Were they trying to make a big old advertisement for slash fan fiction when they designed the new teaser posters for The Return of the King? (scroll down to the very last one)

I take back everything I said below about Sense and Sensibility. I am three-quarters of the way through and I love, love, love it. I love every word. Mrs. Ferrars has just found out about Edward's engagement and I am just plowing through the story at this point. I was late to work because I didn't want to put it down.

I read a couple of books while we were in the Poconos and wasn't thrilled with either. The first was Cherry by Mary Karr, which had been recommended to me by several people. After finishing it, my main thought was that I was glad I'd only paid $1 for it. As someone who had a difficult childhood and adolescence I have little patience with autobiographical books about someone else's difficult childhood and adolescence. Said books usually involve drugs and this one is no different, and reading about someone's extreme drug experimentation usually just causes me to zone out and start skipping pages. This book was no different. Many of the amazon.com reviewers found the book funny; I do not count myself among them.

I also read a book I took along mainly as beach reading - Suzanne Enoch's London's Perfect Scoundrel. I've been hoping to find a romance writer as good as Julia Quinn or Judith McNaught, but I really believe that's an impossible quest. Enoch's book was filled with sloppy writing and unlikeable characters as well as a first chapter that plunges you into the story in a very confusing and uncomfortable place.

I cannot in good conscience recommend either of these books to anyone.

I also started Sense and Sensibility. It's my first Austen and I'm reading in preparation for reading Emma in school this semester. Her style's a little hard to get used to but I am definitely enjoying it. My main trouble with the book is that I have seen the movie far too many times to shut it out of my head and I keep hearing Emma Thompson's voice or losing my place in the story because the movie obviously cut some things out.

Courtesy of Backstreets.com, here's the setlist for the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert Greg and I took my parents and brother to last night. Did I mention our seats were in the 27th row?

From Small Things/The Rising/Lonesome Day/Night/Be True/Atlantic City/Empty Sky/Waitin' on a Sunny Day/Darlington County/It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City/Worlds Apart/Badlands/Out in the Street/Mary's Place/Streets of Philadelphia/Into the Fire/Thunder Road

First Encore: Incident on 57th Street/I'm Going Down/Ramrod/Born to Run

Second Encore: My City of Ruins/Land of Hope and Dreams/Pretty Flamingo/Rosalita/Dancing in the Dark/I'm a Rocker

The show started almost an hour late and didn't get over til after 11:30. We missed our train home and had to take a $35 cab ride out of the city. I was really pissed about that part last night and it wasn't helped by the fact that I hardly ate yesterday - but Bruce played Thunder Road and today, after I've had some sleep, I can say again that it was all good. They are seriously the best live band in the entire world. It was amazing, even if he did play a bunch of obscure stuff and I hardly knew the words to anything. We had a great time.

I'm reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis - the book about obsessive/competitive/talented/all of the above Scrabble players. It's fascinating in a number of ways but it makes my head hurt. I am not a fabulous Scrabble player; Greg almost always beats me. Reading about how these people memorize hundreds of word lists and study the Scrabble dictionary and play anagram games and heaven knows what else almost makes me never want to play the game again. I love words, but I am definitely not freaky about them. Not this freaky, anyway.

Over the weekend we finally saw Lilo and Stitch, thanks to the glory of Netflix. It was very good; we both thought it was cute and funny and for the most part well-written (though nowhere near as well-written as a Pixar movie). I just want to know one thing: could Disney possibly make an animated film about a family where one or both of the parents hasn't died?

Out of the million ways there are to create dramatic tension, Disney picks the one-or-both-dead-parents scenario every time. It's usually the mother that's dead, too - Jasmine, Ariel, Belle, Cinderella, Snow White, none of these girls had mothers (I understand that if you're sticking to the original fairy tales on some of these, that it's the same in the original stories. But they screw with the original stories so much; why not add in an extra parent?). Lilo and Noni had two dead parents. Simba's father died horribly. So did Bambi's mother. Dumbo had no father. Pixar seems to have followed the Disney lead on this - there's only a mom in Toy Story, and Nemo loses his mother in the beginning of the movie.

If we have all sorts of families in the world now, why is Disney only talking about the ones with dead parents?

Last night we watched Donnie Darko. I didn't love it. I thought it was trying to be too many different kinds of movies and the ending was really unsatisfying. The tall freaky whispering rabbit of death really creeped me the hell out. Jake Gyllenhaal was very good, though - but his performance wasn't enough to save the movie for me as a whole.

We also watched about half of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which we've owned since it came out on DVD but never viewed. I fell asleep sometime after Justin was found petrified, but not from lack of enjoyment - maybe the incredibly full weekend had something to do with it? I love when Malfoy says to Goyle, "I didn't know you could read!"

Five more episodes of Coupling further cemented my love for the show. My one complaint about the five that we watched? Not enough Jeff! Jeff needs his own show.

No matter what this may make anyone may think of me - I believe that the Silly Songs With Larry CD is a fine musical compilation. I think very highly of anyone who enjoys Oh Where Is My Hairbrush? as much as Elizabeth and I did this fine evening, speeding down 95 at 1 AM and singing it at the top of our lungs. Even more fun, however, are The Dance of the Cucumber (translated by Bob the Tomato from the original Spanish) and the not seasonal but oh-so-fun O Santa! (with guest appearances by a crafty bank robber, a savage Norseman, and the IRS).

(Also on the playlist this evening: my fab-you-lous "Fun Songs" mix, featuring classic tunes like Copacabana, Istanbul Not Constantinople, Don't Try To Live Your Life In One Day, Express Yourself, and my all-time favorite song, Just Like Heaven; also a brief appearance by Kasey Chambers.)

True to my word, I put down Alice I Think and plan to never pick it up again. Instead I picked up the book closest to the top of the pile and started that instead.

(Tangent: this is a bad idea. I always end up reading the newest books and never get to the books on the bottom of the pile. Some of them have been at the bottom of the pile for years, and that is not an exaggeration. It also seems to always mean that I am reading contemporary fiction, romance novels, and children's books rather than the small mountain of classics lingering there near the bottom. I may never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at this rate.)

So the book closest to the top of the pile was one I borrowed from Patti after Toronto Trek: The Man I Should Have Married by Pamela Satran. It is decidedly chicklit, published on a chicklit press, but it's good chicklit. This book is from the same press that published Pamie's book (which I really liked) and Getting Over Jack Wagner (which I tossed across the room and then returned to Borders, feeling that because I'd wasted my time reading it, I deserved my money back). So I was 50-50 with the Downtown Press books so far; reading this one is making me think they make more right choices than wrong.

This book won't change the world, but it's a good read. I stayed up past my bedtime last night trying to finish it. I never wanted to smack the heroine, like I did when I tried the Shopaholic books. It didn't make me want to smack myself, like the aforementioned GOJW. I like Kennedy (the lead character), I like her trash-talking teenage daughter Maya, and I like the honest portrayal of a woman who got married for every reason but the right one - because I've been there. That part of the story rang true to me. Er...rings, since I'm still reading it. I also found myself wanting to move into a house that Kennedy ends up living in, and I very rarely find myself that attracted to fictional settings.

Recommended, if you like this sort of thing. Faulkner it ain't.