tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29892269633388064892024-03-12T22:33:39.020-04:0054 Books blogbook reviewschristinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.comBlogger139125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-73267743276382686772012-04-23T19:59:00.001-04:002012-04-23T20:00:09.898-04:00There is No Dog<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-47MP-SLHPfs/T5XrWpDAHrI/AAAAAAAAAWI/r5ksfVplnW0/s1600/there+is+no+dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-47MP-SLHPfs/T5XrWpDAHrI/AAAAAAAAAWI/r5ksfVplnW0/s200/there+is+no+dog.jpg" width="131" /></a>Who doesn't love the idea of God just wandering around every day among us? . Meg Rosoff's book <b>There is No Dog</b> is designated a YA novel and the God portrayed here is a malodorous, lazy late adolescent named Bob who won control of this world through his mother's poker game. His assistant--the also-ran for control of this earth--admits Bob has had flashes of brilliance in some of his creations. <i>Mr B marvels that the same God who leaves his dirty clothes in a moldering heap by the side of the bed could have created golden eagles and elephants and butterflies. Such moments of transcendent inspiration! Other creatures fill him with admiration as well--heavy loping striped tigers and graceful long-necked swans, creaking as they fly,. Ludicrous pincushion porcupines.</i> The problem, as Mr B sees it--somewhat resentful that he wasn't considered good enough for the role of God all by himself--is that Bob loses interest easily. He's distracted, gets bored, can't be bothered, or he falls in lust with some human girl and, incidentally, unleashes cataclysmic weather events.<br />
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This particular predicament is how the book opens. Bob has become infatuated by Lucy, a local 21 year old intern at the zoo. He realizes, dimly, that he can't appear as a burning bush, or in full angelic attire, but he's flummoxed how to proceed. Mr B is being less helpful than ever, partly because he's planning his escape to another world as soon as he can. After all, he's spent eons cleaning up after Bob and he's tired of it. This world is a mess, getting messier as Bob chases Lucy--the town is practically underwater already. Bob's mother is even less help as she's too busy getting drunk and playing poker against Emoto Hed, a god whose <i>presence becomes a devastating absence, a malignant Hed-shaped void sucking all light and heat into its core.</i> No, Bob is on his own. He even loses his one-of-a-kind pet, an Eck, <i>an odd penguiny sort of creature with the long elegant nose of an anteater, beady eyes, and soft gray fur.</i><br />
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Will Bob have his way with Lucy? Will Eck be eaten by Emoto Hed, as threatened? Will the world fall apart under the strain of a hormonal God, or will Mr B pull his dignity together and stick around to solve once and for all the Bob problem. Rosoff certainly has fun with her premise and it works, mostly. There are, indeed, flashes of brilliance, but it's a little hard to have to come face-to-face with a fairly unlikeable God, and I was left not too invested in anyone.christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-35870052253583402362012-04-15T21:38:00.010-04:002012-04-19T09:04:48.824-04:00The Brothers K<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Re1qKq7Umbg/T4t5bgImlxI/AAAAAAAAAWA/a9FDnghNVno/s1600/brothers%2Bk.jpg" style="font-weight: normal;"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 136px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Re1qKq7Umbg/T4t5bgImlxI/AAAAAAAAAWA/a9FDnghNVno/s200/brothers%2Bk.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5731808464148535058" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: normal;">For the first third of David James Duncan's gigantic, 650 page book, I was in love. I could not get enough of <b>The Brothers K</b> and I don't even <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> baseball which features prominently in this book. Still, it's about baseball the way <span style="font-style: italic;">Friday Night Lights</span> was about football.</span> Really, the story is about the Chance family and their collective and separate journeys through the 20 ugly years that start in the late 50s. I say ugly because, remember that the bulk of this period involves the Vietnam War. I also say ugly because, hey, it includes <span style="font-style: italic;">the 1970s.</span><br /><br />Papa Toe Chance (though he gets this nickname late in life when, yes, his mangled thumb is replaced by his big toe in what must have been cutting edge surgery back then) is a pitching wonder. Life has intervened (even before the mangled thumb) and he has a growing family, an adored religious zealot for a wife, and fading dreams of pitching. Drink is more appealing to him, though the Seventh Day Adventist spirit in the house often precludes that option.<br /><br />The religion is tough to take, perhaps tougher than the baseball jargon. Sure, I glided over a few descriptions of long innings, but I devoured young Kincaid's description of two announcers and their patter. <span style="font-style: italic;">"Call us Diz and Pee, for short!</span>" Enthuses the more entertaining of the two. Poor Pee Wee Reese has to play straight man to this guy, but it makes for entertaining exchanges. Kincaid says, <span style="font-style: italic;">"[Dizzy] tells you things you hadn't notice, and things that have nothing to do with what's happening, and he gets mad at umps, makes fun of bad plays and players, calls errors 'eras' and basemen 'sackers,' tells lies, brags, invents fake statistics to win arguments, and generally grates on Pee Wee's nerves till you feel you're really living through a flesh-and-blood ballgame instead of sitting in your house staring at a box."</span><br /><br />That kind of patter might make even me pay attention to a game. The problem with this particular game is that it's taking place on the Adventists' sabbath day and Kincaid and his father--he of the still-mangled thumb-- are breaking all sorts of rules set by their mother. Laura is so devout (and devoted to Elder Babcock) that it eventually causes a rift in the family, with the non-believer children doomed to hell in her mind (and therefore no longer destined to be under her earthly care) and the three who still believe. The father gets a pass. Sure, later--at the very end, we find out the source of Laura Chance's blind, determined devotion to her faith. Though it falls a little flat and comes a little late, it all makes sense in the end, and this is after the most devout and kind and thoughtful of her children has been mangled by the Vietnam War, abandoned by his church, and cast out for his very beliefs.<br /><br />The rescue of Irwin from the clutches of those who thought they could best help him could have been a joke. Picture the scene: A motley assortment of Chance family members, Adventists, including a visiting Korean elder, and some hangers-on arriving at a military psych ward in a couple of Winnebagoes. Throw in a dash of the terrible fashions of the 1970s and Duncan could have just made fun of everyone and called it a day. Instead, the scene becomes quite moving and heals a rift among believers and non-believers, drinkers and academics, baseball-lovers and those who have abandoned the sport, draft dodgers and those damaged more directly by war. Those who want to sing Adventist songs and those who want to storm the place to rescue the lost son. This episode is what won me back. Zealotry of any kind--religious, political, academic, spiritual, is never the answer, Duncan seems to say, but family<span style="font-style: italic;"> is</span>. Family matters and never mind how crazy that family turns out to be, you shouldn't let go. Even if it takes 650 pages to sort out what the heck is going on in the Chance family. As one brother's political college paper column is called, <span style="font-style: italic;">"Give Chance a Peace."</span> Give this book a go, just be ready to commit yourself.<br /><br />*You do not have to have intimate knowledge of either <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Brothers Karamazov</span> or Russian literature in general, but it might add a level of enjoyment or understanding.christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-23921789887563461472012-03-19T17:06:00.007-04:002012-03-19T17:46:45.581-04:00The Ice Balloon<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oR_OFE4ZQIY/T2eoTFUdeYI/AAAAAAAAAV0/rKXsK8_vbgY/s1600/ice%2Bballoon.jpg" style="font-weight: normal; "><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 133px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oR_OFE4ZQIY/T2eoTFUdeYI/AAAAAAAAAV0/rKXsK8_vbgY/s200/ice%2Bballoon.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5721726897396480386" /></a><div><span style="font-size: 100%; ">I don't want to give it away, but the fact that we aren't all enjoying hot air balloon rides to visit Santa kind of hints at how S.A. Andree's 1897 attempt to fly over the North Pole went. If you are into the sort of literature that deals with stupid people behaving badly in cold places (or, behaving heroically in cold places) then Alec Wilkinson's book, <b style="font-style: normal; ">The Ice Balloon,</b> is for you. I happen to be someone whose heart quickens to a subtitle like <i>S.A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration,</i> and I couldn't wait to read about this Norwegian who planned down to the most bizarre minutiae how to take two companions and be the first to fly over the North Pole. It being 1897, a hot air balloon made perfect sense. What could go wrong?</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%; "><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%; ">He was such a thinker--and by this I mean just a bit obsessive--that Andree even thought through how to cook food mid-flight in a balloon filled with extremely flammable gas.</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; "> To heat water and cook, Andree had a stove...that could be lowered from the basket until it hung about twenty five feet beneath it. It was lit from the basket through a tube. A mirror placed by the stove allowed someone in the basket to see if the flame had lit. Blowing down a second tube put it out</span><span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; ">.</span></i><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; "> An engineering marvel? No doubt. Practical? Hmm, not sure how good the food was, but they didn't die of starvation.</span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><span style="font-size: 100%; "><br /></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; ">And yes, I don't give much away by saying they don't make it. The mystery of what happened to this visionary--dour and possessed--took 30 years to discover, but Wilkinson leads us to it gradually, and thrillingly, by way of a few other expeditions north. Some more horrific than others, and none terribly successful (in this book). My favorite is the experience of an American named George Tyson who signs up on an expedition only to find himself the leader of a mad scramble to safety. The ship he's on gets stuck in the ice and it's thought to be leaking. In a panic, the crew starts throwing stuff overboard and Tyson finds himself on the ice with a bunch of unknown others trying to reorganize when suddenly the ship breaks free and sails off in the dark without them. By the time there is light, the sad little ice floe crew can see the ship merrily chugging around the bend of land. </div><div style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><span style="font-style: normal; ">Suddenly Tyson becomes the de facto commander of a surly crew of German-speakers, women and children belonging to the expeditions Eskimo hunters, and the only one without a gun. Their tale of escape from the predicament is so unbelievable that many actually </span><i>didn't</i> believe them. It makes for great reading.</div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><br />George Tyson was no scholar and his story is compelling because it is so amazing. Andree, on the other hand, is a scholar and kept meticulous journals--albeit not as emotionally detailed as one might like. The notes on his remarkable journey provide great insight into his daring dream. This was a man determined to succeed in the name of science and to prove his vision that sledging to the poles was never going to work. It is auspicious that the final words he was heard to speak were, <i>"What was that?"</i> as his balloon struck something leaving its mooring. And still, he sailed off, apparently happy, into the crystalline air of the northern regions.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-78642887644333902332012-03-04T13:49:00.008-05:002012-03-04T16:01:51.791-05:00No Way Down. Life and Death on K2<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cZryqXFeQS0/T1O6ArYqbQI/AAAAAAAAAVo/xinNMZgkEMk/s1600/no%2Bway%2Bdown.jpg" style="font-style: normal; "><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 131px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cZryqXFeQS0/T1O6ArYqbQI/AAAAAAAAAVo/xinNMZgkEMk/s200/no%2Bway%2Bdown.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5716116872872226050" /></a>This was a quick read (snow days help) so I barely had to time to extract promises from my sons that they would never climb in the Himalayas before I was done reading Graham Bowley's journalistic account of a 2008 ascent of K2. The 2008 ascent was marred by over-crowding (much more like what Everest suffers in general) and a long-stable serac that decides it's time to let go, completely indifferent to the fact that some 20 people are still above its tilting overhang.<div><br /><div style="font-style: normal; ">Unlike the 1996 disaster on Everest, natural and unpredictable events help cause the tragedy of 11 deaths on K2. Yes, like the Everest event, people summitted too late. Yes, there was crowding and a lack of coordination, but the weather turned on Everest and most climbers knew that it would. In the K2 case, the glacier moved, tumbling skyscraper-sized chunks of ice down on both climbers and, more urgently, on the equipment--the lines, the snow markers--that would have helped them get down in the dark.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">Unlike John Krakauer who so excellently reported the Everest tragedy, Graham Bowley is not a climber. He's a journalist who has little-to-no interest in mountaineering. In some ways the book suffers from his lack of first-hand experience (not with the tragedy itself, but with what it's like being atop the tallest places on earth). While Krakauer could make you feel exactly what is going on with your body as you become oxygen-deprived in the so-called Death Zone, and how that affects your life-and-death judgement, Bowley can only report. At times his subjects seem indifferent to what is unfolding around them and where Krakauer made me understand this as a normal reaction to high altitude, Bowley made me think slightly less of his characters.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div>On the other hand, Bowley was perhaps the perfect writer to bring together all the accounts of what happened over that weekend in August 2008. He did extensive interviews and right up front warns that "<i>the accounts were contradicting one another and it was clear that memory had been affected by the pulverizing experience of high altitude, the violence of the climbers' ordeals and, in a few instances, possibly by self-serving claims of glory, blame, and guilt."</i> Still, the journalist takes over and the accounts are laid out matter-of-factly (that's not to say they are dull. They aren't. They're each and all gripping accounts of life and death above 26,000 ft). It's only in the epilogue that Bowley admits to some controversy among accounts--who was to blame for mistakes made, who helped whom, who was affected most by altitude sickness... By then, it doesn't matter. When you've read about finding three Koreans dangling upside down, overnight, and about having to make the agonizing decision to stop and help or to save yourself; when you've read about a body falling in front of you with no scream or shout and having to sort through your muddled mind to remember whose suit was that color; when you, the reader, know that the character you admire most will either die or lose all his toes, it's hard to place blame or care about egos. These are all amazing men and women and, unlike the Everest tragedy, the mistakes seem minor. Unfortunately, any poor decision, however minor, can be fatal in the Death Zone.</div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-4894183114642343182012-03-02T11:28:00.004-05:002012-03-02T11:59:26.419-05:00The House of Silk<span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nvN83mzz8Kg/T1D5-VE_TuI/AAAAAAAAAVc/f5ocqRd89Tk/s1600/house%2Bof%2Bsilk.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 129px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nvN83mzz8Kg/T1D5-VE_TuI/AAAAAAAAAVc/f5ocqRd89Tk/s200/house%2Bof%2Bsilk.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715342776338435810" /></a>Officially sanctioned by the Conan Doyle Estate, comes a new Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz (Alex Rider mysteries, <a href="http://www.foyleswar.com/">Foyle's War</a>, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/collision/index.html">Collison</a>). In </span><span style="font-style: normal; "><b>The House of Silk</b></span><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; ">, Horowitz captures both the spirit and the times of the original books. This one is old-fashioned without being old. The mystery is perhaps a bit more, um--let's say modern--than anything the old Sherlock might have been involved with, but the characters are believably re-created here, including an almost useless Watson as sidekick. He's so marginalized that at one point, they </span><i>consult another doctor</i> for an opinion. I could only imagine Doctor Watson, leaning over the body, saying <i>What am I, chopped liver?</i> But of course, he wouldn't say that. In fact, he demurs another time when asked about the possible slow poisoning of a woman, by saying, <i>I should warn you, I'm only a general practitioner and my experience is limited...</i>Oh, Watson. Is this why Sherlock keeps you around?<div style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><span style="font-style: normal; ">Horowitz even manages to touch on the odd and rumored relationship between the two men, without, mind you, making anything explicit. There's nothing sexual between the two, but there's something more than friendship. Though Watson is happily married, he's also more than happy when his wife goes to Scotland to catch typhoid fever (being only a </span><i>generalist</i>, he misses this detail) so he can hang out with his old buddy. They don't talk about Mrs. Watson, and when a criminal mastermind asks Watson to swear on something that he won't reveal what he's learned, Watson offers his marriage. </div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><span style="font-style: normal; ">Mysterious man: </span><i>Not good enough.</i></div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><span style="font-style: normal; ">Watson:</span><i> On my friendship with Holmes</i></div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><span style="font-style: normal; ">Mysterious man: </span><i>Now we understand each other.</i></div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><i><br /></i></div><div style="font-weight: normal; ">All in good fun. I know Watson is our way into the brilliant mind of the great detective. Horowitz treats his brilliance admirably. There's a trick to writing about a brilliant person without seeming gimmicky or cocky and I think Horowitz succeeds. <span style="font-size: 100%; ">Also, this being a mystery, it deserves careful reading because<i> everything</i>, down to the odd placement of a fountain, seems like it might be a clue. Red herrings abound, as they should, and the solution is satisfying enough to reflect the time period. People are killed, people escape spectacularly from prison, nothing is romanticized about the harsh life of a street urchin, and Sherlock never resorts to his cocaine habit. You just have to put up with Watson being a little dim.</span></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-1605529676572600612012-02-27T17:39:00.004-05:002012-02-27T18:14:04.994-05:00The Call<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nkhqc5I1Jr0/T0wNJY4RBiI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/6ozHHDMDofo/s1600/the%2Bcall.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 133px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nkhqc5I1Jr0/T0wNJY4RBiI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/6ozHHDMDofo/s200/the%2Bcall.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5713956482174748194" /></a><span style="font-style: normal; "><b>The book:</b> </span><i><b>The Call</b>, by Yannick Murphy.</i><div><b style="font-style: normal; ">The reAction:</b><i> Excellent.</i></div><div><b style="font-style: normal; ">What I was thinking as I read it:</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> <i>I thought Yannick was a man. I wonder where in Vermont this takes place?</i></span></div><div><b style="font-style: normal; ">Why I'm writing like this:</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> <i>the book is set up this way.</i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div><b style="font-style: normal; ">The Call</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> is from the point of view of a veterinarian--preferably large animals, though he'll put down a cat if you appeal to his conscience. Each section begins with the word "<i>Call</i>" and then a brief description of where he's off to. The subcategories are usually "<i>action" ,"result", "what I say", "what I was thinking."</i> Occasionally Murphy lets us in on what other people are saying on or after these calls. This may seem like a schtick that could get old, but it doesn't. It also could make you think the book's just about a middle-aged family man going about his days--and it sort of is--but there are a couple of mysteries and a near-tragedy.</span></div><div><span style="font-weight: normal; "><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-weight: normal; ">For one, the doctor's son is in a hunting accident and two, he has repeated, somewhat humorous encounters with what might be a drone from the nearby air force base or might just be a spacecraft. Both his efforts to find the wayward hunter who shot his son and to get to the bottom of the spacecraft mystery are greeted with typical Yankee terseness because of course he asks his neighbors about both. When he's not driving owners and their sheep to the doctor (or tricking his wife into doing this), or dealing with a collicking horse, or putting down a recalcitrant horse that refuses to face the way it's owner thinks it should and ends up toppling into its grave on top of the thoughtful owner, the doctor is swimming, pondering life, trying to keep his family safe and together, and hoping for the blessing of a life well spent. It is only when a new visitor shows up that the good doctor finds his real calling (yes, pun intended). The story doesn't really take a turn with the appearance of the stranger, but the doctor's character is reinforced.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; ">The writing is believably sparse, but thoughtful, humorous, and surprisingly descriptive for such a limited format. Here's a typical example (if any of the book can be called typical):</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div><i><b>Call:</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> castrate draft horse</span></i></div><div><i><b>Action:</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> Pulled out emasculators, castrated draft horse.</span></i></div><div><i><b>Result:</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> Draft horse bled buckets...Owner said she had never seen so much blood. It's okay, he's got a lot of blood, I said. She nodded. She braided the fringe on her poncho, watching the blood.</span></i></div><div><i><b>Thoughts on the drive home:</b> What's the point of a poncho if it doesn't cover your arms?<br /><b>What he wife cooked for dinner: </b><span style="font-weight: normal; ">Nut loaf.</span></i></div><div><i><b>What I ate for dinner:</b><span style="font-weight: normal; "> Not nut loaf.</span></i></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; "><br />This is a quick, engaging read and I'm sorry I ever thought Yannick was a man. That would be underselling how well the author gets inside her main character.</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; "><br /></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-8874631201039884482012-02-19T11:13:00.005-05:002012-02-19T14:14:55.887-05:00Not Much Just Chillin'<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kiBzVucZ1lA/T0FJ8u9PeeI/AAAAAAAAAVE/i78haOsVvXY/s1600/just%2Bchillin.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kiBzVucZ1lA/T0FJ8u9PeeI/AAAAAAAAAVE/i78haOsVvXY/s200/just%2Bchillin.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5710927110228376034" /></a><span style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; ">Possibly the best line in this book about "the hidden lives of middle schoolers" is: "</span><i style="font-weight: normal; ">Somebody stole my agenda," they tell [the principal] when they lose it, as if this is an item with potential black-market value."</i> This so captures the self-centered yet disorganized culture of middle school, complete with the paranoia that everyone is out to get them and that they are not responsible for anything that goes astray or wrong.<b> Not much just chillin<i>'</i></b>, Linda Perlstein's study of a particular middle school in Maryland during these early aughts, is not for the fainthearted. In fact, it might not even be for the parents of a middle school student (too stressful!) but it definitely helps for teachers to read it. Some of the lessons to be drawn, as she follows a handful of kids through the year, are obvious (disorganization, peer pressure, hormone freak-outs), but others are more unexpected. We see how the curriculum itself does a disservice to the kids it is meant to reach. This is only becoming more so, with the pressure from above for a school to do well on standardized tests. Middle school kids are naturally curious about the world around them, but usually only as it specifically relates to them. Yet, the curriculum and the short day leave little time for exploration and everyone--teachers, kids, administrators--feel ragged as a result. They feel like they're always playing catch-up or pushing along, even while aware that some are missing the lessons.<div style="font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-weight: normal; ">In this book, the events of September 11, 2001 leave the teachers unsure how best to handle the day. Many of their students have parents who work in or near the Pentagon, but they are, after all, middle schoolers, somewhere caught between babies and adults. Such an extreme example of the delicate balance faced each day by educators served as a reminder that emotion--usually overdone or seemingly inappropriate to the moment--is forever at the forefront of a kid between the ages of 11 and 14. It was fascinating and disturbing to see how the kids handled the filtering news of that day.</div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-weight: normal; ">Not that the whole book is despairing, or even vaguely of the "<i>what the heck do we do with these crazy kids</i>" type. These kids were perhaps chosen for their potential, as if Perlstein could see that they would grow up and be stronger people. In spite of the chaos of their home lives or their hormones, these were not all lost kids and it was reassuring to glimpse the future adult in the growing pains these kids go through every day.</div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-weight: normal; ">Some of the slights they deal with or the academic struggles are painful to read, but there's hope--there's hope that they get from their families, their dedicated teachers, and even the very peers who can't help but torment each other. The only really heartbreaking moment comes from Eric, the bright boy with the most dysfunctional home life, who admits to being too lazy to try for the GT classes he's offered (GT here is translated as gifted and talented, but from what I could tell, it was more of an honors track than truly for the gifted). He's one who's perpetually "just chillin'" though <i>he</i> doesn't feel that he is. When his grades begin to plummet, he says he doesn't care because he knows what he's capable of, it's just that he hates school. He feels like he should be judged on the work he could do, not on whether or not he uses pen to do his homework (which isn't allowed). At one point, when he's fooling around in class and missing the directions, he says to the kid next to him: "<i>I could be in GT."</i> I found that incredibly depressing. The self-delusion is complete at this point and adult readers (and probably all of his classmates) see it for exactly that. It's a depressing fall for a kid with such potential, though Perlstein makes sure to cheer up her readers with an epilogue.</div><div style="font-weight: normal; "><br /></div><div>All in all, <b>not much just chillin'</b> is a fascinating, easy to read portrait of a suburban middle school with a healthy cross-section of class and race. While it's short on answers or technical explanations, it is a great reminder of how wonderful this age can be as kids throw off their babyhood to explore their future selves.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-87520297055069657512012-02-12T13:22:00.010-05:002012-02-12T16:03:45.416-05:00[Novels] of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u618Jqi0jCI/TzgHOBbesAI/AAAAAAAAAU4/0HnLXGLyT3w/s1600/darcy.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 131px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u618Jqi0jCI/TzgHOBbesAI/AAAAAAAAAU4/0HnLXGLyT3w/s200/darcy.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5708320465175359490" /></a><span >Can there be too much of a good thing? Why yes, yes, there can be. I am not late to the love of <b>Pride and Prejudice</b>, but I suppose I'm fairly late to reading the enormous number of parody/worshipful/slavish copycats/tangential stories that arise from an obsession with Jane Austen's best-known novel. It's not that I'm unaware of this cottage industry--quite unlike P.D. James who has just written <b>Death Comes to Pemberley</b>, and admitted her obliviousness in this terribly cute way on an <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/12/08/143276773/in-pemberley-james-picks-up-where-austen-left-off">interview</a> with Morning Edition:</span><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; ">James, who is 91, explains how she began her Austen sequel: "When I started, I said to my PA, 'We should look on the Internet!' ... she does all these clever things which I don't do — and see how many other people had written sequels. And we were amazed, absolutely amazed."</span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span >So, I haven't read <b>Death Comes to Pemberley</b>, partly because an Austen-obsessed friend warned me off, but I did pick up Pamela Aidan's trilogy that imagines the events of <b>Pride and Prejudice</b> from the point of view of Darcy. The first one, <b>An Assembly Such as This</b>, was delicious, just what anyone who loves Elizabeth Bennet could have wanted. Aidan satisfyingly explains Darcy's mystifying behavior towards the woman he is obviously meant to marry. A librarian in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (something so perfect about that!), Aidan captures the humor Austen fans have come to appreciate without resorting to anachronism (the way the 2005 Keira Knightley movie did). and brings some minor characters to the forefront to help round out Darcy's true and private character. According to Aidan, he is not just governed by his status and his family expectations, but has never even learned to be easy in company, never expected that he need be, so burdened by status and responsibility. Even when he tries on what comes so easily to his friend Bingley, Darcy fails to read social situations properly. He is, according to Aidan, <i>trying</i> with Elizabeth, but he's not got a clue : <i>All in all, he was rather pleased with his foray into the unfamiliar realm of flirtation,</i> he says at one point<i>.</i> But of course, he's only further offended Elizabeth in this scene, much as he does with his bungled first marriage proposal.</span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span >I skipped book two, <b>Duty and Desire</b>, which, according to the back <i>covers the "silent time" of Austen's novel</i>. Aidan's imagination probably fills out Darcy's character admirably, and I do appreciate that she grounds her novels in the events of the day (Napoleonic Wars, political intrigue) because Austen's books are, essentially, romances and therefore out of the real world, but I don't really care that much about Darcy when he's not dealing with the Bennets.</span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span >The third book, <b>These Three Remain</b>, takes Darcy back to Elizabeth, meeting her at Rosings Park, and deals with his hand in the dreaded Lydia/Wickam affair. Neatly done, and I loved Darcy's friend Dyford, Lord Brougham, who along, with Darcy's cousin Richard Fitzwilliam, help him see the errors of his ways toward Elizabeth. <i>Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn't it?Dy had skewered him with sarcasem. Only you, my friend, would make the lady's general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage." </i>Because, of course, Darcy's argument when Elizabeth took him to task for his poorly executed attempt was to draw himself up and say, <i>"Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own"</i></span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span > Yes, well done Mr. Darcy. Girls love that kind of charm. Turns out, he's not quite the gentleman he believes himself to be, and these novels allow us to poke holes in him, just as Elizabeth does in Austen's novel.</span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span >Aidan is smart to force Darcy to open up to his friends, to unwind that pride he holds so tight. These are romance novels of a most superior kind, much like Austen's own are. They are the perfect recipe for deep winter days by the fireplace, with or without the middle novel.</span></span></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-10251271174224724002012-02-06T10:48:00.007-05:002012-02-07T21:31:29.776-05:00The Impossible Dead<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cFqfB8ade7Q/TzHeFOuNy7I/AAAAAAAAAUs/R85Ma6b-kJY/s1600/impossible%2Bdead.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 133px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cFqfB8ade7Q/TzHeFOuNy7I/AAAAAAAAAUs/R85Ma6b-kJY/s200/impossible%2Bdead.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706586384287779762" /></a>Ian Rankin (forgiving his first novel), is a thinking man's mystery writer. He writes not so much mystery as police procedural. There aren't explosions on every page and there's a lot of driving around and drinking of <a href="http://www.irn-bru.co.uk/our-drinks.html">Irn-Bru</a> (or something stronger) in his books. I liked the Inspector Rebus books enough to read most of them and I've read a couple of his one-offs, but he's got a new series going here about The Complaints--the police who investigate other police for wrong-doing and ethical violations. Needless to say, these rotating members are less than popular, if not outright despised by other officers. The first in the series, obviously titled <b>The Complaints</b>, was almost boring in its minutia, and reading it was made more difficult by Rankin's insistence on using despairingly similar names for half his characters. Still, I finished it because I generally like procedurals and I do think he's a good writer.<br /><br />I'm happy to say that the second book about Malcolm Fox and his fellow "Complaints," has an actual mystery and a lot of forensic archeological digging through paper. <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Impossible Dead</span> zips right along. I'm less happy to say that I decided I don't really like the main character. Fox is too bland. Where Rebus was a drinker (disturbing enough at times), Fox is a teetotaler who begins his evenings with something called appletizer. His personal life is depressing to the point of being boring and so I can't get too caught up with his fate. He's at his best digging through papers or keeping his two partner/subordinates from bashing each other. (Rankin again makes life difficult for the reader by giving them the names Kaye and Naysmith--there's no excuse for names that begin with the same vowel sound and have similar spelling). Fox is at his worse when running through the woods to escape an angry man with a gun. I don't buy it. I can't picture him in such a situation and Rankin doesn't help by not painting a more physical picture of his protagonist. I pictured a guy in a suit with bad teeth and a pasty complexion from bad food, stumbling along while chases by a similarly incongruous man. Call me American, but if you're going to have action, make your characters either hopeless in a chase or disturbingly cool about it, not somewhere in-between.<br /><br />Still, I liked the digging through the past (1980s) when the Scottish Nationalist Party was employing less than legal means to achieve their goal of separatism. How far we've come in our definition of terrorism, though there's no discounting homemade bombs, whatever year they were set. Nobody's a good guy in this; everyone is flawed and everyone has something to hide. I suppose that's to be expected in a novel built on the premise of police corruption. How high up it goes and how far back it's safe to dig, is what keeps this story moving along. Just don't get too excited about the run through the woods.christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-53559925779124736842012-01-28T12:05:00.016-05:002012-01-28T15:04:28.213-05:00The Last Hundred Days, or Bad Places in Modern Times<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xY9MFZb4kxg/TyRTb3-WzHI/AAAAAAAAATw/ytFweNEC0iA/s1600/100%2Bdays.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xY9MFZb4kxg/TyRTb3-WzHI/AAAAAAAAATw/ytFweNEC0iA/s200/100%2Bdays.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702774766504954994" /></a>I accidentally began a literary tour of countries undergoing--um, let's call them "growing pains"--in the modern era. For my purpose, I'm considering modern times to mean, roughly, my lifetime. It all started with the excellent <b><a href="http://54books.blogspot.com/2010/09/cellist-of-sarajevo.html">The Cellist of Sarajevo</a></b> which reminded me that I'd been distant witness to the Serbian nightmare in the early 90s while also pointing out how little I knew about the conflict. Then I moved on to Lisa See's book <b>Dreams of Joy</b> which gave me more insight than I'd needed into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward">China's Great Leap Forward</a>. (okay, I'm pushing the boundary definitions of "my lifetime" with that one). <div><br /></div><div>Fiction is a powerful and usually pleasant way to learn about world hot spots, and generally the protagonist is just as much an outsider as the armchair voyager. But occasionally, non-fiction can be just as entertaining a way to learn about the world, as I discovered with Douglas Rogers' excellent memoir, <b>The Last Resort. A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa.</b> Rogers is the son of white farmers in Zimbabwe and while he emigrates to England and then NYC, his parents try to tough it out during Mugabe's land reforms (which mostly involve re-allocating white-owned farmland to black ownership--farmer or not). This memoir manages to be funny while still leaving me figuratively shaking my head alongside Rogers about how an African country that seemed to more or less have its act together could fall into such chaos in such a relatively short period (and yes, I know this is a one-sided view, but it is a memoir, after all).</div><div><br /></div><div>Next stop on my tour came Romania, in the form of Patrick McGuinness' <b>The Last Hundred Days</b>. This is a novel about the waning days of Ceausescu's iron-fisted reign (side note: I learned to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_EnTgkVnLA">pronounce the dictator's name</a> by watching Seinfeld) and is narrated by a lost soul young British man who finds himself posted to a university there without ever having applied for the position. His job really isn't the focus of the book--in fact, he immediately falls in with characters more interesting then himself and we never even learn our protagonist's name as he ricochet Zelig-like from one historical Romanian event to another. He becomes involved with a well-meaning British black market dealer, the daughter of a high-ranking political figure, some possibly idealistic and possibly self-serving person smugglers, and a sly old-school communist who despises what has become of his country. These friendships are not contradictory at all to the odd experience of living in a communist country so oppressive that escaping to Hungary was seen as a step up.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Bucharest described here is one in which the past is being torn down literally overnight and replaced with cheap, modern (and very Eastern-bloc) style housing. <i>Bucharest's modern parks were flat, planted with dwarfish shrubs and benches arranged to give the sitter maximum exposure and maximum discomfort. You never stayed long anywhere, harried on all sides by an invisible watchfulness</i>. This is a country in which everyone is watching everyone else, with no privacy, and being caught at something, anything could result in a slow and unpleasant death, so people are naturally wary and rather worn down. At one point, a character looks around the room to determine who is the most likely government plant, but once he realizes that it is he, he's able to relax a bit. When things really hit the fan and uprisings begin, there comes a point when the army, the police, and the <i>Securitate</i> (secret police) are so busy watching each other during a "<i>minutely planned display of spontaneous celebration"</i> that no one has time to realize that the workers are out to get their dear leader, rather than to celebrate him.</div><div><br /></div><div>This book isn't necessarily fun--there's no way to romp through such an oppressed country full of secret torture chambers and starving general masses--but <b>The Last Hundred Days</b> paints a pretty complete picture of life in the not-so-distant past, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a reminder of the conflict between the idealism of communism and the reality of life under it, a reminder that there are always those who profit when all are supposed to be equal. In the end, there are those drawn to hot spots, and not just in literary form.</div><div><br /></div><div>Next stop? North Korea. There's a new book out called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Orphan-Masters-Son-Novel/dp/0812992792">The Orphan Master's Son</a> and it seems just the place to visit after Ceausescu's fall.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-80477241405566674272012-01-19T17:34:00.008-05:002012-01-22T17:35:00.398-05:00someday this pain will be useful to you<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--SK7CAfpNzc/TxibG6ipj-I/AAAAAAAAATk/WyXJWMKYqo0/s1600/images%2B%25281%2529.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 133px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--SK7CAfpNzc/TxibG6ipj-I/AAAAAAAAATk/WyXJWMKYqo0/s200/images%2B%25281%2529.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5699475871533469666" /></a>Peter Cameron's excellent modern version of <b>The</b> <b>Catcher in the Rye</b>, called <b>someday this pain will be useful to you</b>, is one of those cross-over books that everyone keeps chasing (<b>Twilight, Hunger Games</b>...). I assume the lower case letters of the title are both to appeal to The Youth and also indicative of how the protagonist James Sveck, feels about himself. The title comes from the motto of a camp where James once spent a couple of ill-advised weeks. Riveted myself, I kept trying to picture the high school student who would enjoy this story of a hyper-verbally precocious 18 year old, trying to sort his way in the world.<div><br /></div><div> James Sveck's life is not one of deprivation--his divorced parents obviously both have plenty of money, even for NYC living--but the angst is real. There is nothing particularly unusual that has led James to his indecision about looming college and future life, and I was grateful that Cameron did not tie all of his protagonist's problems to 9/11, in spite of the location and age of the character. We are led to believe that the event has marked James, given that his school faced the destruction, but even he refuses to be defined by it and is irritated that everyone feels they own the event, the location, or even the date. He's particularly resistant when his therapist tries to draw him out:<div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>"Well," she said, "how would you like to refer to September 11?"</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"I'd prefer not to refer to it."</i></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"Why is that?"</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"It seems unfair that I have to explain why I don't want to refer to something you </i><i>brought up that I have just said I don't want to refer to."</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This verbal jousting is par for the course for James, throughout the book, whether with his father, who thinks he isn't manly to have ordered salad for lunch; with his older sister who has decided to change the pronunciation of her name because her family's pronunciation of it is "<i>a subtle and insidious form of child abuse.";</i> or with his mother, just back from a failed attempt at a new marriage in the city she hates most in the world: Las Vegas. She had claimed it would be "fun," but as James observes, </div><div><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Whenever my mother said anything was, or would be, "fun" you could take it as a <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>warning that said thing was not nor would be at all fun, and when I remind my mother <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>of this--I use the example of her telling me that the sailing camp she had forced me to <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>attend the summer I was twelve would be "fun"--she admitted that sailing camp had not <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>been fun for me but that was no reason why a honeymoon in Las Vegas would not be <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>fun for her. Such is the ability adults--well, my mother, at least--have to deceive <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>themselves.</i></div><div>And yet, his mother returns to New York, early and unmarried.</div><div><br /></div><div>James' best sparring partner is his beloved grandmother who encourages and advises him in life and love, although not in an annoying or cloying way, but simply by accepting his rather old-fashioned ideas of the good life. For example, James wants to buy an arts and crafts style house in the middle of the country somewhere. Obviously, this sets him off from his peers (who are non-existent in this summer-before-college setting), nor does it particularly bring him closer to his unrequited crush on the man who runs his mother's art gallery. This crush and James' attempt to connect with another human being whom he thinks means the world to him, leads to sad and painful grown-up lessons. Still, this is a YA novel, not a study in existentialism. James will survive intact and grow stronger. As his grandmother puts it: "<i>Having bad experiences sometimes helps; it makes it clearer what it is you </i>should<i> be doing...the difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You mustn't let them defeat you, You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>This book is much funnier than <b>The Catcher in the Rye</b> ever tried to be, and therefore perhaps better-suited to our times. James Sveck is likable and not prone to sarcasm or heavy-handed irony. He'd simply like everyone to speak correctly, say what they mean, and let him buy a house in Ohio if that's what he decides he wants.</div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-90339091121138110092012-01-19T12:28:00.007-05:002012-01-19T17:31:51.289-05:00Still Alice<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uvn2CCzNI6s/TxiYaQMcM2I/AAAAAAAAATY/50n57GnmFg0/s1600/images.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 135px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uvn2CCzNI6s/TxiYaQMcM2I/AAAAAAAAATY/50n57GnmFg0/s200/images.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5699472905228530530" /></a>Imagine that you have the kind of intelligence it takes not just to attend Harvard University, but to teach there as a tenured professor. Imagine now that yours is not just any field, but linguistics, the minutia of how language works. Oh, and you're also really, really good at it. This is the case for Alice Howland in Lisa Genova's novel, <b>Still Alice</b>. Alice is turning 50, she's at the top of her game--so much so that her marriage and the troubles and successes of her grown children are less important to her than her ability to shine at a conference. That's not to say that family is not important to Alice, it's just that she thrives on the intellect of her career.<div><br />Now, imagine your life beginning to blur around the edges just a bit. You forget the meaning of some of the cryptic notes on your to do list; you lose a word or two during a lecture. No problem, though. You're tired, over-stressed, jet-lagged, worried about your actress daughter with no college education. Alice barely registers these blips, and then eventually, almost casually, blames menopause, quietly mourning her youth. But one day, she goes for a run and gets lost just a few blocks from home, in Harvard Square no less, a place she knows as intimately as her front steps.</div><div><br />The diagnosis is grim:early on-set Alzheimers. Terrible for anyone, incomprehensible for someone like Alice who has always lived inside a brilliant, inquisitive mind. Alice is so freaked, she's almost in denial, which is understandable, but she also doesn't share the news with her family, not even her husband. There's a weird moment at a cocktail party during which I thought her husband had already guessed, but that turned out to be a red herring. Alice's choices and behavior are sometimes hard to fathom, but most of her reactions are believable. It's hard to imagine how one would or should react to learning such a diagnosis. Who am I to question Alice's reactions. Occasionally, I wondered if Lisa Genova meant to portray an unreliable narrator--after all, Alice does have Alzheimer's disease, and that does add an interesting discussion point. Still, when I read the "guide for book groups" at the end of this book (always a little amusing). was left wondering if some of the questions are so open-ended because the author herself left too many fuzzy questions for the good of the book. I do like that there's no pat ending because, how could there be?</div><div><br /><div>When I cracked open this book--in a mad rush to read it for a book group--I immediately bogged down in despair. How would I get through a book about a woman descending into dementia? There was no positive outcome possible. Still, I read on, and am so glad I did. It was like my resistance to watching the James Cameron movie, <i>Titanic</i>. I knew the end and it wasn't good, so why would I want to watch the movie? But stories like these are all about the characters. There is also, I suppose, a certain amount of voyeurism, or even a "there-by-the-grace-of-God..." mentality. Lisa Genova's book was moving and affirming in the power of the mind and the power of family and love. Like <i>Titanic</i>, there is an inevitable end, but it's the journey there, and the details of the stories of those left behind that make it worth a read.</div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-32792759034765068332011-05-22T15:39:00.006-04:002011-05-22T16:09:42.165-04:00I think I love You<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--C7vB7EWqOA/TdlrxxzTI_I/AAAAAAAAATM/R9hK7tu0Fag/s1600/think%2BI%2Blove.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 136px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--C7vB7EWqOA/TdlrxxzTI_I/AAAAAAAAATM/R9hK7tu0Fag/s200/think%2BI%2Blove.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609633313792926706" /></a>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 <b>I think I love You</b>, 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.<div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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, <i>everyone</i> is a different person by then.</div><div><br /></div><div>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:<i>...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."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>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 <i>"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."</i> And then he recovers, even becomes a little protective of his alter ego. This is what the world of fandom does to you.</div><div><br /></div><div>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 <i>come on, get happy...</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Okay, I couldn't resist that one.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-35730577207516033082011-05-15T13:44:00.004-04:002011-05-15T14:14:25.150-04:00The Devotion of Suspect X<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NofEO5YUNbU/TdAX8sSh0rI/AAAAAAAAAS8/oVZrzvWx2jA/s1600/devotion%2Bof%2Bsuspect" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NofEO5YUNbU/TdAX8sSh0rI/AAAAAAAAAS8/oVZrzvWx2jA/s200/devotion%2Bof%2Bsuspect" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607007867524731570" /></a>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, <b>The Devotion of Suspect X</b>. 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.<div><br /><div>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.</div><div>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: <i>this time it's personal.</i> But whether he wants to clear his old friend,<i> </i>Suspect X, or not, is a big part of the plot.</div><div><br /></div><div>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 <i>who</i>, I thought I knew the <i>how</i>. So what was I waiting for? Ishigami becomes creepier as the story goes along and I was annoyed by that. <i>Oooh, how original--the vaguely autistic genius is a stalker!</i> 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.</div><div><br />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 <i>commit</i> to reading his books.</div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-34004780823742670172011-05-07T18:17:00.006-04:002011-05-15T14:30:48.648-04:00Good-Bye and Amen<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n__FeuMTjtQ/TdAboRoBysI/AAAAAAAAATE/oRmCrXREHdY/s1600/goodbye.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 137px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n__FeuMTjtQ/TdAboRoBysI/AAAAAAAAATE/oRmCrXREHdY/s200/goodbye.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607011914816277186" /></a>Beth Gutcheon makes a risky choice in this novel, a follow-up on the family in <b>Leeway Cottage</b>. <b>Good-Bye and Amen</b> 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.<div><br /><div>The matriarch of the Moss family is long-dead (though unscattered) in <b>Good-Bye and Amen</b>. Sydney Moss dominated <b>Leeway Cottage</b> and the Maine summer home by that name, and she was not a nice person. In <b>Good-Bye</b>, 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.</div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>Gutcheon is a fun writer and clever. Norman Faithful is a pain in the neck, but she gives him some decent lines: <i>America in Bermuda shorts is not a pretty sight</i>, 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" ,..<i>and then <b>obviously</b> 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 <b>your</b> mother's funeral." </i>So, yeah, Norman is a drag, but I was glad as a reader that his fall didn't come too soon.</div><div><br /></div><div>I may have to go back to <b>Leeway Cottage</b>, to revisit these characters.</div><div><br /></div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-78041243768269539642011-05-04T10:40:00.009-04:002011-05-08T20:03:17.946-04:00Heat Wave<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nxSx1IdEd2Q/TccrKjRm4AI/AAAAAAAAAS0/B8C39I_3kiY/s1600/heat%2Bwave" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 77px; height: 120px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nxSx1IdEd2Q/TccrKjRm4AI/AAAAAAAAAS0/B8C39I_3kiY/s200/heat%2Bwave" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5604495721553649666" /></a>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, <b>Heat Wave</b>, 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.<div><br />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.<br />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.</div><div><br />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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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 <b>Heat Wave</b>, 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 <b>Heat Wave</b>, an early book, sets us up to enjoy her later books in which we find some characters to root for.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-21992506919468892482011-05-01T09:38:00.006-04:002011-05-01T21:27:18.163-04:00The Abortionist's Daughter<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3rXgvJFCD1s/Tb1o2L4j62I/AAAAAAAAASs/nDhce6ENG6w/s1600/abortionist%2527s%2Bdaughter.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 136px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3rXgvJFCD1s/Tb1o2L4j62I/AAAAAAAAASs/nDhce6ENG6w/s200/abortionist%2527s%2Bdaughter.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5601748791631014754" /></a>Elisabeth Hyde's book, <b>In the Heart of the Canyon</b> made my top ten of 2009. I loved her characters and the story of a motley crew rafting down a canyon (natch) was intriguing. <b>The Abortionist's Daughter</b> 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.<div>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:<i> ...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</i>. Diana thought, <i>her job, as she saw it, was simply to push the reset button for the woman on the table.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>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?</div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-69366608131960226212011-04-26T13:46:00.006-04:002011-04-27T19:51:37.101-04:00The Weird Sisters<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1k3BldZhtk4/TbcKaJyFSBI/AAAAAAAAASU/7FCIp6AK_8Y/s1600/weird%2Bsisters.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 132px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1k3BldZhtk4/TbcKaJyFSBI/AAAAAAAAASU/7FCIp6AK_8Y/s200/weird%2Bsisters.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599956106077358098" /></a>It doesn't matter if you don't get the Shakespearian reference in the title of Eleanor Brown's book, <b>The Weird Sisters</b>, 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: <i>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.</i> 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 <i>royal we</i> as an effacing, collective <i>we;</i> like the Fates who use the same eyeball to see the future or like, yes, the original <i>Weird Sisters</i> who are disturbingly interchangeable in giving Macbeth a prophecy.<div><br /><div>The book begins nicely with: <i>We came home because we were failures</i>. 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.</div><div>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)?</div><div><br /></div><div> 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 <i>"like the cat in the adage."</i> (Act 1, scene 7). Even if the ending doesn't quite satisfy, it was nice to get to know these women and <b>The Weird Sisters</b> was just the fun read I needed.</div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-48553754950836150122011-04-17T15:50:00.005-04:002011-04-17T16:17:50.559-04:00Blood, Bones, and Butter<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VTCGUSw_WuE/TatKnFRQbDI/AAAAAAAAASM/AIF4_zO9zfY/s1600/images.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 126px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VTCGUSw_WuE/TatKnFRQbDI/AAAAAAAAASM/AIF4_zO9zfY/s200/images.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596648997227883570" /></a>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 "<i>simply the best memoir by a chef ever. EVER."</i> So. Yeah, where do you go from there?<br /><br /><div>Well, I dove in, and <b>Blood, Bones, and Butter</b> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>Food rhapsody comes late in the book (in the<i> 'Butter'</i> 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. <i>"Blood</i>" is not just about family, but about the brutal way by which Hamilton enters the world of (restaurant) work; <i>"Bones"</i> is the structure she builds for herself, including the family; <i>"Butter"</i> is the place where she is now, though mellow, like innocent, doesn't begin to describe Gabrielle Hamilton.</div><div>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.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-3386035382023093282011-04-12T16:11:00.012-04:002011-04-28T20:18:10.194-04:00Started Early, Took My Dog<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J2k_-g-Bx5s/TbiyySHH9KI/AAAAAAAAASk/yjgC46ZlA8g/s1600/001.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J2k_-g-Bx5s/TbiyySHH9KI/AAAAAAAAASk/yjgC46ZlA8g/s200/001.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600422713560134818" /></a><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RyzeBpfNVpU/TbiymbboqpI/AAAAAAAAASc/xz2lQw-YAug/s1600/started%2Bearly.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RyzeBpfNVpU/TbiymbboqpI/AAAAAAAAASc/xz2lQw-YAug/s200/started%2Bearly.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600422509903653522" /></a>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. <b>In Started Early, Took My Dog</b>, 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.<div><br /><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. <b>Started Early</b> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>I just enjoy Atkinson's writing. She has some great throw away lines, for example she writes about a characater's "<i>(misplaced) faith in exclamation points,</i>" which I can relate to. She nicely, if inaccurately sets up <b>Started Early, Took my Dog </b>with: <i>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</i>.</div><div>Well, it's lucky for us that Linda Pallister scarpered because it gave us this story.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you haven't read any Kate Atkinson, read <b>One Good Turn</b>. Everyone raves on about <b>Case Histories</b>, but I really didn't like the obviousness of that one and I loved her second Jackson Brodie book, <b>One Good Turn</b>.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>***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.***</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-5781237986467960492011-04-01T09:29:00.008-04:002011-04-01T18:26:10.346-04:00Tolstoy and the Purple Chair<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s4umVuN3qkA/TZZPVjlG-eI/AAAAAAAAASE/UJm3GtGj0Ig/s1600/001.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s4umVuN3qkA/TZZPVjlG-eI/AAAAAAAAASE/UJm3GtGj0Ig/s200/001.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5590743219173784034" /></a>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. <b>Tolstoy and the Purple Chair</b> (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 <b>Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother</b>--or at least, the hype about it).<div><br /><div>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 <i>"remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built."</i> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>I love that Sankovitch approaches her reading ecclectically, though with some hesitation. Her son, for example, hands her <b>Watership Down</b> 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 <b>Watership Down,</b> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>She gets through her year, and no she isn't <i>"ready to relax"</i> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>For more of Nina Sankovitch, check out her website: <a href="http://www.readallday.org/blog/">http://www.readallday.org/blog/</a>.</div></div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-2775827390663442162011-03-12T15:11:00.004-05:002011-03-12T15:37:30.119-05:00The Radleys<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MVQkI7wZEdc/TXvY1TPpKpI/AAAAAAAAAR8/Cbl4_4qeNJg/s1600/radleys.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 149px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5583294573266414226" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MVQkI7wZEdc/TXvY1TPpKpI/AAAAAAAAAR8/Cbl4_4qeNJg/s200/radleys.jpg" /></a> 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".<br /><div></div><br /><div>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. </div><br /><div></div><div>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: </div><br /><div></div><div align="left"><em>She had fun in the mirror, transforming herself, watching her canine teeth lengthen andsharpen. Dracula. </em></div><div align="left"><em>Not Dracula. </em></div><div align="left"><em>Dracula. </em></div><div align="left"><em>Not Dracula. </em></div><div align="left"><em>Dracula. </em></div><div align="left"><em>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.</em></div><br /><div></div><div>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.</div><br /><div></div><div>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 <strong>The Radleys</strong>.</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-86253817417075832152011-03-01T13:35:00.005-05:002011-03-01T13:59:05.753-05:00American Terroir. Savoring the Flavors...<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4m4q4Q7nYdE/TW1A36grMbI/AAAAAAAAAR0/BR0KSiC6C3k/s1600/american%2Bterroir.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579186842725200306" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4m4q4Q7nYdE/TW1A36grMbI/AAAAAAAAAR0/BR0KSiC6C3k/s200/american%2Bterroir.jpg" /></a><br />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 <strong>American Terroir</strong>. 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Even when he's not snarking (gently) on inferior product, Jacobsen's writing is quite entertaining. The cheese chapter (Vermont) begins with: <em>In composition and behavior, a cheese is not unlike a dead body. It starts off fresh and springy and ends up ripe and runny.</em> And yes, that made me still want to seek out Jasper Hill cheese.<br /><br /><br />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 <strong>American Terroir. Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields</strong> if you don't want to wait.christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-22962293529396022302011-02-13T11:24:00.009-05:002011-02-14T18:06:19.463-05:00Catcher in the Rye<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4_vF44m3rlY/TVm0ZKTcOwI/AAAAAAAAARs/pHiUDS9RiC0/s1600/catcher.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 124px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573684358203325186" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4_vF44m3rlY/TVm0ZKTcOwI/AAAAAAAAARs/pHiUDS9RiC0/s200/catcher.jpg" /></a> Reading J.D. Salinger's <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Catcher in the Rye </span>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 <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Youth and Alienation</span>. I noticed all the same stuff this time around. Yeah, Holden says <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">goddamn</span> a lot and everyone and everything is<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"> phony</span>, 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, "<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">he was the kind of phony that have to give themselves <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">room</span> 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.</span>" Holden does that, too, speaks all the time in a kind of synecdoche: Stepping on someone's foot and breaking every bone in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic; FONT-WEIGHT: bold">her body.</span><br /><br /><div>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<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">: That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.</span> Or even better: <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">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</span>. 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.<br /></div><br /><div>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. </div><br /><div>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.<br /></div><div></div><div>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<span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold"> Catcher</span> did make me realize I'm glad I'm not a teenager anymore. At the very least, I get more sleep.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>**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...</div>christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2989226963338806489.post-3871211276956812052011-02-05T16:37:00.007-05:002011-02-06T21:51:05.807-05:00Skippy DiesPaul Murr<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_thM1vLvREHo/TU35t6IiiuI/AAAAAAAAARc/72apZ7igoZ8/s1600/skippy.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570382881221675746" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_thM1vLvREHo/TU35t6IiiuI/AAAAAAAAARc/72apZ7igoZ8/s200/skippy.jpg" /></a>ay's <strong>Skippy Dies</strong> 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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><em>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.<br />What's that about? He a slippery customer, that it?</em><br /><em>"Actually, I think it's Skippy."</em><br /><em>"Skippy!" the Automator says derisively, "Well , that makes even less<br />sense!</em><br /><em>...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?"</em><br /><br />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).<br /><br />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: <em>hell fire</em>.<br /><br /><br />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 <em>Pachelbel's Canon in D,</em> the boys imagine lighting farts on stage.<br /><br /><em><em>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.</em></em><br /><em><em>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 </em></em><em><em>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.</em></em><br /><em><br /></em><em></em>Sk<strong>ippy Dies </strong>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 <strong>Catcher in the Rye</strong> (for the third time) and I'm having trouble summoning up the courage to read about more alienated youth.christinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17918778015326367006noreply@blogger.com0