READ THIS NOW JERKS

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Sunday. The fact that I read the entirety of it in a day (maybe eight hours total? which, sidenote, I may be broke as s--t, but at least I have the time to lay on the couch for eight hours and read a good book, you know?) should not in any way reflect poorly on the book. I likely missed a lot of the subtleties of Larsson's writing, but when I sit down with a book like this (i.e. mystery/thriller), I sort of need to finish it immediately NOW NOW NOW. And oh man, this book more than most was super engrossing and has some really well-executed plot twists. I've read a lot of mysteries as my mom is a fan--I have no money to buy books of my own so mostly I just read whatever my mom is reading. Actually, I borrowed this from her! Anyway, I have read a lot of mysteries, and soo many of them are poorly written and formulaic and cliched and the kind of thing that makes you think "seriously, why am I not a mystery writer? Because clearly they will let anyone with half a brain do it, and I have at least that much brain." This however, this is good! And in an era when drek like The Book about the Catholic Secret Society or Whatever and That stupid "Vampire" book that is really about how no one should have sex until marriage and maybe not even then because you'll just have a demon baby that eats its way out of your womb are super popular, it is nice to see a hugely popular book that is also actually pretty good. I am actually not going to say anything about the plot, because I don't want to give anything away, but you should really buy/borrow/steal this book and read it immediately, if you like good books, crime novels, and/or books that are set in Sweden. I really want to go buy the other two books in the trilogy, but probably I should wait until I'm caught up with classwork, as I will likely end up spending another day or two reading them immediately, whenever I end up buying them.

two book reviews

My mom bought me two books for my birthday.



This is the one she bought me when she went to the bookstore and said "hey, I'm looking for this book about an archivist, it just came out in paperback this month." It is... not terrible, but I hated it. I just, I don't know how to describe why I hated it without giving away huge, key plot points, and that would be wrong. It's not a bad book, but I hated the characters, and as a future archivist, the ending made me so angry. Ugh! But hey, it was not necessarily poorly written, it was just not written for me.


This is the book my mom actually meant to get me. Two books about archivists came out in paperback in June; how awesome is that? This book made me much less angry. First, it was set in communist Russia, probably one of my top five favorite settings for a novel. The characters were not constantly blabbing about religion, and Holland covered the whole "tough decisions have to be made" thing in a way that did not make me want to stab myself or him.

So, in conclusion, of the two books about archivists that came out in paperback in June, The Archivist's Story by Travis Holland is far superior to The Archivist by Martha Cooley.

Oh, also, Travis Holland had the author of The Historian blurb his book. How apropos!

abandoned library

This just makes me sick.

I'm not sure who the Russian is who actually took the pictures or where they were taken, but the photo is from the Livejournal of Глеб (jst_ru) via Gawker. There are more photos.

more food porn

This is the first batch of guacamole I've made since moving to Milwaukee. There are many things that are better in Wisconsin than in New York (cheese, beer, etc); avocados are not one of those things. I used two and ended up not using bits from both of them because they were bruised or brownish. Still, it ended up being okay. I made bean dip and salsa last night; that went much better. I did not take any pictures, though, so you'll just have to trust me.

I went to Planet Bead with Mary today and bought pretty beads and some fancy sterling silver findings. I can finally make necklaces out of the pearls I bought in November, and I bought some blue beads to use as accent (probably not the right word) beads for a rosary that I've been planning. I also bought materials to make myself a watch! It is going to be yellow and black, and I will call it my bumblebee watch.

Um, yeah. I need to finish reading this , which I am so very close to doing. That grammar is probably wrong, but I don't really care that much.

hey guess what

Remember this?

HEAVEN. ON EARTH.

I have a new life goal: working at a bookstore. OH WAIT, I DO. HAHA, LIFE, I WIN!

Go buy some books; I listed all of the books that are on the front page right now. I recommend this book if you're looking for something to buy for me (make sure to buy it from downtownbooks-milw). On a related note, it's going to be really hard not to spend my entire paycheck on books. Apparently, there's an employee discount.

oh shit

I HAVE A JOB AT A BOOKSTORE.

MY LIFE IS NOW COMPLETE.

labeling inspiration

hockey!
Originally uploaded by marinatina

Taken at the Last Word Bookshop when I was in Philadelphia on St. Patrick's Day. (Not the best day to visit Philadelphia, in case you were wondering.) If (when) I start my own bookstore, this picture will be the model for my own organizational system. Unless I learn something better in library school.

I'm organizing my Flickr account, so maybe I'll post more photos I meant to post ages ago. Or maybe not; have I mentioned my short attention span?

this week

1. I went out drinking twice; both times were lovely. I went to the Packers bar last night, and it was awesome (obviously).

2. Double or Nothing was pretty amazing. I hate to be all sincere about it, but I haven't been affected by a book like I have by it in awhile. It didn't make me all emotional or anything, but it made me think about what a novel is, what fiction is about, more than anything has in awhile. I guess I'm not supposed to call it experimental; but it pushes the boundaries of what a novel is supposed to be. It doesn't really have a plot, except it sort of does, and it's impossible to tell where the lines are between the author and narrator and protagonist. It is a weird strange awesome book.

3. Next on my reading list: Ficciones, The Plague, Slaughterhouse Five, finishing that other book about Prague that I started in MKE.

4. I'm watching Hearts and Minds, a documentary about the Vietnam War. If I do in fact focus on US History when I go back to grad school, it's going to be a depressing 2-3 years.

5. I'm currently avoiding several responsibilities. I need to deal with them this weekend, but I am (amazingly) not very anxious about it. I will finish things when I can finish them.

6. I went on a bike ride, in New York, on my bike that I fixed BY MYSELF. I am clearly mega-awesome.

disc golf

Let me tell you something about disc golf--I suck ass at disc golf. There was definitely a time when I could throw a frisbee, and that time is not now, because I am terrible at the disc golfing. I did get to spend a lot of time in a sunny, sunny park while figuring out the extent of my terribleness, so at least there's that. (According to Firefox spell check, 'terribleness' is a real word, which doesn't seem right somehow.)

I'm flying back to New York tonight, which is lame times a million. Well, the bars open until 4am, the 24 hour delis, the museums, the beautiful old buildings, the history, the mad amounts of diverse people, the stores, etc, are obviously not lame. But I have to go back to work and back to all the responsibilities that I've been avoiding for the past week, and I'm not really "about" that.

Books purchased and/or borrowed this week:
The Plague - Camus
Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
Double or Nothing - Raymond Federman
Commies, Crooks, Gypsies, and Poets - Jan Novak

care bear

A day after Kira's mom and I decide to go to Tashkent, I find a book about a woman who was a Fulbright scholar in Kyrgyzstan in 2001 and then traveled around Central Asia. It's good so far, though on the back of the book there's a blurb about one of her earlier books from Ann Coulter, so... I don't know. I'm trying not to judge.

I worked today; I think there were about 30 people in the lab. Not at once; thirty people spread over 8 hours. I'm unclear on why the lab was even open today.

dirty foxtrot

So on Sunday, Nick carried our old microwave down to the garbage area because he is just that nice, plus it's not like me or Kira were going to carry it cuz we're just girls, and after we decided to just leave the microwave by all the other broken appliances, we saw this old box of books nestled among the bags of trash, so obviously I looked through them, and as if throwing books away, THROWING THEM AWAY WITH TRASH AND BROKEN MICROWAVES, wasn't cause enough for burning hatred, they threw away a copy of The Handmaid's Tale. Bitches, you do not throw away Margaret Atwood. She'll fucking cut you; she'll invent a machine so that she can cut you from a thousand miles away, because she is too good to deal with your boring, pedestrian blood.

Seriously though, who throws away The Handmaid's Tale?

why i love "weeds"

Nancy gets all successful with a new strain of weed, so she goes on a shopping spree, and between buying the expensive purse and the fancy diamond jewelry, she buys books! She buys books on her drug-money shopping spree! This is a show I can get behind.

the future is now

Hey, guess what, you can post to Blogger from Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Haha, I almost typed Cocs! Hilarious.

I finished Crime and Punishment this morning. It was good, obviously, and I'm glad I finished it after I gave up on The Idiot halfway through, but I feel like I just finished a marathon. A confusing marathon where you know everyone else is getting so much more out of the marathon than you, but you really want to pretend you get the marathon, and sort of you do, maybe one or two parts of it, but you know even after finishing the marathon the first time, you're going to need to read it at least one or two more times before you'll have a real understanding of what Dostoevsky is trying to say. Something like that.

The seventh season of South Park is sort of annoying because there's too much political shit, but the Jennifer Lopez episode is still fucking awesome, even though I watched it for the first time with this douchebag I used to be friends with, back in the day. What a fucking pendejo.

In conclusion, I made a necklace today.

so tired my eyes hurt

I've been walking around for the past few days, thinking of things to write about here. I've mentally composed the first paragraph of at least four entries, but obviously none of them have actually made it through to the end. Mostly it's because I'm lazy. Also, I'm taking a break from my computer. We've had some good times, and we're not breaking up or anything, but I need to take some time to, you know, find myself and really figure out who "Marina" is. Plus, spending all my time before work on the computer and then carrying said computer to work seems silly when work is a fucking computer lab.

This morning, instead of watching dailymotion.com for four hours, I went ice skating, and I think if I could skate every day and maybe even play hockey once or twice a week, I would be permanently happy. There was almost no one on the ice today, and I wore my very own skates (which are somehow a tiny bit small which means my huge feet have gotten even huger since high school), and I skated for forty-five minutes, and I fell once, but I also skated backwards a little bit, and I am totally going skating again tomorrow. I really want to go skating every day this winter, or at least every day until the free skating rink and Bryant Park closes down.

I also realized recently that I haven't read a book for at least two months, possibly two and a half or three. After I got over the shame, forgetting but not really forgiving myself for being such a damn philistine, I borrowed two books from Kira and decided to go to The Strand as soon as I'm sure I have enough money for rent and student loan payments (more on that later). I borrowed White Noise and Crime and Punishment (the new translation by... their names escape me, but they are totes the hot new thing in the foreign literature translation world. I decided to start with the Dostoevsy, and guess what? It's fucking intense! So far, I'm pretty sure this Raskolnikov guy is definitely going to do the right thing and certainly isn't going to kill anyone or do anything illegal or "criminal" to get out of debt (don't tell me if I'm wrong, you'll ruin the surprise!).

In conclusion, you know what sucks? Debt! Also, credit. Apparently my credit is only "fair," which I find highly offensive. My student loan payments are going to be $200 more per month than my rent, which according to Sallie Mae is generous, since they could've given me a worse interest rate based on my "fair" credit. Fuck you, Sallie Mae. If anyone has any ideas as to how I can make a lot of money really, really quickly, leave a comment. I'd prefer either legal means or illegal means with very low risk of getting caught (kidding, Mom!).

Also, tomorrow, I'll probably remember to write about Thanksgiving break, but it's going to be old news by then, so who knows.

the skull mantra

All right, dudes, seriously, you need to give me some damn costume ideas. I leave for Montreal in a little over a month, and much as I would like to go as the Statue of Liberty, I feel that would involve green body paint, and no good can come from using body paint. I sort of want to find some way to go as Freedom, because I'll be an American in Canada and what the fuck, right? Maybe I could wrap myself in the American flag and preemptively attack other party-goers (steal their beers? prevent them from getting drunk and vomiting on me and my awesome stars and stripes, god bless america?), but it all seems too obvious. Help me!

I miss being able to actually, unironically, enjoy things. I feel like it's impossible to do anything here without being all detached from the actual experience, critiquing it and analyzing it and its meaning and worth and oh my god I just want to watch the fucking movie, you know? I'm guilty of this a lot; it's hard not to watch TV or see advertisements without thinking about how they reinforce dominant cultural views or whatever, it's been months since I've taken an anthropology class. Sometimes, though, it's nice to just ignore that little voice and enjoy what's around you, and I feel like that's difficult to do in New York, where everyone is so self-consciously pretentious, myself included.

What else... my mom sent me two books, because she loves me that much, and I had to go to the post office to pick up the box from Amazon.com. I waited in line for 15 minutes before someone from the post office noticed I was carrying a Form 8459 or whatever and told me I was in the wrong line. Of course, at that point I was standing next to a sign that said "Have your Form 8459 ready," so it was clearly retarded of me to think I might be in the right line. Obviously the line 40 feet away from the aforementioned sign was the correct line--stupid me. The point here is that the post office lady who told me I was in the wrong line was kind of a jerk and also going to the post office was not nearly as hellish as I'd anticipated. And I have two books, so fuck yeah.