writer
When a dome falls over your entire town, cutting you off from the rest of the world, things can get a little stressful. One of my favorite parts of the book (and show!) was watching how people handled that stress–whether it was admirable or terrifying.
This embroidery is from Under the Dome and, well, has language that’s a little NSFW. Click through the jump if swear words won’t offend.
I have a friend who is always prepared. She has the band-aids, the directions, and the back-up plans. I’d like to have her in my corner if ever I see a disaster like a giant dome falling over my town. Which is something I think a lot about. Not just a dome–any kind of disaster. What would I do? How would millions of people get out of New York City when most don’t have cars? But seriously, if someone could tell me it would ease a lot of anxiety.
During Hurricane Sandy, and a few other storms we’ve had to button down our hatches for, I knew what I would need to grab to get out of the city if I needed to evacuate. Luckily, we had warnings for those storms, and I knew would eventually pass. In Stephen King’s worlds, it’s almost never that easy. As we saw in Under the Dome on Monday night, you have to be ready for every kind of disaster. Even–especially– for the one’s you’d never see coming.
So, basically, I should have made an emergency kit a long time ago. What would you need? Let’s start with the basics.
If you’re in Stephen King’s world, though, you might need some different things.
Anything else? What am I missing?
Also, I just read this thing on the Internet (because of course I did) about how if you are in a house and electricity went out and you don’t have water, you should check the freezer for ice cubes. Those will be safe to drink. Any other tips, figurative boy scouts of the world?
This is the one of a few Under the Dome related posts this week. Check back later for more, and you can see other posts here:
Our world is getting smaller all the time. We’re more connected than ever–I was just in a meeting with colleagues from Paris, London, and Tokyo. They called in and participated in a meeting in New York. I took a vacation with my family, and we came from all over the country to meet in one place–in Florida, where none of us live.
That’s what makes Under the Dome so scary. When a dome falls over the town of Chester’s Mill, the world shrinks to the size of the town, and those who are inside lose their connections to the outside. Angie likens it to a fishbowl, but at least fish can be fed from the outside.
They can see through the dome, which almost makes it worse (but allows us to see some killer explosions). [SPOILERS] When Duke falls because of an exploded pacemaker, the U.S. military is bustling around just outside the dome’s boundary. They have the equipment to help, and the communication to get to a doctor, but they don’t even notice Duke go down. Linda is left alone with the dead sheriff, looking at all those resources just beyond her reach. (And it’s not like they could have helped him anyway.)
Duke dying was a twist, even though he dies in the book in the same fashion. The show has departed from the book in some cool ways, and because Duke was around for so long in the premiere, I thought they might have spared him. Or at least waited a few episodes. But his death, the only one so far of a character we’ve come to know a little bit, changes the game and raises the stakes. Now who will run the police force that Big Jim is so ready to increase? And what was Duke trying to tell Linda about the town?
A lot of Chester’s Mill is familiar to me, but these characters’ backgrounds and families are different from the book. This world looks just as interesting as the one I’ve read about though, and I can’t wait to see where these new mysteries take us. (Like why was Barbie burying Julia’s husband?!)
They’ve certainly taken us to some creepy places so far. The show, like many of King’s novels, did a good job of letting dread creep in, with images like a neatly halved cow and a messy arm that’s missing a hand. The seizures and repeated phrases (a technique King uses often) added a sense of doom as well. Junior, Big Jim’s clearly troubled son, went from creepy to campy and back again. But when he was creepy, he was really creepy.
I can’t wait to see more of Chester’s Mill, and to spend time with these off-kilter characters. The variations from the book will keep me on my toes, and so far the adaptations are smart and interesting. Hopefully you’ll keep watching with me–after all, we’re all in this together.
This is the first of a few Under the Dome related posts this week. Check back later for more, and you can see other posts here:
Under the Dome airs on CBS on Mondays at 10 p.m. Eastern. you can download the first episode from Amazon on June 28, I’ll update with the link when it posts. EDIT: The first episode is available!
Normally I’m begging for authors not to explicitly spell things out for their readers. We’re smart, and we can tell who is sad without having to read “John is sad.”
But in Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio (Kindle version here), I needed some things to be spelled out. It was an easy read, but one that left us with more questions than satisfactory answers when we held our quarterly book club meeting. (This time, we did it in person while we were all on vacation. Photo from my mom.)
Icy Sparks is about a young girl in the South during the 50s who deals with tics and urges she can’t explain or control. She becomes an outcast and spends some time at a mental institution for observation. It’s a coming of age novel (kind of like Middlesex), and Icy goes through a lot without fully understanding why.
So you’ve got your sunscreen on, your piña colada is cold, and you’re sitting by the pool. Now what?
This article I saw in the New York Times about different authors’ best summer reading experiences got me thinking of my own. Picking a beach read is an art, and one I’ll gladly devote time researching. Right now I’m reading Joyland by Stephen King–it’s good so far.
I like mysteries, and scary stories, and a good series. My favorite beach reads are the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout, and they can encompass all those things.
Valar morghulis. All men must die.
This theme and these words come up over and over again in the Song of Ice and Fire books, the series that includes Game of Thrones and its sequels. As those who watch the show and read the books know, in George R. R. Martin’s world, a lot of men must die.
I think I have recommended Unbroken to everyone, whether they were asking for a book recommendation or not (Kindle here). Even though I read this a few years ago, I often still think about it and the incredible spirit of Louis Zamperini.
Unbroken is a story of how Louie, an Olympic-qualifying runner, became lost at sea and a prisoner of war and lived to tell the horrific tale. His plane crashed, leaving him afloat on raft for 47 days before washing ashore a Japanese island, where he became imprisoned.
So, in case you thought being lost at sea for 47 days–with two other soldiers, no food, and man-hungry sharks–wasn’t bad enough, he was also captured, starved, and tortured in Japanese war camps. Just wanted to make sure you got all of that.
But the thing I remember most about this story isn’t the atrocities. It’s the spirit and love that Louie embodies in spite of everything he goes through (it is also the terrifying sharks). The vignettes of hope–like a duck the prisoners take on as their mascot, or Louie’s friendships in unbelievable circumstances, or the back-to-life party doctors throw for Louie–are what make this book one of my favorites.
I first glimpsed Louie’s strength when he was adrift on a raft after his plane crashed. Eight of 11 men on the plane died, and Louie and the other survivors were lost at sea for a very long time. There is an incident on the raft that I still cannot think of without getting knots in my stomach. And when they finally reach land and you think they might get some relief, the land is Japanese.
Louie experiences unspeakable cruelty when he is taken prisoner, especially from a guard they call the Bird. The Bird focuses on Louie, I think, because he couldn’t beat Louie’s spirit from him. But Louie and the men consistently fight back however they can: “To deprive the Bird of the pleasure of seeing them miserable, the men made a point of being jolly.”
In one of many instances where Louie shows he is stronger than this cruelty, the Bird forces Louie to hold a heavy beam of wood and tells Louie that he cannot let it fall.
“He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me. Across the compound, the Bird had stopped laughing.”
Louie was beaten as he was holding the beam, and then he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Louie had held the beam for 37 minutes.
That spirit and holding onto his dignity are what keep Louie alive during his time at sea and his imprisonment.
“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”
And when the war ends, and Louie can begin his trek home (not a spoiler guys, he is alive and interviewed for the book), he keeps that spirit–though not without difficulties and dark days.
“Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn’t have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore.”
When Louie was given orders to fly out, he asked the doctors to keep him longer so his mother wouldn’t see him so thin. The doctor agreed, and also threw Louie “a welcome-back-to-life bash, complete with a five-gallon barrel of “bourbon””–a hodge podge of Coke syrup, water and whatever booze they could find.
These bright spots alone are worth the read. But Laura Hillenbrand’s voice and research are fantastic. Unbroken is beautifully written and easy to read–save for the horrific subject matter at times. And Hillenbrand’s extensive research includes even documenting newspaper interviews of prison guards years after they were assumed dead and then resurfaced. She interviews Louie and his family and treats the material with the same dignity Louie himself exhibits. Her footnotes are a good read in and of themselves, but the heroism throughout Unbroken is what makes it truly amazing.
(I bought this book on my own and am not being paid to write about it. But I am a part of the Amazon Affiliates program, so if you buy through my links on Amazon, I’ll receive a little bit of money for it.)
We met a few weekends ago to discuss our #familybookclub pick, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Kindle version here). We used Google hangouts, and it worked pretty well!
It was so fun to see everyone and to get together from our homes all over the country. And it didn’t hurt that my adorable nephews jumped on to say hello. We were all glad we read Middlesex because it wasn’t something we would have picked up on our own, but I don’t think any of us will probably reach for it again. We classified it as a coming of age novel–for our narrator and many members of his family.
Coming of age
Cal begins his story with his grandparents all the way in Greece. Desdemona and Lefty are brother and sister while a war is raging around them and their own feelings for each other are raging inside. When they leave their burning city and get on a ship to America, they create a new life. Quite literally, in that they lie to everyone and to themselves by telling a story of how they met and fell in love. They became husband and wife on this trip, and they also became adults with an entirely new history. And in America, they begin their adult, married life. But it’s not as easy as they’d pretended it could be.
Milton and Tessie, the next generation and parents to Cal, are cousins. What starts as an exploration of their sexuality turns into a marriage and a family. And, likewise, Cal’s first experiences with sex help him find out who he really is.
I did something a little different for today’s embroidery. For those of us who grew up with Harry Potter, a charming part of those books were the illustrations in the American version at the top of each chapter. I had a small embroidery hoop lying around that was really the perfect size to fit the drawings at the top of the page–just a few inches across. So I took my paperback of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and picked one of my favorite illustrations. And using the back stitch and Sublime Stitching’s tutorial for the chain stitch, this is what I came up with!
Last night was a round-up of sorts, and maybe even a let down from the action-packed past few weeks. But then Brienne fought a bear. A freaking bear. In a dress. So because she fought a bear and kept her composure under fear of death and humiliation, she definitely wins this episode. (Jaime comes in a close second solely for the line “half a million” when the maester pointedly asked how many people he’s saved in his lifetime.)
We know Brienne is more comfortable in armor than anything, but we can still pay homage to our friend and get dressed for the city streets instead of a medieval battle.
Metallic, of course. And she’d probably toughen up a sweet dress with a leather jacket. Brienne is no Cinderella and certainly needs no Prince Charming, so her slippers aren’t quite glass. Her earrings hint at her home, the Sapphire Island, where the water is a beautiful blue.
In a more casual setting, we can give a shout out to Brienne with a metallic sheen and a tough wrist cuff reminiscent of her armor. I’d like to think Brienne is coming to her own and would proudly be that tall girl wearing heels. She knows she’s a bad B.
I’ve also made outfits inspired by Jaime, Arya, Margaery, Daenerys, and Jon Snow. Who’s your favorite?
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