I think I love You

I was never a David Cassidy fan. I was a bit too young and he looked a little creepy by the time I did see pictures of him. I even sort of missed the craze over his half-brother Shaun so I never did the whole lunch box, pillowcase, poster thing. Still, I understand it. I was an 80s kid and my room was all Duran Duran. In I think I love You, Allison Pearson captures the life of a 13-year old misfit in the backwaters of Wales, crazy about David Cassidy. I say misfit, but who isn't at that age? Still, this one gives the term a run for its money. Petra is a cellist, for heavens sake and she's not allowed pop culture in the home. Her German mother unknowingly named her after a tv dog so she gets barked at in school. Even her mother's German-ness is a liability in a country that still remembers WWII in 1974.

The one thing that saves Petra is her friendship with Sharon over their mutual adoration of David Cassidy. And yes, like all other things at that age, both the friendship and the adoration suffer under betrayal.

The other important character is Bill, a recent graduate with a good and useless degree who, in essence, becomes David Cassidy for a magazine and ultimately creates the David Cassidy Quiz that will someday change Petra's life. But it doesn't happen right away because Petra's mom has no tolerance for pop music, pop stars, or anything that doesn't reek of high culture so that when Sharon and Petra do, amazingly, win the chance to meet their idol on the set of the Partridge Family, they don't even know it. It takes another 25 years for them to collect and everyone, everyone is a different person by then.

I really enjoyed this romp through fandom, youth, and middle-age. Pearson's writing is wonderful so that even when I saw some of the coincidences a mile away, I forgave her and enjoyed the ride. Her eye for what makes 13 torturous is perfect as when she has Petra explain why she could never dare disagree with a friend's opinion:...you could fall out. Then, before you knew it, you'd be back out there in the playground by yourself, sighing and checking your watch every couple of seconds to indicate that you did have an arrangement to meet someone and were not, in fact, the kind of sad, friendless person who had to pretend they were waiting for friends who did not exist."

And Bill, who cannot believe he has degraded himself to ghosting for a pop star who doesn't even know he's being ghosted has his little tantrum, comparing the fans to "peasants from 1321. You give them a bit of dead badger skull and tell them it's the funny bone of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they fall down in a dead faint and give you everything they own, including the cow. I am writing for peasants." And then he recovers, even becomes a little protective of his alter ego. This is what the world of fandom does to you.

Worlds collide not once but at least twice over the 25 years of this novel. Don't worry if it seems predictable or contrived just come on, get happy...

Okay, I couldn't resist that one.

The Devotion of Suspect X

Japanese thrillers are apparently exhausting. My husband and I independently picked up two different, translated mysteries at the library only to discover that the first three pages were devoted to the peripatetic wanderings of the protagonist. Still, while he quit under the weight of trying to follow a character through the maze of Tokyo, I pursued Ishigami on his walk to work as a high school math teacher in Keigo Higashino's book, The Devotion of Suspect X. The route along the river does turn out to be somewhat relevant to the plot, but it did take a long time to get there.

Ishigami is a brilliant mathematician who has taken a job as a maths teacher mainly in order to devote more time to his own work. There simply isn't enough time in the day with all the distractions in life to solve the unsolvable. That's a plot point that comes back later, too.

One of the welcome distractions from the dreary business of despairing over non-math students having to take math comes from Ishigami's middle-aged neighbor. Yasuko is a pretty, single mom who used to work in a club. She's moved on to a better life selling bento boxes, but she can't outrun her good-for-nothing ex-husband. Things happen, lousy husband is killed, Ishigami comes to the rescue with a plot worthy of his spectacularly mathematical brain. Everything would be fine if he were only matching wits with Kusanagi, the assigned detective, but throw a genius physicist into the works and you've got a cat-and-mouse of intellects. Yukawa, the physicist, is better known as Doctor Galileo and is a recurring character in Higashino's books and movies. In this case, he's also a former classmate of Ishigami's so, as they say: this time it's personal. But whether he wants to clear his old friend, Suspect X, or not, is a big part of the plot.

The brain play is as exhausting as tracing a route through the city. There were definitely times where I no longer cared about the mystery, but I kept reading because that's what you do in a mystery. I thought I knew the who, I thought I knew the how. So what was I waiting for? Ishigami becomes creepier as the story goes along and I was annoyed by that. Oooh, how original--the vaguely autistic genius is a stalker! But, suddenly (and it does take a while), the plot twists again and nothing is quite as it seems. The book ends in a somewhat Twilight Zone, or Hitchcock way (trust me) so I forgave the cultural stumbling blocks I had to navigate.

This is not a seat of your pants mystery/thriller, but I ended up enjoying the aesthetics of a Japanese-style mystery. Apparently Keigo Higashino is a critically acclaimed writer as well as a best-selling author in Japan, just be prepared to commit to reading his books.

Good-Bye and Amen

Beth Gutcheon makes a risky choice in this novel, a follow-up on the family in Leeway Cottage. Good-Bye and Amen is not just written from the perspective of the family members but, seemingly, from everyone who's ever had any contact of any sort with the Moss clan, including some sort of presiding spirits from the 'other side'. Yes, it's crazy at first, the voices (well-labeled) occasionally interact, as if answering each other's questions or they hint at an event yet unseen, and everyone gets anything from one line to a few pages. I felt very disoriented at first, then realized how aptly it echoed the chaos of that clan. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of the voices and really enjoyed the style and the book.

The matriarch of the Moss family is long-dead (though unscattered) in Good-Bye and Amen. Sydney Moss dominated Leeway Cottage and the Maine summer home by that name, and she was not a nice person. In Good-Bye, it's the turn of the next generation, her grown children--Eleanor the seemingly well-grounded eldest, Monica, the ever-hungry-for recognition middle child and Jimmy, the prodigal son. And their families, of course, because time marches on; even someone as permanent as Sydney Moss doesn't live forever.

The story really centers around Monica and her husband, a former star lawyer who chucked it all to become an Episcopal Priest. Norman Faithful has the name and the oratory for such a role, but he severely lacks the humility to truly succeed. We're here to watch him fall by the end of a final summer at the Maine Cottage, but we get all the back story in the meantime.

I'm a bit of a sucker for sweeping family dramas and this one delivers. I loved reading about all the accidental and intentional clashes with so many different personalities, all the while grateful that I didn't have to deal with anyone of the characters personally. I'm glad that the "spirits" don't show up often. It's almost as if Gutcheon decided half-way through that her characters can tell their story themselves without the need for an omniscience beyond the grave. I couldn't relate to them and didn't care about them. They weren't even giving any great insight.

I loved that one section of the book is a photo album purportedly of the different generations of the Moss family. I think that was a clever little way to round out the characters. I suppose they come from the author's own family which is another gutsy move.

Gutcheon is a fun writer and clever. Norman Faithful is a pain in the neck, but she gives him some decent lines: America in Bermuda shorts is not a pretty sight, he says about the summer view. His own laziness makes a good story as well, like when he tells the church secretary to do a search and replace on a funeral program used for a woman named Mary to be used for the funeral of a woman named Edna. As one character tells it" ,..and then obviously didn't proof it, because we found ourselves on our knees praying to the Virgin Edna. You wouldn't think it was funny if it was your mother's funeral." So, yeah, Norman is a drag, but I was glad as a reader that his fall didn't come too soon.

I may have to go back to Leeway Cottage, to revisit these characters.

Heat Wave

Putting a mother and her grown daughter in side by side cottages in the English countryside, even if only for the summer, is a recipe for disaster. Pauline is the 55 year old voice of Penelope Lively's novel, Heat Wave, and her tenants are her 29 year old daughter, her 14 month old grandson, and--most importantly--the daughter's husband. Maurice, like many of Lively's male characters is peripheral since her focus is often on the generational bonds (some good, some destructive) between women, but his actions are the center of Heat Wave.

Maurice is a writer of popular historical non-fiction-- jaunty travel guides on popular culture-- and Pauline, regretfully, is the one who first introduced this man to her daughter. Maurice is closer to Pauline's age, but he's a charming seducer. We don't see the charm, of course, because Pauline is our already-jaded guide to life with Maurice, but it's certainly hinted at.
While Pauline watches with increasing despair as her daughter begins to understand all those weekend visits with a certain Carol--whose boyfriend is editing Maurice's book--she cannot help but reflect on her similar position years ago.

Pauline's somewhat passive-aggressive battle with Maurice is, in many ways, her effort to make up for her failure to act against her own ex-husband, another flamboyant academic. The difference this time is she wants to protect her daughter in a way she failed to do when Theresa was a child. In ways, Pauline is stronger now, and Maurice is a more distant target for her smoldering anger. Also, apparently the heat wave is the very match that that anger needs. There's a massive, raging storm during the denouement. That, naturally, signals the end of the oppressive heat, and spells certain doom for smarmy, philandering husbands.

Lively puts in touches of humor throughout the book, often where you least expect it. For example, in the middle of her personal turmoil, Pauline finds herself having to advise a young writer living "half-way up a mountain in Wales" whose book she's copy editing. She simply tells an acquaintance she's currently "putting commas in a story about unicorns,' but she's also talking this young man out of destroying his marriage and giving up on writing, and she does it well. We may not relate to the characters in Heat Wave, but we can see why they have friends. I just didn't find them all that likeable. Maurice, obviously, is not to be liked, but even Pauline is difficult to take at times. She's secretly irritated by her daughter's passivity--in career, in parenting, in choice of blindness--but Pauline recognizes the same in herself. Neither of these women is trapped the way some women might be. Theresa is a stay-at-home mother by choice--she had a successful and creative career. Pauline is independent and intelligent. Any cages around them are psychological and self-built. Lively often writes about how memory and our pasts can trap us and Heat Wave, an early book, sets us up to enjoy her later books in which we find some characters to root for.

The Abortionist's Daughter

Elisabeth Hyde's book, In the Heart of the Canyon made my top ten of 2009. I loved her characters and the story of a motley crew rafting down a canyon (natch) was intriguing. The Abortionist's Daughter is an earlier novel and it shows. It's still an intriguing story--I read it all in one weekend--but the creakiness of the craft comes through.

It's not a ripped-from-the-headlines Jodi Picoult novel, but Hyde delicately balances the two sides of the polarizing issue of abortion. The anti-abortionist side is represented by a reverend without a church, but he's no crazed monster. The abortion doctor, Diana Duprey is thoughtful about her work, taking her cue from her mother's early advice: ...if you believed in something, you didn't let your own personal circumstances stand in the way: the true test of your convictions came when your emotions rose up and threatened to scribble over everything you stood for. Diana thought, her job, as she saw it, was simply to push the reset button for the woman on the table.

The problem is that Diana Duprey is found dead in the first few pages of the book. Is it a crazed and angry protester, which is what most people believe in this tight-knit community? Is it her husband with whom she'd just had a knock-out, drag-down fight, which is what the police believe? Or is it her furious daughter, grappling with her own sexuality and politics?

Diana Duprey's death, like her very existence, sends ripples into that community and the police spend a lot of time tripping over information. I must admit I didn't have much doubt as to whodunit, but Hyde takes her time getting there, in a decent way. The question becomes not so much who killed the abortion doctor, not even the why, but the clever way Hyde keeps the killer in the periphery. You just want to shake everyone to tell them what's what, but the responsible character is so realistically drawn that you understand the oversight. Plus, there are so many secrets that need to come out that the reader becomes as distracted as the police. I liked the way the reader is given all the missed connections in people's lives, all the clues that are missed, whether by police or by loving parents and a long-term couple.

The title implies we'll care about Megan Duprey but if anyone needed a good shake, it's the 19 year old daughter. I didn't think she was very realistic for her age and circumstances, but she makes a decent catalyst. The police are better drawn and it would have been nice to get more of Diana's voice as we follow the final day in her life, a day that already starts badly and then...ends.

The Weird Sisters

It doesn't matter if you don't get the Shakespearian reference in the title of Eleanor Brown's book, The Weird Sisters, though you might spend some time thinking she's pretty harsh to call Rose, Bean, and Cordy Andreas particularly weird. The Shakespeare stuff only really rears its head when their father addresses his grown daughter because, yes, this scholar insists on speaking in the words of the Bard. Kind of an annoying construct, but even the girls realize this: Sometimes we had the overwhelming urge to grab our father by the shoulders and shake him until the meaning of his obtuse quotations fall from his mouth like loosened teeth. Let's just say that a little of this goes a long way. Fortunately he's not that chatty. The three sisters are the voice of the novel and Brown avoids showing favorites by writing in the third person plural. Not so much a royal we as an effacing, collective we; like the Fates who use the same eyeball to see the future or like, yes, the original Weird Sisters who are disturbingly interchangeable in giving Macbeth a prophecy.

The book begins nicely with: We came home because we were failures. Rosemund, Bianca, and Cordelia have all retreated from their poor decisions and come home to roost, ostensibly to help care for their cancer-stricken mother. They use their home and the tiny academic mid-western town as a touchstone before (we assume) launching themselves back into the harsh world.

In spite of the "We", Brown does a great job of keeping the women straight, their personalities apparently match their Shakespearian namesakes, but I only knew King Lear's Cordelia well enough to test that. The cancer is a backdrop, as is the real world, but we do want these women to sort out their lives. They're not annoying in the way some dithering characters might be. It's not like I wanted to shake them by the shoulders. Will Rose dare to leave her comfortable life (and ailing mother) to join her fiance in England? Will Bean extricate herself from some destructive habits and hook up with the Episcopalian priest? Will Cordy grow up enough to become the mother she has to be (in less than 9 months)?

Okay, there's not a lot of doubt in how things will turn out, but Eleanor Brown makes the path interestingly spiky and twisted. Wouldn't we all want to be relaunched from the comfort of home when the going gets tough? Brown balances that secret desire with the reality that even Shakespeare occasionally made his characters commit to a decision. Remember, things didn't end well for Macbeth when he was "like the cat in the adage." (Act 1, scene 7). Even if the ending doesn't quite satisfy, it was nice to get to know these women and The Weird Sisters was just the fun read I needed.

Blood, Bones, and Butter

Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir took me much longer to read than it should have, which doesn't entirely reflect my reaction to the book. I read the galley copy and was perhaps a bit set up by the ravings that covered its front and back: Mario Batali wants to burn all the books he's written, in homage, and Anthony Bourdain claims it's "simply the best memoir by a chef ever. EVER." So. Yeah, where do you go from there?

Well, I dove in, and Blood, Bones, and Butter is a fascinating account of a chef by accident. At least, that's how it comes across. Hamilton grows up in a slapdash, complicated family in that there's never enough money and there are too many kids without enough supervision, and there are massive indications that both parents have a screw or two loose, even while they gave their children plenty of interesting traits and skills. Hamilton learns to cook from watching her meticulous, ex-ballerina mother pull off meals as only a French woman can. There is no waste and no skimping, which seems like a contradiction but one that echoes throughout the book: Get the best you can afford and don't mess with it.

Hamilton's mother retires a bit awkwardly from the family and the book, only to reappear a totally different woman near the end. There were some disturbing parallels to my own mother which was one of a couple of reasons I put this book aside. The other that bothered me--and this is my personal tic--was having to listen to Hamilton talk about all the drugs she used to get where she is now. I get so tired of hearing that all the interesting people in the world were abusers at some point (or still are), but that's just me. Doesn't mean anything about the book and Hamilton isn't annoying about it.

The book isn't really a chef memoir in that food isn't lavished over in quite the way you'd expect. It seems more like a "how the hell did I get here and what were people thinking, putting up with me?" For this, the tone is just right. You believe in Gabrielle Hamilton, whether she's disabusing you of any romance over the beautifully catered food you ate at that fund-raiser last week or tossing KFC at some camp counselors, undeserving of a lobster dinner (really, they were undeserving, and the lobster story is depressing). When she stumbles into opening her own restaurant, it seems just as crazy and just as lucky as when she stumbles into her first job at age 13 when all she wanted was to have enough money to buy shampoo (because she sure wasn't getting money for that at home). Even Hamilton admits how wide-eyed and innocent she was about the restaurant business and, having read about her crazy path, "innocent" is not a word that comes easily to mind.

Food rhapsody comes late in the book (in the 'Butter' section) and then it's because that section takes place in Italy. I think it's a national requirement to talk lusciously about food in Italy and Hamilton switches gears readily to do just that. "Blood" is not just about family, but about the brutal way by which Hamilton enters the world of (restaurant) work; "Bones" is the structure she builds for herself, including the family; "Butter" is the place where she is now, though mellow, like innocent, doesn't begin to describe Gabrielle Hamilton.

So, best chef memoir ever? Naw, probably not, but I would eat anything Hamilton put in front of me, even if I never got a great sense of what she cooks. I just know she'll get it done and it'll be delicious and perfect.

Started Early, Took My Dog

Not everyone likes Kate Atkinson's books, but apparently everyone likes her character Jackson Brodie. This is the fourth book in which the former policeman appears, still searching for lost girls or lost childhoods, which he's been doing ever since his own sister was abducted and murdered when he was a child. In Started Early, Took My Dog, Brodie is older and wandering. He's starting to hear the voice of his ex (not quite wife) and he can't help getting muddled into the lives of other people even while he muddles his own.

Still, Brodie can be forgiven (as so many have forgiven him before) because he's returned to his old stomping grounds, chasing the ghostly childhood of a young woman now in Australia. She's eager to discover her origins which are strangely murky. While he's trying to rescue her childhood, Brodie also manages to rescue a dog from maltreatment, gets himself entangled in the lives of an actress suffering from dementia and an overweight, lonely former policewoman who is on the run with another lost child. There's a lot of time shift and character shift, and a lot of names to keep straight, but the book reads right along. Atkinson likes to throw out little tid-bits and then move on, which can be good in a mystery, but can be a bit maddening as well.

Brodie is a little tangential to the story even if he's there for the great denouement, on a train platform, no less: a classic ending for characters who don't know if they're coming or going. This book is all about missed connections. Brodie is almost always playing catch-up. He's always a step behind or ahead and he doesn't always know it. He's even running parallel to a man with his own name in reverse, B. Jackson. Started Early is about missing siblings, lost kids, lost women, and relationships that have crossed and recrossed themselves. Some things get tidied up in a neat little package and other things are left wide open. It's not clear how the policewoman's story will end, and Jackson's phone rings with a call from the past just as the book ends. I suppose there's a good chance there'll be another Jackson Brodie book sooner or later. I hope he's still interesting.

I just enjoy Atkinson's writing. She has some great throw away lines, for example she writes about a characater's "(misplaced) faith in exclamation points," which I can relate to. She nicely, if inaccurately sets up Started Early, Took my Dog with: Later, looking back, Jackson could see that his failed appointment with Linda Pallister was the moment when it all started to go wrong. If she had kept their rendezvous he would have spent a constructive hour or so, would have felt satisfied and purposeful, and might quite possibly have undergone another evening in a hotel, eating a room-service meal and watching a bad pay-for-view movie, instead of spending a restless time, blacking out for large portions of it, and having meaningless, promiscuous sex.

Well, it's lucky for us that Linda Pallister scarpered because it gave us this story.

If you haven't read any Kate Atkinson, read One Good Turn. Everyone raves on about Case Histories, but I really didn't like the obviousness of that one and I loved her second Jackson Brodie book, One Good Turn.

***the art work version of the book is a card from my 10 year old who loved the title, sight unseen, and made me a birthday card version.***

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Weeeellll. Just when I get all impressed with myself for reading around 60 books a year, along comes Nina Sankovitch who spent her "year of magical reading" reading 365 books. Oh, and reviewing them. Oh, and then she wrote a book about the experience. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (out in June) is not just one of those gimicky I-did-this-crazy-thing-and-lived books. Sankovitch is grieving and yes, we all do kind of strange things to get through pain and set ourselves back on the path to living. While at first I thought Sankovitch was a little unhinged, setting this rigorous task of reading a book a day (really? Not even a weekend off? How can you compare it to a job, if you work weekends,too? And you have a family. Oh, and you have to sit in a purple chair that vaguely stinks of cat pee?), I came to recognize that sometimes we need draconian discipline to succeed at something (see Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother--or at least, the hype about it).

The beginning of the book is difficult to read if you've ever lost someone close to you, as Nina grieves for the death of her sister, but the book is neither a sad pondering of loss nor a dull catalog of books of the "today I read this and it was great" sort. Instead, Sankovitch reads widely and weaves in the narrative her family life (both past and present). She writes "remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built." She seeks in her books not only reminders of what she shared with her sister, but a guide to life, a reassurance that others have also experienced joy and love, and suffering. She reads both to forget and to remember which is a much better way to approach survival than any vice she might have picked up in the confusion after a death in the family.

I love that Sankovitch approaches her reading ecclectically, though with some hesitation. Her son, for example, hands her Watership Down and she despairs at the daunting length. She worries about gifts from friends for fear she wouldn't like the offerings and would be forced to admit so in her reviews. She solves the former problem by forcing herself to go ahead and read the 500 pages of Watership Down, and the latter by looking at the intention behind the gifts instead of at the books themselves. She takes advice from mysteries, reveling in the neatness of a solution to a puzzle (if only life were like that); she no longer avoids books with painful topics, thinking there is much to be learned; she reads kids' books; she abandons books she doesn't like and with no regret--there's so much else out there.

She gets through her year, and no she isn't "ready to relax" as a friend suggests, and surprisingly, all pleasure in reading has not been destroyed by complete and utter immersion in books. Instead, it seems, Sankovitch is able to live again, re-enter the world in a better position than when she ran frantically and aimlessly in an attempt to escape her grief. By the end of the book, Sankovitch has found some wisdom that she attempts to impart to us, about life and loss, and living, but she also--more immediately relevant, perhaps--gives us a list of books. I think we can all trust we'll find something to meet our own reading needs.

For more of Nina Sankovitch, check out her website: http://www.readallday.org/blog/.

The Radleys

Do you secretly love vampires, but prefer them not to sparkle in sunlight and fall easily in love with mortals? Perhaps you think creatures of the night should suffer from rashes and be myopic. Meat-eater, sure, but give them migraines from the lack of fresh blood. If you are bemused or annoyed by Edward Cullan's good looks, try Rowan Radley in Matt Haig's entertaining--if a little alarming--novel of modern-day vampires trying to "pass".

Peter and Helen Radley gave up the wild life of drinking blood and flying off (and I mean literally)to terribly romantic places like Prague and Paris for a feast. They no longer feel it's proper, when raising a family, to bite the neighbors (or the unsuspecting tourist or homeless wanderer). They don't even share each other's blood. All this is for the sake of the children who know nothing of what they are or where they come from.Naturally, the children are geeky and misfitting in the English suburbs and Peter and Helen have fallen into a bloodless, er, loveless marriage. So much restraint, so British, so doomed.

Their neat, uneventful, and somewhat unhappy lives are turned in an instant when daughter Clara is assaulted by a fellow student and lashes out with all she's got (and never knew she had), and guess what? She rather enjoys herself. Turns out, vampires kind of need blood to feel whole. Oh, sure abstaining has its benefits (mostly to society), but there's nothing like the power of fresh blood. Clara enjoys bringing out those sharp incisors:

She had fun in the mirror, transforming herself, watching her canine teeth lengthen andsharpen. Dracula.

Not Dracula.

Dracula.

Not Dracula.

Dracula.

She studies her curved white fangs. She touches them, presses the points in the pad of her thumb. A fat blob of blood appears, shining like a cherry. She tastes it and enjoys the moment before making herself look fully human again.

Dilemma. Dilemma. Enter Peter's brother, an infamous vampire (oh yes, there's a whole network of them, based primarily in Manchester) who brings with him not just unsavory habits but a secret from Helen's past. He claims to be there to help Clara avoid prosecution or even suspicion, but things quickly turn for the worse.

As the kids get more handsome and popular due to, um, newly developed habits, Peter and Helen's neatly-constructed world begins to crumble. In the end we have to decide if there is room for abstainers in the world of vampires and whether vampires can be part of respected British society Matt Haig makes it worth finding out with The Radleys.

American Terroir. Savoring the Flavors...

It turns out I've been making and drinking coffee all wrong. Apparently dark roast does not translate to better coffee (must be the French in me). This sad realization was the only stressful bit of information I gathered from American Terroir. Rowan Jacobsen's search for the somewhat elusive examples of terroir (taste of place) in America mostly made me want to eat better food. It also explained why my Vermont-heritage husband prefers that pale version of maple syrup called "fancy" and why hard cider isn't as common (or often as good) as the European version. I learned a ton and even plan to follow a few of the recipes Jacobsen thoughtfully includes at the end of each chapter.

The book is loosely based on a day's normal progression through meals: It starts with maple syrup and coffee and ends with cheese and chocolate with pit stops in all sorts of places and foods, like Yukon King salmon and avocados from Mexico. Jacobsen blends anecdotes with lessons about taste and history, not unlike a good wine critic. In fact, speaking of wine, he didn't make me want to trust California wines any more than I already do (or don't), but now I feel like I understand why it tends to be sweeter than European wine. I also learned some disturbing tricks and gimmicks wine makers subject our wine to. Jacobsen seems to have it in particularly for Australian wine producers, but like the coffee chapter, I may plug my ears, sing lalala and keep drinking coffee and wine the same way I always have.


Even when he's not snarking (gently) on inferior product, Jacobsen's writing is quite entertaining. The cheese chapter (Vermont) begins with: In composition and behavior, a cheese is not unlike a dead body. It starts off fresh and springy and ends up ripe and runny. And yes, that made me still want to seek out Jasper Hill cheese.


In fact, I made a list of things to try: I will seek out local honey (probably waiting for summer farmer's market to start up again), I will try Taza chocolate, Jasper Hill cheese and--with two lactose intolerant people in the family--I will definitely try the berry tartlets with avocado cream recipe. I know avocado is very fatty but it's the good kind and Jacobsen swears it can replace artery-clogging cream in baking. I'll have to get back to you all on that, but feel free to pick up your own copy of American Terroir. Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields if you don't want to wait.

Catcher in the Rye

Reading J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as a 40 year old is a bit of a weird experience. I first read the classic in high school, of course, probably around the age of 15. I read it again in college, in a sociology class probably called something like Youth and Alienation. I noticed all the same stuff this time around. Yeah, Holden says goddamn a lot and everyone and everything is phony, and I laughed at some of the same things, like his summary of a movie he's seen. He hates movies and his explanation of the sappy story makes it sound so inane it's hard to believe such a movie existed. I've always wanted to find out if that was an actual movie. I love when he meets the friend of a date and says, "he was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every bone in her body." Holden does that, too, speaks all the time in a kind of synecdoche: Stepping on someone's foot and breaking every bone in her body.

That's what I noticed more this time:the writing. I wasn't so caught up in the story as I was as a teen and I wasn't reading it for a class for which I had to come in and say clever things along the lines of Holden not wanting to grow up and him catching little kids (in the rye) to keep them from losing their innocence. Instead, I noticed that every chapter ended abruptly or a bit oddly, which I liked, actually. Like: That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman. Or even better: He was strictly a pain in the ass, but he certainly had a good vocabulary. He had the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton when I was there. They gave us a test. End of chapter. We never hear about that kid again. I kind of like those endings; it added to the sense that Holden's mind is jittering al over the place.

I was more tuned-in to the coming mental break-down and I finally saw how Holden's problems are tied in with his brother's death. I'd been so blinded into thinking this was a book about an alienated teen, and youth tearing away from grown ups, that I'd always missed how affected Holden is by Ally's death from leukemia.

The other thing that struck me more forcefully this time was how late everything happens. I mean, I know he's in NYC, and that I'm old now, but still, doesn't anyone sleep? All of his adventures occur in about 48 hours and he sure packs a lot in. I also finally paid attention to the copyright date. This is such a 1950s book and yet it was published in 1946. I can see why it seemed like a scandalous view of a teenager then. The country is just coming out of a war in which young men became adults too soon (and often died). They gave everything for a larger cause. In contrast, Holden is loose and self-absorbed. His adventures and frankness of speech (and action) would have set a lot of adults all a twitter, adults still reeling from the loss of their hero sons and daughters. This is exactly why the book is considered a classic. It has dulled with age, but in context, you realize how ground-breaking this probably was at the time. Would a teen still care about this book today? Maybe. Holden's got a pretty good voice and speaks some truths but he is a bit of a whiner.

In the end, after a bit of resistance, I'm glad my book club chose this to read. It's made me think of going back to other books about which I have happy, shiny memories and see how they read, how they age along with me. Of course, that has all sorts of disaster potential and I have no interest in ruining good memories, but Catcher did make me realize I'm glad I'm not a teenager anymore. At the very least, I get more sleep.

**A note about the cover picture. This is not the copy I read, but I remember seeing this at an slightly older friend's house when I was 9 or 10 and she told me the book was scandalous because the teacher picks his nose (which is true!) Ah, innocence...

Skippy Dies

Paul Murray's Skippy Dies gave me more insight into adolescent boys than I ever wanted to have. As the parent of not one, but two future such creatures, I spent some time cringing over details of how 13-15 year old boys in Irish boarding schools spend their off hours, at least according to one author. The book itself is a little more cosmic than the nasty little habits of boys and Murray does try to cram a whole lot into his 661 pages and sometimes, admittedly, he lost me, but I was eager to follow his characters.

The title character does indeed die, and in the first few pages no less. Normally, this would seem like an impedement to plot, but as soon as Skippy dies, we veer back in time to another person's perspective. Murray really knows the milieu. He's got the posh school caricatures down well, the angry, possibly pedophile priest teaching French (His name rendered in French neatly emphasizes his proclivity), the ruined former athlete as coach, the middling former student returned in disgrace from his high-finance job to teach history to boys who don't care, the sexy replacement teacher (though she's just a distraction here), the excitable music teacher...etc. The list of adults goes on, none better rendered than the presumptive new head of school. He's interim and he's a lay person, unlike his ailing predecessor Father Furlong. Murray has a perfect ear for this character and perhaps captures him best. We first meet Costigan, known as the Automator, when Skippy takes ill in class. The head asks the history teacher about him:

He was involved in an incident today in Father Green's French class, an incident of vomiting...Who is this kid, Howard? Priest asks him a question, he vomits all over the place?...Apparently he likes to call himself Slippy.
What's that about? He a slippery customer, that it?
"Actually, I think it's Skippy."
"Skippy!" the Automator says derisively, "Well , that makes even less
sense!
...Set him straight... Vomiting in the classroom is definitely not something we want catching on. Time and a place for vomiting, and the classroom is not it. Think you could teach a class, Howard, with kids vomiting everywhere?"

Everything conspires to make Skippy look like he's up to something, and the Automator is always there to notice, but really, Skippy is just a geeky boy in love with the wrong girl, a girl who in turn is in love with a budding and dangerous drug dealer who, of course despises Skippy beyond all reason. Skippy is the classic geek who is less-geeky than those he hangs around with, the one you're sure will eventually grow up to be recognized as an interesting person. His brilliant friend Ruprecht doesn't seem headed quite so well into the wider world and bets are off on the rest of the little gang, but it's fascinating to eavesdrop on their lives (even if disturbing from a female parent point of view).

The story barrels along nicely until Skippy's death and then it veers terribly, terribly off-course, which is fitting. Without their glue, the gang of geeks falls apart, teachers are exposed or not for their roles in his unexpected death, love is examined and found wanting. In all, the book becomes darker and more crazed. There are moments in the resolution that are satisfying (like the final concert), and some that are a bit heavy-handed. A fire, really? If that wasn't an obvious enough symbol, there's a priest around to name it for what it is: hell fire.


But Murray knows his way around the male adolescent (and presumably quasi-boarding school life). He doesn't capture the girls and women as well, but they are symbols or obstacles, or plot devices to the story of a group of people thrown together. The putting away of childish things is more of a sad thing in the end, so I prefer to remember how Murray explains it earlier in the book, as the school boys are auditioning for a talent show/concert. The Automator envisions Pachelbel's Canon in D, the boys imagine lighting farts on stage.

Among the two-hundred plus boys, there is scarcely anyone who does not have some ability or idiosyncracy or weird body condition for which he is celebrated.
As with so many things at this particular point in their lives, though, that situation is changing by the day. School, with its endless emphasis on conformity, careers, the Future, may be partly to blame, but the key to shift in attitudes is, without a doubt, girls. Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence;now--overnight, almost--it is paramount; and girls have quite different, some would go so far as to say deeply conservative, criteria with regard to what constitutes a gift. They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples; they do not, most of them, consider mastery of [flaming farts] to be a feather in your cap... As the juggernaut of puberty gathers momentum, quirks and oddities and singularities turn from badges of honour to liablities to be concealed.

Skippy Dies is an interesting, if overly-long book, that starts strong but veers crazily off into a sadder reality. This is on purpose, I'm sure, and it's still a good read, but now I'm supposed to dive into Catcher in the Rye (for the third time) and I'm having trouble summoning up the courage to read about more alienated youth.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Boy, a lot of things happen to Huck Finn. I hadn't read this in 25 years and all the controversy swirling around the so-called bowdlerized version now out got me wondering how offended I would be by the unchanged wording of the original. I picked up the least-dusty looking copy from the public library (1985), opened it up and here's what I found in the introduction by Charles Neider: What! Tamper with an American literary classic? Sacrilege! Lese majesty! Megalomania! Well...maybe. But before we rush into a drumhead court-martial, let us sit and sweetly reason a few moments...

Poor Twain has, apparently, been abused before and no, Neider did not take out offensive wording. He simply abridged the allegedly controversial "Tom Sawyer" section (my, how times have changed on what constitutes controversy) and added in a formerly omitted "long, brilliant raft chapter" (which I skipped because I found it... long).

Controversy aside, I was impressed by how well this story holds up. Yeah, too much happens, and some of it is skippered through while other times there is way too much detail for the importance of the section, but the story of a boy and a slave on a Mississippi raft moves right along and is amusing to boot. I actually laughed out loud several times and not just at the scene in which Huck tries to explain to Jim that French people speak a different language while Jim will have none of it. His reasoning is flawless and reminded me of a great Ionesco play in which there is a debate between philosophers in which it is finally determined, logically, that Socrates must be a cat. Trust me, in a strict debating sense, this works.

I also love Jim's condemnation of King Solomon's supposed wise decision to cut a child in half. Jim determines that Solomon was cavalier about the life of the child because he himself had so many children. You take a man dat's got on'y one er two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o' chillen?No, he ain't; he can't 'ford it. He know how to value 'em. But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A chile er tow, mo' er less, warn't no consekense to Solermun...

And all the talk of children brings to mind the children from whom Jim has been separated. Huck ponders a bit about how wrong it is for Jim to want to steal back his own children from their master, but I didn't spend a lot of thought on what we were supposed to "learn" from Huck's attitude toward slavery because I did find that distracting and overly obvious. I was looking at the story and Twain throws in a lot of seemingly random adventures (a family feuding Hatfield-McCoy style seems particularly unimportant), but the way Huck deals with each of his encounters--his abusive father, meeting the escaped Jim, the swindling Duke and King--seems believably childish. At first I thought Huck wasn't being very bold in his actions, but then I realized he's a thirteen year old boy out on his own and so, yeah, he'll make some stupid mistakes, and he'll fall into the games of fantasy with Tom Sawyer and others, because he's still straddling that innocence and knowledge of the world.

In the end, I wasn't particularly distracted by the language, not even the dialect which I thought would drive me crazy. You get into the rhythm of it, eventually. I guess my only real complaint is that it's overly long. I think I'd keep that old "raft chapter" out and I can think of a few other editing choices I'd make, but it's a good read and a reminder that, inspite of the overwhelming choice available today, there are some classics still worthy of a visit. I hope the new version without the potentially offensive and distracting N word will encourage teachers to present it to their classes once again.

True Grit

I picked up Charles Portis' True Grit kind of on a whim, reasoning that I was more likely to have the chance to read the book than I was to see the movie, and then something strange happened. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Sure, it's a cowboy book (not that there's anything wrong with that), and the language is strangely stilted, and I never quite got a handle on Mattie Ross our heroine, but what a great read. Fourteen year old Mattie sets off matter-of-factly to avenge her father's death, hires and then teams up with an old marshal who is not what he seems, and a Texas Ranger who is also not exactly what he seems. The book meanders a bit at first, not unpleasantly, the way you kind of picture John Wayne meandering in his role as Rooster Cogburn in the original screen adaptation. Rooster doesn't always seem like he knows what he's doing--he's a bit shifty and a drinker at that. It's never too clear whether LaBoeuf, the Ranger, can be fully trusted either, and some of the encounters the three avengers have along their quest are casual in their occurence and their violence. The book is touted by the New York Times Book Review as "a comic tour de force" which didn't make much sense at first, but I did laugh out loud several times. It's a dry sort of humor, but it's there. When a lawman meets up with the little band, he looks at LaBoeuf and asks,

"Is this the man who shot Ned's horse from under him?"

Rooster said, "Yes, this is the famous horse killer from El Paso, Texas. His idea is to put everybody on foot. He says it will limit their mischief."

LaBoeuf's fair-complected face became congested with angry blood. He said,"There was very little light and I was firing off-hand. I did not have the time to find a rest."

Captain Finch said, "There is no need to apologize for that shot. A good many more people have missed Ned than have hit him."
"I was not apologizing," said LaBoeuf. "I was only explaining the circumstances."

And right after this exchange the three men have a pissing...uh, a shooting contest, using hard little cornmeal balls as targets, much to Mattie's exasperation. She sometimes feels she's the only one with a dog in this race, but she's paying for their help so feels they should listen to her.

She gets her wish, more or less, and there's a big show down, of sorts. The action meanders still except when it suddenly doesn't and Portis leads us straight into phobia territories. What are you scared of? Snakes? Got 'em, in the form of a nest or rattlers. Bats? Yep. Being stuck in a cave? Uh-hunh? Infested skeleton keeping you close company? Check. It's all there. Everything to keep you awake at night for a week and all of it at once, just when the reader's been lulled into a little old western. It's a satisfying and entertaining read with a delicious bit of excitement, even if exacting revenge doesn't feel quite as cathartic as we all hope it to be.

Parrot and Olivier or Why Top 10 Lists Stink

I've abandoned a book. That alone isn't terribly unusual--I ditch bad books all the time--but I was really trying this time. I ended 2010 ashamed by my new reading habits (or lack thereof) and worried that I was no longer capable of reading "difficult" books. I thought that embracing harder books would be an easy New Year's resolution. But like most resolutions made in hopeful and possibly inebriated states, this one has fallen by the wayside in the first few weeks of the first month of a new year.

Parrot and Olivier in America is a "comic" retelling of Alexis de Tocqueville's visit in 1831 to write his famous Democracy in America. Okay, I'll admit, that's not the most promising selling point to the general reading public, but it would certainly be meaty. And it was a finalist for the National Book Award! And by Peter Carey! two-time winner of the Booker Prize (although, that in and of itself should have set off warning bells--those are almost always weird and difficult and/or depressing books).

The titular Olivier is a French aristocrat post-revolution, at loose ends in a country that is still hiccuping its way toward some kind of democracy. Parrot is an English journeyman's son, trained as an engraver and naturally a mimic of languages and accents. Both are in trouble with the law or family and are brought together by a mysterious one-armed Marquis who sends them to America, bound together by fate and, as it turns out, fortune. One cannot act without the other and yet they dislike one another. Oooh, an old-fashioned buddy movie.

Or not.

I don't mind the two voices--clearly announced by helpful chapter headings, but I do mind very much that both characters saw fit to occasionally refer to themselves in the third person. Oh, thanks very much, Peter Carey. I quite liked Parrot's sections, most of the time, but the story just seemed unnecessarily difficult to follow and to read. Not the basic plot--I got that--but the writing was complicated. At first I thought Carey was doing that on purpose for Olivier's character (he is, after all, a well-educated French aristocrat), but ALL the characters were like this. Here's an example of a section that I had to read more than once: Compared to my own cramped malodorous accommodation, the deserted main cabin was a site of healthfulness, smelling of nothing worse than salt and tar. It was here I was seated when I felt the swell preceding the first big wave, that long dreadful quiver running through the timbers of the ship, not stilled or contained by the copper sheathing of its hull but rather amplified so that a deadly vibration ran through every human bone aboard the Havre, and when that shiver had been doused, snuffed, drowned, and the little barque had tumbled off the edge, then I felt the first big wave break and I saw the great wash of beef and brandy erupt from the dreadful Parrot's gorge, and as the entire craft was hurled like a lobster into a kettle, I was very pleased to note that I was not afraid.
Ugh.They're on a ship and Parrot throws up. It's all like this. It's exhausting to read, though I understand some feel their pulse quicken to such lyrical description and can think of nothing better than to curl up with just such a book. Well, have at it, but it turns out that it's not for me.

I persisted for awhile still because that was my resolution: to not abandon difficult books just because they were "hard to read" but then I realized I wasn't having any fun and really, what's the point of reading if you're not having fun and don't want to pick up the book. I made an effort and now I guess I'll have to admit that I just need to read formulaic and/or YA novels for the rest of my life. Maybe just movie adaptations.

Which brings me--sort of--to top 10 lists.
I didn't make one for 2010, though it's in my head. I did read a lot of lists, though, and found that I didn't want to read any of the books on them. Jonathan Franzen was on all of them, but I just don't like him or his writing. I don't care how brilliant some of it may (or may not) be, it's too didactic in places and I'm not a big fan of dysfunction. I never really understood Strong Motion (which is the only one of his books I've read--years ago-- and no one has read that, and, no, I don't recommend it). Parrot and Olivier was also on most, if not all, of these lists and well, obviously, that didn't work out either.

The fact is, I get to make a list of books from only those I chose to read in the first place, whereas a lot of writers and magazine and newspaper staff make lists of books they had to read. For work. Uh, well, yeah, I could do that and it would be a very short list of books I had to read with kids who struggle to read. Just think how constrained that would be.

Next up for me? True Grit. Oh wait, that hasn't been on any lists, has it?

The Wave

I saw the original The Poseidon Adventure at a very impressionable age. It was on a grainy black and white TV at my dad's house, but I was way too young for it and it took me years to recover from the thought of an ocean liner being turned over in the middle of a night-time ocean. It didn't help that I'd already been on an ocean liner and had looked over the side at churning waters. I had no doubt that the ocean was capable of tossing up the worst and taking me with it. Years later, I was just fine reading and then watching A Perfect Storm so obviously I was cured of cold-sweat nightmares. In other words, I pounced on reading Susan Casey's book The Wave. In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean.

I had read Susan Casey's exploration of great white shark behavior and the ongoing research into it in The Devil's Teeth. As she did in that book, she divides this story into science and freaky human obsessions. Yeah, there's science in The Wave, but really it just feels like an excuse to get into the heads of big wave surfers like Laird Hamilton and his crew. Not that there's anything wrong with that. These people are crazy! But oh, it's such a great crazy. There are people out there who's sole goal in life is to successfully surf 100 foot waves. Repeatedly. Oh sure, they'll settle for a 70 foot wave--if they have to. Apparently 50 feet is about the limit for traditional paddle-out surfing. After that, you need to be expertly towed out by jet ski. Susan Casey isn't really exploring surf mentality, though, but she does get to hang out with the big wave crowd and discover how much they know about these so-called freak waves.

She doesn't really get into traditional tsunamis which are generally triggered by a known something (earthquake), but she's interested in the sudden strange waves out at sea that are capable of splitting a ship in half (she includes pictures). When you read about these cargo ships and what they endure out at sea, it's a reminder of just how powerful water is as a force. You expect a surfer will get pounded, but when you see that waves can take apart a giant ship, it's something else. Suddenly The Poseidon Adventure doesn't just seem like a cheesy 1970s disaster of the week movie.

It turns out that 100 foot waves are pretty common, much more so than was originally believed. If that seems a bit dull, try the recorded 1,740 foot wave that hit Lituya Bay in Alaska in 1958. There were no surfers there, but two fishing boats made it over and survived to tell the tale. Apparently, if you can't outrun a giant wave (and, really, you can't), your best bet is to gun in toward the thing and go up over the top. You just have to hope you don't discover--as this one fisherman did-- "to his horror that the wave's backside was nothing but a sheer vertical drop; the water had drained out of the bay so dramatically that its surface had been sucked below sea level." And that was only a 490 ft wave, though there were three more just like it, dumping on that little boat. The boats that went over the top of the 1, 740 ft wave also had to contend with raining debris (the ripped up forest from the bay). Hard to believe that some people seek out crazy waves and think about surfing them.

The Wave is armchair adventure with a little science mixed in. It's an easy read and an often gripping one. Probably just right for the winter months so that your psyche has time to recover before you hit the beach in summer.