Dave hit the road Friday with pretty much all the furniture in our apartment. He rented a truck and hauled it to his parent's house (about a 5 hour drive away) leaving brother Matt and I in Boston town to entertain ourselves.
And entertain we did! We bounced around from the North End to Concord, MA and some places in between.
And then Saturday evening, we went to the Harvard Bookstore and stared at a lot of books. I enjoy visiting bookstores with my brother Matt because he loves books too and a dialogue ensues about new books or old books or book reviews, etc. It's great. And he ain't no book snob. His purchase was a used copy of There is Treasure Everywhere, a Calvin and Hobbes masterpiece.
*He also left me a copy of the New Yorker he carried on the plane. It's their science fiction issue (awesome). He made me read this short fiction piece by Junot Diaz called "Monstro". See the New Yorker interview of Diaz here. The story was great and spooky and the perfect amount of science fiction. More on that some other time.
Back to the Harvard Bookstore, I picked up My Antonia and the Gulag Archipelago...just a little light summer reading. It got me thinking about my summer reading book list, and it is woefully long. In all likelihood, I'll probably make it through 2 of these tomes, but that's the great thing about summer reading, right? Who cares? I'm not trying for a personal pan pizza here.
Here is my list:
The majority of this lineup is fiction. I am craving it.
The big highlight of Sunday afternoon was Matt and I dined with Kate Winslet!
And by dined "with" I mean we were eating in the same room. After strolling around Walden pond, we stopped at this little sandwich shoppe (spelled how people in Concord, MA would spell shop). As we sat down at a table by the window, Matt started getting that nervous Matt look about him. And then he just blurted out, "That's Kate Winslet!" Thus ensued lots of nervous laughter and staring and a collective sigh of relief when she finally left. But really, she was about 5 feet away, and she looked as great as you think she would.
And then Matt got her number. Go, Matt!
P.S. Have I mentioned Brother Matt has a blog?
*Thanks for the book covers, BarnesandNoble.com!
Kate, if you read this, you're invited to our next family barbecue. You can bring the potato salad. Love your ambitious reading list, Mar. You can always be relied upon to find scads of books I haven't heard of but want to read. I think I may give the Willa Cather a shot myself.
ReplyDeleteMore details on Kate, please! Was she nice? Did you guys speak to her later? It's quite cool that he got her number! Wow.
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe he didn't actually get her number, but wouldn't that have been neat? She looked great, effortlessly cool. And she was dining with her director (we overheard her introduce him). Her kids came in after a while, and she was at a 2 person table and then tried to squeeze her kids around her. She sort of apologized to the couple next to her for overcrowding and then popped (British vocab I have now) out. A family asked to take her picture with their kids, and she said she didn't do that when she was with her own children. And that's it!
ReplyDeleteSweet! Sounds like a pleasant experience all around. Was she nice about refusing the picture? I guess she'd like to keep some normalcy around her kids.
ReplyDelete