And continuing to ramp up the treadmill work preparatory for the NYC trip.
1. John Grisham's The Confession
2. Stephen King's UR
3. Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Tale
4. Ian Graham's Unbillable Hours
5. Jonathan Saran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The movie (Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock) is probably good but it can't possibly match the book. It is being touted as a "9/11" movie, but I found it to be less about 9/11 and more about means of dealing with loss. Images of 9/11 are juxtaposed with stories of loss by the boy's grandparents during and due to the bombing of Dresden. I read the book in two days last weekend, unable to put it down. I give it my highest recommendation.
I've started highlighting some of my favorite passages so that I can recall them.
"In the end, everyone loses everyone."
"I've spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?"
"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
"I understand, now, the tragedy of my childhood. It wasn't the bombing. It was that I never once liked a photograph of myself."
I'm now reading Page from a Tennessee Journal by Francine Thomas Howard. It is set in 1913-1914. I find it difficult to believe that this is the world my grandparents were born into, particularly my Grandma Ginny who was born in Bumpus Mills, Tennessee in 1914. Or that this was the time of her parents, my great-grandparents, who I was close to. They moved to California with their 5 children in the back of a pickup truck when grandma was 13.
It was not just a different time. It was a different world.
