Greetings and Happy New Year! As I type this, my spouse and I are en route back to Maine from a child free trip to San Francisco to see friends. We ate great food, saw great music, did a ton of walking, and, best of all, got to spend time with dear friends. To ease back into blogging for 2012, and to kill time during a four hour layover in Detroit (don’t pity me. I’m hanging out in the Delta Sky Lounge within slurping distance of both an espresso machine and an open bar) here’s a list of paper books purchased, e books read, and book stores visited, while I was away:

My first bit of travel was actually to the sun and sand with my mom and the kids. During that portion of the trip, I read, or in one case, tried to read, some m/m romance, including Carol of the Bellskis by Astrid Amara, and Love Ahead, by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban. I also finished Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I also read one non fiction title, Fall in Love Like A Romance Novelist, edited by Amelia Grey. For het romance, I read Miranda Neville’s The Wild Marquis, and, for the second time, started Nora Roberts’ Sea Swept, and for the second time, put it down.

Needing a paper book for the takeoffs and landings, My mom and I both picked up a 2009 memoir about a woman whose husband drops dead at forty seven, after which she discovers his many adulterous affairs, called Perfection, by Julie Metz. We agreed that this book was both terrible and hard to put down. Also in paper was book two of Jordan Castillo Price’s Psycop series.

For the San Fran flights, my paper book was year end issues of various magazines, and The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides first novel from back in 1993. I bought that one at City Lights, the famous San Francisco book store, THE Beat bookstore, the first exclusively paperback book store as well. Other books purchased at City Lights include: The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, by Victor Pevelin, which was a staff pick. Also Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason, a recommendation from Keishon of Avid Mystery Reader.

The next day I got to meet up with @JanetNorCal, and she took me to the fantastic Book Passage in Corte Madera, which specializes in YA and mystery. There, I picked up Warm Bodies by Isaac Merton, a recommendation from The Book Smugglers, and Sun Storm, by Asa Larsson, another mystery rec from Keishon.

On the flight from San Fran to Detroit, I read Falling Off the Face of the Earth, another m/m romance, by JF Smith, and some more of the Eugenides.

The one that got away was The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, which my friend bought, and is loving. I will need to get that one some day soon.

I had hoped for the usual things, like hyperlinks and photos, hell, even italics, in this post, but as I tried to write it using only my iPad, I discovered what a pain it is to try to post from something other than a computer. I downloaded a free Word Press app, became frustrated with it in about a minute, then bought a very highly rated one called Blogsy, which I noodled around with and which does seem much more promising, especially when it comes to getting images in to the post.

So, sorry for the stripped down nature of the post. I hope to write a proper one tomorrow, a review of one of the books I’ve read over the break. Thanks to everyone for their top ten lists. As you can see, I’ve made three purchases from them just this past weekend.

Cheers!

I had great plans to pre-write and schedule all of my m/m reviews before heading out today on vacation, but it was not to be. I’m going to be traveling for the next two weeks, all of it for fun, from Florida to the Caribbean to San Francisco. Expect little posting, with the exception of my Book Smugglers  guest post on Tuesday Dec. 20, on Memorable Violence in this Year’s Reading. Since I won’t be around on the 20th, let me take this opportunity to thank Ana and Thea for inviting me once again to be part of the wonderful celebration of books that is Smugglivus.

I’ll be back in early January with a slew of m/m romance reviews, as well as reviews of Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked, Ilana Gershon’s The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over new media, Patricia Gaffney’s Lily, and maybe Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind.

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and/or Hanukkah and a Happy New Year!

Coach and son

After terrific semi-final win this morning, we lost the final of the state cup to a terrific southern Maine team this afternoon.

This absolutely sucks, but we went 19-1 for the season. And that’s pretty darn good.

To console ourselves on the ride home, we all listened to Flight of the Conchords songs. Who can stop laughing when they hear Business Time?

Then we’re in the bathroom
Brushing our teeth
That’s all part of the foreplay
I love foreplay
A-sshga-sshga, a-sshga-sshga, a-shhga-sshgaow!
Then you sort out the recycling
That isn’t part of the foreplay process but it’s still very important

Happy Saturday!

A few pictures and tales from my recent family trip.
In Ireland, we visited the 15th century Dysert O’Dea castle in County Clare, where I discovered the Irish version of how copyright came to be.

My family a mile ahead of me as I try to take photos

As Edward T. O’Donnell wrote in a 2001 column for the The Irish Echo:

One story that captures the essence of his personality involved an altercation with his mentor, Finian.  Columcille loved books, especially a psalter owned by Finian.  Secretly, he copied the manuscript in his room (in the dark with the page lit by light emanating from his fingertips according to one legend).  When Finian found out, he demanded the original and the copy (books were extremely rare in those days).  When Columcille refused to surrender the latter, the case went before King Diarmaid who issued his famous edict: “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy.”  Reluctantly, Columcille handed over the book.    It would not be his last encounter with the king.

Dublin is such a literary city. I knew this, because as an undergraduate at Boston College, I worked in the Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections (see beautiful interior shots here), which has a huge collection of papers, letters and manuscripts of Irish writers. My main job was organizing the letters of Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, although I am pretty sure I spent most of my time writing my own love letters, none of which were as lovely as Belloc’s:

“….So again good night – if I could follow the night round her long whirl around the bend of the earth – at last I should come to you….”

– Hilaire Belloc to Elodie Hogan, August 6, 1890

But it’s totally different to be there and actually visit birthplaces and homes. Iris Murdoch, Marian Keyes, Maeve Benchy, Patricia Scanlon, and of course, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, and on and on. Inspired, I read Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and I hope to review it soon.

While in Dublin, we visited one of the many bookstores (sorry to say I cannot recall which), and an employee noticed me trying to help my nine year old son choose a book. He came over to us, sussed out our Americaness immediately (I am not sure whether it was the accents, the loud bickering, or the Adidas track pants), and proceeded to hand sell us books for 9-12 year olds by Irish authors, including The Skullduggery Pleasant, by Derek Landy, which he LOVES.

In Baltimore, Ireland we stayed with friends. Who had many siblings, and nieces and nephews. We were surrounded! But it was wonderful to “come to people” as they say. One of the women, who has four grown sons, gave me three rules for parenting through the teenage years:

1. You know nothing

2. Walk several paces behind.

3. Keep hugging him, even if he doesn’t want you to.

Here’s a shot of my pre-teen and his dad playing soccer in Baltimore:

We visited the Belfast Northern Ireland area, including the Giant’s Causeway, all of which we loved. The Belfast experience was especially powerful, both in seeing the remaining chicken wire, neighborhood gates, fences, and political murals and memorials to The Troubles, and in seeing the new vitality of the city in the beautiful new shopping mall (Victoria Square, were we saw Harry Potter 7.2), hotels, shops, municipal buildings, and restaurants.

But here’s a shot of the family at The Giant’s Causeway, on a rainy windy day:

VERY windy:

London was great, too, of course. We ended up staying in a heavily Middle Eastern area, with all signs in English and Arabic, the streets lined up and down by men smoking hookah pipes after work, and most women in traditional Muslim clothing, hijabs and ankle length gowns, many with face coverings as well. So that was an entirely new experience for us, but otherwise, the boys and I had fun visiting our usual haunts while the husband researched.

I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, Courtney Milan’s novella Unlocked, the Oscar Wilde mentioned above, Julie Ann Long’s I Kissed an Earl and What I Did for a Duke, and Shannon Stacey’s Yours to Keep, all of which I enjoyed.

Fantastic trip, but we’re all happy to be home. Hope your summer is going well, too.