Oh, happy late July, dear ones.
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| We actually own our own tubes, which makes this activity #1 on the free thrills chart. Also: good beer in a can has changed my river life forever. Photo courtesy of the amazing Chris Perry, of deviled-egg photography fame. |
I’m posting some summer links—the quick version because we
are (seriously) tubing again today.
Judith Frank’s big, beautiful novel All I Love and Know will make you laugh and cry. And I mean laugh
in big loud snorting gasps, and also cry in the choking, snot-everywhere kind
of way that makes your partner say, “What are you reading?” (Full disclosure: when I read this book, it was in
manuscript form and was called “Noah’s Ark.” Because Judy’s my friend in real
life.) The book has become weirdly, sadly timely, given that it starts with a terrorist
act in Jerusalem, and a couple, Matt and Daniel, on their way to Israel; Daniel’s
twin brother and his wife have died in the bombing, and they’re going to fetch
the baby and 6-year-old they’ve inherited. It’s a political book in an
excellent, stirring way, but of course the part I loved the most was the
domestic: these two hip, young people returning to Northampton, Massachusetts
with a pair of messy, grieving children. The kid scenes are completely
hilarious and heartbreakingly real. Every detail is perfect: "At night,
the upstairs hallway was lit up like an airport runway with night-lights." Perfect.
I also want to recommend one more to the grown-ups: Rufi
Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona del Mar.
(Full disclosure: I don’t actually know Rufi Thorpe!) I reviewed it for More magazine, and this is what I said: This
is a ravishing, stay-up-all-night-reading kind of novel—a sad, funny, almost
impossibly good debut about a decades-long friendship that spans decades and
continents, teenagerhood and motherhood, unwanted pregnancy and addiction, dark
secrets, fate, and, almost improbably, joy. How
well we can ever know another person? The book seems to ask. How known can we ever be ourselves? This
is rousing, high-impact prose: every sentence is like a ringing buoy or a slap
in the face. Rufi Thorpe can write.
Let’s just hope she can write quickly so we can read more soon.
Birdy wants to recommend Cammie McGovern’s absolutely
magnificent YA novel Say What You Will.
(Full disclosure: Cammie is our neighbor and one of the loveliest human beings
on the planet.) “I liked the characters and the way the plot keeps changing,”
she says, in what is not, I’ll admit, the most sparklingly worded review ever.
That said, she basically lay in bed with the book, reading frantically and breath-holdingly,
until she had finished. And then I read it too, and loved it almost as much as
she did. Heads up: grown-uppy things happen in this novel about friendship,
love, and ability.
Birdy also wants to recommend This Book Was a Tree: Ideas, Adventures, and Inspiration for Rediscovering the Natural World, by Marcie Chambers Cuff (a stranger!). It
got the full Birdy Post-it-note treatment, and she got very busy making a
terrarium, ASAP.
She has plans to tackle many more of the lovely, sweetly
illustrated projects. Meanwhile. . .
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| Is this too visually confusing, with the Munchkin lid? Note: you don't need the lid from Munchkin to play Qwixx. |
Our number-one game of the summer, for when we don’t have
time for Catan, is the easy card/dice newbie Qwixx. It is somehow the perfect
mix of strategic and untaxing, like Yahtzee crossed with Shut the Box crossed
with Blackjack. We have played in clam shacks, at home, in our tent, and even
at the Laundromat while we were waiting for our bedding to dry after a
campground thunderstorm. On the very off-chance that the rules confuse you,
here are the two issues we clarified (geek alert): 1) The active player can
take the initial white dice. 2) The active player can take only one
combination of white and colored dice.
Happy reading and gaming, friends! Please do weigh in with your current favorites. I can't tell you how much of your advice we've taken over the years.
