Wow, Sue- surgery ~ma for your dad!

Happy Birthday Son of Laura!

I hate that "To Build a Fire" story. I feel like all we ever read in high school were short stories by Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Bret Harte. All of which I hate. But I did like "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Hemingway) and "The People of the Abyss" (London) so maybe I just hate short stories? But even though I didn't have the term at the time, my whole high school English curriculum made me annoyed at "blah blah blah manpain" And yet, still, I was an English Major. But seriously, both the Old Man and the Sea and The Pearl made me want to shoot myself in the head!

Surgery~ma for your dad, Sue.

Thanks everyone.

Sophia, I hate The Pearl too, That and Lord of the Flies, the only assigned book in HS that I refused to finish.

Surgery~ma for your dad, Sue.

My high school definitely hammered home the idea that Great Literature had to be depressing. I'm glad I found Wilde and Donne on my own, or I might have thought I hated English, in spite of spending every spare hour with my nose in a book.

I like Steinbeck, but mostly for Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flats. And his version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I think I like Bret Harte, but I don't remember why. And I might like stories about Jack London more than Jack London stories. I didn't hate Old Man and the Sea, but I have no fondness for Hemingway.

The thing I liked in To Build a Fire is the bit where he gauges the temperature by whether his spit freezes before or after it hits the ground.

I also hated The Pearl.

Surgery~ma for your dad, Sue.

It's the practical details that make the Fire story feel so very, since of course London really had been to Alaska.

One detail I'd love to work into a story of mine is how the housewives used to tell if the oven was hot enough for baking: hold your hand into it, and count out loud until you couldn't stand it anymore. Through practice, you'd determine that the oven was hot enough say when you couldn't count beyond ten or whatever.

Pretty sure I haven't read The Pearl. I know I haven't read Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden. Makes it a lot easier to like Steinbeck, I'd wager.

I've gotten into the habit of having Trader Joe's drinkable yogurt before bed, some vague notion of calcium and vitamin d being good for sleep and live cultures being generally good. Tonight's set ING tasted kind of funny, like maybe it was considering making a career change to cheese, so after I drank I checked the expiry date: Aug 10. That's probably not going to hurt me, right?