BooKs!

I just found this newly released book, Kaleidoscope, which is deeply inspiring filled with stories and ideas, and beautiful to leaf through too.
You can read more about it here if you are interested.

I've never read so many books in a row that I have enjoyed so much. It got started with The Time Traveler's Wife last year and then it never slowed down since, just one amazing book after another after another! Another really thought provoking one was The World to Come, a mesmerizing fiction novel that was hard for me to read because I never knew how very close to nothing one of my very favorite painters, Marc Chagall, did to save his fellow Soviet Jews, some of whom had been very close friends of his, from being murdered one by one by one by Stalin when he went on his purges to rid Russia of its Jewish intellectuals and artists, this despite his worldwide fame by that time. It starts out at an orphanage where Chagall really did teach art following one of the most brutal pogroms in Russian Jewish history in 1919 when over 100,000 Jews were slaughtered, leaving so many orphans that it was necessary for them to set up special orphanages for all the tens of thousands who had seen their whole families murdered. But the book is about so much more than this. Its also a series of intergenerational love stories and how we as individuals and families sometimes lose our way and stumble our humble way back. I was mesmerized, and very sad too, as I read it but it was one of the best books I had read in some time.

Another way up on my list of recent favorites was The Adventures of Hugo Cabret, a huge, beautiful novel that is part words, part graphic novel/flipbook, about a young orphan hiding out in a Paris train station in the early 1900s and is desperately trying to repair an automaton which he believes will reveal a secret message from his late father. I loved it.

Any suggestions for future reads?!? Any new recent book faves??? I'd love to know.

"As a child, I knew I had one great possession: my body. It was little and quick. I lived within it...I'd wake up in the morning, excited, ready to go out and look at the world. Breakfast would only slow me down. I wanted to leap into the empty lots outside our windows just as soon as I could and see what had happened overnight. As an adult, I met people who talked passionately about their new Rolls Royce. But that isn't a real posession. All we actually have is our body and its muscles that allow us to be under our own power, to glide in the water, to roll down a hill, and jump into someone's arms."

-Allegra Kent

If YoU SeE SoMeOnE WiTh Hair MouSSe In ThEiR Ear DO TeLL ThEm!

All day long yesterday at work I unknowingly to myself walked around with a big dallop of shiny white hair mousse in my left ear. I didn't notice it until almost four o'clock in the afternoon when I caught the top glimpse of it in my rearview mirror. Now instead of putting my mind to what it really needs to be on, mainly studying for my license exam and finishing the first part of a certification program through University of Washington, I can't stop asking myself, "Why oh why oh why did no one tell me?" I keep running in my head all the people I saw and worked with throughout the day- families, my supervisor, students, a gas station attendant. I didn't notice it either in the restroom mirror but then again I was so rushed all day I don't think I looked in the mirror, And why didn't it melt? Or fall out? Are my ears like little magical safety baskets that can store all sorts of stuff I've never considered before now? Swords and lanterns, letters and cupcakes, rifles and fairy tales, ushebtis and massage oils! Maybe I don't need a new purse afterall? I'm thinking about Gene and being from Ukraine, he was with me the first time he had Chinese food. He was about to eat his fortune cookie when I stopped him and said, "Waitwait! Theres something in there!" Mesmerized, he watched me crack it open and pull out his little fortune. Then!, he snatched it back, peering into it with one eye as if it were a seashell, and asking "What else is in there???" The world is full of silly things waiting to be discovered and this may just be the most unnecessary post I have yet written! But! I needed to vent because again, why wouldn't you let someone know they have hair mousse in their ear? I just don't get it! It was a BIG dallop! And what if my left ear is really a secret portal, a gateway to another universe in time altogether? Maybe only I could see the mousse as it was a secret signal illuminating the entrance point! If I don't return again, you know where I went! (I wonder if I can fit my beloved honey brown leather writing chair in there too!)