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Moving Books

Mitch and I were both English majors in college; we have a lot of books between us. We're selling most of them, 80%, and moving with few. Here are the ones that I've already read that I'm keeping because they're so damn good:

(In no particular order. Graphic novels, ebooks, and photo books not included.)

David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Consider the Lobster

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

Great Short Works (collection)

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina 

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections

Josef Skvorecky

The Bass Saxaphone 

Bohumil Hrabal

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Too Loud a Solitude

Penelope Lively

The Photograph

Andrzej Szczypiorski

The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman

Mikhail Lermontov

A Hero of Our Time

Salvador Plascencia

The People of Paper

Thomas Pynchon

V. 

Gravity's Rainbow

Marek Hlasko

The Eighth Day of the Week

Jane Hirshfield

The Lives of the Heart

Yehuda Amichai

The Selected Poetry

Georgi Gospodinov

And Other Stories

Wislawa Szymborska

View with a Grain of Sand

Poems New and Collected

Ludmila Ulitskaya

The Funeral Party

Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Jane Kenyon

Otherwise

Cormac McCarthy

The Sunset Limited

Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Stories

Mystery and Manners

Anne Tyler

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Donald Hall

Old and New Poems

George William Curtis

Prue and I

George MacDonald

Phantastes

The Light Princess

Adrienne Rich

The School Among the Ruins

Your Native Land, Your Life

Vivian Gornick

The Situation and the Story

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Pulphead

DBC Pierre

Vernon God Little

Zbigniew Herbert

Selected Poems

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Little Prince

Wind, Sand, and Stars

Brian Garner

A Dictionary of Modern American Usage

Messy

Mitch is gone, in Minnesota for a couple of days, and I am holding down the fort. Next week is our last real week in Chicago. We're having a garage sale, tomorrow. I'm supposed to get ready for it while Mitch is gone.

You guys, I do not pull my weight around here. My friend, Jamie, and I moved the couch on Wednesday, and the dust exposed from under it, I've left untouched. It's awful. I can't bear to put dry swiffer sheet to swiffer rod. And I just realized sitting here, on this end of the table, that this used to be Mitch's side. I can't sit on my side of the table because it is piled up with too much crap.

If you see Mitch, say a kind word to him.

Also, here's this:

Post by Alvaro Villagran.

Do Things.

So, my internet reader friends: I am doing things. I am not solid on plans, but I am doing things.

This Jam is My Jam!

Life Changes

I flew out of Johannesburg on my way back to Chicago. Jesse and Simone kept me company at the airport since it was a while until my flight. The beers we drank cost $1.30. I had such a good time on my Africa trip, and I knew that Lindsay, Jesse, and Simone were going to continue on. Keep traveling Africa and then move on to southeast Asia. I told them that I was going to go home and pitch it to Mitch. Simone said I might be surprised - he could say yes and we'd be seeing them in Asia.

Cut to:

Sunday morning, the day after I got back, Mitch and I were having unlimited mimosas with brunch. He gave me the news: he wasn't going to have his job back next year. It had been a rough two years for him, teaching in an underserved community in Chicago. Mitch is good at letting things wash over his back, not stick to him, but even so he had become a bit shell-like. Two mimosas in, I pitched it...

"In that case, why don't we leave Chicago a year early?"

Mitch told me I was still on a travel high, and that I should see what I thought about it after a week. Three days later we had pretty much made the decision to do it. 

My last day at work is June 27th. We'll be in Washington for a week then coming back to Chicago and moving around July 10th. We're flying from Denver to Thailand where we'll meet up with Lindsay, Jesse, Simone, and Lindsay's boyfriend, Mat. (Mat's the best.) Then from there we'll be going to Cambodia, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. (Staying with friends in Hong Kong and our former roommate, Bud, and his wife, Caitlin, in NZ.)

Mat and Lindsay

That trip will take us about six weeks, and then we'll crash in Fort Collins, Colorado for a while. We're moving in with my brothers. Planning on drinking some good beer. Nate gets married in mid-October, so the plan is to stick around until then. Mid-October to November, we plan on moving to L.A. 

Nate and Nick (brothers)

We don't have jobs lined up - my plan is to look for research administration-type jobs (like the one I have now) at hospital or university to get started in L.A. and then work my way towards writing for television. Mitch will do something, he assures me. We have some time to figure out what that is. 

Stay tuned.