Well HI! Sorry it’s been a few weeks since we posted some Girl Talk! You know, life happens sometimes. But we’re back and we’re talking about old wives tales or superstitions you’ve believed or even still believe.

At first I was like “yeah right, I’m not superstitious.” But then I remembered a few days ago at a restaurant that my 4 year old knocked over the jar of salt and I immediately picked it up, poured some in my hand and threw some over each shoulder. You know, to ward off the Devil or something like that. And I threw it over each shoulder because I couldn’t remember which side it was supposed to be and I figured both would be better than neither. Yeah.

Did you ever hold your breath as you drove by a cemetery? Didn’t want to breathe in ghost spirits?

Did you get seven years of bad luck for breaking a mirror?

Have you walked under a ladder or stood under an opened umbrella inside? (the horror!)

Ever think your face would be stuck forever if someone tapped you on the back while you were making a funny face?

I’ve certainly tried to guess what gender a pregnant woman’s baby is by seeing how she is carrying her baby weight.

I used twist the stem off my apple and recite the alphabet. Which ever letter I was on when the stem came off was SURELY the first letter in the name of the man I would marry someday.

I still believe it’s good luck to find a four leaf clover or to have a lady bug land on you.

I wish on shooting stars.

I blow on dice before I roll them. Obviously my breath has magical good dice rolling luck.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back? Step on a line, break your father’s spine?

A watched pot never boils.

I’m laughing at these as I write these people. Individually they don’t seem so bad but when I put them all together… it makes me laugh.

I also just went and googled “Old Wives Tales” just to see what else there is out there. And these are some of the stranger ones I read.

• To cure a cough: take a hair from the coughing person’s head, put it between two slices of buttered bread, feed it to a dog, and say, “Eat well you hound, may you be sick and I be sound.” What do you have against the dog?
• If a clock which has not been working suddenly chimes, there will be a death in the family.
• Cows lifting their tails is a sure sign that rain is coming. Or maybe they are going to poop?
• The dried body of a frog worn in a silk bag around the neck averts epilepsy and other fits.
• Unless you were born in October, it’s unlucky to wear opals.
• A cat will steal a baby’s breath.

Hey I fully admit to the “why not? It doesn’t hurt.” category of people with the things I still do. Unless of course I end up throwing salt on someone in the booth behind me. That person is clearly the Devil, right?

I think superstitions are passed down just so the older generations can get a good chuckle out of watching their kids get scared.

What do you do? Can you laugh at yourself about it?

I’ve done a lot of silly things in my life, all 33 years of it. I’m usually pretty good about laughing at myself. If I didn’t I’d surely be crying.

When I was young, in like 4th grade, one of my friends and I walked from her house to the town lake/recreational park. It was winter and the lake, Green Lake as it is called, was drained. There was only a small steam cutting through the center of it. We thought it’d be brilliant to walk in the bottom of the lake since we wouldn’t normally get to do that. We walked out, crossed the creek, and then walked the length of it, and crossed again. But we weren’t really paying attention to where we crossed. And we crossed in some quicksand like mud. I lost a sneaker (a TRETORN sneaker – very trendy back in the day *ahem*) and my awesome heart socks were covered in mud. When we reached the other side of the mud pit I had to make the agonizing decision to return to the mud pit to retrieve my shoe or not. I did. I stumbled that time. The mud was everywhere and my friend had to help me out. We walked back to my friend’s house with my holding my shoes and socks out in front of me. The mud weighed like 1,000lbs and I was exhausted. (My friend? She wore a skirt that day. I had on jeans. She won.) Her mother took one look at us on her front porch and started yelling at us about our bad decision, and what was she going to tell my parents. Well we had no reason. It was just dumb to go out in to the lake despite that I can say now that I’ve walked on the bottom of it. I am still connected with this friend on Facebook now after years and years. I am positive she and I would have a good laugh over the image of me carrying my socks home that day. Oh it was a mess…

When I was a little older (13) I thought it’d be super cool to get in a car while my same-age friend drove it. (It belonged to our 18 year old friend.) We were only going to the deli to grab sandwiches and back to the stables where we worked as grooms for a horse trainer. It was only a couple miles. Well we almost crashed. The 18 year old friend had to pull up the parking brake to slow down the car that my same-aged friend lost control of on a downhill. Yeah. DUMBNESS ALL AROUND. We ended up almost in a ditch, thankfully avoiding several cars that we swerved around at breakneck speeds.

Let’s also not talk about the time I was a freshman in college and thought I needed to carry mace with me everywhere and was a little tipsy one night and decided to show my friends that it worked. I was smart and all and sprayed it away from us… in to the wind headed straight back at us. I think about 15 people had breathing trouble for about 10 minutes, myself included. Brilliant, no? I, um, wasn’t friends with them for very long after that.

Ah and pregnancy hormones didn’t do me any favors either. While pregnant with my Bug I really did put the cereal away in the fridge and the milk away in the pantry. And while pregnant with Bear I went to work and realized I had put on two different black sandals that morning. With completely different length heels. I was mortified about that one but everyone in the office thought it was hilarious.

What about you? Can you join my silly club and talk about the air headed things you have done?

Seuss. That was how it started.

It’s pretty much a gateway drug. A little Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, and before you know it, you’re hitting up the library at all hours for the hard stuff. Like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

That was how it happened for me, anyway. I remember being in bed around age five or six, Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? propped up on my knees as I willed myself to read it one more time until late into the night. Well, until a reasonable hour as designated by my parents.

I’ve never been big on thwarting authority.

I was really just biding my time until fourth grade. My mom and I were out buying a last minute birthday gift for a friend, and she saw a display of books on an end cap at K-Mart. I remembered my friend talking about the series before, so I picked out a set for her. My mom got a set for me too. Three “Super Specials” from the Baby-sitter’s Club series. AN OBSESSION WAS BORN.

If you didn’t read these books, all you need to know is they focused on a group of seven girls who worked as babysitters. They were 11-13 years old, but they had the autonomy of ADULTS. (Seriously, can you imagine leaving MALLORY alone with your children? Or Claudia? That girl was inSANE.) The books were trite and pretty much defined formulaic, but I ate up the entire 50+ book series.

There’s a rumor going around that I still have one of those Super Specials on my bookshelf. For NOSTALGIA. It’s not like I’ve read it in the past four or five years.

It’s starting to feel suspiciously like list time up in here.

• Anything by Roald Dahl. Specifically Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.
• Everything my 3rd/5th grade teacher read our classes. I wish I’d written about her for the teachers post a few weeks back, because she was brilliant. Her name was Kathy Mullins, and she was always reading to us from a chapter book. That was how I met Beezus and Ramona and The Indian in the Cupboard. She read us Old Yeller, The Pink Motel, and Bunnicula. When I was in middle school (and my brother was in her class), she passed away from leukemia. I still think about her when I get really excited about a book. TISSUES, PLEASE.
• Seriously. I need some tissues.
• The Little House series.  One summer my aunt cleaned out my cousins’ old room, and the end result was a very large box of books with my name on it. The Little House books were in there, and I was instantly enamored. I can’t wait to share them with my girls. The box also held
• A whole lotta Judy Blume. I have to admit, I was a little surprised (GRATEFULLY SO) when I found out maxi pads no longer required a BELT.
• The Anastasia Krupnik series, by Lois Lowry. Hilarious. Lowry wrote a ton of books that I loved in childhood (A Summer to Die is probably still the saddest book I have ever read, but it is a beautiful story) and more that I didn’t discover until I was in graduate school writing papers on YA lit. If you haven’t read The Giver, you are really missing out.
• Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. I’m still a little bit bitter my husband wouldn’t let me name our second daughter Annika, so much was my love of this book.
• Bag Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky’s silly poetry was SO much better.
• Sweet Valley ____. Kids, Twins, High. I read them all. They looked exactly alike, but they were so different! GROUND-BREAKING, I tell you.
• Anything by Christopher Pike. He was a little bit horror (Monster), a little bit urban fantasy (The Last Vampire series), and a little bit depressing (The Midnight Club.) These were the books that defined my middle school years.
• Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. I obviously didn’t read these until I was in college, but what an incredible set of books it is.

Enough from me and my still-checks-out-books-from-the-children’s-section-under-the-guise-of-them-being-for-my-children self. What are some of your favorite children’s books?

Do you make time to read? What are your favourite novels?

I love to read.  I think it’s one of the most important things you can do if you want to be a writer, and I do.  It’s gotten a little harder to make time for it lately — or, more accurately, I’m not prioritizing it the way I used to.  I mean, at the beginning of every month I settle down with my new issue of “Today’s Parent” and “Every Day With Rachael Ray” and fight to read the pages before my toddler flips and/or crinkles them.  I read a lot of blogs, some of them creative fiction.  And I do enjoy settling down at the end of the night with a novel, but I’m usually doing something else — working on a site, blogging, tweeting (okay, mostly that last one) — and end up crawling into bed too exhausted to have thought about reading.

I’m a big fantasy fiction geek and I won’t even pick up a novel from another genre if I have the choice of sticking with fantasy (although I’m not totally closed-minded and will go out of my genre for the right story).  When I first had my daughter and she nursed 75% of her waking hours, I filled that time with reading — her cradled against my chest, my hands full with a hardcover book.  I reread the entire Wheel of Time series and, despite the obviously weak spots (books 7-10), really enjoyed it.  I started trying to read The Sword of Truth series, and despite finding it to be basically a redux of WoT, got through the first four books before I had to set it aside.  The third and especially fourth novels were so unapologetically bad as to be embarrassing.

I’m a huge fan of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart trilogy.  It’s sexy, poetic, and engaging; it’s also pretty light in the fantasy genre, more like an alternative history with a touch of magic.  Definitely worth picking up if you have the time to read — in fact, it’s so good that it might just make you make time.

It’s hard for me to pick a favourite novel when I look at series, though, since they all tend to work together.  The most recent book (the 12th one!) of the Wheel of Time series, The Gathering Storm breaks that trend, though.  The character and plot development in it are awesome, and after the way the last few books dragged, the pacing in this one was refreshing, although it definitely wouldn’t work as a stand-alone novel.  Richard Adams wrote a novel called Maia that’s a favourite, although it’s pretty hard to find these days.  And yeah, it’s where I got my daughter’s name from, although I don’t want her to be like the main character (who is a glorified prostitute…).  Cliver Barker’s Imajica is another amazing novel, because there’s a sense of being immersed in the fantastic as I read it.

Stepping out of the fantasy genre, I really enjoyed Anderson Cooper’s (yeah, the guy from CNN!) Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival.  It’s surprisingly beautiful, touching on how several news stories affected him personally, with a look at his (not candy-coated) past. I like novels with a wry, almost confused protagonist, like Jeffrey Moore’s Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain, which is about a professor of Shakespeare who teaches in Montréal pursuing his own Dark Lady.  And Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is another novel I adore; I love the alterna-history, the vulnerability of the narrator, the mysticism and heart-breaking humanity of the “Her” of the title, a rock star named Vina, and how the novel spans several decades and the entire globe.  And yeah, the U2 song is based off lyrics written in that novel.

Anyhow, after writing this, I really really want to make more time for reading.  What are some of your favourite novels?

PS: I just signed up for Goodreads, the social network for readers.  Are you there? Let’s connect!
PPS: All novels are Amazon Affiliate links.  I need more MAC stuff, I’m an addict now, so if you buy any of these books I will make a little bit of money. Which is awesome.