Sad State of Affairs...

When I read on Publishers Lunch yesterday that the B. Dalton Booksellers in Laredo, TX was closing, thereby giving that town of a quarter-million people the piteous distinction of being the largest city in the nation without a single bookseller, I was horrified. No bookshops to browse? No aisles of books to peruse? No chance to page through the glossy picture books or riffle through the heavy paper pages of a trade paperback? Egad! I felt for those people.

But then on my walk today, I was still emphathizing, and I realized that these folks are completely bereft. After all, I'm sure they still have a Walmart, Target, Best Buy...maybe even a Costco or Sam's, not to mention a few grocery and drug stores that carry books. Not that these establishments could in any way replace a bookstore--certainly not--but they're something at least. Those Texans will be okay. They'll visit the library and do roadtrips to other Texas cities who can still lay claim to a Barnes & Noble or Borders. They'll be okay. Amazon will necessarily become their best friend. I'll be thinking of those less fortunate this holiday season...

Lunching with books

Thank you for all the kind comments about my hair. Today is the day that Emma gets her haircut. Her mom is pulling her out of school because the stylist didn't have any other openings before Christmas, so I am eagerly awaiting the after-school viewing.

So anyway, it occurs to me that a casual reader (or even a regular reader) would hardly recognize this as the blog of a book-lover. Other than my participation in Barrie Summy's Book Review Club, I've hardly had a word to say recently on books. Let me tell you why that is...I haven't been reading!! I haven't been reading, and I am feeling the loss. For the past two or three weeks, the only reading I am getting in is while I'm eating my breakfast or lunch alone. Once the last bite has been chewed up, it's back to work. And it's just going to stay busy all the way till Christmas. But I thought I would tell you about the books that have been read in little snippets as time presents itself.

I did just finish Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange. Quite honestly I've had enough of vampires for right now, but I was intrigued--I couldn't resist picking it up. And while it was certainly an entertaining, well-written book, it was, I think, a little slow. I don't want to post any spoilers, but let me just say that it was some time before Elizabeth found out about Darcy's secret, and in the interim, it was just life, if not normal, then at least not overly abnormal. Read between the lines if you can...

Now I have moved on and am allowing myself to switch back and forth between my meat-and-potatoes book and my dessert book (classification style courtesy of Ms. Summy). My M&P book is The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, which we've had for a while now and I'm just now getting to, and my dessert book is Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison. I'm just starting both of them, and yesterday was a serious-minded lunch, complemented by The Lost Symbol, so today I chose Angus and spent the entire meal laughing out loud. Seriously, that book is hilarious. I'd had my eye on it for a while (who wouldn't with that title?), but after the Dec. Book Review Club posts, Angus having been reviewed by Barrie herself, I decided I needed to read it. Dan Brown is just going to have to wait, because I plan on lunch dates with Angus for the forseeable future.

What's everyone else reading?

The Irony is Delicious!

This past summer my boys were in swim team with the daughter of a good friend of mine, who is the same age as my younger son (now eight). We'll call her Emma (which is, in fact, her name). Well quite regularly after swim team, we'd all stay to swim, and after an hour sitting in early-morning Houston summer heat, I was ready to get in the pool myself. Everyday I'd catch Emma staring at me, either underwater or above, and everyday she'd make some crack about my bathing suit, which is a tankini top and fitted swim shorts (they actually look like they could be regular shorts, but they're not). Multiple times she asked me why I was in the pool with my clothes on despite seeing me in this suit almost everyday. One day while I was prepping to get in the pool, she asked me if I wanted to race, then looked me up and down, and seeing the same outfit as usual, said, "Nevermind, you're not wearing your bathing suit." !!!!!!!

Okay that's all just background info for the real story of this post.

When I got my hair cut short a few weeks ago, Emma saw me for the first time after school on the playground. Her response to her mom asking her if she liked my new haircut (not in front of me) was, "I don't see Miss Alyssa, I only see a man." Then later, after her mom confided this to me, she ran by me, glancing in my direction, and smirked. I assumed she was remembering her earlier cleverness. Instead she looped back, came up to me, and said, "Who are you? Are you someone's dad?" Good one!

So yesterday my friend called and said that she'd told Emma that they needed to do something with her hair--it was getting too long and unkempt. Emma's resonse? "I want to get my hair cut like Miss Alyssa's." And so my friend asked if I'd please take a photo of my head and text it to her so that she could show the haircutter. This is the picture:


(In case you're confused, no, that's not a picture of someone's dad, it's really me!)

I can't wait to see the haircut I've inspired! Little turkey! And now I've got to come up with some good teasing lines of my own.

My new favorite show

I gotta admit to being very impressed with the USA network--they have come up with some quite imaginative, very entertaining new shows, several of which are high on my list of favorites. Currently being DVR'd at my house...

Psych (an uber-observant regular guy who plays at being psychic to assist on police investigations)

Burn Notice (a burned spy, trying to figure out who burned him, doing the sort of good deeds that require his particular skill set)

In Plain Sight (the day to day of two U.S. Marshalls who work for the Witness Protection Program)

And now...

White Collar...a by-the-book FBI agent offers a charming and worldly con artist a way out of prison--assist in "catching other elusive criminals in exchange for his eventual freedom" (that's from the website).

I have been LOVING this one! I like the premise and all the secondary characters, but I think the two main characters play very well off each other, and I am absolutely mesmerized by the dashing ex-con, played by Matt Bomer. I have, in fact, added a photo to my 'Writing Inspiration' folder. So many good qualities...

Give this show (or any of these USA gems) a try, and let me know what you think!

Snow Day!

It's snowing! Way down here near the Gulf of Mexico that's pretty rare, and I'm excited! I just hope there is a little accumulation for when the boys get out of school... I wish we had our tree up, and I wish I was playing some festive Christmas music and wrapping up gifts and baking yummy things, but instead I'm buckled down in front of the computer trudging through my edits... But the view out the window is so pretty!

December Book Review Club

Jingle bells, jingle bells! Jingle all the way...

Believe it or not, December is here, and along with it comes a flurry of activity: shopping, wrapping, baking, celebrating... For me, this is when my opportunities to read become few and far between. Actually, this has already started happening, and so I've gone back to a favorite author, whose books I own and have read many times.
I never get tired of re-reading them. So for this month's meeting of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club, I am reviewing Jennifer Crusie's Fast Women.

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@Barrie Summy

My love for Jenny Crusie started in a Target in Austin, Texas. I was browsing through the paperbacks and spotted the bright red cover of Welcome to Temptation, with that appealing apple and catchy title, and I couldn't help but pick it up. The blurb intrigued me, so into my basket it went, and the rest is history. I quickly tracked down her backlist and read them all and then, rabid fan that I was, I waited not-so-patiently for each new release.

Fast Women is the story of a detective agency, a decade-old murder, and a entire cast of characters starting over. Nell Dysart recently got a divorce, needed a job, and walked into McKenna Investigations intending to fill their need for a secretary. Pretty much from page two on, all hell breaks loose. As part of her recovery, Nell steals a dog, inspires a warrant sworn out for her arrest, performs some sketchy undercover work, falls for her boss, sleeps with her boss's partner...you get they idea. And through it all, Crusie keeps it all whip fast, light, funny, and very appealing. And at the end, murder solved.

Crusie has a knack for developing smart, savvy characters who find themselves in really downright insane situations and still manage to keep their cool, not to mention their snarky senses of humor. As a writer (and a reader), it's impossible not to be impressed. Even more impressive is the extensive mentoring work Crusie has done for authors wishing to hone their craft. Her website is full of essays, and eventually she will be publishing, with sometime collaborator Bob Mayer, a He Wrote, She Wrote compendium of their different takes on writing elements and strategies. For a while, the bulk of this material was available for free online, and I printed out pretty much all of it. Definitely a good investment.

But I digress.

If you're looking for a snappy read with a little bit of everything, pick up Fast Women. Hmmm...that last sentence didn't come out quite the way I'd intended. How about read Fast Women. Or take your pick--any Crusie will do. Happy Holidays! And be sure to click through to Barrie's site to read some other great reviews.

Holiday Spirit

I'm proud to say that I've added the 'Followers' tool to my blog. Given the spotty nature of my posts, I'm thrilled to have any one at all to include under the 'My Peeps' heading. My only excuse for this latest absence is the holidays...and being out of town. Pretty much nothing at all got accomplished except a tiny bit of Christmas shopping, which is something I guess. Instead, we decorated gingerbread men, played football in the park, went ice skating, and toasted marshmallows over a campfire at a Festival of Lights. It was lovely.

The ice skating in particular was very interesting. I haven't been in years and was a little terrified that it wouldn't be quite like riding a bike. I worried that I'd wobble and topple and come away with a bevy of bruises, aches and pains. But...I didn't fall even a single time! The only close call was when my ten-year-old skated up and thumped his skate into mine. But I held on and kept my balance. It wasn't skill, though, that impressed my brother-in-law. It was my gutsiness in wearing whatever I'd scrounged from my sister's family's collection of winter wear in order to keep myself warm. I'm going to try to upload a picture in a little bit, but I'm not sure even a photo will do this ensemble justice: sweatshirt jacket, pale green scarf, Elmo-esque gloves, long, tassled, goofy pale blue ski hat, and vivid red ear muffs. I was quite the sight, but as I told my sister...I was warm. Besides, I didn't know any of those people, and they all looked cold.

The best part about the ice skating was that the place we went, the Ice Palace I think it was called, had these 'walkers' for new skaters. They were available (for a $3 fee) in varying heights, and we rented one for each of my two boys, neither of whom had ever been skating. They were made of PVC pipe, and with all those contraptions on the ice, it looked like a miniature geriatric convention--it was an awesome image. Plus, they seemed to help build the boys' confidence quite a lot. By the end, they had both abandoned their walkers and launched off on their own. I must admit that my niece and I requisitioned a few walkers that had been left behind and raced each other around the rink--she won pretty easily.

Now I'm trying to get the boys to agree to go skate at the Houston Galleria over the holidays. There are no walkers, but it's truly lovely at Christmas time.