I'm on Twitter

This isn't really breaking news, cos I've been on Twitter for awhile now.  I started using it probably sometime over the summer when I needed to learn more about it for work.  My co-worker and I set up our own personal accounts and I've been hooked since.  I can't really explain the appeal but I'm on the thing all the time so it's got its hooks in me. 

Why am I bothering to tell you about my Twitter account?  Because slowly people from the book blogging universe found me over there.  Then I started tweeting my blog entries because someone recommended it as a good way to share your blog.  Originally I was keeping the 2 separate because my Twitter account isn't really about books so much as it's about whatever is on my mind at that moment.  But now the two worlds have collided so I figured it was time to add a Twitter button onto my blog.  It's over there on the left.

I love that the bird looks terrified.

I follow a few different book bloggers and it was fortuitous that the day I decide I should just suck it up and add a button is also the day Brenna from Literary Musings asked on Twitter about any good follow buttons.  And Greg from The New Dork Review recommended a site that looked pretty good, so I piggy-backed on that advice and here we are now.

So if you want to follow me, the button is now up!  Just fair warning, the Twitter account isn't book centric so don't expect great literary witticisms.  Not that you're getting those here but you really shouldn't look for them there.

Favorite Places to Read

I skipped out on last week's Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, because I couldn't really think of literary characters I'd want to be BFFs with.  I usually do the top 10 if either it's something I've thought about before or if it's something I can think of some answers to right off the bat.  But like the worst character names, the topic just made me go "meh," so I didn't bother. But I am back this week for the topic: Favorite Places to Read.  As usual we'll see if I can make it to 10.  Also as usual (though I don't always state it) the answers are in the order I thought of them, not in any "most to least" favorite order.  I usually read curled up on the couch or maybe in bed but here are my favorite places to read

1. Central Park - At least when the weather is nice.  I love Central Park and it is probably one of my favorite places to be overall.  Having a book only makes it better.  I usually read over by the baseball fields, since I'm usually with Boyfriend and we're either watching some team play or he and his friends are playing.
2. The Beach - For the most part any beach will do, so long as it has nice sand, it's not too windy, it's warm and I have an umbrella.  I am far to pale to actually sit out in the sun so the umbrella is key.
3. My friend's giant pink chair - I wish I had a picture of this thing.  It was a chair you could comfortably fit 2 (very close) people in.  It was squishy and soft and the best place to curl up. 
4. Boston Public Gardens - If you've seen Good Will Hunting the Public Gardens are where Robin Williams and Matt Damon go to sit on a bench and talk, out by the swan boats.  It has more shade (so pale) and more benches than the Commons has and is generally a more relaxing place.
5. The T - I know, I know, I hate the T so how is this one of my favorite reading spots? Hear me out: if I have to take a long subway ride AND I get a seat (preferably with no one on either side of me) I can get a lot of quality reading done because I'm so focused on blocking everything out that I can get fully absorbed into the book.  I haven't had this experience in awhile and I miss it.

Alright, so I only made it to 5.  I'm sure there are more great places to read I'm not thinking of.  So where are your favorite places to read?

Morning 007

Normal day at the office

I decided to give some Ian Fleming a go, mostly because of my brother, for 2 reasons.  He's a James Bond fan and I'm pretty sure his last job was for a James Bond-esque villain.  Maybe not Dr. No but at least someone like Hank Scorpio (who by the way is one of my favorite one-time Simpsons characters).  He described some of the projects he was working on and they all seemed to involve lasers pointed at a person, usually aimed at the jugular or eyeball.  Sure, he claims it was part of some elaborate lie detector test that involves measuring heart rate or eye movements, but I assume it's a lie detector that involves making the person tell the truth or you shoot them with lasers.  He also recently described part of his office as the "command center" and this is apparently not just some nerdy nickname but the actual name of the place.  I've advised him to quit immediately if they ask him to start wearing a jumpsuit to work.

I haven't see the movie Dr. No, so other than the usual Bond hijinks I wasn't too sure what I was in for.  My initial thoughts are this book has not aged all that well.  The book was written in '58 and displays the racial sensitivities you would expect of a book from this time.  One of the characters, Quarrel, is described as "West Indian" and is given the dialect to match.  I hate when authors do this because it makes it that much more difficult to read unless I'm reading it out loud, which is generally discouraged when in public.  Here's a bit of his speech describing Dr. No:

"'Him have plenty watchmen. An' guns - machine guns.  An' a radar.  An' a spottin' plane.  Frens o' mine have landed dere and him never been sen again. Dat Chinee keep him island plenty private.  Tell dat trut', cap'n', Quarrel as apologetic 'dat Crab Key care me plenty.'" (40)

So that's been fun to wade through so far. There are also some Chinese-Africans called Chigroes (racial sensitivity!)

Even though I haven't seen Dr. No, I can't help but already have a vision of what Bond is like.  Thus far he's somewhere between Connery and Craig, although I understand that Bond as Fleming has written him is even more amoral than the version Craig plays.  So far M fits this description.  In the first few pages he's listing off organs that his agents can go without, including: "one of his two lungs" and "two of his four or five quarts of blood," (13).  Considering this is Bond's boss, no wonder he's a bad ass.  There's also a picture of Fleming on the inside cover and I now picture him as M.  He has this expression on his face that says "I'm tired of your bullshit and if you keep this up, I'm putting this cigarette out in your eye."  M is so well defined in a few pages, I'm hoping Bond gets fleshed out more.  Hopefully once Quarrel has wandered off so I don't need to read his lines anymore.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes.  If anyone has read any of the Bond books, let me know which you liked better: the book or the movies.  I know in general the books are better but so far this has the potential to show me that I like the film version of Bond.

Fleming, Ian.  Dr. No.  Penguin Books, New York.  2002.

Travel is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses

I mentioned in my previous Neither Here Nor There post that the Italy portion of Bryson's journey through Europe is my favorite part and this post would most likely just be a series of quotes.  I gave you a little bit of false hope that this might be something other than that, but nope!  I love Bryson's voice in his writing and I love Italy so I think the best thing to do is to share my favorite quotes from the Italy chapters.  These are the quotes that made me laugh, reminded me of Italy or, most often, a little of both.

I feel I should, at least briefly, explain my Italian infatuation.  First, despite the red hair, I am part-Italian.  I'm originally from Northern New Jersey (think Sopranos locales and please ignore Jersey Shore) so I grew up assuming everyone was at least a little Italian.  And because my grandmother is very proud that she is Italian and my other non-Italian relatives didn't really seem to care too much about their background, I most identify with this portion of my heritage.  Second, I studied in Italy for a semester in college.  My friend and I picked Italy because when I mentioned other countries to my grandma she got nervous (this is her normal state-of-mind).  When I mentioned we might go to Italy she lit up because see, that's not a foreign country, that's "home," so it's not scary to her.  And off we go...

"The Italians appear to have devised a way of having sex without taking their clothes off, and they were going at it hammer and tongs up there.  I had an ice cream and watched to see how many of the lovers tumbled over the edge to be dashed on the rocks below, but none did, thank goodness.  They must wear suction cups on their back." (133)

"I love the way Italians park.  You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you've just missed a parking competition for blind people...Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap." (134)

"Italians are entirely without any commitment to order.  They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.  They don't line up, they don't pay their taxes, they don't turn up for appointments on time, they don't undertake any sort of labor without a small bribe, they don't believe in rules at all." (135)

"[Italians] are too busy expending their considerable energies on the pleasurable minutiae of daily life - on children, on good food, on arguing in cafes - which is just how it should be." (136)

"I stood there for ages, perhaps for an hour and a half, then turned and walked back toward my hotel and realized that I had fallen spectacularly, hopelessly, and permanently in love with Italy." (153)

"I passed the Istituto Tecno Commerziale [in Naples], where a riot seemed to be in progress both inside and outside the building.  Students were hanging out the upstairs windows, tossing down books and papers and holding shouting exchanges with their colleagues on the ground.  Were this was some sort of protest or merely part of the daily routine I couldn't tell." (155)

"I walked down to the Uffizi Palace and around the Piazza della Signoria and the other fixtures of the old part of town and it was the same everywhere - throngs of people, almost all of them from abroad, shuffling about in that aimless, exasperating way of visitors, in groups of five and six, always looking at something about twenty feet above ground level.  What is it they see up there?" (160)

"I remembered reading that it was near Lake Como that Mussolini was found hiding after Italy fell to the Allies, and I figured it must have something going for it if it was the last refuge of a desperate man. (174).

Title quote from page 131

Bryson, Bill.  Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.  HarperCollins, New York.  1992.

Literary Blog Hop: My favorite poem

Time again for the Literary Blog Hop hosted by The Blue Bookcase.  The question for this week is what is your favorite poem and why?

When given the choice between poetry and prose, I tend to go for a novel.  Having said that, I'm still too fickle to pick one poem I like most of all, so here are a few I love. 

Ulysses by Tennyson.  I was instantly taken by this poem the first time I read it in a high school English class.   Ulysses is tired of being in Ithaca and wants another adventure and I love the voice Tennyson gives Ulysses: "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/ To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"  Wonderful call to action.

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. From high school through times in college I had this poem up on my wall.  I just love the nonsense verse and I can't help but hear the opening and closing lines in the Cheshire Cat's voice.

Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare.  I love Shakespeare and this is my favorite of all of his sonnets.  It's the opening lines that get me: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments. Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds;" If I were to get a tattoo, it would most likely be from this poem.  So I suppose that means this is my favorite poem.

What's your favorite poem?

I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe

I want to start my posts about Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe by saying this is one of my favorite books and one I have read multiple times.  If I start relentlessly gushing, just keep in mind I am unable to give an unbiased review.  Though now that I've typed that I realize that suggests that I believe my other reviews/posts/whathaveyou are unbiased and I don't really think that's true.  Well, now that I've spent the entire intro contradicting myself, onto the book.

If it wasn't clear from the title, the book is about Bryson's travels through Europe. (Though if it wasn't clear, perhaps you should move along. Maybe lie down for awhile.) He somewhat retraces the trip he had taken years earlier with his friend Stephen Katz, a character you may remember from A Walk in the Woods. He tells stories about his first trip, describes his trials and tribulations navigating new cities, and describes all the wonderful and frustrating things about Europe.

It's the style that gets me.  Bryson has the best voice for a travelogue. At least in my opinion, having hardly read any other travelogues.  None that I can think of right now anyway.  I don't really want to read about spiritual journey about self-discovery, I want to hear a funny story by a clumsy, not-very-suave guy as he goes to places that I want to see.  I've traveled a little around Europe (some Ireland, some Italy) but my current financial situation means I won't be jetting off to the continent whenever my little heart desires.  This acts as a nice stand-in if I get the urge to travel but the ATM makes a sad trombone sound when I check my balance.  And let's face it, when I travel my experiences are much closer to the awkward situations Bryson finds himself in than any journey of enlightenment.

The book is a quick read, one of the reasons I've read it so many times.  And I tend to pick it up if I've just read something I didn't enjoy or if I want to go back to something familiar.  I know all the funny situations in the book, yet they make me laugh every time.  Bryson has a fantastic way of describing events or general observations in this amazingly witty way.  I know I've said it before but I'm pretty sure he could write about paint drying and I'd still be cracking up.  Here's a quick example of his view on countries living up to their stereotypes:

"Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let on to the invention of the automobile." (35)

The book isn't Bryson going to a city, telling you where he ate, what museums he say and providing travel recommendations. You'd need a Lonely Planet book if that's what you want. He'll discuss the basic feeling of the city: the abundance of hippies in Amsterdam, the air of sophistication and wealth in Aachen, the fact that all Parisian drivers want him dead.  He breaks up his current journey with tales of his previous trip with Katz, as well as stories from the cities history or of his own history or just small bits of advice while traveling, such as the importance of making sure a German restaurant does not have a polka band that will surprise you during your meal.  As he says; "It should have been written into the armistice treaty that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms," (73).

I'm almost to my favorite part of the book, when he gets to Italy.  Reading this part always makes me long to go back.  I'm thinking that post will possibly just be a series of quotes because I'm not sure I can say anymore that I haven't already shared, yet I'm not quite finished talking about it yet.  Perhaps I'll come up with something incredibly insightful in the time being but I wouldn't count on it.

Title quote from page 35

Bryson, Bill.  Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.  HarperCollins, New York.  1992.