Stacy Horn

Did I mention that everyone should read The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel? Actually, read her book Station Eleven first, then The Glass Hotel. I adored both, but I loved The Glass Hotel a little more. The reason I’m suggesting this order is, Station Eleven is a post apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and it sucks you right in. It’s like no other post apocalyptic novel, it’s truly wonderful. The Glass Hotel may sound like something you’re not interested in. It revolves around Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme, except she creates new characters that are not based on Madoff or his cohorts or family. If you read Station Eleven first you will be so in love with her writing you’ll think, okay, I’ll give this book a try even if a financial crime isn’t my cup of tea. The Glass Hotel book took my breath away.

What shall I read next? I need to read The Big Short (about the 2008 financial crisis) for research for the book proposal I’m working on, but I want to also read something just for the sheer pleasure of reading. I’ve started a few and they just didn’t hit the spot. I think the winner might be Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

A Remains of the Day-like scene I came upon during one my recent walks. The sign says that 20 gingko trees were planted on 5th Avenue in 1960 in memory of Dorothy Shaver, the late president of Lord & Taylor. But the plot in front of that sign was empty, and when I looked up and down 5th Avenue I didn’t see a single gingko tree. It was a little like the last line from Shelley’s Ozymandias: “Nothing beside remains …”

I am enjoying all the time with the cats. Animals are such great mood-regulators, aren’t they? They make everything better. This is them inspecting my candy delivery.

This is them about do something destructive. They’re still relatively young (three years old) so knocking over things, ripping up things, is their reason for living. I keep having to replace my shower curtain because for whatever God forsaken reason they like to eat it. This scares me because one of them swallows the plastic pieces and I’m terrified it might become a foreign body. At the ASPCA hospital we’re always seeing animals with foreign bodies. If they pass it great, but we perform a lot of surgeries to remove them and that doesn’t always lead to a happy ending.

Seen on my search yesterday for single serving Amy’s Margherita Pizzas. I only found three, so I had to buy the large size which I break in half by banging them on the side of my kitchen counter. It’s a good day when I get mostly equal halves.

The upside of my quest was coming across this pupper on my way home. Well hello there, sweetie pie!

This is what we do now. We see a delivery has been made to a grocery store, we check it out. Now, what was I looking for? Bleach? No. Amy’s Pizzas? No. Damnit.

I haven’t done a ton of reading, but I’m ramping up it seems. After reading a bunch of material that was book proposal related, I stopped because I wasn’t concentrating. Then I switched gears. The first book post-gears-switched was just for fun: The Woman in the Window. And it was fun. Perfect escapist reading. Now I’m just finishing up The Glass Hotel, which is just marvelous. It’s the new novel from Emily St. John Mandel, who wrote the post apocalyptic Station Eleven, which is one of the best I’ve read.

The Glass Hotel was supposed to be just for the sheer pleasure of reading, but it’s a fictionalization of Bernie Madoff’s crimes (which might make it sound not so interesting, but it’s glorious). The book proposal I’m working on is also about financial crimes, but like her book it’s about more than financial crimes and her book is inspiring me.

I’m going to finish her book before my next one arrives, a novel by one of my favorite authors who usually writes non-fiction, Lawrence Wright. It’s about a pandemic! I would have ordered it regardless, but now I can’t wait for it to get here. It’s called The End of October: A novel.

While I wait for Wright’s book to arrive, I’m going to re-read one of my top ten favorite books of all time: One Hundred Years of Solitude. So many people are using the title of one of his other books, Love in the Time of Cholera, for signs. I wonder how many of them have actually read his book? (Not one of my favorites, alas.)

What are you reading?