Names & a Book

According to this:

my first name ranks 32nd in popularity in the United States.

My middle name is 105th, as a first name.

In the last names scale,

My maiden name ranks in the 1560s, and my current last name ranks in the 200s.


"J#n!c@" does not appear in the list of 4275 girls' names. :(

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This weekend, I read Michael Lowenthal's The Same Embrace. I loved his Avoidance. (No, T, it wasn't so strong as to be "avoision.") The Same Embrace is very well-written, strong and sensitive, engrossing and sad. I'm not quite sure why, given the subject matter of Avoidance, the latter book captured me so much more firmly. However, I fell absolutely in thrall with that where this just entertained me.

It's the story of Jacob and Jonathan Rosenbaum, identical twins, and their parents and grandparents. And about the concepts of twinness, coupledom, family, relationships, love, separation, war, loss, remembrance, sorrow, and hope.

I don't want to say too much, again, about this. I'll let Lowenthal's words speak for the book.

"Why couldn't things always be this way between them? It occurred to him that it was other people who messed up everything.... If only they could be alone like this."

"There was simply a shimmering perfection to the moment, a throbbing eureka sense that dwarfed any explanation. Jacob felt a tug toward completion, as palpable as the pull of an unseen fish on a line, a hidden reward that you know will soon break the surface and sparkle in the brilliant sun."

"He had heard of strangers trapped in elevators, who emerge hours later bonded as lifelong friends. He could understand that now, the almost surreal but utterly honest closeness two people could achieve under the right circumstances."

"Sometimes it is a little thing. A thing that, by itself, perhaps you could tolerate. You could dismiss it, or forgive and move on. But if it comes after so much else, after so many years of other little things building and building, then it bears the weight of everything combined."