Yum & Yuk

We saw "The Punk Singer" recently and I cannot recommend it more highly. Not just great subject matters (Kathleen Hanna, of course, but also music and feminism and art) and great visuals and music, but also just a really well done documentary. The trailer doesn't do it justice, just go see it.

A few weeks ago I read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a debut novel by Adelle Waldman. It is a smart and intricately drawn portrait of an unremarkable protagonist - a straight young white man in Brooklyn who has found the literary success he was always sure he deserved, and the subsequent attention of women that validates the years of being "the nice guy" he clocked prior to success. While I don't have a connection to the publishing world and didn't care about many of those details (the hierarchies of who gets articles published in which places, and book deals/contracts, etc), the characters were very familiar (especially, I would guess, if you went to a liberal arts college on the East Coast). Waldman is clearly talented and observant, and the book was a quickly engrossing read, but I can't say I found it enjoyable - I spent the majority of the book either tortured by the protagonists infuriating opinions and successes, or tortured by my own recollections at having behaved like both he and the victims of his emotional idiocy. When I put the book down, I was definitely not sorry to have read it, but I was also not at all sorry to be out of Nathaniel P's world.

I also recently read Sisterland,  by Curtis Sittenfed. I really enjoyed this novel, and thought the author smartly used the sisters' twin-ness and psychic abilities as ways to explore intimacy and our relationship to trying to control or predict the future (and Sittenfeld does so without hitting us over the head too painfully with heavy metaphors). My interest and enjoyment of the book was definitely increased by the proximity of twins in my life, and I would particularly recommend this book to anyone with siblings, or to anyone with twins in their lives. However, even if that's not the case for you, this book still stands on its own as a well-constructed and well-paced novel, addressing themes of trust, family, parenting, and how much we want to know about those around us - or ourselves.

Is anyone else doing the holiday Run Streak? For those blessedly ignorant about this particular challenge, it sounds sort of innocuous to begin with - the challenge: run (at least) a mile a day every day between Thanksgiving and New Years. I just started week three, however, and it's brutal! Not having any off days, and battling the winter cold and darkness, and just scheduling the runs has proven challenging. It's sort of a bummer because it's cutting into my precious yoga practice, but it's a fun thing to try to do once, and is helping me stay in good enough condition for our half marathon in February....I hope.