The Therapist Takes A Nook

I, Therapist, take you, Nook, to be my E-Reader of choice. To have and to hold, (ok, carry), from this day forward, whenever there are times that the book I'm reading may be heavy or awkward to juggle with my other worldly items. I promise to keep you dry from bath water and your battery charged til death (of your battery or screen life) do us part.
Yes, I have "taken" a Nook. I, who never thought such a day would come.
It's not that I don't have friends with E-Readers; I do. And I have tried not to judge them for their purchase, their mad and reckless departure from all that is holy. And...in the end, it turns out that scripture is right on this topic, "judge not lest you be judged", because here I sit, not alone, but with a Nook. I blame Stephen King for my unfaithfulness.
I have written about Stephen before when his new novel UNDER THE DOME came out in 2010. I believe I called it a "tomb" and may have mentioned Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. A devout King fan since his infamous THE STAND, I was excited to hear that he had written a new novel called 11/22/63.

               

Anyone that has been on the planet for a half of century knows exactly what that date is and I was interested to see how Stephen King would write about the assassination of JFK. Bibliophile bought the book for me right away and when I came home from work, there it sat covering up a large portion of my night stand. This is when the first thoughts of adultery came to me. I thought about how I read in the bathtub every night. I thought about reading Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE and the aforementioned UNDER THE DOME...it was in that moment that I knew I would become a cheater. It became quite clear to me that my faithfulness could not bear up under the temptation the Nook presented of giving me ALL of 11/22/63 in just 7.5 portable ounces. Three days later the Nook and I bathed together with all 897 pages of 11/22/63...I fell in love.
I wrote the first part of this when I first "took the nook", (that ended up catchier than I intended), and can now look back on my first three months as an adulterer. It turns out that the nook did not steal all my affections as my reading has been evenly divided between those books I can actually (have and) hold and those that are digitized. I have not deserted my habit of browsing through bookstores and caressing a cover or page. I still fill my "to be read" bookshelf with books of the original variety.
So, what I have found is that my divided affections have actually caused me to read MORE, and that is the real beauty of my new reading partner. Although unexpected, I am quite satisfied with this new, open relationship. I hope my real books understand.

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Bossypants

          

I received a copy of Tina Fey's new book in the mail from a fellow Bookcrosser (check out www.bookcrossing.com).

First of all let me say, I am a Tina Fey fan. She's smart, she's funny, and she is able to skewer Sarah Palin. What's not to like?

I had high hopes for BOSSYPANTS. Of course I wanted to find out more about Tina, but mostly I wanted to read whatever she wrote from her clever and funny point of view.

She talks about her childhood, her stint as a writer then performer on SNL and then her development and unexpected (to her) success of 30 Rock. She also talks about having a baby, and maybe having another one (this written before her pregnancy with her second child).

She also intersperses these chapters with things she's learned...(beauty tips! rules of improv!).

I loved the rules of improv.

When improvising a scene with someone, the first rule of improv is Yes. Agree with whatever someone brings to the scene. For instance (she says), if someone enters the scene with their fingers like a gun and says "I'm going to shoot you now!", it's a scene killer if you say, "No, that's just your fingers shaped like a gun." Not good in improv. You have to have somewhere to go with the scene and that involves cooperating and agreeing to go with what your partner brings.

The next rule of improv is Yes, AND. So not only is it important to agree with what your partner says or does, it's important to add something of your own. If your partner with the finger gun says "I'm going to shoot you now!" and you say, "yeah." It makes the partner do all the work and you end up being a warm body on stage not participating much.

She goes one to talk about a few more rules for improv as well as how they can also be rules for living.

These rules for improv didn't take up much space in the book, but they really stuck with me.

In addition to all of the above, there were also parts of scripts from 30 Rock and SNL...It kind of seemed as though this book didn't know what it wanted to be...an autobiography? Funny insights from a funny lady? A little bit of everything? I wanted to like it more than I did. That said, I'm glad I read it.

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"Puts the Remembering..."

It was strongly suggested to me that I not purchase the leather-bound volume of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, even though it was a great price AND I no longer have the complete set of the individual books I'd received when I was ten years old. I liked the idea of having the complete set again, as I do reread them occasionally and the leather-bound volume includes the same illustrations as the ones in the books I had, so it felt familiar.

The reasoning behind the suggestion was that we don't need to bring any more things into the house that are just going to sit there, collecting dust and mocking us from the bookshelves. (This suggestion isn't limited to just books, mind you, it's just that books are a frequent purchasing option in our house.)

Since Bookcrossing (check out bookcrossing.com. My bookcrossing member "name" is 2of3Rs) , we've both become pretty good about passing books along when we are finished with them.

There are books (and other things), however, that I'm not ready to part with. In Lisa Tracy's OBJECTS OF OUR AFFECTION, she talks about going through he parent's things as they've scaled down and hearing and remembering stories connected to some of the items her parents owned.


    

In the beginning of the book, she describes how her great-nephew is attached to a particular toy...

    "It is a plastic toy milk bottle that moos when you turn it upside down. His toy, from six or seven years ago. He's nine as I write. On this particular morning, I'm moved to suggest that we might get rid of it. Pass it on to someone else, someone younger, perhaps? Yes, he says unthinkingly, then immediately reneges.
    "The milk bottle, he tells me, reminds him of when he and his dad were living in the country. One night, his dad was making popcorn in a skillet, and when he took it off the stove and opened the lid, the fluffed kernels exploded all over the place. 'And when the popcorn blew up, I was looking at the milk bottle, and it put the remembering right in my head,' he explains. The memory still makes him laugh uproariously."

I love that, "puts the remembering right in my head". And things can do that.

As I look over the bookshelves, I see that there are some more books that I am done with, some books about business that I won't be reading again and perhaps are outdated anyway, a few novels that I (or we) read that we are done with.

I also see some books that I'm not ready to part with. For me they evoke the enjoyment of the actual reading of them, like the hardcover copy of BLACK BEAUTY that has a smudge of mud on it that it got when I dropped it walking home from babysitting when I was 12. I don't want another copy of BLACK BEAUTY, I want THAT one.

There's TIME AND AGAIN by Jack Finney, which I read in high school at my friend Sally's recommendation. She was the one who lectured me as we walked to and from school on the merits of being a Democrat. I hadn't given it much thought before then (not being old enough to vote, I suppose), but Sally MADE me think about it. I'm still a Democrat.

And what about THE MISTS OF AVALON? I read this at a friend's urging. It validated questions I had about the patriarchy and hierarchy of the church, with which I'd been struggling.

Bill Bryson's A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING came with me to the hospital when my mother had her stroke. My brother and I took turns reading it, whoever was at the hospital got to have the book. We both loved it. He is a science-y person, me not so much. Nope, not getting rid of that one.

I didn't end up buying the new leatherbound copy of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, and I'm okay with that.

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Good Combination?

A man came to the counter with several magazines. All (but one) of the magazines were marijuana related, including HIGH TIMES and WEED WORLD.



The other magazine was about weapons.



I wondered if this was a good combination of magazines for one person to be buying.

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