"Cough, Cough"

Word of the day: opsimath : one who comes to learning late in life

I'm calling in "sick" to work today so that I can spend the morning with Gabriel and so that Julia and I can take him to COSI (the Children's Science Museum) this afternoon, along with a few other spots to celebrate his Birthday Eve.

I hate my job, but what other place could I be working at right now that would allow me to play hooky once a month and get paid for it? I've done this once a month for over four years now. For you math majors out there, that's about fifty imaginary illnesses.

I think on Sunday that I'm going to get back to work on my novel. I started it last August and spent a few months on it, before I got distracted and wanted to take some time off from it. I had just finished my fifth young adult novel (in fifteen months) and I was a little burnt out and more than a little depressed that I couldn't find any agency representation for them. It's time to get back, though, to my novel. It's a story about a couple's marriage through the years, parceled out in short anecdotes. I want to finish it, though, and to keep writing screenplays, novels, TV pilots, plays... even as I try to figure out what I want to do with my life once we move to Georgia.

If you haven't noticed by now, I transition randomly and abruptly on here with a conscious, off-the-cuff brusqueness, so I'll do it again. I've been reading a lot lately, and here is a list of some of the best books I've read over the last four years.

2010:

- Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

- The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

- True Grit, Charles Portis

- Indignation, Philip Roth

- Nemesis, Philip Roth

- Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

- Hypothermia, Arnaldur Indridason

- Disturbing the Peace, Richard Yates

- The Human Stain, Philip Roth (sensing a pattern here?)

- The Call of the Wild and White Fang, Jack London

- Christine Falls, Benjamin Black

- Native Son, Richard Wright

- A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

- Sophie's Choice, William Styron

- The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

2009

- A Dog's Ransom, Patricia Highsmith

- Disgrace, J.M. Coetze

- The Family Man, Elinor Lipman

- Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin

- The World According to Garp, John Irving

- Trouble, Jesse Kellerman

- 1984, George Orwell

2008

- Anything For Billy, Larry McMurtry

- In the Woods, Tana French

- On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

- The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

- Little Tiny Teeth, Aaron Elkins

- Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie

- The Chemistry of Death, Simon Beckett

- Life Class, Pat Barker

- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

- Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O'Nan

- Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo

- World Without End, Ken Follett

2007

- Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

- Straight Man, Richard Russo

- Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett

- Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

- Red Leaves, Thomas Cook

- The Tin Roof Blowdown, James Lee Burke

- The Water's Lovely, Ruth Rendell

- Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

- Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane

- Crazy in Alabama, Mark Childress

- Empire Falls, Richard Russo

- The Post Birthday World, Lionel Shriver

- The Road, Cormac McCarthy

- The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud

We're all looking forward to an exciting weekend. Julia has plenty of work to do for her classes and dissertation, and I'll watch Gabriel, do a little work, maybe watch a movie. I plan on resuming working out again soon - that is, if I can get focused.

Another feature of the blog will be a "fun" fact about something in history, usually art history. While reading Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, I got to thinking about John Singleton Copley, the leading painter of colonial America, most famous for his portraits of the elite figures of his day (in America and England) and his 1782 painting Watson and the Shark.

Two interesting facts about Copley:

1) He was a pioneer in the orchestration of private exhibitions, and one of the first contemporary history painters, a genre more appreciated at the time in London, where he eventually resettled before the Revolutionary War (Copley was a Loyalist, supporting King George), than in his native Massachusetts.

2) The figures in his paintings were often holding telltale objects, portraits d'apparat. The largest collection of these paintings, indeed the most expansive of Copley's ouevre, can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Above is Paul Revere (1768-1770).