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?
Maybe you'll wake up with superpowers, -t.
A friend posted this on FB [link] and I really want to say that the meme reads like a prompt for slash fic, but I'm afraid that's the wrong corner of my friendslist. I don't want to end up trying to explain slash.