Uncreated Conscience

Since I’ve gotten my shiny new MacBook laptop and iPod Touch, I will confess to being more preoccupied with playing with my new toys than doing anything productive or useful, like blogging about the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve seen, or even finding someone—anyone in publishing who will hire me, or finishing revising my novel. (I have not even gotten coffee yet, which just attests to the awesome power of Apple and Steve Jobs.)

It’s mostly because YouTube videos will now actually play on my computer (and iPod!) instead of freezing and skipping about. Last night I stayed up until 4am binge-watching John Green and Hank Green‘s 2007 Brotherhood 2.0 project. Oh internet, never stop being awesome.

But I figure I do owe you a few reviews. This past weekend, I went down to see my Teddy Bear after a long hiatus. Our initial plans were to go paintballing (which I haven’t been since I was 13), but the weather decided it wanted to rain on our parade. Literally. Our Sunday plans to go skydiving also derailed due to inclement weather. Summer, she is mean in a different way from spring. Spring teases. Summer smothers. So Bear, The Inimitable Bex, Oz, and I decided to watch The Hangover instead.

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Just finished the ARC of CATCHING FIRE by Suzanne Collins.

Am incoherent.

And tragically impatient for the conclusion to the series. I hate cliffhangers! So unfair!

I love living and working with book people: I get to 1) steal books from their shelves and 2) “borrow” books from work. Russ has been the most consistent purveyor of new material to read; in addition to PURE, he’s also given me WINTERGIRLS, a Brian Eno biography, and Chuck Palahniuk’s PYGMY (which I have started but have not yet finished). Most recent on my to-be-read pile from him was A RELIABLE WIFE by Robert Goolrick, with the recommendation, “You like Victorian lit, right?”

Review of A RELIABLE WIFE by Robert Goolrick

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

I do indeed love Victorian literature, although I wouldn’t classify A RELIABLE WIFE as “Victorian lit”, despite the fact that it is set in 1908 Wisconsin. This is the where the pedant in me gets a little nitpicky; Victorian literature had a lot of conventions that are missing in contemporary literary fiction, as well as “cliché” storylines that I feel most writers try and avoid, or at least subvert to the best of their ability. “Good girl/boy is rewarded for his/her virtue and/or tenacity!” (GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens) or “Good girl falls from grace and dies tragically!” (THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton) or “There is hypocrisy and corruption in our society!” (see: most of the works by Henry James and Evelyn Waugh) or else it is a novel of manners (see please Oscar Wilde, William Dean Howells, and E.M. Forster).

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