Cannonball Read IV

That's right, I'm reviewing books again. It's much slower going this year, since the small person is, well, much more person-like, and so I made the good decision to only go Half-Cannonball (26 books) this time around. But, in case you're interested, I will link to reviews here.

1. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, by Charles Dickens.
2. Wildwood, by Colin Meloy.
3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey.
4. My Man Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse.
5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
6. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris.
7. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami.
8. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel.
9. Codex, by Lev Grossman.
10. Messy, by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.
11. Pink Smog, by Francesca Lia Block.
12. Busy Monsters, by William Giraldi.
13. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.
14. Scott Pilgrim series, by Bryan Lee O'Malley.
15. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel.
16. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern.

Lament

I'd like to propose a moment of silence for some truly great children's literature that somehow got made into mediocre (or not even good) film, when it really deserved just as much, if not more, as Twilight and The Hunger Games and Harry Potter ...

Sigh. The Golden Compass made me sad, but Inkheart still breaks my heart. Such a cast ... I would give a lot to see the second and third books realized with that cast.

Sunshine

Wanted to just curl up and go to sleep on my lunchtime walk today. My place of work is on the edge of a very nice neighborhood: big, lovely houses, some of them historic, manicured lawns, nice cars in driveways ... I'd like just a little while to live like those people must. I know everyone's got troubles and worries, but it still seems to me that some are probably easier to deal with than others.

Experimentation

So, I have a stupid-long commute. It makes life seriously difficult in that one has to fit things in rather tightly, and if one gets a little bit off-schedule, things are going to have to get dropped. This means that I generally get up at 4:45 A.M. to run (and can only run a set amount that is within my time-frame), only get to read on my lunch break, and have maybe an hour a day with my kid. I'm planning on most of that changing sometime soon, but in the meantime ...

Today, I attempted a lunch-break run. I have an hour for lunch, and it normally only takes me about 15 minutes of that to actually eat lunch. SO, armed with a towel, deodorant, and dry shampoo, I made my attempt. Success! I needed for 3 miles to happen in under 30 minutes; my time was 29:47, which would have been even shorter minus a few traffic stops. Lunch was eaten, and I feel, if not shower-fresh, at least reasonably normal. Certainly not slimy and disgusting. Hair's still a little damp, I'm probably still a bit red in the face, but nothing major.

I'm excited about this development. If I can keep it up, I can get in 3 miles 5 days a week as opposed to struggling to get up in the mornings and barely squeeze in 2 and a quarter. Plus it's a major pick-me-up in the middle of the day. I feel great! Woooo.

Signifying nothing

How much of our lives is just noise?