Books I Have Known

I'm re-reading Torey Hayden's oeuvre (sp?) right now and have been pleased to see that my daughter Hannah is also picking them up. On her website, Hayden has some follow-up material on some of the (now grown) kids from her books and it's pretty cool to see "what happened" after the books ended. Today I flipped open a book to revise it ("Shelter Dogs") and it opened to a photo that could have been Pepper: ha ha! Ha ha ha! Old Dime-A-Dozen: that's my dog. We see Pepper dogs everywhere: Ms. Ubiquitous. Your basic hound. Sarah brought home this big book of dogs once and looked in vain through all the breeds for Pepper....until the very end, where there was a page on mutts.....and there she was. The illustration could've been her twin.

"The Eyes of the Amaryllis" came in for me today: I don't know how it is that I've never read this, but it's so. Someone returned the movie version of it the other day and I ordered up the book after reading the case. I'm re-reading "Delivery" by Jennifer Chrichton (sp?), which is a nice thick book about a nurse-midwife. I'm also reading "Elephant In The Playroom" and "Born On A Blue Day." Last night we watched the short film that eventually became "Sling Blade" and that was interesting. Molly Ringwald (who, frankly, I don't think is much of an actress) played the journalism student.

Is There Nothing New Under The Sun?

Brought home the new Chris Bohjalian book last night and will be returning it today. I can't seem to find any new fiction that catches my interest these days. I've been disappointed in Bohjalian's last few works (my favorite, "Trans-Sister Radio," may be the least well-known of his novels; "Midwives," which was much more popular, was pretty decent, too) so can't say I was surprised, exactly, to find this latest ("The Double Bind") unsatisfactory. Sigh. I ordered up (ILL, mon amour! My one true friend!) "Trans-Sister" and a sort of companion book I like to read along with it, "She's Not There" by Jennifer Finney Boylan (I think. This is a memoir, and a truly fascinating read. I've been intrigued by a six-degrees-of-separation thing that has Jennifer- once James, if memory serves; I haven't read "She's Not There" in a while- at its center. Richard Russo, who wrote one of my favorite books of all time ("Nobody's Fool") figures prominently in "She's Not There" (he taught with Boylan at - memory's getting a workout today!- Colby College....I think) and J.F.B. pops up in another memoir, just in passing, when she/he visits the author of-I THINK- "You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman," which is a pretty good account of an older mother's first year or so with her twin boys. (Note how I don't know how to underline titles. I cringe every time I put one in quotation marks.)
After chugging through as much of "Double Bind" as I could, I abandoned it in favor of "East of Eden," which I read with one eye while watching "Breaking Away" with my husband and Hannah. Was somewhat startled to realize that the parents in this movie are probably younger than I am now. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmm.