From Caitlin...

i just finished american pastoral. i'm not ready to talk about it yet and i kind of need a hug.

i've been kind of thinking about my top five books for what, months now? i'm not even sure i finished 5 books of 2009 but i'm gonna give it a shot.

the nick adams stories, the compilation of hemingway's semi-autobiographical character. you need to read this, ms han. the only hemingway i'd gotten to was 'the old man and the sea,' so my idea of him was more formed by bar pilar. you read these stories and get the sense hemingway is revealing himself and it's fascinating. many vignettes are barely linked, many are unfinished, which helped me understand the man's process a little bit and gave me a little bit of courage to push on with my own stories.

housekeeping by our girl marilyn robinson. i had to restart it a bunch, and then towards the end all the images came together and the whole experience was overwhelmingly beautiful. i love that it's all about women and the inexorable force of aloneness! everyone in this book comes off as truly alone, and people are only brought together by mutual understanding of that fact. like the antoine st. exupery quote, something about love is not gazing at each other, it's looking outward in the same direction. lookin' out over a lake in fingerbone, waiting for a train.

i picked up Salt by Mark Kurlansky to better understand the foodie brain.... and i found out i pay a lot more attention to world history when there's a common food thread to hold my attention. taken in small doses, (har, har) it was nice to come home from big bear and get my brain off of trying to understand coffee. i did get tired of hearing about fish and caviar towards the end; but i can't get the image of people in poland dancing in underground ballrooms carved entirely out of salt, with statues and religious figures from salt, rowing around the underground lagoons.... miners sliding down 350 foot slides to get to work... it's all pretty fantastic.

i read the first true blood by charlaine harris. it was trashy and i liked it, i'm not proud of myself. an aunt pushed the whole series on me at once and i got into it. you know my thing about bloomingdale's obsession with vampires. i just wanted to fit in.

aaaaaaaand i reread still life with woodpecker, because it is the medium for communicating with my best friend from college. how do you make love stay? it's kind of the only question there is.