So, it’s long been a goal of mine to get through all the works of Shakespeare. One good thing about this is that it’s relatively easy to find copies of all his plays when you’re on a college campus. According to my Shelfari account, the last time I polished off a piece of Shakespeare was in December of 2010, when I read “Julius Caesar.” I remember I started going through the Histories, which I had never had interest in before, because they were always on the shelf, and probably because I’d already read most of the Comedies and Tragedies.

Apparently, “Coriolanus” was the last Tragedy that Shakespeare wrote. I guess I’m reading them out of order. It was actually kind of a depressing story (fitting, I guess, being a Tragedy). The thing is, as you’re reading, you don’t really feel that anything Coriolanus says justifies his image of an arrogant, prideful man. So then he just comes off as sort of misunderstood, and his motives don’t seem all that bad. And that just makes his death that much more tragic.

Yeah, he dies. I don’t think this counts as a spoiler since you know “Coriolanus” is a Tragedy, and you know that in all Shakespeare’s Tragedies, pretty much everyone dies at the end. If they get married then it’s a Comedy.

Anyhow, I have one other Shakespeare play on my reading list at the moment, and then I will have to go back to the library and check what else I still need to read.

Nutmeg starts out with Gabriel Angélico and an interesting situation – his heart is on the right side of his chest rather than the left. So you are led to believe that this will be the premise of the novel and that somehow, “nutmeg” will come into the story. While Gabriel Angélico does indeed share a nutmeg tree with his neighbor, the story ends up being broader than this one man. I don’t even feel that he ends up being the main character at all.

I have no idea what language this book was originally written in, but it felt like a Gabriel García Márquez novel. It talks about love in a roundabout way. It shows you the intimate, painful details of every day life. And it feels just the tiniest bit foreign, and yet completely familiar at the same time. Universal.

So last night I decided to make a birthday scone for Mike. Cranberry-orange sounded delicious, and I thought we probably had all the ingredients in the apartment, so I Google’d “cranberry orange scone” and glanced at the first three hits. Here’s what I settled on:

Ingredients–
1 1/2 c flour
1/4 c sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 c butter
1/2 c dried cranberries
zest from one tangelo
1/2 tbs lemon juice
1/2 c milk

And I just realized, looking at my little note paper that there actually was an egg in the recipe which I failed to add in. But the scones turned out fine so no harm done I guess. ^^;

Preheat your oven to 400F.

In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
In a smaller bowl, mix lemon juice and milk. This was my substitute for buttermilk.
While the fake buttermilk sits, cut the butter into the dry ingredients. I mean literally put the cold butter in the bowl, take a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and cut the butter into smaller bits while sort of mixing it in. Try to be quick about it so the butter doesn’t get soft.
Add cranberries to dry ingredients. Zest the tangelo into the dry ingredients. The original recipe said 2 tsp of orange zest, but I didn’t bother measuring and just zested one whole thing. Also I had a tangelo in the fridge instead of an orange. Whatever.
Add the buttermilk (and egg if you want to do it right) into the dry ingredients and mix it a bit to make a dough.

Squish the dough together to try to get all of it to stick, but if there are crumbs on the bottom of the bowl don’t worry about it. It’s better to not let your hands warm and melt the butter than to get every last bit of flour.

Make a big round patty thing and put it on a cookie sheet. I made mine around 1-1.5″ thick. Try to make it uniform thickness. Mine tapered off at the edges, and then the very edge got sort of burnt. =/
Cut the patty into 8 wedges, but don’t separate the wedges.

Bake for 15-25 minutes (until “golden brown”). Mine took the full 25 minutes, and turned out lovely.

I actually cut a slice out at the 20 minute mark, but it was still somewhat gooey inside? Which, given that I forgot the egg would probably have been fine. I was also worried because I could see the edges getting really dark brown and I didn’t want them to be super burnt. But I put it back in for 5 minutes and the inside of the scone crisped up, and the edges didn’t get noticeably darker.

The recipe gets you a nice crispy bottom, which I like. And the inside is flakey rather than crispy. So I liked that.

Oh, also when I ate that early slice, it actually turned out to not be very sweet, so at the end I sprinkled some sugar over the top of the entire thing. I think the recipe I Googled included a glaze that consisted of orange juice + powdered sugar? But I skipped that. So maybe that’s why the scone itself was made less sweet (if they assumed you’d have the glaze).

I guess with a subtitle like “A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater” I shouldn’t have expected more.

I just finished How I Paid for College by Marc Acito. It was fresh, I guess, but it was also a bit boring at the same time. How an author can pull that off is beyond me. It was like all the stereotypes of contemporary fiction rolled in one. Like Catcher in the Rye meets “Glee,” the TV show, plus a bit of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Throw in some extra sex scenes for good measure. The main character and his friends go on mad-cap adventures, and then in the end it’s wrapped up neatly as a coming of age story, the end.

I picked up this book from the library because it was right next to “Hugo Cabret,” by the same author, and had the similar format of being “A Novel in Words and Pictures.”

A few oddities.
The beginning section is set in Gunflint, Minnesota. I was just there last week.
The middle section is set in Hoboken, New Jersey. I reading another book right now (How I Paid for College) that is set in New Jersey and the author mentions that the nickname of his town (Oak Acres) is Hoboken Acres.
There’s a mini-theme running through the story about silent films. I was just comparing “Hugo Cabret” (and the words+pictures format) to silent films.

Anyhow. I liked the book. The ending seemed a bit…strange? Weak? But the use of the pictures interspersed was a lot more interesting than in “Hugo.” In “Hugo” the pictures seemed to supplement the story more? Which made the book feel a bit like a graphic novel. In “Wonderstruck,” the pictures depict a parallel storyline.

I found out recently that the movie “Hugo” was adapted from a book. When I was in Minnesota, I stepped into a tiny bookshop and I actually saw a copy of it, but it was kind of thick and I didn’t want to commit to bringing it back to California with me.

Today, I went to the UCSD Geisel Library and I saw a copy there! Mike checked it out for me with his card (yay for husbands).

It was not at all what I expected. Because of its size I thought it would be a story of similar length to Eragon or something. (Haha, don’t judge a book by its cover….) But if you flip through it, you instantly know it’s nothing like that. There are pages and pages of illustrations. It’s a bit like a graphic novel, or a child’s picture book. And it also feels a little like a silent film, which fits the theme, I suppose. It’s really quite well done as a whole. And I can see why someone thought to make it into a movie itself.

I’m reading a book my dad gave me that’s a collection of short stories. It’s really good so far (I’m about 3/5 of the way through), although I guess that isn’t surprising given the title “The Best American Short Stories.” The one I have is for 2010. The weird thing is, I recognized one of the stories: “Safari” by Jennifer Egan.

When I was at Michigan, I would sometimes walk through the MechE building on the way to the bus stop or some such. There was this area where people would put free reading material that you could take. Usually it was just extra copies of some scientific journal or other, but once it was an old copy of The New Yorker. When I left, I brought the issue with me on the plane and one of the stories in that issue was “Safari.”

Odd coincidence. *shrug*

I’m in Minnesota, and was just wandering around Grand Marais. Walked into Drury Lane bookshop, and saw Small Steps by Louis Sachar on the 50% off shelf. I flipped through it and saw “Armpit” and “X-Ray” and realized it must be some sort of sequel to Holes so I decided to buy it.

Finished it in an afternoon. Couldn’t quite remember the characters from Holes but everything felt like it was in the right place. The love angle was a bit of a stretch, but I can see how it worked into the story and it didn’t bother me too much.

Very cute, and it made me wonder what the other Camp Green Lake boys are up to. =P

May left me this book after one of her trips home. I assume she got it at the airport? I don’t know. Apparently won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is quite impressive.

Oh right, I forgot I can no longer have the Amazon book image (or can I?). The book I’m talking about is The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer.

I glanced at the back of the book for a quick run-down before starting. I usually don’t do this, as I don’t like to know what’s coming up in the plot, but the book basically dropped down on me from out of the blue so…yeah. Based on the back of the book, I thought it was going to be about a girl whose car breaks down and a young man “picks her up” (since her car is broken). But no, that’s not what the title refers to at all. It’s “pick up” as in when guys say, “Let’s go pick up some chicks.” Only it’s the girl who’s doing the picking up, and the guy who is “The Pickup.”

Only, just now I noticed that in orange font, they have the tag line: Who picked up whom? And why?
And that makes me wonder, because there was something…

Anyway, the book is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but the sentence structure is free form enough that it actually slowed me down? I had to think about where clauses began and ended, and it was a little annoying. But the story was interesting, and maybe a bit too…easy? Smooth? Even the conflicts seemed rounded on the edges, which was a bit surreal.

Not sure what it means that this won the Nobel Prize. I haven’t read many Nobel Prize winners so I don’t have much to compare it to in that sense.

Today it occurred to me that the second and third babies (Next One and Next Next One, per George’s nomination) will be born in the same year, and one will be a boy and one will be a girl, just like Sara and Allen (although in the other order). And then it occurred to me that I am once again treating the babies as if they will be cousins, when in fact they will be the children of cousins, which are actually second cousins, I believe. Which led me to the thought that if I imagine the babies as cousins, then I am in some way imagining The Cousins (my cousins, plus my sister and myself) as siblings.

I guess The Cousins are pretty close. And by “The Cousins” I really should say “The Six” since I mean only my cousins on my mom’s side. I had this idle thought – when people ask you to put someone down as your emergency contact, it’s normal for you to put your parents, or your older sibling, or your spouse. When we needed to have two emergency contacts for school, or one emergency contact that wasn’t your parent, I would always put my aunt. On the one hand, it was a logical emergency contact because she was an adult and she lived nearby so if someone was needed to come get me or something, she would be in the vicinity (oddly this applies to both to my eryi – when I was in NorCal- and my da-ayi – when I lived in SoCal).

Nowadays nobody asks me to list emergency contacts. But I was thinking, if I did need to list someone, first I would put Mike. But if asked to list a second, I would probably list Sara. Again, this is because she lives in the area and could probably come to get me if that were necessary. But I have never heard of someone putting their cousin as their emergency contact. I mean, I’m sure people do it all the time, especially if they’re relatively close to their cousins (like we are), or if their cousin lives in the area.

But for some reason, “cousin” sounds so…distant to me. It sounds even further removed than “friend.” In my imagination, people are more likely to put down a friend as their emergency contact than their cousin. Maybe this is because not many cousins live in the same city? Whereas you make your friends in the city you live in, so they usually live relatively close by. I had this fantasy that I would be dawdling over an emergency contact form, and I would put for “relationship” next to Sara’s name: sister.

But honestly honestly, I don’t think of her as my sister. May is my sister, and it’s a very different relationship than the one I have with Sara. Even when I try to imagine a family like Marilyn’s, with seven siblings, I imagine that her relationship with her siblings is closer than my relationship with my cousins. Maybe you’re not equally close to all of your siblings in such a big family, but maybe still closer than another person’s cousins, even if that person were close with their cousins?

I think of Amara as my niece. But even though Sara refers to me as Amara’s “auntie,” I don’t think she sees me having the same relationship with Amara as Gina has with Amara. And that’s fine with me, and natural. But I don’t think that when I tell other people that I’m going to visit “my niece” that I’m just saying that to simplify matters. (Although when I’m talking to people who know I have a sister, I do usually say “my cousin’s baby” so that they don’t get too shocked.)

This doesn’t have a point. I just had thoughts and wanted to put them down.

I wonder how close normal people are with their cousins. “Normal.” Right.