A Compelling Story, Beautifully Told

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I spent the last third of 2005 sick, off and on.

Yesterday, I developed a sore throat.

Is this some sort of sick joke?*

* Totally unintentional pun! I just caught it when I was proofreading this before hitting the "publish" key. I'm funny even when I don't mean to be, or perhaps because I don't mean to be. Or perhaps I'm just not funny. Oh, whatever.

Following up on the Disney Princess rant: I have gone to Toys'R'Us, Target, the Disney Store, and K-Mart to see if I can get store credit for the Disney crap foisted upon us. Out of all of these stores, only one found one item in their system, with the result that I now have $10.81 in store credit at Toys'R'Us, and I ended up dropping the rest of the stuff off at Goodwill.

Heavy sigh.

Am feeling generally exhausted/rundown/out of sorts today.

Oh, but looka here -- here is what my mom would risk if she were able to allow her packrat mania to run unchecked:

Wash. Woman Suffocates Under House Clutter

I can't make this stuff up. It reads like a story out of The Onion, but it's true.

And now we come to the literary criticism portion of the Blah Blah blog. I don't have any serious literary pretensions or aspirations, being that I majored in...cultural. anthropology. which. is. so. lucrative. and. marketable. But I can say that my verbal SAT scores were very high, lo those many years ago, and my AP and ACT English scores were so spectacular that I placed out of Freshman English. Which makes absolutely no difference to my life right now, but I'm just saying. I seem to have some aptitude for this language, um, thing.

And I usually devour books quite quickly. I just finished Ahab's Wife, which was 666 pages, and took me nearly a week to read, and I have to say, I suspected the ending from the beginning, and was pissed as I saw it coming and yet still had to read the whole book to figure out how we were going to get there. This is not to say that I did not enjoy the book -- I did. I think it was very well-written, but I felt kind of cheated by the author. Nonetheless, read it if you dare -- it's an interesting look at women and gender roles in the 19th century, as well as a journey of self-discovery. (Ecch, did I just write that?)

And you will notice that, as often happens when I can't think of a title for my post, I've stolen a bookjacket blurb. It's kind of becoming my shtick.

And you? What are you reading these days? Do tell*, I must know.

* For the benefit of my friend, Mr. X, I must tell you the following story:

On one side of my family, I am descended from dirt-poor "mulattos" (as they were called then) who eked out their existence on the farms of easterm shore Virginia. One of my grandma's cousins was named Dutell, allegedly because when he was born, the midwife told his father, "It's a boy!" His response was, "Do tell!"

I have met Dutell, but I was a teenager then and very self-conscious and shy, and he was what seemed to me an older gentleman, deserving of some respect, so I never did ask him if this was true. Nonetheless, it is part of family lore and thus I pass it on to you.

And now, adieu. Off to pick up my little puka shell.