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New salad obsession has ruled my life yet again. Spring mix, cherry tomatoes, green onions, goat cheese, almonds, white wine vinegar and olive oil dressing.
Book room work is done. Gym is on deck for Friday morning--tomorrow I'm typing up inventory--any suggestions for a good workout playlist?
Day three at the pool; oh, sun. I do love you so.
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While I was home for the River Festical, I read a book I forgot to write about: Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven. It's Appalachia before WWII and Velva Jean's mother, just before she dies, tells her daughter to "live out there" as she gestures to the world beyond the windows of their small mountain home. I was completely transported by this book. The era fascinates me anyway--prohibition, moonshine--and the setting is brilliantly described. Having just read the Bondurant novel and watched "Hatfields and McCoys", I was primed for a novel set in that are with a female protagonist, and Velva Jean does not disappoint.
As she grows into a beauty, she becomes fixed on a young revivalist preacher named Harley Bright, the same young man who she used to call the moonshiner's boy when they were young and he was trouble, before he found his way to salvation. The novel covers her life before him and with him, and throughout its telling there are rich descriptions of land and love, of what it means to want someone so badly you lose yourself in the wanting. It was beautiful and full of aching hope.
The novel of today is Blue Angel by Francine Prose. It is a decidedly different beast. Most everything else I've read would be pretty accessible to most audiences, but I have a hard time imagining everyone would love this. Set on a small east coast college campus, the protagonist (Swenson) is the novelist in residence and is teaching a particularly diverse writer's work shop including a young Boston Brahmin girl he refers to as Back Bay Barbie. This--among many other things--cracked me up, but if you aren't familiar with the references this book would probably either be a snoozer for you or a plain old irritation.
Case in point: the campus is worrying about sexual harassment in the wake of an incident at a neighboring state school. The dean throws a dinner party to feel out the English department about the climate on their own campus; one professor talks about his class referring to Poe as a child molester after learning of his marriage to his 13 year old cousin. Another says a particularly evangelical young lady told him she felt 'unsafe' after a class discussion surrounding possible gay overtones in the relationship between Pip and Magwich in Great Expectations. Finally, the female poet in residence shares a story about trying to open her students' minds to the notion of what a poem can mean. To do this, she read them "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin. Her students did not respond well, and one of her colleagues tears Larkin apart for being self-pitying and essentially a waste of time.
Now, if you read the above paragraph and laughed because those references all resonate with you, then this is your book. If not, skip it. Me, I'm having a ball. Of course all of this surrounds the central story of the professor who falls for his weird looking but incredibly talented young female student and the havoc it wreaks on his wife. Not very original, but Prose can write, so I'm eager to finish it.
Next up, either The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacob or I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron. Any votes?
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