What I Love Right Now: PIRATE TALK OR MERMALADE

I’ve seen boats as big as this whale. I’ve seen gryphons the same size, with teeth growing in even as they were taking their last breath.


My friends always know about the coolest things first. Better still, they are usually involved. Lauren directed me (and the rest of Twitter) to an excerpt of Terese Svoboda's newest novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade. I read it and now, many minutes later, I am still sighing at the beauty of it.

Pirate Talk is a "novel in voices." It reads like poetry set to pirate-speak (like that option on Facebook). I was immediately reminded of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, another book that left me breathless. The excerpt, the dialogue-instead-of-narration, left out just enough to make me wonder what might be coming next. As if the word "mermalade" wasn't enough to pique my interest.

Pirate Talk or Mermalade comes out on Talk Like a Pirate Day. Read this book.

What I Bought: 3 July

I spent most of the day lazing around and turning healthy food into junk food. I drizzled a Chocolate Brownie Z bar with almond butter, warmed it up on a plate and put a tiny oval of yogurt next to it, with honey on top. Classy, as always.

I went to see The Proposal. I thought that Sandra Bullock's character was too resistant for most of the movie (even until the end), and saw no give from her except when she was yelling about forgetting that people had families or something. Ryan Reynolds is hot, Sandra Bullock can do no wrong, I was in exactly the right mood to see it and, as Roommate #2 says, "it looked cute or whatever." Indeed. 4 out of 5 stars.

Then I bought books. It's not like I have at least 10 waiting to be read or anything. I wanted to pretend I was 15 again, and read an entire book in a night. This may yet happen.

I meant to only buy The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.
Here is what I ended up with:
I am beyond excited about Perfect Fifths. My best freminist (she is a feminist, a hell of a lady, and one of my best friends), Suzy, and I have been squealing over Jessica Darling's adventures since we were 14. That is a lot of adolescent emotion to expend over a work of fiction, but that's what we did, always sharing our opinions each time a new book came out. Marcus Flutie, Jessica's love interest, is (I think) the kind of boy that Suzy loves (especially in 8th grade), and I am a little bit like Jessica (pretty neurotic, an over-analyzer of every situation)--so it's a good series for our friendship. Jessica moved to New York around the same time we did, and so I'm pretty sure that we both missed the 4th book (and I was underwhelmed by the few pages I read in a store), but the 5th, and last, book--told from Marcus' perspective--looks promising.

I picked up Herzog (even though Saul Bellow frightens me)because I wanted to balance out Perfect Fifths and Bridget Jones's Diary with something, and because Saul Bellow is all over the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Most of his books seem to be notable because of their covers which, for the first editions that I saw, only have his name in GIANT letters and then the title, smaller.

I also purchased Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son because it is Amanda Stern's "favorite book in the entire world"--she even made a Stickie on my laptop for it--as well as the various cosmetics pictured above. A cream eyeshadow called "Skinny Jeans," 2 cheap blue eyeliners, and some clear mascara, because I want to have gorgeous, thick eybrows just like Emma Watson (who is a top 5 style role model of mine--and also on Twitter!).

I am on attempt 2 of tea-making tonight, because the whistles of tea-kettles apparently no longer mean that the water is hot enough.