Nerd Nerd Nerd Nerdy McNerderson

Hello my lovelies … is it officially fall already? For most everyone in the nation, it’s “sweaters, boots, warm coffee shops and bars in the wind and rain” time. For ME, I just turned on the fan in my bedroom for the first time since living in SF. It’s October 17th and 80 degrees out. Everyone wasn’t lying when they kept saying, “SF has an Indian Summer!” when I was freezing my teeties off in August here.

As much as I love the sun and warmth, what I REALLY love about the close of summer and start to fall is the chance to hunker down a bit more, stay inside, snuggle up with a good book and not leave the house all day on a Sunday. The best!

It’s officially been a year since I’ve owned my Kindle, and I’ve never read so much in my life. I’m not sure if I really do read quicker on my Kindle, or if it’s because there’s no lag time between books, or if it’s easier for me to discard the books I don’t like. But if I had to rate all my years of reading from 1 to 10, this year takes the cake. I’ve read TWENTY-THREE BOOKS. That’s nearly two a month! Craze.

I know many of you are readers too, so I wanted to share my reading list with you from the past year. It’s sorta half-hazardly in order from favorite to least favorite, but all are worth reading because the only one I really didn’t like but forced myself through was Kristin Hannah’s, “Magic Hour” (NOT as good as Firefly Lane).

Top Five Books Je Thinks You Can’t Miss (in 3rd Person)

1. The Number One Spot def goes to “Just Kids,” by Patti Smith. One of my favorite books ever. You can read by review of it here.
2. The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (I counted this as three – I’m not one to jump on teeny book trends *cough* Twilight *cough* but these books are FANTASTIC)
3. Room by Emma Donoghue
4. Girls In White Dresses by Jennifer Close
5. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

The Rest of the Read-This-Year List:

1. The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch
2. My Year With Eleanor by Noelle Hancock
3. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
4. Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
5. Little Bee by Chris Cleave
6. Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
7. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
8. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
9. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
10. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
11. Yoga Bitch by Suzanne Morrison
12. Bossy Pants by Tina Fey
13. Bright Lights, Big Ass by Jen Lancaster
14. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
15. Magic Hour by Kristin Hannah

A few books I started and read probably at least half but couldn’t get through the rest:

Here’s what I have on my upcoming reading list – I can’t stop bookmarking on Amazon!

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe

As I mentioned earlier this week, I started reading Just Kids, a memoir by American singer-songwriter, Patti Smith.

Patti writes about her lifetime love and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe – a well-known photographer who passed away in 1989 from AIDS. Starting in 1967 when they met each other, the story is set in New York City during the 60s and 70s, a backdrop for the Vietnam War and an artistically brilliant time in America’s history that included Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol and The Factory.

It was the summer Coltrane died. Flower children raised their arms… and Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, and the summer of love… and it was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe.

I’ve always had a fascination with the 60s and 70s, with flower children and a lifestyle that was free of sexual and drug inhibitions. I’ve often remarked that I’d love to be reincarnated as a hippie in the 70s. I am absolutely fascinated with this time frame, so Just Kids seemed like a perfect book for me. And oh – was I so right! I’m only 20% of the way through it (so says my Kindle), but I’m already in love. Her prose is brilliant, her story nostalgic and fascinating, and their love for each other magnificent.

Just Kids was Amazon.com’s Best Books of the Month, January 2010, and a National Book Award winner in November – I highly recommend it!

Currently Feeling: Crazy busy – why is it that going on vacation is so dang stressful? I’m squeezing two jobs, for two weeks, into one.
Currently Anticipating: Hawaii! Duh. Less than a week away now!
Currently Needing: To curb my online shopping habit. Ahh! So addicting to receive boxes in the mail!

Movin’, shakin’ and money savin’

Last week, I was flipping through last month’s Self magazine, and I stumbled across a little box about BooksFree.com, which is basically Netflix for book lovers. If you know me AT ALL or read this blog AT ALL, you know I’m a huge fan of reading and have had a huge Summer Reader list. Not only do I love to read books, but I love to buy them too. I have a rather large (color coordinated at that) bookshelf in my apartment and for some weird reason, it gives me a strange little joy to add books to the shelves every time I finish one.

But the thing is about not having a job, is that you have to learn to cut corners; and buying books in threes and fours every month is rather expensive. So I looked into this BooksFree.com site, and I AMSOFREAKINGEXCITED. The concept is genius, if you ask me. I wish I would have thought of it… I only have to pay $10.99 a month to receive two in two out, just like Netflix. That’s less than most paperbacks you’ll buy at bookstores. And the selection is larger and more available (no long waiting lists for new books) than your local library. You can even borrow cookbooks! So in some ways, it can be a “try before you buy” thing, and you don’t have to keep crappy books you don’t like.

I signed up immediately, of course. The first two books I have coming to me are:

• Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World by Lisa Lillien
• I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

And some additional titles in my queue:

• The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb
• Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
• The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• Unaccustomed Earth: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana by Haven Kimmel
• The Tender Bar: A Memoir by J. R. Moehringer
• Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
• Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

I can’t wait to get started! AND… to save even more money, I checked my absolute favorite online shopping saving site – RetailMeNot.com, which has coupon codes for nearly every place I shop online at, so I always check it. And sure enough, they have a coupon for 25% off your first month at BooksFree.com! (DAX8)

Happy reading, lovers.

Currently Feeling: A little shocked and weirded out that it’s already September. This summer went SOOOO fast!
Currently Anticipating: Labor Day weekend and my boyfriend all to myself!
Currently Needing: To finish my professional Web site – so damn time consuming.

Summer burns fast and bright in this part of the world

I ditched The Year of Living Biblically (I tend to be fickle with both religion and books that don’t keep my interest, so it’s somewhat fitting) and started reading Firefly Lane. Too many people told me how good it is, and well, it’s like $500 was burning a hole in my pocket. I needed to start it straight away. For me, a good book I can’t put down is like a drug I need and think about all the time.

And boy, oh boy, am I glad I did. I’m only 120 pages in – and I’m totally sucked in already. I’ve been averaging approximately 60 pages a morning before I force myself to put it down and get started with my day.

I mentioned in my summer reading list that the book is set in Seattle…I read this passage this morning:

[source]

Outside, it looked like a postcard of Seattle; the kind of blue-skied, cloudless, picture-perfect day that lured out-of-towners into selling their homes in duller, less spectacular places and moving here. If only they knew how rare these days were. Like a rocket blaster, summer burned fast and bright in this part of the world and went out with equal speed… page 67, Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah

I love, love this paragraph. It’s SO true, and it showed me that this author just didn’t set her book in Seattle – she’s actually from here. It’s a simple paragraph like this (or like the one I posted about a year ago) that makes me fall in love with an author. This could have only been written by a Seattle native, and I couldn’t have said it better myself. Seattle summers are amazing and luring and gorgeous and sparkly. It’s like the whole city has been washed all year, and gleams the four months the sun comes out. Summer is an infectious disease that the whole city and all its inhabitants catch. People seem lighter, happier – everyone is a little bit more busy. This city comes alive.

And I’m going to enjoy every freakin minute of it before the rocket takes off once again, awashing us in grey.

Currently Feeling: Disappointed in this season’s Bachelorette. Seriously? She has kept some pretty big D-bags around and got rid of a freakin cute and nice guy last night.
Currently Anticipating: Getting my scary doctor’s appointment over with on Thursday!
Currently Hating: The phrase, “Nice guys finish last.” Bull shit. Nice guys are the greatest.

Summer Reading

Do you remember, as a kid, those summer reading programs at your local library? There’d be some sort of contest and a cool, colorful list where you could pencil in all the books you read – well, I LOVED those. I lived for them. I wanted to do nothing more than fill that list up and then some. That’s just how nerdy I am on the inside. (Cause clearly I’m fabulously unnerdy on the outside. Like doi). Anyway, I’m bringing back the summer reading list this summer. I mentioned last week that I was super excited to have a little more time to read the looong list of books waiting in my reading queue… I seem to have good books coming out of my ears these days. Here’s what’s on the agenda for this summer; let’s see how many pages I can check off.

Waiting on my bookshelf already:

Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
My former coworker highly recommended this one. She said it was a story of friendship, but not overly girly and cheesy. I’m a sucker for novels about best friends since it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy about the girl friends I have. It also takes place in Seattle, so that’s kinda fun!

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this book was sold out of the last two books stores I went to. I figured it must be good. The book follows a taxi driver’s story in modern India and was recommended if you’re a fan of Slumdog Millionaire, which um, DUH, I am.

Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman
I was sent this book by the lovely Vanessa, who was my partner for a book swap on Just a Small Town Girl. We had to do some emailing back and forth about possible books to send since I was paranoid I was going to get something I already had. The book she chose follows seven perspectives of characters affected by the abduction of a 6 year old and was rated 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon.com!

Bought by Anna David
Harper Collins contacted me again, similar to when I received the copies of Thanks for Coming, and sent a copy of Bought to me a couple weeks ago. It’s a little more chic lit than I’m into these days, but I thought I’d give it a try. Apparently it delvs into women as escorts and the price you pay to get what you want. I sell my body regularly for diamond earrings and Cristal, so I thought, at the very least I could relate.

Waiting on my Amazon.com WishList:

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
I found this book on a reading list from NPR radio. This one sounds a bit creepy, but super fascinating – “The only survivor of the ‘Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas’ massacre that wiped out her family is forced to confront the lies she told that convicted her brother of the killings.”

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
This book keeps popping up on recommended reading lists and in bookstores everywhere I am, so even though I’ve read the back of the book at least twice – Oscar is a 300-pound-plus ‘lovesick ghetto nerd’ with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. – and it didn’t immediately grab me, I’m going to give it a try.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
The most recent, 2009 Pulitzer winner, this book is a series of short linked stories about a gruff, 60-something school teacher in a coastal town in Maine. I’m not usually a fan of short stories, but much like Oscar Wao, the whole Pulitzer thing sucks me in. Slap an award on the cover of a book, and I’ll probably purchase it.

(That’s all I’m going to highlight for sake of length, but just so you know, I also have My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler, Getting Stoned with Savages by J. Maarten Troost – the follow up to The Sex Lives of Cannibals, which I just finished – and I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley on my list. Who freakin’ knows if I’ll be able to get through all of these).

Currently Feeling: Tan and relaxed after my week of beaching and sleeping in. Next week – time to crack down on resumes.
Currently Anticipating: Camping this weekend – it’s our first camping trip of the summer with The Mini.
Currently Needing: To desperately clean my room. I have zero excuse for not having the time – I just don’t wanna! *Clenches fists and beats them on the ground*

Psst…this post is about S-E-X, oh, and a pretty sweet giveaway

A few weeks ago, I was approached by HarperCollins to do a book review of Thanks for Coming: One Young Woman’s Quest for an Orgasm by Mara Altman. My immediate reaction was, um, YES because a) I’m obsessed with memoirs and b) who doesn’t love to read/write/talk about or have sex? Not this girl!

My lovely review copy came just in time for me to pack it with me on the plane to Mexico. I started it right away while lying poolside on day one, and HELLO, I couldn’t put it down! I kinda wanted my BF to go off on solo snorkeling trips all the time, just so I could be left alone with the book. Now, if you know me, you know that I read a lot of books and a review like that should come highly coveted. [I'm not just giving a rave review for shits and giggles or suck-up points.]

At age 26 Altman realizes that she’s never had an orgasm and goes on an emotional, physical and sometimes spiritual quest for one. Immediately you’ll probably have the reaction that my boyfriend did when I told him about the book, “Not even with a vibrator?”

No. Not even that. And for the first 100 pages I was like, “Girl! Just go out and buy a freakin vibrator!” as she carefully, with the detail of a true journalist, logs all of her past sexual relationships, growing up with a sexually open “naked family,” and her emotional attachments, or nonattachments, that have prevented her from orgasming. Pretty soon, everyone in her story was telling her to just.go.out, and buy a VIBRATOR too, but for Altman, it was more of a personal journey and exploration. Altman’s quest turned from simply searching for orgasm, to searching for the sexual being in her that would let go of all inhibitions, insecurities and just LOVE being a woman, even with all the grody details that womanhood sometimes entails.

Altman is insightful, witty (even the mere chapter titles crack me up) and delightfully honest. And what keeps the book rolling, page after page, is her secret door into the crazy underworld of sex. I don’t even know where she obtained half the contacts she did, but as she searches for her orgasmic self and the MEANING OF ORGASM, she spends time with sex workers and scientists, goes to sex shows and conventions, takes off on trips with a sex colony, interviews women that have been deemed the original, ALL-KNOWING sources of the female orgasm, and regularly experiments with her “sacred whore.”

You’ll want to read this book, if for nothing else than to kick up your sex vibe a bit – if you read about sex, you’re thinking about sex, and it pretty much makes you want to have sex all the time. I think I wanted to have sex 462 times a day while I read this book. That might be TMI, but nothing like the TMI you’ll read in Thanks for Coming…

So, the book went on sale today, but I have five lovely copies to give away to you, blog readers! Isn’t that exciting? All you have to do is enter the contest by telling me in the comments how many people you’ve slept with!

Joke.

Just leave any comment, no special response necessary, and you’ll be entered. If your comment doesn’t link to a site, be sure to leave your email or send it to me privately at whatjesaid@gmail.com. If you have a Twitter account, and Tweet about the contest, I’ll give you a double entry. The giveaway closes on Friday, and I will choose five winners at random and mail out your copy of the book this weekend!

(P.S. The first person to leave a comment automatically wins a book just because your Twitter or RSS skills rock).

Currently Feeling: Groggy. I couldn’t stop watching Trading Spouses last night. Those people are craaazy!
Currently Anticipating: Checking out some more sweet condos/apartments tonight. I’m anxious to make a decision this week!
Currently Needing: To get back into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I opted for lighter reading during vacation, and now I’m not into it.

Instantly spend three times longer in the grocery store!

This past weekend I picked up “Eat This, Not That” after listening to all of my co-workers talk about it (I am easily coaxed onto bandwagons). As I move comfortably and sometimes awkwardly through my 20s, I am increasingly more concerned and aware with the food I buy. Everything in my pantry and lunchbox is low sugar, low calorie, whole wheat, high fiber, blah, blah, blah. It’s sorta funny because I don’t even blink on the weekends when pizza is ordered, and high-calorie lunches and dinners are consumed. I swear that 75% of the calories that make me a little squishy come from weekend drinking and eating, but I digress.

During the week, however, I’m usually straight as an arrow with my diet. What caught my interest with this particular “diet” book is that it dissects the labels, ingredients and misnomers in the grocery store. It compares items in every part of the store that you think are healthy vs. what really are healthy. ie: “Healthy” items to avoid. For instance, instead of eating Kellog’s Smart Start Strong Heart cereal (with more than 10 itemized sugars and sweeteners), you should eat Kashi’s Vive cereal. Or that some organic, light, or fat free yogurts contain as much sugar as a scoop of ice cream or Kit Kat. Or how to pick your butter, peanut butter and cheese. It even goes through snack isles, showing the better corn chip, the better cracker, the better hot dog (Kosher beef even beat out turkey!), the better cookie.

See, the food industry has caught on that it’s popular now for items to be healthy and organic, so they “trick” you with false labels, using “light,” “organic” and “healthy” whenever they can, but to keep the taste, they make up for decreased calories by increasing the amount of sugars and additives. “Eat This, Not That” breaks those labels down, dissects condiments and meat, and explains produce, and its nutritional breakdown. The book is fascinating stuff, I tell ya.

There’s only one slight side effect to reading about all of this… Last night I ventured to the grocery store for the first time after finishing the book, and I felt overwhelmed in every isle. Everything was claiming to be healthy, and I had to pick everything up, turn it over, compare ingredients and look for hidden items like “high fructose corn syrup.” I was in every section for a half hour, if not more. I’m pretty sure the people there who caught a glimpse of me picking items up, reading, picking them up again, comparing, thought I was nuts.

I explained the book to someone recently, and they said, “Yeah, but I hesitate and wonder if I really should be worrying about this because I grew up as a kid, eating Top Ramen and Mac n’ Cheese, and I’m fine!”

Good point, I guess. I suppose it’s all relative, and if that helps you feel better after consuming the entire box of Kraft Mac n’ Cheese (something I’m known to do on an occasional basis), then FAB-u-LOUS. But I know I feel slightly better watching the chemicals in my food, and if you do to, pick it up.

Currently Feeling: Motivated.
Currently Anticipating: A double date for TheatreSports with Bestie Amanda and her boy tomorrow night, and Super Bowl parties on Sunday!
Currently Needing: To swap out my fiction book right now, I’ve lost interest in “Saving Fish From Drowning,” so haven’t been reading…next is “Save Karyn” one of the books from my favorite blogger, Karyn Boznak at Pretty in the City.

The One After You

In bed, Neil asked me if I’d ever been close to getting married.
I told him a little about Chris: He’d grow up in Manhattan, gone to Brown, and worked as an advocate for homeless people. I said that we’d been engaged for three weeks when I decided not to go through with it.
“Why?”
“I saw that getting married wasn’t going to change anything,” I said. “It would just be more of the same.”
“Which was…?”
I said, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
He said, “So, you don’t regret it?”
“He died,” I said. “In a car wreck.”
“Jesus,” he said. “When?”
“About a year later.”
“That’s so sad,” Neil said, holding on to me.
He fell asleep, and for a long time I lay there. Then I got dressed and went downstairs. I poured myself a glass of wine and took it outside to the little porch.
There was a nice moon, not full but fat, and it lit up the apple trees and the petals underneath.
I smoked a cigarette.
What I didn’t tell Neil was that I always thought I’d wind up with Chris, even after we’d broken up, even after he’d died.

Adam had gone with me to the funeral. It was crowded, as a young person’s funeral almost always is. We sat in the back, where it was hard to see and hard to hear.
I was looking at all the women. I could only see them from behind, but I studied each one, their hair and backs. Their necks and shoulders. Their arms. I found myself thinking, You? Did he sleep with you? Here I was at his funeral, overwhelmed not by grief but jealousy.
Reading my mind, Adam told me that whoever these women were they hadn’t meant anything to Chris. “They were just keeping your seat warm,” he said.
As a procession, we walked to Central Park, past the carousel to the field where Chris had played softball on Sundays. There was a metal can of his ashes, and Adam and I each took some and scattered them on the mound. As a joke, I said, as I had a thousand times, “Tell me the truth: You don’t think Chris and I will ever get back together, do you?”
Adam laughed, and so did I; he hugged me, and then I think he knew I was about to cry because he said, “Oh shoot, I think I got Chris on you,” and dusted off my coat.
Adam and I were walking to the Boathouse when a woman stopped us. “You don’t know me,” she said. “I’m Myla. I was the one after you.”
Once she’d gone, Adam said, “See?”
It didn’t make any difference.
The part of my brain that made no sense at all didn’t believe Chris was dead. He’d switched hospital ID bracelets or charts with another patient. He’d tied sheets together and lowered himself out the window. I looked for him, like he was a fugitive in hiding. A hank of blond hair, a jean jacket, and I’d think, Chris.

I’d always thought of him as the one who got away, but right then it stopped being true. I knew that if Chris walked across the moony grass and up to this porch and proposed again I would say no again.
I wondered if he was here—that is, everywhere. I imagined that he was. I imagined him saying, Who’s the guy inside?
As though he had, I made my voice as kind as I could: “He’s the one after you.”

Pg. 275-276, “The Wonder Spot,” Melissa Banks.