Hi, folks!
Hope everyone had a wonderful vacation. I ran into a few of you in my travels - some of you LITERALLY in my travels (bus, bus station) and others of you just in my Stop & Shop and Bunch of Grapes and Cronig's type travels. As always, lovely to see you!

I've jumped back into whole-hearted reading this week! Hannah has been transferred to the bone marrow transplant ward. She has a (small!) private room and she's not allowed to even leave her room. She feels pretty miserable from all of the chemo, so she sleeps A LOT. And she likes to have me at her side. So . . . she sleeps and I read. I finished Kite Runner, of course. It was, seriously, the best book I've ever read. SOOOO good. It was darker than I usually like, but I think I'm starting to appreciate dark, realistic stories a little more - they make me appreciate what I have. Anyway, there's a really disturbing incident early in the book, and you think, "Is that it? How can there be more? What's the author going to do for the next 300 pages?" But the author doesn't let you down. There's more and more and more again. I talked to Ms. Ferrone about it - she thought the ending was too neatly tied, too full-circle, too melodramatic. I guess I agree with all parts of that EXCEPT the "TOO." I thought it was perfect.

Next I read a book called More, Now, Again by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a pretty famous memoir of her adolescent/young adult struggle with depression; I read it long ago. This book is a memoir of her drug addiction in her late 20's and early 30's; it is EXCELLENT! It is pretty graphic in terms of her drug use, but it is realistic and highlights her highs (no pun intended) and lows and self-discovery. Another dark book.

Yesterday, I read one called Things to Bring, S#!t to Do by Karen Rizzo. It's a book of lists from 10 years of her life. The beginning is kind of lame, but I really appreciate the concept of the book - a book in lists. It reminds me of the magazine Found or of the book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse-Rosenthal. As the book goes on, it gets much better. Or maybe I just got better at reading it - it takes a while to get used to garnering a story from the lists.

I did read a trashy but fascinating book called Fools Rush In by Kristan Higgans. I think it's a Harlequin Romance but now they're calling them HQN because they know that people like me are WAY too snobby to read something that says Harlequin Romance on it even if we'd LOVE the romantic storyline and happy ending. Anyway, one of my best friends gave me the book because one of her friends and neighbors in Connecticut WROTE it! I practically know the author! Very cool. And it's set on Cape Cod in Orleans and Eastham, an area I know pretty well. Usually I don't like that because I spend too much time trying to figure out place landmarks, but the love story of this was so compelling, I actually enjoyed it. It's not perfectly written - some of the dialogue feels a little bit fake and some of the story feels a little bit forced, but I got very sucked in to it and read it in a morning. It was like watching addictive tv.

Whew! That was a lot of book information - told you I'm reading a lot. Probably I should take a break and talk to Hannah or fetch her some ginger ale or do her laundry or something. I'm thinking about all of you and hope your last weeks of first semester are going well. Almost halfway through the school year!

Ms. Wallace