Spoiler alert: the hot chocolate won

Here's a conversation with my sister. 

Don't bother

Bared to You by Sylvia Day
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a book about two clearly damaged, rich, attractive, narcissistic, young people who have mind-blowing sex. The reader knows that both Gideon and Eva are damaged, although how exactly remains un-cleverly veiled. Gideon is also incredibly controlling and manipulative, and only shows emotion by jamming his hands in his hair. Eva is pathetic. I stopped reading this book because I can't figure out why in the world I'd want these people in my life.

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Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir That Inspired "Upstairs, Downstairs" and "Downton Abbey" by Margaret Powell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was really interesting and an enjoyable read. I have recently started watching Downton Abbey, and was curious to learn about that lifestyle from the perspective of one of the staff.

This is a short book, so there isn't a lot of details on the different families Powell worked for, and it was also interesting to read about how much thought and effort went into finding a husband, which at the time, was the fastest way out of the service lifestyle for a woman.

The book is uncomplaining, for the most part, and it is sprinkled with humor.


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Resolutions for 2013

I've just looked at my Goodreads stats, and I've read 10 fewer books and 1,841 fewer pages in 2012 than in 2011. That's sad.

Anyway, I am yet again making New Year's Resolutions, although really, they're more like goals, although I suppose all resolutions are more like goals.

One change you may notice (if you pay attention to this sort of thing) is that I'm not going to list all of the books I hope to read in 2013. Instead I'm going to list the ones I have read. I never manage to read much of anything on my resolution reading list, because I'm always too busy reading something else, so I just thought I'd dispense with that altogether.

So, without further ado, here are my resolutions:

1. Consolidate my reading lists (and boy, do I have a lot of them!)
2. Accomplish some financial goals:
1. (I'm not sure why Blogger started numbering again and didn't move to lowercase letters. I just wanted to let  you know in case you though I may have come up with this bizarre list convention myself. I assure you, I did not.) Pay off student loan 3-03 (again, I didn't come up with this numbering convention).
2. Pay off credit card
3. Put $5k in my IRA
4. Pay off student loan 3-04
5. Get our savings account up to $25k
3. Spend a day watching the Lord of the Rings movies (this and #4 were both things I hoped to accomplish during one of my unemployed stints, but sadly? they didn't last long enough for me to get around to this)
4. Spend a day watching the Harry Potter movies
5. Edit the novel I wrote in November into something passable
6. Read all of the books I borrowed from friends (yes, I haven't forgotten)
7. Lose weight
8. Run a sub-4 hour marathon (I'm pretty sure that this is directly dependent on #7, at least to a degree)

The Sixth Man by David Baldacci
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was fine. Sean and Michelle are getting a little old for me. Sometimes a book needs characters to move the plot forward, but when those characters are the main characters, the book feels a little screenplay-y to me. I mean, when you watch an action/adventure movie, it's okay that the characters aren't particularly multi-dimensional, but in a series, it's nicer to care about the characters.

And I'd call this a spoiler, but it's just so random that I don't think it will spoil anything, but there's a secondary character in this book who's really a lot of nothing, and this character ends up being the bad guy (or one of them). With absolutely no explanation after the fact. It was like Baldacci just needed to tie up a loose end or two and said, well, I'll just have this person do it since they're already here and therefore I don't need to make any changes to the plot or anything.

On the upside, it was a nice, easy read, which I needed, since my mom was in town for the holidays, so "quiet reading time" was a bit sporadic.

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Midnight in Paris

Last night, my mom and I watched Midnight in Paris, starring Owen Wilson. It's a Woody Allen film, which really tells you just about everything you need to know about it.

The basic premise of the movie is that the protagonist, Gil (Wilson), is dissatisfied with his life and imagines a better world/time/place...in Paris in the 1920s. He somehow time travels back to that era and meets a number of cultural icons of the time, including Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, and Picasso.

In his real life, Gil is surrounded by some really annoying people  one of them being his fiance, with whom he has no real chemistry.

During one of his time travel/fantasy escapades (the movie isn't clear on exactly what is happening...is he really traveling in time, is it his imagination...it really doesn't matter), he and Picasso/Hemingway's lover Adriana travel further back in time, to Paris in the 1890s, which Adriana thinks is preferable to Paris in the 1920s. It is this experience that awakens Gil to the fact that the present is always less pleasant than the past seems because life isn't always pleasant, but that a person shouldn't try to live their life in the past.

Gil returns to the present, decides to live in Paris, breaks up with his fiance, and presumably lives happily ever after, or at least happier ever after.

I enjoyed the  movie. It was good, but not great, but on another level, I found it relatable. I mean, who hasn't been dissatisfied with their life, or some aspect of it, and imagined themselves in a better time or place? The Virginia in my imagination is taller, thinner, and has way better skin and hair.

I think this is also the premise behind fan fiction (or at least one of the premises)...fan fiction allows the reader to insert him or her self into the story, and therefore allows the reader to escape their own life for a while, yet to do so in a way that they still control.

In the movie, what was more unbelievable to me, wasn't that Gil was managing to travel back in time, it was that no one in his present life seemed to understand this sense of yearning for something more/fuller/bigger that comes from feeling unfulfilled. I mean, isn't that just human nature? Otherwise, how would we grow at all?

Neo

I've recently been officially hired on by my company, so I've had to go through new employee orientation, despite the fact that I've been working here for two and a half months. The acronym for "new employee orientation" is, of course, NEO. So of course, this is what I think of:

Sadly, this is totally not what I've been hired to do.