total number of books i’ve owned: good god. a thousand? two thousand? while the installation of new bookshelves last week did require that we reorganize all of the books currently residing in the apartment, (alphabetize the fiction by author, and develop the jen-and-andy-decimal system for non-fiction and theatre) i don't have the heart to try and count them now. but baby, i ripped through those babysitters' club series when i was a kid. i kept a regular pace of 2-3 books a week for all of my grade school and junior high school years, so those must have added up pretty fast.

last book I bought: used copy of reading lolita in tehran. the "i'm a memoir so coherent through-lines don’t' apply to me" approach is more than a little annoying, but i can't get over how fascinating the subject matter is.

last book i read: still half-heartedly working through will of the world, a shakespeare biography andy's dad gave us, and ouch. i didn't think it possible to write such a boring book about such an interesting person. guess i'll stick to my glossy full-color shakespeare in love misconceptions instead.

last book i finished: the time traveler's wife see below.

5 books that mean a lot to me:

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance i'm especially attached to the particular edition i have, which i inherited from my father and have since loaned out to many friends. there's something about the physical presence of a book that has been read so many times the cover is falling off that pleases me.

alice in wonderland the alice in wonderland tale is one that is ripe for telling and re-telling, and i've loved nearly every version of it i've encountered, from jeff noon's hipster remix alice to the excellently acrobatic lookingglass alice production mounted recently by lookingglass theatre in chicago.

the time traveler's wife so, so beautiful, in brutal, gritty sort of way.

the hobbit i didn’t grow up with the hobbit and lord of the rings like most kids; but about five years ago (long before the movies) my friend nick discovered that i hadn't read them and arrived the next day on my doorstep with four much-loved paperback editions and said, "don't give them back till you've read them." i read them all that summer after college, living on my own up in san francisco, and they were such a treat, i couldn't believe they'd been waiting for me all these years and i had just finally discovered them. andy and i have since read all of them aloud to one another, and i have pleasant memories of long summer afternoons spent in the park with andy (who does all the voices better than i ever could hear them in my head), but more than anything they recapture for me cool, foggy san francisco days, sitting on the beach at the end of golden gate park, digging my feet into cold sand and sitting on driftwood while strands of summer fog drifted by.

east of the moon and west of the sun specifically, the edition with the kay nielson illustrations (out of print but available from rare-book collectors). it's this amazing collection of norwegian mythology that we used to read when i was a kid, and the stories and illustrations, although i haven't read them in years, still haunt me. need an escapist afternoon? look this one up at the public library and find a big, comfy chair in a corner somewhere.

i've realized the sad truth: chicago doesn't have a spring. we leap directly from winter (which lasts until the final week of may) straight into summer. two weeks ago i was still bringing my tomato plants in at night to keep them from freezing; this week the temperatures are hovering around 90 with humidity to spare. mini skirts and tube tops evidently leap from the closet shelves of their own accord; chicago doesn't know what to do with all the exposed winter-white flesh.

i'm not really filing a complaint, however. summer is here, and that means…free time, and that means…projects! sometime last winter i picked up knitting as a way to keep my hands busy when i'm calling shows, or on the train, and it's a lovely meditative thing to do when i get home from work before going to bed. i wasn't quite prepared for the ferocity with which i have taken to the hobby. now i can't watch television or call a show or really sit still without something to work in my hands. each new project has to be harder than the last, with new tricks – last week it was intarsia and fair isle, this week it was cables. i'm not saying a don't knit plenty of ugly, mishappen things, mind you, but i am getting better at the tricky stuff.

the difficult thing is that since knitting has long been the domain of the frumpy and has only recently been reclaimed by the crafty, hipster crowd, is that there is a shitload of ugly acrylic yarns and dumpy frumpy sweaters patterns out there. the challenge is finding the cool patterns, or devising them myself. it's even harder to come up with projects when it's 90 degrees out – i'm discovering that most knit things go with cold weather. which is okay, really, since chicago is hat-and-mittens weather for 9 months of the year, but does seem a little crazy to be up to my elbows in winter-weight wool right now. on the other hand, i'm just not brave enough to go out in public wearing a bikini knit by these fallible hands. one loose thread, and zip! the project that carried me through the winter was making gifts for my two pregnant co-workers: baby blankets and little hats. there were supposed to be matching booties as well, but my attempts at booties ended with one sock sized for a cat, and a second that would last into the preschool years, so i threw in the towel on that one.