Weddings & Reading!

Books, where am I with books?

Manifest is about to pub and the coverage is rolling! And there are plenty of giveaways, interviews, reviews, and other fun events surrounding that release. Keep an eye on the Manifest page and Twitter for coverage!

I have a couple more copies of To Your Dog's Health! and Questions and Answers on Life Insurance left, so check them out on the left sidebar and contact me if you'd like a copy.

As for personal reading, well, there's been a lot of acquiring going on lately. I've made a couple of trips to Boswell Books and picked up: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore (my first book by him), and The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin (I loved The Passage and am just dying to check out his earlier work!) Ever the cyclist, the boyfriend picked up a gorgeous copy of Bicycle: A History by David V. Herilhy. I've commented a dozen times on how much I love the cover.

The boyfriend and I also celebrated an anniversary this weekend and we managed to make that event booky nerdish, too! Instead of gifts, we went to an enormous used bookstore in downtown Milwaukee called Renaissance Books. It's three stories tall, dusty, crowded, and barely organized, but it's also pretty amazing. They have stacks and stacks of very old books. I love it.

We headed there with a mission: buy one another books and only spend $15. I'm so glad we did it! As I scoured the Eastern philosophy section trying what to decide what to get for the boy, I was so distracted, wondering what section he was in. In the end, I think we both did really well!

He picked up a Jim Crace book for me (Continent) and a fabric guide from the early 90s. The fabric info is still relavent because it describes the basic structure, weight, and components of fabric, and the bonus is that it comes complete with these incredible images of gaunt, super gelled, spiky haired models with linebacker shoulder pads. Straight out of a Robert Palmer video.

And he was given a copy of a book on Tolkien characters and...a book that requires further research. It seems to be a rare, independently published book of Buddhist thought from the 70s that may have been compiled by a lama...or a quack. We're not sure, yet. But it's full of sketches and isms that are pretty bizarre. One prominently features an ice cream cone in the sky. It's pretty incredible.

I'm sure by now everyone knows this was a pretty wedding-tastic summer for me. I chatted via Twitter about them often and blamed them for falling behind at times. And below are some pics from those. I haven't gotten any pics from the photogs yet, so these are just the ones I took with my camera, which is why I'm only in one of them!

First up: my brother's wedding!

My brother and his wife

hands and rings

Next up, my friend Kristen from college:

(l-r: Shelly, Bridget, Kristen, Jacque & me!)

Her dress was so vintage fantastic, I had to take some vamp pics!

I'm still playing with the colors and contrasts, so let me know what you think!