Monday, December 08, 2008

Still Progressing

Not surprisingly, I read very slowly now. Occasionally I'll read out loud to the baby--today I was reading from The Paradox of Choice, which was very easy to make cheerful and kiddie sounding, but I realized you read more slowly that way. Still, it's nice for us to share Barry Schwartz's ideas about how having to decide things is stressful. I sort of want to tell him that if he wants stressful, he should try sleeping in two hour chunks, but for all I know he has kids, so he might already know that.

Anyway, I'm also reading The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff, because I love Mormon fiction. So far I'm really enjoying it. It's two stories; one is excerpts from the fictional memoir of Brigham Young's 19th wife, written after she left the church. The other is the modern story of a young man who was excommunicated at the age of 14 from a fundamentalist sect (called the First Church of Jesus Christ etc., clearly based on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ, etc., who have been in the news lately). Apparently, when all the powerful older men take all the teenage girls as wives, you need to excommunicate a handful of boys to tweak the ratios. His story revolves around his mother going on trial for killing his father.

It's really a good book, and I think the segue back and forth between stories makes it easier to read in the little dollops of time I have available.

Also, I know it's not about books, but we watched the movie Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day yesterday, and I really loved it. It did the best job of capturing the feeling of a movie from the 30s that I've ever seen in a modern movie--no matter how hard George Clooney tries. I usually don't care for Amy Adams, but she was great. So I wanted to plug that for all you guys.

Okay, I'll keep plugging--for the fans!

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