Seattle Part 2

Sleater-Kinney Road! For anyone not familiar with the band who named themselves after this road:

Sleater-Kinney's musical style sprang from and was rooted in Olympia, Washington's fertile punk and independent rock scenes of the early- to mid-1990s, forming around the last years of the riot grrrl movement, and with Tucker and Brownstein coming from veteran acts from the beginning of the movement.*

*From Wikipedia

David was sent to Bothell, WA (a town right outside of Seattle) for work, so Jonas and I went with him. We weren't able to spend very much time in Seattle, but we did what we could with exploring it. We hope to go back this summer when we have more time and money.

I do love living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

Also, I am super pale.

Seattle Part One

Books and The Grilled Cheese Grill

Oh, books. My loves. I recently finished some incredibly amazing ones. Two books of short stories: Revenge by Yoko Ogawa (beautiful, strange, and eerie stories that end up all intertwining with each other), and There Once Was a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (stories about "the bleak Soviet and post Soviet living conditions and lives of the people of Russia"). Also a short novel called We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. This last one tells the story of two sisters who are basically shut-ins, and are feared by the people of their village. Throughout the story you learn why. I completely fell in love with the narrator, Merricat, the younger of the two and wish there were more stories written about her and her sister.

I also finished J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy. As Jo herself says about it:  "This is a book about responsibility. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: how responsible we are for the poor, the disadvantaged, other people’s misery."

As far as my own opinion of the book:  I loved it. I finished it lying in bed at around 3 in the morning and was basically sobbing. It's not a happy book. It's not an easy book. It's about some very ugly people and bad situations. But after I finished it I felt that it had a very important message, and that it sheds a lot of light on social and political responsibilities, and how people view them so differently from one another.

As for what I am reading now:  Pattern Recognition by the amazing William Gibson. My buddy :)

Today we went to The Grilled Cheese Grill. I could not help but to take a photo of the Virginia license plate, since that is the state where I grew up and it will always be very special to me.

I loved the inside of the bus. Old portrait photos on the tables, as well as Trivial Pursuit cards.

Also some incredibly interesting mural work on the ceiling.

Wow, I think this is one of my most wordy posts ever. Ah, well. My intense feelings towards books can't help but to show themselves I suppose. Have a great weekend!