my tragic right hip

And she wears it well, and she wears Chanel, and Manolos and all kinds of other things…

The Devil Wears Prada is a faithful and fun interpretation of Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling novel of the same name. The super-cute Anne Hathaway plays Andy, the ever-fresh journalism student who lands the job of a lifetime at Runway magazine. There’s just one problem: Andy’s not really a fashionista. In fact, she’s just the opposite and, to add insult to injury, she’s never even heard of the she-devil herself, Miranda Priestly (a pitch-perfect Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief and fashion icon.

Andy wants to be a journalist and takes this job as a stepping stone. Only it’s a serious job in an industry where people take fashion seriously, who seriously know the difference between Prada and Club Monaco (Andy’s sweaters of choice). And when she doesn’t fit in, Andy becomes the fashionista she never knew she could be, which changes her world forever. Once Andy enters the world of Miranda Priestly, she finds it’s hard to get out. Long hours, impossible requests and ridiculous cutdowns, Andy’s own life starts to suffer. She goes from ‘working to pay the rent’ to living, defending, and even dieting for Miranda.

The movie is kind of silly in a fun, chicklit sort of way, and even though the peformances are all very good, I found it a bit boring. Reading about someone being abused and watching repeated patterns of abuse in the workplace just isn’t all that fun. And there’s some pat scenes (I’m so tired of the uber-makeover scenes in movies like this, as if Andy realizing her inner fashion queen would solve all of her problems, yawn), along with some really cheesy dialogue, but the players rise above it and damn, if Anne Hathaway isn’t just charming as all hell.

In the end, I enjoyed it, but not as much as I thought I would. But then, that’s how I felt about the book too. But the shoes, well, they are remarkable. All in all, it’s good summer fun. I’d give it three highkicks out of five.

Boing Boing takes on jPod and wins. A very apt and quite persuasive critique of Coupland’s book. Still, as much as I might like the mini-review, it doesn’t take away from how much I enjoyed reading jPod.

Especially after being one of those droids forced into bad corporate internet chop shops run by bosses from hell who really should end up chained to a factory addicted to heroin. However, maybe that’s the main difference between mega-blog Boing Boing and little ole me, he sees the bigger picture and I just make everything about me. Because, well, I’m not setting out to make an impression on the state of the net, at least, I don’t think I am.

And no offense Seattle Weekly but there are far, far worse books out there. What’s the bee stuck in your bonnet?

Okay, so the streetcar that I happened upon to carry me home from work tonight contained the happiest TTC driver I have ever encountered in my life. Here are the signs by which I was able to discern this:

1. He sang the street names like thus: “Spaaa-dinna, oh, Spaaadinnaa.”

2. He stopped the streetcar at a green light, held up all the traffic behind him, so he could help a blind woman out of the streetcar, across the street and safely to the other side of the intersection. It was rush hour people. Magically, no one honked.

3. He laughed about the annoying World Cup Wonkheads honking and hooting and generally making a menace of themselves and announced, “Aw, here we go!” like driving down Dundas was an adventure we were all going to partake in.

4. He said please, thank you and you’re welcome to everyone.

5. He happily flirted with cute girls as they stepped on and off the trolley car.

Honestly. Next to the Asian kid in the $5000.00 suit who said on his cell phone that he’s looking for a career in “idea consulting,” it’s the strangest outdoor experience I’ve had this month.

I’m twelve days too late to join this Summer Reading Challenge 2006. The main gist of the challenge is to try and read 2 books a week from a self-decided list, classics, books that have been on your pile forever, or any other fun theme you decide upon.

As it’s now June 13, I should already almost be 4 books into the challenge. However, I’m going to start this week, which means I’ve got a lot of reading to do by next Monday. And how am I going to decide upon my list? Well, I’ve got some ideas. I figure between now and the end of the summer, that should equal a total of about 30 books (at least that’s what I’m going for). So, here’s my list, let me know what you think!

THE SUMMER READING 2006 CHALLENGE BOOK LIST:

1. I’m going to take the following titles from the 880 I still have left to read: The Sea, John Banville, Slow Man, J.M. Coetzee, The Master, Colm Toibin, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, City of God, E.L. Doctorow, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres.

2. I’m going to read more poetry this summer, in big chunks instead of here and there: Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, Whetstone, Lorna Crozier, Strike Sparks, Selected Poems 1980-2002, Sharon Olds, Strike/Slip, Don McKay, Airstream Land Yacht, Ken Babstock and Inventory, Dionne Brand.

3. I’m going to catch up on the up next Canadian classics that have been on my to read pile forever: Runaway, Alice Munro, A Map of Glass, Jane Urquhart, Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood, Cease to Blush, Billie Livingston, A Perfect Pledge, Rabindranath Maharaj and Until I Find You, John Irving (I know he’s American, technically, but the book is set partially in Toronto so I’m counting it).

4. I’m going to read some classics: Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham, Pale Fire Vladmir Nabokov, The Good Soldier Ford Maddox Ford, Howard’s End, E.M. Forster, The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton and The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

5. Lastly, I’m going to read some mysteries just for fun: Thirty-Three Teeth by Chris Cotterill, Before the Frost, Henning Mankell, The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl, Affinity, Sarah Waters, The Children of Men, P.D. James and The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova.

And if I finish all of these, I’m going to throw in some nonfiction: London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd, Miracle in the Andes, Nando Parrado, Anna of the Russians: A Life of Anna Ahkmatova, Elaine Feinstein and Being Caribou, Karsten Heuer.

Add all the reading I’ve got to do for work and I should be super busy between now and September 1st. Oh, and I’ve got to get my Page A Day finished as well.

Go big or go home, I always, ahem, say.

Aw, I’m a big fan of my own self-imposed challenges. This summer, it’s the Page A Day Challenge. I’m going to try to write one full page every day (as the title, ahem, suggests), in one story without editing from now until the end of August. If I miss a day, I can choose to write two pages, as long as I keep it up for the majority of the working week (weekends excluded, but good for making up missed pages).

Anyone out there with me?

I got a very fun book today: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Damn, who doesn’t love lists? I just finished going through it, and I’ve read 121 of the titles. It’s got a heavily British focus in terms of the modern literature (does every single book by Ian McEwan deserve to be read?) and any list that doesn’t include Margaret Laurence, probably my favourite Canadian author, isn’t complete in my mind. I’ve listed all the books I have read, more for my own sanity than anything else.

I’m not sure if I’ll use it as a guide to what classics I should be reading, but maybe. There aren’t enough African writers, nor Canadian, and they’re missing the best of Faulkner in my mind, As I Lay Dying, but hey, if you have to start somewhere, it’s a pretty cool book to go through in terms of making sure you’ve read the best literature the world has ever produced.

My 1001 List: 121 Down, 880 To Go:

Oroonoko, Aphra Behn
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, Fodor Dostoevsky
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy (probably my all-time favourite book)
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence (another of my all-time favourites)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (as above)
Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence (do you see a pattern emerging? I went through a Lawrence phase after I finished my undergraduate degree)
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Miss Lonleyhearts, Nathanael West
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller (I heart Henry Miller and all his yummy, dirty goodness)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Native Son, Richard Wright
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
Junkie, William S. Burroughs
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
On the Road, Jack Kerouac (all-time, all-time favourite)
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (see above)
The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Clockworld Orange, Anthony Burgess
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John Le Carre
Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (love, love, love that book)
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood (the first Canadian I’ve seen)
Sula, Toni Morrison
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The World According to Garp, John Irving
Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee (another favourite)
The Colour Purple, Alice Walker
The Life and Times of Michael K., J.M. Coetzee
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (given to me by Katie, in Banff, at a time when my life was neither light nor bearable, will always be close to my heart)
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Cider House Rules, John Irving (probably my favourite Irving)
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanetter Winterson
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Foe, J.M. Coetzee (see above; he’s my one of my favourite writers)
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (I hated every word of this book)
Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood (her best novel, in my opinion)
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (my second-favourite Irving)
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (I own four different copies of this book, that says it all, doesn’t it?)
Jazz, Toni Morrison
The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood (never really understood what the fuss was about)
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (honestly? The movie is better)
The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (love, love, love her)
The Master of Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Morvern Caller, Alan Warner
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
Jack Maggs, Peter Carey
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden (aw, the movie, so bad)
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Fury, Salman Rushdie (awful, awful book)
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Youth, J.M. Coetzee
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
Unless, Carol Shields
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry
Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Saturday, Ian McEwan
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

In the hopes of avoiding the “what are we doing for dinner fight”, I’ve been trying to build our daily repertoire of recipes with “new” and “exciting” dishes. For the most part, I’m passable in the kitchen. My mother, who had a real talent with and for food, didn’t pass all the good cooking genes down to me. But I do enjoy cooking, which is good, right?

I’ve started making meal plans for us during the week (shot to hell because my RRHB was out on tour a couple nights this week and now he’s working nights, sigh) and have bought everything I need beforehand. We’ve got a good library of cookbooks, but I’ve mainly been going through Simple Suppers, the latest Moosewood Restaurant tome. So far, I’ve made Asian Braised Fish with Greens (verdict: good, but the sauce was too sweet for the RRHB). The recipe called to serve it on rice, but I used potatoes instead, and used tilapia as the fish. One thing I’m not sure of though, are scallions green onions or something different entirely?

And last night, I made Pine Nut-Crusted Fish. Now, I went to a nice grocery store, not too, too expensive, but definitely more pricey than going to Kensington Market, where we do a lot of shopping. I walked up to the fish counter (only recently starting to cook fish on a regular basis with both of us starting up again after many years being almost complete veggies [the RRHB especially]) and asked the nice fellow (butcher? fisher?) for tuna. He showed me a couple of steaks, one quite large and one much smaller—perfect for the both of us. And when he hands them back, I’m shocked to find the cost of said tuna is $19.23! Wha? We might as well go out at those prices.

Hence the Pine-Nut Encrusted Fish recipe coming to life last night. It calls for bread crumbs, garlic, oregano, and lemon peel (whizzed in the blender) along with the pine nuts. Then you fry the fish. And holy crap, if it’s not the yummiest thing I’ve ever cooked. In fact, with the exception of one pasta recipe, all of the thing we’ve tried from the Moosewood cookbook have been exceptional.

I also tried to make a spinach dish with raisins and the rest of the pine nuts. It didn’t turn out as well, mainly because I mistakenly dumped all of the water I had already drained from the veggies out into the pan and had to start all over again…but the fish was good!

That I’ll confess online and nowhere else…

So, because I’ve got more energy, I want to exercise. Said exercise is also the key to losing some of the prednisone weight and allowing me to be able to indulge in the odd bag of rice chips.

However, I am far too chubby and out of shape a) to put a bathing suit on and head to a pool and b) to go to the gym. So, I’ve been jumping around, literally, in my house to, you guessed it, Mariah Carey.

Yes, I realize this totally blows the cool, RRHB lifestyle of going to see kick ass shows (he opened for Amy Millan this weekend, very fun) and turns me into a person who is too embarrassed by the state of herself to actually go to a gym like a normal person, but at least I’ve got the energy to do something.

Like everything else, it’s a start down the path to good health, something which I’m desperate to enjoy for the next thirty-odd years of my life.

These are the farkwits in my neighbourhood. There were two, count them, two parades on the weekend celebrating the soccer. Well, perhaps not soccer entirely but because I don’t know anything about said parades I’m making assumptions. Yes, that makes me assy.

Jane Green‘s latest novel, Swapping Lives reads like reality television on the page. A fairly flimsy premise: 35-year-old journalist Vicky Townsley, looking to make changes in her life, says off-handedly that she’d love to swap lives with someone who’s married with kids. It’s the life she’s always dreamed of and what she wants more than anything. Her editor thinks it’s a fab idea and off they go, trying to find the perfect Swap-mate.

They find her in Amber Winslow, a ‘Desperate Housewife’ from suburban Connecticut, bored and frustrated with her own ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ (Green honestly uses that phrase at least six times throughout the manuscript). Amber’s husband is old money whose family has been broke for generations; now he’s a successful trader on Wall Street. They’re fabulously wealthy—the epitome of the American dream.

The moral of the story: the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. However, both women make changes in their lives based up on their experiences in the swap. Green’s prose is repetitive and the characters, especially Amber, are kind of one-dimensional (there are playboys, bitchy suburban housewives, and not one but TWO friends named Deborah [she couldn’t pick a different name?] on either side of the ocean). But I read the book to the end, and, on the sliding scale of chicklit, Green’s new book comes in somewhere on top of Plum Sykes but nowhere near our beloved Gemma.

Edited to add: The one thing that I did like about this book was that the heroine, Vicky, started off single and ended up single, still looking for love but happy and fulfilled by her life. Now that’s a twist in chicklit, one that I’d like to see more of…