"You prefer the lyrics. I don't trust you."

(Post title for my other sister, just because.)

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but my everyday life keeps intruding, as it so often does. I have recently become aware of some things in my life that I take for granted, and I wanted to get them listed so I would (perhaps) be more aware of my extraordinary blessings.

• The ability to stand, sit, lay down, walk and change position without pain in my back (after I somehow injured it, doing any of these things caused an amazing amount of pain for about a month-hurrah for that being over!)
• Having a job
• Getting more hours at my job
• Receiving a calling that I love and have always wanted
• The realization that sometimes Heavenly Father does give us exactly what we want and it is exactly what we hoped it would be

Also, today's installment of "What I've Read Recently":

The Teashop Girls by Laura Schaefer. I don't drink tea and I still found the various tea facts interesting. The story is amusing, the characters are nice enough (if a bit two-dimensional) and it is occasionally very funny. First book by this author, so maybe she just needs some more...any word I think of here sounds condescending. She just needs MORE. Of something.

Xenocide; Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. Okay, I love Ender's Game. I love Ender's Shadow and all its sequels. I love Card's Women of Genesis series. And reading the Ender series in its entirety was absolutely a good idea, because I had a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas, and I didn't come away HATING them the way I did the first time. However. I still don't love these books, and it is, of course, partly because I am not a huge sci-fi fan. Partly it is because these books generally feel overwritten and overwrought: the foreign languages, the philosophical references, the huge cast of characters making it virtually impossible for their voices to remain consistent, etc. But mostly I feel Orson Scott Card is at his best when he isn't trying to show off how smart he is, and his pomposity makes it hard to focus on his genius. This is never clearer than in the afterword to Children of the Mind, where I wanted to sit him down and say, "Look. You're brilliant. You've written a ton of bestsellers and won a bunch of awards and proved that you know your way around a book, okay? We GET it. Now, would you please, just BE great and stop TALKING about it so much? Thanks."

The Brooklyn Nine by Alan M. Gatz. There is a really terrific book in here somewhere, but this isn't it. A family in nine generations told through the history of baseball, its main problem is that it was written for the wrong audience. As a middle-reader, it simply does not have the space it needs to reach its potential, and each "inning" feels truncated, when it doesn't feel totally superfluous. Rewritten as a real saga, with another couple hundred pages of story, I might really enjoy it.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I do not have the words I need to describe this utterly breathtaking book. Suffice it to say that it is one of the few times in my adult life where a book lived up to the hype. And then I found out that The Help is Kathryn Stockett's first book, and she did it exactly right.

Also a new feature: I have a two-and-a-half-year-old niece, who is so delightfully funny that I thought I should share. When she was smaller I called her "Tanker" because of her ability to eat like you would not believe, so that is how I shall refer to her here. Anyway, she was brought to her mother (my sister) toward the end of Relief Society the other day because she claimed she needed to go potty.

My sister: Do you need to go potty?
Tanker: Nope. I'm just done with nursery.

PS I did finish that Charlaine Harris book, and I still think what I thunk before.