A question + What I'm Reading Wednesday

[topaz119]

Ok, lj/dw, what would be an appropriate gift for BabyBoy (who is 12, almost 13, now; I should probably come up with a new nickname for him) to give to his friend for her bat mitzvah? He was invited to the synagogue and to lunch and to the dessert/dance later that evening. They've been friends since kindergarten (she "manages" him--you don't want to know how many times I've heard, 'yeah, R says I need a haircut' or 'If I don't read this, R is going to give me that look' or 'there's this thing going on on Main Street and R says we should get there around 1'.) They're not boyfriend/girlfriend. Both of them say that--R could and did roll her eyes at that at age 5--but they've been the kind of friends where we used to tell the teachers to make sure they weren't sitting together in any classes because they'd get into all kinds of trouble if they were. TIA.

ok, books...

What I'm Reading
Grave Mercy, by Robin LeFevers. The one with the 15th Century nun-assassins (I can't say that too often) but it also has a ton of political intrigue and world-building so I can only read it when I've got a good chunk of time. Also still reading The Art of Possibility which is another one that needs a good chunk of time if I'm going to get anything out of it. And last night, while I was waiting around for a kid, I started To Marry A Prince, by Sophie Page. I'm only about 25 pages in, but I have yet to roll my eyes or feel the need to throw it across the room, so that's promising.

What I Just Finished
I stopped about halfway through The Billionaire's Vinegar because a) I knew how it ended; b) I just could not make myself care about whether people who have hundreds of thousands of bottles in their wine cellars are being defrauded or not. I felt badly about once again bailing on a book club book, but since we tabled all discussion of the book itself for a session led by a sommelier about what makes a wine able to age well (complete with tastings) I didn't mess up anything. I also went and slammed through a contemporary romance called A Royal Pain which pissed me off to *no* end. I went off on it on goodreads; I'll spare you here, except to say that the very least you can do if you're writing a book where the hook is that the male lead is a British duke is to make double-damn sure you get the forms of address right. I mean, I get that it's a little quirky but if I can do it for a fucking *fanfic*, you can do it for pro fic. IIRC, several romance novelists maintain little charts on their websites. It's not *that* hard. /frothing at the mouth

What I'm Reading Next
The three I'm reading now are going to take me a bit to get through, so I doubt anything new will come up on the horizon.

Comments

[ladycat]

For the bat mitzvah- any sort of 'birthday' appropriate gift is fine, but a lot of people give money. Working the number 18, if you do go the money route, is significant because that means 'life' in Hebrew.

But there's nothing special or significant you need to get for her. Something she'd like, if babyboy knows, would be better.

[rogoblue.livejournal.com]

Ok. Nun assassins. I'm in.

As to the gift, if she is like minded, perhaps he should procure for her his top three Shakespeare plays (arranged by number of sword fights) so she can be informed when he acts in them.

[ariadnes-string.livejournal.com]

That's a hard one. The perfect bar/bat mitzvah gift used to be a thesaurus/ fancy dictionary--something the kid would find useful in high school--but that stuff is all online these days. The last such gift I gave was a gift certificate for fencing equipment--does she do a sport or something?....But a peer-to-peer gift...(I still think something education-oriented is appropriate to the occasion, but that's the teacher in me talking).

Grave Mercy sounds like a lot of fun!