Andrea Y. Griffith

Week 16/52: The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

The Highest Tide was recommended by the owner of our downtown bookstore. Jim Lynch lives in Olympia and The Highest Tide is his first novel. Loved it. Miles O'Malley is a young teenager obsessed with the tidal flats around Olympia and has a crush on the naturalist Rachel Carson. The novel follows Miles and the tides during one amazing summer.

I really don't know much about South Puget Sound. We were at the farmer's market last week and I picked up a handout from the South Sound Estuary Association that lists summer dates for low tide explorations with naturalists. Yes, please. Perfect timing.

Our farmer's market in Olympia is open again for the summer. We have the best farmer's market. Really. And Nikki McClure, another local author, just published a picture book, To Market, To Market, on our farmer's market in Olympia. It is fabulous.

Spring is coming around

I was walking Mr. Henry around the neighborhood last night and found these flowering branches on the ground. The gardeners were going to throw them away so I rescued a few. So beautiful they don’t look real. Appropriate for Easter week.

We headed over to Richland this last weekend to visit my parents. We had a really nice time. Both girls do really well in the car and love their Grandma Rose & Papa. However, Jane is not a fan of sleepovers. She slept so unbelievably badly. The weather in Richland was lovely. We wine-tasted, visited G-G, hid easter eggs in the yard, went to church, played outside and brought home a dozen spudnuts.

Cate is potty-training and it is a bit of a mixed-bag. I know we’ll get there. One morning she managed to pee in both my shoes (while I was wearing them), on our new brown rug, Jane’s socks, and her own dress and panties. Amused sigh.

Week 15/52: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald [and a lot of other random book stuff]

I haven't read The Great Gatsby since I was a junior in high school (um, 1995?). Rereading Gatsby was pleasurable yet strange. I remembered so much. Partly because we dissected it to death: the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg have never felt far away but partly Gatsby strikes a nerve in the young. In contemplating grown-up life, you hope that someone comes to your funeral. You hope your books don't go unread. You hope your dreams don't implode. You hope you don't surround yourself with careless people. Reading Gatsby again is not a polemic as it was as in adolescence but just a tragedy. I have already made the big choices. And I want to adopt Tom & Daisy's little girl. I certainly never gave her a second thought in high school.

I love the famous cover art of The Great Gatsby and I almost ordered this t-shirt from Out of Print (cool company: for every shirt they sell they donate a book to Africa). But then I thought: do I really want to spend $28 to have a pair of eyes on my chest?

So I may have just ordered this bookend instead [from CB2]

And maybe the $20 edition of this print by Tatsuro Kiuchi from 20×200. I am slowly collecting a few things here and there for the closet in our bedroom that will eventually be my home office (once I start working again – hopefully this summer or fall?).

Alert: 30Rock Fans

I may have accidentally picked up Tina Fey's new book while at Costco this morning picking up our picture order. Whoops. I read about 1/3 of it during the girls naptime this afternoon. Snortingly funny.

April Bookshelf

I realized that I never posted about the Ideal Bookshelf that Jane Mount, a New York artist, painted for us. This was Telfer’s Father’s Day present and I picked it up shortly before I ended up in the hospital so I never mentioned it. It hangs in our entryway and we just love it. So April’s Bookshelf is the books represented in the painting with one exception – I loaned Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal to my mom.