leisure reading with clam juice and pickles

i consider it a small miracle that i finished some leisure reading over this break. i tend to have these inflated, unrealistic ideas about how much time i'll have to do the things i want to do before the next term starts, so i've started to move in the other direction and assume that i'll get next-to-nothing done. E's naps have been blessedly long this past week--topping out at three hours--but there's always laundry to do, a dishwasher to empty, e-mails to respond to, etc. still, i managed to read the brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot diaz with a few days to spare (the other novel i bought recently, the children's hospital by chris adrian, is just over 600 pages. it will have to wait.). 

i do a lot of reading for work/school and the difference between that experience (even books/articles i really like) and reading just to get lost in a good story is always surprisingly and wonderfully stark. thank god for that. maybe i'm a little afraid that one day i'll lose the stay-up-late-to-finish-feeling that a satisfying novel can bring. hasn't happened yet, though... 

anyway, oscar wao was great. those pulitzer prize folks know their business. it was being considered by my college as the book that all first-year students read before starting their first term, but it was rejected. if you read it, i suspect you'll know why. still, for a few reasons i think it would have been good for our mostly suburban, white, middle-upper middle class kids--yunior, the narrator, and oscar, the protagonist, are dominican-american; the dominican republic's recent history and racial politics play out in footnotes and through the multi-generational, biographical storylines (what do we know about the DR apart from baseball?); yunior's voice is young and street, laced with sci-fi/fantasy/generally nerdy references, which makes it a really fun book. mostly, the characters are complicated and believable.   

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i'm making clam chowder for dinner tonight. i always feel a little funny about buying clam juice. i don't really know what it is (do they squeeze the clams?) and maybe i don't want to know...

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this morning when i went into E's room, she looked at the round, green flowers on my shirt and, with nuk-in-mouth, said "pickles!" it was a great way to start the day.