January 17, 2008 -- Thursday evening

Reading Sweet Thursday, by John Steinbeck. She and her friend are having a contest to see who can read all of Steinbeck's books first....in the order that he wrote them. Before this, over the past month-and-a-half, she's read Tortilla Flats and Cannery Row.

Something she's read again and again--A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter A. Miller, Jr. It's a marvelous story. Society is the main character. It begins after great devestation and those that remain find a metal box and in it a list. They understand everything on the list except for "salami." From the ashes a new society grows, based on misunderstandings.

She's had to buy the book six different times because she loans it out to people and they don't give it back.

If she were to write her own book it'd be quasi biographies about the interesting people in her life, like her stepdad, who ran away from Helena, Montana (that's where I'm from) to join the circus.

She's never lived in Helena, but she did live for a year in Gardiner, by the boundary of Yellowstone, a town with a population of 850, 7 bars, and 1 church. There was a deer that would hang out by her bathroom window and watch her take showers....whenever the water went on, the deer was there.

But, back to the quasi biography--her biological father is a socialist and an engineer. He graduated NYU at the age of fourteen!