Close to you...
In a fit of nostalgia, Joel recently pulled out a Carpenters CD. In an instant, I'm wisked away to my lanky, child self. I'm wearing headphones, floating a few inches above a too-large, lavender dentist chair in a nitrous oxide haze. The Carpenters' mellow crooning makes grusome reality split off, transporting me to a warm, sunny land where I swim though the air, flying with the bluebirds and butterflies.
"Sing, Sing a Song" brings back the spooky way my childhood dentist would sneak that huge novacaine needle past my line of sight, shake my cheek while rotating the needle for too long. "Yesterday Once More," tastes of that sickening, somewhat metalic spreading numbness as the novacaine begins to take effect. "We've Only Just Begun" reminds me of my tired jaw, aching from the dentist levering himself to pry out a particularly stubborn tooth. Stangely, I'm "On Top of the World" while biting down on a big wad of cotton stuffed into the now-empty socket. They can take my teeth, but not my spirit.
If it weren't for nitrous oxide and the Carpenters on the headphones, I don't know how I would have survived years of "pre-orthodontia" extractions. I've lost 13 teeth to professional extractions, including some baby teeth, 4 wisdom teeth and my lower 6-year molars.
My poor kid is doomed to terrible teeth, though perhaps not the big teeth/small jaw issue that plagued me. I've got the perfect soundtrack, however, when treatment begins.
4.28.2005
4.15.2005
Giving up
At what point do you feel it's okay to give up on a book that just isn't grabbing you? One of my friends has an age based rule. Teens and twenties need to give a book 100 pages to hook them, she says, while those over 30 should be able to tell within 50 pages if a tome is indeed a waste of time.
I fear I may have given up too much of my time struggling with a book called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. The author's name itself sounds like a snarky nerd joke--perhaps that should have been a clue. The dust jacket description, however, made it sound fun:
"In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career."
Perhaps I've been spoiled by J.K. Rowling, but his attempts at world building are clunky and self-conscious, not fun and flowing like Rowlings'. He also does not even remotely write a convincing female narrative voice.
Hmm, if I'd read what I just wrote in an amazon review, I never would have borrowed this book in the first place. That's arguement enough. Life's too short to waste on books that don't make you feel more alive.
At what point do you feel it's okay to give up on a book that just isn't grabbing you? One of my friends has an age based rule. Teens and twenties need to give a book 100 pages to hook them, she says, while those over 30 should be able to tell within 50 pages if a tome is indeed a waste of time.
I fear I may have given up too much of my time struggling with a book called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. The author's name itself sounds like a snarky nerd joke--perhaps that should have been a clue. The dust jacket description, however, made it sound fun:
"In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career."
Perhaps I've been spoiled by J.K. Rowling, but his attempts at world building are clunky and self-conscious, not fun and flowing like Rowlings'. He also does not even remotely write a convincing female narrative voice.
Hmm, if I'd read what I just wrote in an amazon review, I never would have borrowed this book in the first place. That's arguement enough. Life's too short to waste on books that don't make you feel more alive.
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