Tag Archives: book review

20 books & 20 lbs (week 35): Musings on being lucky

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It would be an understatement to say that the last week has been pretty hard on everybody. We lost a friend, and I wanted to just leave up my memorial post for him so that I could focus on just getting through the week’s events.

Amazingly, after eating seemingly everything in sight – and at some of the oddest times of day for me, I managed to keep my weight relatively stable. I’m still 10lbs down from my starting point, so I’m hovering at that halfway mark towards my goal, but I didn’t gain…and I consider that a big success. Or maybe it’s luck. It’s hard for me to guess.

I’m sure that I need to do something more drastic to lose the remainder of the weight, and I’m trying to figure out what I’m up for that’s actually maintainable over a long span of time. I can say that going down the 10lbs has already paid me back nicely in pants that fit a bit looser (which is both a blessing and a curse, since I hate wearing belts and then end up endlessly fussing with wayward capris).

Trying on outfit after outfit to wear to the wake and memorial service left me thinking that I have an odd dearth of black dresses appropriate for such events; even worse, some of the dresses I have that COULD be perfectly appropriate are a skosh too small for me right now. If I lost that other 10lbs…maybe. So, there’s always THAT for additional motivation.

Book #12: “Lucky Man” by Michael J. Fox

This has been on my list for a donkey’s age. DH added it to our library, since we’re both fans of Fox going back to “Family Ties” days. I knew about Fox’s battle with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) at a very high-level; I knew that he got it very early, and I knew that he worked as long as he could before disclosing his condition and dropping out of the acting world for a while. Reading his autobiography gave me an even better sense of what it was like for him, both before and after his diagnosis. He describes himself ultimately as a lucky man for having realized just how precious his time is and how he can use what status he has to help others. Just as he says that (post-diagnosis) he suddenly started to notice when someone young had tremors or other signs that were similar to his, I started to notice that about people I come in contact with. It makes me wonder if I’m looking at early-onset PD or something else.

This cleverly-written, engaging self-portrait talks of his meteoric rise to stardom and the life of a normal guy who could’ve fallen off the fame cliff with a bottle in his hand had he not found just the right partner in his wife, fellow actor Tracey Pollan. He describes how he spent nights (and some mornings) completely blotto, because that’s how someone at the top of his game found escape from his own nagging self-doubts. It makes me wonder if any normal person sucked into that unreal reality would react; there are just too many stories coming out about stars taking comfort in bottles, needles, pills or other unhealthy distractions. In many ways, he IS lucky for having survived just that, although the PD diagnosis seems like a cruel reminder that even rich and famous people are just that – people. Humans.

Towards the end of the book, he talks briefly about setting up the Michael J. Fox Foundation – an organization to which I have donated money (and will certainly do so again in the future). There’s something very noble, very touching, and very human about someone realizing that they have the ability to help others and then exploiting that opportunity in the best possible way. And, as someone who’s enjoyed his work on the small and big screen, I can say that his writing only makes me love him more. You can’t help but root for him and hope that his luck only keeps improving.

 

20 books & 20 lbs (week 32): Stumbling towards success

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So, the good news is that I lost more weight; I’m now 11lbs below my starting point. The not as good news is that it was most likely at least PARTIALLY due to the fact that I got sick (although this time not sick to my stomach). The last few weeks have been pretty rough in our house. There was that week where I had the stomach whatever-that-was that took me out of the regular eating game for a few days. Last week, I caught a cold from ds that was brutal, and I ended up face-planting on our bed before dinnertime with a fever and a complete inability to be upright. Thankfully, I have the BESTHUSBANDEVAR, who stepped in and took care of everything for the four hours that I was tossing and turning in our bed. I then spent another 3hrs in our bed, reading with my booklight…at which point dh kicked me out of bed.

Well, I probably deserved it. I guess reading until 1am is bad form?

Anyway, I moved out to the den and waited out the rest of the fever there, which finally broke sometime during my sole nap (4am-6am)…but by the time I was ready to muster the strength to get to work, dd came into the den sporting a pair of slightly pink eyes. So, there went my Thursday. Thankfully, we have no shortage of DVDs and OnDemand options, so dd had some screen time while I worked away on all the things, waiting for her eye goop prescription to be ready.

So, short story quite long, I lost weight…but I’m not entirely certain it was for the best of reasons, if you catch my meaning. I’d rather that I lost weight because I was doing something really great, not because I wasn’t able to eat / interested in eating. My appetite is still off, a side-effect of not being able to breathe too well through my nose, but hopefully that’ll go away soon and then it’ll just be me vs the scale the way things were intended to go.

Now, not to get TOO down about a weight loss (I know, I’m clearly not looking at the bright side here), I did manage to use that long stretch of awakeitude to finish off my latest read…and I loved it.

Book #11: “The Inner Circle” by Brad Meltzer

I wasn’t familiar with Meltzer until fairly recently; I’m not quite sure what rock I’ve been living under, since Meltzer has been a best-selling author for some time, as well as the host of the History Channel show “DECODED”. RadioBDC got him to speak Live in the Lab back in January, and I managed to catch the stream on my computer. I found him charming, utterly engaging, and impossible to ignore. He’s just a great storyteller, someone who easily got the audience focused 100% on what he was saying. “The Inner Circle” is much in the same vein – something that captures your interest and becomes something you don’t want to put down, even when it ends.

The story revolves around Beecher White, an employee of the National Archives in Washington, DC. Beecher’s just been contacted by a middle-school crush looking for her father, and his help gets them both far more than they bargained for. Add in some serious historical references about…well, just about everything…a conspiracy theory or four, and you have a convoluted but manageable story that pivots on the Presidency and what it means to preserve that at all costs. Beecher stumbles into his future, clumsily at first – until he gets to the point where he runs at a breakneck pace to reach what he thinks is his destination. Along the way, he learns more about his former dream-girl, Clementine Kaye, and how truth and strength are really only what you want them to be to others.

For native Washingtonians who’ve migrated elsewhere, like me, Meltzer’s story is a treat, and it has enough to offer so that those from outside that sphere of interest would find it interesting, too.  I’d never even HEARD of the Culper Ring before, and now I’d love to read more about it. I’d also like to take a second crack at the National Archives, since I’ve only ever been there once or twice, and now I know there’s much more for me to see than just the “gasper” documents.

The other nice part of this is that I’ve discovered yet another writer whose works I need to plow through. If any of his other books are as good as “The Inner Circle”, I suspect the man will easily occupy a shelf in our library rather soon.

20 books and 20 lbs (week 30): It would be nice just to be whelmed

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I’ve had this conversation with family before, including dh: how come you can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but never just “whelmed”? Right about now, I could use just being whelmed. It would be such a nice change of pace.

Since we got back from vacation, things have been quite busy at work – to the point where one of my major sources of work-related stress is just getting there and getting out on time. I’m very much looking forward to the point a little more than a year from now, when we’ll get back to ONE set of drop-offs and ONE set of pick-ups for the kids; having two separate drop-offs and pick-ups makes morning and evening logistics hard and adds stress. Will I get to work on time or show up late? Will I get the kids before {the place I’m getting them from} closes and I get into trouble?

I also – rather randomly – got sick late last week, probably food poisoning of some kind, so my eating was pretty curtailed. On the plus side, that meant I lost some of the weight I’d gained in DC. That’s definitely NOT how I like to lose weight, so I’ll hope that I can find a way to lose the remaining 10lbs without that extra oomph. Of course, being that this week had extra stress at work and with my family, my eating habits were off a bit. I wasn’t shoveling all the food into my body at a breakneck pace, but neither was I existing off lettuce and raw carrots. Neither is sustainable, anyway, so I’ll just take what I’ve got when I weigh in tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I can report that I’m currently down almost 10lbs from my starting point…but I’m losing daylight on the year and need to find a ~sustainable~ way of losing the remaining 10. I also managed to finish off another two books, so at least I think I’m on track there. I hope.

Book #9: “Gun Machine” by Warren Ellis

This is my second read by Ellis this year, and between that and “FreakAngels”, I’m starting to get the sense that he’s one moody, dark genius. I consider this an incredibly good thing. The story opens with Detective John Tallow losing his partner to a gun-wielding psychotic. The building where the shooting takes place gets cordoned off as a crime scene, and when Tallow discovers an apartment that’s literally covered in guns, he unwittingly uncovers a conspiracy, ages-old murders, and a plan by one of the most dangerous men in history. Ellis deftly mixes the geography and history of New York City with more information about how to kill a person than most sane folks should ever know. The story builds slowly and carefully until it all starts to come together…by which time the characters, the story, and you are running through it all so fast that it climaxes in a blur. Ellis’ second novel is an incredibly engaging read – not for the faint of heart – and it shows that just as he’s got the ability to craft rich, well-drawn stories in graphic novels (where “well-drawn” refers both to the artwork AND the story), he’s mastered the art of the graphic (un-graphic) novel, as well.

Book #10: “Gossip Girl” by Cecily Von Ziegesar

Figuring that I’d need a “light, come-down” reading after another Warren Ellis book, I’d saved this library sale pick for the #10 spot. It definitely didn’t disappoint for the category of “light read”, although I can’t say that I was entirely enamored of it. Perhaps it’s because I read it immediately following a book that had my neurons firing constantly, or perhaps it’s because I never saw the show “Gossip Girl” but had the images in my head of the various actors who played the key roles as I read every page of this book. In any event, I found “Gossip Girl” to be fairly meh, as books go.

I’ve read enough young adult (YA) lit to know how things typically go, and I’m just as interested as the next person in reading about the troubled life of the brahmin; however, I found the writing to be scattered enough that character development was too limited for my taste. Only two characters really got fleshed out to any extent, and even then it was hard to find anyone particularly sympathetic enough that you’d want to continue reading on. This works fine for TV, when the purpose is to give short, easily consumed bites on a weekly basis…but when it’s a book, it’s not always as attractive. Let’s just say that I’m not inspired to read the rest of the series. For those interested in a far better YA read with a girly bend to it, I’d recommend skipping “Gossip Girl” and getting “Spoiled” by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (aka “The Fuggirls”). It’s a far more amusing and engaging read, as is its followup, “Messy”.