All Day Wednesday in Seattle which resulted in a bit of a magazine and dinosaur book binge at the super duper huge Barnes and Noble, but overall got the appointments done that needed doing and was much too whipped to write let alone think coherently last night.

Back now, much refreshed.

Jenny had a very interesting book recommendation the other day and after looking at the Village Voice columns she linked to I must say that it sounds fascinating and totally up my alley. So that gets added to the list. (Maybe an end of summer book buying binge in August, or a reward when Draft 1 of the YA novel is done...hmmm).

In reading Jenny's blog I see that she took me up on the Katie Fforde recommendation but didn't get the really good ones - sorry Jenny!! I promise you will enjoy Wild Designs and Rose Revived or at least get a chuckle from them. I am particulalry fond of Wild Designs as it is about a woman who dreams of being a landscaper/gardener and I always wish I was better at that than I am. So it calls to my particular delusion of grandeur. (One of the teens in my novel is very much a gardener although he leans more to the sustainable living/farmer market direction. And yes - there are still dragons! ha!)

I finished Sir Neville Henderson's amazing Failure of Mission and now have the clearest understanding of Hitler and Czechloslovakia and Poland than I ever did. (In spite of that History degree.) I also see much clearer what Italy and the USSR were doing in the late 1930s and of course, Britain is particularly explained in the book. I have all these post-its sticking out for passages that struck me and I thought today as I looked at them - who was I planning to tell all this to? (My husband has been hearing about the book for weeks.) I'm not reviewing it and I'm not teaching anymore so what were my goals with noting these pages? Yet how do I ignore when Sir Neville recalls Hitler meeting the Reichstag after the invasion of Poland and annoucing he had been "forced to take up arms in defense of the Reich." Sir Neville's response: "It was a deliberate travesty of the facts and never can there have been or ever be a case of more premeditated and carefully planned aggression."

I wonder what he would think of all the invading the world has done in the decades since WW2? "Carefully planned aggression" is the order of the day it seems and Hitler was just a man almost ahead of his time. (And no - I'm not comparing anyone to Hitler - PLEASE!)

It was a fascinating history altogether and even though a bit slanted (Sir Neville was the British Ambassador after all), it was wonderfully intimate reading about Herrman Goerring's plans to buy tapestries and all the dinner parties in the year leading up to war. It seems none of them hated each other which is odd, isn't it? It's a human book I guess, a most human look at a horrible time.

Finally, a confession. I fell for one of the organizing yourself books at the bookstore yesterday and I'm already done with it and thoroughly disgusted with myself. I should so much know better than this! I just have to go through the paper and recycle my brains out and be done with it all and reading a book about doing that is really the utmost in laziness. I thought if I admitted my weakness then perhaps I would learn my lesson and not repeat it. That's my plan anyway - reduce clutter by reducing silly clutter books! ha!

New issue up of Bookslut - more on my reviews there tomorrow.