We’ve been updating our Listographies!
Denise wrote about her favorite books, TV shows and songs.
Sunshine updated her Wish List.
Have you started your Listography yet?
Page 56 Game 3 September 2010
I saw this game on another blog and I’ve always wanted to try it. It’s too fun!
Here’s how to play:
* Grab the book nearest you.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence. (Tell us the name of the book, too.)
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, or the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.
We’ll wait a week for you to post what you find and then use the sentences to create a story. It’ll be fun, so get posting!!
My Fair Lazy 20 May 2010
Jen Lancaster stopped in Philly this week for her My Fair Lazy book tour! She was funny as usual. 
For the reading part of the evening, she read us the passage about when she went to buy her first car.
Of course someone asked where Fletch was, and she said he’s not allowed to “help” anymore because he doesn’t really help. Apparently at an event in Chicago, the store was understaffed and she told him to help set up. Fletch said he was busy; she was like, Doing what??? He said, “They want my autograph.” That did not sit well with Jen, but we thought it was hilarious.
When we finally got to meet Jen of course I forgot everything I wanted to say. When I said, “Hi, how are you?”, she asked me back and I squeaked out, “Good, allergies,” because I had almost completely lost my voice. She said, “Oh, sorry!” and I replied, “No, it’s okay, I just want you to know I’m not sick!” Now she thinks I’m a weirdo.
I did ask her about whose house they were at for the big dinner at the end of the book because I thought she was dropping hints to avoid naming names but I couldn’t figure it out. She said it wasn’t anybody famous, that she wasn’t trying to be “cagey”. I was like, Oh, okay. Then she said, “It’s not like when I didn’t say my landlord was Bill (B something? Like Bellichek?). I’m sure he loved people going up to him and saying, ‘Hey you’re Jen Lancaster’s landlord!’ ” We laughed.
Then when she signed Sunshine’s book, I started to tell her about the whole “Phoenix is a cultural black hole” joke. (After meeting Jen two years ago, and then Jennifer Weiner and Julie Powell last year, Sunshine called Phoenix a Cultural Black Hole because no famous authors were going there – or at least those three didn’t.) Jen said, “I’ve been to Phoenix.” I knew she mentioned Scottsdale in the book, but she continued, “I went there two years ago.” I just said, “Oh, I guess she missed you then.” And then my turn was up.
Though I did ask for a picture!
Julie and Julia: The Movie 27 December 2009
I finally finished reading Julie and Julia, so now I can see the movie! I already know it’s going to be different just from what I remember in the commercial – Julia isn’t in the book that much! So hopefully it won’t annoy me like Revolutionary Road did.
At the book signing, someone asked a question about it being difficult to “let go” of the book and have someone change it into a movie. She said No, and then added, “So are you asking me what I didn’t like about the movie?” We all laughed, and she hemmed and hawed, til she finally said there are three things she doesn’t like about the movie. But, while telling the second one, she amended it to four.
#1 The scene at the beginning where Amy Adams is sitting around with all of friends just shooting the shit and they get in an argument. Julie said that would never happen – the sitting around or the arguing. But, she said she understood they had to do it to set up the movie.
#2 When Amy Adams walks by a chocolate fountain (to which Julie commented, “Isn’t that so 90s, a chocolate fountain??”) and says, “I think I’ll make …” Julie said that never happened, and it was so totally lame and something she would never ever do or say.
#3 When she makes the beef bourginon for Julia Child’s editor, in the book the newspaper guy still came over but in the movie he didn’t. Julie didn’t understand why they changed that.
And of course #4 escapes me but hopefully it will come back when I watch the movie, and then I’ll add it here.
Julie Powell: Cooking, Blogging, Cheating, Cleaving, Reading 15 December 2009
Julie Powell of Julie and Julia fame came to the Free Library of Philadelphia to promote her second book, Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage and Obsession. I think she was surprised by the turn-out – she did a double-take when she came out from behind the curtain onto the stage. (She also tripped a little when she got to the podium which was totally cute.) I think she was really nervous because she had a hard time looking at the audience. I don’t blame her – there were 300 people there sitting in an auditorium, all staring at her!
Julie explained her story: how she came up with the Julie and Julia project, how it took on a life of its own, how it became a Nora Ephron movie starring Meryl Streep (which she mentioned several times – Amy Adams not so much! ), how her life changed so much after the fame and fortune. She likened it to winning the lottery, how she “put her numbers in and hit big”, but the lottery doesn’t fix your problems. Julie was building up to what we’ve heard about the new book, that she had an affair and the foray into butchery was her way of dealing with it and her unraveling marriage.
Julie prefaced her reading by warning people that it’s very different from Julie and Julia, that it’s much darker. She said if J&J is Nora Ephron then Cleaving would be (some David guy I never heard of and now I can’t remember). She even said, “You will hate me.” We laughed, and she said, “No really. People love Eric Powell” and in the book she did some bad things to Eric Powell.
She read a passage about learning to butcher (is that how you say it?), and when she mentioned cutting her thumb (after telling us how you have to be careful about your fingers getting numb so you don’t cut them off without feeling it), everyone gasped. She looked up, surprised, and laughed. “That’s nothing!” So I’m guessing we’ll find out about other injuries while reading. But her reaction is why I love reading out loud to my students – the reaction when they get it.
By now she was more relaxed. (She even joked about being terrible at speaking “off the cuff”. Not true though.) Then she talked a little more about her affair. She said she should have known the guy was no good because he had absolutely no interest in cooking. (He also didn’t like dogs. What’s wrong with that?) During Q&A (which she said is her favorite part – “I’m really good at that!”), someone asked if it was hard to write about something so personal, to be so brutally honest and “put it out there”. She replied, “People who use their lives as creative fodder do it bcs it is just necessary… to understand it.” So like she had to do it to get through it and figure out what happened. Reminds me of the benefits of journalling (except I would never publish them ).
This idea was reiterated when someone asked for advice about finding a project. She said you just have to find something that means a lot to you so that you will turn off that Editor in your brain that says, ‘You stink, you’re no good, you may as well quit now.’ By this point I was nodding, thinking of my own blog “project”.
Another question came from a fellow Texan who blogs about the connection between food and love. Julie had already talked about feeling bad while butchering because she was always thinking about her affair (which was already over) and not about her marriage. She realized it was because Eric was so intertwined in her life she couldn’t fathom him not being there, even though they had been apart and even technically separated. Basically she rook him for granted, but they worked it out. (She said so, and she was wearing a wedding ring.) The blogger asked for Julie’s thoughts on the food and love, to which she replied, “Cooking requires a kind of trust that is also required for loving someone.” Everyone approved.
I was able to get a good spot in the line though it seemed like most people just left. Sunshine had asked me to tell Julie she couldn’t be there (probably as a joke, but I said it anyway!) because she was stuck getting her house ready for a Christmas visit from the in-laws. Julie laughed. Good one, Sunshine! And wait til you see what she wrote in your book! (I won’t spoil it here. )
Definitely see Julie Powell if she comes to your town!
A Little Too Late 12 December 2009
I guess we’re getting into this blog thing too late. I’m 100 pages into Julie and Julia, which is only Day 42 of her project, and she’s already being interviewed by a magazine (who is bringing Julia Child’s editor to her apartment!). She said she got 36 hits on her first day which was just before the first anniversary of 9/11. So, I figure we’re about seven years too late, and there are too many blogs, and that’s why it’s so hard to get people to follow. Sigh.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane 27 November 2009
Sunshine and I both love to read. In college we spent hours browsing for new books at Borders. Now that we live on opposite ends of the country, we still find books that we know the other will like. (Books can be expensive to mail unless you remember to use Media Mail!)
Sunshine’s latest recommendation was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe. I just finished it, and it was phenomenal. It’s the kind of book you don’t want to end. I’ve come to realize I really enjoy historical fiction. This one uses the witches of Salem as its central theme. It bounces back between the past and the present to solve a mystery. In that regard it reminded me so much of one of my favorite books, The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier. (I liked it a thousand times more than Girl With a Pearl Earring, which is good, too.) I can’t understand why the bookseller at Barnes and Noble told me she had a hard time getting into it, and she had to put it down several times because it was boring. I love Barnes and Noble, but obviously my friends know me better – I’ll take Sunshine’s recommendations any day!
So I guess next I should read Julie and Julia which Sunshine sent to me before she knew it was going to be a movie. She’s a literary savant!
Revolutionary Revelation 3 July 2009
When a movie comes out that was a book I want to read, I always read the book first. Interview with the Vampire was the first one; it killed me to wait to see it, but I didn’t want the movie to ruin the ending of the book since I love to read so much.
Everybody knows the book is always better than the movie. I’ve known this since Gone With The Wind. I devoured the book in three days as we drove home from vacation in the summer of 1989, and later couldn’t believe how much they left out of the movie. Yes, a four-hour movie and important things are missing like the fact that Scarlett has two other children.
I was reminded of this again last week when I watched Twilight. I suppose it would have been four hours long, too, if they included everything, or used the right timeline. (The meadow scene was a special date, and does not occur right after Bella accuses Edward of being a vampire.) It was mildly annoying because I kept comparing the two, but I did enjoy the movie.
Not so for Revolutionary Road. It seemed phony right from the beginning, like they were still acting in the play they were arguing about. The book was hard to get through with all the thinking and postulating and descriptions, but that is what makes the story, and it did not come across at all. Maybe I was expecting too much from the movie version. The basic events were the same, but the feeling/mood of the book did not translate. Maybe it would have been better if it had voice-overs to tell what Frank was thinking. This was part of the problem with Twilight, too: so much of the book is going on in the characters’ heads – how do you convey that on screen?
By not showing all this thinking and description, the movie-goer misses out on quite a lot. Frank just looks like a jerk instead of this philosopher who is known for his art of bullshitting. April’s cold behavior is not explained, nor do you fully realize that she’s going through what inspired Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique. Nor does Mrs. Givings’ obsession with the Wheeler’s and her son get properly explained. Knowing all this made the movie seem sorely lacking in character development.
Spoiler Alert
If you haven’t read or seen Revolutionary Road, stop reading here because I’m going to give away the ending.
And then they left out the most touching scene in the whole book, when Shep calls Frank and picks him up at the train station to get to the hospital. Frank doesn’t tell Shep right away that April “did it to herself”; he waits a while til they’re out drinking and it just comes out. Maybe I’m being nitpicky, but I thought these were two important events that should have been portrayed correctly.
At first I said I would see the movie versions first since it’s almost always a let-down. Then when I started writing this, I remembered I didn’t like the movie spoiling the end of the book. So maybe what I’ll do is this: if it’s an action movie, like The DaVinci Code, I’ll read the book first. If it’s a drama like Revolutionary Road, I’ll see the movie first – or not at all.
Check out Shelfari! 25 May 2009
I came across Shelfari while browsing book blogs. It is perfect for book-a-holics like us! You make a bookshelf that shows the actual covers of the books you’ve read, are reading, or want to read. Then you can rate the book and write an opinion. The coolest feature may be that you can use it like your own personal card catalog and keep track of who you loan your books to!
Check it out! And then tell us so we can link up on the site! 
Threaded Comments 21 May 2009
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