Yesterday, my flight from Fort Lauderdale was two-and-a-half hours late, which meant that I had exactly 65 minutes to get luggage, take a cab home, grab my car and go to Borders in Timonium. I was exactly one minute late.
June was there and I hugged her twice, once for me and once for everyone else at TMP who was kind enough to mourn Syd’s passing. And Ab, another TMP denizen and friend, asked a question so gratifying that I’m sure some people suspect he was a plant.
I am updating the blog at Spoons, after writing 1,095 words. Yes, I barely met quota, but it was a full chapter. And I will be reunited with my trainer later this afternoon, so a 2-W day is in store. A 2-W day studded with interviews, but a 2-W day nonetheless.
Anyone recognize the literary allusion in the title?
Hah! Well, then I get to meet her again after LS, when I dive between the ‘French flaps’ of What the Dead Know.
btw, at 200+ pages read, I still like Cassandra – despite My Huang’s somewhat firmly negative reaction! (but I don’t like her dad)
(presumeably because I tend to be much more clueless than she is)
make that “Mr Huang”…
I like them all. Seriously. But I believe that’s my responsibility as the writer.
Late to the party, but I smiled at the title of this entry.
I read that book a thousand times to my two children when they were very little. I can still feel the weight of their bodies on my lap, the way they would wriggle when they were wide awake and grow heavier as they became sleepy (they’d smell different, too, warmer somehow.)
Some books have last lines that are a pleasure to read, and whose final period can be punctuated by the firm closing of the book. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is one of the best of them.
“Anyone recognize the literary allusion in the title?”
No…but ‘some like it hot’.
(Sorry. I seem to be in a silly mood today. Monday, you know.)
–Marjorie
Hint: It’s the last line of a book about a happy homecoming.
I won’t spoil it for others, but I hope you did have a wild rumpus, and that nothing rolled its terrible eyes at you.
I’d be hot, too, if I was wearing a wolf suit.
I am hot when I’m wearing a wolf suit.
Oh, wait, you probably meant that differently.
Now there’s an image to make a man smile on a Monday. Have you seen the poster for the WtWTA movie yet?
Not sure why my recent posts are not, well, posting, but at the risk of being repetitive, I look forward to seeing you at P&P on Tuesday, and I hope to have finished LS by then. Since I have said so little, this one’ll likely go right through.
Glad you made it back–and working out is a good thing!
//karen
..and it did. Sigh.
//karen
Karen,
Your previous post did make it, I’m sure of it. But it’s always good to see you here.
I’ve come late to the party, but when I saw the title in the email update, my first thought was, “Where did you find a wild rumpus?” (Not in Indiana, that’s for sure.)
(NOT a spoiler) Memory Project question:
So, my theory is that the allure LL’s books have for me is (mainly) the three dimensional women (and girls) in them; and – whether based on my still-limited frame of reference (with regard to LL books) or not, Life Sentences has been striking me as a sort of coda for To The Power of Three. But I have lost my copy ot TtPoT and cannot look this up: Teena is the ex-detective (and partner of the great Lehnart) from Three, yes? And in THAT book she was also sidelined, but (here’s the question) – she was pregnant then, yes? Or just had a baby? Or – have I completely spaced out, and the on-the-job-injury referenced in LS had already occurred?
Anyway – further to the allure of three dimensional women, this past weekend my lovely wife and older daughter got hooked into the modeling show wherein Tyra Banks goes on one tirade after the next, as a parade of beautiful women strut and struggle – which left me free to read 2/3s of Life Sentences; and the juxtaposition between the women in the book and the women on that show produced the same effect as eating cheesecake with sauerkraut on top
edit: we Hoosiers don’t do the ‘wild rumpus’ thing!
Brian,
Teena is wholly new; the character you’re remembering is Nancy Porter, whose backstory is told in Every Secret Thing; is pregnant in Three; and is one of the key interrogators in What the Dead Know.
David – yep! A lifelong, natural-born Hoosier (but my mom is from Brooklyn via Oakland [Navy].
The young folks and I visited your state last summer; we went to the Dells and stayed in a cabin right next to where Lake Delton had been, up ’til 2 weeks before we got there!
We still got to do a ‘Duck’ ride out into the Wisconsin River, and indeed – all the water parks and attractions were offering huge discounts in the wake of the diasterous levy breaks and flooding.
Really, we didn’t know what to expect – but it was an absolutely marvelous journey through Wisconsin, including a close pass by Madison, and a stop at the (somewhat bizarre!) “House on a Rock”.
But the funniest thing while we were in the Dells was reading the local paper. There I learned that the industrious people with metal detectors who were criss-crossing the dry bed of Lake Delton were finding dozens and dozens of (are you ready for this?)…… hand guns!
Plus, they found a huge safe (minus its door), buried in the lake bed beyond the boat ramp!
So – you Badgers have a few pecadillos, too! (I take it that local lore ascribes many of the ditched firearms to Chicago mobsters…)
I enjoyed hearing you speak at Borders in Timonium. I am enjoying Death Sentences, and was especially struck by Callie’s comment about her aged mother: “Complaints were her only power.” It helps to explain my 87 year old grandmother, once a major force in our lives. I tend to fall for a book and remember it always when a few words among thousands hit home.
Brian, are you a native Hoosier? Because we do our best to do wild rumpii down here in Madison, but most of us who do are transplants from elsewhere. (And theatre folk, to boot.)
Whoops, wrong Madison. We’re down in Madison, Indiana, down on the Ohio River between Louisville and Cincinnati. That’s why I was asking, because the native Hoosiers down here don’t seem to get up to the rumpus like those who’ve moved from elsewhere…
Hah!
Well, many apologies for accusing you of being a cheese-head! Truth be told, I even clicked on your weblink and looked at the theater information, and STILL was thinking Madison, Wisconsin – which struck me as a beautiful and ‘with it’ major college town (which is to say, I thought my cultural prejudices were being confirmed!) when we passed through it last summer
Some day I will successfully get a clue, but in the meantime, this is probably another reason I enjoy LL’s books (and this site) so much. (and Pam at post 18 got me laughing out loud!)
That’s cool. We’re still sort of a college town–we’ve got Hanover College, maybe best known for siccing Woody Harrelson on an unsuspecting world–but we’re not really like what you’d think when you think the phrase “college town,” alas.