e_phemerart's place

36) Donoghue, Emma. ROOM. Little Brown: 2010.

5 year old Jack has lived his whole life with his mother in a 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed. Ma was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a young college student. Her kidnapper, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma and Jack prove to be resilient and resourceful--and attempt a nail-biting escape.

32) Weise, Jillian. THE COLONY: a novel. Soft Skull Press: NY 2010.

Anne Hatley is in need of a reprieve from the drudgery of work and an increasingly tedious relationship. She accepts an invitation to the nation’s largest research colony. Anne feels fine the way she is, wearing a prothetic limb, and she strives to maintain her resolve under pressure from her peers and from doctors eager to pioneer an experimental procedure, which would make her the first patient to generate a new leg. Meanwhile, she falls into a reluctant romance with the rakish Nick, possessor of the “suicide gene”; befriends Charles Darwin, who is on site digging through the eugenics archive; and attempts to come to terms with her first love. The Colony is the story of one young woman struggling to accept who she is, and who she will become. But it is also a novel that mines some of the most polarizing issues of our time—among them, medical ethics, body image, and genetic engineering. (from Amazon synopsis)


Quirky and interesting but not quite as much so as I had hoped.

27) Mezrich, Ben. THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES: The Founding of Facebook A tale of Sex, Money, Genuis and Betrayal. Anchor: 2009.

This is the nonfiction book the film THE SOCIAL NETWORK was based on.

It just feels wrong to be posting about Facebook here on LiveJournal.

24) Stoppard, Tom. ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Grove Press: 1967.

Script for the stage play.

21) Wells, Dan. I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER. Tor: 2010.

John is a teenaged sociopath, obsessed with serial killers and trying desperately to keep his own impulses under control while working in the family mortuary business. Not exactly a copycat character, as the story ends up taking a paranormal twist, but reminded me of a young Dexter. Decent read for killing time with a thriller.

22) Kingsolver, Barbara. ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE: A Year of Food Life. Harper Collins: 2007.

Entertaining and informative nonfiction about local sustainability-- Kingsolver and her family undertake, for a year, to buy and eat only food grown in their own region, grow it themselves, or learn to live without. "Part memoir, part investigative journalism... makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet." VERY good book.

I redyed my hair last night. It is once again a lovely deep purple, as are a few random spots of my skin. :)

Talked to Coleen. She's happy to be back in California, is having a good time reconnecting with friends and even found a room to rent already (actually, it's in the same flat she moved out of six months ago!)

Talked to Hannah. She and Ken picked up the furniture for the nursery yesterday. She's happy about that, but not happy about her swollen feet.

I'd gone to look at quilt fabric on Friday evening, but ended up feeling anxious and overwhelmed by the options and not buying anything. However, now I can just about "see" the quilt in my mind and think I'm ready to make my choices and actually get to work sewing and piecing. Today, I brought in my sketches (for the embroidered animal characters)into the library with me, and used the xerox machine to emlarge them to the size I want. (The working title for this project is "Rock Me Crazy"-rock as in Rockabye baby, rock as in music, crazy as in quilting and color)

Current favorite breakfast cereal: Mix together 3TB couscous, 3TB oats, 2/3 c milk, splash vanilla. 3 minutes in the microwave= yummy hot cereal. (The texture is almost like a rice or bread pudding)

Am looking forward tonight to watching my latest Netflix dvd, THE PROPOSITION (a 2005 Aussie "Western" with the screenplay written by Nick Cave (who of course did the soundtrack as well)! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421238/ Earlier today, I watched all the "making of" special features on the dvd, and it looks to be a very good cast and quite interesting (if violent).

19) Tetsu Saiwai. THE 14th DALAI LAMA: A Manga Biography. Penguin Books: 2008.

17) Eagleman, David. SUM: Forty Tales From the Afterlives. Pantheon: 2009.

A slim volume composed of a collection of creative and scientific vignettes imagining possible scenarios for an afterlife.

While admitting I do not have a firm grasp of either of these concepts, the one word I would use to descibe the "afterlives" of SUMS is: "fractal."

A fractal often has the following features:
It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language. (
It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).
It has a simple and recursive definition.

Poetic and interesting writing, but I'm not sure I "got" it.

14) Beck, Judith. BECK DIET SOLUTION: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person. Oxmoor House: 2007.

Cognitive Therapy approach to weight loss. Meh, another diet book. Some good stuff, so take what you can use and leave the rest.

12) Yates, Richard. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. Vintage Contemporaries: 1961.

8) Roth, Geneen. APPETITES : On the Search for True Nourishment. Dutton: 1996.
9) Pollan, Michael. IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: An Eater's Manifesto. Penguin: 2008.

Call it a second helping of nonfiction by these two authors writing on our lives, health, and food.