It’s the last day of Carnival season. One million people are celebrating, eating beignets & king cake & dancing in the street to the music that fills the air from every corner. There’s an ache in my soul because my heart is in New Orleans but my body is at the Co-op. New Orleans (pronounced Nu Orluhns, by the way, NOT New Or-leens or Nawlins, heaven forbid) has no rivals; there are no substitutes. There’s no such thing as “too much” on Fat Tuesday. I’m not sure New Orleans even knows the meaning of excess. It makes no apologies. Anything goes. New Orleans is far too busy living life & having fun to worry about what everybody else thinks. Be like New Orleans. Happy Mardi Gras, y’all…
IThe Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins Book #4: A Young Adult Bestseller I’m not above reading YA. I believe that sometimes people disregard YA novels because they are too juvenile. You could not make a bigger mistake. Generally speaking, YA isn’t full of fancy language. It’s just easy reading & generally captivating. Since I had bought Hunger Games sometime back on the recommendation of pretty much everyone in the world, and I feel like I’m the last person left in the universe to read it, I figured I’d better hop to it. That, and because I’d broken the cardinal rule of all readers everywhere, & watched the movie a couple of years ago. That’s right, before I ever cracked the spine on the book. One of the guys at work, who never reads anything at all, even commented that it was the only book he’d ever read cover to cover for pleasure (not assigned school reading). So it HAD to be good. I found it spellbinding from the get go. I was thankful for the explanation early in the novel of how Panem, their country, came to be because I never understood that from the movie. Furthermore, Katniss’s homeland, District 12, is the Appalachians. So she’s even more near & dear to my heart. “To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12…they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we…