March Madness

So, long time no write. This whole daylight savings thing has honestly made me a ruined woman. To be fair, I did predict that being ahead in my book count would become an advantage once I started to trade my valuable reading time for an hour of shut eye. These past couple weeks have been pretty insane.

Firstly, last weekend was a ridiculous extravaganza of wedding frivolity. James, Terry, Tini, Carlos, Emily, a bunch of our other friends and I attended the wedding of Ryan and Jen French. We stayed at the Seaport Hotel in Boston both Saturday and Sunday night and had an absolute blast. It's definitely going to be a difficult shindig to compete with.

Last Friday night, Terry, Molly and Molly's college roommate Bethany went to the Worcester DCU Center to see Michael Buble. We were in the absolute last row of the arena, but we had a great time and our love and affection for Mr. Buble seriously at least tripled.

This week, we had a complete re-org at work and everybody feels a little blind sided. It's going to take some getting used to for certain, but we'll have to wait it out a little to see what this change actually signifies for us as a team.

Our kitchen is also almost finished, we just need to paint, add hardware to all of the cabinets, get the sink installed, and put EVERYTHING into its place. Wow, I guess that list is a little more daunting when it's actually written out. Eeek. Add on top of that that James sent out invitations to a party at our house tomorrow night, and the pressure is on to make our house look inhabitable.

Now onto more important things. Since my last entry, I've finished 3 books and am 1/3 of the way through a fourth. Warning: there are several spoilers in here so if you don't want to find out what I hated most about a book (which is most likely the ending), I'd stop reading now if I were you.

I honestly can't believe that my last entry was before I finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I feel like it was an absolute lifetime ago. It turned out that the dreamy publisher I was eluding to before turned out to be gay, but you know, it's really hard to utilize gaydar when reading about a fictional character. I loved the epistolary style, and I always have ever since Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. The plot was really interesting because none of my exposure to World War II in school ever discussed it's impact on other parts of Europe aside from Germany and Austria. The setting of the book was in Guernsey (obvi), one of the islands in the English Channel. During the war, they were completely cut off from civilization, and they had no idea what other countries/cities/islands had been taken over by the Nazis, or who was winning, or how many people had been killed. It was as if they were stuck in a complete deprivation chamber, and based on the book it's hard to say who had it worse: those who were seeing first hand what was happening or those who were cut off from it entirely with only their worst fears to guide them. I give it a solid 4 stars, simply because I wanted more out of the ending (and because I was super let down to know that Elizabeth had died and Kit was left motherless, and I thought it was a little far fetched that everyone trusted Juliet so readily to let a stranger adopt Kit).

The next book I read was Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Book 14). While I was reading it, I had a lot of people ask me what I thought about it compared to Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code since those books turned out to be such crazy blockbusters. I kept comparing it to a hybrid cross between The DaVinci Code and the National Treasure films staring Nicholas Cage. Professor Robert Langdon was as dreamy and dashing and intelligent as ever, and the villain was equally as creepy and demonic as that albino dude from DaVinci Code. I really love how Dan Brown creates insane fast paced thrillers out of such a vast array of subjects and topics. In The Lost Symbol, he fuses together Science, Philosophy, Logic, Art, Masonic Tradition, and National secrets and conspiracies and weaves a web that was almost impossible for Langdon himself to escape from. I really think that anyone who enjoys any of his other writings will really love The Lost Symbol, especially if they have any interest at all in the history of our nation. Easy 4 stars for readability, suspense, and hunky Robert Langdon (laps at the Harvard pool every morning at 4am? Yes, please).

My next reading venture was Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (Book 15). I finished it last Friday, and it honestly took me SO long to read (almost as long as it took Inman to return home to Ada). There's very little dialogue, and since it takes place in the woods and on mountains there are a lot of long, winded passages describing nature (which, don't get me wrong, I really love, but enough is enough Frazier!). Each chapter rotates between the story of Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier, and Ada, a beautiful and spoiled young woman whose father has recently passed and left her with a lot of land and very little help and life experience. Many people claim that Cold Mountain is an illustrious love story, but I felt that there was very little connection between Inman and Ada other than the fact that Inman had a little crush on her before he left for war, and Inman was the only prospect of male companionship that Ada had after her father passed. The two shared less than a handful of encounters before Inman had been drafted, and even after that they had only shared four letters during the four years that he was away. I didn't feel love, I felt necessity, and that's the last thing you really want to feel while reading a "love story." I give the book 2.5 stars. I would have given it 3.5 because Ruby's character was amazing, and an absolute breath of fresh air, but then Inman had to go and get himself killed within 3 pages before the end of the story which really makes reading the entire thing absolutely useless.

I'm onto Little Bee by Chris Cleave (Book 16) now, and so far I really like it. The author has an intrinsically mesmerizing way with words, and I find myself wanting to remember and highlight so many passages simply for their amazing structure. I put this passage up as my facebook status because I just love how dry and ironic it is: "We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City. It seemed as if we'd been cut-and-pasted. My thoughts raced, nightmarish and disconnected." I'm only about 1/3 of the way through, so I'll have to update you next time.

Welp, I guess that's all I have to write for now. My next 24 hours are going to consist of cleaning like a crazy person for our party tomorrow. Who knows what disgusting and horrifying things I'm going to find in the wreckage that was our kitchen and dining room. Wish me luck. :)