Happy New Year, everybody!

Wishing you all the best for a healthy, happy, wonderful 2008.

Stopping by woods on a snowy morn

Sorry for all the photo-heavy posts, folks. I’m feeling too lazy to write anything substantive. So, more photos!

First, yesterday Brian and I strolled around lovely but chilly downtown Murphys. Here we are in the park. Yes, the only park.

Brian does not stop telecommunicating even while in a quaint rural town.

Here I am next to the ‘crick.’

A place I’ve spent much time contemplating things throughout my life. Like how cold it is outside.

For his part, Brian contemplates how well he matches my mother’s kitchen.

This morning, it was all snowy! Well, a little bit snowy. Enough to highlight the trunks of trees against the hillsides and to create mini-snowfalls as the clumps melted out of the branches. Very exciting. So we went out for a walk up the hill.

(By the way, don’t ever let them rent you a tomato-red car. It’s just obnoxious and slightly embarrassing.)

The end of our driveway where it hits Green Tree Road.

Any bushes can be pretty when covered in frostiness.

Table Top Mountain is beginning to be covered in fog as the clouds descend.

I swear there used to be more trees here. Not to be all NIMBY or anything, but I really resent the people who choose to move out to this wooded valley and then tear down all the vegetation. I get saddened by all the changes we’ve seen out here over thirty years.

Nice, manzanita tree.

Um, those are bear tracks, fresh ones.

Yup, definitely bear. Maybe we should walk a bit faster, Brian.

Over in the canyon by Peppermint Creek—amazing what trees and rocks can do to each other.

Last oak tree photo, I promise. This one comes with a barn!

Thanks for coming on our walk with us. I have to leave the foothills tomorrow. :(

A little of Christmas in Murphys

Merry, merry, merry Christmas everyone!

All best wishes to you and yours.

Pennsylvania Gulch & Skunk Ranch Road

I went out for a walk up the road yesterday evening and took a bunch of photos. Hope you like oak trees! I do.

Sorry for the shadow. I just could not get out of the way.

Ducks! (and geese)

All those clumps are mistletoe. How appropriate to the season! Of course, they are parasites that are killing the tree, but that’s romantic, right?

Merry Christmas Eve!

Made it to California!

Ah, home. Already took a trip up to beautiful downtown Murphys. It was a bit more empty of tourists than I would have expected. Only saw two people I knew from high school, so that’s not so bad. Had a delightfully garlicky pizza from Firewood—thanks, Mama!

Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with every detail of my days here. Really I want to use this post to put up a few photos of town for those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the Gold Country.

Main Street

Main Street. Ask me about the shamrock sometime.

The requisite photo of the historic Murphys Hotel.

Wild Bill’s horse and buggy. I was too shy to get a picture of Wild Bill himself, and spent ten minutes trying to get a paparazzi shot without his noticing. My mom says he saw me doing this and grinned about it. Nice. I will try again some other time. I've got your number, Wild Bill!

A list of one's own

The end of the year is all about the twin human impulses of reflecting and categorizing—a dangerous combination that results in an overload of lists. Lists of the best celebrity bloopers of 2007, of the catchiest pop songs of 2007, of the biggest blockbuster movies of 2007…and, inevitably, of the best books. This month, every media outlet in and out of the publishing industry released their picks for top books of the year, which is all well and good. The problem is that these lists are pretty much all the same. If I see one more mention of Joshua Ferris, Denis Johnson or Junot Diaz, I’m going to scream. Thousands of books are released each year, but the literary elite slaver over only a dozen of them that they by winking consensus have deemed to be the crème de la crème.

I, for one, am tired of it. And I’m not the only one. Over at the blog The Millions, they’ve interviewed literary types not about which of the newly released and well-reviewed novels they think are best, but simply about what they read and liked this year. I’m so taken with this idea that I’m now going to inflict on you my own list—a record of those books I read this year that struck me, moved me, made me think, or all three.

Fiction:

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Two short novels set in occupied France by a writer soon afterward killed in a labor camp. Circumstances of authorship aside, the writing here is spectacular, spare, and sweet. What a terrible loss to literature.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Fascinating story about a man who witnesses a tragic balloon accident and becomes obsessed with it—McEwan at his carefully observed best.

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
A take-shelf find! I was completely engrossed in this very frank novel of young office workers running around New York in the 1950s, screwing up their lives in marvelous ways.

Moon Palace by Paul Auster
I’ve read a lot of Auster in the past year—he must be hitting a nerve with his strangely glowing yet dark novels. This one was odd as usual but very arresting.

Evening by Susan Minot
The movie looked lame, but I took a chance on the book. Despite some mediocre writing and an obvious plot, I was really taken with the idea of an old woman looking back on her life and loves and wondering what might have been.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I liked this book before Oprah did, so there. What can I say that hasn’t been said? Read this. then be glad you live in a pre-apocalyptic world.

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
More accessible than her sci-fi stuff, this novel grabbed me in its clutches with its astonishingly accurate portrayal of the twisted psychological games girls play with each other.

This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes
A.M. Homes doing a middle-aged man going slightly insane while the world is falling apart—literally—in California. You can’t go wrong with that.

Night & Day, Orlando, and Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
I went on two-week Virginia Woolf jag and read all of these in succession. Not sure why, because her stilted style really annoys me at times. But she does have that thoroughly modernist ability to show the world as it really is, and not how we tell ourselves it is.

Nonfiction:

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Everyone, everywhere, please read this. I’m not one for alarmist environmentalism, and this is not that. It imagines an Earth if humans suddenly disappeared, and in the most engaging nonfiction prose I’ve read in a long time, illuminates what we have already done, for better and for worse, irrevocably and not, to the planet.

Writings from the New Yorker 1927-1976 by E.B. White
I am always floored by E.B. White’s writing, which cuts to the heart of human experience with searing, hilarious wit.

Fun Home by Allison Bechdel
A graphic memoir by a lesbian dealing with the legacy left her from her closeted gay father’s untimely death.

Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller
In her follow-up to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Fuller revisits Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique in the company of a soldier who can’t quite leave the war behind, and finds she can’t either.

Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg
Katharine Hepburn: an utterly fascinating woman, in a somewhat biased biography by a friend.

Lastly, I read three books in the past couple months that affected me deeply: Savage Beauty and Zelda, by Nancy Milford, and What Fresh Hell is This? by Marian Meade. These are biographies of, respectively, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker. I have far more to say on these books that can fit here, so stay tuned for a longer piece, but for now, let me just tell you that I should have been a young woman in New York in the 1920s and ‘30s. I’m eighty years too late. But if I had been there, would I have fallen into the same traps as these women did? They all started out so bright, and then faded into sad twilights of their own devising. The stories of these women will remain with me for a long time to come.

And one more thing: Talked-about books that I read and found overrated. Maybe it’s just me:
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
The Accidental by Ali Smith

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

Saturday by Ian McEwan

The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester

Happy reading!

If you were at our party Saturday and haven’t seen the photos yet, please scroll down to find them below.

Christmaswatch '07

Leave it to someone in the West Village to take Christmas decorating to a whole new level. I spotted this on my lunch hour while strolling around the historic neighborhood of quiet, brownstone-lined streets. In the past, due to its cheap rents and easygoing spirit, this area harbored writers and artists—personalities such as Bret Harte, Louisa May Alcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dylan Thomas.

Now, these homes have been converted into $3,000-a-month one-bedroom apartments inhabited by quietly obnoxious bourgeois bohemians. Exemplifying that is this house on Grove Street that has an elaborate, peacock-themed holiday display on the exterior. What you can’t see in the photos are the yards of expensive iridescent fabric draped along the front fence and dotted with real feathers.

I’m not sure how I feel about this—it was striking, creative, and beautiful in its way, but the message seemed to be that they could outdo the neighbors with this show of ostentation. I bet the residents are the type who would rather die than purchase holiday decorations at Rite-Aid like the rest of us.

But still, lovely and weird!

A Christmas Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Thanks to all our beautiful friends who graced us with their presence on Saturday night for our Christmas party. It was snowing and icy, and the trek down to Greenwood Heights is onerous, but lots of fabulous people came out—and brought us delightful food, drink and presents. So thanks! I hope everyone had as good a time as Brian and I did. Now, a photo bonanza!

Gina, Jane, and me

Beautiful girls

Matt, Alex and me, in descending order of height

Alex, you’re such a ham! Nice crown.

Lounging for peace

Stuffing our faces

With 35 bodies in our apartment it got so hot Brian’s buttons just popped right off.

Justin and friends James and Faye

We are laughing (and enjoying Jane's scallion pancakes).

Jordan, Jessa and Jane. Jane, how are you in every photo?

A barrage of people: Deborah, Alex, me, Repino, Daniel looking insane, and the lovely Jane

Sam, so sorry I’m obscuring your face. Unintentional, I promise.

Up on the roof, there are shenanigans with cigars. Jonathan and Ben, who very kindly came down from Boston to join us.

Sam’s a pro at this.

Is every single person in this photo speaking? Jonathan, Ben, Ben, Sam, and Daniel

Molly, Johnnie, and Dan

Fahhhbulous!

Crazy gesturing from the men folk, next two photos.

Crazy gesturing from me.

Wonderful toy that spells “Let’s Party” when you swing it around. Thanks, Ben! This is very, very late in the night.

The morning after, amid the ruins, we devour White Castle. Mm.

Thanks again, everybody, for a truly wonderful time!
P.S. If you’re missing a blue scarf or an Old Crow poster, let us know.