Monday Book Giveaway (November 15, 2010)

Today’s Choose Your Book! winner is … (do you feel suspense yet?) … Amy! She chose Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. Amy, if you’ll send your shipping information to Katrina (at) Stonoff (dot) com, I’ll get your book in the mail for you. Congrats!

For today, I’ve just finished (today) a book most of you have probably already read: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. I picked it up a thousand times, but I was put off by the very passive weather beginning. Silly me! It’s a stomach-turning, heart-pounding thrill ride of a read. Makes you think a lot about human nature, what is inevitable and what can be changed. Not an easy read, mind you. It’s unsettling and dark. But it’s one of those books that has you up turning pages long after everyone else in the house is snoring.

If you’d like a copy of A Reliable Wife, just comment below and come back next week to see if you’ve won. Contest open to anyone on the planet who has access to reliable mail service. Good luck!

Now, the hat (Kim’s Hat #13):

This is another vintage hat from the collection of the indomitable Kim. It’s made of ivory straw.

It’s deceptively simple. No decoration at all except a tone-on-tone braid along the base of the crown.

However it has a very unusual shape. It’s hard to see in the first picture, but the second picture (after the jump) is clear.

The brim is canted from the crown. It’s off-center, not perpendicular. I’m wearing the hat completely straight — I don’t have it tipped at all. But the brim tips itself when the crown is straight.

I love that the milliner trusted the unusual tilt of the brim to be enough decoration.

These are terrible pictures of me. It was late in the afternoon on an incredibly hot day, and most of my makeup had melted off.

Since I was visiting Kim, I couldn’t coordinate  outfits (plus it was too hot to be changing clothes). Nor did I look at the pictures to make sure I didn’t look like a dork.

And we were trying on a boatload of hats in a short period of time, so I didn’t have time to even look at myself in the mirror and make sure each hat was placed at the best angle. In this picture, for instance, my hair is totally flattened by the crown. If I’d checked a mirror, I would have fluffed it a bit.

So … here’s a chance you’ll rarely have, to see me like you’d see me tooling around doing Mommy Taxi duties. Only wearing a really snazzy hat.