Like a lot of other people, I thought I was going to write something about the boston bombers. I haven’t rules it out, but I’m leaning more and more to spending the summer working on something else. That said, I have some drafts I wrote over the past two weeks, stuff I liked or at least felt are worth sharing. Here’s one of them, along with some Marathon-related photos I have taken since April 15….

Everyone who grew up in Boston has a marathon story. This one is mine.

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Just picked up a writing job related to the Boston mess and need as much info as possible in as short of time as possible. If you have any connection (i.e. knew the suspects, were in Boston Monday near the finish line, etc.) I probably need to talk to you.

Please email me at dave@davecopeland.com with what you know and a phone number where I can reach you today/tomorrow.

Please share this post.

You’d be lacking all sorts of native reason if you accepted a friend request from your boss on Facebook, but what happens when you like your company’s Facebook page?

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These are the books I read in the first three months of 2013. My general view is if a book is good enough for me to finish reading, it’s good enough to recommend, so even a one out of five stars in my ratings is pretty good.

Continental Drift (P.S.), By Russell Banks

Date Started: December 24

Date Finished: January 8

Year: 2011

Pages: Kindle Edition

Publisher: Harper Collins

Synopsis: Typical Banks about down-on-his luck working class loser.

Quotes of Note:

• “and nothing seems improved over yesterday”
• “pretending he wasn’t who he was”
• “like most people, Bob finds it difficult to know right from wrong”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Lots of good descriptive writing. Tough to read in parts and the parts about Bob seemed to be better, filled with more depth than parts about the Haitians. Lots of sex – almost to the point of being unnecessary, overdone. Liked how the stories collided.

Overall Review: 3 out of 5 stars.

The Roundhouse, By Louise Eldrich

Date Started: January 8

Date Finished: January 19

Year: 2012

Pages: Kindle Edition

Publisher: Harper Collins

Synopsis: National Book Award winner; Native American family living on a reservation comes to grips with brutal attack on the mother.

Quotes of Note: Just a sampling – so many good descriptions and theme-supporting quotes in this book.

• “like punching a bruise”
• “His face registered the humming rage of a man who could not think fast enough.”
• “There was the added weight of being a surprise….and the surging hopes that implied. It was all on me – the bad and the good.”
• Quoted Marcus Aurellius: “Very little is needed to make a happy life.”
• “Lots of men cry after they do something nasty to a woman.”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Really loved this book despite it being predictable in some parts (Cappy’s death, for example, and I say that without giving too much away), but thrilling in most parts. Wish I could write like this. Gave me some good guidance for narration on a fiction project I have been struggling with, as the narrator is retelling a story from his youth.

Overall Review: 5 out of 5 stars.

With The Animals, By Noelle Revaz

Date Started: January 18

Date Finished: February 13

Year: 2012

Pages: Kindle Edition

Publisher: Dalkay Archive Press

Synopsis: Translated story about a misogynistic, semi-illiterate French farmer who relates better to animals than his family, including his cancer-stricken wife and his children.

Quotes of Note:

• “to know the son you have too look at the father too.”
• “Life’s like that, a wheel that turns faster and more frequent all the time, so the seasons seem to pass quicker than they used”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Tough read, and didn;t strike me as being as great as the review I read about it had lead me to believe. Semi-simplistic themes.

Overall Review: 2 out of 5 stars.

The Year We Left Home, By Jean Thompson

Date Started: March 1

Date Finished: March 13

Year: 2011

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Synopsis: Tracks on family through four decades. Interesting structure and, again, something I could possibly experiment with if I were to write a novel based on my experience at summer camp.

Quotes of Note:

• “what really mattered was the life you made for yourself, and the person you decided to be”
• “You never can tell, looking at it from the outside. How miserable people can be in marriage.”
• “You decided that your life would go in a certain direction, and maybe it did. Or maybe you were kidding yourself and the world was mostly a matter of being in the right or wrong place in the right or wrong time.”
• “They didn’t think in terms of happy.”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Very sad when this book ended – picked from the dioscount table at Brookline Booksmith and it ended a streak of starting and not finishing a few books that let me down (Eat the City being one of the titles I really wanted to like a couldn’t like, or finish for that matter, in February). Structure definitely worked, as it showed complexity and growth of characters. Wondering if a similar structure could work in literary nonfiction.

Overall Review: 4 out of 5 stars.

The Lost Weekend, By Charles Jackson

Date Started: March 9

Date Finished: March 31

Year: 1944

Pages: 248

Publisher: Vintage

Synopsis: Semi-autobiographical tale of a five-day binges on the East Side of Manhattan.

Quotes of Note:

• “What was happening to him was, in a sense, not happening at all because nobody knew about it.”
• “Never dreamed it because these things just didn’t happen. Not to the kind of person he was, the kind of people he knew…”
• “How nice and neighborly of them to straighten up for him. The dear, sweet, considerate bitches.”
• “They wake up on mornings such as this, all but out of their minds with remorse, enduring what others call and can call a hangover – that funny word Americans will joke about forever, even when the morning after is their own.”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Picked it up after reading a Vanity Fair article about the film version (which is supposed to be quite good). Fairly timeless and has held up well; will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled with functioning alcoholism.

Overall Review: 3 out of 5 stars.

Anyone know what is going on with this helicopter flying over Boston? And buzzed the Southeast Expressway at an altitude of no more than 200 feet when I was heading home around 3 pm today and I can still hear it flying over the Charles in Cambridge now, more than two hours later.

Questions I have after the reports that Facebook is going to start incorporating the hashtag into its service in what amounts to a direct shot across the bow of Twitter:

• As Facebook tries to look more and more like Twitter and Twitter tries to look more and more like Facebook, what the fuck’s the point of being on both?
• Is Zuckerberg et al capable of an original idea? More and more, and from its inception on down the line, Facebook seems more about stealing good ideas and (sometimes) making them better. I don’t think this is one they can make better or worse, for that matter.
• Isn’t the whole point of a hashtag to make content easier to search? Doesn’t this say something about the quality and usability of Facebook’s long-promised search engine? Hashtags are so simple they’re brilliant, but something tells me you’re not going to topple Google or Bing if you’re resorting to the rather low-tech hash tag.

While I am going to continue to play around with all of the following as I try to find an adequate replacement for Google Reader, which will be retired July 1, here are my initial takes on the services most often being mentioned as replacements for a Cloud-based RSS reader to replace Google Reader:

NetVibes

Pros:

Quick signup and the free version of NetVibes seems to offer most of the features that Google Reader had. The paid version offers some fairly impressive analytics, as best I can tell (not going to pay for a RSS reader if I don’t have to, and if I do pay, it will only be after one of these services wins me over with their free offering). Some cool looking skins and layouts to choose from, and lots of widgets.

Cons:

The interface is radically different from what I’m used to, but that may not be a bad thing. You can switch between a widget view and a reader view (shown above). Took longer than the other services I tested to Still haven’t figured out how to import my Google Reader subscriptions (like all of these services, they’re dealing with an overload of new users today).

If I had to choose a replacement for Google Reader today, NetVibes would get my vote.

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