This week has been a total blur – but I look back and feel like I traveled miles. There were work complexities, three days in the office, depression and rage over
the current political situation (always, now), a comparatively and thankfully minor ice
storm, and an evening spent at EMT Cadet training for the kiddo. (As usual, this was the
high point for me. This week our intrepid heroines strapped the lifelike dummy to the gurney and fluttered around him performing industrious lifesaving maneuvers. Then, they took turns hurtling the gurney up and down the halls, banging him around the corners, and loading him into and out of the ambulance. I’m glad that the dummy made this appearance; a couple of weeks ago it may have been volunteer moms strapped to that gurney. I speak from personal experience.)

I finished the latest Haruki Murakami book. “The City and its Uncertain Walls” was not
as swiftly immersive as “1Q84”. The book felt a bit disjointed, which makes sense as I
learned it was written in two different time periods of Murakami’s life. The cast of people and places include a teenage couple in love who become separated; there is a walled city with a library of dreams, perishing unicorns, and characters who become separated from their shadows. There is another library in another world, a ghostly librarian with a quirky fashion sense, and a boy with a Yellow Submarine parka. The plot and poetry lies amid those details. If you love Murakami and would read his writing even if it was on a bathroom wall in a Tokyo train station, you’ll enjoy the delicate unfurling of this book. If you don’t, or if you’re not familiar with him at all, this may not be the book for you.

In other reading news, perusing the NYTimes, I saw this starter pack of romance novels and I’m intrigued. I think the last romance novels I read were back in early high school. One summer vacation, our rental cottage had a rickety bookshelf full of old Harlequins and I worked my way through all of them with single minded determination, staying up late, gritty eyed with fatigue but determined to find out if the romance between the plucky yet wilting amnesiac with a secret twin and the arrogant aristocrat with the eyepatch and the tortured history could ever bear fruit. That led to spending allowance money on a few Regency romances at our local bookstore ‘The Printed Word’ (where I also bought my Tiger Beat magazines, horoscope rolls, and later, the biography of Ed Gein which made the clerk ask suspiciously if my mother knew what I was reading). I really only remember ‘Lady Lochinvar’, a Barbara Hazard banger (no pun intended) with the requisite strong-willed heroine and a worldly and fairly smutty viscount, but I know for a fact there were more than that on my shelves for awhile, until they became embarrassingly unsophisticated for my high school literary ambitions. One of my mom friends has a Goodreads account full of ‘new’ romance – she says she likes her reading to be “spicy”. She’s Canadian (and btw Canadians – I am SO VERY SORRY about our embarrassment of a “president” – over 75 million Americans did not choose this for you or for us) so many of these are centered in the hockey world, and have seemingly endless riffs on the word ‘puck’ in the titles. So there’s definitely a market for it and if romance is written up in the NY Times, it HAS to have an aura of respectability, right?

I feel like I might be coming down with a head cold so perhaps some time spent under
the duvet with a couple of recommended steamy romance novels may be the best plan
for the weekend ahead. I will report back.

In the meantime, be well and safe – xo.