Sunday, October 16, 2005

Pictures are back

and thus so is Brian! Very nice to have the hubby home, of course, but my camera withdrawal was getting pretty serious.

Here is our favorite street sign from Trier:
Yes, there is a place called "Meat Street"

and in France, dog love extends to public dog water bowls outside the bars.
It's nice to know that all the dog shit you step in while in France comes from well-hydrated dogs.

I do promise actual food photos of European food delights soon.

In the meantime, I'll update you on the beneficial effects of jet-lag. I keep getting up at 3:30 am (my body thinking that I've slept in 'till 9:30) and thus I've found more time than usual to read. I polished off Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot in two mornings. It was a speedy read and I enjoyed it, but not as much as The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I think it also would have been better in smaller doses rather than a marathon read. Bank is incredibly good at irony and dry wit, but I enjoyed the early set of stories (all about the same character at different points in her life) more than the later ones primarily because I had a little irony-overload by the end.

I do appreciate that she is able to tell a compelling story without relying on the horrors of modern life to move it along. There are no sudden acts of violence, incidents of incest or other crises of that magnitude. The conflict in the stories is the stuff that we all deal with everyday--what "success" mean both to ourselves and the world, how our self-image can be warped by the presence of other people, and the shock of being considered a "grown up" by the world when you still often feel like a kid.

I'm about half way through Sara Donati's third Wilderness book, Lake in the Clouds, and am alternating reading it with Fallen and the almost completed John Adams. And when I finish one of those puppies, I have Pope Joan to start.

I'm gonna miss this jet lag induced reading spree when my body eventually readjusts. The plus will be not becoming an incoherent mess at 7 pm each evening (that is to say, more incoherent and more messy than my usual state).

1 comment:

portuguesa nova said...

I totally want to read the new Melissa Banks, but have a constant fear of sophomore books by author's I loved the first time.