Nineteen Minutes

Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult, is eight of your worst nightmares, in ascending order, by my personal scale:

1. You did your job badly as a judge, since you were not really objective but you were too subjective to understand the difference between subjective and objective (Alex).
   
2. You got caught between your professional and your personal obligations and each prevented you from doing your best job at each (Patrick).
3. You raised your children the best way you knew how, but it wasn't good enough to prevent the society that really raised your child from turning that child into a monster and then maiming and killing it (various parents of slain teenagers).
4. You tried your best to know the truth about what mattered to you, but somehow the truth slipped between the facts (Lewis).
5. You tried to be as humane as you could in every circumstance, from your relationships with your family to your relationships to your clients (women in labor), but somehow, they went their own way and left you behind (Lacey).
6. From the time you were a child, you were too good for this world and wanted to be left alone, but they provoked and provoked and wouldn't stop provoking. Finally, you did what they wanted you to do (Peter).
7. You were only as good as you had to be and then you were never good enough, but no one but you ever had to know this unless by some terrible accident, the truth came out. Then, the truth came out (Josie).
8. You were a casual mother, a phone it in mother, a hope it works out, but not giving it much thought mother. Then, when it looked like you had lost your child and it looked like she was never going to come back, never, you got a second chance. And you didn't have any idea what to do with it (Alex).
   

Gentlemen and Players

I'm almost done reading Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris and I didn't realize that she was the author of Chocolat. G and P is a delicious revenge story, but so far I have no notion of what the specific act is that is being avenged. I do know that a lifetime of horrible injustice and misunderstanding is the subject of vendetta (cosmic justice) and for this, two characters are intertwined and become narrators, victims and perpetrators, all at once. The climax is yet to come. I can't wait.

I have also begun Jen Lancaster's Bitter is the New Black and I find myself strangely sympathetic to Jen, who is nothing like me, except in her compulsive aggressive perfectionism, judgmentalism, narcissism, antisocialism and neologism.

I've been trying to read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, highly recommended by CG, whose recommends are always firstrate and challenging. This one is too, especially since it's about the lives of children and don't let it fool you and make you think it's about bioethics or apocalyptic endtimes or somesuch. It takes your lungs and squeezes them hard and you forget to breathe while you are reading just like you did when you read Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale. "How were we to know we were happy?"