(Sorry, I have to go with it...) Gone tomorrow.

I finished Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I don’t know what I expected from this book – perhaps to be scared, or even uneasy? I wasn’t. It was an interesting enough book, with cleanly drawn characters slowly revealing their idiosyncrasies, but I was never biting nails or turning on lights which somehow was what I expected from the reviews and description. So maybe I will read The Haunting of Hill House which I avoided previously because it also is supposed to be very scary. I really liked Castle, don’t get me wrong. It just wasn’t quite what I was led to expect.

And I have a hundred pages left in Misfortune. Every time I decide to ditch it, it gets interesting again. But all right, already, Wesley Stace, you obviously have a classics degree (from Cambridge) and are clearly very well-read and smart, more so than the average person. Can you let it go now and just wrap up the actual story for God’s sake? He’s the classics version of the stereotypical name-dropper. Wesley “Smarter-than-thou” Stace.

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Then those Things ran about
With big bumps, jumps, and kicks
And with hops and big thumps
And all kinds of bad tricks.
Should I be concerned about the loud thumps and crashes coming from upstairs, or just wait till the blood trickles down the steps? (What would you do, if a mother asked you?)

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Someone just came in and donated Edward P. Jones’ The Known World to the library’s paperback exchange. I am not even putting it on the shelf; I have been wanting to read it so it will go home with me first.

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Snippets:

An amusing take on the aforementioned Cat in the Hat.

Salon has an interesting article today on the evil behemoth Wal-Mart. Even my children know I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, such a silly little stand to take, but hey, you have to do something. Mostly for me it’s tied up in their censorship of music and books. Hey, I *am* a librarian…concern for civil liberties is a priority for me.

Check this out:Pravda Online. The child who grew up in the seventies and eighties, listening to Reagan rhetoric and knowing that all press in Russia was heavily censored, finds this very cool. (Although I must admit that I found this through a blurb about the “Russian Kama Sutra.”)

All right: Women should keep their ovaries. (And not in a jar on the shelf.) This headline is right up there with one of those drug disclaimers I heard recently, for a menopause hormone treatment sort of thing, which went something like this: If you have a uterus, you should consider a different medication. Um, all right. I mean, I understand why some women have to have their ovaries/uteri removed, but it’s just the ridiculous wording that gets me. It’s like those disclaimers for heartburn meds or whatever that list this huge bevy of side effects, ending solemnly with “and sometimes, death.”

By the way, I have a uterus, a fact of which I am all too well aware at the moment. Especially since a coworker just repsonded to my due date with, "Oh gosh, really? You're HUGE!"
I hate her.