Ticking My Boxes
Can an author plagiarise him or herself? You betcha. So what’s the problem? You like the author’s style, you’ll like more of the same, right? Not necessarily. I just finished Jennifer Crusie’s Maybe This Time and I was so struck by the similarities to my favourite Crusie, Welcome to Temptation. Somewhat straight-laced hero, check. A mother-in-law who comes to appreciate the fey, untraditional side of her DIL, check. An unhappy child who is brought into the light of happiness through food and eighties music, check. Would that have been OK — oh, wait, sex in the “open” where they “might” be walked in on, check — if I liked the book? Maybe. I think it was more than the ghosts that made this book a wish-I-hadn’t-bothered: it was the feeling that Crusie was on the book equivalent of a band doing a summer tour 20 years after their greatest hits had led the hit parade.
I’ve been waiting all year for Suits to return! Call it a bromance or another law firm series or whatever, I love it. The chemistry between the two leads is sensational, I am often surprised by the solutions to the insoluble problems posed and there’s enough meanness and humour to keep me happy. The dragon lady leading the law firm is pretty cool too — she makes me think of what a Michelle Obama might be like if she wasn’t cordoned into the safe territory of gardening and exercise.
How do you know you’re doing it right, if you’re the Duchess of Cambridge? Easy, if the Daily Mail is complaining. It’s not just soldiers and clerics and clerks at the grocery store who wear uniforms, so do the royals. And Kate has got it down — when she’s with the Queen, she wears outfits that are completely appropriate but that don’t overshadow. To make it “worse”, from the perspective of newspapers who want to sell New and Improved, she’s entirely comfortable in re-wearing. Today everything Kate wore was previously seen, ergo, move along, nothing to see here. My thought is that she’s trying to make it about the event and the honorees, not her wardrobe.
There was a time when all I read was self-help books (pre-romance!). Diet and organize your life books still hold quite an allure. So this morning I searched high and low for a book I bought and never used: Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat by Peter Walsh. I will report back 🙂 now that I’ve found it.
Who in your life says Jump and you say How High? For me, more times than I care to admit, it’s my dd. Given that, it was with interest that I read an editorial this morning by Ruben Navarrette (courtesy of WaPo). Navarrette was riffing on a commencement speech to the Wellesley grads by David McCullough Jr. (yes, son of). To paraphrase a paraphrase, McCullough told the grads that they weren’t special and that they should stop thinking that the world revolves around them. One line in particular seemed both exciting and rather sad, “Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.” Looking out instead of looking in. Good advice for any age.
THE DAILY RUCKUS 