My weekly blog at Literary Chicks is up! Check it out here.

Here’s my third review for my year-long Reading Project: The Maltese Falcon. And I’ve reactivated the comments, so feel free to tell me how spot on my review is.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
While reading The Maltese Falcon, I felt a strange predilection for martinis, cinched-waist suits and hand-rolled cigarettes. And I don’t even smoke.
Set against the gritty noir background of 1920s San Francisco, where real men can hold their drink and the women are all dames, The Maltese Falcon finds our hero, Sam Spade minding his own business when a beautiful damsel in distress begs him for help in finding her sister. Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, agrees to tail the man suspected of kidnapping the sister, but is murdered while on the job. And from there, the plot thickens. I don’t want to give too much away, but I can say is that the lovely lady isn’t what she first appears to be . . . and everyone wants to get their hands on a certain statue of a falcon.
I’ve seen the movie adaptation, but all I can remember from it is a grainy Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette dangling from sardonically smiling lips. Which is a good thing, since knowing the ending would have ruined the book, which was, on the whole, a ripping good read.
I felt a bit guilty indulging, though. I’m pretty sure that, even though I’m only three books into the Reading Project, I’m already cheating. Although The Maltese Falcon may be at the top of its genre, and one of the original examples of noir (a genre that later became so popular as to almost make this forerunner a cliche), it’s really commercial – and not literary – fiction. Which goes against the grain of what the Reading Project is supposed to be about: reading boring books I wouldn’t otherwise get through.
But, screw it, I loved the book. And it was a nice palate cleanser after all of the heavy-handed imagery of The Sun Also Rises.
The Maltese Falcon gets an A+ from me. Straight up with a twist.

I love the Mighty Goods shopping blog. I don’t even know I want half of the stuff on there until I see it . . . and then I instantly realize I can’t live without it.
A funky mod birdfeeder? Yes! Bright orange mugs? Yes! Silver antler candelsticks? Yes, yes, YES!

My alarm clock broke. Or, to put it more accurately, George broke my alarm clock.

I loved that alarm clock. It was a funky little round one designed by Michael Graves for Target. I’d only had it for a few weeks, but every night before I went to sleep, I’d look at it fondly and say, “I love this clock.” It was quiet, it didn’t glow annoyingly, it had a cute retro look.

And then I asked George to vacuum the bedroom.

“It was round,” he said in his defense. “It rolled right off of the table and shattered. This is why they don’t make round alarm clocks.”

So I headed back to Target for a replacement. But, alas, they were sold out.

I’ve been trying to track down a replacement clock, and it’s harder than you might think. In fact, I’ve wasted not one, but two, afternoons when I was supposed to be working browsing clock sites on the Internet. (Can you say procrastination? PROCRASTINATION.) Most of the clocks out there are digital, and I can not abide having a glowing light one foot away from my face when I’m trying to sleep.

I thought I’d found my winner with this one, the retro Moon Beam Clock, which apparently made an appearance in the movie In Good Company. But then I read the Amazon reviews, and saw that they major complaints were that it was (1) big, (2) loud and (3) bright. All bad.

So now I’m leaning toward this one, mostly because it suctions on to the table. And it has a cool rooster wake-up tone.

But I’m still as yet undecided, and open for recommendations for cute, quiet, non-glowy clocks. In the color chartreuse, if at all possible.

Update: A-ha! Ahahahaha! I finally found a clock! And a green one, at that. Check it out here.

Update: OK, this alarm clock is going back. All I could hear last night was TICK TICK TICK. I had on a white noise machine and was wearing ear plugs, and still: TICK TICK TICK. It is quite possibly the loudest clock in the history of clocks.

My post on bad hair days is up over at Literary Chicks.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
This book was good but annoying.
Good, in that it reads like a pretty travel memoir, each town laid out in such sensuous detail that you easily imagine yourself there. And also good because, despite the slow pace of the story and the general unlikeability of nearly even character in it, I couldn’t put it down.
And annoying, in that the characters, almost without exception, were all truly awful people.
The story follows Jake Barnes and his friends as they travel from Paris to Spain, to watch a bull fighting festival. The group represents the notorious “Lost Generation,” a phrase coined by Gertrude Stein about the young men who had a hard time finding meaning in the world after World War I. The characters include: Jake, a reporter, who is impotent and drunk most of the time. Lady Brett Ashley, also a lush, and a slut to boot. Robert, a writer, who’s pathetically in love with Brett, and whom everyone else hates because he’s Jewish. Mike, Brett’s fiancee, who doesn’t really do much of anything other than drink and talk about his bankruptcy. And Bill, also a writer, who’s fond of stuffed dogs.
Individually and as a group, they’re selfish, immature assholes who spend all of their time drinking, sleeping, fishing, drinking some more, and making anti-Semitic cracks about Robert. It doesn’t matter that things don’t turn out all right in the end, because you don’t want good things to happen to any of them. Mostly, you just want one of them to get gored during the running of the bulls.
Oh, and that’s another thing about the book: it’s big on symbolism and likes to hammer you over the head with it, to make sure you get it. Like, Jake’s impotence, and his fascination with the virile bulls and even more virile bullfighters. And, Jake’s craving for religion set off against the Godlessness of post-war life. Stuff like that.
I’m rating it an A-. Good concept, good follow-through, thoroughly dislikable characters.
Next up: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

It’s not even 9 a.m., and I’ve already been puked on three times.

As I posted below, I’ve set a goal for myself to read 50 classics over the next year. My first review is now up!
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I have a confession to make: I’ve tried reading Brave New World before. The book had a profound affect on George when he read it in college, and he enthusiastically recommended it to me. But I’d start the book, get halfway through the tedious first chapter about growing babies in bottles, and would promptly fall into a drooling, boredom-induced stupor that made reading on impossible.
So imagine my surprise when I finally got past the baby factory scene, and learned for the first time that the book is all about sex. That’s right: sex.
See, I think that’s a major structural problem. Huxley really should have started with the sex, right there on the very first page. And, sure, if he wanted to, he could have slipped the whole tour of the baby factory scene in at some point further on in the book. (Although, preferably, a shortened version. Yes, yes, they grow babies in a factory. We get it. Can we please move on now?).
So there’s my editorial suggestion: Sex first. Boring laboratories later.
Anyway. Brave New World, set in a distant future that finds wimpy outcast, Bernard Marx, traveling with Lenina, the girl of his dreams, to the American Southwest to gawk at a tribe of Native Americans. There they find John, otherwise known as the Savage, whom they talk into going back to London with them. Bernard wants to use John to impress his colleagues, while Lenina plots to seduce the newcomer.
But here’s all you really need to know about Brave New World: it’s Dick Lit. In fact, considering that the Modern Library gave the book the impressive number five slot on its 100 Best Novels list, you might even say it’s the preeminent example of Dick Lit.
In BNW, Huxley created a world of frat boy fantasy. The women are all easy (monogamy is considered a moral failing). Men can grope their work colleagues without fear of a sexual harassment law suits, and hook up without the hassles of commitment or child support. Subjugating lesser males is not only expected, but encouraged. Free time is spent watching porn, playing golf and popping ecstasy tablets.
Of course, the reader is supposed to see through all of the sex, fun and good times, and recognize the BNW for the dystopia it is. First comes the promiscuity, and then it’s a slippery slope to administering electrical shocks to babies as behavioral modification.
Would I put BNW in my top five books of all time? No. The book was well written, but cold, and it was difficult to relate to the characters. The women were all weak and slutty, the men were all either self-absorbed and shallow, or self-absorbed and weak. Although, once I got about halfway through the book, I did find myself pretty absorbed in the story, if only to find out how it ended (unsurprisingly, everyone did not live happily ever after).
Still, I’d give it a solid B-plus (and somewhat higher, if you’re a twenty-year old college boy).
One down, forty-nine to go.

I’ve always ridiculed those mothers who start worrying about securing a pre-school spot for their child when the kid is still in the embryonic phase.
Yeah, well. Now I’m beginning to learn that I’ve been a little too lax on the subject.
I’ve been asking my Mommy friends for pre-school references. The consensus is that the best school in town, without a doubt, is a local Montessori school. It has a beautiful, vast campus, highly trained teachers and the most fabulous playground I’ve ever seen. I call it Baby Yale. But Baby Yale also comes with an Ivy League price tag. We might just be able to afford it, if we cut back on other areas. Like food. Or our mortgage.
I tracked down another well thought of pre-school at a local church, and stopped by to see it yesterday. The administrator gave me a tour of the facility, explained the curriculum, and handed me a registration packet.
“Do I just fill this out and mail it back to you?” I asked naively.
She actually laughed. “Registration is on March 1st at 7:30 a.m. There’ll be a line, so get here early. We only have a few open spots.”
“You have to get there really, really early if you want to get Sam in,” another mom advised. “Like around four or so.”
“Four? Four in the morning?” I asked incredulously. Surely she was joking.
“Or maybe, just to be safe, you should just plan on camping out the night before,” she said.
Gah.

Want to know why I hate Valentine’s Day? Head over the the L.C. and find out.