Read: Legs by William Kennedy.

Okay, I posted about this book and I e-mailed my father about it and I complained to Brian about it. I said that I hated it. And I really did want to hate it. It was about John/Jack/Legs/whatever you want to call him Diamond, a man who made lots of money and was very rarely successfully prosecuted because he had friends in high places in Albany during Prohibition. I don't like violence, and there is a significant amount of violence - shooting, punching, killing animals (pet peeve of mine, for what it's worth), and some light torture.

The book was told from the point of view of Jack's lawyer, although it strangely slips into a third-person narrative every once in a while, referring to the lawyer by his first name, which also annoys me. And Amazon says that the book humanizes Jack and makes you like him, and it didn't do that to me, either. I don't like people who kill animals and people. I don't care if they buy an organ for the church or not.

So it had a lot of reasons for me to hate it, but to be honest, I didn't. The problem is that the book was written pretty well. It was easy to read. It was interesting. The dialogue read like how a real person would talk, not how some stilted first-novel gangsters would talk.

I wouldn't read it again, but if the author wrote something with a little less violence, I might read it. (And I'll probably have to if I keep reading my grandmother's favorites. This was on there, as well as two other books by the same author - and she read another five of his books that didn't make the favorites list. As a side note, she read this book in the year I was born, probably right around the same time of year that I was born - 27 years ago this month.)

That's 43 books for the year.

Next up, a book that was on my grandmother's favorites list - and was also recommended to me by the doctor running a medical study in which I am participating.

Everyone has their favorite and least favorite holidays. My favorites are the Fourth of July (it's always sunny, and it's a great excuse for a BBQ or picnic) and Thanksgiving (you get to invite everyone you've ever met over to dinner and then stuff yourself silly - who doesn't love that?), and my least favorite of the traditional American holidays is Valentine's Day. That's a whole different story, though.

Our plans for this Fourth of July were up in the air for a while due to work and friends, but we ended up going whitewater rafting on the Wenatchee River and camping near Leavenworth with some friends. (Leavenworth is a Bavarian town in the mountains two or three hours east of Seattle - not to be confused with the prison.) It would have been a great weekend - it was almost 100 degrees, but we wore enough sunscreen to not get burned, the 35-degree spray from the snow-melt river felt great, and I even drank enough water - except that our campground was basically infested by mosquitos. I'm not an "ew, a bug!" kind of girl, but I got about twenty bites on Friday night and a few more last night, in spite of wearing a long sleeved shirt and jeans tucked into my socks.

We drove out Friday morning, stopped for bratwurst (Munchen Haus), cheese (ardi gazna, the number one cheese in the world), and chocolate (from Schocolate, for a friend) in Leavenworth, and then set up at our campsite. We normally camp alone, so it felt pretty packed with six tents and twelve people at our campground, but that went as well as it could have. We went rafting Saturday morning, ate lunch, then went back to Leavenworth to get gelato and go to a river there - because no one wanted to go back to the mosquitos at the campground.

I didn't plan it this way and didn't even realize what I'd done until today, but I finished a very appropriate book yesterday - the Fourth of July - American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis. This book, which is about Thomas Jefferson, was really interesting and clearly written for a layperson, although it didn't condescend, either. Ellis wrote a book (that I'll probably read) on John Adams and realized afterwards that, although he's one of the more popular American presidents, most people only know two facts about Jefferson: that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he had an affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. (On that topic - Ellis doesn't actually believe Jefferson had an affair with Hemings, but he basically refuses to address it in the text of the book - there's an appendix that discusses it.) So he decided to write a book discussing some of the major events in Jefferson's life, what we can learn about his character from those events, and what his legacy is.

The whole book was interesting, but this is a good example (from the time when Jefferson was living in Paris) of how a book about history can be pretty funny, too - if your sense of humor is like mine, anyway:

Finally, and rather comically, Jefferson decided to refute the leading French naturalist of the day, Georges de Buffon, who had argued that the mammals and plants of North America were inferior in size, health and variety to those of Europe... Jefferson launched an all-out campaign to gather specimens of American animals that were larger than anything in Europe. Sparing no expense, he commissioned an expedition into the White Mountains of New Hampshire to obtain... "the Moose, the Caribou, and the Original or Elk." The expedition produced the desired specimens, but Jefferson was disappointed in their lack of size, especially the moose, which he had counted on as the trump card to play against Buffon's puny European deer. So another hunting party went out, another moose was killed, another carcass was shipped over to Paris, where Jefferson put it on display in the entry hall of his hotel, still somewhat frustrated that the moose was only seven feet tall and that its hair kept falling out. Buffon, who was himself a miniscule man less than five feet tall, was invited to observe the smelly and somewhat imperfect trophy but concluded it was insufficient evidence to force a revision of his anti-American theory. It was one of the few occasions when Jefferson failed to enhance mutual understanding along the Franco-American axis.

That makes 42 books for the year. This book was on my grandmother's list of favorites (along with Founding Brothers, and His Excellency, both by Ellis - she also read Passionate Sage but didn't mark it with an asterisk), and although I still read history slower than I read fiction, I really enjoyed this book.

On the other hand, I already dislike the book I've just started, and I've only read about ten pages of it. This would be the point at which a less stubborn person would put it down and start reading the next book.

I’m on an airplane to Cincinnati. Then I have a puddle-jumper flight to Dayton – I think that I should have just flown directly to Cincinnati and driven to Dayton from there, but this should probably work out.

I finished There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene a little while ago. This was, hands-down, the best book I’ve read this year. It’s about AIDS orphans in Africa and one particular woman in Ethiopia who has been taking care of orphans with little or no support from anyone else until recently.

I don’t normally read reviews until I’ve finished a book – I hate to spoil any surprises, and I like to come to my own conclusions about a book – but I did glance at them at one point after I’d started the book. There was only one three-star review – all the others were four or five stars – so I read that one. The commenter said something about the fact that there was too much data in the first couple of chapters. There are a lot of numbers and facts in this book, but they provide some necessary background and statistics on AIDS, without which I think the book would not be as powerful. An excerpt:

”Terminology like ‘developing countries’ [gives] the impression that the whole world is moving in the same direction, albeit at varying rates,” writes Mark Heywood of the AIDS Law Project… “The whole world is not moving in the same direction. Many so-called ‘developing countries’ are more accurately described as undeveloping countries. They are going backwards. On a whole range of vital indicators, development is now being reversed. In South Africa in 1992 two decades of progress in reducing infant mortality were put into reverse thrust. Infant mortality is on the rise again. Adult life expectancy is going down. Poverty is increasing…”

When, in 2005, the UN appraised the health, longevity, education, and standard of living of people in 177 nations for its Human Development Index, Ethiopia was ranked 170th. The UN’s Gender-Related Development Index, capturing inequalities in achievement between men and women, ranked Ehiopia 134th out of 140 nations. The UN Human Poverty Index evaluated 103 nations and ranked Ethiopia 99th.

This book wasn’t on my grandmother’s list of favorites. I don’t think she had ever heard of the author – I hadn’t, before she was recommended to me less than a month ago – but if I had read this book a year ago, I would have stopped at a bookstore in Dayton to buy the book and ship it to her after finishing it. It’s that good – heartbreaking but beautiful and inspiring at the same time.

(As a side note, the Ethiopian history was interesting to read, because Brian and I got a little background on that when we went to see the Lucy exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. I am unreasonably pleased when something I am reading or otherwise learning about references something else I've learned recently.)

I just finished Tough Trip Through Paradise by Andrew Garcia. The rough manuscript for this book was found with Garcia's things when he died in 1942. Even after editing, it was still pretty rough, but I think it was worth the trouble to read it - Garcia tells some interesting stories about Indians (who he calls Injuns) from 1877-1879. Some of the book is first-person stories from his own experience; other parts are his Nez Perce wife's stories. For me, it's amazing to read this stuff and realize that this is significantly later in history than Jane Austen or even Charles Dickens were writing - it really shows how different various parts of the world were at the same time.

This book was also on my grandmother's list - a lot of the books so far have been historical memoirs, like this one. Then again, I've also purposefully skipped some of the books I know to be mysteries.

That makes book 40 for the year at just under halfway through the year. By my simple calculations (I'm too lazy to do that graph-thing every time), I will have read 81.56 books this year. I'm bringing the newest Melissa Fay Greene book (There Is No Me Without You) with me to Dayton - it's a long enough book that I doubt I'll need another before Thursday.

Hey, last minute travel! I missed you the last two weeks, but here you are again.

Apparently, I'm going to Dayton (Ohio) next week. At least the meetings don't start until Tuesday this time, so I can travel on Monday instead of Sunday.

My trip to Fort Worth was pretty quick. My flight arrived around 5 pm, so I printed out directions that took me by Sonny Bryan's (I went to the Irving location) on the way home. As my father said, Texas BBQ is brisket, which is great since I don't eat pork. I got a brisket sandwich with macaroni and cheese and mixed squash on the side. The food was pretty cheap, quick, and tasty.

Monday, I ate breakfast at my (beautiful) hotel and then headed off to work and meetings. The Fort Worth people decided that they should take me to barbeque while I was in the city, and I wasn't about to tell them I'd just had some the night before, so we went to Soda Springs in beautiful downtown White Settlement. No, that's really the name of the city. (It was apparently named when there were two settlements in the area, the white settlement and the Native American settlement.)

On Monday night, one of the guys I work with invited a bunch of us over to his house for fried chicken and beer. He has a big house in a pretty rural area with thirteen cows, a horse, and an albino donkey. The weather was pretty much perfect - mid 70s once the sun went down - so we sat outside and watched one woman's kids ride the horse for a while.

Since I had spent so little money and gone out of my way to find the local Jamba Juice, I stopped there for breakfast on Tuesday before my meetings and left around 11:45 for the airport. It was a pretty quick trip, but I got two tasty BBQ meals and some Jamba Juice out of it, so I'd consider that a success. I think I'll be going back in late September for a big meeting.

In other news, I finished another book, Tallgrass, by Sandra Dallas. There has been a lot of buzz about it recently, and I really enjoyed it. The subject matter (Japanese internment camps during WWII) and feel are pretty similar to Snow Falling on Cedars, but I don't think that it felt redundant - it was just another interesting book about the way we treat people who are different. That's book 39 for the year.

I'm thinking of signing up for the Seattle Livestrong Challenge, but I probably won't. It's tomorrow. A while ago, I thought I'd sign up to do the ride, but you have to have to get $250 in donations for the cycling events (I have no idea why the riders have that requirements and walkers and runners don't), and I hate asking people for donations. So I could sign up for the 5k run/walk, but I probably won't unless my partner in physical exercise/crime logs onto gmail and tells me she'll go, too.

After my last post, I read The Cuckoo's Egg. That book is a nerd test - if you've heard of it, you're probably a big nerd. I can say that because I've heard of it. It's by a physicist who was working at Lawrence Berkeley Labs as a sys admin. He was asked to research a 75 cent accounting error and eventually found that it was the result of a hacker who was using their systems to hack into lots of military computers, often successfully. The writing is pretty bad, but it's an interesting story, and his documentation of the whole thing as it went along was probably the only thing that got the guy caught and prosecuted. Recommended if you're a big nerd; not recommended if you're not.

Today, I read Gloria Mundi, by Eleanor Clark. Now, most of you know that I'm generally pretty kind to books, but I wasn't a fan of this book. The writing style is very strange - the author drops pronouns, squishes sentences together in strange ways, and generally makes it really hard to tell what the heck is happening. I'm only vaguely sure of what the plot was, and I did actually read the book. Not recommended, but I tend to like more traditional literature and not more modern writing styles, so take that with a grain of salt. This was one of my grandmother's starred books, but one of my least favorite of those so far.

Including the last three books, which I neglected to number, that's 37 books for the year, which means I'll read 78.98 books this year if I stay on track - although I do seem to be continuing my recent faster pace, so I might end up reading more than that.

Oh, just kidding. I'm a nerd, so I wanted to graph my reading to get a more accurate forecast of the books I'll read this year (I read very few in January and February, so I thought a graph would help), and I realized I miscounted (I counted two books as book number 7), so I've actually read 38 books, which means I will have read 81 books by the simple average. By my totally unscientific corrected average (I made a curve based on my reading speed since Feb 22nd, instead of Jan 1st, and then extrapolated to Dec 31st), I will have read 91.825 books by the end of the year. If I do that, I will exactly tie my grandmother's number of books read in 1977.

I am apparently a little behind on the book updating.

I read three books since I updated last on books. The first was The Garden of Invention, by Jane S. Smith. I bought this book for my mother last month (her birthday is in early May, as is Mother's Day) because it looked interesting (I do buy books based on their covers, if I haven't mentioned that before), but it didn't fit in the padded envelope I'd bought to send her gifts, so I figured I'd read it first and send it along later - as a Hanukkah gift if nothing else. The book isn't exactly a biography, but it tells the story of Luther Burbank, a man who was famous in his time for developing new plants, including the Russet potato and elephant garlic. It wasn't the most exciting thing I've ever read, but the author clearly had a sense of humor, so it kept me interested.

The second book, Praying for Sheetrock, was recommended by my favorite southerner, JD. This book was so interesting, about both a culture and a time with which I'm not familiar - small-town Georgia during and after the civil rights movement. It didn't end exactly the way I was hoping, but it's tough to argue with the ending in nonfiction. (As a girl who grew up in California in the 1980s, it was also just amazing to me to read what kind of racial issues were happening so recently in Georgia - I tend to think of that stuff as ancient history, although I know that it's still very current for a lot of people.) I'm buying this one for my father for Father's Day. (For what it's worth, JD says that The Temple Bombing is also good, but he thinks this one's better.)

The third book, which I read entirely in the airport and on the plane home today, was The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I guess this is a "well-loved fantasy book" and has also been made into a movie, but I don't think I'd read or seen it before. It was an interesting and relatively charming story, but it didn't make me think deeply or teach me anything. This one was on my grandmother's list.

Last week's ride was something like this:

Distance: 36.4 miles
Time: 3 hours 40 minutes

Today's ride, which included my first organized ride (the 25-mile portion of the Flying Wheels Summer Century), was:

Distance: 42.4 miles
Time: 4 hours 30 minutes

Pictures (including one very dark picture from our congratulatory dinner at Canlis - there's a much better one here, nine from last week's Susan G Komen ride, and two from today) here.

Was informed yesterday afternoon that I'll be flying to Fort Worth (Texas) for meetings next week. It'll be a quick trip - I get there Sunday evening and leave Tuesday afternoon - so I won't have a lot of time for sightseeing. Any recommendations, especially for restaurants? I was in Austin once and I drove through Texas twice, but that's about it other than flying through.

The ride to Marymoor park is 20 miles. Then we'll do the 25-mile ride that we actually signed up for, and then we'll ride the 20 miles back to my place. And then I'll fall over and die. This will be my longest ride, although the rides that I've done to Qwest field included a 5k walk.

In other bike news, we each worked some overtime over the last pay period. (I only worked five hours, but Brian had a bunch of overtime due to the testing he was doing in Roswell.) Brian says we should use the extra money to buy some nice bikes - I like my bike, but it's sure not built for distance.

Our softball league plays with ten players, and three of those have to be girls. If you have two girls, you can play with nine players, and if you have one girl, you have to forfeit. The opposing team tonight only had seven players, including one girl, so they forfeited. But we were there anyway, so we decided to play. They got some girl on the sidelines to play, and we lent them one of our guys, so we had three girls and six guys, and they had two girls and seven guys.

And then we proceeded to play. Since the umpire left, we decided that each person would take two swings, and they'd either hit the ball or be out. (We normally start with one ball and one strike in this league, so two strikes actually makes sense.) If the pitches were awful, you didn't have to swing, but there would be no walks. A bunch of people batted left-handed (mostly from the other team), and there were a bunch of crazy missed plays (again, mostly from the other team). And we won! Not that it matters, since we already got a win because they forfeited, but it's always nice to win anyway.

I got my husband back (a day late, from Roswell, NM)! This is good for many reasons, including the fact that I don't eat well AT ALL when he's gone. I'm looking forward to cooking real meals again.

Now he's golfing and I'm on my way to softball.

Friday: Worked and then dropped a friend off at the airport.

Saturday: Went to the gas station and Jamba Juice and then headed off to a baby shower. Sadly, all of our wrapping paper is packed up with the stuff we don't need on a daily basis in someone's garage, so I couldn't wrap the boring Amazon.com box in which I had placed the gifts. Luckily, there was a Target just off the freeway at the exit for the baby shower, so I bought some ribbon to wrap around the box. Oddly enough, that's exactly how much ribbon it was. It was a medium-sized box, but that seemed like a rip-off to me. I also bought a card - although I can't stand most pre-printed greeting cards, so I bought a blank one and wrote on it.

There was some friendly small talk and an hour of oohing and ahhing over baby stuff. I talked to my friend and her mother and stepfather, and then I decided I should probably get going, as it was almost 4:30, and I had to be up early on Sunday. Did I mention that the baby shower was 45 minutes south of Portland? Yeah.

I had dinner with Sam and Zack at Burgerville on the way home and eventually arrived home around 9:45. Considering that a friend was showing up at 5:45 am the next day, I stayed up a little later than I should have, but I did manage to drag myself out of bed in the morning. We took the easier bike route. I'll post the actual mileage and time at some point, but it was still a long day - somewhere around 40 miles of biking and a 5k walk.

Then I completely forgot that I was supposed to pick up the friend from the airport - luckily, I hadn't gone to bed yet, and my plan all along was to leave my house when she sent me a text that the plane had landed, so I was right on time.

I got a little reading done, but not a lot. Brian's work ran late, but they rebooked him for a flight home tomorrow, and I think that one's definite.

On Friday, I went to the library to pick up a couple of new books - and proceeded to read The Joy Luck Club cover to cover. I did try to go to sleep at one point, but I wasn't all that tired, so I finished up the last couple of chapters.

I may be one of the last people on earth to read this book. If it helps any, we did read The Kitchen God's Wife, another of Tan's books, in high school. (Senior year, Sam?) In my opinion, the theme of both books was very similar. There were multiple generations of women, each of whom didn't exactly understand the struggles the other went through. I liked the book, and I enjoy... studies of how people interact with each other and communicate without understanding each other completely, and this book was definitely in that vein. It was pretty good, but it wasn't the best book I've ever read.

Next, I started on The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves. Whew, the title alone took up a whole line. Oh, I should say that both of these books were from my grandmother's favorites list - and although I might have read Tan's book eventually on my own, I hadn't even heard of this book before. It was so interesting. This guy grew up in Virginia, near the Lees and the Washingtons. He had all those same excuses that we give when people question why the founding fathers didn't free their slaves in their lifetimes.

Martha Washington freed her 150 slaves while she was alive, but it wasn't entirely by choice; George had stipulated in his will that his slaves were to be free - on the death of his wife. So she wasn't necessarily being kind - she was afraid that they would kill her.

Robert Carter freed all 452 of his slaves in a quiet document, with very little fanfare - in 1792. This guy was so many decades ahead of popular opinion in the United States, it's just amazing. This document, the Deed of Gift, provided the legal groundwork for the largest manumission (freeing of slaves by the owner's choice) in the history of the United States, and we literally never learn about him in schools. The author gives some history of Carter's life, the Deed of Gift, and also talks about why he thinks we don't learn more about him. Very interesting stuff, and also (luckily) not quite as dry as the book on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Recommended.

That's, um, 32 books for the year, on track for 76.34 books by the end of the year.

I'm sort of behind on the updating.

Last year, I was so good about riding my bike, because I worked four miles from our condo. This year, I've been awful. Not only do I work twelve and a half miles from home, it's also right down the street from Brian, so we carpool. Also, since the condo's on the market, my bike has been in the storage closet on the patio - if I wanted to ride it, I'd have to put it together and carry it through the condo and down the stairs. It's not difficult to put together, but I am a lazy bunny.

But I signed up for two big bike rides - one is this coming Sunday and one is the next weekend - and I had no real excuse not to ride on Saturday. I had agreed to go shopping with a friend in Bellevue, and that's normally a pretty good training ride for me - it's about 30 miles and somewhat hilly.

I made it there and back with no major problems, although it took me a while to find all my riding stuff before I left, and I ended up forgetting to bring anything to drink. (It was a pretty warm day, so I bought Vitamin Water at QFC before coming back - that stuff is pretty good!) However, I was slower than the last time I did a similar ride (that one was an average of 10.459 mph; this time clocked in around 9.775 mph), but it was - oddly enough - exactly the same amount of time that it took me to ride exactly the same distance as the first time I rode up to Bellevue and back on this route.

Time: 2 hrs 58 minutes
Distance: 29.0 miles

On Saturday night, I took myself out to Tilth, which would have been good if I didn't have such high expectations. I got a small baby carrot soup (very tasty) and a small halibut cheeks entree, which was just okay. I think they might have cooked the halibut sous vide, because there just wasn't a lot of taste there. The asparagus and watercress it came with was fine, but not flavorful to make up for the vague waste of a flavorful opportunity that was the halibut cheeks. The prices were pretty reasonable, especially considering everything that can be sourced organically and locally is. Also, since there's no hostess stand, I ended up standing in the entryway looking lost with another guy for a few minutes before someone came over to greet us - I get that they're going for "home-style," but it still wasn't the best way to make an impression, in my opinion.

I finished a couple of books, but it's too late to post about them now.

Tomorrow: softball.
Wednesday: softball.
Thursday: dinner with the girls at Canlis.

Also, pet peeve: people who are chronically late to meetings. That's just disrespectful to everyone who showed up on time. However, since that's basically the only thing I don't love about my new job (not another new job - still the one I've had since October), I think I made a good choice to move.

I just went to the grocery store. Normally, I'd go in the late afternoon on Sundays, but since Brian has been away, my schedule has changed a little. So, since it's pretty late, there weren't many people in the store. When I heard someone say "Excuse me?" in the vegetable area, I was pretty sure he was talking to me. Because there was no one else around.

I'm not sure what I was expecting - maybe someone telling me that I'd dropped something. Instead, it was a soldier, about my age, in uniform. He asked if I'd help him pick out flowers, which is probably the most charming thing anyone has ever asked me in a grocery store.

So I agreed, and we walked over to the flower section. When I asked, he said that he'd bought her flowers once before, but he had forgotten what they were called. He said he was considering the colorful daisies. I like regular colored daisies, but I've never been able to get into the fake-looking ones. I walked around and picked out a pretty bouquet that was colorful. He pointed to a different bouquet, composed of the same flowers as the one I'd pointed to, and I agreed. Then he thanked me and shook my hand.

I find a certain amount of nervousness - anxiousness to please - extremely charming early in a relationship, and the idea that this guy walked up to a strange girl in the grocery store to ask her advice on flowers really sweet.

We won both of our softball games on Tuesday in exciting games. Last night, we lost the first one by ONE RUN - we made a bunch of errors, so we definitely should have been able to pull it off - and we won the second one by the murder rule (winning by more than 15 runs at the end of the 6th inning). At one point, I caught the ball and tagged a runner (who happens to work with Brian) at home - he slid straight into me, causing me to flip over and fall on top of him. He apologized and asked me if I was okay - I said, "I'm fine, but I think you're out," which had the ump laughing for a while.

I just dropped Brian off at work. He's flying to Roswell, NM, home of lots of crazy alien hunters, for work. He'll be gone for twelve days, and I'll be home, eating weird dinners and reading a lot. And hopefully riding my bike a lot - I'm signed up for two big rides in the next three weeks, and I haven't ridden AT ALL yet this year.

My employer has decided (at the last minute, but better than nothing!) to donate $100 for every employee who does the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure again this year. I was always planning on doing the run/walk as I have in past years (and I'm riding my bike to it again this year), but I was waiting to sign up until my company had decided whether or not to sponsor - it would determine what team I joined.

Anyway, if you're interested in donating, my "personal" page is here.

I really enjoy this event. They shut down a major freeway that goes along the waterfront in Seattle, and there's a huge wave of people as the race starts. (Most of the pink shirts in this picture are breast cancer survivors, although some teams choose pink shirts, too.)

( The Harrowing of Gwynedd )

( Not Becoming My Mother )

( Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings )

That's 30 books so far this year, which means that I'm still on track for about 75 books for the year. I have two more books on hold at the library, and I'm still slogging through Walden on readprint. (I added a little blurb at the left side of my journal showing what I'm reading - I'm usually reading on Deryni book with Brian, one readprint book, and one physical book at a time.)