Yup....I'm still alive. Just, you know, lazy. I'm at work browsing through Bookmarks Magazine, thinking, hmmm, wish I had a way to keep track of all these books I want to read. My eyes fly to the neon green post it note pad. I have mounds of these notes on my desk, pink and yellow and blue ones, scribbled with titles and authors - little sticky stacks of them everywhere I look. I wish there were a better way, I think to myself, a place I could make a list that I'd have access to anywhere. Wait, didn't I already have this conversation with myself? Oh yes, the blog. The blog!

Phew ... I know I'll return to this list of books someday, read one, and it will be riveting, page-turning - life-changing. Okay, even I know, I will almost definitely never look at this list again. This is just another manifestation of the addiction. I became aware of the addiction when I packed five hardcover books to go on a week-long camping trip a few years ago - not because I can read five books in a week, but what if something happened, or if four of them were terrible, or well, who knows.... We moved twice last summer, and we had to pack and unpack the gargantuan book collection - box after box after box - both times in the sweltering heat. I like to think of myself as a non-materialist, by the way. It's just books - they are temptresses.

Anyway ... let's just get this over with, shall we? :

The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd
King of Lies by John Hart
Rumspringa by Tom Shactman

So, what have I actually read this summer? Good question. One that I could answer if I'd been keeping up on the blog. As it is, all of the titles are blended together into one big summer shlush pile in my frontal lobe - if that is where such things are kept? - and I can't seem to disentangle it. Don't worry, I'll try, I'll try...

Hamlet by Shakespeare. All but the last act, which is driving my husband crazy. Did you finish Hamlet yet? he keeps asking. I know I should just get it over with, except that I knows it ends badly. Shakespeare didn't mess around with tragedies. Ophelia drowns herself in scene one, you say? Crap. See what I mean.

It was my summer of Shakespeare. I saw Two Gentlemen of Verona and Taming of the Shrew. Both excellent presentations, although Taming of the Shrew left me a tad confused. Petruchio was starving Katarina and denying her sleep - aka torturing her - to make her a more agreeable wife. And he succeeded. What's so funny and romantic about that? I know, it was written 400 years ago - women were considered the property of their fathers and husbands. Perhaps we should be more amazed at what tough women existed back then, and with how obsessed Shakespeare was with men dressing as women and women dressing as men. What the heck was up with dressing the homeless guy as the king? It was rather tangential, not that it wasn't hilarious ... just strange.

Where is the Mango Princess by Kathy Crimmins. Crimmins's husband gets run over by a boat and severely injures his brain. He keeps asking her, "Where is the mango princess?" and no, this was not a personal joke between them. Heartbreaking, but fascinating. I had no idea the brain could recover from injuries of this magnitude. Crimmins is highly critical of the American Managed Care system she dealt with in 1996; I would wager they'd fare far worse today. So much for progress.