Airplane reading

Last week I was supposed to fulfill one of my New Year's resolutions to take a trip somewhere other than Indiana. But unfortunately my plan to head to Denver didn't quite work out the way I had intended it to and I ended up flying straight home to California after my friend's wedding in Indy.

But the condensed trip still helped me make some progress on another resolution. Though I get a little stressed out by air travel - the packing, getting their early enough to make it through security screening, worrying about catching connected flights - the one plus to spending hours in airports, on runways and on planes is that it offers plenty of time to read.

When I travel, I try to bring a mix of reading materials - a couple New Yorkers, which are always plentiful in my house, a lighter magazine like People and a book or two. I rarely get through all the reading materials, but it's nice to have options. This time around, I was low on People magazines since I read those at the gym so I packed two copies of the New Yorker and a random book I found in my room. See part of what prompted resolution No. 1 to read 10 books this year is that I have a cardboard box full of them in my room - gifts from Christmas and birthdays over the last couple of years. I grabbed one out of the box that seemed like it would be light reading and stuffed it into my carry on bag.

When I got through security at the airport, I pulled the book out to kill sometime and that's when I realized it was going to be bad. "A Version of the Truth" is written by two authors, Jennifer Kaufmann and Karen Mack. Now, call me conventional, but I prefer my novels to have just one author and one voice. The pair wrote another book together and I wonder what their process was. Did they trade off chapters? Or did one write the first draft and then the other go through it, adding to it.

The book was not very well-written and it wasn't all that entertaining. But it did offer a break from the in-depth articles in the New Yorker. So I kept reading it. It's one of those books I would have put down after a couple chapters if I had picked it up at home. But being as I had about 12 hours in airplanes and a few more in airports, I kept chugging through it.

The book is about Cassie Shaw who is a 30-something widow who is glad her mean, alcoholic husband died three years earlier. Now it's really hard to find a character sympathetic who wishes her husband dead and then is actually glad when he dies. Even if he was a jerk, she should have had some more complicated feelings than just being happy about it. Cassie doesn't have much going for her. She barely finished high school. She lives with her mom, who is kooky as can be, and she doesn't have a paying job.

She suddenly decides to take things into her own hands - but not by any self-improvement, higher education means. She just lies on a job application and says she has a college degree. She gets hired in the psych department of a college. The more time she spends around the college, she begins to want more out of life - like nice clothes and a good-looking boyfriend. But she is still in the woe-is-me mode for most of the book and it gets old really fast.

The actions of the characters is not believable and a lot of their behavior is inconsistent. The most annoying thing in the book is Sam, Cassie's African gray parrot who not only talks, but seems to converse with Cassie as well as any guests she has. Her conversations with the bird were just one step too much for me. But I nearly finished the book while I was traveling. I only had two chapters to go when I arrived home so I figured I might as well finish it to its very predictable conclusion.

Hopefully the next book I read for the resolution will be better.

'Rejection' book offers a bit of humor

So when it comes to my first resolution to read more books this year, I've been doing a lot better at reading book reviews and compiling a list of books I might want to read in the future than doing the actual reading. I took a break and read two books last month - and now I am three months behind on my New Yorker magazines so I decided to take a little break again from the long-form materials.

I do read a lot of book reviews - some in the New Yorker, some in People Magazine and some in whatever other magazines I read while doing cardio at the gym. I've noticed that People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and some other popular magazines all tend to run reviews of the same books. The New Yorker rarely offer reports on anything that is quite so mainstream and popular.

One of the recent book plugs in People is for one called "Other People's Rejection Letters" and it is edited by Bill Shapiro. At first, I thought it seemed like kind of a mean idea - poking fun at other people's lowest moments. After all, it's hard not to take any rejection a little personal. The few letters used by People's writers to illustrate the book are written by children - to a mother and a grandmother. One is just a kid saying they can't go with grandma because they have other plans and it's pretty funny seeing it in the large print of a young child's handwriting.

I guess rejection is sort of a universal thing. I know I have had my share of it - from friends who back out of plans, to breakups, to getting the brush off from a potential employer. I've gotten rejected by voicemail for a job I had already decided not to take. I've gotten e-mails, handwritten letters and in this new digital age I am sure I will eventually get rejected by text. The thing about rejection is that it smarts in the moment, but I have to say that most of my rejections end up to be funny stories down the road.

There was the rejection by my first sort of boyfriend, with whom I never really got past the "hanging out" phase when I was fifteen. After two-intense weeks of talking on the phone, holding hands and a kiss or two, he wrote me a short letter about how we needed to stop "hanging out" because of our different views on alcohol. It was news to me as we were 15 and the topic had never come up between us. Of course, the most recent time I saw him a couple years ago, he was pretty heavy into drinking so maybe he was right way back then.

And just a few months ago I reconnected with a former coworker on Facebook. We exchanged a few messages and all seemed well. In my last message to him I said if he ever wanted to catch a movie to let me know because I write a weekly movie column for the Pinnacle. And he never responded back. Message received.

Perhaps the book is really just a way to help everyone find a little humor in their past rejections and to realize that it really is a universal experience. It sucks to go through it, but I guess the optimistic way to look at it is that by risking the rejection we can end up with great opportunities, in love and jobs, and whatever else.

I haven't added the book to my to-read list yet, but I might get to it someday. After all, I'd hate to make editor Bill Shapiro.

Dream a little dream

One of my coworkers and I often share the things we dream about, especially when they are oddly work related. He has dreamt he had two mountain lines perching on his chest. "It was uncomfortable, but not unbearable," he said. I suggested perhaps his two part-time jobs were weighing down on him.

Most of the time, however, our dreams are a lot more obvious. We both work at a newspaper, which is a deadline driven business so maybe it's not unusual that we both have the same recurring dream. In mine, I am back at school, most often at Gilroy High School, and I suddenly realize that I have missed a class all semester and I have a final or major project coming due. The class is almost always a math class, but once in awhile it is a photography class. The dream just kind of goes around in circles with me thinking I need to get the project/final done, but not really doing anything to get it done. A lot of times in my dream I am semi-aware that I am dreaming.


My coworker has the same dream, and yes, his missed class is often math (we are both not very good with numbers.) He said he doesn't think he stresses about deadlines, but maybe he does subconsciously.

Dreams are a weird thing and that was reiterated by an article on nightmares I read in a November issue of the "New Yorker." According to the article, 20 percent of people have lucid dreams, where they are aware that they are dreaming and have some control over their dreams. And through the years people report differently whether they dream in color or black and white. One expert in the article said dreams are probably more like sketches, and when we wake up our brains fill in all the dimension and color details. My own dreams seem to be in color, and sometimes they are lucid - at least I think they are.


The article was interesting because some of the researchers who are treating people who suffer from extreme nightmares are not trying to figure out what triggers them or what might be the root cause - instead they are trying to teach people how to control what they dream about. They have the patients practice visualizing dream scenarios in the day where they change the scary or disturbing elements into more benign imagery. They are having some success.


I can understand that happening since I will often have dreams that are seem to relate to something I watched or read before bed. A few weeks ago, I watched a video of a friend's baby on Facebook before going to bed. That night I dreamt about babysitting him and that he wouldn't stop crying. I couldn't wait for his dad to pick him up. And a few months ago when I chatted with a guy I sort of have a crush on before bed, I dreamt about him that night. The dream basically clarified that I was unsure if he reciprocated the feelings.

When I reconnected with someone I knew in college while I studied in Ireland, I dreamt about him. I tried to get him to eat jelly bellies and let me borrow his car to drive around Ireland. I don't really get the jelly bellies, but maybe borrowing his car just has to do with my desire to take a vacation in Ireland someday.

I try not to analyze my dreams too much, but it is funny to swap stories about the most odd ones with my friends and coworker. And lucky for me, the nightmares are few and far between lately.

Munro stories collect tragedy and hope

Last week I finished reading the third book of the year (Resolution No. 1.) It was not one of the many books piled in a box in my room from birthdays and Christmas, but a book I picked out somewhat on a whim.

I always read the book reviews in magazines and try to keep in mind the ones that sound interesting - but usually I forget them all by the time I get to the library or a bookstore. There was one review that stuck with me, however, a review of short stories by Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness." There was a line taken from one of the stories that struck me enough to make me want to read the book.

A few weeks later I was at Barnes and Noble with an ample supply of gift cards and I happened across the book. Unlike a novel, the short stories sort of fit into my schedule the way a magazine would - I could read one story a night the way I read one article a night. There was no desire to stay up way past my normal bedtime to find out what would happen next. And with a mix of short stories, there is always a chance that if one story is not so great, the next one might be good. With a novel, if it's bad at the beginning, it's probably bad all the way through.

Though the stories in Munro's latest collection are unrelated, they do have some common themes. Most of the stories are told from the point of view of women, and several of them are women who've made it to late life without having children. There is something of a dreary outlook on relationships to the collection.

My two favorites in the book are the first story and the last. I liked the stories because they are the most different from the rest of the pieces in the book. The first is about a young woman who is travelling on a bus to visit someone who is in an institution of sorts. Long before much is revealed I guessed what had happened to the woman's family. But it is told in such a way that I could feel the young woman's pain as she struggled to come to turns with the worst tragedy of her life and move on.

The last story is the one that made me want to buy the book. It is the longest piece in the book, and the most moving one. It is about a woman who settles for a marriage of convenience so that she can study mathematics in an era and in a country where women are not encouraged to do much beyond raise a family. Then when she is older, she settles for a man who isn't really interested in a commitment. She accepts a lot less than she really wants from him. And she rethinks every moment she has with him, trying to find any sign that he might want more.

A friend reminds her to "Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."

It is such a succinct reminder of how two people can experience the same moment in such different ways.

A lot of the stories in the book are a little heartbreaking - and in taking a break from reading "The New Yorker," I was disappointed to see that several of the stories were ones I'd already read in recent years in "The New Yorker." But there are some pieces where a little ray of hope shines through in the most unusual of circumstances.

A Sedaris fix and some insight

I needed a David Sedaris fix and I got one in the latest issue of "The New Yorker." I am actually backlogged on the magazine, which I read pretty much cover to cover. For anyone who hasn't read it, it is a throwback to the magazines of old, with articles of long word count and not many pictures. I try to read them in order so whatever current events are covered don't get too outdating. But when the issue came last week I saw Sedaris on the table of contents and I rotated it to the top of the pile.

I can't remember what made me pick up my first David Sedaris book, but I bought "Me Talk Pretty One Day" at Barnes and Noble. The personal essays were so laugh-out-loud funny I was hooked on him. I liked him enough that when he stopped by the Flint Center for a reading I had to see him. While in line for a book signing, I overheard his conversation with a young couple in front of me that led me to believe his humor isn't just manufactured for his writing, but he genuinely is a funny and witty guy.

I was pleasantly suprised when I started reading "The New Yorker" (which I started only after I was accepted to grad school and a professor told me to make it part of my summer reading list) and found that I could get a fix in between Sedaris' book publications.

The most recent piece by Sedaris is not only funny, but also offered some insight. He writes about a trip to Australia and how a friend took them around to the outback. The friend explained to them a metaphor about life as a stove that has four burners - one represents friends, one family, one health and one work. The friend told Sedaris that to be successful, a person has to turn off one burner. To be truly successful, they have to turn off two.

It seems like an apt description of my life lately since for the last year I feel like work has taken over. I stopped hanging out with friends. I stopped going to the gym for six months. Probably the only reason the family burner didn't go out is because I live with them. I told a colleague about the theory and he said he could relate - his friends and health burner were out just like mine.

Luckily, I don't mind being just mildy successful and the last month I have started getting back to the gym and have been making more of an effort to see old friends, and maybe make some new ones.

Thanks to Sedaris at least I know I am not the only one who struggles to find a balance.