The Titian Librarian

The Language of Flowers

2011-11-14T15:46:00.003-05:00

Best book this year, hands down.

Why?

1. Takes place in the Bay Area. If you have lived there, you will know the streets, the neighborhoods, the parks and the flower markets in San Francisco. You'll be able to picture the vineyard north of the City. You can feel the sun, smell the air, everything... It adds so much to your reading experience.

2. Lots of flowers. I'm a sucker for flowers. I loved this book, devoured these, and love my plant identification guides on my home bookshelf. Not only is this book about growing and selling flowers, but it's also about flowers on another level.

3. Nearly dead languages brought back to life--in the book, it's the Latin names of plants and the Victorian language of flowers. Witness the ongoing symbolism of the various flowers and names throughout the novel--you'll be constantly flipping to the dictionary of flowers and their Latin names that's conveniently tucked at the end of the novel.

4. A heroine who does not follow the rules of society. Way more interesting to read about than ordinary, law-abiding folks. And she's flawed in ways that are recognizable and inspire empathy.

5. A touch of the fantastical. An apartment with a half-sized door, a midwife with an eerie sense of what is about to happen...

6. Love. [sigh] No explanation needed.

The Borrower

2011-11-14T15:18:00.004-05:00

Lucy Hull is a twenty-six year old Russian-American woman who graduated from Mount Holyoke with an English degree. At the end of college, she broke up with her boyfriend and systematically worked her way down a list of connections provided by the Career Development Office. That's how she ends up as the unlicensed children's librarian in a town in Missouri, working for an alcoholic director and feeling utterly alone.

p. 8: "At twenty-six I was the head children's librarian only because I was willing to work more hours than the other two (much older) women, Sarah-Ann and Irene, who seemed to see the library as some kind of volunteer work, like a soup kitchen.

'We're so lucky they give us their time,' said Loraine. Which was true, as they were often busy remodeling entire rooms. I was four years out of college, had started biting my nails again, and was down to two adult friends. I lived alone in an apartment two towns over. A simple maiden lady librarian."

Good, but I found I enjoyed the first third of the book far more than the remaining two thirds. Something about what could have been her standoffishness came across as a lack of character depth. She was so unknowing about why she was doing what she did that I had trouble following her actions with empathy--along the lines of, "if she doesn't know why she's doing what she's doing, then how can I understand her motives?" I spent time wishing that there was an omniscient narrator who could shed light on her views.

But still, it's definitely a good book and well worth the reading. Enjoy!

The Egypt Game

2011-11-14T14:35:00.004-05:00

Have you read The Borrower yet? If not, stop now and I'll wait for you to go out and read it.

...

So now that you're back (or if you're one of the lucky few who's already read the book), then you know that the Rebecca Makkai weaves dozens of children's books into the story's narrative--The Phantom Tollbooth, Charlotte's Web, Matilda, the Narnia series, Madeline, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and Choose Your Own Adventure series are just a few examples. The references are often subtle, unnoticeable if you don't know the books themselves. Sometimes, though, Makkai specifically mentions books by name, and The Egypt Game was one of them. I had never read this book before, so I had no time to waste.

It's a perfectly good book about children creating an imaginary world in the fenced-in yard behind the city antique shop, but reading the book now showed me how important it is to read children's book as a child. No matter how many children's books I read now, my viewpoint and imagination is that of an adult. I'm struck by things like the lack of description and the gaps in time and character complexity. But that's less important to a child. Then, I didn't want to be bogged down with details, and my imagination was eager to fill in the gaps left by the author.

Making an Apartment into a Home!

2011-11-14T13:37:00.006-05:00

Recently I and my cat became the sole dwellers in my beautiful 1200 square foot apartment. Imagine tall ceilings, big windows and sun-drenched hardwood floors. I love it. I'm especially loving the feeling of freedom that comes when you alone get to choose your environment--how you decorate it, how and when you clean it, and how you use it. I'm finding myself choosing to be spare with tchotchkes, heavy on comfort and practicality, and I like not bringing in anything new to the space until I know what purpose the object will serve and where it will "live."

Both these books are a great inspiration in this mission. Isn't it exciting?

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest

2011-11-14T13:13:00.003-05:00

Good for step-by-step directions for canning--both water bath and pressure--but I've been primarily using this book to learn about freezing fruits and vegetables. Wet packs, dry packs, and tons of recipes to cook before freezing.

Poser: my life in twenty-three yoga poses

2011-10-25T21:39:00.003-04:00

Interesting, but I struggled to get beyond the middle of the book when poses are repeated. I did not finish it.

p. 177: "I wanted him to desire me ardently and hopelessly. This was of course impossible. I was married, and therefore known. I wanted to be perfect and adored for it, but any fool knows that you cannot be known and perfect at the same time."

The Social Animal: the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement

2011-10-25T21:31:00.007-04:00

This was the summer book club book choice. Folks were strongly divided over their opinions of the book and its author--they either liked it or hated it. I liked it. I think it's a nice interweaving of a lot of social theories with characters. Imagine that it's a serial published in Psychology Today, and maybe that will give you a better sense of which camp you'd fit into after reading it.

p. 208: "This yearning for harmony, or limerence, can manifest itself in small mundane ways. People experience a small spark of pleasure when they solve a crossword puzzle or when they sit down and find a perfectly set table that meets their standards of 'just so.'"

The Quiet Girl

2011-04-11T19:32:00.007-04:00

Meh. The characters, especially the mysterious clown who can hear the individual musical tones emanating from people, are unforgettable. The action, however, much of it political and in flashbacks, is complex and hard to track throughout the chapters.

I couldn't finish it. I'd like to come back to it someday, though.

Skylight Confessions

2011-04-11T14:33:00.007-04:00

This one has seeped into my brain like memories that aren't mine. Without a definite beginning or ending, I get a sense that I have always known pieces of this story, and I find myself pondering parts of this story without having a clear sense of where they came from--

It seems that Alice Hoffman's books do this to me. In The Ice Queen, I identified so fully with the protagonist that, occasionally on some mornings, half asleep in bed, I still find myself half dreaming that I have been hit by lightning and forever changed. It feel utterly natural in the moment, of course, although so often dreamlike morning thoughts sound like lunacy in daylight.

In this book, young Arlyn, raw from her father's death, decides that she will marry the next man who walks down the street, not simply out of necessity or loneliness, but because she declares that he "will be my one love and I will be true to him as long as he's true to me." So when Yale architecture student John Moody pulls up in his car asking for directions, her path becomes clear and her resolve unshakable.

Years later, it's clear that Arlyn and John have a terrible but complex relationship, a son named Sam with disturbing emotional issues, and a daughter named Blanca upon whose shoulders so much responsibility for family cohesiveness rests. They all live in John's family's house named the Glass Slipper, a giant architectural wonder made all of glass.

What I have told you here is merely a stepping stone for the rest of the story.

p. 30: "Watching John in the half-light of spring, with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, Arlyn remembered how she had felt the first time she saw him, back when he was lost and she was so dead set on finding him."

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: a novel

2011-04-04T12:31:00.007-04:00

Amazing. Best book I've read so far this year, hands down.

As soon as I brought it back, I recommended it to a patron, and bam! it's checked out. So you'll have to wait until it's checked in again for the shortlist of delicious quotes I want to share with you.

20th Century Ghosts

2011-03-10T20:29:00.002-05:00

Read it for a book group. Meh...

Christopher Golden (who wrote the introduction) called it "subtle," but I'd call it

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

2011-02-25T16:14:00.013-05:00

This is a series of interconnected short stories that I just wasn't ready to read. I like Bloom's style, but some of her characters were off-putting, in the way that I almost want to dissect them to figure out what exactly it is about them that's so distasteful--perhaps it's something I need to explore further.

The set of characters that bothered me most were William and Clare. Although they have both been happily married to other people for decades, they are seemingly unable to resist each other now. William is grotesquely obese and superbly spoiled and Clare can't stop thinking that William's wife Isabel is a better wife to him than she is as his mistress.

Why can't I find empathy with either character? I like to think that I'm an empathetic and open-minded adult, but I'm hitting a wall here. Is it the affair? I don't think that reading about an affair necessarily turns me off from the characters--I did enjoy Emily Giffin's fictional foray into affairs in Heart of the Matter. Is it because the characters are old? Or maybe because they're not attractive or young? Or because their spouses are portrayed as so decidedly good. I may have to revisit this book in a few years to see if I can accept the characters, foibles and all, in the future.

From a later story in the book, a brother is talking about his brother's relationship:
p. 116: "My brother married someone more beautiful and wild than I would have chosen. They had terrible, flying-dishes fights and passionate reconciliations every few months, and they managed to divorce and remarry in one year, without even embarrassing themselves. Jewelle loved Buster to death and told me she only left when he needed leaving, and my brother would say in her defense that it was nothing less than the truth. He never said what he had done that would deserve leaving, and I can't think that it was anything very bad. There is no bad even in the depths of Buster's soul, and when I am sick of him, his undaunted, fat-and-sassy younger brotherness, I think that there are no depths.

And finally, from one of the last stories, about the aftermath of a murder:
p. 177-178: "I don't miss the dead less, I miss them more. I miss the tall pines around Lake Pleasant, I miss the brown-and-gray cobblestones on West Cedar Street, I miss the red-tailed hawks that fly so often in pairs. I miss the cheap red wine in a box and I miss the rum and Coke. I miss Anne's wet gold hair drying as we sat on the fire escape. I miss the hot-dog luau and driving to dance lessons after breakfast at Bruegger's Bagels. I miss the cold mornings on the farm, when the handle of the bucket bit into my small hands and my feet slid over the frozen dew. I miss the hot grease spattering around the felafel balls and the urgent clicking of Hebrew. I miss the new green leaves shaking in the June rain. I miss standing on my father's shiny shoes as we danced to 'The Tennessee Waltz' and my mother made me a paper fan so I could flirt like a Southern belle, tapping my nose with the fan. I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary."

How I Became a Famous Novelist

2010-12-20T18:19:00.017-05:00

Different, but okay in a weird way. The whole story is good, but last two pages made me yearn for so much more (you'll see). Total hipster appeal, comparable to The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walters. Both protagonists are on a desperate quest for literary success, but while Walter's character is absolutely earnest in his sincere efforts to write a financial newsletter in verse, Hely's character couldn't be more contemptuous of writing and is entirely focused on the wealth and fame he expects will come after publication of his book, The Tornado Ashes Club.

I've been scouring my Internet history trying to remember where I heard about this 2009 title, but with no luck. Damned RSS readers that leave no breadcrumb trail I can follow...

Anywho, somebody liked this book well enough to write an enticing review, and I took the bait. Here's the NPR interview of the author on Fresh Air, along with a good chunk of chapter 1. And if IMDB is to be trusted, we can expect to see it in a movie theater in 2012.

p. 50, when Pete Tarslaw is planning out the type of book to write:

"Not including a murder in your book is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself? [...]

Writing an updated version of some public domain story seemed like a worry-free route to literary success. A ready-made plot would keep my mental effort to a minimum. It would just be gussying up the SparkNotes, really. In my notebook I wrote down a few ideas: Oliver Twist in exclusive San Diego gated community? Huckleberry Finn with a hovercraft? Hamlet but he loves sudoku? Iliad among Hawaiian surfer chicks? But these all seemed tough to maintain past the first hundred pages." (emphasis and hyperlink is mine)

Ms. Hempel Chronicles

2010-12-07T18:59:00.012-05:00

I came across this list by Jonathan Franzen a little while back. He discusses four older books that never received the attention they should have, and this little gem is one of them.

As a child, Ms. Hempel (and her teachers) thought that she would grow up to become a famous writer, but here she is, grown up to be a very ordinary seventh grade teacher. Too inexperienced to feel terribly good at her job, too unsure of her career choice, but too dismayed by life to consider doing anything else.

Here are eight stories about her, from her sweetly naive and honest thoughts about her students (whom she feels she is letting down every day with her substandard teaching), to thoughts of her fiance, a forgettable classmate from her childhood with whom she has forged an amenable, if only tolerable, relationship.

So it sounds really negative, right? Not so much. I really enjoyed it. She aptly captures the innocence and earnest effort that I think most adults in their 20s pour into their jobs. Her characters complicated and lovable. Plus the writing is superb; Bynum was a finalist for the National Book Award for a previous work.

p. 11: "She was not a good teacher, yet teaching had rendered her unfit for everything else: She was not a good friend (she didn't return phone calls), nor a good lover (a student's smiling face would suddenly materialize before her, mid-coitus), nor a good citizen (she didn't have time to read up on the propositions before she went to vote). She had chosen teaching because it seemed to offer both tremendous opportunities for leisure and the satisfaction of doing something generous and worthwhile. Too late she realized her mistake; teaching had invaded her like a mild but inexorable infection; her students now inhabited her dreams, her privacy, her language."

On talking about her two best friends from her own childhood --p. 58: "They served as each other's most passionate advocates: no one, in Beatrice's mind, was as intelligent and beautiful and kind and brave and talented as Kate and Greta. And Kate and Greta, in turn, would insist the same of Beatrice. It was puzzling, then, that together they had managed to collect such a number of men who seemed less alert to these qualities."

Rolling Rose

2010-10-26T14:11:00.016-04:00

Baby Rose is in her "Rosemobile." But when no one is watching, she rolls out the door, out of the garden, down the sidewalk, and out of town! Luckily, she and the other runaway babies come back home in time for their baths and bedtime. Original, funny, and sweet.

How much of this idea was used for the HP commercial below? A little, or A LOT--that's right, the latter. And the lesson of the story is...if you are an advertiser with an idea, chances are good that a talented and funny writer thought of it before you.

Last Night in Montreal

2010-10-21T20:16:00.008-04:00

This summer on Morning Edition, I heard librarian Nancy Pearl review Last Night in Montreal in glowing terms, so I ordered it from another library ($13000 was removed from our library's book-buying budget by the director, so purchasing books is a rarity these days).

Maybe I just expected too much after hearing that Pearl was "entranced" by this book's characters and language and "breathtaking" ending. But I only found this book good, not great (and yes, I realize that this is yet another situation in which I prove just how picky a reader I am). I had trouble connecting with the characters, and so much of the book felt like everything (plot, character, etc.) was stuck at a standstill.

One of the elements I did enjoy was when the protagonist discusses his seemingly neverending thesis on endangered and extinct languages. Here's an excerpt from p. 17 where Eli's explaining his thesis:

"Three thousand languages, destined to vanish. He'd become obsessed with the untranslatable: his idea, and the subject of his thesis (or what had been a thesis, some years earlier, before it suddenly imploded and went unfinishable on him overnight), was that every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated. Not just a word but an idea, like the French déjà vu: perfect and crystalline in its native language, otherwise explainable only by entire clumsy foreign paragraphs or not at all. In Yup'ik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K'iche, there is the Nawal: one's spiritual essence but separate from the self; one's other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned."

And in an example of NPR completing this circle, just this past week on Radio Times I heard this program on endangered languages and what they're able to convey in one word that no other language can do so succinctly. Life imitating art imitating life...

The Magicians

2010-10-20T14:52:00.008-04:00

I left off at p. 206, returning this to the library after weeks of it languishing unread at my bedside. I'll check it out again in a while, because I read this blog post, I get excited about it all over again. Helen describes the mood better than I could, but in short, the plot follows a New York City teen who is inducted into a school of magic called Brakebills that is much darker, more adult and more abstract than Hogwarts.

p. 71: "In the end he went home for five days. And for a moment, as he was climbing the front stairs, and the good old familiar home smell descended on him, a lethal enchantment compounded of cooking and paint and Oriental rugs and dust, when he saw his mother's toothy, exasperated smile and his dad's hale, stubbly good humor, he became the person that he used to be around them again, and he felt the gravitational pull of the little kid he once was and in some unswept back corner of his soul always would be."

p. 127: "In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to be have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory."

The Cookbook Collector: a Novel

2010-10-20T14:01:00.009-04:00

Another awesome book that is partially set in the Bay Area of California. What other books claim setting here? Immediately, I think of The Monk Downstairs (Tim Farrington), Backseat Saints (Joshilyn Jackson), and My Name is Will: a novel of drugs, sex and Shakespeare (Jess Winfield).

A love story hiding in a book about rare books and intense characters--all wildly dedicated to their causes (environmentalism to collecting to business), to their characteristics (curmudgeonly to naive), and drawn together by blood, love or lust. I started this book eagerly, fell into a slump in the middle when thought I knew where the plot was going, and finished it at 2 AM with a bang!--amazing ending that I never saw coming, even though it was right in front of my face the whole time. Awesome.

p. 81: "She looked up at him and wondered how his eyes were so blue and his skin so dark, and how he could be shy and also confident, and most of all, what he was thinking, but she didn't dare ask. And he saw her wondering, and he gazed at her delicate upturned face and felt a sudden tenderness for her, a little pang of responsibility. I'll never never hurt you, he promised silently."

The Naturally Clean Home: 150 Super-Easy Herbal Formulas for Green Cleaning

2010-10-20T13:35:00.006-04:00

I love this book. When my partner and I moved into a new apartment this summer, I tried at least a dozen of the recipes in the deep cleaning I did that first month--hardwood floors, window blinds, window glass, dishes and more. I found these homemade cleaning solutions effective and their odor innoxious--a far cry from the terrible headaches I get from most hard-core commercial cleaners and air fresheners.

When I first got the book, I read and reread it, trying to absorb the specifics of each recipe--this one for laundry, this one for counters, and so on. In reality, I found that once you're comfortable with the properties of the ingredients (borax, vinegar, baking soda, essential oils), it's not essential that you follow the recipes to the letter. You can start to improvise with what you have around the house and what scents you enjoy.

The White Garden: a novel of Virginia Woolf

2010-10-19T15:55:00.010-04:00

If you're a fan of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, the Bloomsbury group, or you like garden-themed cozy mysteries, I think you'll enjoy this one. I picked it up because I'm intrigued by authors who create fiction about other authors; it's like the respectable version of fan fiction, in which you borrow the author's life rather than their characters for your own work.

Unfortunately, I reached the end of the book feeling very apathetic about the whole thing. The characters never grabbed my imagination (or rather, these fictional versions of them didn't), and I wanted to know more about where the facts ended and Barron's storytelling began. Maybe it would have helped if I had read a book about Vita's garden first, seen some photos of it--gotten some base knowledge of the real before delving into the fictional.

p. 34: "Lists were a staple of Jo's life. They made her feel purposeful and competent, and they were usually written in red ink. "

This is so true for me, and the color of the ink really does make a difference. Oh, it's always a treat when I see my own absurd quirks reflected in fictional characters!

Gods in Alabama: a novel

2010-10-18T20:38:00.005-04:00

Gripping, but I didn't like it as much as Jackson's Backseat Saints, which is its companion book (the plotlines and some characters are intertwined).

After a fight with her boyfriend, Lena calls his mother for advice.

p. 73: "She released a loud breath into the phone, and then she said, 'Then I'll tell you two things. The first is, you have to give him something he wants. Right now I think he's feeling that everything flows in one direction, from him to you. He's thinking you don't care about him the way he cares for you. So you need to yield some. But the second thing I'm telling you is, you better make him bend, too. You don't ever let a man say 'My way or nothing' to you. Not even a good man. Not even my son. And you never say 'My way or nothing' to him. You don't take your sweetheart's love and use it on him. You can do that to your mama, but not your sweetheart.' I smiled at that.

She went on, 'He's wrong by doing that with you. But you're wrong to put him in a place where he feels so poor he thinks he has to say that. You both need to bend, but I think this time it has to start with you. And that's all I can say to you without breaking confidence. Now, don't you make me sorry I helped you.'"

p. 326: "'You're too hard on yourself. I think boys just don't ask you out because you don't flirt. You have to talk to them like you think they're the very best one. They won't ask you unless you practically send up a big firework that will explode right over their heads saying, 'Yes, yes, I totally like you!' Boys live every second scared to death a girl is going to say no when they ask her out."

Addition: a novel

2010-10-18T16:31:00.005-04:00

An obsessive-compulsive woman named Grace has shaped her life to fit her illness. From her need to buy ten of every item at the supermarket to her need to cook exactly the same dinner every night, she has limited her world to accommodate this seemingly necessary minutiae. Of course, when she meets Seamus at the grocery store, he complicates her life in ways that challenge her reasoning.

I thought the subject matter was unique, the dialogue fast-paced and witty, and certain observations of the protagonist were spot-on. I especially liked the little detail that Grace keeps a photo of Nikola Tesla (fellow OCD sufferer) in her bedroom, beloved because he was able to balance his obsessions with his career as a brilliant inventor. Yet I still had trouble empathizing with the protagonist, and even more trouble believing that her romance bore some semblance with reality.

p. 22: "I used to be good at flirting. A lot of people think that flirting's about sex. Well, flirting's about surprise, and surprise is about sex. If someone can be unexpected using words, imagine how thrilling they could be using their mouth."

p. 196: "That tenderness that boys are made of before school and hormones frustrate and sharpen them." What a beautiful sentence!

Gardening Shelf

2010-10-17T14:27:00.036-04:00

I'm returning all my 635s to the library now, and I wanted to show you some great new titles that I've been reading this past growing season.

Low Maintenance Garden: Yes, the cover says "gardening," but the book title is actually "garden." Not surprisingly, this is a DK publication. But the step-by-step color photos of processes are useful, and the easy-care plant guide gives a lot of good information to help you when you go shopping at the nursery. Good inspiration for plant groupings too. A+ for browsing on a winter afternoon while planning for next year's garden and landscaping.

Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens: This book gives very specific, multiple-year plans for gardens. What to plant, even the layout of your garden from year to year. Great for someone planning their first big garden. B+ for bogging me down with specifics but having a cool, hand-drawn, earthy layout.

Grow Your Own Vegetables: Read this with your seed catalog in one hand; the listings of varieties and their traits will help you choose your seeds for next year. A+ for well-organized content, appetizing layout and charming British overtones (courtesy of the Royal Horticultural Society).

Garden Plants & Flowers Through the Year: an A-Z Guide to the Best Plants for Your Garden: Another DK production. I found this more useful as a plant identification guide than anything else. When I see a beautiful plant in a park or a yard, this is where I've been looking it up. An A for comprehensive index and great color photos.

Vegetable Gardening: From Planting to Picking: the Complete Guide to Creating a Bountiful Garden: This one is from Reader's Digest. Big, attractive (full-color photos throughout) introductory book for gardeners. Each page features a different plant, with easy-to-refer-to headings for each such as "planting guide," "care," and "harvesting," as well as the authors' favorite varieties. I like the idea of having this one on your shelf all the time; then you can refer to it whenever questions arise. A+ for detailed information while still remaining "browsable."

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

2010-10-13T20:37:00.013-04:00

I've officially fallen for Alice Munro. She's so articulate, writing beautifully about the complexity of ordinary lives. Plus she's Canadian. Plus she won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, with judge Jane Smiley remarking that "[h]er work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise" (you can read Smiley's entire presentation of the award here). [Swoon!]

First I stumbled upon her newest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness. That led me to a whole host of titles, so I dove into this 2001 collection. If you haven't read her, please--do.

Nina remembers her husband Lewis after his death by euthanasia:

from Comfort, p. 128: "They did get job, both of them, at the high school--though Nina gave up teaching a few years later, when Latin was phased out. She could have taken upgrading courses, preparing herself to teach something else, but she was just as glad, secretly, to no longer be working in the same place, and at the same sort of job, as Lewis. The force of his personality, the unsettling style of his teaching, made enemies as well as friends, and it was a rest, for her, not to be in the thick of it."

A retired professor is visiting his Alzheimer's stricken wife at the nursing home, where she has become romantic with a fellow resident, Aubrey. He recalls his own (and fellow professors') indiscretions throughout their marriage. I love the brevity and complexity of the last clause (talking about the wives).

from The Bear Came Over the Mountain, p. 302: "Scandals burst wide open, with high and painful drama all round but a feeling that somehow it was better so. There were reprisals--there were firings. But those fired went off to teach at smaller, more tolerant colleges or Open Learning Centers, and many wives left behind got over the shock and took up the costumes, the sexual nonchalance of the girls who had tempted their men."

War Dances

2010-10-13T20:09:00.005-04:00

As always with Alexie, awesome. He writes roughly and truthfully and sweetly all at once. If you haven't read anything by him, check out The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

The Ice Queen

2010-10-13T16:43:00.005-04:00

I loved this book. Loved it for its protagonist, its story-telling rhythm that aches to be read aloud, and its wild Grimm-like fairy-tale descriptions. I feel so akin to her character, and I wish that her words were mine. I am lost for words on this one, so I'll say it again: I simply loved this book.

p. 23: "It was my first cry in a long time, and I overdid it. I sat there sobbing, shudders running through me. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by everything, a wreck, true enough. My hair had fallen out in clumps and there was that dreadful clicking noise in the back of my head. I still wasn't able to hold down solid food. The doctor had told me the symptoms were similar to someone suffering from radiation poisoning. That's how I felt--to my bones, to my toes--poisoned. All down my afflicted side there was a wrenched sort of feeling, as if something had been twisted. A short in my electrical system, I supposed. My very essence, my inner self was gone. I reached for things and couldn't feel them. It was as though everything solid had slipped away from me. Inside, my heart felt frozen."

p. 160: "I thought about the way old blind women in stories found their lost loves and recognized them even though fifty or a hundred years had passed, even if their husbands or lovers had been turned into stags or monsters. I thought about how the familiar imprinted itself on you--a hedge, a scent, a touch. If someone had taken a photograph of Lazarus and me together and pinned it to a wall, anyone who'd seen it would have thought, They aren't meant for each other. They don't belong together. So we didn't take any photographs. I had questioned how it was possible for this man to love me all along, but I had finally begun to understand the reason: I knew him. If he came to me as a bear or a deer, I would still know him. If I were blind, if it was at dusk, if a hundred years had passed, I'd still know."

Heart of the Matter

2010-10-03T16:50:00.009-04:00

Giffin does it again. My favorite of hers is still Love the One You're With, but Heart of the Matter is just as real, empathetic, well-written and often painful as her other books. This one addresses the question: how does an affair start? Can anyone be considered blameless in that situation?

p. 336: "Grief is a more complicated matter. It is something I can't direct at Nick, as it is also about my loss, my children's loss, the loss of our family and everything I once cherished and believed in. It has a component of fear and one of regret--of wishing I could turn back the clock and do things differently, more vigilantly guard my marriage. Be a better wife. Pay him more attention. Have more sex. Be more attractive. When the grief hits, I find myself looking inward, blaming myself for somehow allowing this to happen, for not seeing it coming at all. Grief also has a disorienting effect, offering no game plan whatsoever, leaving me only one option: to suffer there in the moment, until it is usurped by rage once again."

Are Men Necessary?: when sexes collide

2010-09-30T18:36:00.005-04:00

Read this one when you're feeling bitter about men and you want someone to back up your feelings. Funny, conversational and cynical about men and the ways that women behave around them, Dowd reminds me of Lisa Scottoline, a fellow newspaper columnist.

But stop reading every few chapters--too much and Dowd's refrain of cynicism will affect you. Because the book is a series of essays, the chapters each seem to start over at ground zero. Each one echoes similar emotions rather than building on each other to form a cohesive argument or satisfying conclusion. Bottom line: read it expecting enjoyment, not expecting a gender argument.

From p. 9: "My mom, a soft touch who loved men, suggested that I change my title to Why Men Are Necessary. 'Men are necessary for breeding and heavy lifting,' she said wryly."

Skin: a novel

2010-09-30T15:45:00.011-04:00

Our narrator, Donnie, is a fourteen year old with a family falling apart--his sister has anorexia, his parents are fighting constantly, and his father is clueless about raising his own children. In the midst of all this, no one has time hear from Donnie.

While this book is written to be Donnie's narration of his older sister Karen's disease, it also pulls in Donnie's own high school struggles in a moving, painful story. I thought this was a decently written, emotional journey that will connect with most teens (regardless of gender).

p. 120: "Every day since Karen's been gone, I practice floating through the school halls like a ghost. I don't touch anyone and I imagine that the times I do I brush up against their arms it feels like a clammy, cold breath on their skin. I sit in the back of class and I don't raise my hand. I ignore everyone, even the teachers. Not the kind of ignoring where you jut out your chin and hope that everyone notices you ignoring them. I ignore them like we're not even in the same universe. I ignore them because it's easy: I'm not even here. My goal is to get through the whole school day without anyone talking to me. I decide once I do that, I'll become a superhero. I'll become Donnie Disappeared."

Backseat Saints

2010-09-02T20:20:00.006-04:00

VERY good. Good just short of Verbena good, but better than Jodi Picoult.

Rose Mae Lolley can't stop thinking about her high school sweetheart, especially now that she's decided to escape her abusive marriage for a new life. On her own (but for her fat little dog Gretel), Rose Mae begins a desperate journey to find the boyfriend who disappeared, but what she finds has more to do with her long-gone mother and her own struggle to define herself.

I loved this book for its subtle magical realism (think of Like Water for Chocolate or Chocolat), its characters' complexity (an abusive history is never simple, but it's often portrayed as a simple victim/victimizer one), and its section set in Berkeley, California. Odd and yet comforting in its familiarity, any books set there remind me of my childhood and strike a chord in me.

A fortune-teller watches Rose Mae use her beauty to get what she wants from a man and comments (p. 37):

"'I remember, in my twenties, especially, how I would feel a young man turn and see me. I'd watch his face become bright and greedy. Always made me feel like a naked Christmas tree, how he'd be hanging things all over me, expectations and wants. Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you'll be onto you till you're so weighed down you can't move.'"

Rose Mae is walking in Berkeley with Gretel when they encounter a homeless man (p. 235):

"'The weird go west,' I tell my dog. Anyone too strange for Berkeley must walk straight into the sea like a lemming to drown. Or possibly grow gills. If they are too odd for this city, there can be no place for them above sea level.'"

Crunch

2010-07-29T15:04:00.008-04:00

This was a fun, straightforward chapter book for those under twelve. The story centers around a group of kids whose parents took a trip just before a massive gas shortage. Their parents are stranded out of town, and the children are left to fend for themselves, all while running the family business, a bike repair shop. Business at the Marriss Bike Barn is booming now, almost too much!

Like a combination of the Boxcar Children (absent parents) and Who Killed Cock Robin (environmentally driven plotline), but sometimes I felt as though the author was trying to tackle too many issues without satisfactorily resolving any of them.

I liked this quote...our protagonist is sitting up late with his youngest siblings waiting for his parents to finally arrive home:

p 263: "Bedtime caught up to Angus and Eva. Soon they were just staring. I'd watched them do this before--reach the end of the day with their eyes still open but with everything else all gone to sleep."

Too Much Happiness

2010-06-02T18:35:00.004-04:00

Divine.

To Read Later

2010-05-27T20:02:00.006-04:00

Sometimes you can't read everything you want. Life becomes busier, you've moved on to a different short-term favorite genre, or someone has recommended the book and you just don't know what the polite thing is to do without reading it. So you write it down.

Making a list of books to read shows good intentions (whether genuine or fake) and eliminates the need for optimistic thoughts like "I'll stumble on this one book again, out of the hundreds of thousands of books I could possibly reach for in this library. When I see it I'll remember that I wanted to read it, I'll have the time to read it, and I'll actually (gasp) read it."

Here's my newest list:

How we live & why we die: the secret lives of cells / Lewis Wolpert

Nocturnes: five stories of music and nightfall / Kazuo Ishiguro

The Sugar Queen: a novel / Sarah Addison Allen

Child 44 / Tom Rob Smith

Catching Fire: how cooking made us human / Richard Wrangham

more to come...

The Financial Lives of the Poets

2010-05-27T19:17:00.009-04:00

I did not like it. I thought it was outlandish and yet trendy (in that odd, hipster-cool in the oversize sunglasses and too-tight pants clutched to man-hips way).*

A journalist sinks all his money into a failure--a website that dispenses financial advice in free verse, then is seemingly surprised as everything else goes to pot: his marriage, the mortgage on his house, and his job. So he turns to pot himself--literally--he becomes a weed dealer for yuppies in his neighborhood. Like My Name is Will, the author reached for a distant far-fetched plot, but where Winfield succeeds in humor and transcendent emotion, Walter falls a little short.

However, if you have a bunch of poetry you've read rushing around between your ears, you'll really enjoy the way that Walter inserts it so neatly into the text. It's so quietly done, what you don't recognize you'll miss. For example, on p. 91, he's driving with his weed dealer to a growhouse hidden in a low-key suburban neighborhood:

"We park behind a red Camaro (so much depends on a red Camaro) and I follow Dave and Jamie between piles of leaves up the sidewalk..."

*One could say, "Oh, but you're one of the hipsters, aren't you?" In many ways, yes; I do enjoy dark roast coffee and museums and I like being around "artistic" people. But no, because I wear regular pants, regular sunglasses, and I like my fictional tragedies as real as possible.

A Spring Without Bees: how colony collapse disorder has endangered our food supply

2010-05-27T18:27:00.008-04:00

This one was hard to get through for two reasons: one, because of the wealth of scientific data combined with my lack of science knowledge made for tedious reading, and two, because of the sense of powerlessness one gets upon learning about this enormous and tremendously important issue that is largely unreported in news media or understood by the general public.

In short, pesticide companies like Bayer and BASF are spraying flowering crops and trees with neurotoxic chemicals like imidacloprid, fipronil, thiamethoxam, and clothianidin. Neurotoxins (like DDT) are designed to take out an insect starting with its nervous system, and they are very potent, requiring only a small dose to be effective. These long-lasting toxins remain in the environment for years, and the combined effect of honeybees feeding on treated crops and feeding on plants grown in ground that was treated years ago is taking its toll. The bees take this toxic pollen back to the hive, where they store it until the fall (in the US). Once the bees eat this contaminated nectar, their immune systems become so compromised that if the neurotoxins don't kill the bees, then varroa mites or exposure to additional pesticides or malnutritious monocrop diet (a la commercial bees, who are trucked in to feed on one crop at a time) will do them in.

[If people more science-minded than I find an error with this last paragraph, let me know: I will freely admit that I may be oversimplifying/misstating in trying to create sense out of a complicated situation.]

If you care about the effect of humans on the environment, you've considered raising honeybees, or you just have a yen for science, I highly recommend this book. You won't regret the knowledge you will have gained.

Short Girls: a novel

2010-05-27T16:36:00.016-04:00

With all the books I've been bashing lately, I was starting to feel like it was just me, that my terrible reviews weren't a reflection of the books, but symptoms of a more encompassing negative outlook. But I loved this book. LOVED it. (So maybe in disproving this theory it means I'm okay after all...)

Van and her sister Linny are smart, troubled and leading very different lives in the Michigan/Illinois area. Van, a self-doubting but brilliant immigration lawyer, is living in "The Perfect House" in the suburbs, where everything about the house --down to the "carefully chosen jazz music" has been selected by her husband. Linny is dating a married man and feeling unsettled with her life managing a make-ahead meal business. Their widowed father has been perfecting his beloved invention, the Luong Arm, an extendable grabber tool, since the girls were young.

It would be easy to say that the action gets rolling when Linny spots Van's husband in a bar with another woman, but the truth is that life is more complex than that. Each character is struggling in her/his own way, and Nguyen is empathetic but fair when looking at the complications of aging, relying on one's family, forging one's identity and feeling satisfied with oneself.

Upon Van discovering that her fiance Miles kept pictures of his previous girlfriends hung in the house:

p. 39: "She knew, by then, that in order to keep him she would have to sweep away what bothered her. And she did want to keep him. She wanted, with a fierceness that daily rebloomed, to have what the other women could only eye, or remember, from afar."

p. 43: "When Van and Miles moved into their house, the framed women disappeared along with Julie's black and whites. Grateful for his silent tact, Van took it as a sign of how well Miles understood her. How much he truly did love her. She was glad she had suppressed the urge to throw away the photos or say something about them. Now that she and Miles were married it was all worth it. Like a strange hazing she had survived."

p. 183: "There's a core insecurity about you, Miles had told her once. This was weeks before their wedding, when a sentence like that could both shatter Van and make her determined to be the opposite. I'm not criticizing, he added. I'm just curious about where it comes from. Van didn't say what she really thought: Didn't he think she'd tried to figure that out a thousand times already? She'd blamed her height, and being Asian in a mostly white, conservative town in the Midwest, and sometimes called it shyness coded into her genes. Van had never explained to Miles, or to anyone, how exhausting it was to work against the sense of inadequacy that arose whenever she felt on display--whether it was on the Model UN team or in the courtroom. [...]She knew well that secret feeling of being tucked away, unseen."

A Good Fall: stories

2010-05-27T16:17:00.012-04:00

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. Very moving, but pain-filled. Loyalty to Chinese culture rubs uncomfortably up against American culture in many of the stories.

In the short story In the Crossfire, a young man invites his mother from China to stay for two months with him and his wife. Neither woman can stand the other, and Tian is caught in the middle, unable to bear hurting either and yet resigned to watching his wife Connie withdraw from him and their relationship.

p. 98: "'Mom, you don't get it. This is my home and you shouldn't interfere with my schedule.'

'What did you say? Sure, this is your home, but who are you? You're my son, aren't you!'"

p. 116: "That night Connie asked Tian to share the master bedroom with her, but he wouldn't saying they musn't nettle his mother from now on. He felt sad, afraid that Meifen might change her mind. He remembered that when he was taking the entrance exam fourteen years back, his parents had stood in the rain under a shared umbrella, waiting for him with a lunch tin, sodas, and tangerines wrapped in a handkerchief. They each had half a shoulder soaked through. Oh, never could he forget their anxious faces. A surge of gratitude drove him to the brink of tears. If only he could speak freely to them again."

Slow Death by Rubber Duck: the secret danger of everyday things

2010-05-25T16:18:00.008-04:00

How is it possible that the incredibly toxic chemicals we encounter every day are still legal? Not only legal, but widely used in health and beauty products, baby bottles, food, and toys...

Truth is, the FDA can only regulate substances that have been proven to be harmful (similar to the US justice system, in which you are innocent until proven guilty). Without studies to prove harm, the substances are still considered safe. And the industries reliant on these chemicals are doing everything in their political power to keep longitudinal studies from being funded that will uncover these negative health effects.

I recommend everyone read this, even if you'd rather keep your head in the sand and believe that American businesses are looking out for their consumers.

The Magician's Elephant

2010-05-25T15:48:00.006-04:00

This is a wonderful magical story about a little girl in an orphanage, a fortuneteller, an elephant, a countess, and a little boy trying to find his sister. It's a soothing read-aloud for parents of younger children, especially if you read together before naptime or bedtime. There's a lovely flow to the story, and parents will enjoy seeing how the pieces of the plot intersect each other. There are also several black and white illustrations (reminiscent of Brian Selznick's in The Invention of Hugo Cabret). Very comforting and sweet.

The nun recounts to Adele about her arrival to the orphanage (pp 89-90):

"Were you glad?" said Adele. "Were you glad that I came?" She knew the answer. But she asked anyway.

"I will tell you," said Sister Marie, "that before you arrived, I was sitting here in this chair, alone, and the world was dark, very dark. And then suddenly you were in my arms, and I looked down at you..."

"And you said my name," said Adele.

"Yes, I spoke your name."

"And how did you know it? How did you know my name?"

"The midwife said that your mother, before she had died, had insisted that you be called Adele. I knew your name, and I spoke it to you."

"And I smiled," said Adele.

"Yes," said Sister Marie. "And suddenly, it seemed there was light everywhere. The world was filled with light."

Sister Marie's words settled down over Adele like a warm and familiar blanket, and she closed her eyes.

Posh: a novel

2010-05-25T15:07:00.006-04:00

If you liked Prep or The Nanny Diaries, you'll like this one. It's the world of the New York elite high schools, but from the headmistress's point of view. Kathryn "Lazy" Hoffman has to balance disciplining her spoiled students who expect (through experience!) that they can sail through life without rules or work with pacifying the egos and emotions of the students' powerful, wealthy parents and the school's benefactors. A thin line to walk, indeed.

Hate List

2010-05-20T12:18:00.022-04:00

"Sixteen-year-old Valerie, whose boyfriend Nick committed a school shooting at the end of their junior year, struggles to cope with integrating herself back into high school life, unsure herself whether she was a hero or a villain." (Library of Congress summary)

Meh. Very contemporary and interesting plotline, but I couldn't get very drawn in to the characters.

But it made the ALA's 2010 Best Books for Young Adults, so it works for a lot of people. But you all know I'm a tough sell and very picky...what can I say?

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

2010-05-17T19:41:00.011-04:00

p 112: "'You are unreliable, Flavia,' he said. 'Utterly unreliable.'

Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.

Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like 'boof-boof'--just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible--except when we choose not to be."

p 282: "'What did Flaubert mean,' I asked at last, 'when he said that Madame Bovary gave herself up to Rodolphe?'

'He meant,' Dogger said, 'that they became the greatest of friends. The very greatest of friends.'

'Ah!' I said. 'Just as I thought.'"

p 308: "Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.

But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it 'woman's intuition.'"

The Rose and the Beast: fairy tales retold

2010-04-05T14:56:00.010-04:00

If you're a fan of Robin McKinley's enchanted worlds wherein women find freedom from societal conventions by mythical and majestic means (i.e. The Blue Sword), then you'll enjoy Block's collection of short stories. These are not stories for children, but rather for teens & adults who are looking for thorny, emotionally complicated retellings of classics in a time when Nature was wild and more dangerous.

p. 190-191: "Beauty began to change. Her hair was always a tangle, she bathed less often, her skin smelled of the garden and the forest, she was almost always barefoot--there were hard calluses on her soles. Her senses were so sharp that she could smell and hear things she had never known existed before. This was the happiest she had ever been in her life, if happiness is waking with a start of joy for the day, feeling each moment in every cell of your being, and going to sleep at night with a mind like a clear moonlit sky."

Benny & Shrimp

2010-03-14T21:42:00.013-04:00

Benny and Shrimp live in Sweden, where they meet in a cemetery. Benny is a bachelor dairy farmer who eagerly covers his mother's fresh gravesite with garden plants and Shrimp is a young librarian whose husband's death leaves her immobile to do anything at all but sit on the cemetery bench next to his gravesite.

This is translated from Swedish, and I have to think that we're missing a fair amount of cultural references. Some of the descriptive phrasing is beautiful and unique, but some things just didn't fit right, or I was left guessing why a character would feel this way or that. This detachment from the characters kept me from fully engaging in the pain they feel throughout the story, and the everyday tragedy of the end of their relationship.

Maybe I need to reread this one at a later date.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days

2009-11-24T13:08:00.009-05:00

I hear that the Wimpy Kid is coming soon to a theater near you--"Harrumph," says the crotchety old-lady librarian in me. "Another great book series going to hell in a handbasket with this movie business." I think that three quarters of the appeal of these books are the illustrations--a point lost when you throw real kids onto the screen and expect that the nuances of the real can replace the ridiculousness & truthfulness of the viewpoint of the artist (in this instance, Greg). Who else but a fictional kid whose reality is represented only by cartoons can make the truth fresh with attitude and exaggeration? A real kid just comes across like Malcolm in the Middle. Smarmy and unlikeable and dull.

"Last night I was watching one those television shows where a nanny lives with a family for a week and then tells them all the ways they're screwing up. Well, I don't know if the woman had to go to some special nanny school or something, but that's the kind of job I was BORN to do. I just need to figure out how to get myself in line for that job when the nanny retires." (In the picture, Greg is lecturing a dumpy-looking family of four, saying "Your house is a wreck, your kids have no manners, and ...hey, Mr. Johnson, you're not going OUT in that shirt, are you?")

A La Carte

2009-08-28T12:05:00.014-04:00

A few weeks ago the New York Times had a great article by Michael Pollan on why, with so many cooking shows on television, so few ordinary people actually cook. Parents are raising their children on take-out and tv dinners, so the next generation is even less likely to cook for themselves.

This book for teens is trying to buck that trend. Not only does 17 year old Lainey cook, but she wants to be a celebrity chef. And with so few African American chefs on television, she knows there's an opening for a woman of her talents. Lainey is a lovable character with real-life teen problems of boys and school, but she is also very mature, continually coming up with new dessert recipes for her mother's restaurant and nurturing everyone around her with rich comfort food when times are tough.

This is an excellent book for the right teen.

Home Repair

2009-08-12T18:56:00.011-04:00

Eve's husband leaves her the morning of their garage sale--just goes on an errand and within one sentence he is gone. Now she's got to carry on as if everything's just fine while she cares for all the other people who crop up in her life. I have mixed emotions about this book: the plot feels forced and characters are on the cardboard side. However, I liked the chapters of this book about Eve with her ailing mother; her character is much more real in those spots. Perhaps one would enjoy it more if one's personal history more closely matched that of the protagonist.

p 180: "Eve finished her book of stories, then went right back to the first story and read it straight through again, amazed at how much she had already forgotten. The author, on the back cover, looked happy and beautiful, her blond hair swept back from her forehead. She lived in Ohio with her husband and three pet beagles. Eve devoured every word, the author's bio, even the dedication page. The book was like a giant pacifier she clung to, holding it in her lap or keeping it on the table beside her. Its voice kept her company during the endless night."

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

2009-07-09T13:53:00.006-04:00

I tried. Really, I tried. But I couldn't get beyond the scene at the Meryton Ball, where the Bennet sisters whip out their weapons and turn their backs to each other to form the 5 person Pentagram of Death in order to kill the hordes of invading zombies.

Here is the link to NPR's interview with the only co-author who's making any money from this project, Seth Grahame-Smith.

Later note: This is truly the best part of the whole debaucle: a book trailer produced by the publisher! (I have to admit that I watched and truly enjoyed the trailers for all the monster-remake books, though it did not change my opinions about the books themselves.)

The Hunger Games

2009-07-08T21:47:00.010-04:00

Oh, my--was this good.

From the time you pick it up until you turn the last page, you will have little chance of being productive at your job or responsive to your loved ones. If you want to know what it's about, ask any teenage reader--this is old news for most of them. It's along the same line as 1984 or Animal Farm or Brave New World--a scary but increasingly foreseeable future.

The sequel is being published in September--I've already pre-ordered it for the library.

Don't Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me

2009-06-18T20:50:00.004-04:00

I religiously gathered up all my creams, lotions, face washes and sunscreens when I sat down with this book. I looked up everything, but it was only by chance that, after about a half hour of this, the book flipped open to a page reviewing a product line called Paula's Choice. All these products received top marks and rave reviews. Incidentally, this line is produced by the one and only Paula Begoun, who happens to be the author of this book--hmmm...

Forget it--she's only putting out the book to help market her product line--gross.

Food Not Lawns: how to turn your yard into a garden and your neighborhood into a community

2009-05-28T19:44:00.013-04:00

This one looks good at first glance, I know. "Wow," you think, "a way to transform my lawn from a dull expanse of over-sprayed and under-utilized grass into a place that's much more inviting, practical and environmentally friendly."

Trouble is, this isn't that book. Flores has passion for her subject, but she's a green radical without a head for language. She's overtaken this book with poorly written talking points of why we need change and only very extreme and ideas of how to achieve it. She won't tell you a detailed plan on how to build a composting toilet, just make you feel badly that you don't already have one. Essentially a book for people already believe that they're just a little holier-than-thou (proven by their lack of a car, super-cooler-than-your-neighborhood's activities, and their composting toilet).

Exes and Ohs

2009-05-28T19:17:00.005-04:00

Blecch. The "oh" part of the title apparently refers to the protagonist's orgasms. Really--really?
Really not worth it.

Secrets to Happiness

2009-05-28T19:13:00.003-04:00

Holly Frick has a lot going on. She's an unattached divorced woman who's just adopted a dog, is sleeping with a younger man and then she starts dating the man her best friend just had an affair with. She wants to be carefree, loved and live life to its fullest, but her mid-western sense of morality keeps stepping in on her and her friends' lives.

p. 184
“You realize it’s just neurotic, don’t you?”
“What is?”
…
“Your inflexible, puritanical attitude. It’s a common attribute of the truly neurotic. Along with wanting everybody to like you and waking up in the middle of the night.”

I didn't love this book--it follows the typical chick-lit plotline without much ado. The cutest subplot involved her adopted dog, but he's forgotten for chapters at a time. Maybe a beach read for someone who identifies with one of the life experiences in the book...

Audrey, Wait!

2009-05-28T19:06:00.005-04:00

Have you ever wondered about Jane, the ex-girlfriend of Adam Levine, who inspired Maroon 5's breakout album after they broke up? (This is not rhetorical. I actually have spent a solid chunk of time wondering about the women who break up with musicians who later write songs about them...)

Meet Audrey. She has just broken up with her boyfriend Evan when his band scores a breakout single about, guess what--their breakup. Now everyone thinks they know all about Audrey.

Good for light teen reading, especially if you're a music fan.

Everything Nice

2009-03-26T21:17:00.005-04:00

This is my first foray back into junky chick-lit now that I am officially done with graduate school. Did you catch that?--Absolutely, Positively DONE with my library degree. It was by the skin of my teeth, all last-minute and inappropriate for a young professional, but this expensive test of my time-management skills and patience is finally over after two and half years.

Hooray! And now I'm back to blogging.

Everything Nice = Fairly bad. There's better chick-lit out there, with more in-depth characters than Mike (Michaela), a motherless, frigid advertising exec (with a taste for whiskey and married men) who loses her job and has to learn to loosen up when she gets a job as a substitute teacher in a charter school. The writing isn't bad, though--I like this quote.

p. 163 "Mike was formulating a theory that said the difference between 'finding yourself' and being a fuckup was about five years. The twenty-six-year-old who lost his job and moved to Costa Rica was destined to be a surfer. The thirty-one-year-old who fell off the corporate ladder was destined to be a serf. It was wildly unfair of her and probably unrealistic, but being at sea in your twenties can feel so much more forgivable."

A Brave New World

2009-03-10T13:30:00.006-04:00

Oooo, I enjoyed this.

A Brave New World wasn't taught in my high school, and, being prejudiced against science fiction, I've avoided it in my adult life, but really--it was time to take the plunge. My older brother has raved about it for years, and he teaches it to his high school English classes.

Totally worth it.

How to Sleep Alone in a King-Sized Bed: a memoir of starting over

2009-03-09T23:27:00.007-04:00

This was excellent until I read the jacket and realized that it's a memoir and not a novel. Then it just seemed sad.

Food Lovers Guide to New Jersey

2009-01-17T19:05:00.006-05:00

Mmm... This is how my partner and I discovered Sweet Eats Bakery.

Creative Vegetable Gardening

2009-01-17T19:03:00.007-05:00

Way colorful. Not too informational. And nobody discusses the difficulty of weeding when you've interplanted 4 or 5 flowers in with your lettuces and kale.
But it does help fuel one's imagining of the coming gardening season when everything outside now is dead and brown.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility, 10th Anniversary Edition

2009-01-17T19:01:00.008-05:00

I (heart) this book. Because:

1. This is an approach to fertility/contraception that I had not encountered in depth before.

2. Our bodies are amazing in their details.

3. The author writes in a non-judgmental and welcoming manner while still bringing science to the table. (This does not come across as a Rhonda Byrne's The Secret "Ask and you shall receive"-style approach to fertility/contraception).

4. I am wildly curious about whether, if I (Queen of Irregularity in All Things) checked and charted my own waking temperature daily, I too would find that my body follows a regular cycle of fertility.

5. It's out of print. Which makes it that much more special when you can get your hands on a copy.

On the Make: the hustle of urban nightlife

2009-01-17T18:55:00.005-05:00

I had such high hopes for this book. The author is a professor at UPenn, and he uses sociological information from his students to analyze the the five Ws of the younger party scene in Philadelphia. Who they are, what they do when they go out, where they go to party or eat out, when they go, and why it's such a big deal...
Unfortunately it reads like a dissertation that was painfully stretched out to make a full-length book. What should be self-explanatory is explained in detail, and topics that could have been further researched are merely skimmed. I couldn't finish it.

Buyology: truth and lies about why we buy

2009-01-17T18:51:00.006-05:00

The author's a little, no--a lot, too self-involved in his own role in advertising to make this a great read. Everything is, "look what our company did," "look what I wrote," and so on. Too bad, because it's a fascinating subject and I was really looking forward to it being awesome.

Survival of the Sickest: the surprising connections between disease and longevity

2009-01-17T18:49:00.010-05:00

My best friend was reading this book when she came for a long visit. So, as I do with many things owned by my loved ones (from their clothes to their magazines to their movies), I temporarily pilfered it.

Good read, but I did not find this book to be as accessible as many other non-fiction titles. The chapters felt long, even though the material was fascinating.

House Lust: America's obsession with our homes

2009-01-17T18:45:00.007-05:00

Awesome. Thought-provoking and well-written. Especially timely if you, like I, have felt bombarded by modern cultural landmarks such as HGTV renovation television shows and Levittowns of McMansions. I would read this again in a heartbeat, especially if I was on a trip across the US--imagine looking out the windows at all the "little boxes made of ticky tacky."

Twilight Saga

2009-01-17T18:43:00.015-05:00

Meh. I didn't even make it to Breaking Dawn. My interest declined as the novelty of the plot wore off. Unfortunately, the plot was all that kept me reading so far along in the series; her writing is on par with Dan Brown--forced, pedestrian and clichéd.

Does my unflinching honesty sound cruel?

True, Meyer has captured the imaginations of her millions of readers, but I believe that much more is left to be desired (as least for my taste).

American Wife

2009-01-17T18:41:00.003-05:00

Very good. Even more memorable if you promise not to read the front jacket of the book before you start reading it. You will be rewarded with a richer reading experience and more unforgettable characters instead of falling back on simple stereotypes--I promise.

Here's the beginning of the publisher's blurb (my apologies for not writing an original one):
"A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice learned the virtues of politeness early on from her stolid parents and small Wisconsin hometown. But a tragic accident when she was seventeen shattered her identity and made her understand the fragility of life and the tenuousness of luck. So more than a decade later, when she met boisterous, charismatic Charlie Blackwell, she hardly gave him a second look: She was serious and thoughtful, and he would rather crack a joke than offer a real insight; he was the wealthy son of a bastion family of the Republican party, and she was a school librarian and registered Democrat. Comfortable in her quiet and unassuming life, she felt inured to his charms. And then, much to her surprise, Alice fell for Charlie."

Love Walked In

2009-01-17T17:27:00.005-05:00

Marisa de los Santos is amazing. She is a poet, and that fact is made clear in the ease and grace of language with which she maneuvers her characters through this book. Follow this one with Belong to Me: a novel, which features some of the same characters and which I loved too!

Food and women

2008-11-26T16:30:00.007-05:00

Food never seems to be just about eating for most women. It's got guilt, shame, self-image, love and responsibility all wrapped up in it together. Families and lovers too. Both of these books attempt to unravel the issues through the short stories.

I wasn't a huge fan of either collection. Berg is lighthearted but unmemorable; Vapnyar is depressive and unappetizing.

Belong to Me: a novel

2008-11-18T14:45:00.006-05:00

As my boyfriend remarked the other day, I have been nursing this one for a long time. Finally finished it last night, and it was well worth it.

There are a lot of plots going on in this book, and Santos juggles them all deftly. A boy raised without knowing the identity of his father, a woman dying of cancer, a best friend who learns to love in the midst of tragedy and a young couple eagerly welcoming a baby into their lives... It could have just ended up as a piecemeal, trite novel, but thankfully it doesn't. Santos is a talented poet, and her language and balance are perfect.

For example, isn't this lovely? "Dev loved talking to Clare, but all the time they talked, he looked at her and wondered what he had wondered before, about museum guards and Inuits: how you got used to so much beauty or if you ever did. Like how a person could just go about his ordinary life--salmon fishing, dogsled driving, or whatever--with the northern lights hanging in the sky above his head." (311)

Sushi for Beginners

2008-11-17T19:40:00.005-05:00

This is British chick-lit. Very cute--it's like the Irish version of The Devil Wears Prada. Magazine publishers scrambling to get everything just right and uber-hip before the deadline. Plus there's lust, drinking and rampant egos. Like eating a popover--delicious, but mostly air.

Slummy Mummy

2008-11-09T16:46:00.011-05:00

Fiona Neill has such a good voice--I folded over page after page because of her character's wit and depth.

Lucy Sweeney is smart, resourceful and funny, but she is trapped in a chaotic disorganized mess of motherhood. She loses her credit card in the freezer half a dozen times a month, her laundry piles are epic, and she and her children are always late to school, often because they have to climb out the living room windows due to lost keys.

The whole book is delightful and funny, but this is my favorite episode. I couldn't stop laughing as the absurdities mount. Lucy is driving the children to school after a marathon morning of forgotten homework:

......"I notice the roads are very quiet. Sealed in the car with the heaters blowing wildly, it is easy to feel cut off from the rest of the world. When I stop at the next junction, I see a large number of parents walking their children to school with unnaturally cheery expressions of homhomie and collectivism. I remember with a sudden lurch that I have forgotten it is Walk to School Day. I will suffer ignominious associations with childhood obesity, global warming, and congested roads. I switch down the heating and explain the situation to the children.
..... 'By driving to school, we are releasing bad chemicals into the atmosphere. Today, lots of children in London are walking to school to show that they care about this. I have forgotten, we are late, and so we are going in the car. But if you crouch down and lie on the floor until I tell you to get out, we might be able to get away with it.'
..... I pull on Joe's Spider-Man hat and shrink down below the level of the dashboard to drive within two hundred meters of school. Then we all sit there, quietly waiting for a break in the cloud of parents wafting along the pavement.
...... I note Alpha Mum, striding down the road in a pair of heavy walking boots and wearing a rucksack. She lives miles away. She couldn't have walked here, but judging by the zealous look on her face, she has. Just as she is level with the car, Fred gets up and starts banging on the window. 'Help, help,' he cries.
I try to pull him away, but he is rubbing the steamed-up window with his tiny hand. A nose appears, pressed against the glass, one of those turned-up, slightly superior noses that never has freckles because it is always protected from the sun with wide-brimmed hats and factor forty. Then a pair of eyes, wide open and blinking, tries to focus on the tiny face inside. The overall impression is ghoulish, and Fred starts to cry louder. It is Alpha Mum. 'Someone has left a child locked alone in this vehicle,' she shouts loudly down the street. Clearly she is a woman who enjoys taking charge in an emergency. 'I'm going to inform the school. Will you stay here and try and comfort it?'
..... I hear Alpha Mum's walking boots stomping along the pavement out of earshot and shut my eyes, practicing deep breathing techniques that I hope will keep the car steamed up."...

Wordle

2008-10-23T20:04:00.003-04:00

<-- Click on this to see it larger. A fellow Smith alum over at Cultivating Domesticity posted something about this little gem of a procrastinating tool. You enter in the url of your blog (or any other website) and the program will create a picture of your most commonly used words. You can change the fonts, colors, backgrounds and shapes of your collection of words. Then you can step back and realize that (yikes!) the most commonly used words on your blog include "married," "man," "love" and "romance"--altogether too heteronormative and lovesick for what I would expect from a girl like myself. Very fun.

Penguins!

2008-10-21T14:19:00.019-04:00

Isn't it funny how similar things tend to cluster together in one's life? Granted, penguins are a guaranteed money-maker-animal in America--witness the number of animated movies, documentaries, children's fiction and adult non-fiction that have come out over the years. We all just love their their awkward little waddle, their adorable way of regurgitating food for their loved ones, and their cute travel-ready size (wouldn't you be tempted to smuggle one in your luggage if you were returning from an Antarctic visit?).

But I have found some oh-so-cute penguin things that I simply must share--enjoy the parade of the family Spheniscidae!

This Polly Dunbar book started it all. It is sooo good. And short. And colorful.

Tacky has no style or grace. And the other animals make fun of him for it. The story can be a little lame, but the illustrations more than make up for that.

This started out as a song on Sandra Boynton's Blue Moo : 17 jukebox hits from way back never, but it's so cute that it's now marketed as its own board book. Very cute pictures, and the song is both catchy and clever.

Big photos. Good coffee-table book, but with facts--like the DK series, but for grown-ups.

Chasing Harry Winston

2008-10-19T13:59:00.009-04:00

You'd think that after a smart novel like The Devil Wears Prada, one that made millions of dollars for everyone involved, the publishers would vigilantly edit whatever Weisberger came out with next. I can only imagine that either her publishers lazily retreated and let her reputation sell the book, or that her ego stood in the way of the editing process. Either way, somebody dropped the ball.

Weisberger's tale involves three women seeking love and husbands as they approach their 30th birthdays. One is too promiscuous, one is too monogamous, and the third doesn't love the man she's with. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, one's too hot, one too cold and so on...

The book is too long, too shallow, and it's crowded with too many plotlines, men and inexplicable plot meanderings--such as these beauties...

p. 196-197: Two characters argue for 2 whole pages about one character's penchant for popular chick lit, detailing such works as Something Borrowed, Something Blue, Bridget Jones's Diary and The Nanny Diaries.

p. 247: One character leaves her OB-GYN exam (which has NOTHING to do with the plot):
"After dressing, Emmy jumped on the 4 train to Union Square. She figured on a brisk walk directly home to shower--something she always felt compelled to do after the K-Y-heavy exams--but as she exited the subway at Fourteenth and Broadway she found herself heading directly toward Leigh and Adriana's building. With Leigh's breakup only a week old and Adriana's newfound commitment to work, she figured at least one of them had to be home, sulking or writing or both, but the doorman shook his head [...] By the time she reached her building and trudged up the five flights of stairs, she was drenched from head to toe: her hair from the freezing rain, her feet from the filthy slush, and her ladyparts from the overzealous application of medical-grade lube."
Isn't it terrible?-- the overuse of the word "directly," the fact that this does nothing to advance the plot and finally, it's not even well-written!

The Skin Type Solution

2008-10-09T20:41:00.007-04:00

The book begins with a detailed questionnaire that will determine your own score on four counts-- skin hydration, skin sensitivity, skin pigmentation and skin aging. Once you know how you place in each of those four areas, you turn to the chapter of the book that directly addresses your own unique results.

The questionnaire is good for my own knowledge--where else could I discover that I have slightly dry, very sensitive, pigmented and tight skin? TMI, right? But the chapter on my skin type seemed like a marketing device for certain cosmetic companies. She didn't do a great job of explaining why this particular product works better than that product. I would rather take the questionnaire results to a dermatologist and get a real answer, face-to-face.

Too Good to be True

2008-10-09T20:30:00.006-04:00

Book publishers did a study of devoted readers of the romance genre, seeing as how romance novels make up 50% of the American book market. They wanted to pinpoint what makes a good (to the readers) romance novel. The number one answer: the couple has to get together in a fairy-tale romance by the end. Most readers will actually skim the ending of a book before they buy it, in order to determine that there is indeed a happy ending.

I feel like this book's first page is the ending of a romance novel. An air traffic controller goes on a vacation and gets married to the man sitting next to her on the plane. If I could get past the idea that they're already happily together and married by page one, I might be able to get through the remaining 403 pages. So far no luck.

Bombshell

2008-10-09T14:10:00.004-04:00

Ooo, this was an embarassing cover to been seen with. And I knew that the plot was formulaic, but when I went on Powells.com to get the image, they told me that it's number 33 of the series! What?? And now I'm reading the quote on the front cover--"'Sex and the City with more heart...a winner.' Publishers Weekly on Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend." The positive review isn't even about the book whose cover it's gracing! I feel like I've been played in a major way.
Throw this one back. There's better chick lit out there.

People of the Book

2008-10-07T19:36:00.005-04:00

This book was good enough to win the Pulitzer Prize, but evidently I'm even pickier than the prize committee. I'm so close to finishing the thing, but only because I've been pushing myself to read just one more chapter, to renew one more time... Am I way too picky in my demands of an author's work? Perhaps I'm just reading Brooks at the wrong time in my life.
In a nutshell, this is the history of a book, a Jewish text called a haggadah. Every other chapter concerns the rare books expert who is examining the codex in the present-day; the remaining chapters each concern themselves with a period in the book's history. Both the book's setup and the book's characters seemed predictable and shallow--I must be missing something big here. Maybe in a couple of years I'll revisit this one.

Chez Moi: a novel

2008-09-22T15:02:00.005-04:00

This first chapter explains it all:

"Am I a liar? Yes, because I told a man at the bank I'd been on a hotel and catering course and done an eighteen-month work placement at the Ritz. I showed him the diplomas and contracts I'd made the day before. I also brandished a management training certificate, a really good fake. I like living dangerously: that's how I lost my way in the past, and why I'm on a winning streak now. The banker was completely taken in, and gave me the loan. I thanked him without turning a hair. The medical check? No problem. My blood, my precious blood is clean, nice and clean, as if I hadn't been through anything.
Am I a liar? No, because I can actually do everything I claim I can. I can wield spatulas like a juggler with his batons. Like a contortionist, I can supplyly activate several different parts of my body independently: thickening a sauce with one hand while separating eggs and tying filou pastry parcels with the other...
My restaurant will be small and inexpensive. I don't like frills. It will be called Chez moi because it really will be my home, I'll be sleeping there; I don't have enough money to pay for the lease and a rent.
It will serve all the recipes I've invented, the ones I've transformed and the ones I've worked out for myself. There won't be any music--I'm too emotional--and the light bulbs hanging from the ceiling will be orange-tinted. I've already bought a giant fridge on the Avenue de la Republique. They've promised me an oven and a hob at a good price...
I cook with and out of love. How am I going to manage to love my customers? The sheer luxury of that question makes me think of prostitutes because that's precisely what they don't have--that luxury."

Stolen Innocence: my story of growing up in a polygamous sect, becoming a teenage bride, and breaking free of Warren Jeffs

2008-09-21T15:55:00.005-04:00

Not my style, and terribly written, even considering that it was churned out by a ghost writer. It could and should be at least 200 pages shorter. I did finish it, though, but resorted to judicious skimming.

A tragedy that this happened, yes, but this muck doesn't help matters.

Barefoot

2008-09-21T14:44:00.007-04:00

Elin Hilderbrand is a sure thing. Her books are always about Nantucket, women and love. It's like Keebler's Vienna Fingers cookies--they can taste so bland and cheap sometimes, but when you wake up in the middle of the night and you desperately crave them, it's hard to imagine a world without them... We want what we want.

Three women arrive in Nantucket for what they hope will be a relaxing summer--Vicki comes with children and cancer, her sister Brenda comes with heartache and a legal scandal, and friend Melanie has just left her husband and realized that she's pregnant. They hire a handsome young Middlebury college kid to take care of the kids, but of course his role morphs over the course of the book. I thought this was alright, but my fave is still The Blue Bistro.

LibriVox: "accoustical liberation of books in the public domain"

2008-08-20T15:29:00.008-04:00

This is my most recent discovery, and I'm already hooked.

"LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books."

Anything that was published before 1923 is now free of its copyright, and so this volunteer-run site, LibriVox, is endeavoring to create audiobooks of those works. Way cool.

Hero: a novel

2008-08-18T20:54:00.007-04:00

This is fantastic! I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone, really, anyone. It's a young adult book, but it's clever and unique and the main characters are really complex and lovable in their own messed-up ways.

The main character, Thom Creed, is a teenager and an only child who is being raised by his father. His mother disappeared when he was younger, his father was publicly humiliated years ago and has never recovered his self-worth since. In this stunted household, he struggles with his awakening sexuality, desperately tries to earn his father's respect and his peers' acceptance, all while trying to get a handle his increasingly severe seizures.

Plus, everyone who has tried Ulysses can admit that stream of consciousness writing can be hard to get through. But somehow, in a modified (just-happened-a-few-minutes-ago past tense) way, Moore makes it work. Example--this is right as our teen protagonist is packing to run away from home:

"In my room I grabbed the Swiss Army knife my dad got me for
Christmas. I stood there picking at a hangnail as I tried to think about
what my life would be like once I left, where I'd live, where I'd work, how I'd
finish school. I caught myself thinking about falling in love with someone
who I hoped was out there right now thinking about the possibility of me, but I quickly banished the notion. It was that kind of thinking that landed me
in this situation to begin with. Hope can ruin you" (50).

Plus, his whole family are superheroes. Neat, huh?

Matrimony: a novel

2008-08-18T19:44:00.006-04:00

Compelling. It's a little drawn out (the timeline for the book is over 15 years), but the characters are good, especially Mia. She and a handful of her fellow college students meet at the alternative-styled Graymount College in Northington, MA (By the end of the first chapter I was sure beyond a doubt that it's a fictional stand-in for Hampshire College near Northampton, MA. I went to another college in the Pioneer Valley, and there's way too many similarities for it to be merely coincidental.) The story follows two couples who meet in college as they grow up and forge their way through the next decade and a half of their lives.

p. 64: "She'd read that most college students met their spouses in college, but 'college students' included junior college students and state college kids from Oklahoma and Nebraska, and she understood that people like her, at schools like Graymount, didn't marry their college boyfriends. Doing so seemed fantastical and quaint, not all that different from marrying the boy next door or even from the dimly exotic world of dowries and arranged marriages..." I love Henkin's language--"fantastical and quaint"--isn't it beautiful?

p. 202: "...I'm always saying a mother never loses her peach pit instinct. Even with a grown son, you have to stop yourself from sticking out your hand when your child finishes a piece of fruit." Isn't this a little gem?

Easy Green Living: the ultimate guide to simple, eco-friendly choices for your and your home

2008-08-13T20:09:00.007-04:00

Pass on this one. It smacks of celebrity authorship (the trite stories of 'this is how I do it' and the complete absence of price as a factor in what people buy) and it should be half as long as it is. It's been done better elsewhere. Try Green-up Your Cleanup by Jill Potvin Schoff instead.

I was told there'd be cake

2008-08-13T18:46:00.005-04:00

It's hard to find good thought-provoking essays these days, but I'm certainly not the first to come to this conclusion. This month, Cristina Nehring's essay in Utne magazine, entitled "Why Essays are so Damned Boring," doesn't delve too far below the surface of this phenomenon, but her reasoning makes perfect sense. Basically, she says that essayists today are turning out (and editors are only printing) self-involved meditations on minor choices in life. The dramatic questions, the large-as-life issues are being passed over in favor of the documentation of small incidents (like a quiet evening spent at home). It's safer to print the petty things, it's easier to write about petty things and with Americans' shortened attention span, a quick essay recapping one's day is faster reading than an in-depth essay on the meaning of life.

I like Sloane Crosley. I like the language she uses and the way she can twist words slyly to fit her needs. I think she will mature into an excellent novelist or science writer. She can capture feelings and explain theories clearly and with a light touch. For example, regarding volunteerism: "Of course I had considered volunteering. I think that once you know what something is, you have considered it. I'm far too solipsistic not to apply myself to every scenario that crosses my path. I remember the day I found out what an enema was, what spelunking was, that Asian women plucked their underarm hair, that the Golden Gate Bridge was an iconic springboard for suicides. I immediately considered jumping off it" (117).

Unfortunately, in this collection all you can see is her harmless self-absorption and her shallow magazine-styled way of writing that has served her well in her career. I struggled to finish this, putting it down for weeks between essays.

How to talk to a widower

2008-08-07T16:59:00.005-04:00

Doug Parker has a mantra: "I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she's gone. And so am I." At this point, the pain of losing his wife in a plane accident is the only grounding force in his life; pot and alcohol haze over his days while he struggles to pull together the remnants of a slick suburban life. At the same time, Doug's 16-year old stepson is desperately reaching out for his love. And then there's Doug's twin sister's problems. And Doug's father's senility.

This is raw. It's written well, but it hurts.

p. 77: "But as bad as the house is, I rarely leave it. Because the pain is my last link to her, so as much as it hurts, I wrap it around myself like a blanket, like a teenaged girl cutting jagged lines on her inner thigh with a razor blade, inflicting the hurt on myself just because I need to feel something. I'm not ready for time to heal this wound, but I also know I'm powerless to stop it. And knowing that makes me fight harder than ever to hold on to the pain and anchor myself in this tragedy while it's still freshly tragic. So every so often I pull at my scabs like a dog, desperately trying to draw some fresh blood from my open wound, but even as I do it, I know the day will come when I pull off that scab and there's no blood underneath it, just the soft pink expanse of virgin skin. And when that finally happens, when time has inevitably had its way with me, then I'll know she's gone for good."

The Fiction Class

2008-07-21T18:51:00.004-04:00

Good. A little overly self-conscious, but the characters are good and the writing rings true.

My Name is Will: a novel of sex, drugs and Shakespeare

2008-07-14T14:38:00.003-04:00

Hedonistically, scandalously good. I was excited about this book way back in January, and it didn't disappoint.

It's the 1980s in northern California. Will Shakespeare Greenburg has been putting off writing his master's thesis for two years while enjoying the pleasures of drugs, inactivity and the company of women.

It's also the 1580s and teenager Will Shakespeare is going through similar experiences in southern Britain--women, wine and trouble.

Straightforward tale of parallels between two people and time periods, right? But there's more, and that's what makes this novel from the co-creator of the Reduced Shakespeare Company worth it. His command of Shakespeare's work results in wry plot details, clever quotes by other characters, and intriguing theories on the meanings behind parts of the plays and sonnets. And having lived in the Bay Area, it was a delight to know the backdrop against which he has set the characters--the UC Berkeley campus, the street intersections, the highways into the hills, etc. You think you know what this book has in store because you think you remember Shakespeare's biography, but Winfield surprises you when you least expect it. Dive in without scruples--it's a treat.

Thursday

2008-07-03T19:21:00.007-04:00

Today I found information on:
the optical meaning of "refraction"
learning to play the keyboard
literacy statistics in the United States
home inspector licensing in New Jersey
family information from the 1910 and 1920 census
family planning policies in China
antique furniture repair internships
details on resume-writing
local Superfund sites
building a deck
choosing stocks
cosmetology licensing
learning about mutual funds
and a woman called to get help with her crossword puzzle. A seven lettered desert plant is ephedra, a thirteen lettered city in Uruguay is Puente del Este, and the director of Casablanca was Michael Curtiz.

And that doesn't include the people who were looking for a certain type of books or specific titles.

And a patron got me a Perrier because I looked thirsty and hot. I am wicked tired, but I like my job.

Nice to come home to

2008-07-02T19:40:00.008-04:00

I am too tired to think my way out of a box. The best I can do is to give you what the publisher said:

"A funny, entertaining novel of love and family for our times: a single woman who fears she's lost her chance at a family of her own, begins to accumulate an ad hoc one around her.
In the tradition of Elinor Lipman or Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In), Flowers delivers a smart, witty, appealing story of love, family, and community that breaks the mold of the conventional love story-and will have readers cheering. Everyone around Prudence Whistler, thirty-six, seems to be settling down. Her once single girlfriends have married and had babies. Her gay best friend is discussing marriage with his partner. Even her irresponsible younger sister, Patsy, is the single mother of a two-year-old. But when Pru panics at losing her mediocre boyfriend of two years-and begins to see the door to her traditional family life closing — she accidentally finds something even better: a new definition of family and happiness. First, it's the crazy cat who moves into her apartment. Then come Pru's headstrong sister and two-year-old niece. Then the niece's dog, the sister's ex-boyfriend, and, ultimately, Patsy and Pru's widowed mother. With the strength of her modern new household, Pru musters the confidence to open the
dress shop she's always wanted in town — and discovers an extended family of sorts in the community of shop owners and devoted customers. It's only then that she ends up with the man of her dreams. Endearing, romantic, and satisfying, Nice to Come Home To is a charming, crowd-pleasing debut."

Year of the Goat

2008-07-02T19:07:00.005-04:00

Margaret Hathaway used to manage the Magnolia Bakery in New York City. Her boyfriend Karl Schatz was the photo editor of the online version of Time magazine.

But when these two successful city folks fell for goats, they fell hard.

To make sure that they were not wrapped up in the romantic idea of raising goats and making cheese, the two decided to take a year out of their busy New York lives and try on the lifestyle for size. They lived in their van with their dog, Godfrey, and they went from farm to farm all across the US. Over the course of a year, every farm they visited served as an example and every farmer taught them lessons.

Hathaway writes well, and it's relaxing and pleasant to breeze through the book, especially if you have an interest in small-scale farming.

A partial inventory: i.e. what's laying around my house

2008-06-22T09:00:00.014-04:00

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is so incredible, so very very well-written and stunning, but it packs a punch. Save it for those times when you are feeling more secure in your life, in order that it doesn't sweep you away on an unwelcome tide of emotion. I'm afraid to even spoil it by telling you the premise of the story, but it got so much publicity when it came out a couple years ago that you may already know.

So I picked up another of her books: The Almost Moon. Haven't started it yet--it just moves mysteriously around the house, propping open a door for a few days, stacked on a table for another spell of time...

*****

Good poems for hard times. Also for not-so-hard times. And for good times too. 'Nuff said.

The Love Cook
by Ron Padgett

Let me cook you some dinner
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daiquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it's night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I've got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing.

*****

Now this I've skimmed, but it's more as inspiration than as a guide. I mean, look at the cover--he's going all out in Fast Runner style--speedy, efficient, driven. Nothing like what I do, which involves a lot of flailing limbs, heavy breathing and cajoling the dog to keep up--that yes, she will get a treat when we get home. Occasionally my encouragement isn't enough for her, and so there have been times in which I carried her the majority of the way home. Weight training it is, running it is not.
Needless to say, this book rests on the coffee table facedown when I'm not in need of an impetus to get on my sneaks and get outside.

*****
Also-- How to Build a House, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Good Women of China, and I Was Told There'd be Cake.

Stealing Heaven

2008-06-18T17:33:00.004-04:00

Good new teen/YA read. No one knows Danielle's name except her mother--the two are thieves continually on the run and under assumed names. That is, until they stop in a beach community (with the intention of robbing one of the homes) and Dani meets a really cute guy, tells him her real name and falls for him--but he happens to be a local cop. Problems abound, but the protagonist is smart and wily, and you'll enjoy her sarcastic sense of humor.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

2008-06-16T09:26:00.007-04:00

As funny as it is to read David Sedaris, it's always funnier to hear him read his own stories. The essay about working as a Christmas elf in Macy's, the one about him putting shoeshine in his hair as a kid in order to mimic the sleuthing doctor from the Fugitive--they have made me laugh so hard tears were rolling down my cheeks as I drove down the highway.

Now I can't wait to hear some of these stories on the air. Two in particular--"It's Catching" and "That's Amore" already had me in tears just reading them. I also really liked "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle," though it's a quieter read--you will not disturb those around you with out-loud laughter, just the occasional giggle.

48 states to go--piece of cake.

2008-06-16T09:02:00.005-04:00

"Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin, lesbian activists who have been together for 51 years, embrace after their marriage ceremony at San Francisco City Hall" (SFGate.com, 2004).
Now in their 55th year of couplehood, Phyllis and Del are getting remarried just past 5 this afternoon.

Best new band ever--without reservations!

2008-06-15T16:10:00.016-04:00

"Welcome to Iceberg! Come on in, take off your coat and that dorky hat; make yourself comfortable. Take a seat on that beanbag chair over there. We are the next big indie rock band, and we're coming for you! We like to rock, we drink bad beer, and we have bad haircuts. You know those indie rock glasses - the ones with the thick black frames? We got one of those. We hate everything, especially corporations and money [...] we'll put up with you if you buy one of our cd's.

On Sale Now In Stores Nationwide - Iceberg Action Figure Playsets!
Collect all four Iceberg Action Figures, plus a limited-edition 99 Custer playset! Hours of fun for the whole family!

Action Zac - Comes equipped with two (2) pairs Action Drumsticks, one (1) half-empty Sparks can, retractable flamethrower arm attachment, and six (6!) hilarious jackets, including all-new The Zookeeper!
Ninja Fill - Comes standard with triple-necked guitar/bass/banjo, cell phone, and high-heeled rocket boots for intergalactic shredding. Capo not included.
Anatomically Correct Dress-Me-Up Wakefield - Features three (3) different outfits to fit any occasion - The Maid-of-Honor, The Public Servant, and The Hillbilly. Put a beer can in the left hand and press the button to make him say one of eleven hyperbolic overgeneralizations!
Ginger Man - Place in water overnight and watch ginger mane magically grow! Realistic freckles! Authentic-looking iPod attachment with harpoon-gun mount!
99 Custer Playset - Comes with miniature practice area in basement with life-like stagnant water pools! Fireplace opens to reveal secret underground tunnel to local beer purveyors! Limited-edition set, made in Mexico.

Love the one you're with

2008-06-14T13:19:00.008-04:00

Sorry for the long silence. There have been a lot of serious goings-on. It's during serious situations like this that I'm so grateful I was born into my family. We're so scattered across the country, but as soon as someone is in danger, we all pull together. My parents drop everything when a child is in trouble, all the sibs gather across the phone lines, calling each other every few days, and the ones who can visit in person do.
It feels like we're all rattling around in a gigantic drawstring bag most of the time, but when the situation calls for it--zzipp! the drawstring gets pulled taut and this big bag suddenly seems a lot smaller and we're all just as close as we were growing up. Thankfully, everyone in my family is safe and on the road to recovery.

In lighter fare, Giffin has such a lovely voice and a light touch, I really enjoy anything she writes. This one in particular was less chick-lit-y and more "real." A happy bride of ten months has her world turned upside-down when she passes her ex (the one everyone has--the one you can't forget, the love-of-your-life and the one who utterly tore apart your world) on the street one day. Two minutes after their eyes meet while crossing the street, he texts her and asks her to meet up with him. And thus it begins...

A Guide to Better Behavior

2008-05-30T13:15:00.005-04:00

For the very best reference service possible, please attend to the following hints.

1. Do not begin your reference question by asking me if I am engaged.
2. Do not follow up my refusal to answer the question with a "why?"
3. Before calling in a reference question, please turn down your television volume. I cannot fully focus on your question when all I can hear is the organ playing the noon church service on channel 19.
4. Do not call me "honey," "sweetie," "red," or "darling" unless I am crying on your shoulder or we are family.
5. Do not ask me for assistance with the computer when you have no intention of typing or learning the procedure for yourself. While I will help you, I will not do your resume, your job application or your taxes for you.
6. Do not blame me personally when the waitlist for the computers is long. My powers do not extend so far as to supply extra computers or to speed up time.
7. The reference desk is circular and enclosed in order that I can help you from across the desk. For my nerves' sake, please don't sneak around the rope and tap me on the shoulder for help.
8. Your cell phone doesn't drive me crazy. It's only when you talk on it at my desk.

The Gaslight Effect

2008-05-27T15:52:00.006-04:00

I just started this book today, but it's already reading really well. The subtitle is: how to spot and survive the hidden manipulation others use to control your life. Also on the cover is the explanation that you will "learn how to stop letting other people get inside your head, tell you what to think, shake your judgment, sabotage your self-esteem, make you question your grip on reality."

I'm curious and intrigued. It is interesting how these books end up in my life.