Notes From the Bedside Table

Sunrise was at 7:14, sunset will be at 7:21. We're getting closer and closer to the equinox. I'm so excited about this! There is something so elemental, so very pagan, about the changes in the season. I have lilac blossoms that look like little clenched fists the color of new bruises, an extremely fuschia-colored something out in the yard, birds chirping at 5 am, when it is still really dark. They must be able to feel the change in the air as the sun warms it into a slight breeze. Or something, anyway, maybe it's really all the early workers gunning their motors coming up the hill.

I was out early this morning filling the water feature pool and scared a hummingbird right off the bubbler. I think, of all the decisions we've made in our lives, besides that very first one where I asked to sit at Dennis' table at Max's Tavern, the water feature in our back yard was one of the best. We get so much happy-happy watching the birds flit in and out of the bubblers and bowls and we share the sound with our neighbors.

Ah, so many books to read. It's hard to choose just one, so I don't. I know there are many of us out there, samplers of first chapters, searching for the book that claims your day, the one you finally can't put down.

I have The Brixton Brothers: The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity (Simon & Schuster), a middle grades book by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Adam Rex (the team that brought you Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem)on the desk next to me (and it is FUN! Can't wait to go eat breakfast so I can keep reading).

I am 60 or so pages into Vellum, (Del Rey), by Hal Duncan, which is lying next to the bed, and I am only just now beginning to even care about the people in it. Should I keep going? Nancy Pearl would say 100 pages...I don't know- with so many other books needing read, I may just wait to continue reading it. The problem is that it's not a book you can read at the end of the day, very complicated science fiction, but I don't have enough time to read it in a chunk, which is what I think it needs.

I started Ann Lamott's new book, Imperfect Birds (Riverhead), and it made me so tense I had to put it down, it is still in the bathroom where I can read a little here and a little there until I get invested enough or hardened enough to what is sure to come to finish it.

The downstairs bath has a new book for teens in it called Folly, one of a couple of books I am reading to discuss with the publisher. I have a stack of books on the floor next to my desk to review for a couple of awards committees I'm on, another stack by my chair for reviewing for my newsletter and for this blog. My book group book for April is Sounder. Isn't it funny how the moment a book goes onto a list or a pile that has to be read, even if you want to read it, it feels like homework?

So, with all those things that need reading (and soon!), I still search for something that resonates immediately, something I can slip into like a bath, coming to the end with a startle, suddenly thrust back into an bigger, brighter world of dishes and laundry, a world somehow made more worthy by the addition of this pile of paper and type. And then, maybe even minutes later, off on the search again, a paragraph here, maybe a whole chapter there, reading on the fly (extreme reading!), looking for another story to highjack my brain for a bit.