Tolstoy vs. Torrential Rains

I'm a typical American. I have literature by the toilet, just like everyone else. But you know me - I can't be contented to just follow a trend or custom; I have to make it my own. (Call it my over-developed sense of individuality.) So, as bathroom reading, I have a basket of all my Russian novels.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a torrential downpour. This was unlike anything we ever got in the Northwest. I wouldn't have been surprised if Auntie Em had flown by the window, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, not unexpectedly, we had minor flooding in the basement. Nothing too major. Just in my bathroom.

The only things that got wet? A bathroom rug, and...

I wish I had a "before" picture, but trust me that this is over twice its normal size.

Best Map Ever

Jasper Fforde is one of my favorite authors, mostly because he writes fiction about fiction, and his characters jump between our world and "BookWorld," where all the book characters live. (Yes, it gets kind of meta when his characters have characters of themselves because he's writing, well, fiction.)

Anyway, in the sixth installment of the "Thursday Next" series, he publishes a map of Fiction Island, where all the fictional characters live.

If you don't like fiction, you might like this map anyway. If you like fiction, you will chuckle at this map. If you're a fiction-fiend (like I am), you will pour over it and then print up a life-sized version and tape it to your ceiling (probably next to your book-cover posters, am I right?).

Enjoy! (On an unrelated note, does anyone know a printer who does ceiling-sized posters?)

July Reads

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

The Maximum Ride series by James Patterson:
Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment
School's Out - Forever
Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
The Final Warning
Max
Fang
Angel

I think I may have broken my own personal record by reading all seven books in the Maximum Ride series in eight days. Highly acclaimed, the books are fast-paced, well-written, and memorable. The story and characters compelled me to shun human interaction for the greater part of a week. But in the last half of the third book, the author whips out a "save the earth" agenda.

It made me so mad, I didn't want to read the rest of them. But I couldn't stay away, especially since I could get them all as eBooks from the library and read them on my phone. It's a good series; I just hate it when authors have a blatant, pre-determined agenda.

"Children of God," on the other hand, blew me away. It's the sequel to "The Sparrow," which I think everyone should read. It wasn't as good as its prequel, but it was, nonetheless, breathtaking.

"Ella Minnow Pea" (read that out loud) was also on my list of favorite books this month; it's a fun, quick read which I can unreservedly recommend to anyone, especially anyone who loves the alphabet.

Have you read any of these? What did you think? What do you think about authors' pre-determined agendas?

June Reads

Only finished two books in June. In my defense, I had to take an emergency road trip to Oklahoma for a funeral, and driving over 20 hours in a week kiiiiiinda eats into my reading time.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

I don't know if I should count Mockingbird since I've read it a least three or four times, but I always notice something new and interesting when I read it. This time around, I annotated my copy.

A favorite Mockingbird quote, from when Scout's 1st grade teacher is horrified that Scout already knows how to read, and tells her to slow down:

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned how to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from the snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Penderwicks is a fun, young adult book about four sisters about the same distance in age as my own sisters and me. I quite liked how well the author is able to get into the heads of four very different school-age girls without making them seem like grown-ups.

Moby Dick - no progress. :-(