Doves, Lost Souls Album..Oh.My.Gosh!! This is outstanding and a great cd to sink your soul into, especially "The Cedar Room": "a psychedelic slow-trance groove number, introduced by an electric, stutter-tremolo guitar."--The Big Takeover, 2000

I could try and write about just how great this album is, but I wouldn't be able to do is justice. As Lionel Shriver writes in the New York Times: Much like smell (it’s all very well to say that something smells “like an orange,” but how do you describe the smell of an orange?), music is notoriously difficult to evoke on the page. The fact that language has musical attributes — rhythm, melody, tone — isn’t much help when you’re trying to express Bartok or Captain Beefheart in words. Even when music has lyrics, its essence is antilanguage, or at least in another language — and an inability to translate explains why so many album and concert reviews are unreadable.

Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover, however, does a pretty darn good job of capturing the amazingness of Lost Souls:

Honestly, I sometimes think insomnia and a need to reach out and easy access to the Internet make for the worst possible combination.

You know that horrible half sleepy/half wired where you're too jumbled to get anything functional done, but too alert to fall asleep? And you want to talk with someone kind and interesting, but you don't have a cat (or any creature with a heartbeat, for that matter) so you do the next best thing. You watch Lucy! I will always be grateful for the legacy she left behind. Nothing cheers me up quite like a mini-marathon of I Love Lucy!

 

I love the episode ("Return Home From Europe") where Lucy smuggles cheese on board a plane so she doesn't have to pay fees for it being over a certain weight. Pretending it's a baby since she thinks they fly free, she is soon caught up in yet another wacky adventure. 



Reading Forbidden Passion I felt the characters come alive. I understood their situations and the feelings of liking someone you shouldn't all too well, of dealing with inappropriate feelings and desperately trying to channel them into something else entirely, something more productive and feasible. ("It was endless...and hellish," one woman thinks as she longs for someone who is emotionally and logistically out of reach.) Yearning for the impossible and having it somehow happen (eventually) is often a favorite theme of mine, especially in romantic fiction.

But everything here that makes this a gripping read also makes it a frustrating one: two completely different people connect unexpectedly and then spend the rest of the novel coming together and separating, coming together and separating, the one woman totally committed to understanding and accepting how aloof, and even cold-hearted, the other woman (the love of her life) is, both of them often behaving in a way that makes you want to yell a little.

We suffer for love, surely, and many of us would do most anything to get and keep it. Yet I found the dynamics between Kim and Sonja often very exhausting. Not a lot of people would put up with the nonsense Kim does. She's either a fool or exactly the kind of person you'd want to be in a relationship with.

Crisp yet heartfelt writing, great dialogue and fully fleshed out characters keep what should have been a ludicrous plot a very compelling one. Another selling point for me is the uncomfortably realistic attitude that desperately trying not to acknowledge how you feel about someone can be a twenty-four hour a day job. In a way the very things that made me uncomfortable with Forbidden Passions were the things that kept me reading.


........................................................................................

When I first read Forbidden Passion early last year, I didn't have much patience for the characters. But having just finished this novel a second time (and finding it to be a much better book than I had previously thought) I found (unfortunately) more than my share of quotes with which I could relate, not (of course) on a relationship level like the women's in Gogoll's novel (even if they don't know they both feel the same about each other until well into the story), but in a completely one-sided way.

Using Kindle Highlights more this time around, I saw a lot that struck me as emotionally familiar. You can see both what you like and what other readers favor when you activate digitally underling functions on ereaders, as well.

Seeing some people have picked the same passage can give you an eerie, but not unpleasant feeling, of being less alone...I also believe (however pathetic or 'nuts' this may sound) that a lot of the reading I've done this past year has somehow saved me (whether it be lesfic or mainstream.) Sometimes, without my choosing it at all, the right book seems to fall into my life and heal little part of me. 

Kim had nearly fainted. She immediately began working out a plan for how, “for reasons of strategic importance to the company,” she could move the department head’s office. (The main character is half joking/half serious about relocating when she realizes her new boss is someone she likes.)

She watched Sonja as much as possible without staring openly. I have got to stop doing this! Kim squared her shoulders and forced herself to look in the other direction. It made no sense whatsoever to become attached to a woman like that, or to even waste time thinking about it. She glanced over at her and enjoyed watching her laughing, relaxed profile. What a wonderful woman. (It made me feel slightly better this passage had been highlighted several times by other readers. It's awful when you catching yourself looking at someone, almost against your will.)

My God, she must be afraid of me! What did straight women really think of lesbians? That they had nothing better to do than pounce on unwilling partners. That's how it looked anyway. (This both saddened me and made me laugh because there are actually people out in the world who believe lesbians are out to "get" every woman in the world. Yikes!)

Kindle Highlights has helped me both personally and with research for book club related materials. Even though Sleep Donation by Karen Russell is about as far away as anything I've read this past year I found myself underlining many wonderful passages in it. Also, oddly enough, H.L. Mencken's In Defense of Women has some highlight-worthy lines in it, too! :)

"It is a special kind of homeless, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams."


 

Odds and ends...

I may have jumped the fence too soon on Songza the other day. I already find myself back to 8Tracks, especially because their opera playlists are so much better and more unique.

I have been impatiently waiting three years for an English translation to be released from one of my favorite (okay, my only favorite) German writers, but it looks like it's not going to happen so I bought the novel through iBooks and am painfully (it's literally quite painful) translating it myself.

In trying to do that I discovered that Siri can read your iBooks for you herself (or himself, if you switch the gender in your settings) and though her German is quite quite good, her performance is very understated. Siri, where , oh where, is your willingness to get into character?? You are certainly no Jim Dale!

If you would like Siri to read to you...

Last night I couldn't sleep and happened to be reading this past Sunday's New York Times which featured a rather interesting article on the newest in music streaming sites and Apple's foray into it all: read here. I've always been a big fan and user of the 8Tracks and Pandora apps, but after seeing Songza mentioned I had to check it out. Boy, is it amazing!

Similar to 8Tracks, Songza lets you find playlists based on different categories, such as moods, activities and genres. Let's say, you choose "Sleepytime Indie." You pick that and suddenly you're hearing really relaxing, but still insightful music from some of the best (relatively) unheard of musicians and singers around. Richard Hawley's quietly heartbreaking "Baby You're My Light" came on and his warm, deep enveloped my ears like a nice blanket.

I couldn't help but be amused that Norah Jones was filed under just "Sleepy." I have nothing against her, but there's a reason her nickname is "Snorah Jones."