Yellow Wallpaper

Swing Time by Zadie Smith This is the first time I've read anything by Smith and I mostly liked it. For me, the strongest aspect of the book was the writing. There were many points where I paused and thought "I love this phrase", and the bits of social commentary sprinkled throughout were just as compelling as the quality of sentence construction. The plot was a little hard to follow and the central conflicts were a bit muted, making it hard to want to keep reading at times and leaving me a bit unsatisfied at the end. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss This was our book club pick for the month and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I've seen comparisons of the book to Harry Potter, but I think that's a little weird since they don't have much in common besides a young protagonist at a school for magic. The tone is completely different in this book and it has a different structure--I love the nested story conceit and Rothfuss does great things with it. Desp...

January has never been my favorite month and this year wasn't much of an improvement. First of all, January is way too long. We even had five Sundays this month so it felt like things were really dragging. The weather was really cold and extra snowy--which is great for keeping away the inversion and excellent for this summer's water prospects, but terrible for travel and everything else. Thankfully we're now in February, which is not only the shortest month of the year but also the month for Valentine's Day and P. Bibby's birthday and other wonderful things.  Actually, January this year really wasn't bad other than being excessively cold and snowy. I started doing yoga a few weeks ago and have mostly kept up with my goal of doing it for five days every week. One of these days I want to be able to go to bed early, get up early, and ride the exercise bike vigorously for half an hour before work. That isn't happening at all yet. However, I decided to start sm...