Time //11:40 a.m.

Place // At my desk.

Eating // Homemade chocolate chip cookies, the breakfast of champions.

Drinking // Whittard of Chelsea English Rose Tea, a tea I actually brought back from London when I studied abroad there about five years ago (I know, it’s ridiculous I still have it). But, I’m down to my last few bags and am feeling really sad about it — this is delicious tea, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to get more!

Watching // The boyfriend and I have been watching Homeland. I also loved this weeks episode of Parks and Recreation.

Reading // I just finished Outlaw Platoon by Sean Parnell and John R. Bruning. It was an incredibly sad, disturbing, inspiring, important book. I’ll be reviewing it Wednesday as part of a TLC Book Tour.

Thinking // About how to get my reading and blogging mojo back after a string of middle-of-the-road books (minus Outlaw Platoon) and an unpleasant reaction from an author to a review I posed this week. I’m feeling a little gun shy about review writing, but I’ll get back in the game this week.

Listening // To the audio book of A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness which, despite being rather silly, has been keeping me entertained for the last few weeks.

Hoping // That I can get at least one other book finished today, plus reviews/posts written for the week. I’m also hoping to get organized enough to post about a super informal read-a-long that I’m planning to co-host next month.

Anticipating // A quiet day with few responsibilities so I can read and write without pressure.

Reflecting // On the great time I had at the Prairie Gate Literary Festival this weekend. I got to see poet Ed Bok Lee and author/blogger Patti See give readings, which were refreshing and thinky. I’m going to end this post with the last few stanza’s of Lee’s poem “Whorled” from his most recent book (also called Whorled, and the winner of the 2012 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry):

In the beginning, there was a word, but it got lonely
So it prayed for brothers, sisters, and neighbors, and yes,
love was born, but along with it came shame, passion, greed, more
love, benevolence, and need

And soon some of the words became flowers and trees
And others animals, and eventually some were human beings;
Queens and Workers,
Kings and

Thieves

Happy Sunday, everyone! What are you reading today?

Title: Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, A Prince, and the Search for Home
Author: Alison Singh Gee
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2013
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Publisher’s Summary: Alison Singh Gee was a glamorous magazine writer with a serious Jimmy Choo habit, a weakness for five-star Balinese resorts, and a reputation for dating highborn British men. Then she met Ajay, a charming and unassuming Indian journalist, and her world turned upside down. Traveling from her shiny, rapid-fire life in Hong Kong to Ajay’s native village, Alison learns that not all is as it seems. Turns out that Ajay is a landed prince (of sorts), but his family palace is falling to pieces. Replete with plumbing issues, strange noises, and intimidating relatives, her new love’s ramshackle palace, Mokimpur, is a broken-down relic in desperate need of a makeover. And Alison wonders if she can soldier on for the sake of the man who just might be her soul mate.

This modern-day fairy tale takes readers on a cross-cultural journey from the manicured gardens of Beverly Hills, to the bustling streets of Hong Kong and finally to the rural Indian countryside as Alison comes to terms with her complicated new family, leaves the modern world behind, and learns the true meaning of home.

Review: I have to admit that I went into Where the Peacocks Sing with a little trepidation. I’m often very hot or cold with memoirs and fiction of this style, loves stories in exotic places where a shallow person comes to realize the True Meaning of Love/Life/Home/Family through a relationship with someone else. And this story — a woman who loves Jimmy Choo shoes falls in love with a modest Indian man who then turns out to be part of a wealthy Indian family — seemed like it could be an excellent travel story or be too close to chick lit for my taste.

Where the Peacocks Sing ended up landing just about in the middle. I loved when the story focused on life in India and the way the modern world is changing the people and estates of that country, but felt disconnected from the narrator and her personal transformation because of some details that I found difficult to accept or understand.

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 “Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hand together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos — a cult of two with fallible gods. All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”

— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love

In 2006, writers Diane Ackerman and Paul West were at the hospital, again. Paul was receiving treatment for an infection, the most recent in a series of maladies over a 20 year period that had put Paul in and out of the hospital. The pair went to bed confident that they would be leaving the hospital the next morning to continue Paul’s recovery at home. The next morning, lightning struck. A blood clot, filled with bacteria from the kidney infection, traveled to Paul’s brain, cutting off blood flow from one of his major arteries:

The tests revealed that Paul had a massive stroke, one tailored to his own private hell. In the cruelest of ironies, for a man whose life revolved around words, with one of the largest working English vocabularies on earth, he had suffered immense damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Though not visible in the CAT scan’s chiaroscuro world, other vital language areas has also wilted, leaving a labyrinth of fragile liaisons hushed. Global aphasia, it’s called. Paul’s aphasia was indeed global, round as his head, a grief encompassing our whole world. I’d never heard the expression before, and didn’t want to think about the full cartography of loss. Yet I had no choice because someone had to make decisions about his care — informed, clear-headed decisions.

Paul’s outlook seemed grim. No one at the hospital expected that he would recover fully, if at all, from the stroke that ravaged his brain, destroying many of the key language areas in his brain. In One Hundred Names for Love, Ackerman writes about the five years after Paul’s stroke — his daily struggles to make himself known, the challenges an illness that takes away language does to a relationship built on words, and the process of designing a new life in the wake of a condition that all but destroys what used to be.

I picked up this book on Sunday on a bit of a whim; I was struggling to get into the two books I’d planned to read during the day, and thought that a memoir about love would fit into the romance of this week. Although I was confident I’d enjoy the book, since I was familiar with Ackerman and her style from The Zookeeper’s Wife, I didn’t expect that it would get into my heart as deeply as it did.

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Although Tumblr seems to have fallen by the wayside when it comes to social networking popularity, it’s still home to one of my guilty pleasure on the Internet: pop culture mash-ups. I love stumbling (tumbling?) across a blog that combines bits from my favorite pieces of pop culture to create something new and funny. Instead of a regular post today, I thought I’d share three of my favorites (and one bonus mash-up from Twitter). In no particular order:

Downton Pawnee

In this blog, two of my favorite shows meet: Downton Abbey and Parks and Recreation. Although it’s hasn’t been updated recently, the short archives are well worth scrolling through.

Slaughterhouse 90210

Slaughterhouse 90210 is my favorite Tumblr of all time, and a perfect place for people who are television and literature lovers. With each post, creator Maris Kreizman combines an image from television with a quote from literature. It’s fabulous and funny and often sad, all at the same time.

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