Debut Day: Part II

Time has gone by and I haven't the desire or interest to write about Rosie O'Donnell's "The View" debut. She has a lot of kids and she does crafts and she didn't work for four years. Great.

I did DVR a couple of episodes this week and I even tried watching them. They talk over each other. Like four hyenas going after the same cracker. Barbara's cheeks offend me and Elisabeth, well, she didn't say much during the last episode I watched. But Joy's cool. She should have her own show.

No more television. Here's some book talk. A friend gave me a copy of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude for my birthday. I started reading it but put it down around page fourteen. I couldn't go on anymore. But I went back to it yesterday after a few discussions about his Motherless Brooklyn and its Tourette's Syndrome-afflicted narrator. So I figured I'd give it another chance. And around page thirty-six, I stopped. Again. Never to go back. Never say that, of course, but I just can't see myself trying to pick it up again. Especially knowing it tops out at just over 500 pages.

I must admit here that I do have some guilt over it. I've heard that giving a book 100 pages is fair. I can't do it. I could die next Thursday morning and I don't want to go out while trying to see through the eyes of Solitude's  narrator. But then I think -- fear, actually -- that someone will stop reading my book halfway through, or worse on page fourteen, without giving it a chance. But that's what books are for. To devour or to put aside. I'll give Motherless Brooklyn a shot. Incidentally, Lethem will be appearing at the Starbucks Salon sometime this month.

I'm still working out what to read next. I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats in anticipation. Blah. Speaking of books, I came across a post on NPR.org about Middlemarch. Close friends know this is one of my favorite books. It shares the top spot with Sexus and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I'm such a dork about it that I commented on NPR's site about it. I gave them my Middlemarch story. It consists of a patient professor who offered me a chance to redeem myself in my Victorian literature class.

I thought I'd try and get my presentation that semester over with fairly quickly. About six weeks in. So I chose to read William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Shit.

I read half of it, chose to discuss satire, and proceeded to trip and fall my way through to the end. And the professor saw right through it. Go figure. She even told me she'd give me an incomplete  and I could make up the work. That freaked me out for some reason. Ha. For some reason. I knew it wasn't the same as an F but it felt like it, and I had flashbacks of high school Algebra. She offered an alternative. Write a ten-page paper on Middlemarch.

And that's what I did. I read the 600-page book in five days and wrote about the effect of marriage on the characters' lives. I got a B in the class. And the professor invited me back to Chico a few years later to help her lecture on the book to her Victorian lit class. So I got to read it again. And I'll read it a few more times, too. I'm still in touch with Carol, the professor, and I'll be seeing her when I'm in California soon.

More on books? I'm on page 57 of mine. In five pages, I will have surpassed the point where I scrapped my first attempt. I have taken some from that version, but it's different this time. No matter how unhappy I am with one or five pages, I'm just gonna keep writing. By the beginning of the summer, I want to be finished with the first draft. Then it's editing time. Then it's find-an-agent time. I will write more on this. But now, I'm going back to page 57.