Blog
Last night I went to a screening of Hotel Rwanda. People who had seen it had urged me to see it with a quiet intensity that I rarely hear connected to a film. (I think the last time I heard this was when people were talking about Life is Beautiful.) Everyone told me to be prepared to cry; no one told me to prepare to be stunned by what I was seeing on the screen.
All the holiday decorations are stored away --- and I have yet to find a stray piece around that we missed. I am sure that you can relate to that --- you think you are done packing things up and then bam there's an overlooked piece of "Christmas celebrating" stuck on a shelf somewhere and it looks really out of place in January.
It's early Saturday morning. Today I need to take down the Christmas decorations that have been up since Thanksgiving weekend --- and yes, I am procrastinating as I write here. In the busy-ness of this week I forgot to mention the latest turn in the Andrea Yates case in the newsletter. Last February I read Suzanne O'Malley's book, ARE YOU THERE ALONE, The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates. We also interviewed O'Malley as part of this feature. Her comments about the non-Law and Order episode from both the book and her interview stayed with me.
Yesterday they were calling for snow here last night. This triggered a flurry of emails in my box cancelling every event in town last night due to weather. This always humors me since I live in a town where 90% of the people drive SUVs. I guess they drive them because of the cargo space instead of road handling. A couple of years ago one of my friends was debating whether to buy an SUV or a minivan. Her line was a classic --- "I have my master's degree and now I am debating whether to drive a bus or a truck." By the way, mere flakes of snow arrived, but hey, we were prepared!
Happy New Year albeit a couple of days late. We had a dialup connection when we were on the Outer Banks, which can make it a bit difficult to get much done online! I am amazed at how much I am dependent upon the Internet for information and communication. I will be away and look up recipes on Epicurious.com, the news at NewYorkTimes.com and I always am researching things that I hear about as we travel. The creeping dialup had me wanting to hurl the laptop on more than one occasion.
Yesterday I went to visit friends who are staying here on the Outer Banks. They had celebrated Christmas here and thus all their presents were under the tree. Soooo, I being a book voyeur started taking toll of what was there thinking that books tell so much about a person. I am sure you have done this. I was trying to match the gifts with the recipient.
It's just about 7AM the morning after Christmas and folks already are headed to the after-Christmas sales. I find it very interesting that bookstores stay open late for the on-sale dates of Harry Potter, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton's books, but I cannot recall any opening early for the release of a book. What book would you get up at dawn to go by at 50-60% off? Good question, eh? After all, there are millions of people heading out to buying wrapping paper at 50% off right now. Now that is a concept that completely bypasses me.
As promised in our December 17th Bookreporter.com newsletter, here is my new blog. I was stuck when we were naming this, but I clearly knew it was was going to be musings about books, authors and life, thus this is the title we came up with.
