Symbolism 101

(The view from my backyard last week, 4 o'clock on a balmy summer afternoon. Plus a tornado watch.)
Things are getting brighter but it's been mighty cloudy for a while now.

Not torrential downpour cloudy, but more like take-a-blog-hiatus cloudy. I was on the edge of a bad spell and needed to spend some time addressing it. I've being getting acupuncture for the past few months and just recently started on some Chinese herbal medicine to "restore my middle qi" and fix my weak spleen. There's some detoxification action happening as well. I'm not sure if I understand it all, but I'm definitely feeling it, in a good way. One of these days, I may actually feel like a real live girl and then the next step is to stay that way. Right now, it's a goal I think I can obtain. Fingers crossed (and needles at the ready.)

There are a lot of things I want to share with you all, but we're going to start with some baby steps. I like blogging but I need it to not seem insurmountable so we'll be spreading out the fiber, travel, Lucy, bookly and deep-thoughts wealth. First up (because they're the closest to the computer) is all of the books since April.

22. Life was a Cabaret: A Tale of Two Fools, A Boat, and a Big-A** Ocean - Becky Coffield. Arizona book club. Not good. If you're going to sell your home and sail around on a boat forever, at least invest in some safety equipment. Also, a 360 degree turn leaves you facing the same way you started. If you want to run away, try a 180. Jeez louise.

23. Julia's Chocolate - Cathy Lamb. Hospital book club. This one I'd recommend with a few me-specific caveats. a) The cover managed to piss me off by the second page; the narrator is fat and her abandoned wedding dress, as pictured, is a size 2, if that. And b) without a speculum and a mirror, you can't see your own vagina. Vulva yes, but vaginas are internal. Intelligent women should know this. Other that those points, it was very good.

24. The Complete Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi. A graphic novel that's recently become a movie. Very interesting look at Iran from a non-conforming female perspective.

25. The Blue and the Gray - John Leekley. There was a CBS mini-series done from this book in the 80's. I vaguely remember that but I read this book approximately 7 billion times. It has to have been 10 years since the last time I picked it up, but I still had large sections memorized. Actually a pretty good overview of the Civil War.

26. The Twelfth Card - Jeffery Deaver. Typical Deaver twinkie book.

27. A Darker Place - Laurie R. King. Not as good as the Mary Russell/Holmes books but okay. The ending was a little rushed.

28. Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861 - David Detzer. Local history (for me at least). I liked this but it needed more maps, I spent way too much time trying to figure out where people were supposed to be. I was forced to supplement with a Manassas Battlefield Park map and even that didn't help too much because all the landmarks apparently have at least 2 names. It took me a long time to finish, but it was worth it. I also learned that there was a Confederate officer named Bartley B. Boone and that, in and of itself, almost made up for the lack of maps.

29. Savannah Blues - Mary Kay Andrews. Hospital book club. Mystery set in Savannah (duh). Cute book.

30. Whatever You Do, Don't Run; True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide - Peter Allison. Arizona book club. The title says it all and it was funny. Recommended.

31. World Without End - Ken Follett. Sequel to Pillars of the Earth, set a few hundred years later in the same town. A Fortunate Find at the library with means you get two weeks to read it. At 1024 pages, that was a challenge but worth it.

32. Grave Talent - Laurie R. King. Not Mary Russell again. Okay.

33. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara. Re-read to prepare for a trip to Gettysburg National Battlefield Park. Love this book and still have a major literary/historical crush on Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. If you haven't read this already, please do. Even if you don't like "war" books, it's so much more than that. But stay away from Chamberlain, he's my imaginary civil war boyfriend.

34. Another Thing to Fall - Laura Lippman. Tess Monaghan book. Very similar to the others.

35. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World - Eric Weiner. Arizona book club. Pretty good.

36. Breach of Duty - JA Jance. Hospital book club. Okay, nothing special. May have been better if I didn't start in the middle of the series.

37. The Cold Moon - Jeffery Deaver. Again, pretty typical Deaver but I think he outdid himself with the twists. I lost count after the third time "nothing was as it seems". At least he redeemed himself with an actual reason for repeating plot points and motivations from The Bone Collector.
I think that's all of them. I'm not on track to hit 100 this year but I'll give it a shot.

More later. Probably.