I Spend My Life Consuming Stories

More than a month ago A. recommended (and lent me) Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault. It took me a while to get into the characters and story. I read it in bursts and that may have impacted how I related to and understood the plot. The principle relationship in the book is between a husband, Avery, and a wife, Jean. The story opens along the Nile, in Egypt, in 1962 (
1964?) and ends in Canada, with a number of other locations, Poland for example, heavily explored. There were a lot - a lot, a lot, a lot - of scenes with two people being in bed sharing long conversations about their past, stories of Warsaw's destruction and reconstruction through the eyes of a Jewish boy who grows up to be an artist living in Toronto and knowledge of plants comes into play. There are beautiful lines in this book and small moments that pack a punch, but there is also just a lot of remembering. It's funny that I feel this way about reading memories, since memory and nostalgia is a theme on which I like to touch in whatever little creative thing I have going on, but reading characters' rememberances for pages at a time became tiresome. It may just be as simple as my thinking that the nature of the conversations couldn't possibly be that meaningful and heavy all the time. There were very few moments of joy, and when they happened they were very quiet somehow. This line set up, simple as it is, was lovely to me:

"Jean led Avery a small way up the slope. They stood by a scattering of stones. Standing next to him, looking down at the river flowing in the white light of the generators she said: This very place we stand is where you first learned we will have a child. And she smiled at Avery's astonished face."
One of the reasons my progress on Winter Vault was so slow was due to my also deciding to re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I noticed Rowling's tendency to use people's hair as characterizations of their personality/inner life and thought it lazy. Still loved it. Kind of thinking about reading it again, but I'll hold back and try to read another grown up book.
A. also lent me the first season of Gossip Girl. What a ridiculous show. Chuck Bass continues to amaze me.
I watched the first two thirds of Wendy and Lucy and then the disc started skipping. I wanted to know what happened but I haven't actually asked for a replacement disc. Definitely on the bleak realism side.
I really enjoyed The Visitor. All the actors were really good and it wasn't overtly a political statement about the U.S. policies on illegal immigrants. The characters really stuck with me.
I'm jumping on The Mighty Boosh Bandwagon. It's funny and absurd and I laugh and laugh.
I watched the first season of This American Life as well. Though I haven't lived in a house with Showtime in pretty much ever, I found that I had seen a number of the episodes, or fragments of the episodes, at some earlier time. That night, my dreams were narrated by Ira Glass. I remember feeling comforted by this.
I also watched Demetri Martin's Comedy Centeral show. I laughed and laughed. I mean, not every jooke is super funny but the funny is right there often enough.
And that's all I've watched or read.