhere but it’s a fantastic diversion for me.

 

Finding my way…

Sometimes I lose my way when it comes to reading. For me, reading is like swimming is for Michael Phelps. I hate to go a day without it. It feels natural to have my nose in a book (so much so that I sometimes run into things on the sidewalk because I can’t help but read and talk at the same time). There’s no other thing I enjoy more. It’s not hard, it’s not work. It’s just the simple act of being transported to a different place.

Every once in a while though, something goes wrong. I lose my way. I pick up a book, dig in, and then lose steam. I figure it’s the book. I start another. The same thing happens. It’s like I’m stuck in some parallel universe where reading is hard and I’ve got to fight to finish a book. Normally I try to make myself read slower so that I don’t finish the book too quickly. The past few weeks have been like that for me. I haven’t been totally lost but I have been unable to stick with one book long enough to finish. I’ve been jumping back and forth like the book will start to lose it’s brilliance if I read it for too long.

I was at a loss. And so, ever so typically, I went back to my roots and I found out why I loved reading so much in the first place. I have a deep love of the cheesy sort of high school teen dramas written by women like Meg Cabot and Anne Brashares. It’s slightly an offshoot of my love for chick lit (which has waned in the past year) but I think it’s also an outlet for me. I never really had the typical teenage life so I need to immerse myself in them whatever way I can. I don’t want to feel like I’ve missed and if reading is the closest I am going to get then I’d rather have at least that.

So for the past week I’ve been on a tear trying to read as much of those books of my teen years as I can. And here’s the amazing part. It’s brought me back to the stories I love now for their maturity and complexity. Somehow, these books about frivolous things have made me love the books about important things. I’m always constantly surprised when that happens. I fall in love with reading all over again.

 

Sports, sports and possibly, more sports

I am completely obsessed with the Olympics. I’m on this kind of overdrive where I can’t miss a minute of the swimming or the gymnastics. It’s crazy and I love it. But there is one (one?) unfortunate side effect of this obsession—I’ve been reading a lot less. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still slogging through at least 50 pages a day (accumulated over more than one book). But my torrid pace has slowed to a trickle. And this blog has become about my fascination with Michael Phelps. For that, I am sorry and I offer a brief respite from those who have a more literary persuasion.

One of the things I’m reading at the moment (nearly finished) is the manuscript of ones the books that will be published by the press I work for. The book is about sports injuries in minors and then lengths we go to make our kids the best athletes in the world. (well, not me, considering I have no kids, but you knew what I meant) It’s part cultural deconstruction and part memoir, infused with the kind of perspective you can only get by going through the things you want to write about.

When I first got into writing, I desperately wanted to be a sportswriter and so this book speaks to me in a lot of ways. I also was a three sport varsity athlete my senior year of high school (which totally weird because I’m not at all athletic but I went to a school that required us to play three sports a year and it kind of stuck). So I know a little bit about the drive and fire of wanting to be the best, wanting to succeed. I know what Michael Phelps’s couch is talking about when he describes practices but I went through a similar thing (though much scaled down) when I was on the swim team.

I hope this book gets a lot of attention when it comes out. It’s fabulously written, well reported and it hits a critical issue that is too much ignored in our search for guts and glory.

 

Pure Victory

Courtesy of the New York Times…

 

…and then I remember why I’m occasionally proud to be American.

I used to be a swimmer. I wasn’t very good. I have nice form and all but I’m not very fast. But it’s an amazing sport. If you’ve never felt the exhilaration of coming off a really good race and realize that half the wetness on you is sweat mixed with the water of the pool than you’re seriously missing something. Or maybe not. I guess that may be a swimmer’s thing.

Anyway, watching the US pull off an upset yesterday over the cocky French freestyle relay team was unbelievable, even more so because Michael Phelps swam first and thus wasn’t the hero of the day. (Though he did get his gold and another day with a chance of kicking Mark Spitz’s record to the curb). The hero of the day was Jason Lezak who swam a race I couldn’t even believe, coming from at least half a body length behind from about 50 meters. He rocked that last 25 meters like his life depended on it. There’s a point in swimming where you lay it all on the line, throw it all in the pool and just pray that what you’ve got will be more than enough to beat the overly favored guy swimming next to you. It was almost pathetic to see the French team after the race won, adrift in disbelief while Michael Phelps ran around screaming like an insane lunatic. It was like the world had become unmoored in the space of twenty seconds.

These times, these little accomplishments, are when I’m proud to be an American. I’m not what one would call patriotic. I scoff when President Bush gives interviews with Bob Costas during Olympics coverage (Where in the world is your mind dude? America’s NOT in trouble?). I swear that I want to marry a Brit so that I can go live in that country and not have to deal with feeling like I don’t really like the country I live in. I don’t know. But when I watch an American team cruise to the finish line in that final burst of glory I want to leap with joy and scream at the top of my lungs. Because we are all American. And these are the times we can shine.

 

Totally awesome

Books are taking a back seat for a week or two as I immerse myself in the wonderful world of the Olympics. I’m a shameless lover of the Olympics. Gymnastics and swimming for the most part. I don’t care if Michael Phelps is part fish, he’s the most amazing swimmer I’ve ever seen. He’s beyond describing in his total awesomeness. I used to swim competitively so I have some idea of the nature of these things. He blows them all away. He’s like part swimmer and part zen master. After I read this article I became absolutely convinced that he is the coolest person I have ever read about. I mean the guy f-ing breaks down lactic acid while he is swimming at his all out. He’s beyond belief. 

And I’m a total sucker for gymnastics. These people defy physics and make it look easy. How they even manage to hold onto the bar for a few seconds much less let go and re-grip and not pull their arms out of their sockets blows my mind. It’s not even real. They’re awesome. I’m hooked.

 

Only in France…

French Oyster Crisis Team Saves Oysters with Herpes