Slow Love, Deep Bore

I just finished Slow Love:  How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas & Found Happiness, by Dominique Browning.  Browning was the last editor-in-chief of the now defunct House & Garden.

Slow Love details Browning’s journey of self-discovery after losing her gig of 13 years.  As with many, Browning’s high powered/pressure job came to define her identity trumping that of a single mother, lover, friend, daughter, etc.

Unfortunately, as universal and timely as this story may be, Browning doesn’t move beyond a few illuminating moments which gently prodded her to reconnect with her more authentic self.  At times, this memoir is more than self-indulgent. I often imagined I was sitting next to Browning as she divulged to her therapist and I, along with her beleaguered therapist, stifled more than a few yawns.

Sure, not everyone who finds themselves unemployed needs to get their hustle on with a quickness or their mortgage won’t get paid, but Dominique’s sheltered and privileged status may appear to be an affront to the millions who still find themselves mired in this mess of an economy.   

No Bonus Awards for Tweens

Saturday, I went to the bookstore. I wanted to get the The Lightning Thief because we were reading it in school but the end of the year came and we stopped right in the middle. When I got to the cashier, I handed her my Borders Reward Card and she said, “You must be 16 years or older to have a card.” I’m 11 and I buy and read books. Why can’t I get special discounts? 

When I purchased books at the same bookstore a few months ago, another cashier offered me the rewards card, and I took it and provided my email address as requested.

Now, I’m super confused. What’s my age got to do with it?

He Reads Too

This year, instead of giving the kids a list of required reading for the summer, my kids’ school sent home  reading logs and suggested that each kid read at least 20 mins. a day.  I knew this wouldn’t be an issue for Livy Girl, but I’m not sure how this is going to go over with my 8 yr. old, Yannick.

Yannick is a different kind of cat.  He definitely marches to his own beat, at his own pace.  He’s smart, funny and very rhythmic. He loves percussions and The Beatles and displays infinite patience as he follows the detailed directions of the most intricate Bakugan.

Yannick’s teacher distributed the class’ reading logs early last week and Yannick surprised me the first night, when without any prompting, he grabbed one of the paperbacks his Aunt Allyson gave him for Christmas and read until he feel asleep on the couch. The next morning, he dutifully filled out the log and asked for my signature to verify his entry. He’s followed this same routine every day this week and even asked me to take him to the library so he  could check out a few books. 

Today, Yannick and his sister hung out at Borders while I ran a few errands in the shopping center and when I returned, Yannick seemed a bit frustrated because he hadn’t found a book yet.  He asked if I’d help him look and I soon realized that other than comic and graphic books and the Magic Tree House series, books for boys his age are a bit limited.  I tried to convince him to look at Encyclopedia Brown series, but as with most kids, my enthusiasm made him completely tune me out, and trying to find something age-appropriate with a male of color as one of the lead characters was impossible.

Right now, it seems as if Yannick enjoys reading graphic novels and comic books.   When he was in the first grade, he was really into Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants, but now he enjoys Jeff Smith’s Bone series. At the library, he was excited to discover the Black Lagoon Adventures by Mile Thayer.  I must admit, his recent reads don’t appeal to me in the least, but he’s been whipping through them, while filling the first sheet of his reading log. 

Need to Read at Lightening Speed

In my English class we’re reading The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. But, instead of Tr. Scott reading aloud, we're listening to it on CD, and today I just couldn’t take it. The actor on the CD reads WAY too slow!  I decided to tune out the CD and I read ahead on my own.

I’m really starting to like The Lightning Thief and for me to really comprehend the story, I need to read at my own pace. I keep telling Mango Mama that at the end of this week, when school ends and summer vacation begins (YAY!), I’m going to have to buy the book so I can finish it because at the rate we’re going, we’ll never get to the end by Friday.  

My family and I checked out the movie, Percy Jackson & The Olympians:  The Lightening Thief, earlier this year, and when I think about the movie, I realize how much they took out of movie.  The book is a lot better. I can’t wait until I buy the book!!!!!

My Little Buddy

So maybe a week or so ago I had a first grade buddy. At my school, “younger” buddies are usually assigned to the older kids and my fifth grade classmates and me were asked to read short, little books to first graders. This buddy session, my first grade buddy, Sara, started to read first.  She read Little Witch’s Bad Dream by Deborah Hautzig. She read the book perfectly!! She didn’t miss one word. Then, she read a another book. Now, the teacher said that the fifth graders were supposed to read too, but did I get to read to her?   No!!!!  Little Miss Sara read three whole books and I didn’t read even one. When my classmates and I went back to our classroom, everybody was complaining about having to read little kid books, but I had nothing to say because my little buddy seemed perfectly fine with reading to me or just herself.  She suited me fine!

Back Down Memory Lane

I wasn’t always a reader.  In kindergarten I was diagnosed dyslexic and although it was 40 years ago, I remember vividly the slow and tedious daily one-on-one instruction I received at Evans Elementary.  I dreaded the inevitable charge to read my assigned paragraph aloud and hearing my classmates giggle as I struggled with the easiest of words.  It took about four years of special classes for my brain to automatically switch the letters on the page to their correct order and even today, if I attempt to read late into the night, when real fatigue sets in, the words on a page begin to slip into a jumbled mess.  In college, pulling an all-nighter was useless.  It was better for me to go to bed, get a good night’s sleep and get up refreshed and ready to hit the books at 5am.

Something happened in 5^th grade.  I was a new student at St. Louis and somehow as I struggled to fit in and find my way, I noticed that reading didn’t seem as laborious. It was like a light switch had been hit and all of a sudden, everything on the page made sense. I began to read furiously, I couldn’t stop.  When I finished one book, I had to have another waiting in the wings and if I didn’t have a book to put my hands on, I’d read whatever was in front of me, including the milk carton as I ate my cereal in the morning. I see some of these same habits developing in Livy Girl.  She reads while eating breakfast and well beyond her 9pm bedtime.  She loves to receive Borders or Barnes & Noble gift cards.  She even memorizes upcoming release dates for new titles by her favorite authors.

My favorite author when I was my daughter’s age was Judy Blume. I inhaled everything she wrote.  I especially loved Deenie, Are You Their God? It’s Me, Margaret and a little later, I was one of the first girls in Sister Vincentine’s to read Blume’s Forever.  I can’t remember if I had my own copy of the paperback or if I simply inherited the book that was being passed around among the other readers in my class.  I do remember the sections colored by a yellow highlighter, which detailed the scandalous heavy petting and French kissing.

I was never one of those girls who dreamed about my wedding or even getting married, but I do remember thinking that if ever I had a daughter, I’d introduce her to Judy Blume.

I know a lot of people who travel down memory lane when they hear the first few notes of a certain song, but for me, my personal history is marked by what I was reading at the time.  I still have the peanut butter stained copy of The Color Purple my mother included in a care package she sent to me my freshman year at Hampton. Also in the box was a jar of Skippy peanut butter that cracked in transit and the oil from the jar seeped into the first 100 pages of the book.  The works of Toni Morrison consumed my junior and senior years of college and I was reading Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje when I met my husband in France.

A few years ago, two of my dearest girlfriends moved beyond a day’s travel and I suddenly found myself feeling rudderless and an invitation to join a book club introduced me to a wonderful group of women who have become good friends.

I’m always recommending books to people I know.  I strike-up conversations with strangers when I notice they’re reading something I’m familiar with and I can talk about my favorite books/authors for hours on end.

They’re few things that are a constant in life, but since I was ten, reading has been a constant friend, provided comfort and sometimes even an escape.

Go Read a Book!

Have you ever been so aggravated that you would do anything to just make your parents or siblings (a.k.a my brother, Yannick) leave you alone?

               

Whenever I’m bored and complain to my mom about it, she always tells me to “Go read a book!”  She’s been giving me the same answer for years. Once I do what she says, and I read a book often until real late and then, guess what, she tells me to stop reading and go to sleep.

My mom is right about reading. Once I really get into a book, it’s like I’m traveling, doing something and my boredom's gone. The book I’m reading now, Gilda Joyce “The Dead Drop” is set in Washington D.C. She’s working as an intern in the Spy Museum. In another book I just finished reading, The Mysterious Benedict Society, the main characters are whisked away on a secret mission to away fictional island, Normasan Island.

So for me, reading takes me to different places and do different things without leaving home, it’s all in my mind.

Kudos!

Kudos to my new favorite writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has been named one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40. 

I first learned of Adichie after checking out her TED address on the danger of a single story. Since that introduction, I ferociously read all of Adichie’s books including her most recent release, a book of short stories entitled, The Thing Around Your Neck; after which I fell headfirst into Purple Hibiscus and her haunting Half of a Yellow Sun. Chimamanda is one of those few authors that just can’t write them fast enough for me.