The Library Diva

I stand against SOPA

2012-01-17T22:31:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow, I'm blacking out this site (assuming the coding worked) to oppose the internet censorship legislation currently under consideration by our government. As you cruise the web tomorrow, hopefully you'll see a lot of this. According to sopastrike.com, you will. Don't try to get your entertainment fix in via Failblog or Reddit tomorrow. Need to look something up? Don't ask Wikipedia. Everyone's getting active, whether they've got one of the largest search engines or a tiny little book blog. If you've got a website and want to help make this point, go to the above address. See you on the other side of the blackout, and let's hope it's not a permanent one.

Life under the bridge: The Lost Memory of Skin

2012-01-10T21:51:00.002-05:00

Pedophiles are high on the list of things that we, as a society, fear and hate. States are passing stricter and stricter laws that carry harsher sentences and lifetimes of punishment. In one very well-publicized instance, it led to a colony of sex offenders forming under a Florida bridge. The law stated that sex offenders couldn't reside within 2500 feet of schools, parks, daycare centers, or similar places that attract a lot of children, and the bridge was one of the few places that met the criteria.

That bridge inspired Russell Banks' new novel, "Lost Memory of Skin." A young sex offender, known only as The Kid, is struggling to build some sort of life for himself under the bridge. After a raid, he meets The Professor, a sociologist interested whose interest in studying the community quickly crosses the line into actively trying to help The Kid and the other denizens of the bridge make things better for themselves. But The Professor has a past, too, that ultimately catches up to him (and no, it's absolutely not what you're imagining).

While child molestation is one of the worst crimes someone can commit, I've long felt that as a society, we're entirely too hysterical about it. And given the devastating consequences of it, that's a difficult stance to pull off. But we've managed it. People see them lurking everywhere, in pretty much anyone who so much as looks at a child they don't know. Seventeen-year-old boys are forced to register for life for receiving "child porn" sent to them by a classmate. Nineteen-year-old boys are stamped with the sex offender tag for having sexual contact with girls three or four years younger than them. The outcome doesn't even matter. On the Free Range Kids blog, I have seen comments from people who grew up, married the guy when they were of age, and have children with him, yet he's unable to attend their school events or get involved in their activities, all because of something he did with his now-wife years ago when they happened to be on the wrong side of an arbitrary age line.

So I viewed this novel, of course, as a scathing commentary on all of that. Banks did an excellent job of walking a fine line, knowing that many people would have little or no sympathy for The Kid. He made him not exactly likeable, but somehow sympathetic anyway. It's ambiguous just how much of a danger to society The Kid might be. It's more that he's simply not very bright, and not very social. He grew up without much of a home life. Around the age of 10, he discovered porn, and that was pretty much all he did for the next several years until going to basic training in the Army. I won't get into the exact nature of how The Kid came to commit a sex crime, but that story is rather pathetic, too.

Overall, this is a terrific novel, and it has a lot in it. I'd be interested to see what other people think of the book. I'm glad to see someone willing to take on such a controversial and highly charged issue. It's one that's not going away any time soon.

Hey, Boo

2012-01-06T23:39:00.003-05:00

So, the Mr. and I were fed up with Time Warner Cable's usurious rate hikes, and finally did something about it: we ditched the cable portion of our package, got an Xbox Live Gold Membership (around $60 per year) and got streaming Netflix and Hulu. It's not exactly the same experience. One upside is that Netflix has all sorts of offbeat stuff streaming that you'd really have to hunt for on cable TV. The documentary "Hey, Boo" is one of them, and we watched it tonight.

It's a strange coincidence that I was just writing yesterday about how I'd like to interview Harper Lee, then I watched a documentary about her. I learned many interesting factoids about her life and her book, for example:

The courtroom in her hometown, where her lawyer father used to work, was replicated precisely for the movie, and is now a museum.

When Harper Lee was a young woman, working at the airline reservation counter in New York and trying to hone her writing, a very good friend of hers who had made a big pile of cash off music royalties gave her a year's worth of living expenses so she could write. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was the result.

She had a brother who died of a brain aneurism at 31, and a sister who turned 99 in 2010 (the year of the documentary) and was still practicing law.

The documentary was studded with many literary stars, including Richard Russo, Wally Lamb, and Allan Gurganis. Oprah Winfrey was also in it, as was the girl who played Scout in the movie. It included footage of teachers discussing the book with their students. The writers talked about their favorite parts of the book, and what it meant to them. Richard Russo highlighted the father-daughter relationship, and the conversation Atticus had with Scout after she told him that other kids were saying he defended niggers. Oprah Winfrey choked up, reading the moving passage in the book after Tom is found guilty and the entire black community stands to honor Atticus' efforts to defend him. Anna Quindlen said that she collected incendiary, non-conventional heroines growing up, and counted Scout among them.

I had no idea that Harper Lee hadn't granted an interview since the 1960s, although I knew she'd stepped back from the public eye. The documentary made me wonder even more, how she felt about the tremendous, enduring reaction to her book and what her intent was when she wrote it.

Booking Through Thursday: Dream Interviews

2012-01-05T23:37:00.002-05:00

This week's question sort of made me laugh:

If you could sit down and interview anyone, who would it be?
And, what would you ask them?

As some of you know, I interview people all the time. I'm a reporter for a weekly community newspaper. I've interviewed a wider variety of folks than that description of my job might imply. The biggest thrill for me was the time I got to interview Judith Viorst, in my opinion, a true living legend, author of "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" and a book my mom had in the bathroom titled "Yes, Married." I read that book many times when I was 10 and it kind of gave me a thrill, since I viewed it as being all about sex. It wasn't about sex in any kind of racy way whatsoever, more a humorous look at marriage (I kind of viewed her and Erma Bombeck as being the same, growing up). But when you're 10, anything about sex is pretty interesting.

One thing my job has taught me is that you never know when you're going to get a quality subject to interview. I've interviewed people who've done tremendous things and had little to say about them. And I've interviewed people for stories I'd been forced into doing that sounded poke-your-eyes-out boring, but the people behind it had such passion for the subject that they got me excited, as well. I've noticed that sort of dynamic even as a reader of profiles in magazines. I despised the music of Marilyn Manson, for example, but whenever I saw him profiled in a magazine, I would usually pick it up, because he's quite an interesting person with a unique take on the world and a lot to say.

Since this is on BTT, I am guessing that the idea was that we choose an author. I might pick Harper Lee. I've always wondered what her intent was behind writing her book. I'm curious as to why she thinks it remains so widely read after society has changed so much. I'd talk to her about her character development, and the balance she had to strike in writing in Scout's voice, since it was an adult looking back on her childhood. I also wonder why she stopped at one book, and what she's been doing with herself since "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published. But I highly doubt she'd answer most of those questions.

Really, my dream interview is anyone who's had an unusual life experience and can talk about it well, though. That's who I look for in writing articles.

The library system in Erie County (where I live) has released its list of most borrowed books in the past year. I found it pretty interesting. The top adult fiction novel surprised me, and it surprised me that it's ruled for two years in a row.

I'm not at all surprised that "Without a Word" dominated adult non-fiction around here. A decade and a half after retirement, Jim Kelly is still revered as a god in these parts. Thousands of people participate annually in the Hunter's Hope fundraising events. He and his wife remain sought-after speakers, emcees and commentors. Some of the others surprised me. I'm curious, do other library systems do this sort of thing? I feel like I've never seen a list like this from the Erie County system before. If anyone else has a link to one from a different part of the state or the country, or another country altogether, I'd love to see it. I wonder how much what we read varies by region.

Adult Fiction: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson ** this is the second year this title has been the most borrowed library book in Erie County.
New Adult Fiction: "The Confession" by John Grisham
New (21-day) Adult Fiction: "Sing You Home" by Jodi Picoult
Graphic Novel: "Grim Hunt (The Amazing Spider-Man)" by Joe Kelly, Fred Van Lente and others
Adult Non-Fiction: "Without a Word: How a Boy’s Unspoken Love Changed
Everything" by Jill Kelly
Adult Paperback: "Eat This, Not That! 2011: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution" by
David Zinczenko
Children’s: "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth" by Jeff Kinney
"Princess Bedtime Stories (Disney Princess)" (no specific author)
Children’s Non-Fiction: "The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary" by Jeff Kinney
Children’s Paperback: "The Sea of Monsters" by Rick Riordan
eBOOKS
Fiction: "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett
Non-Fiction: "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption" by Laura Hillenbrand

How to Be an American Housewife

2012-01-03T22:39:00.002-05:00

After reading "How to be an American Housewife," the debut novel by Margaret Dilloway, I googled the title. I'm astonished that there is no movie in production right now. I predict, though, that you can look for it soon.

This book has everything Hollywood loves, and I don't mean that in a negative way at all. Just that it's the type of book that would translate to film well, and be loved by audiences. I could see mothers taking their teen daughters to it, or making it a tri-generational outing. It's an enjoyable read, too, but isn't so light that it floats away.

The story is told by two women. Shoko was born in Japan and came to American just after World War II. Her family realized that things were changing, that they needed to change with them, and that Shoko's best hope for success was to get a job where she could meet lots of nice American men, and marry one of them. She does just that, working in a hotel gift shot and going on dates at night. She obtains photos of the most promising men she meets, and her father chooses one of them for her.

Charlie turns out to be nice, and amenable to marriage, and they raise a family and have a relatively happy life together. But it hasn't come without costs to Shoko, and chief among those is her relationship with her younger brother, who hasn't spoken to her since the day she brought Charlie home. Now an old woman, Shoko wants nothing more than to return to Japan, for the first time since she left it, and make amends with her brother.

But she's too sick. Shoko lived 50 miles away from Nagasaki, and her heart was damaged by the radiation. So, she sends her daughter, Sue. Her granddaughter Helena accompanies Sue to meet the family they've only heard about, scarcely even seen in photographs, and to try to make amends on Shoko's behalf.

The story is structured by a neat narrative device: each chapter is framed by a quote from a book titled "How to be an American Housewife" that is written for women like Shoko. There are chapters with titles like "Becoming American" and "A Map to Husbands." I was crushed to learn that Dilloway wasn't quoting from a real book. In an afterword, she said she was inspired by a book her own Japanese mother had, titled "The American Way of Housekeeping." But it was written for maids working for Americans, and her mother didn't use it much, although she says that an internet search revealed some instances of other Japanese war brides using it to help them assimilate.

What I liked about it was the Japanese perspective on what it was like to be defeated, and live in Japan after the old order has broken apart. It's often said that history is written by the victor. It's easy to forget the other perspective. It's also hard to imagine what it must be like to leave behind everything that's familiar and try to become part of another culture forever. This book brings it to life. It's definitely worth a read!

Maxwell Perkins and his "test"

2012-01-03T10:42:00.000-05:00

I realized in looking over some old posts that I've frequently referred to "the Maxwell Perkins test" on here, without fully explaining what I mean, or where the phrase came from.

When I was about 16, the cover of "The Great Gatsby" jumped out at me at Barnes and Noble. This version had the original, iconic cover, with the impressionistic carnival lights and the woman's face superimposed in the sky. It captured my imagination immediately. I simply had to read this book that had the cover with its mixed images of longing and celebration.

The version I got was a Scribner classic that drew on the original manuscript and the surviving proofs, and claims to restore a number of errors that arose from a rushed printing schedule of the first editions, and multiplied over the years through careless reprintings. My version came out in 1991 and has a foreword and a note on the text by Matthew Bruccoli of the University of South Carolina, an afterword by the publisher, Charles Scribner III, a map, several pages of explanatory notes, suggestions for further reading, and a biographical note on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The publisher's afterword was what stuck with me the most, for it concerned the process of writing and editing the book. It was a revelation to me to learn that one of the great luminaries of American literature went through the same process of rewrites and criticism that my own short stories as a high school student were subject to. Charles Scribner quoted at length from a letter that Maxwell Perkins sent to F. Scott Fitzgerald on the book. It's fascinating to see his criticisms now that the book is a bona fide classic. The original letter took up three pages in the book, but I'll quote the part from which my "Maxwell Perkins test", my gold standard for character development, derives:

I could go on praising the book and speculating on its various elements, and meanings, but points of criticism are more important now...I have only two actual criticisms:
One is that among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital -- I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him -- Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader's eyes can never quite focus on him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery...and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

So simple, yet there's the heart of good character development, to me: would you know the character if you met him or her on the street, and would you have a clear sense of how to react to him or her? Would you hesitate to greet Walter Freeman while you weigh how interesting your talk with im would be, against how much energy you have for it today? Would you grit your teeth as Leah from the Poisonwood Bible approached, ready to hear all her opinions on politics and world economics? Would you give Adah a warm hello, knowing she probably won't answer you back, or would you steel yourself as Rachel descends on you like a hurricane, full of energy, drama and complaints, and smelling of hairspray and expensive perfume?

Of course, not every character needs that type of dimension. But I maintain it's a good thing if your leads have them. I don't know how much Fitzgerald took that particular criticism to heart. I'm inclined to think, much less than I did, for my impression of Gatsby was similar to Perkins'. The letter also goes to show that just because someone says they dislike something about your writing doesn't mean they dislike it as a whole. Perkins also went on to say:

The general brilliant quality of the book makes me ashamed to make even these criticisms. The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary. The manuscript is full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life. If one enjoyed a rapid railroad journey I would compare the number and vividness your living words suggest, to the living scenes disclosed in that way. It seems in reading a much shorter book than it is, but it carries the mind through a series of experiences that one would think would require a book of three times its length.

Burning Christmas Greens: a poem for the New Year

2012-01-02T12:40:00.003-05:00

Happy 2012! I don't often "do" poetry on this blog, but I heard this one on our local classical station in the run-up to Christmas, and it stayed with me. To me, this is always sort of a melancholy time of year. The excitement of Christmas is past, and here on the Niagara Frontier, we're digging in for several months of cold, gray weather. Yet, I'm not sure if I've ever seen it depicted in literature before. So for this time of year, and since it's an activity some of you may be engaging in today, I give you a poem by William Carlos Williams titled "Burning Christmas Greens."

Burning Christmas Greens

Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
--go up in a roar

All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash--

and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame

At the winter's midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green

At the thick of the dark
the moment of the cold's
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees

to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons

we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the

mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they

were walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We

stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log's smouldering eye, opening
red and closing under them

and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we

did not say so) a challenge
above the snow's
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where

small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down

the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow--Transformed!

Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.

In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind

and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red--as

yet uncolored--and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,

breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.

Vikings, and the best book I ever gave up on

2011-12-22T18:45:00.003-05:00

So, I'm ashamed to say that on my trip back to the library, I also turned in "The Vikings" by Robert Ferguson with 100 pages to go. I had had the book in my posession since late August, and had renewed it a bunch of times. I read a fair amount of it, but finally just faced facts that I was hopelessly bogged down and needed to give it back.

I bogged down because it wasn't what I was looking for. Military history has never interested me much, and that's what this was. I was hoping that the books would focus more on the belief systems and daily life of the Vikings. To make myself get through some of the military stuff, I used a trick so simple, I can't believe I never thought of it before: I took notes. Every time I found something interesting, I wrote it down.

The book made me realize, first of all, how little I really do know about some eras of history. The narrative we get in school tends to start with the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans, and pick up sometime in the Middle Ages, where you learn about the Magna Carta, the War of the Roses, the plague, Queen Elizabeth and King Henry. In 1442, the story begins its move across the ocean but stays sort of vague until the American Revolution era. But you're missing a good 1200 years of human history, between the fall of Rome and the point where the story gets picked back up.

So, this book was fascinating from that perspective. Ferguson considered the "Viking era" to begin in 793 with a violent attack on a monastery in Lindisfarne, and to end circa 1066. The most striking aspect of Viking history is the lack of evidence and narrative. They were an oral culture, more or less, and left behind mostly artifacts that are still being uncovered today. One of the most striking discoveries was in 1816, of a ship burial with tons of grave-goods. It was at this point, as a new museum was being developed expressly for it, that the Stone Age/Iron Age/Bronze Age divisions were created by the new museum's curator. It was initially just his means of sorting the artifacts, until he took a step back and discovered that there was a real progression there.

A chapter is devoted to their beliefs, but most of the book is devoted to their military adventures all across Europe and even into the Middle East a bit, it seems. Like I said, I'm not reallly into accounts of battles and conquest, and this book was not exactly written in an entertaining way, not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, But I enjoyed the book a great deal for what I did get out of it, and I'm looking forward to tracking down other books that may focus more on the aspects of that era that I do find interesting.

We wear the chains we forge in life...

2011-12-20T23:53:00.003-05:00

Not long after I vowed to quit going to the library for a while and catch up on what I had here, I decided to go after all.

This time, I had a purpose. A few weeks ago, I posted that reading "A Christmas Carol" at Christmastime was on my bucket list. A co-worker had just taken his girlfriend to see a production of the play, so it was even more on my mind. I made the trek, partially on foot after picking up a poster for him from the theater company, and at first I thought: everyone else had the same idea.

I couldn't find the book, and the irritating parents of small children were making it harder. As part of the reconfiguration, the children's section got moved into the fiction section. It used to have a separate room. When I first saw that, I was worried about kids being loud. It turns out, I had to worry about parents being loud. The kids were as good as gold. When they raised their voices above a whisper, however, they'd get very loudly corrected. I was about two seconds away from saying something when I discovered that the book I wanted was in the other part of the library, with the literary criticism.

I looked it over carefully. I've been duped more than once by a book that says "George Eliot's Middlemarch" or something similar on its spine, and it turned out to be ESSAYS ON George Eliot's Middlemarch. I happened to get a wonderful edition, an Everyman classic with pen-and-ink sketches and other of Dickens' Christmas stories, too. I'm excited. I finished up to Ghost of Christmas Past last night, and although I kept picturing Daisy Duck breaking up with Scrooge McDuck, I quite like it. It reminded me how much I like Dickens. I'd been planning "Crime and Punishment" for after Christmas, but maybe I will go with "The Old Curiosity Shop" instead!

A very straightforward Booking through Thursday

2011-12-08T20:05:00.002-05:00

I didn't post yesterday, because I had no ideas. I wasn't going to post again today, because I was still struggling to come up with something. Then, I remembered what day of the week it was!

Today's book question is about as straightforward as they come. For your consideration:

Mystery or Love Story? December 8, 2011
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:04 am

All things being equal, which would you prefer–a mystery? Or a love story?

Well, both are pretty well outside my usual realm of reading. When I was about 12, I decided I was going to get into romance novels, because it seemed as if real adult women read them. I got a couple that were geared for my age and historical. I liked the first one. The second one was the exact same shit set in a different time period. I haven't returned to the genre since, and maybe it's unfair. On my trip through the blogosphere, I noted a trend: romance novelists and readers are trying to skirt the "r-word." I don't blame someone for not wanting their book lumped in with a genre so prolific and consumable that a lot of used bookstores refuse to take them, even if their book is the definition of a romance novel.

Mysteries are also outside my usual fare. A lot of them strike me as extremely formulaic as well. But I was also a teen Agatha Christie devotee, and still cherish my leather-bound copy of what must be her greatest book, "And Then There Were None" (alternately "Ten Little Indians"). More recently, I enjoyed reading some of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books. They're pretty light reading, but they're funny, as they chronicle the work and love life of a Jersey girl who became a bounty hunter in her cousin's bail bonds business after losing her job as a buyer at a lingerie store. The guy who's been her on-again off-again boyfriend since high school and her mysterious, dangerous co-worker vie for her affections, although maybe at this point in the series, that's been resolved.

So all in all, I guess I would generally prefer a mystery over a romance. However, if the choice was more literal -- say, if I found myself with a lot of time to kill in a confined space with just one romance novel and one mystery novel, I might pick up the romance first, just for the novelty.

Animal story

2011-12-06T22:57:00.002-05:00

If you've ever taken any sort of communications class, you've probably heard confirmation of something you've already observed for yourself: people love animals. Stick one in your commercial, or on the front page of your paper or magazine, and people will gravitate towards what you're offering.

It works on me, definitely. I'm a total animal person. My county has managed to reach zero-kill countywide, partially through satellite cat adoption centers at the local malls. I stop in every time I'm there. I have two cats. I know all of the neighborhood dogs and cats, sometimes better than I know their people.

And I like animal books, too. For today's post, I thought I'd compare a few that stand out in my mind.

"My Dog Skip" by Willie Morris is sort of the classic American animal tale. It concerns a pet, and follows the arc of the pet's life, complete with the very sad end inherent in all stories about a bond between a human and one of the small, furry creatures with the short natural lifespans.

It's a wonderful book, though. It explores very well the actual bond between Willie and Skip. Growing up in a large Southern town in the 1940s, Willie and Skip did most things together. Skip could, and did, play football and baseball. They had a gag where Skip would drive a car, with Willie operating the pedals and controlling the steering wheel from the floor. They had near misses and adventures. Skip was a part of the community. He was known by everyone and was a regular customer of the butcher, when Willie would send him for bologna with money under his collar.

A series of animal books that breaks out of that mold was written by James Herriott, Yorkshire country vet. He tended to not just dogs and cats, but horses, sheep, pigs, cows and anything else found on farms. His stories are also delightful. He told his tale over several volumes, which take their titles from different lines of a hymn: "All things bright and beautiful," "All creatures great and small," "All things wise and wonderful" and "The Lord God made them all."

These books can't help but explore small-town country life, and the various characters and idisyncrasies of the owners of the animals. Herriott can't help but laugh at himself, and many of the stories involve him facedown in the mud, chasing after recalcitrant patients, or tangled in the nightmare red tape of tuberculin testing. They also can't help but be hopeful. One of my favorite tales involved a man whose calves were dying of a common but fatal virus. Herriott said that he wanted to try something, that he'd read of this new drug that could do wonderous things, and persuaded the farmer to allow him to give it a go. He returned the next day to find the calves much on the mend. The whole lot of them were saved. And penicillin had come to the Dales.

A darker, much less happy book is titled "Zoo Story: LIfe in the Garden of Captives" by Thomas French. Covering the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida, it's an enthralling, depressing, fascinating read. French goes behind the scenes at the zoo, as they attempt an incredibly ambitious renovation featuring an elephant exhibit as its crown jewel. But as humans attempt to subvert nature, bad things inevitably happen.

It's upsetting for anyone who likes animals, or is even just concerned about the direction things are going in, to contemplate the "Fifth Extinction" that is currently underway. Animal species are disappearing at a tremendous clip as their habitat is gobbled up to make way for fields of corn and soy, coltan mines, and other such things. That topic is discussed extensively in the book. At the beginning of the book, he talks about an elephant refuge in Africa that actually succeeded too much. Elephants were happy there, and multiplied, and soon began to strip out all of the vegetation at such a clip that the park was becoming a barren wasteland. If some elephants weren't put down or moved or something, none of them could survive. As four of them are airlifted to Tampa and Lowry Park, French notes that humans are the only animal that can modify their environment more, and leaves us to chew on that.

What are some other thought-provoking or heart-warming animal books that you've read?

EvMo is NaBloPoMo

2011-12-05T22:06:00.003-05:00

So, astute readers may have noticed that this year, the amount of blog posts did not take a nosedive after Nov. 30. So smart, you are!

This month, for the first time, I really got interested in how to build an audience for a blog. I'd never thought about it much before. It seemed as if I heard about the various sites I frequent just by magic. A friend would say, "Hey, you've gotta check out Regretsy, hilarious stuff." Or, I'd see a magazine article that referenced it. So when I started this blog, I waited patiently for the Internet to sprinkle its magic fairy dust over my page. And waited. And waited.

Do I have it even close to mastered? Hardly. The Internet seems very "mushy" to me. People read the paper I work for because it's available everywhere. When people in my community ask where they can get a copy, I don't even know what to tell them. To me, it's like asking if I know where they can dig up a sample of dirt. We have free drop boxes all over the place. On street corners, in grocery stores, in restaurants and coffee shops (I still love going into the one closest to the office on the day the paper hits the stands and seeing everyone reading what I wrote). But on the Internet, there's nothing like that. You control your online environment, so how does one sneak their own content in there?

I'm clueless. The wife of one of my friends and followers here works at a marketing firm and I know digital strategy is a big part of her job. I can't even imagine how she makes that happen.

But one fundamental piece of advice I've read on sites that give advice on how to get readership is quite simple. It's the same piece of advice I've been hearing from sources as diverse as my second grade teacher, a smartass McSweeney's columnist, and the woman I posted about yesterday: just write. Just keep posting things for people to read. You'll never become a better blogger by not doing it. You'll never garner more readers by not posting. So, I'm going to try to keep going with this, every day. I may not make it through some of the holidays, but I'm going to try. Thanks for reading!

Inspiration

2011-12-04T13:11:00.002-05:00

I try to avoid talking about work on here too much. Getting "dooced" is the fear of every blogger, even when they're saying innocuous things. But I was having trouble all day Friday with a story that I really want to be good and meaningful, and I thought maybe writing from the heart would help when it comes time to wrap it up and write it like a feature story tomorrow.

On Tuesday afternoon, I got a call from an area resident who had written a book and was wondering if the paper would be interested in covering it. I said sure. I've done quite a few similar stories. The fact that people can self-publish for much less money has led to an explosion of people making their authorial dreams come true, which is cool. It used to be that in order to ever see your work in print, it either had to be judged marketable by a large publisher, or you had to have enough cash to afford old-school self-publishing, where you assumed all of the risk (the chief one being spending thousands of dollars on books that would molder in your garage until your descendents threw them out after your death) and reaped (generally meager) rewards yourself.

Now, someone wants your book, and your e-publishers make them one. And in my two years at the paper, I've interviewed a variety of area residents who have taken advantage of this new way to make their voices heard. There was the man who wrote a memoir of his father, a well-known OB-GYN in the area, after his own days as a doctor. There was the fascinating woman who homeschooled her children because she didn't think public schools provided enough experiences, and was trying to position her children's book as the next Flat Stanley. There was the artist and all-around neat old man who wrote a historical fiction novel about the earliest days of this area.

So I met with the woman with interest. She was older than I expected her to be, and in the course of the conversation, I learned that she had a college-age grandchild and had retired in 1988. She got inspired to write her book when her own children were young, and went to summer camp. Since then, she's worked at it on and off, throughout the changes in her life. She's seen those children grow up, get married, move away and have children of their own. Since she started writing, computers went from the provenance of NASA to being carried around by everyone, the country flipped from Republican to Democrat and back again several times, the Cold War ended and the War on Terror began. Some people would have said that society has changed so much that a mystery novel written for her children would hold no appeal for today's children.

But she kept going. Whether her breaks from the book lasted two weeks, two months, or upwards of two years, she never gave up on it. I think a lot of people, when pressed, will confess to having something like this in their lives. The quilt they started for the baby that's now in first grade. The dollhouse kit they bought with babysitting money that's half-built and has survived multiple moves. Or even, the novel they started ages ago. I think most people view them as a failure, but meeting this author has given me a new way to look at it: that they're just successes that haven't happened yet. Because her book is now complete, and now available for purchase.

She's definitely inspiring. She probably won't make a lot of money off of these books, but she has had her say. She felt that she had something to share with the world, an idea that would motivate children to read. She felt that she had the power to make them laugh, make them think, give them something to respond to. And I'm sure that more than a few children will respond this way. I haven't read her book. I don't know how a critic would judge it. I don't know if a major publishing house would say that they could market it. But the fact that she never gave up on it, throughout all of the changes her life brought her, from being a working mom of young children, to an empty-nester, to a retiree and a grandmother -- it can't help but inspire. So I encourage anyone reading this to take what's left of their Sunday and dig out an old project of theirs, or even just knock a small one off their to-do list. It's never too late.

Batavia: This Place Matters

2011-12-03T19:32:00.002-05:00

When I started Bill Kaufmann's "Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette," it struck me mostly as an angry rant. Bill Kaufmann is angry about homogenization, the failed policies of urban renewal that left us with soulless, empty buildings and saplings were ancient trees once stood, and the death of civic life and small towns. He's angry that society seems to believe that success only comes when you leave your small town, that "communities of exiles" like New York, Washington D.C. and San Francisco are glamorized while the Batavias of the country are mocked and ignored. He's angry that more people gravitate towards a mass culture that has nothing to do with them personally while the culture created by their neighbors begs for an audience. It's a lot to be upset about, and it comes through in the first fifteen pages of the book.

But if you stick with it, the angry rant sweetens into a love letter to a flawed small town. Bill Kaufmann achieved success in the larger world, but returned to his roots simply because he liked it better there. But Batavia is a tough place to love. I have visited it a few times. I've seen its soulless "brutalist" mall, which (if Kaufmann is correct) is venerated in planning textbooks as an example of what not to do. It's so awful that it's not even online anywhere. I tried finding a photo of it to show you how ugly it is, and there just aren't any. A lot of its historic buildings have been torn down, and driving around, you don't get much of a sense of place. He's right in saying, too, that the community did it to themselves.

But it's still home to Kaufmann. It's where he went to high school, where generations of his family earned a living, where he grew up watching the single-A baseball team play. And there's that sweetness about the book, too. Kaufmann has been busy since he returned, and sits on the boards of several Batavia organizations, so he's known, and he knows lots of the local characters.

I initially was going to suggest skipping this book. Now I think it's a quality read for anyone who loves small towns.

Stories of the Season

2011-12-02T23:18:00.002-05:00

You can tell it's getting close to Christmas in several ways. The stores have all of the decorations out, which you can see in the tiny gaps between the mobs of people. Christmas events are everywhere: I set a 20-inch story on this week's events alone for my paper, and have one of comparable length ready to go for next week.

And, inevitably, one of your Facebook friends will post an angry rant about the phrase "happy holidays," something I've never understood. Most of us grew up with that phrase, which is said to either people you don't really know that well who may be of a different faith than you (like someone who cashed you out at the supermarket), or people who you won't see with enough frequency to issue separate greetings for the two to four holidays that happen within a week (like the co-worker who requested vacation time starting with Christmas and ending on New Year's). It's not some mid-1990s PC-police invention designed to somehow supress Christianity. I'm always surprised that some people actually believe that, and always irritated when I wish someone happy holidays and they say "Merry Christmas" back in an aggressive manner.

But at least they're fighting. The worst is when people say, in a resigned manner, that they're "not allowed" to say Christmas anymore. By who? Are the cops now issuing tickets to anyone overheard using the word? Some people not only act like the word Christmas is literally outlawed, but like they're resigned to that fact. You'd hope that people would fight. I believe that other religious communities, even the atheist community, would join the fight if there was an attempt to literally outlaw Christmas.

It's just that some people would like the celebration to be more inclusive. They'd like to have the Christian kids at least be aware of what happens in the homes of their Jewish classmates who are singing about Santa alongside them. Or their Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh classmates. And really, doesn't it matter more how Christmas is celebrated in the churches and in homes than at Target? Retailers just want to make as much money off the holiday as they can, and the sole belief system they promote is the belief that you should buy big expensive gifts for people. So, take the greeting in the spirit it was offered, and say whatever you feel comfortable saying, is my philosophy.

But look at me. This was supposed to be a nice post about Christmas stories. The holiday has spawned many things and looms large in literature, and I'm wondering what everyone else enjoys reading around this time of year.

Probably the ultimate literary Christmas classic is "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. Reading it around this time of year has been a feature of my bucket list for the past few years, and I'm hoping to make it happen this year. But my personal favorite Christmas tale is "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas.

My sister has taught this story to her English classes as a wonderful lesson in imagery. And it is. You can taste, smell and feel everything in this sweet, humourous story, from the "snow coming down in buckets" to the dead robin the young Thomas finds in the snow, "all but one of its fires out, and the last burning on its breast." The late Dylan McDermott starred in a late-1980s television adaptation of it, as the grandfather who narrates for his grandson a tale of Christmases past. If you ever see it on television or can find a copy on DVD, Netflix or anywhere else, it's worth a watch. A family viewing is usually the last thing we do on Christmas day.

What are your favorite Christmas stories?

Mood music, mood books

2011-12-01T19:27:00.002-05:00

Awww...remember Booking Through Thursday? So do I. I figured today would be a great day to revisit it, it being Thursday and all! So, here goes:

Do you find that your mood affects the things you read? Like, if you’re in a bad mood, do you tend to indulge in reading that will support it or do you try to read things that will cheer you up? Do you pick different types of books on dreary, rainy days than you do on bright sunny ones?

For that matter, does your mood color what you’re reading, so that a funny book isn’t so funny or a serious one not so deep?

I think mood definitely colors what you read. How can it not? It affects everything else, which is why I find "It's a Wonderful Life" to be a heartwarming story about our interconnectedness in years when things are going well for me, and a tragic story about a nice man who gets screwed out of every dream he has at every turn through no fault of his own during other years.

Sometimes, when I'm in a bad mood, I really just want to wallow. I pull a bunch of books that have depressing scenes in them off my overcrowded bookshelves, make a cup of tea, and crawl back into bed and read all of the sad parts. Other times, I actually do want some cheering up, and I choose something that always makes me feel good, like my James Herriott books.

And by the same token, when things are going well, the last thing I want is to find the biggest downer possible, so I tend to try to find things that reflect my mood. I gave up on a very sad book about a man with terminal cancer and his suicide plans one fine spring when the snow had melted and skies were blue. So I do think mood affects reading habits, and vice versa, at least for me.

The whole Kindle/Nook thing

2011-11-30T23:19:00.002-05:00

So I've been avoiding writing about the whole e-reader debate for a while for several reasons. The first is that it's been absolutely done to death. Since they exploded on to the scene about a year and a half ago, all anyone's done is discuss them. Are they the end of the printed word? Are they good, bad, or indifferent? And by the way, anyone hear of any good sales on them?

Another reason is that I don't know much about the debate. I'm not a techie. I was without a cell phone from 2005 until last Christmas, and my co-workers laughed pretty hard watching me try to figure out my future sister-in-law's old Android. I don't have a burning desire for an e-reader, although The Sedentary Vagabond let me mess around with her Nook last week.

The third reason is that it's a debate based mostly on emotion. Either you're seduced by the ease and convenience of Kindle, Nook et al, or you're in love with the tactile smell and feel of books. How can you argue that?

But three things changed my mind. The first was a conversation with a different co-worker today (we'll call him Gibby) who told us of his recent trip to Barnes and Noble. I don't think I've visited one since I picked up "A Dance with Dragons" by George RR Martin over the summer, but apparently they've made some changes. Gibby says it's very Nook-focused now, with the music and DVDs eliminated, and a lot fewer books. He described it as going to an Apple store.

This change seems to be depicted on the New Yorker cover, which also influenced my decision to write about them, as did the fact that I had no other ideas for today.

I can definitely see their appeal. A Kindle or Nook would eliminate the problem I was writing about a few days ago, where I feel as if I'm drowning in books. I'll end up selling the ones I don't want, which is a hassle, and I'll have to keep going through this process over the years. With a Kindle or Nook, hit delete, no problem. It would also be nice to have an endless variety of books available to you on vacation. I usually lug several pounds with me and can work myself into a frenzy packing: but what if I'm not in the mood for that one? What if that one isn't any good? What if I'm feeling more serious? What if this one is too fluffy? Another problem eliminated by a Nook or a Kindle.

The instantaneous nature of it also appeals. In my travels through the blogosphere, I came across a woman who blogs on Canadian fiction. She wrote an article about an interesting-looking book. I wrote down the title and author, but if I had a Kindle or a Nook, it would already be downloaded to it. And by the way, when you're out in public with your Kindle or your Nook, no one knows whether you're reading a trashy romance novel or catching up on back issues of The Economist.

But at the same time, they do have disadvantages. You'll have to keep charging it. My Android spends as much time dead as it does working because I always forget to charge it. I'd be irritated if I wanted to read a book, and couldn't because of a stupid dead battery. You also can't take it in the bathtub with you. I'm assuming that the technology will improve, so you'll have to update every few years, and what, transfer all of your books, I guess? Sounds annoying.

As The Sedentary Vagabond
pointed out, with a Nook or Kindle, you can't tell where you are in a book. If you downloaded "Cannery Row" and didn't check out the page count, you wouldn't know how short it is. You don't know how to tell whether you're almost done with the book. You don't know whether finishing the chapter before bed is realistic. I do that constantly with my books, so I think that would annoy me greatly.

A physical book prevents revisions later, too. I believe there was a case recently where they pulled all of the virtual copies of a particular book for some reason. Just gone, wiped out. I don't know whether it was a licensing dispute, or whether it was that well-publicized case of a recent mystery that turned out to be totally plagarized. But the implications are pretty scary. It would be easy to destroy every copy of something with a click of a button, or revise it to better suit someone else's needs.

So despite the fact that Barnes and Noble is peddling fewer of these "book" things, I do think they'll be around for a while. People will still want a physical copy. People like the tactile aspect of books. A lot of readers are older and not tech-savvy. Others just feel they don't need the expense in this economy. Others may prefer aspects of the physical-book experience for a lot of the reasons I outlined. If you're a busy mom who does her reading in the bathtub after the kids are in bed for the night, if you plan your reading around the length of chapters, if you spend lots of time away from outlets, the Nook or Kindle may not be for you.

But they'll have their devotees, too, and that's also great. I hope it will encourage not only more reading, but more writing too. What could be cheaper to produce than a digital book? I interview many local authors for my paper, and their careers wouldn't be possible without internet-based on-demand publishers. Maybe de-books will be the next frontier and the bleeding edge in independent writing. And in the meantime, I don't see why the printed and digital word can't co-exist.

Short Takes

2011-11-29T21:27:00.002-05:00

It's back, that feature where I talk about a few books in quick succession. They're books that didn't spark any sort of deep thoughts, but still worth mentioning anyway.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. If you haven't read any of his books other than the two that everyone gets assigned in high school, do yourself a favor and pick this one up. It's very short, and is simply a slice of life in this part of a California town, and the characters that live there. Like a lot of fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, it's rather difficult to describe, as it's so character-driven, and doesn't seem to have a formal "plot." It's worth reading for yourself. Pick it up, you won't be sorry.

Faith, by Jennifer Haigh. Having discovered her through a remaindered hard copy of "The Condition" last year, I was pleased that she came out with a new book so quickly. This family drama coincides with the international scandal of priests molesting children. When the narrator's brother is accused, she and her other brother have to choose sides. Since you get several perspecitves, it also provides an interesting look at the life of a modern-day priest. It's definitely up to her usual standard. I wish I could recall more detail, but I do recall liking it.

The Bride's House by Sandra Dallas. I enjoy Sandra Dallas, but honestly, her books tend to be similar. Though one thing I do appreciate about her is that she can resist the "too spunky for her time" trope on occasion. The first inhabitant of the Bride's House, Nealie Bent, has no higher aspirations than to escape her abusive father, marry a rich man and settle down in the Bride's House, the fanciest place in her new community. It doesn't go quite as planned, though, and her daughter is actually forced into Too Spunky mode, on a short leash as her father's accountant when she'd prefer to marry. By the time we meet Nealie's granddaughter, she doesn't need to be Too Spunky. I loathed the ending of this book, because it just seemed dumb, but for the most part, it was a nice quick read.

Get out of jail free

2011-11-28T23:15:00.002-05:00

So, one of my longstanding rules for NaBloPoMo is that I'm limited to one post during the month about how I have nothing to blog about, how I'm not into it anymore, how no one reads this anyway (although I do have some evidence to the contrary thanks to the "stats" feature), etc.

Here is that post. It's not so much that I don't have any ideas, it's that I worked almost straight through from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. and am just what you might call zombie-fried. I used my chair massager tonight and read a Vanity Fair article about Charlie Sheen, and I'm just not up to writing, especially since I'm staring down the face of having to write several articles tomorrow and lay out my section as well. So, this will be a very short post. But I posted today, just under the wire. NaBloPoMo, still going strong.

The Library in my House

2011-11-27T17:07:00.003-05:00

Today, I was trying to clean up a "problem room" in my house. Often known as "the back porch," "out back" or simply "the back room," it's been a trouble spot ever since the day I opened its sliding door to move my stuff in. Four years on, I feel like it's never really gotten set up. There are two bookshelves back there, along with a whole lot of other random crap. One large thing back there made its exit this weekend, when we gave our old television to my future sister-in-law and her husband (previously it had been in the middle of the floor).

Mr. Library Diva's Halo-playing chased me back there with my book about the Vikings, and I started looking around. I decided that if I could get rid of the "overflow" books stacked on top of the bookshelves and on the floor, it would go a long way towards making the room feel more like a room and less like the place where things we don't know what else to do with dwell. Since I'm not working in the field right now, I took all of my museum reference books off the shelves to put in a box until things change. It's odds-on that I won't be looking up how to write exhibit labels or searching for ideas on where to put an accession number on a sofa in my day-to-day life. That freed up significant space on my shelves, since those are big books.

It also made me really look at everything on my shelves. With shame. There are quite a few books I've never read, good books by authors I like. I decided that my new year's resolution will be to make decisions one way or the other on them. I've had some for so long that I'm ashamed to feature them in a TBR list on this blog again. Here are some others, though:

Children of Henry VIII, by Alison Weir. This was one of those strange choices, where I saw someone reading it at a Renaissance Festival that my old, terrible job hosted. For some reason, it got into my blood. I had to have it. I didn't want to read anything else. It wasn't at the library, so I bought it. I think I made it to page 4, but having just finished a book about Elizabeth I, maybe the time is ripe to revisit it.

Crystal Beach: The Good Old Days, by Erno Rossi. This was a Christmas gift a couple of years ago. Crystal Beach was an amazing old amusement park that got torn down to make way for condos when I was 13. From time to time, I still visit it in my dreams. I'm not the only one. It's spawned a minor cottage industry in Western New York. Someone purchased the recipie for the suckers they used to make, and several places claim to sell Crystal Beach-style waffles and loganberry. Of course, there are also books. I think I have them all, but have yet to read this one.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. When she's good, she's very very good. When she's bad...I don't want to say she's horrible, but I've read some of her books that were absolutely forgettable. I guess this one never much appealed to me, but I'm going to give it a try anyway.

Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins. I bought this ages after it came out. I love Molly Ivins but wasn't really in a political mood when I picked it up. I put it on a shelf and it's stayed there ever since.

The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. Bought it over the summer after finishing "David Copperfield." I decided to start with "Our Mutual Friend" instead, but didn't get far, and didn't pick this one up either.

Collected stories by Carson McCullers. I got it during the Borders closing orgy. I love her writing style, though, and don't think this one will linger unread too much longer.

Dracula by Bram Stoker. I tried it once before. I'm not sure if knowing the plot will work against me or not.

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. I got it at the American Association of University Women's book sale this year. I've had a longstanding interest, and vaguely planned it as a winter project.

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. Growing up, I always looked forward to our library's biannual book sale. You could get tons of books very inexpensively, and my whole family pretty much just grabbed. I got this during one of those. I do like Kurt Vonnegut, though, so I really should get this one read.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. A few years ago, my dad asked me to go through a big box of books, take what I wanted, and bring the rest to the library for the aforementioned book sale. This is one of my rescues. He's a good writer, and I enjoyed his book about Mormons a lot.

Front Row at the White House by Helen Thomas. Another resuce, and one that I might enjoy more now that I'm working in the field, albeit at the lower end of it.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. I like learning about the space program, and actually didn't even realize I had this book.

Often, reviewing my shelves doesn't turn up anything unread that I still have a strong desire to read, but today was different. Rather than go to the library when I finish my Viking book, I'm going to pick up one of these.

Workday companion

2011-11-26T21:00:00.002-05:00

Working at a newspaper is not what I thought it would be, based on the impression the movies give. In movies, a newsroom is non-stop action. It's fifteen or twenty or fifty different conversations all going on at once (depending on how large a staff the movie newsroom has). It's the hum of a wire, the clacking of keyboards, the constant ringing of phones, the buzz of interviews, and the beeping of the scanner. It's people screaming at each other because they don't have the time to be civil, running around, yelling things like "Page One!" or "Stop the presses!"

My newsroom is generally not like that. I used the generic "hum" to describe a newswire, because I don't know what one sounds like, or if they even make a sound anymore. The scanner is going constantly because my boss is a volunteer fireman, but for the most part, people are pleasant, and if people are yelling, it's usually because there was a super-exciting episode of "Survivor" last night.

But it's definitely not constant activity. What the movies don't show is how much time you spend waiting around. On an average morning, my to-do list may look like this: check e-mail, check voice mail, check regular mail, call mayor about random rumor, call high school drama director to set date to interview musical actors, call owner of new jewelry store down the street regarding business story, call school to arrange interview with the 8th grader who got invited to the White House, set press releases that may have come in. Yikes, huh?

Well, the results often go like this: e-mail, one message from the publisher alerting everyone that the copier won't work between 2 and 3 p.m. and two press releases for things we don't cover, regular mail, a press release from the secretary of a local church regarding an event which you already interviewed the pastor about and wrote a story on, voicemail, someone going "Oh, I think I have the wrong number," after four minutes of silence. Mayor is in meetings all morning, not for the village government, but for his day job. The high school secretary is totally befuddled when you ask about the musical and transfers you to the music department office, where you leave a message.

Jewelry store is so new that its phone is not yet in service. Middle school tells you that they can't just let you talk to a student because after all, you may be one of those phone pedophiles they heard about on CSI, but they'll contact his parents for you. Now you've been at your desk for nearly 20 minutes, and it's time to set those press releases, but there aren't any. Go to your email and refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Go check you mailbox in case a fax came in the last 10 minutes. It didn't. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

I love my job, I try to bring energy and ambition to it every day, but the reality is, there is some downtime. It's during these times that I turn to one of my newest favorite websites: www.mcsweeneys.net.

I stumbled on it by accident, but there is so much great stuff on there. It's essentially a collection of essays and columns written by a great variety of people. Some of it's funny. Some of it's sad. Some of it is thought-provoking. You kind of never know what you're going to get. "Notes from an amateur spectator at an amateur mixed-martial arts fight" by Rory Douglas is so funny it should come with a warning label. It describes the fights, fighters, spectators, and ring girls at his brother's MMA fights in the Pacific Northwest. The same with "Sarah Walker Shows You How," where she provides detailed explanations on accomplishing some of life's basic tasks. I especially reccommend "How to Train Your Dragon."

Others have the ability to make you think and expose the hidden worlds around you. In "Total Loss," Stef Willen takes literary snapshots of days in her life inventorying charred remains of people's homes. When there's a house or business fire, they call her to sit with the victim and find out what was in the structure so they can make an insurance determination. It's far and away my favorite column on there, so much so that I actually wrote to her to tell her and received a very nice email in return. Some of the columns are funny, and most have at least a little humor in it. But she's dealing with sad situations, and often with very sad people, so there are quite a few tragic columns, too.

Bianca is living every underemployed college graduate's worst fear as a high-class hooker, in "Bianca, the Covert Toronto Escort with a Day Job." That column is also often funny and sad. The funniest parts are when she's comparing and contrasting her day and night jobs, and determines that her madam boss has more credibility than her daytime boss (because she knows what it's like to hold Bianca's position and has a very clear understanding of what she does), and that her night-time co-workers are friendlier, often more professional, and have a better sense of camraderie (unlike the girl who sits next to her all day, never has a longer conversation with Bianca than "Can you hand me that" as is the custom of her daytime workplace, yet maintained a secret Twitter feed entirely devoted to how awful Bianca was). Of all of the columns on there, Bianca's has the strongest arc from start to finish, and she's a heroine you truly root for.

In this year's new column contest, I voted for "History's a Bitch: A Dog Walk through Time" by Robb Fritz to win the extra $1000. His column focuses on dogs' roles in history. Each one must have taken a great deal of research, but he also injects a lot of humor into it, making them a truly enjoyable read. "The Chorus Boy Chronicles" by Brian Spitulnik wasn't an option on the column contest, but it's also very good and entertaining. "Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos," on New Age living by Dani Burlison, and "Assimilate or Go Home: Dispatches from the Stateless Wanderers" by someone credited only as D.L.M., have both gotten better as they go. "Assimilate" is about young Fundamentalist Christian woman and her work with recent Somalian immigrants in the Pacific Northwest.

I sincerely hope that all of this has convinced you to check out the website for yourself. I'm planning to enter next year's column contest, so someday, you may even see me on there!

Occupy Main Street

2011-11-25T09:57:00.000-05:00

Here I am again, with my annual plea to think differently on this Blackest of Fridays.

It's ironic that we go from a holiday rooted in thankfulness and appreciation to one that is all about greed, materialism, and seemingly, how rude one can be. Buffalo shone with pride last year, when we made national news because a man was trampled at Target. Elsewhere in the metro region, shoppers reached over EMTs trying to assist a girl who was having a seizure to grab more shiny plastic crap.

I hate it. I hate it all. The entire concept of Black Friday, a day set aside to honor the worst aspects of our culture, just sickens me. I feel for the retail slaves who were ripped from their warm beds in the pre-dawn hours, if they got any sleep at all, to get screamed at by these hordes for minimum wage.

But Small Business Saturday, that's a concept I can get behind. Small businesses are likely to be quieter and to cultivate an atmosphere of appreciation. There will be tea and cookies, not security guards trying to keep people from killing each other over flat-screen TVs. You'll talk to someone who has made hardware, or shoes, or cupcakes, their life's work and passion, not someone who's still learning the register. It's a tangible chance to help do something about the chains that are taking over everywhere. Small businesses need you. So on Saturday, and throughout the holiday season, do try to buy it local first. Your neighbors depend on you.

2011-11-24T09:50:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

In honor of the holiday, I am posting a speech that I think exemplifies the spirit of the day. It was originally given on a different national holiday, July 4, by a man who some might say had little to be thankful for. Forced into retirement by a rare and fatal disease at the age of 35, at the peak of his career, no one would have blamed Lou Gehrig for seeming angry, sad, or broken. Instead, he gave a speech so powerful, so moving, that people who know nothing about baseball remember him for his ability to see the blessings in his life, even in the face of terrible adversity.

Here is what he said on the day of his retirement, to a packed Yankee Stadium full of people there to honor him. If you feel you have nothing to be thankful for today, remember Lou Gehrig.

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

"Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.

"When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know.

"So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for."

Things I'm Thankful For

2011-11-23T21:21:00.002-05:00

Since it's Thanksgiving Eve, and I will be on the road for the next few days, I thought I'd post now a list of things I'm thankful for this year.

Thankfulness can be tough, especially when things aren't going the way you want them to. With me, the main things I wish were different are work and money. Although I like my job, it's not in the field I went to school for, and it doesn't pay very much. It can be hard to put in perspective when you've just paid all of your bills and have $100 left that needs to cover gas and food for the next week, but although money's a big thing, it's not the only thing, and money problems are far from the worst kinds of problems one can have.

Other than the money, I realized I like pretty much everything about my life right now. My job is meaningful, creative, and it's even fun. It offers the type of work environment I didn't think actually existed. When I feel slightly under the weather, I would be more inclined to go in than stay home, because going in would make me feel better. Working at a community newspaper also gets you appreciation. Occasionally, people will give you hard time, but the kind, thoughtful emails and letters I've received outnumber the nasty ones at least five to one. So I'm definitely thankful for my job, especially at a time when so many people don't have one.

I'm also thankful for family. Family's easy to take for granted when you have a good one. They're like air: you don't really think about them until they're gone. My mother and Mr. Library Diva's father both had health scares this year, and my sister had a minor surgery over the summer, so I'm thankful that everyone is OK and is doing well, and here with me. And I'm thankful that they are such a wonderful, supportive, kind, loving family.

I'm thankful for my partner. I have a friend right now who's divorcing a terrible human being and tells stories that will make your hair curl. Whatever else happens, I know I have Mr. Library Diva to come home to, and that makes my home a safe, welcoming place. He's there whenever I need advice or have a problem or just need cheering up. He's there for the fun times, too. I'm looking forward to marrying him next year!

I'm thankful for my friends. Some, like Chris and Dan, I only get to see rarely. Others, like The Sedentary Vagabond, I get to see every day. But I appreciate your support, I appreciate you being a part of my life, and I'm thankful for your companionship and for the relationship we have, whether we talk all the time or not often at all.

I'm thankful for my cats. A co-worker interviewed second graders for her paper about things they were thankful for. Pets ranked high. One little boy said that his cats kept him from getting lonely when his brothers didn't want to play with him, and another said that his cat slept on his clothes and warmed them up for him. I definitely agree with all of that, and more. They make me laugh, they help me fall asleep at night, and home just wouldn't be the same without them.

I'm thankful that I have a decent place to live, and thankful for all of the stuff in it. I've been in this apartment for four years, and the only place that felt more like home was the house I grew up in. I got a good deal on a nice place in a nice neighborhood, with a place to garden and sit outside in the nice weather, and offstreet parking for the cars. Kids come in hordes at Halloween, everyone decorates for Christmas, and it's a place I can invite people to with pride.

I'm thankful for people who create things. Maybe blogging daily and working for the paper has given me a new appreciation of the simple fact that there are human beings behind every snarky website you snicker at, every book you read, every TV show, movie or play you watch, every exhibit you visit. Some of these people are well-known, others you'll never hear of, but they enrich our lives just the same. Thank you for the time and effort you spend to entertain others.

And I'm thankful for you, my readers. I'm never sure how many of you there are, but I appreciate everyone who comes here and checks out my blog. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Getting Romantic: a guest post by The Sedentary Vagabond

2011-11-22T22:20:00.002-05:00

Today's post was brought to you by .The Sedentary Vagabond. I am guest posting on her blog today, too, so make sure to visit me over there!

My introduction to romance novels came when I was a fifth grader smuggling them home from my tiny Christian school. (I was really sheltered, and my mom thought I was too young to read romance. Long story)

They were works by authors such as Janet Oke, full of pioneers and Amish people and very definitely PG.

My mother no longer desires or is able to control my reading habits, but I hadn’t read a true romance novel … until this week.

I love reading - it ’s my go to answer when anyone asks me what hobbies I enjoy – but I’ve mostly focused on classic fiction, biography, humor, detective fiction – pretty much everything but romance. My aunt has bookshelves upon bookshelves of romance novels though, so there must be something to them. Right?

I selected “A Scotsman in Love” as my reading choice. I’ve got some Scottish blood in me, and the cover featured a dashing Scottish gent shirtless, garbed in tartan and holding a lovely lass in his arms, so it promised the true romance novel experience.

The book was fine for its type. It was well written enough – not enough to deserve to enter the same room as “Anna Karenina,” but it was readable. The author did seem to have had her thesaurus too handy – seriously, nobody describes leaf color as “persimmon and ochre.”

Stories tend to have a certain setup: tension and resolution, but it was all too evident in this piece. And no, I don’t just mean the non-PG stuff. The main characters, a Scottish lord (of course) and a talented female painter, spend too much time unaccountably sniping at each other before the non-PG stuff begins.

Of course, the man is perfectly beautiful. Of course, the woman is unusually strong and sassy for her time. Of course they’re suddenly passionately obsessed with each other.

I don’t think this is a fault of this particular author. This is what the romance genre is. It’s about using certain common tropes to provide a predictable type of entertainment. The formula is what makes it attractive. If it wasn’t formulaic, it would be a different type of book.

I can definitely be one for predictability myself, at times. I like “cozy mysteries,” defined by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.” You can come to those sorts of stories with certain expectations and find them fulfilled. And I am perfectly fine with that.

I don’t find romance novels all that compelling. Maybe it’s an acquired habit, and I need to read another.

Do you like romance novels? What attracts you to the genre? Should I be looking for volumes without sexy Scottish men on the cover?

Also, apropos of nothing in particular, I found this sentence in the book hilarious: “He was not so much hirsute as all male.” Author, what I think you really mean is he was a hairy, hairy man.

TBRR = To Be Renewed Repeatedly?

2011-11-21T22:57:00.002-05:00

I think I may have mentioned a few times that I have a longstanding ambition to learn more about Vikings. I'd like to say something lofty inspired it, but World of Warcraft inspired it. And it wasn't the fact that an entire 12-boss raid was lifted from Norse mythology, featuring bosses named Freya, Thorim, and Hodir, or that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion had a Norse subplot, with Skaldic warlords to defeat, and valkyries waiting to attack you everywhere. No, my honest thought was that if I read up on it, I could annoy the rest of my guild with random factoids.

Well, that subplot is over and done with (they moved on to mining Egyptian beliefs), but the desire never really went away. This summer, I checked out a book simply titled "The Vikings" by Robert Ferguson.

I didn't read it.

Then I checked it out again.

And I didn't read it.

But this time, I'm pretty determined. I'm about 20 pages into it, and it's really good. It opened with the description of an excavation of a burial ship in the 1920s. When the ship was buried, with the bodies of the two women, they chose an area with very clay-like soil, and the soil preserved the spring flowers that were growing when they dug out the pit, and the fall flowers that were there by the time they were ready to bury the boat. It was interesting reading earlier theories on conservation, as well. I'm also surprised at the paucity of primary sources, even archaeological sites, for Viking culture.

But I'm not sure I'm going to get to keep going, sadly. I checked my library account as a means of checking the author's name, and also to renew my books. It won't let me. I owe too much in fines, so it may be going back to the library tomorrow, sadly.

Hawaii and American Domination through the eyes of Sarah Vowell

2011-11-20T17:07:00.002-05:00

I remember in eighth grade history class, Mr. Vincek warned us that we were going to be studying a sort of dark period of history during the decades following the Civil War, when America started to seize territories across the globe. I don't remember how it was explained to us, but it's a part of American history that we certainly don't like to dwell on much.

Sarah Vowell touched on this towards the beginning of her book on Hawaii, "Unfamiliar Fishes." She notes that during the time was researching the book, America was preparing to go to war in Iraq. The anti-war protestors tried to argue that what we were doing was against American ideals, and that "this isn't who we are." Sarah Vowell's history of American involvement in Hawaii, as she put it, demonstrated that "from time to time, this is exactly who we are."

Her book is very short, only about 200 pages. It outlines a part of history that we generally don't learn about in school: how exactly Hawaii became part of America. She outlines the period of time when American missionaries traveled to Hawaii from New England to bring Christianity and the written word to Hawaii, and how, over time, the interests of their descendants turned more towards the worldly pursuits of sugar farming, which is what led to its being annexed. She explores how its annexation wasn't entirely on the up-and-up (it was done through a joint resolution after failing an up-or-down vote). And in the process, she notes how its culture was nearly destroyed: through the outlawing of the hula dance, the replacement of creation myths with Christian stories, the spread of disease and death of large portions of the native populace, and more.

One thing I disliked about the book was the lack of other voices besides Vowell's. It told the story primarily from the American perspective. I found the apparent passivity of the native Hawaiians baffling. I know she's writing from a historical perspective, but she included brief glimpses of a modern Hawaiian nationalist movement and a few words with experts on Hawaii's past. I would have liked to have seen more of that, but at the same time, the book opened my eyes a lot. Hawaii's story is hardly untold: Vowell included a two-page reccomended reading list of primary and secondary sources. But at the same time, it seems like it's not widely known either. I picked this book up as a Sarah Vowell book, not as a book about Hawaii, so I'm glad that she used some her her fame to shine light on this topic. If I had any myself, I'd like to think that I'd do the same sort of thing.

"Sisterhood Everlasting" and the nature of friendship

2011-11-19T16:05:00.002-05:00

If you're an older person who enjoyed "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," your own experiences might have endowed it with a more poignant dimension. Growing up, we all had best friends that we thought would be with us our whole lives. But for the most part, at least for me, that hasn't turned out to be the case with many of them. I grew apart from my best elementary school friend by seventh grade. A close middle school friendship ended when our schedules were diametrically opposed in ninth grade. We both made new friends, and when her family moved to Georgia later that year, I didn't even hear about it. My college BFF likewise moved cross-country and, after a while, stopped contacting most of her New York State friends.

I'm fortunate to still have a few close friends from various stages in my life with me. One of them is Chris, a frequent commentor on this blog. I've also stayed in decent touch with two college friends, Dan and Melissa, but sadly, I don't get to see any of them nearly as often as I'd like to.

So with these experiences in my past, I naturally wondered how Tibby, Lena, Bridget and Carmen's friendship would fare as the girls aged, as careers, marriage, and children pulled them in different directions. Ann Brashares chose to tackle that subject in "Sisterhood Everlasting."

Of course, "everyone drifted apart" would be an extremely boring answer, as would "everyone still lives in town and is still BFFs." Their lives have changed a lot. Carmen is an actress on a show very similar to "Law and Order," and is based in New York. Bridget still never stops moving. She's still with Eric and has worked a whole series of temp jobs in San Francisco. Lena is an art professor, and that's the most interesting thing about her: she lives by herself in a one-bedroom apartment and spends her evenings renting movies, occasionally with her "sandwich artist" quasi-boyfriend.

Tibby is the conundrum. We learn early on that post-college, all of the girls shared a New York City apartment for a while. Tibby was the one to break the quartet, when she moved to Australia with Brian, who had a good opportunity with a software company there. But since then, she's sort of been...incommunicado. They will hear from her every once in a while, but don't really know what's going on. The time zone barrier keeps them from calling and finding out, and it's not like she's alarmingly silent.

Then she surprises everyone with plane tickets to Greece. She wants a full-scale reunion, in the town where Lena's grandparents lived, where she met Kostos, where the pants got lost all of those years ago. Everyone attends, but it doesn't go as planned. Three of the girls have to contend with not only a sudden loss, but with unraveling the truth behind it.

That's what gives the book its momentum. I've essentially recounted the plot of the first 40 pages. This book is a lot sadder than I thought it would be, because it does deal with grief (and there's nothing on the jacket to suggest that). Several plot elements I found to be slightly implausible (the drop-everything-and-travel-for-no-good-reason device is still very much in force), but I liked the book regardless. People always wonder what happens to YA characters when they grow up, and it's interesting to see each of them approach 30. If you hated the Traveling Pants series, this won't redeem it, but if you enjoyed it, I think you'd like this sequel.

SOPA? Nope-a

2011-11-18T19:31:00.002-05:00

About five minutes after the invention of the Internet, people started to use it to find ways around buying things they used to pay for. As magazines and newspapers rushed to make use of the new technology, their subscribers stopped getting their print subscriptions, or never started them in the first place. Since most of their revenue comes through advertisers, they were able to adjust well enough to view a continued online presence as a sound business strategy and a complement to their print versions.

The music and movie industries, however, were subject to more outright theft. They found themselves locked in a battle with fans, especially as the economy worsened and a $10 movie ticket represented a larger expenditure to people. They used PSAs to try to equate illegal downloading with stealing cars. They targeted a few downloaders in well-publicized cases, slapping 22-year-olds with five and six figure fines for their crimes. ANd now, they're trying to flat-out make it illegal.

Currently before Congress is the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. One clever linguistic trick politicians employ is to name a bill or law after something most people would approve of. The Clean Air Act, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind -- how could you not vote for those things? You're telling me you like dirty air, hate America, and want to see kids left in the dust? So when a bill or a law has an upbeat sound to it, be very suspicious.

Suspicion is warranted in this case. The proposed law, in its current form, would do away with the so-called "safe haven" law that prevented sites with a lot of user-genreated content from being liable for the actions of every single user. It's what allowed Craigslist to escape liability in a lawsuit on housing discrimination, and kept it from being shut down in the wake of the prostitution scandals. It's why the Chinese resellers don't take out all of Etsy. It's why this blog can continue to exist, even if the guy at the "next blog" button's entire blog consists of movies he filmed off the theater screen using his iPhone.

Even if you're not on the creation side of Internet content, (and actually, most of us are: if you sell on Ebay, have an Etsy store, sell your old furniture on Craigslist, upload photos to Flickr or have a YouTube channel for your toddler's antics, this applies to you) this bill has another creepy feature for you. According to this great explanation at CNET.com, this bill would require a sort of Internet wiretapping to make the blocks on these pirate websites work. Your internet providers would be forced to see where it is you're going online in order to keep you from getting there if there's a block on it.

The law also doesn't lay out a framework for how something comes to be blocked. This could be very, very bad. If you are of Regretsy, you will know that most people have an imperfect understanding of what copyright infringement is. The copyright laws are so ridiculously obtuse that in graduate school, I was advised as a curator to not even attempt to understand them myself, and call a lawyer whenever things weren't clear to me. But to quote "The Princess Bride," in general, it does not mean what you think it means. It's not infringing on your copyright to re-post a photo of your work that you yourself placed online, as long as you are credited. It's not infringement to link to someone else's site without their permission. It's all right to photograph anything that's not placed where the owner or creator has a reasonable expectation of privacy, so if I were to photograph everything in one of those booths at the Allentown Art Festival that hangs a homemade sign warning passerby that their beaded jewelry is intellectual property and you can't photograph it, the cops would side with me. Shit, I could even re-post the photos here!

But like I said, a lot of people don't realize that. Combine that with the abolishment of safe haven, and you've essentially got the end of user-generated sites on the Internet. Think of Etsy, for example. There are hundreds of thousands of listings at any given time. If one person is accused of violating copyright and reported for it, if I'm understanding this bill correctly, the entire site would be shut down, all transactions suspended, and they'd actively look through your online activity to do it.

This is not the way to protect the film and music industries. If you agree, tell your representatives. Visit www.house.gov and
www.senate.gov to let them know.

Where's today's post?

2011-11-17T20:45:00.001-05:00

It was one I'd worked on over the weekend, but hadn't finished. I forgot that when you start writing something and leave it as a draft, Blogger will post it in the day you wrote it, not the day you published it. So it's right here. NaBloPoMo, still going strong!

Eragon and Hunger Games, making headlines

2011-11-16T20:19:00.002-05:00

It's been a big week for young adult fiction. First, there was the much-anticipated release of the trailer of "The Hunger Games" on "Good Morning America" earlier this week. In case you still haven't seen it, you can watch it here. We'll wait!

There's a lot of debate among fans of the books whether the movie will be as good. THe main thing I hope is that they don't water down Katniss. It still makes me angry that they excluded Hermione's hero scene from the "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" film, where she solves the logic puzzle and figures out which flask Harry needs to drink in order to proceed. I don't want them to turn one of contemporary literature's most badass female characters into a wimp. I didn't see Jennifer Lawrence (who plays Katniss) in "X-Men: First Class," but I did see her in "Winter's Bone," and she was great.

I had long held out hope that they'd cast Robert Downey Jr. as Haymitch. I've adored him in everything I've seen him in, from "Iron Man" to "The Soloist," and I still think he would have been awesome, but Woody Harrelson will also be good. I didn't know that Lenny Kravitz acted, but he definitely looks like how I imagined Cinna. I had heard of Donald Sutherland, who plays President Snow, but couldn't recall what he'd been in. So I looked him up on iMDB, and was pretty blown away by the wide variety of roles he's had in his lifetime. He should be a good President Snow as well.

The timing of the film's opening concerns me a bit. It's due to open March 23, 2012, and that's usually the time of year they reserve for bottom-shelf releases. Gross-out comedies with no-name actors, romantic comedies rejected from Lifetime Movie Network on the grounds of excessive sappiness, small-budget action films that might as well be titled "Shit Blows Up Near Boobs"...and rotten adaptions of less-popular books and graphic novels. "Hunger Games" doesn't fall into that category, though. It topped bestseller lists and garnered many accolades and awards. Google-search "The Hunger Games," and 142 million results will appear. People will definitely be watching this film.

Also, the final installment of the "Eragon" series by Christopher Paolini hit stores last week. The series was initially supposed to be a trilogy, but Paolini had so much left over, he created a fouth book. The new book is called "Inheritance." I know very little about it, as I read only the first book in this series. The series has many, many fans, though (including Mr. Library Diva!) and I know they've been anxiously awaiting this book for several years. If anyone out there has read it, I'm interested in your thoughts!

Another NaNoWriMo author discusses her project

2011-11-15T21:41:00.004-05:00

The first time I ever heard of NaNoWriMo was through a college acquaintance of mine, Carol. Most people can conjure up those they knew as acquaintances at some point in their lives, always liked and found interesting, but through chance and circumstance, never became closer. It turned out that Carol is a cousin to Mr. Library Diva, and will soon be official family of mine, so it's nice to get a do-over with someone like that.

Carol is a NaNo vet, as you will see from the interview. Her longtime experience makes her one of the best people you could possibly ask about NaNo. Here are her thoughts!

How many NaNoWriMos have you participated in? What keeps you coming back?
This is my ninth year doing nanowrimo. I've done it every year since 2003. I really enjoyed the reckless abandon of the thing, the ability to push out a novel in 30 days and keep all of the prose, good and bad. It was a very hard debate this year, whether or not to do nano again.

Part of me was just tired. I tend to put everything else on hold during nanowrimo and focus solely on the process. I spend all of my creative energy during this time of year. Part of me was afraid I was only doing it because of tradition; I've been doing it so long it would seem strange not to do it again.

For whatever reason I tend to pass the finish line on odd years. That was a big push to do it this year (because last year I came within 100 words, but couldn't pass the finish line in time). I also had the right project to work on this year. In the end I opened up googledocs on November1st and wrote 4000 words. At that point I wanted to prove to myself that I still have the passion I did nine years ago. Nanowrimo is as important to me now as it was then.

Describe your current novel project. What is is about, how long have you had the idea, and what inspired it?

Funny enough, this year's nanonovel is a complete reboot of my 2004 nanonovel. I decided I needed to rewrite it, mostly because I borrowed too much from books I was reading at the time, but also because I've matured as a writer. I have the ability to write the story properly this time. Originally it was titled Shades of Purple, but I've retitled it Book of Threads.

I always struggle to describe my writing projects, but I was thinking about this one the other day. This novel is about various people who live in a world that they see is deteriorating around them. They see their government making decisions for the people that no one is happy about. They decide that they need to do something about it and set themselves on a round about path to fix it.

Originally this was just a story about one girl trying to live up to her destiny, but since then it's become something more to me. It's more politically driven this time, but there are other messages tucked in the prose. It's about finding your way no matter how old you are, finding your family among your friends, loyalty, regret, and the choices we make that shape our future.

If you were an employee at a bookstore that is organized thematically, where would you shelve this novel?

I don't know where I'd put this novel. It would probably get relegated to the fantasy section, since it's set in a world where magic exists. My issue is that I tend to write fantasy novels that aren't categorically fantasy novels. For the most part magic takes a backseat to the characters and their personal drama.

The week we're heading into is usually where the slump starts to come in any similar projects. Where do you turn for support when you're stuck?

I have a group of nano-cheerleaders that have helped me through past projects; they keep me going if it gets bad just by asking me how it's going and offering support. If I notice the slump happening I try to step away from the novel for a bit. Sometimes it helps to go do something else and then come back to it. A lot of time I have to write out of order and just follow what wants to be written. One year I actually stepped away from the project altogether and started writing a new one.

Can you describe your NaNo routine? What time of day do you like to write, where do you like to write, do you use a computer, typewriter or pen and paper, and do you like to have any particular food, drinks or music on hand to help you write?

I'm doing it a bit differently this year. In previous years I'd write in msword and then post finished chapters to my livejournal for friends to read and comment as I was writing. This year I'm using googledocs as my word processor and I'm not sharing on LJ. It's just as well because I'm writing so far out of order I wouldn't have posted much.

I tend to write in the wee hours of the morning. Since I work evenings, it's usually the end of my day and it's how I wind down. If the writing is really good I end up staying awake a bit too long, but I'd rather be tired than put the book away when some good writing is happening.

I'm comfortable writing anywhere, but when other people are around I tend to get distracted. I either need headphones or I have to shut myself up in my room.

I prefer using a computer because I type faster (and my handwriting tends to get sloppy and illegible as I write quickly). My hand can't keep up with my brain. I will jot down notes on paper when I don't have access to a computer and type them up later. Sometimes it's nice to have the weight of a pen in my hand.

Since I quit coffee, tea is my favored nano beverage. I like herbal blends, but chai is my all time favorite. Chocolate is also my great sustainer during nano, but I tend not to snack much while I'm writing.

As for music it's different every year. I tend to make a playlist of tunes that remind me of the characters, or songs that suit the themes of the novel. This year it's a bit Queens of the Stone Age, Stornoway, Ani Difranco, Florence and the Machines, Radiohead, Telepopmusik, and a lot of Jimmy Eat World.

What, in your opinion, makes NaNo special and worth doing?

Before nanowrimo I struggled to finish stories. I found that nano helps me finish projects (most years at least). It's the one way I've been able to get a story out; it really works for me. It's because of this that I keep coming back. It's important to me and my creativity has somewhat synced up to thrive under the pressure of it.

The people in my life also expect me to do nano. Silly as it seems it's become "my thing." I gear up for it every year and even when I dread it I'm really looking forward to it.

NaNo ends in about 17 days. What is your next step with this novel?

I don't know if the novel will be finished when I cross the 50k line. I'm going to keep writing otherwise, but I might need a bit of a break in December. If that's the case I'll come back to it in January and once it's finished I'll be posting it on my livejournal for my friends to read and critique. My goal is to publish this novel at some point, but it's going to need some edits and work put into it before that happens.

What is the most surprising reaction you've gotten from your participation in NaNo? Do you find most people are generally supportive, generally believe you won't make it, or somewhere in between?

Probably the best reaction is having my sister join me. We have word wars where we try to beat each others daily wordcount; it's been the most effective way to keep my count up (because there's no way I can let my little sister beat me).

For the most part people are very supportive, or they think it's a cool idea. The only time people have been negative is when the writing comes at the cost of everything else. Like my brother and his girlfriend constantly trying to get me out of the house when they know I'd rather be writing.

What advice would you give to someone who's contemplating doing this next year?
Do it. You can't know if nano will work for you unless you try it. My first year I was doing it by the seat of my pants. My second year I planned my novel a bit more through the course of October (mostly world building and jotting out character profiles). I discovered I'm a bit more of a pantser (as fellow nano-ers call it).

Don't give up if you have a bad day (or a string of bad days). It's never too late to start over. Get out of the house for a bit or do something else for a few hours. Relax and refocus, and if you can try to avoid forcing it.

Keep every word, even the stuff you hate. If you hate it so much you don't even want to look at it, make the font white so you can't see it. I highlight all the stuff I'm going to get rid of in red so when I do a second draft I can delete it right away.

If it's going really poorly there are some little tricks that help boost your words. You can stop using conjunctions. Write out full names of characters. Borrow songs/poems, have a character describe their favorite movie from opening credits to end credits. Title your chapters.

If you're really struggling, go hang out in the forums or go to a local write-in. You might be surprised to find that you're not alone and there are plenty of people who are willing to help.

And hey, it might go beautifully your first time. If that's the case, feel free to share the love and support other writers you know.

How have you seen NaNo change over the years that you've participated?

Nano has been through different website designs. This year's roll-out has been slow, but I like the new site overall. A new t-shirt design for every year I've been doing it (and any year that I have some extra money I buy one).

To be honest I think I've changed more than nano has. I've grown as a writer over these past nine years, grown in ways I might not have if I didn't embark on this insane literary journey every November.

Thanks very much, Carol! Wishing you all the best with NaNoWriMo!

Interview with an author!

2011-11-14T22:26:00.003-05:00

One of the cool things I wanted to introduce to this blog was some more participation. I am probably pretty boring to listen to all the time, after all, so I wanted to get some other perspectives on here from time to time. I contacted a friend of mine who didn't pussy out with this NaBloPoMo, and went right for the hard stuff: NaNoWriMo.

Rebecca, who will be identified by her first name unless she gives me permission to edit this, is a graduate school classmate of mine. I remember her as never being one to shrink from a challenge: her thesis research was of the type that required her to look at hundreds of old documents and draw conclusions. Certianly not for the faint of heart! She's currently the director of a cultural center in sunny New Mexico. And this month, she is also a novelist. She took a few minutes out from her novel to answer a few questions about writing and maintaining her sanity this month. Here goes! (Warning: there may be more later. Facebook seems to have cut some stuff off?)

Is this your first NaNoWriMo, and if not, how many others have you participated in? Why did you decide to participate this year?

This is my second year to participate. I did it last year for the first time. I love writing but it isn't something I take the time to do - so I try this to recharge my love of writing.

What is your novel about?
I went with fanfiction this year. Last year my favorite author - Mercedes Lackey - gave the advice that it was perfectly fine to start with fanfiction if you need help getting started. So this year's story is a HP story. It is an alternative world where Harry moves to New Orleans before Hogwarts and events bring about the end of Voldemort in a completely different world.

If you were an employee of a thematically-organized bookstore, where would you shelve this novel?
It would be in the fantasy section.

Can you describe your NaNoWriMo routine? What time of day do you write, where do you write, do you use a computer, typewriter or paper and pen, and is there any particular food, drink or music you like to have on hand to help you write?

I write after work - at a table - on my laptop with a large glass of milk and a special music blend on my Ipod.

Mid-month is usually the hardest time for any of these challenges. Where do you turn for support to keep going?
Last year I just plowed through - this year I am having major writers block and nothing I am trying is working. It is very frustrating.

What aspects of NaNo have surprised you? What about doing this challenge has been either harder or easier than you anticipated?
I am always surprised at how busy the month of November turns out to be...life intrudes way more than I plan.

Thanks so much for your time, Rebecca! I have so much respect for anyone attempting NaNoWriMo. It's like running a marathon. Only maybe even harder. Best of luck, you are halfway through!

Hunger Games teaser trailer

2011-11-13T18:29:00.002-05:00

The full trailer is supposed to debut during Good Morning, America tomorrow.

"May the odds be ever in your favor."

Good Queen Bess: The Elizabeth I project is done!

2011-11-13T17:36:00.002-05:00

Margaret George doesn't have many books, but all of them are both a treat to read, and a time commitment to read. They're always very long, but they also always flow well and are absorbing. She will take a major historical figure, usually name the book after them, and write about their lives from their own point of view. It's "historical fiction" in the sense that she endows them with their own thoughts and emotions, and will occasionally do things like consolidate four minor characters that served a similar function into one, or invent a minor character to illustrate something important and real. But it's meticulously researched, and she infers the thoughts and emotions based on real events.

For example, it's not hard to imagine that if you were flirting with a guy, and your cousin hauled off and married him, you would feel pissed off at your cousin, and maybe never speak to her again. It's also plausible that if you got to know the son of your cousin years later when he was an adult, your feelings towards him might be complex, carrying both the weight of your anger towards his mother and your long-stifled love for his stepfather. Especially if you were a virgin queen, married to your realm.

This is where we pick up the plot of "Elizabeth I." As Margaret George notes in the afterword, few British monarchs hold such a continued sway over public imagination. You can look at her and see many things, and people felt that way even in her lifetime. It must have been a daunting task to try to write from her perspective, and there were so many tacks she could have taken, since Elizabeth I reigned for so long and had so much happen. But the primary plot of the novel concerns Elizabeth I and her cousin, Lettice Knollys Devereaux Dudley Blount. Lettice was banished from court when she married Robert Dudley, and when the book opens, she and Elizabeth I have not seen each other in years. Robery Dudley dies soon after the book opens, and that's when Elizabeth I gets to know his stepson, Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex.

We see from both Lettice and Elizabeth's points of view as the book wears on. Robert Deveraux is the thread that binds them together, and although Lettice at first seems like a typical stage mom whose only hope is her offspring, her character evolves. Elizabeth is a bit harder to categorize, which I guess meshes with history. Though this isn't my favorite of Margaret George's books, it's still a good read, and I'd still reccomend it.

Other blogs, not my own

2011-11-13T14:40:00.004-05:00

So one of the main suggestions that comes up if you look for ways to increase blog readership is to visit other people's blogs and comment on them. I've been doing this over the past couple of day, just by using the "next blog" button on Blogger. I've made the following observations:

Lots of people start blogs and don't keep up on them. I've found many blogs that haven't been updated in over a year. Some haven't been touched since Obama came into office.

Commenting on family blogs feels weird. I don't know why. After all, the people who run them are the ones that made them public. But are they looking for random people to come and comment that "OMG yes, my baby cried that much too! Wow, you guys are making peanut butter cookies today? Sounds super-fun! Ugh, it's science fair time at your house, too? I can totally relate!" It feels sort of invasive to leave comments for these folks. It's like I knocked on their front door and asked if I could come in and look at their family album, then sat in their living room, eating their food, with my feet on their coffee table, commenting on how each photo was shot and telling them boring stories about how one time I did something sort of like what's happening in the picture.

Lots of people blog about running. I had no idea there was that much to say on the topic, but then again, I'm not a runner.

Many bloggers believe they are better than you. Sometimes it's subtle. One blog said that any comment that revealed obvious ignorance of rules-based systems will not be posted. It made me wish I knew a little bit about them, so I could whip up the most maddeningly ignorant comments I could think of and leave them all over the place, just to be contrary. Sadly, my ignorance is so vast, I didn't even know how to annoy the author. Other times, they're much more in-your-face. One blog that featured mostly the author's political opinions said something like "If you're just a clicker then click on through, this is not the blog for you." Translation: I CAN READ HUFFINGTON POST AND YAHOO NEWS BETTER THAN YOU CAN, BITCHEZ!

Sharing your photography seems to be one of the most common reasons to start a blog. I came across TONS of them. There was the guy who takes mostly action shots of skateboarders and BMX. There were quite a few wedding photographers. There were loads and loads of nature photographers. I commented on some, not on others.

Commenting is deceptively hard. Or maybe I overthink it. If I just wanted MOAR PAGE VIEWS, I could make one generic comment and post it everywhere, like the people who spam for cheap electronics. "Hi! Your blog is excellent resource! I must tell you, I will never buy electronics from store again! My mom got bran new laptop for only $20! Click here see how!" But I guess I want people to come here because they're curious, or I sound interesting, not because they believe some scam. So to me, that means I have to say something worthwhile on other people's blogs, not just NICE POST! HERE'S MY LINK!

At the same time, since part of the point of commenting places is to encourage people to come here, that also narrows it down to where I should comment, in my mind. So I don't comment on blogs that aren't in English, that haven't been updated sometime in 2011, and that I don't find interesting, or at least relevant to my blog.

Those are the easy decisions. Then it gets murky. If someone describes herself as "an avid homeschooler and warrior for Christ," and most of her links are to churches and extreme right-wing causes, but seems to like some of the same books as I do, would she "follow me home?" Would the guy who did a great interview with the man who designed stage clothing for most of the hair metal bands but mainly blogs about death metal "follow me home?" Should I comment? If I come across a poetry blog and I think the poetry isn't to my taste, but they seem to have tons of followers, should I comment?

It's been fun exploring what other people's blogs are like, but I'm not sure how this piece of advice is working out for me. I see a couple of people have been enticed here, and I really appreciate you coming and hope you enjoyed my blog. But at the same time, this seems like an awfully labor-intensive way to try to build a following. I could spend every night for the rest of my life doing this and still not visit every blog. I got accepted into a a book blogging Ning group, so I'm going to try to develop that more. If you're interested in seeing the site, you can visit it here. And anyone with advice, I'm all ears!

What People Google, or Making my Blog More Awesome, part 3

2011-11-13T00:03:00.002-05:00

So I noticed that Blogspot has an option called "stats," you know, along with "posting," "settings," "design," etc. In my ongoing (12-hour long now!) quest to make this blog more awesome, I checked into it.

It's neat. It will tell you which of your posts people are looking at, where the people came from (both online and on the internet) and what google search may have brought them here. Very interesting and surprising. For example, several years ago, I titled my post on my saints book "Have you ever come across a St. Maureen?" It's a line from a British film called "Millions," and is said several times throughout the course of the movie by a young boy who has recently lost his mother and is fascinated with the saints. He sees several of them, and always asks that question. Well, apparently he's not the only one: 18 people have come here by googling "St. Maureen." Fans of the film? Catholics looking for a baby name? Guess I'll never know.

I received a number of hits from webistes with .tk domains. I've never heard of that domain before. I followed one, and it took me to a slutty video of Emma Watson and warned me repeatedly that my computer could explode if I didn't stay to watch. I got one hit from someone who had googled "chicken bestiality" and didn't understand it, until I found this old post about a salaciously named but otherwise forgettable short-story anthology. I am very surprised at the continued interest in my post on "Charity Girls." The one person from Etiquette Hell who came to see me truly warmed my heart. That website is one of my favorites. I go there all the time, I've shared it with many people, and always enjoy not just the stories, but the lively debate in the comments and the wild stories some commentors have. So, thanks for your visit.

And thank you to anyone else who comes to see me. I've been trying to get out there more today. I visited lots of folks on their blogs and left some comments, and have applied to join a Ning of book bloggers. I don't aspire to be Regretsy, at least not in terms of readership. I'm not looking for a book deal, a movie deal, or my own line of e-readers out of this. I would just like to expand this blog's circle a little bit, to attract 15-20 followers instead of three, and to maybe even see comments sections where the people start talking to each other. So, thanks for being here, thanks for hearing what I have to say, and if you have something to say in reply, I appreciate that too. Even the chicken bestiality person.

In the spirit of "more awesome..."

2011-11-12T16:36:00.002-05:00

I'm trying an experiment. I eliminated comment moderation on new posts. I had it in place solely because I was concerned about spammers. In the years since I've doing this, though, I think I've declined to post only a handful of spam. At this point, I think it's hurting me more than it's helping me, since people can't really talk to each other. So, have at it!

Making your blog more awesome

2011-11-12T12:33:00.003-05:00

As I mentioned before, the reason for the sharp drop-off (to zero) posts between mid-July and now is that I was pretty convinced no one was actually reading. In the past 12 days, I've begun to wonder how to reverse that trend.

I frequent an embarassing amount of websites. Only some of them are listed in the links. Others, I didn't bother to link to, because frankly, they don't need me. Regretsy updates several times a day and never fails to garner fewer than 100 comments on a post. STFU, Parents likewise has a huge following, so large that it's earned her a column on a large parenting website. Seriously, I might as well link to Google: hey guys, let me tell you about this ahhhh-mazing website where you can just ask it a question, any question you want, and it will tell you the answer!!!!!!!

But most of the sites I like to visit, I just heard of through word-of-mouth. I learned of STFU, Parents through my awesome, child-free friend Kiki. I heard of Edge of Sports through a website called Working for Change, which was an ethical telecommunications company and also carried many syndicated columns. I used to go there to read the works of the late, great Molly Ivins. Dave Zirin's column was there, too, and it inspired me to go to his site. The rest, I'm not even sure how I heard about the sites. But I have no clue as to how to attract that kind of attention myself.

I think this is sort of reflective of a larger issue in my real life. I'm not a networker. Some people are always working, always out there making connections, and amazing things happen. They hear through a lady in their spinning class about a great house for sale for $30,000 because the owner just wants out. An alum of their college hooks them up with a great job, through which they meet someone who can offer them something even better. Sadly, that's never been me. I tend to do my job and go home. When I interview people for stories, I often feel like I make good connections with some of them, but I never trust it. When they say something like "call me anytime," I never take them up on it. I never think that they may actually mean it, for one thing, and many times, I'm not sure what to say anyway.

I have commented on people's blogs, but I'm not really sure how many of them have "followed me home." This month has reminded me of how much I do enjoy blogging, though, and I think I'm going to try harder to figure out how to share this with more people. I started by putting a "follow" link on here.

The Future of Books? Small-scale

2011-11-11T20:57:00.002-05:00

When Borders first hit trouble earlier this year, then went under, much ink was spilled about What This Means For Books. Theories abounded. "This is a sign of the times. People download e-books to their iPads, they don't leave the house to buy some clumsy dead-tree product," some said.
"Chillax," said others. "Borders was a poorly run company, and this is what happens when you do a bad job, even if your product is a home run."
"Nuh-uh. You wait. This was just the first round. In ten years, we'll download them directly to our brains."
This article at Business Week Magazine has another theory as to what we may expect post-Borders, a theory to compete with "direct-to-brain downloads" and "just one less shitty company in the world." The article posits that as large corporations get out of bookselling, mom-and-pop business owners will get back into it, and we'll see things return to a smaller, saner size.

It's a nice thought, very nice. It's harder to determine if it will happen. I think there's been a lot of backlash against the whole concept of e-books right from the start. Many people just love the idea of books, the way they smell, and feel. As this article points out, people don't like giving soulless downloads as gifts, and may not plan ahead enough to use an online retailer exclusively.

I don't think e-books and e-readers have a clear advantage over books. You interact with them entirely differently. The Sedentary Vagabond bought herself an e-reader with birthday money, and has pointed out that you can't tell where you are in a book at any given moment. If you hold a 300-page book in your hand and open it up randomly, it's easy to determine if you're almost done, or jsut starting out. I'd assume, too, that you have to keep an e-reader charged, that they will (or can) break if you drop them, and that you can't take them into the bathtub with you.

Of course, I can see their appeal. I like the idea of being able to obtain any book you want instantly. It's also nice that they won't clutter up your home, although they will clutter up your machine and you'll have to start making some hard choices at some point. But another thing about books is that they're oddly social in a way. When you read something good, you want to talk about it. Even when you read something bad, you may want to tell the world how terrible it is. Bookstores are places set aside for books, with frequent author readings, book club meetings, and just a good atmosphere, and I think that e-books can never entirely kill them off for that reason.

Annoying Book Trends

2011-11-10T21:47:00.003-05:00

So I've been trying to find ways to take the content of this blog beyond what you could find cruising Amazon reviews. I still haven't figured it out, but I did come up with an idea for tonight's post: Annoying Book Trends!

1. Title format: The [quirky profession's] [female relative]. You know what I speak of. "The Alchemist's Daughter." "The Mandolin-maker's wife". This is one of those trends where one book with a similar title broke through and everyone rushed to do it. It's particularly awful when you can tell that the book does not, in fact, concern the daughter of an alchemist. And the fact that it invariably concerns a female relative reeks of that "herstory" crap...clearly, the alchemist or mandolin-maker is the interesting one, and it makes me think that it will be primarily about the tribulations of keeping the wood shavings out of the casseroles and explaining the mysterious explosions to the neighbors. I think it's time for this trend to die.

2. The Girl who was Too Spunky For Her Time. It's hard for modern women to imagine an era in which they had almost no freedom. When it was a commonly held belief that encouraging a woman to learn things would interfere with her ability to have babies, when an unmarried 19-year-old was an old maid, when people went around saying things like "women belong in the kitchen" in a non-ironic way and didn't get smacked for them. It's hard for modern women to imagine, but if you're writing historical fiction, you need to try.

Yes, throughout history, there were women who were Too Spunky For Their Time, but the fact that the repressive system remained in place for so long seems to indicate that they were generally in the minority. Why were most women OK with their lack of spunk? What made so many women agree to marry at an early age, turn from their books once they could read well enough to get by in their society, and generally conform? Maybe the happy housewives of earlier eras are harder for us to relate to, but who says that everything in historical fiction needs to speak to our modern world?

3. Cardboard boyfriends. Chick-lit books are notorious for this. Even though the focus is supposed to be primarily on the girl, would it kill writers to give their male characters the tiniest bit of depth? Usually, all we know about them is their profession and their penchant for doing thoughtful things (if they're good guys) or being thoughtless (if they're the douchebag obstacle character). Give him a hobby or something!

4. Memoirs by boring people. The memoir genre is hard to do well. The cold, hard truth is that not everyone's life is interesting. Other people have interesting lives and can't portray them well. Some have something very mildly interesting about them but flog it way too hard. Since the explosion of the genre about 15 years ago, they've definitely varied in quality.

5. Formulaic fantasy. Shouldn't that be a contradiction in terms? Sadly, it's not. I took a beating on here a few years ago for my post on The Alchemyst, but it's pretty typical of a formulaic fantasy novel. Person or persons receive a strange visitor. Strange visitor reveals magic ability/chosen one status. Person embarks on a quest to either find a lost object or destroy a dangerous object. Fate of world hangs in balance. Quirky companion goes along. Plot culminates in an archetypcial struggle between good and evil. Good wins.

When it's good, like in the Harry Potter series, it can be good. There were enough side roads and distractions in that to prevent it from seeming like the same old plot. When it's bad, like in "The Alchemyst," it's dreadful. When it's not like that at all but forced into that model for a movie, as in "The Golden Compass" film, it deserves a prison sentence. George RR Martin gets high marks from me for breaking out of this mold. Wish more people would.

So tell me: what do you all dislike in books? What device, trend, or character archetype would you like to place a 1000-year ban on?

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2011-11-09T23:05:00.002-05:00

Just the title of this book, "MIss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" was enough to capture my imagination. I decided to buy it after looking at it in the store.

Most books use bespoke illustrations to fit with the story. In this book, the author unearths vintage photographs that become an integral part of the story. If you've ever checked out my Big Happy Funhouse link, you'll know that one of the best aspects of that blog is mousing over the images and reading the comments, and seeing what the blogger and his commentors think is happening in the photo.

Ransom Riggs, in his debut novel, wove an entire story around the photographs he found in people's private collections of vintage photography. The tale concerns Jacob, who recently witnessed the violent death of his grandfather. His grandfather had a small collection of strange photos and used to tell even stranger tales about them. When he was growing up, he lived on an island off the Welsh coast, with other children who could do strange and wonderful things.

Jacob's grandfather's death triggers a near-nervous breakdown on Jacob's part, and for his own healing, his father accompanies him to this island to sort out the mystery for himself. The children, of course, were real, and there is an interally-logical explanation for everything.

But the real joy of the book is seeing the story interact with the photographs. Sometimes it falls a bit flat: a two-part series of children in yarn suits with yarn balaclavas is never explained at all; one gets the sense the images were simply too good not to include. But others are haunting and clever: his father, a dejected Halloween bunny, sitting alone on the curb; a photo of a man holding a toddler labeled "this is why"; a man in a suit loading a shotgun into the back of a 1960s-era car. "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" is worth checking out, simply because it's so very different.

Can anyone reading this think of a book where the images played such an integral role in the story -- a book that would make no sense without the images (excluding picture books for children?)

TBR

2011-11-08T20:43:00.003-05:00

Though the TBR list on this blog never seems to get updated, I usually carry around a mental one. It helps to have some ideas when I go into the library, since the Central Branch is so big and overwhelming. Here are some things I'm currently thinking of picking up:

Extraordinary, Ordinary People by Condoleeza Rice. Anyone who knows my political leanings would probably be extremely surprised by this. But although I don't agree with her ideology, I have always liked her. In an administration marked by missteps, major and minor, she always struck me as smart and competent, and the type of person that represents the country well to the rest of the world. I felt that if people from Nepal or France or Niger assumed we were all like that, I wouldn't mind. This book is not about her time as Secretary of State, but about her parents. She was impressive on "The Daily Show" when talking about it.

The Secret Man and All The President's Men. I vividly remember reading a detailed account from either Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein in "Vanity Fair" after the identity of Deep Throat was revealed. Now that I'm a journalist myself (covering much less exciting stuff) I'd like to read these.

A book of Norse mythology. I've checked them out before and been forced to return them unread. Originally, I just wanted to annoy my World of Warcraft guild with references to it while we worked on a raid that had its roots in Norse mythology. But those references are everywhere, and I'm still kind of curious.

The Help by Kathryn Willett. Yes, I'm finally giving in.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by someone I don't feel like looking up. I hear about books like this through work sometimes, via book club announcements. The author is coming to the Jewish Book Fair in the area. It's about Egyptian Jews that were forced to flee the country for some reason. I don't know why. I guess I will have to pick this one up, and find out.

Slash by Slash. Yep, still looking for it, on the rare occasion I remember it, it's not in. Still.

Our Mutual Friend and The Old Curiosity Shop both by Charles Dickens. An awesome writer whose books still have the power to provoke and entertain modern audiences. Ultimately, I'd like to read them all. These are good places to start, since I own them.

Good Wives by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Six years and counting...

Always open-minded... I pride myself on being the kind of reader that is willing to give anything a chance. I figure there is no harm done, if it sucks, I'll simply stop reading.

The Useless Books

2011-11-07T22:48:00.002-05:00

I had an idea a few months ago to start a collection of books that will one day be pointless. It was inspired by a conversation with my friend over at The Sedentary Vagabond about Y2K. I remember as early as 1998, looking at a table of books in Glastonbury, England during my semester abroad, and seeing a treatise on this terrible, looming apocalypse of Y2K that everyone was afraid to talk about. I didn't buy it, but less than six months later, the general tone of the book would have become obsolete, as everyone was talking about it by then.

It spawned many, many successors. By 1999, Barnes and Noble was offering entire tables of Y2K books. You could read about any aspect of the coming disaster: how it happened, how to prepare for life afterwards, how it could be averted, how to avoid similar catastrophes, should we survive this one. Obviously, it didn't come true. But someone worked hard on all of those books. What became of them?

I wondered that anew the week Barack Obama produced the original copy of his birth certificate. I happened to be in Barnes and Noble again, and saw a hardcover copy of a book called something like "Where's the Birth Certificate?" on the new release table. Unfortunate timing, though I felt less sorry for the author once I learned that he was behind the Swift Boat book, too.

I can't help but feel a little sorry for the authors of all of these books that are current now, but will soon fall out of favor. Those who write books like the 300-page guide on finding information on the internet (c. 1997) that I saw at my library in Central New York, at least know that they are not necessarily writing for the ages. But I feel bad for those who spent a lot of time formulating and researching a thesis, only to be entirely off-base with it.

Apparently I'm not the only one who does. I checked out one of my favorite book humor websites, Awful Library Books, and they too have a white elephant book featured in a recent entry.

Bliss Incorporated: One Perfect Day

2011-11-06T21:42:00.002-05:00

Though Mr. Library Diva isn't a big reader, he usually enjoys hearing about whatever I'm reading. During the course of reading "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding" by Rebecca Mead, though, he didn't seem to want to hear about it. I found out why a week later: he asked me to marry him, and admitted that anything wedding-related had been making him really nervous!

So, since I will soon be in the throes of wedding planning myself, I was glad to have read this book, depressing as it is. I had the feeling it would be, just didn't realize how depressing. Its central thesis is that as the symbolism of a wedding has eroded, the weddings themselves have gotten bigger and bigger and more out of control. I guess Mr. Library Diva and I are the perfect example of how its symbolism has eroded. We're both in our 30s and have been out of our parents' homes for a while (no transition to adulthood here). We've lived together for four years, so our lives together have already begun in a very real sense. And without being too graphic, let's just say that if asked what my main concerns about marriage were, I wouldn't answer "adjusting sexually," which was the top concern cited by brides-to-be in the 1940s.

So it is kind of a depressing book, but it's a fascinating book, too. Mead runs down trends in weddings and dissects the (often surprisingly recent) origins of things we believe to be "tradition". For example, it was likely that your great-grandmother didn't receive a diamond from your great-grandpa, unless he was a cutting edge kind of guy. That concept was introduced in the 1920s. The unity candles started to be seen in the 1970s. The popular "Apache wedding prayer" is actually from a 1950s Western film.

She also takes a look at how things are sold. We see the cynical, unflattering portrait of brides-to-be and their parents painted by the wedding industry: easily manipulated saps who will buy anything with minimal convincing that it's essential to make the day more special. Videographers quote one client who said that she feels watching her wedding video will help her marriage in the future, should she and her husband hit rough waters. Wedding planner trainers encourage the planners they're teaching to offer free "plan your own wedding" seminars to scare brides with how much work it is to get everything right. One wedding expert compared a bride to a "drunken sailor: everyone's trying to get at her."

She travels all over in the course of the book: to a wedding dress factory in China, to Las Vegas, to Sandals resort, to a small church in Kentucky or Tennessee that is trying to market itself as a wedding destination, through the merchants participating in Bride Magazine's Wedding March on Madison, to conferences of videographers and wedding professional associations, to a seminar for young women who want to be wedding planners. She meets a woman who planned her friend's wedding on a $200 budget. She talks with a wedding minister who has an arsenal of several hundred services, whether you want Orthodox Jew or Wiccan. She interviews the man behind David's Bridals, and a woman who is a giant in the wedding industry and has her own line of champagne flutes, ringbearer pillows, and the like.

I'd definitely say this book is a must-read for anyone who's starting the wedding planning process. She writes all of this in an engaging way, and allows the reader to draw many of their own conclusions without totally failing at providing analysis.

TV Obsession: American Horror Story-

2011-11-05T23:48:00.005-04:00

I have never really been much of a television person. There was a two-year stretch where I didn't have cable at all (and may be heading back there if Time Warner keeps raising its rates). There are things I'll watch when I catch them, like "Scrubs," "Daily Show," "Colbert Report," "Keeping up with the Kardashians," "Real Housewives of Atlanta," etc. But for the most part, I'm not into it and generally just sit there when people talk about television at work.

Until I started watching "American Horror Story." I caught the first 15 minutes of the third episode a few weeks ago, and it just wouldn't let go. I've seen most of the rest of them since then. For the first time in years, I actually planned to watch the newest episode last week. I'm obsessed. I check in on FX regularly to see if "American Horror Story" will be on, and I hate all of their other programming for not being "American Horror Story". In fact, I hate everyone's programming for not being "American Horror Story."

The show is extremely weird in a lot of ways. The difficulty in understanding what's going on is what's hooked a great many of its fans. "American Horror Story" concerns the Harmon family, Vivian, Ben and Violet. Vivian had a late-term miscarriage and Ben had an affair approximately a year before the show begins. To start over as a couple, they move to a suspiciously cheap mansion in California. Turns out, it's so cheap because it's extremely haunted. A weird supporting cast of characters make their appearances in the show, at least some of whom are most likely dead (debate rages online about this, and it's never spelled out).

Each episode, you get a little more backstory about the house and what happened there. It was built by a doctor and his socialite wife in the 1920s. The doctor was a drug addict with a "Dr. Frankenstein complex" who became an abortionist to support the family. His own child was kidnapped and murdered in revenge, and he "did things" to the body. Jessica Lange, the strange next-door neighbor, lived in the house at one point, and shot her maid and husband when she caught the latter raping the former. We see the maid again, sometimes she's young and hot, and other times she's old and has a cloudy eye where she got shot.

A man named Larry was recently released from prison because he torched the house with his family and himself in it, and he has only half a head of hair and burns over 70 percent of his body. Two boys, often referred to as the Weasley twins because they look exactly like them, broke into the house during the pilot, smashed everything and got savaged by a monster in the basement. There were murdered nurses, apparently (this was in the episode I still haven't seen). Most recently, there was a gay couple who died in a murder-suicide.

It's a strange show, but it sucks you in, determined to keep watching until you figure it out. As other people have noted elsewhere, better, the show also deals in more mundane horrors. Adultery. Fertility problems. Getting swindled by your investor, and trapped somehwere you don't want to be by a down economy and depressed real estate market. Bullying, teenage mental illness, and the worries that your own child will go astray and you won't even be aware. It all makes it pretty compelling. Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX. Try some if you dare.

The One I Wanted to Hate

2011-11-04T20:57:00.002-04:00

Whenever I'm working late, covering a government meeting of some sort, Mr. Library Diva spends his evening making fishsticks for dinner and renting a Redbox movie. But he doesn't just choose something I wouldn't want to see. He chooses something NO ONE would want to see. Typically, they are smaller-budget knockoffs of a big-budget sci-fi/action or fantasy/action film. WHen I ask him how it was, there's always a note of surprise in his voice when he says it was terrible. At first, I used to try and understand the impilse, and ask him what precisely about the movie made him think it would even be worth $1 to rent? Then I gave up. Then, I checked out "The Baby PLanner," and I thought I understood.

I fully expected this book by Josie Brown to be dreadful. It had all the hallmarks of it, certainly. Any "baby planner," I figured, would by definition be dealing with irritating, whiny clients who never learned to distinguish between a real problem and one they made up. Furthermore, the baby planner in this book (in a refreshing twist) is in her 30s and wants a baby herself SO BAD, while her husband waffles and her sisters reproduce like Xerox machines. And yet, I totally did the Redbox thing: "OMG, this book looks so shit...I'm getting it, I'm totally checking this one out."

And it was actually a pretty enjoyable read. Brown is a clever writer, and dispatched my main objections early on. Katie, the "baby planner" heroine, fell into the job after her position at a consumer safety agency was lost to budget cuts. A mom-to-be sees her helping her own sister figure out which cribs are the best, asks how much she charges, and she's in business. Two of her early clients genuinely need her help: one has suffered several miscarriages and is on total bed rest and literally CAN'T do any of her own baby planning, and the other lost his wife in childbirth and is now trying to solo-care for their child while his company is getting ready to go public. See, these people NEED Katie!

Katie's husband is also -- how to say this politely? -- a douchebag. There are some clues to this early on, so I'm not exactly revealing anything shocking, and he only gets worse as the story rolls on. Her birth-control sabotaging and his stonewalling are less about a potential baby than a marriage. This adds a lot of interest to the story, and his opposition to parenthood comes from a very different place than the stereotypical "I like my freeeeeeedom!" sentiment. The tension between them culminates in The Worst Day Ever for Katie, which has a twist you spot several miles down the road, and one you're very unlikely to guess at, ever.

Katie's very likeable, which helps keep the whole "baby planner" notion palatable. Most of her clients are fairly sympathetic as well, and the unsympathetic ones are funny. It helps that she herself doesn't take the notion super-seriously, either. It's her business, and she clearly gets satisfaction out of it, but doesn't pretend that she's saving the world or anything. She doesn't make it more than what it is. As surprised as I am to say this, I enjoyed this book a lot. No, it's certainly not a tale for the ages, but it's a fun read.

Telling Herstory

2011-11-03T20:44:00.002-04:00

Even when I signed the papers to become a women's studies minor, I despised stupid cliches like "herstory". I even hated how the feminist group was called Center for Womyn's Concerns. It made us look unnecessarily angry, when we mostly passed out condoms, and sponsored speakers with an "admission charge" of personal items for the battered women's (sorry, womyn's) shelter.

But "The Girls Who Went Away" is an important piece of women's history that hasn't been examined much. During the 1950s and 1960s, a solution was imposed on the thousands of teenage girls who got knocked up: have them stay with a "sick aunt" at a home for unwed mothers, put their baby out for adoption, and then return to the community, with the secret kept. Many kept the secret for the rest of their lives.

Ann Fessler interviewed women who were "the girls that went away". Their stories are interspersed with a comprehensive look at what led to the rise of the homes for unwed mothers as a way of dealing with teenage pregnancy; what life at one of these homes was like; what drove the demand for adoptable white babies; and the lasting effects on everyone.

It's a very sad book. One of the first things that jumps out at a reader is how much the women in the book fail to conform to any stereotype about unwed mothers. They weren't all poor, or even mostly poor. They weren't all promiscuous: many got pregnant during their first time having sex, and others got pregnant by their boyfriends. And most of them wanted very much to keep their babies, but weren't allowed to.

That part was also very depressing, and what messed with the mothers the most. One woman compared the psychological pressures in the home for unwed mothers to those exerted on a soldier in basic training, explaining that they broke you down to rebuild you into what they wanted, a woman who would give up her child. They were reminded repeatedly how irresponsible they'd been, how much their stay was costing their parents, and how much better off their child would be with a "decent" family. Almost no one resisted. When they were back to their old lives, though, they were left to wonder why not.

Another notable thing about the book was how shockingly restricted information about sex and contraceptives were, so very recently. One woman said she wasn't worried about pregnancy, because she knew that pregnancy was for married women, so since she wasn't married, didn't think it'd be a problem. Another woman asked her mother how the baby was supposed to come out of her stomach. Condoms were kept behind the counter at pharmacies, and their use wasn't encouraged. It wasn't until 1965, with the Supreme Court case of Griswold vs. Connecticut, that some state laws banning the use of contraceptives were struck down. It wasn't until 1972 that that right was extended to everyone, not just married couples.

This book is compelling, important, and destined to become a classic. It's a powerful reminder, too, of how far women have come. Read it, and you'll have another reason to respect your mother's generation.

Two new from Jennifer Weiner

2011-11-02T21:28:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking for the past hour about where to start with tonight's post. Now that I'm writing it, I'm still no closer to an answer. I read so many books this summer and fall that it's hard to figure out where to start.

But I settled on the two Jennifer Weiner books I read recently, "Fly Away Home" and "Then Came You". These are her eighth and ninth books. I've mentioned before some of the things I like about her books: they're funny, entertaining stories about "the rest of us", without the extensive materialism that plagues so many books aimed at women (we don't ALL live to shop, you know...)

Both are present in her latest two books, although I liked "Then Came You" much more than "Fly Away Home." Although she says "Fly Away Home" wasn't inspired by a particular event, it had a vague, ripped-from-the-headlines feel, heightened by the unfortunate coincidence that Weiner shares a last name with a recent philandering politician. That's the subject matter of this book: what happens to the wife and two adult daughters of a respected senator after his affair with a girl young enough to be a daughter herself is revealed.

I hate to say it, but it was kind of dull. The characters felt rather stock: the kooky, screwed-up youngest fresh from rehab, her love interest, the uptight, little-miss-perfect-with-a-secret older daughter, her schlubby husband, and the wife who's repressed her own personality for a very long time in service of her husband. In fact, I bet you can guess a few key things about the plot just from the character descriptions here (what do you suppose the older daughter's "secret" is?). It wasn't bad overall, but not her best one.

Certainly not as good as "Then Came You." This book deals with the subjects of surrogacy and egg donation. It's told from several points of view. Julie, the egg donor, is a college student who sells her eggs to fund rehab treatments for her father, a depressive who lost everything when he turned to drugs and alcohol. Annie struggles to stretch her husband's small military salary and becomes a surrogate mother. She's carrying the baby of India, the new wife of a New York City financier. But his daughter Bettina doesn't trust India one bit, and even has her investigated. Each of these women have their own chapters in the book, and it's interesting to see how the story weaves together and how the characters develop.

Julie's goes in a fairly surprising direction. India, it turns out, is hiding a sad past behind her face lift and fake first name. Bettina and Annie are both struggling with their socioeconomic status: Annie has everything she ever wanted but enough money to allow her to live a decent life, and Bettina is so worried about being seen as spoiled or entitled that she overcompensates. The baby that Annie's carrying, along with an unexpected tragedy, brings everyone together. In fact, I'd say this is one of her better books.

What's this? A blog post?

2011-11-01T20:21:00.003-04:00

You might question the wisdom of someone who hasn't blogged since July doing NaBloPoMo. Or you might not question it at all. You might forget about it in five minutes, the way you forget about the schemes of that one cousin or friend of a friend who's totally moving to Vegas next month, or developing his own video game, or going back to college and this time I even have an application, but whose commitment to those things has never lasted beyond boring people at parties.

So why'd I quit? Why'd I leave you guys dangling with "The Women of Westeros, Part I" back on July 13, nary to return until all the leaves were gone? It was simple. I became rather convinced that there weren't any of "you guys" out there reading this. The longer I was away, the more out of the blogging habit I got. I write about four articles a week for people who do actually read them, and I get paid a princely sum for it (not like Prince Charles...more like a four-year-old boy who is Prince of Bedroomia). So, writing at night seemed to pull me less and less.

But why'd I return? That's also pretty simple: I was asked to. I'd like to flatter myself and pretend that my gmail account was overwhelmed during my absence and I finally decided that it would be easier to write blog posts than respond to the thousands of emails a day about how much I'm missed. But I was asked to return by a friend, who's doing NaBloPoMo and wanted company. She's an awesome writer and an awesome person, and I know how important support is for NaBloPoMo, especially around mid-month. So check her out at thesedentaryvagabond.wordpress.com.

And keep visiting me during the month of November. If you've read this far, you're awesome too. I'm looking forward to getting back into this, and I'd love feedback on what I can do to make the blog better. I certainly have lots of good material from the past few months!

The Women of Westeros, Part 1

2011-07-13T17:47:00.004-04:00

So I've been wanting to blog about my trip through George R.R. Martin's series for several weeks now. It's always hard to know how to write about books that are strongly plot-driven, and these are so highly unpredictable. Many main characters have been killed off, or their nature completely changed. Victory occurs when defeat's expected, and vice versa. Evil triumphs over good on many occasions.

But one thing that stood out to me was the role of women in the books. As I mentioned in last month's post, women are very repressed in the Seven Kingdoms. The acceptable roles for women are that of wife and mother, of servant, or of septa (similar to a nun). Prostitutes aren't exactly "accepted," but it's acknowleged that they have their place in society, and they appear frequently in the books.

As the books develop, however, many women emerge that don't fit the defined roles in Westeros. Arya Stark, Cersei Lannister, Danerys Targaryen and Brienne of Tarth were the ones that interested me the most.

Arya Stark is only 8, but is an ungovernable child. She's very headstrong, she hates needlework and dancing (unlike her sister Sansa, who enthusiastically works towards becoming a noble wife). Her father, Eddard (Ned) Stark, becomes the Hand of the King at the opening of the series, and within the confines of the court, her nature is merely irritating to those around her. She fights with the septa who has the thankless task of trying to make a lady out of her, and squabbles constantly with Sansa. She strikes a compromise with her father, who allows her "private needlework lessons," and also allows her to keep her sword, which he names Needle.

When her father's star falls from the sky, however, her time spent with Needle proves to be a literal lifesaver. It's not long before her swordfighting lessons gain practical application. The fact that her spirit was never broken allows her to survive her exodus from the castle and the horrors of war she's confronted with along the way. She's disguised as a man, forced into servitude, kidnapped over and over, but manages always to endure. I felt George R.R. Martin took her character in an odd direction in A Feast for Crows, so it will be interesting to pick up A Dance with Dragons and continue to follow the Arya storyline.

Brienne of Tarth is also a child, though twice Arya's age. She was given less of a choice in what she would become. Brienne is described, harshly, as large and ugly. Stronger and more powerfully built than many men, with buck teeth and a freckled face, she is most unsuited to the stereotypical female gender role. We first meet her when she's fighting in a tournament at a palace held by Renly Barthaeon, brother to the king, and onetime contender for the throne. When she wins, she's given the opportunity to ask for any boon from Renly, and all she requests is to become a member of the Rainbow Guard, which serves and protects Renly.

Chaos reigns Westeros, though, and her service is as short-lived as Renly himself. She offers her service to Lady Catelyn Tully-Stark (the hyphenation is mine), who asks her to escort the prisoner Jaime Lannister from Riverrun to King's Landing, and negotiate the release of her daughters, Sansa and Arya. Throughout the rest of the books, Brienne dresses as a man, and is frequently mistaken for a man. Once her gender is ascertained, however, she's subject to ridicule, and to attacks. She and Jaime are captured by a group of outlaws at one point. It's telling that although their first inclination is to threaten her with the most violent rapes imaginable, the form of humiliation they ultimately choose is to force her to wear a frilly dress and fight a bear in a pit.

Brienne has absorbed the lessons of chivalry and honor. She keeps all of the vows that she swears, even the ones that are solely between her and someone who is now dead, even when it would be more advantageous and convenient to abandon them, and even when no one would know that she'd betrayed anyone. It comes out in bits and pieces that she's endured a lot of pain, however. She was the subject of an extremely cruel "contest" to win her virginity, and rather than sympathize with her, the lord who ultimately put a stop to it blamed her for tempting its organizers. She was betrothed three times, and at least one of them was broken when her intended met her face to face.

The qualities which she possesses would have made her a valued and respected knight if she were a man. Since she's female, they earn her little but ridicule. Her journey towards carving out a place in society is an interesting one, though. When we see her last in Feast, she and her companions have been kidnapped and are all hanging from nooses, but not dead yet. It seems she's agreed to do something that will push her sense of chivalry and honor to its limits, so it will be interesting to see how she resolves her various loyalties in A Dance with Dragons.

I will finish up with Cersei and Danerys in the next post. This one was rather longer than I intended already.

...and success, with Game of Thrones

2011-06-05T09:26:00.003-04:00

So where have I been these past few weeks? Not moderating comments, not remembering to return the mountain of library books I decided I didn't want to read after all, but finding success with George RR Martin's Game of Thrones and the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series.

I'd been hearing about these books for a while. Several of the folks I play World of Warcraft with enjoy reading fantasy books, and I remember them chatting about this series as long ago as last summer. I, however, do not usually enjoy reading fantasy books. I don't really know why I never venture into that section at the bookstores, because when I do pick up something with unicorns or magicians in it, I often enjoy it. I liked the Harry Potter books. I liked the Lord of the Rings books well enough. At one point in my life, I had The Once and Future King virtually memorized. So I don't really know why I shied away.

But a recent New Yorker article about George RR Martin spurred me to try Game of Thrones. The article mostly focused on the extreme internet backlash Martin has faced for not being terribly forthcoming with the latest installment in his series. The prior one came out in 2005, and ended on a cliffhanger. He had a ton of loyal fans, who formed fan clubs, talked on internet forums and chat rooms, and occasionally even found out that they had more in common than just the books and wound up marrying each other.

Plenty stayed loyal, but now there are hate sites too, and he gets bushels of angry letters warning him that he'd better not die before he finishes the book. (Incidentally, the article was also an eye-opener for me in a different way. The week after the article appeared, the New Yorker ran a four-folded ad for the HBO show based on Game of Thrones. I guess the publication I work for is not the only publication that does stuff for its advertisers).

Anyway, several things jumped out at me from that article. George RR Martin was consciously trying to take the genre in a different direction, away from the quest-based archetype that Tolkien set up. The article says that the books were based very loosely on the events of the War of the Roses (the real one, not the Kathleen Turner movie). It also said that the books were minimalist in their fantasy trappings. Those are two reasons that I guess I'd shied away from the genre: the fantasy books that I looked at often struck me as either the same basic book over and over again, or just an excuse to write vivid descriptions of unicorns. So I gave Game of Thrones a shot, and liked it so much I bought A Clash of Kings last weekend.

These are perfect books to get lost in, they're nice and long and action-packed. The characters are fully fleshed out but there's a lot there for "plot" people too (oh, is there ever). The NYer article was right about the minimalist nature of the fantasy elements. They are there, but they don't hit you over the head with it, focusing more on the relationships between the characters, and how events change them.

The story is basically a conflict between several noble families. About 12 years prior to the start of the books, Ned Stark and Robert Barthaeon massed an army to overthrow the mad dragon king Targaryen (he wasn't literally a dragon, but the family had an affinity with them, even though dragons are extinct). The last of the Targaryens fled across the seas. Stark returned to his family's lands in the north, and Barthaeon wed Cersei Lannister and ruled as king. But Cersei Lannister has higher ambitions than just being a pretty ornament, and the Targaryen children are now of an age where they can start plotting to win back their throne. Stark has no desire to be anything but the lord in his own region, but he's not given much of a choice.

One slightly disorienting thing about the books is that they're told in a round-robin fashion through the eyes of a variety of characters. I counted about ten third-person-limited perspectives in Game of Thrones alone, and more are added in the second. It's good in a way: if you find someone boring, all you have to do is wait out their chapter, and the story will go with someone else, and you will have seen the back of them for a while. Sometimes, though, they're too long away and it's hard to remember where you left off.

The books are also pretty brutal. There's rape. There are violent murders, including one of the most imaginative, gory and fitting death scenes since the film Seven. There's more treachery than you can shake several sticks at. There is a lot of sexism, but one thing I like is that as the story unfolds, you get a hint of what might be coming to sexist asshole kings who discount the capabilities of women.

The books are very absorbing, though. George RR Martin tempers the brutality with humor and tender touches where you least expect it. For example, the young Targaryen girl, Danerys, is essentially sold into marriage by her older brother to the leader of this fearsome, savage tribe. She's only 13. Her wedding festivites are terrifying, with members of the tribe getting drunk, grabbing random women right out in the open and having sex with them, killing each other over who gets to have sex with who, and by the end of the scene as the wedding night approaches, you are terrified for Danerys. But her new husband turns out to be tender and gentle, and their wedding night is one of the sweetest scenes in Game of Thrones.
So far, I highly reccommend the series, and can't wait to see what comes next.

Fail

2011-05-14T12:32:00.002-04:00

I don't know why, but I've had a rather high fail rate among my library picks recently. I went to the library a few weeks ago, full of ideas. Of course, they were all checked out or unavailable. I got some alternatives.

The first to fail was Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving. I'd liked Cider House, of course, and wanted to try something else. This was set in a logging camp and opened with a gripping account of the death of a young boy. But after that, I just couldn't get into it. Also, not to sound shallow, but the book was falling apart, and I kept having to hold the pages and the binding together.

So I turned to The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan. I was savvy enough to know that the title couldn't possibly be literal, but naive enough to get drawn in enough to pick the book up anyway. It sounded like it might be good. It's about a girl whose older sister was a hippie in the 1960s and died under mysterious circumstances in Italy several years earlier. Adrift after high school, she goes to retrace her sister's footsteps.

The first half of it was slow-moving and emotionally devoid. Phoebe (the main character) has had a lot of sad things happen to her, and from her lifestyle, it's obviously affected her deeply, but we don't feel it. She seems flat. It's hard to conjure up much empathy for her, and by the time she's obtaining her passport and plane tickets, I wanted her to just quit fucking whining already.

But when she made it to Europe, I just wanted to smack her. I went when I was slightly older than her, and it was so terrific and incredible that I've wanted to return ever since. I remember vividly the sense of possibility around every corner, the feeling of your mind and senses being blown wide open, the way that everything seemed extraordinary. Phoebe doesn't see any of this. She's a one-note singer, looking for hippies everywhere and asking if they remembered some random girl who had passed that way years earlier, as if it's even remotely likely.

So I gave up on that book. I looked in my book bin, and only two still appealed to me. Riches Among the Ruins by international financier Robert Smith is the one I'm reading right now. I saved Pelican Road (can't remember the author) as well, and a few others I'd picked up at a library visit earlier this week: a book by Carolyn Chute, and a book about the Vikings. The rest are going back today. Better luck next time, right?

The amazing childhood of Catherine Gildiner

2011-05-03T11:54:00.002-04:00

At the paper, I interview local authors a lot. In the year and a half I've been there, I've done stories on maybe ten different people who had written books. It's always pretty interesting, but one of my absolute favorites has been Catherine Gildiner.

My co-worker had actually read her first memoir, Too Close to the Falls. Her sequel, After the Falls, came out in November, and that was when I talked to her. I knew I'd like her from the opening description of their move to a suburban subdivision (when I first became aware of subdivisions, I promised myself that if anyone tried to make me move to one, I wouldn't even take the time to argue, I would just run, as from any dangerous situation. I actually still feel the same way. Gildiner did, too.) She was excellent to interview, she recalled reading the paper I work for when she was growing up, and I met her at a signing and she signed the advance copy she'd given me. Fortunately or unfortunately, her new book made interest in her first book spike to the point where it was unavailable at any of the libraries. I finally went out and bought it, and you know what, I'm glad I did.

I would like to arrange a virtual introduction somehow between her and another writer I admire, Lenore Skenazy, of the wonderful Free Range Kids blog. Gildiner was the ultimate free-range child in Lewiston in the 1950s. She was born to older parents, a welcome but unexpected surprise. When she was four, the doctor said she was hyper and needed a job, so she went to work at her father's pharmacy, keeping the place neat and helping to deliver medications.

Through her job at McClure's Pharmacy, she was exposed to many other worlds. She was the delivery man Roy's right hand man. He was the one with the driver's license, and she was the one with the ability to read, and together, they were unstoppable. They got to know Lewiston's former prostitute and abortion doctor, Marie Sweeney (and Cathy ruined her mother's bridge party by suggesting that one of her mother's friends should take her sick daughter to Sweeney). They went out to the Indian reservation regularly, and got to know the scary, violent Mad Bear, and the consequences of delivering his sedative too late.

The pharmacy wasn't her only world. She attended Catholic school, and battled the nuns constantly. She was a member of a neighborhood gang, the Bloods, where your membership renewed seasonally and if you could do scary stunts like swing out over the gorge, you were out. She writes a lot about her mom, who was a key member of the Lewiston Historical Society and knew the background of every building in town, who was a master bridge player and a participant in a women's study group where she wrote weekly research papers, but who had a maid and who never, ever cooked (Cathy was about 10 before she realized it was possible to make food at home).

Both of her books are wonderful. There's a lot of humor in them. Cathy was what one might term a trouble-maker, who stabbed a bully in the hand, who caused a wimpy kid to lose part of his fingers, and who also drink Shirley Temples in bars. There's a lot of sadness" I cried during the chapter on Warty, who ran the town dump and suffered from both Elephant Man disease and from ostracization, and at the part where Roy disappeared, never to be found or heard from again (I asked).

The books feel very real: Gildiner remembers well what it's like to be a kid and the sense of unfairness that often surrounds you, how well-meaning adults insult your intelligence and capabilities, how you're constantly smacking into the gaps in your own knowledge of the way the world works, the revelation that your parents and even your teachers don't have all the answers.

She'd hinted to me that she might write a third, and I genuinely hope she does. The first two are absolutely worth a read.

My hero, f*cked over

2011-04-27T17:51:00.003-04:00

So, I read a terrific biography of one of my personal heroes, Molly Ivins. I wish I could be cheesy and say she's the reason I'm in journalism, but that's truthfully more down to a weak economy, so I'll just say that anyone could do worse than attempt to be like her. I first heard of her when my mom got her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? for Christmas. I checked it out, of course, and her subsequent books were under the tree in my pile. My local paper started carrying her column, and that was awesome because I didn't have to wait.

She died shortly after I started this blog. I wrote a goodbye post to her here, but never really knew more of her life than she shared in her columns.

Molly Ivins: A rebel Life by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith taught me a great deal, then. They interviewed friends, co-workers, family members, and people who knew her in a professional capacity to paint a surprising portrait of a contradictory woman. Her image was that of a frank-talking Texas liberal, but she also spoke fluent French and attended several Ivy League schools. Her father was a wealthy Texas oilman, president of a large oil concern. She struggled with alcoholism. She struggled with authority, getting fired from the New York Times for her use of the phrase "gang pluck" in a story about a chicken-killing contest.

She, famously, never married. I'd always believed that the love of her life was killed in Vietnam, based on a column she wrote. According to this book, though, the love of her life was killed in a motorcycle accident, while they were both in college. I wish the book had explained that column, though. Instead of a husband and children, she had a large family of friends that spent her last Thanksgiving with her, and she remained close to her siblings, even though her relationship with her father was always strained.

The biography is good, neither a love letter nor a posthumous savaging. There was one particular quote that came from her late suitor's sister that I thought was just inflammatory conjecture and should have been excluded ("I think they talked about a master race." Really? Were you there? Did anything come of it? No, huh? So why bring it up?).

But there was one aspect of it that pissed me off, that was glossed over near the end. When Molly Ivins became ill with breast cancer, she was working for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Her wikipedia bio will tell you that she left there to become an independent journalist. According to the book, however, she did not leave voluntarily. She was let go, or her contract was not renewed, or however you want to put it. You see, no one has to cover the health insurance of an independent journalist who has cancer. It's a scary thought. If it happened to a New York Times best-selling author, who can't it happen to?

Eagerly anticipated meta-Thursday

2011-04-26T23:10:00.002-04:00

So, Jasper Fforde has a new Thursday Next book out! It made my month to see this, especially since it was miraculously available at the library when I went!

One of our Thursdays is Missing is so meta that it will make your head spin. It's set mostly in the Bookworld, and the main character is the written Thursday Next. If you read First Among Sequels, you've met the two competing written Thursdays that got whittled down to one by the end of the book. Well, the book is about her. The characters are somewhat familiar, but different. Pickwick the dodo is played by a total diva who bullies everyone in the written Next household. Thursday's dad is also somewhat of a diva who is always blaming their low read rates on her performance. Acheron Hades, arch-villain of the series, is actually a really nice guy who often does not have a coffee with the written Thursday (the coffee shops are so expensive that no one actually drinks in them, they just go to be seen).

There are others, too. Mrs. Malaprop, trying to manage her unfortunate illness, serves as sort of a housekeeper. Early on, Thursday meets a robot about to be stoned and rescues it, procuring his services as a butler in the process. In order to enable the written Thursday to enjoy the occasional non-coffee and rescue robots, she has an understudy, a talented but panicky woman who likes to get 'hypenated' off her brain and hook up with goblins in her off-hours.

The plot of this one? Honestly, I'm not sure. As the title implies, the real-life Thursday Next has gone missing, and the written Thursday spends some time looking for her, to be sure, but there are all sorts of other complications and convolutions that were sort of tough to follow. If I'm to be completely honest, I didn't enjoy this one as much as the others. I sort of felt the humor wasn't there, and that's what always saved the others from becoming total confusion. But if someone had told me that last week, I would have picked this up anyway, so I won't discourage anyone else.

Cider House Rules!

2011-04-19T21:07:00.002-04:00

OK, I admit, I'd always sort of read the title that way. After reading the book, I can say that, in fact, it does.

If you're looking to get lost in something, this sprawling tale by John Irving is a good choice. It's the tale of two men. Dr. Wilbur Larch is truly an unforgettable character. He was forged by his first sexual experience: with a prostitute his father bought him as a going-away-to-college gift, whose daughter came in at the end and sat in a chair by the bed, smoking a cigar. He contracted gonhorrea from the prostitute, then years later, he would treat both mother and daughter in a Boston ER. Both would die, the daughter from a back-alley abortion that Dr. Larch had refused to perform. After that, Dr. Larch began performing them. He also became the head of an orphanage in rural Maine. For decades, he provided a safe choice to women: they could come to him to have either an orphan or an abortion.

Homer Wells was a 'failed orphan'. He was adopted four times. None of them took, for various reasons. He remained at the orphanage as the heir apparent to Dr. Larch, and as the only son Larch would ever know.

The book chronicles Dr. Larch's entire life, and most of Homer Wells'. It's set in the first half of the twentieth century throughout rural Maine and has a huge cast of memorable characters. Melony, Homer Wells' first girlfriend, also a failed orphan and a large, rough woman who finds her place as an electrician. The two nurses, Dr. Larch's platonic wives, who worship him. Candy, the woman Homer leaves with and has a doomed, decades-long affair with. Fuzzy Stone, an orphan who succumbs to poor lungs but is reborn in Dr. Larch's mind. Many, many more, including the migrant apple-picker denizens of the Cider House, for whom the rules of the title are written. I enjoyed this one a lot, and plan to try more Irving in the future.

Another Ishiguro, with an unlikeable narrator

2011-04-12T22:31:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure how I felt about When We Were Oprhans by Kazuo Ishiguro. Wait, yes I am, I just don't want to admit it to myself. I enjoyed the other two books I'd read by him so much that it sort of hurts to admit that I didn't think much of this one.

This book is a detective novel, in the sense that the main character is a detective. He grew up in Shanghai between the wars. First his father, then his mother were kidnapped, and he was sent to live in England with his aunt, where he grew up, became a detective, and ultimately returned to Shanghai to try to learn what happened to his parents.

Except, he's kind of a lame character. And not in any particular way. He's self-aggrandizing, believes himself to have always been a popular child, despite evidence to the contrary, and is a social climber, despite his insistent denials of those aspirations to the reader. He adopts an orphan himself, and seemingly loses interest in her almost immediately. There's a quasi-romantic subplot, but he doesn't seem to like her much, and disparages her as a climber (he ought to know).

The payoff should have been in the plot, but that also sort of fell flat. The truth about what happened to his parents is much, much less interesting than what his shadowy recollections might have assisted the reader in conjuring up. So I have to say this book was a disappointment, but not enough to put me off Ishiguro permanently. In fact, I liked the others that I read so much that I will probably read all of his books, even if I dislike them as well.

Life worth living

2011-04-02T13:23:00.002-04:00

This week, I received some sad news. The sister of a high school friend had died very suddenly. I hadn't seen this girl in years, but I'd recently reconnected with her on Facebook. She posted a lot, so I felt I had a sense of what was going on with her. She was the only FB friend I had who would randomly post on people's walls, just to say hello. She was looking forward to getting a new job. To log on, a week ago today, and learn that she was no longer with us was a terrible shock.

I attended the wake, and for some reason, didn't feel like going right home. So I drove out to the library nearby, which was probably not the best of ideas. If you're like me and don't go with a 'shopping list', what you come away with is definitely influenced by your mood.

But one thing I did grab is Fannie Flagg's newest, I Still Dream About You. I like Fannie Flagg. Her stuff is not terribly deep, but you usually come away feeling good. And if she can write a cheerful book whose plot is driven by the main character's plan to kill herself, I guess that's no small feat.

Maggie Fortinberry is an ex-Miss Alabama whose life didn't go as planned. Her simple dream had been to marry, live in one of the older mansions in Birmingham and raise children. Instead, she wound up in a long-term affair with a married man who died suddenly, then returned to Birmingham and became a real-estate agent. She's pushing 60, doing real estate with less and less success, squeezed by a ruthless competitor agent and still missing her mentor in the business. She develops a plan that she thinks is foolproof, but things keep interrupting her.

In the process, she realizes, of course, that her life does have value. There are people that care about her, even if none of them are her husband or her child. It is worth living to see tomorrow, after all. The book isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but parts will make you smile. It's also an extremely quick read. But after this week, it was nice to read something that was just life-affirming.

Between the Wars: The Remains of the Day

2011-03-19T10:51:00.002-04:00

It's odd that I should read two books set in Engalnd between World Wars I and II back-to-back. It's an interesting period of history, because even looking back, World War II doesn't seem like a foregone conclusion. There were lots of points where it could have gone differently. Kazuo Ishiguro explores these in his terrific novel The Remains of the Day, and chooses a very interesting person as his narrator.

What must it be like to see your entire way of life crumble and change? That's the question facing his narrator, a butler in a large house. He was at the top of his field, and it was indeed considered a field as legitimate as plumbing or law or nursing. There was a lot to know, there was extensive training, there were trade publications and professional societies. Moreover, being a butler apparently wasn't something you did, it was something you were. Until you weren't.

The book is set in 1956, and the butler's employer for 30 years has been dead for about three, his home sold to an American who finds his formalities baffling. His new American employer invites him to take his car and go on vacation while he's away, and he decides to go visit Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper.

During his trip, he remembers many incidences, most of which were highlights of his career and bittersweet at the same time, for example, the night when his father died, which was the very night his employer hosted a large gathering of influential people from a variety of nations, with an eye to forming a coalition to change the conditions of the German surrender and stop punishing them so severely before there was real trouble.

Through these reminiscenses, we get the sense of how much he sacrificed for his career, how much it meant to him, and we feel for him that he lived long enough to see himself become obsolete. At the age of about 60 or so, he never married, had few personal joys, but all he can really say is that the silver was always polished. It started to make me feel sad and stressed out for him, but despite these serious themes, the book ends on a high note, a casual conversation from which the title comes.

It's actually a book of hope, it's very absorbing and well-written, there's humor in it along with the more serrious themes. I do believe Ishiguro is going to become a favorite of mine.

Brideshead Revisited: now for something completely different

2011-03-13T12:01:00.003-04:00

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, was a completely random selection on my part. I have no idea what could have influenced it. I think I might have noticed a memoir about someone's relationship to that book and decided to read the real thing, but I'm not sure. I essentially had no idea what I was getting into. I knew nothing about Waugh other than that he was a man, was British, and lived sometime between 1850 and and 1960. In fact, at one point in my life, I'm pretty sure I thought this book was a sequel to something.

The way this book unfolded reminded me very much of how Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter unfolded. In modern books, you typically get the backstory, the incident that drives the rest of the book, and a bit of character development right up front. Take, for example, Ron McLarty's The Memory of Running, a book no one would accuse of being terribly plot-driven. Yet, right away, you find out that the narrator is an overweight middle-aged man who is unmarried and works a shitty job in a factory. Both of his parents die in a car accident, then he receives a letter from a California coroner saying that the body of his sister, who disappeared decades earlier due to mental illness, had turned up in their morgue. He has a conversation with the paralyzed girl next door, who is still in love with him, then gets on his bkie and goes out, cross-country, after his sister.

All of that in about 40 pages. Whereas, with Brideshead Revisited, I didn't quite know where things were going until they got there.

The book has an aura of things lost about it, in fact, I'd say that's its central theme. It's a flashback told by Charles Ryder, an army commander in World War II who is moving his troops to a donated country home, only to find out that it's one he spent a great deal of time at on and off throughout his life. He remembers those times, first coming there with his friend Sebastian from Oxford. I think many people had a Sebastian of one sort or another in their lives at college, a friend who was intensely interesting, lots of fun, very smart, but there was some sort of darkness there, too.

As the story wears on, Charles gets to know the whole wealthy, eccentric family. Lady Marchmain, called Mummy by all of her children, who managed to turf her husband out yet make herself seem abandoned at the same time. Brideshead, Sebastian's religious older brother who spends much of his adult life collecting matchboxes. Julia, his sister, who discovers that the bad thing about making a good match is that you then have to live with the gentleman. Cordelia, also religious, who transforms from a young girl to a grim nurse caring for war wounded over the two-decade sprawl of the book. Sebastian himself, who still carries a teddy bear around, and descends into alcoholism.

The book does a reversal on you, as you think it's going to be about a long friendship between Sebastian and Charles, it shifts to the events following a chance meeting between Charles and Julia. Since one of the pleasures of this book for me was seeing everything unfold, I don't want to give away too much along the lines of plot. Although it wasn't exactly a happy book, it felt good to read, and I'd reccomend giving this one a chance.

Zombie invasion

2011-03-05T14:38:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, zombies had A Moment. Remember that? Everyone was making 'braaaaaains' jokes, a few ironically shitty movies with zombies in it came out, stuff like that. They got eclipsed, of course, by ninjas or pirates or yetis or something.

Still, Max Brooks' World War Z is an excellent, if depressing read. It is an oral history of the war that humanity fought against zombies, a conceit taken all the way to the author's bio on the back cover.

But it's not really *about* zombies, something that the page who reccomended it tried to explain, and something I've spent the last week trying to explain to everyone else. It is one of those books that's like an inkblot. Different people will see in it what they want: it's about the fact that American society isn't sustainable, it's about the dangers of bureaucracy, it's about the fallacy of relying on tech-based military solutions for all problems, it's about the limits of science, it's about the nobility of the human spirit, it's about what happens when people revert to their basic instincts and the trappings of society are stripped away, it's about hard choices during war, it's about what it means to be a leader. And all of those people are right, and probably a few more.

World War Z will definitely make you think, that's for sure. (Ironic, because zombies can't. In the book, some people 'reanimate' inside of cars and wind up spending eternity there because they don't have the brainpower to figure out how to open the door and get out.) It may even make you go out and buy a low-tech item like a crowbar or heavy metal shovel that can be used as a weapon -- just in case.

Me, I've decided that I'm on to more cheerful fare. I got several books that day. I sure hope one of them is not bleak and apocalyptic.

This bookstore, and everyone in it, is disposable

2011-02-16T20:27:00.003-05:00

By now, it's all over the Internet, all over the evening news, all over everywhere: Borders has filed for Chapter 11. Stores will close and people will be out of work. As a book-lover, I should have 'feelings' about this. I guess I do have some. I used to frequent Borders when I was younger. They have a terrific classical music section, or they did back then. The coffee bar in the store was a novelty back then, and sometimes I'd stop in just for a drink. Honestly, I always found their book section sort of lackluster and diffuse, good if you wanted something off the NYT Best-Seller list but not so hot if you're looking for something more off-beat or localized.

If the entire chain goes under, as it seems to be in danger of doing, that would be A Bad Thing for sure. Between them and Barnes and Noble, they virtually killed off indie bookstores in the country. Buying books will be reduced to the click of a mouse for many people. They'll miss the serendipity of the remainder table, of the interestingly-titled book that wound up on the shelf next to what they were going for, or the tantalizing history book they happened across when they accidentally wandered into that aisle. They'll miss the communal experience of having a place to go and feel less alone, the surge of validation when they ask at the counter for an author they were sure NO ONE ELSE had ever heard of, only to be told they were all sold out. If the bookstore was really good, the bookseller might even add, by the way, the store has a book discussion group on that genre, if you want to come.

Many commentors on stories about the fall of Borders have sunk to schadenfreude. It's certainly tempting: you opened your mega-store across from my favorite indie bookstore, they were out of business in a year, how's it feel, motherfuckers, how's it feel? The problem is that the people that stand to be hurt the most by this, as always, aren't corporate suits. They're little guys. Like Manny, Roz, Nicolette and Jackie from Last Night at the Lobster. Kids putting themselves through college, single moms, retirees forced back into the workforce, veterans who came home and couldn't get better jobs. And, increasingly, people who played by life's rules, attended college, and wound up with little more to show for it than a job at a failing bookstore.

The first round of closings will affect an estimated 19,500 people. I wish all of them a soft landing.

Attack of the Clones

2011-02-06T10:42:00.002-05:00

Just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let Me Go last night, and I guess I'm still forming an opinion, but it's definitely a novel that stays with you and makes you think.

I'd shied away from the novel because of the sappy title. I thought it was a cheesy love story, and imagined it was set against the backdrop of war or an oppressive culture. I got more interested when I found it out it was about clones.

For all of that, the book is very subtle. It's so subtle that it's actually hard to follow at first. Like any subculture, the clones have their own lingo, and when our narrator, Kathy, speaks of being a 'carer' and watching over people after 'donations', and how many of her donors have 'completed', it's a bit hard to follow at first. The book is a trip backwards into Kathy's childhood memories, and someone ultimately spells it out for her and her classmates: they are human clones, brought into the world to donate their organs. They'll be 'carers' at first for other clones, and then they themselves will give their organs until they no longer can. Most clones go through four surgeries, some 'complete' early if the surgery goes poorly, and they hint darkly at the fact that occasionally, a clone will go on for more surgeries as a sort of vegetable.

Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy were raised in an idyllic boarding-school atmosphere. They attended classes, they made tons and tons of artwork, they played sports like any other kids. Throughout the course of the book, she traces their relationship growing up, the instances where they first became dimly aware of their fate, and their attempts to fight it.

What I had trouble understanding throughout the book is why no one just ran. I came to think that it was simply because it was what they were raised to do. They may not like it, just as many American adults don't really like working a 9 to 5 job, but they do it because it's what they're supposed to do.

It's a very thought-provoking book. Some of the thoughts that come may be sort of uncomfortable. During the passages describing what they learned in school, I wondered what the point of it all was, when they were just going to die before 35 anyway. But then again, how many people is that true of in real life, anyway? I have several classmates from high school that are dead now. Think of all the people every day that die in stupid, senseless ways, and all the effort that was expended to educate them, train them and mold them into decent people. Never Let Me Go fulfills the promise of literature in a very literal way, then: to explain what it means to be human.

The Stench of Death II:another library visit

2011-02-01T20:57:00.002-05:00

Well, the purge continue at my library. There has been a well-publicized
scandal involving thousands of books that have been discarded. Officials say that all that was thrown out were books that were badly damaged, hadn't circulated in years, or were outdated. Online comments on several of those articles from people who claim to work at the libraries say otherwise.

When you're there, you can feel it. 67,000 books recycled in the past year makes an impact. And the reorganization continues. When I walked in, I went straight to the fiction section and almost had a heart attack. They'd removed several rows of shelves to make way for a new kids' section. But there already is a kids' section. It has its own room off the main floor. I can't figure out what they intend to put in that room. And yet, the large cafe with the limited hours remains untouched.

All this made me even angrier as I looked around the library. A lot of the people there were poster children for why the place needed to exist. The most poignant to me was a couple who appeared to be in their fifties. They were clean, but looked sort of on the poorer side. They also sort of looked like they didn't normally patronize libraries. They sat together at a table with a backpack between them, full of water bottles and cheap snacks. She was reading a true crime book. He was staring straight ahead. I was there towards the end of the day, and they had the stupefied look about them that people get in waiting rooms everywhere. My theory, after passing them a few times, was that their heat was shut off at home and they came to the library to be warm for a few hours.

So, my trip was very depressing, and most of the materials I selected matched my mood:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I picked it because I imagined it'd be as bleak and apocalyptic and moving as the Hunger Games trilogy. So far, it's sort of diffuse. They're getting at something big here, and from the movie reviews, I have a vague memory of what.
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth. Living in Buffalo and recently watching "Cars" several times, urban decay intrigues me.
Ava's Man by Rick Bragg. Part of a trilogy on his family and growing up poor in the South.
Postcards by E. Annie Proulx. I haven't read this one yet. And I love her.
Novelties and souvenirs: collected short fiction by John Crowley. Haven't read any in a while, and I liked the title.
Paradise, New York by Eileen Pollack. Because there's rural decay, too.
The Last Talk with Lola Faye by Thomas Cook. I need to get on this one, it's a 7-day about a son's meeting with his father's mistress.
Too Rich: The Family Secrets of Doris Duke by Pony Duke. I went to her house and know that she led a sad life. More of a guilty pleasure I guess.
Buffalo Bill's America by Louis Warren. A work-influenced book. I recently did a story on a high school that was doing "Annie Get Your Gun" and wanted to know more of the real story.
Bean Blossom Dreams by Sallyann Murphey. About life on a farm or something. I guess a cheerful selection never hurt anyone.
Egypt: a short history by Robert Tignor. Influenced not by current events, but by World of Warcraft, and the fact that several of their new dungeons borrow heavily from Egyptian mythology.

So there you have it. I am trying to enjoy this library while I can. Each time I go feels like the end, though I know logically they'd close every other branch before they closed this one. But it's a shadow of its former self already, and the page I talked with has no idea when they're finishing.

Trilogy complete, mind blown, spoliers within

2011-01-19T22:43:00.002-05:00

After I wrote the last post, I ran out and bought the other two books. I returned home at 10:30 p.m. and started reading "Catching Fire." By morning, I was into "Mockingjay". By Sunday night, it was all over...and it took me this long to be able to articulate more than "wow...fucking amazing."

I'd wondered where the series would go after the first book. I wouldn't have really said it ended on a cliffhanger. Katniss won the Hunger Games, when the Gamemakers sadistically forced her and her District 12 partner Peeta into an alliance, then shattered it at the last minute by renegging on their promise to declare co-victors. Katniss and Peeta were ready to kill themselves when the Gamemaker frantically ordered them to spit out the poison, they could be co-victors after all.

Well, it turns out that didn't sit well. You're not supposed to beat the Games, you're supposed to beat the other competitors. Katniss winning in the way she did was the worst possible thing for the Capitol. It gave hope to the districts, and the Hunger Games are designed to quell hope. The next two books deal with the fallout from her subversive victory.

My sister teaches this book to her classes sometimes, and she said on her blog post that one of the main things about it that students always notice is how violent the books are. Every death means something, there's no gratuitous violence here. Either the deaths happen offstage, or they happen as you stare into the eyes of someone with a name, a family, a backstory as they take a spear to the core or melt or get attacked by a monkey. It's enough to make you wish for some gratuitous violence, actually.

The books don't make you feel like a horrible person for enjoying them, however, because they really do make you think. It made me think a great deal about what life under a totalitarian society would be like. As the trilogy wears on and the rebellion's spread, it becomes clear that no one's safe. Members of the victor's prep teams (Capitol citizens all, at the top of society) are murdered. When the rebellion reaches the Capitol, their society disintegrates. The poor citizens of Katniss' home District 12 don't escape notice either.

Being a victor won't even guarantee anything: win in the wrong way, like Katniss' mentor Haymitch, and they kill your whole family. Have the misfortune to be attractive, like Finnick, and you become a sex slave, a reward for good behavior, and if you refuse, they kill your family. And there's the psychological fallout that leads many down a path of addiction and insanity.

I also thought it was clever how the characters keep shifting. When you first meet Haymitch, the only other victor in history from Katniss' district, he's sort of a pathetic and laughable character, showing up an hour late to dinner and puking all over their prim escort because he's drunk. Get to know him, though, and he's clever and tough. The aforementioned Finnick is a flirty, sexy career tribute at first. After a while, he's revealed for who he really is: a loyal guy, in love with a badly damaged girl from home, who screws everyone they tell him to in order to protect her. Beetee transforms from an older, burnt-out Victor to a wily hacker, indispensible to the revolution.

I'm not sure how much my sister liked Katniss at the end of the books. I still liked her a great deal. I still feel she's an excellent female role model with many, many fine qualities, even if she is guilty of selfishness. Her two love interests, I'm less sure of. Peeta is the only character who really doesn't change. He's still the boy next door, goodhearted and in love with Katniss, the same boy you meet on the train to the Capitol as a scared tribute. Gale hardens, although you know him less intimately at first. Once he hears of the rebellion, he's all about it. He has no problem sacrificing ohter people's lives for it, either. I thought the resolution of the 'love triangle' was a bit of a cop-out, although at least no one died.

If you made it this far, you've probably already read the books, so I'd like to know, what did you think of them?

Sensation: The Hunger Games

2011-01-15T12:41:00.002-05:00

So, my library inexplicably did not have any of The Hunger Games trilogy of books. I was pretty excited, then, to get the first book for Christmas from my sister. Before I was into the third chapter, I'd already made two decisions: I was going to read the rest of the trilogy, and I was going to purchase, rather than try to borrow, the books.

"The Hunger Games" is set in a dystopian, future-America called Panem. Every year, each district is forced to send a boy and a girl to participate in The Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live television. It's treated as a celebration, the victor is taken care of for life, and in some districts, it's actually an honor to be chosen. Not in the district Katniss comes from. It's the poor, former Appalachia area, and those kids are usually among the first to die.

But when her little sister gets chosen against all odds, she steps in anyway, and becomes a contender, also against all odds.

The book is totally engrossing. Katniss is an ideal heroine and a great feminine role model: very smart, very brave, very clever. She also has a lot of heart and compassion. It would be a wonderful thing if a generation of girls grew up trying to emulate her. The plot alone would be enough to create solid momentum for the book, but Suzanne Collins is adept at keeping us turning the pages during those stretches where Katniss is mostly trying not to be found, or not to dehydrate. I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy. In fact, I'm heading out to the bookstore now!

Vamp, or light shining from a dead star

2011-01-10T21:41:00.002-05:00

The most poignant line from Eve Golden's biography of Theda Bara, titled Vamp, is about a fan magazine popularity contest that Bara placed highly in. The magazine called it "The Contest to End All Contests". Golden notes the view of the results that history provides, with notables such as Charlie Chaplin faring poorly while others, today, "are nothing more than obscure names in a faded fan magazine." I think that's the real story of Theda Bara.

Golden had a formidable challenge in writing this biography. Her subject had been dead for decades. She had no children, nor did the sibling to whom she was closest. Bara's spouse had also been long on the other side of the veil when the book came out in the mid-90s. This would be bad enough, but the bulk of Bara's films, including most of her best work, was lost to vault fires long ago. To top it all off, much of what was originally published about Bara in fan magazines...well, it had me re-thinking my stance that PR work is not a creative profession.

She does an admirable job, despite the fact that reliable source material about film's first sex symbol is exceedingly thin on the ground. Unfortunately, though, Golden was left with a skeleton. Much of the book is devoted to recounting the plots of films that have long since burned to a crisp (including big-budget epics "Cleopatra" and "Salome": according to Golden, anyone who could recover a copy of either of those films would never have to work again), and explaining how they were received. How Bara felt about those films, we are clueless. What her experiences were in the dawn of a medium that came to dominate everyday life, we get only sketchy information. (I can surmise it for you: one worked a great deal, did their own hair and makeup, and had their life stories scripted by people who make JK Rowling look unimaginative). Golden tries to build around the concept of the "vamp," but didn't really do it forecfully enough.

This book didn't really give me a lot, but I enjoyed it anyway, despite the fact that I prefer scandalous and tragic Hollywood tales to ones about people who work a lot, then get married and retire from pictures. There's something forlorn about Theda Bara from our perspective. Ninety years ago, she had it all. She was on top of the world, making tons of money, renowned by everyone. Today, her pictures are gone and all that's left of her is the shadowy concept of the "vamp", some remarkable still photos (this book is worth a checkout for the pictures from her epics alone), and the Teddy Bara character in Disney's Country Bear Jamboree.

The Day They Came To Sanitize The Book

2011-01-04T19:18:00.003-05:00

Growing up, the afterschool special "The Day They Came To Arrest The Book" was one of mine and my sister's favorite things to watch. We taped it and watched it repeatedly. If you're not a devotee, the plot unfolds at a modern high school when the students are assigned to read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in English class. A black student takes offense at the copious use of the workd 'nigger' and walks out of class. He returns later with his father to meet with the principal and ask that the book be removed from the classroom. This ignites a firestorm within the school and tears him and his best friend apart.

The climactic, heroic, scene belongs to the school's librarian. who attends a hearing on the matter and announces to the crowded room that she's found an even more vile, disturbing book and goes on to re-tell a scene laced with graphic sexual violence contained in it. When everyone's jaw is on the floor, she announces the chapter and verse of the Bible in which that scene can be found and sits back down.
"Huck Finn" lives to be taught another day.

But as you've no doubt heard by now, it's not safe from sanitization. An 'n-word free' version will be released in February. There's a lot of reaction to it on the Web, but very little information, except a very vague quote from the Mark Twain scholar and Auburn professor behind the project, stating that the change is 'to meet the needs of a mondern audience'. That, coupled with the $24.95 price point, make this read as a giant publicity stunt.

And, in a way, that's even more disgusting to me. The student in the after-school special was genuinely offended. There are many scenes where his anger is palpable as he talks about the challenges he faces at a majority-white school. I must say that I never thought I'd see 'to make a buck' listed as the reason to censor anything. I hope this tanks.

Fireflies and friendship

2011-01-02T14:13:00.003-05:00

I always want to post something clever around the first of the year, about the year in review or a new year's resolution pertaining to books, or something. But I honestly don't make new year's resolutions, and I was too lazy to dig through past posts to write a year in review. So I guess I'll just start 2011 in my usual manner, writing about a book I just finished.

I got Kristin Hannah's Firefly Lane because I'd heard of it at work and remembered the title. It was another book club selection by one of the clubs in my coverage area, and I figured that was as good a way as any to choose a book.

The book tells the tale of Tully and Kate. Kate is a quiet, geeky 'good girl' who grew up with loving parents and a younger brother. Tully was raised by her grandma because her own mother was a hippie and a drug addict, and is a larger-than-life personality. The two meet during one of Tully's rare stints in her mother's custody and become best friends. When Tully's grandma dies, she moves in with Kate's family to finish her senior year of high school. They attend college together, major in communciations together, begin working in TV news together. Along the way, their paths diverge. Kate falls in love, gets married, has children and stays at home with them. Tully becomes a bigger and bigger name in TV news, ultimately so big that the news can't contain her and she gets her own Oprah-style show.

If this sounds familiar to you, I guess that means you've seen "Beaches." And like that film, it has the same sort of punch-you-in-the-face sad ending that comes out of nowhere. Firefly Lane is a weeper, that's for sure.

It's also, technically, not very good in a lot of ways. Most of the characters are archetypes. Kate is the Barbara Hershey character from "Beaches" to the hilt, ditto Tully with Bette Midler's character. Kate's husband is sort of a cardboard cutout of a handsome, successful man. Kate's mom is the archetypical Ideal Mom, who bakes cookies and dispenses wisdom, though there is a slight edge to her in the form of her wistfulness over the fact that she was born a decade too late for the feminist movement and never had the chance to even attempt going to college and pursuing a career. Tully's pursuit of her Big Break gets repetitive, as she gets about ten in a row.

But there is a lot of value here. One theme that the book explores a great deal is the difficulty of Having It All. Kate had this drilled into her growing up, and had a great deal of peer pressure to be a career woman with a family. When she gets pregnant, she renounces this to be the stay-at-home mom that she always secretly wanted to be, but expresses many times throughout the book that it's not quite enough. On the other side of the coin, Tully's eighteen-hours days which start at 2:30 a.m. are barely conducive to hookups, let alone any sort of longer-time relationship.

The message of being happy with your choices is also a strong one, though, with both sides declaring at the end of the book, that upon careful examination, they really were happy, so that conflict sort of gets washed away.

The book is also (until the last few chapters) a fun one. It's not really funny, but it makes you smile and feel good at many points.

Spoiler alert:
But I have to say, the sacrifice of The Quiet One kind of bothers me. Why is it always her that has to leave her kids before menopause? It would have been a little more interesting to see some introspection and serenity forced out of Tully, who is all smart remarks and courage during the final chapters (you know, like Bette Midler). The Quiet One's character is all about sacrifice, she always learns to just be happy for her friend, be happy with what she's given, be happy taking care of people and take what she's given. Why do they always have to kill her off, too?

Potato peels and wartime

2010-12-29T18:19:00.002-05:00

I mentioned earlier this month that all six of the book clubs in my coverage area have had a go at The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society this year, and decided it was my turn, too. I finished it last night, and found it enjoyable and funny.

Guernsey is a classic epistolary novel, told through a series of letters. Juliet is a columnist and author who lives in London. World War II has just ended and things are slowly settling back to normal. She's much relieved to have new subject matter (she's had a difficult assignment, writing an observational humor column during wartime to keep everyone's spirits up, even though she lost her ex-fiance and her apartment was bombed) and an idea for her new book comes from a surprising place: the Channel Island of Guernsey.

All I knew of Guernsey was their cows, so I was intrigued. After reading the novel, I'm not sure how much more I know, but I did learn that they were occupied by the Germans during WWII and nearly starved (maybe. I'll have to look it up, after the incident with the movie "Millions" when I was shocked to learn that Britain never converted to the Euro.) Juliet was intrigued by the presence of Potato Peel Pie in the society's title, and so was I. It dates back to the spontaneous founding of the Society, when one of its members held a secret pig roast that kept them out after curfew. On the way home, several of the Islanders were detained by German police, and one of them invented the literary society on the spot.

When the policeman asked to attend their next gathering, they had to create one, and one recalcitrant member stated that he wouldn't join unless there was food involved. Potato peel pie has potato peels as the 'crust' and mashed potato filling. After the war, one of the members contacts Juliet because he owns a book she had given away, and he wanted to know if she knew more about the author. They strike up a correspondance, and as Juliet learns more about wartime Guernsey, she decides it would make a perfect book and travels to the island, where she finds (predictably) romance and a home.

What makes this book are the characters, and the added elements of war and of books sustaining one through a difficult time (the initial subject Juliet asks them to muse upon). It's more lighthearted and entertaining than a book involving genocide, oppression and war has any right to be, but its tone never feels inappropriate. I can see why it's so popular among book clubs, but I have to say that while I found it a good read, I did not find it terribly thought-provoking and wonder what the clubs discuss.

Girls who like Girls

2010-12-23T00:23:00.002-05:00

So, it's a bit off my usual fare, but I wanted to make a note of something that made me happy recently. I've talked on here before about how I play WoW. A new expansion has just come out and they've made quite a few changes, including making everyone get five more levels and raise their profession skills. The profession skills I picked back when I first started my character were mining and jewelcrafting. Mining is easy to skill up: just mine whatever you see. Jewelcrafting takes more time, and there is a daily quest for that profession. There are five or six different ones, and you get a random one each time you go.

The questgiver is a female blood elf named Marith Lazuria. She is stationed outside the jewelry shop in the main city (Horde city anyway). WoW gets criticized a lot for using sex to sell the game to guys, and all the criticism is absolutely justified. The female blood elves are sort of the Playboy Bunnies of the game. Gear that looks normal on other races fits them like clothing rejected by a stripper as being too provocative.

But. When I went down to see Marith Lazuria yesterday, she had a quest for me titled "A Present for Lila." She explained that she was trying to impress a female boat captain named Lila and wanted me to cut some purple gems that she was going to fashion into a necklace 'to match her pretty hair.' When I turned the quest in, Marith expressed glee that she'd now be able to turn her special lady's head, that she had a huge advantage now over a female rival in the Alliance capital, and also said something that implied Lila only had one eye (but that's sort of besides the point).

I loved it. I thought it was terrific that the game developers decided to put a lesbian NPC in the game and not make a big deal out of it. You do many similar quests to help an NPC man impress a woman, and I think a few vice versa, and they just fit this one right in. Studies have shown that WoW has a large adult player base, but a lot of teens play it too. Since many people say they value its escape from real life, I imagine that maybe some of the teens who play are questioning or working up the courage to come out and value the game as a haven from harassment. Maybe seeing this will help them.

It seems like there are so few images of gay and lesbian people just being *people*, not being campy or conforming to some stereotype, or where their gayness is an essential part of the character. Marith is just another female blood elf with an impressive rack, long hair and diaphonous dress making players run around doing her bidding. I think that the inclusion of more images like that in pop culture is an essential step towards greater acceptance. Marith's presence in the game is a reminder that everyone should do what they can to promote acceptance. Every day when I go to find out what she wants of me today, I will view her as a reminder that if the developers of a notoriously sexist fantasy game found a way to do what they could, I can too.

I am Hutterite

2010-12-21T18:19:00.003-05:00

I'm posting tonight mostly because I want to, not because I've got anything earthshattering. I did finish one of the books from my last post, though: I Am Hutterite by Mary-Ann Kirkby.

Kirkby faced a dilemma in writing this book. She was raised in a Hutterite community until the age of 8, and wrote this book a couple of decades after her family left. She stayed in touch with her friends from the community, but the fact remains that she had at most four years of really solid memories to draw on, and had to get the rest from her family and Hutterite friends. And unfortunately, it kind of shows. With a couple of exceptions, the Hutterite portions read exactly as if the person writing them just asked around about community life. They're well-written and interesting, but they don't have that emotional depth and 'insider' feeling that the title and jacket of the book lead the reader to expect.

The central figure in the family's decision to leave is also ambiguous. In some chapters, he's a tyrant: the horrible man who gave them a hard time about seeking asthma care for one of their children and deliberately withheld crucial information about the health of a different child, leading to its death. In other chapters, though, he's an intelligent, respected leader, beloved by everyone, who has the author over for Christmas Eve and is good with children. But the conflict there is never really explored.

When I fail to connect with a book, I often blame myself, and this time is no exception. I read the short book over a period of about two weeks, a handful of pages here, a page there, a chapter before bed: who can connect with anything read in that manner? Yet: the book also didn't reach out and grab me, the way After the Falls by Catherine Gildiner and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers did. With those books, all I wanted to do was read them, yet I never wanted to reach the end. This one didn't do that for me.

The Stench of Death: last weekend's library haul

2010-12-08T23:02:00.003-05:00

Dark times are upon our library system. Our county executive called for the system's budget to be slashed, causing public outcry but suspiciously low-key response from the institution's trustees. At the eleventh hour, county legislators voted to restore the funding that had been slashed. Our county executive is notorious, though, for simply ignoring things of that nature. Yeah, he's an asshole.

But the plan that was devised to deal with these cuts entails cutting hours at a good portion of their branches. At the branch I frequent, however, they decided to cut not hours but services. They have a wonderful humanities/nonfiction collection that's very fun to walk through. On the second floor, they have a large collection of business and employment-related resources for all levels of the job market. Whether you're the type who needs a book to tell you to shower and dress nicely for a job interview, or whether you're looking for pointers on how to start your own company, that section of the library can help. What they're doing is closing that floor, moving a good portion of the job stuff into the humanities, and kicking the humanities stuff into closed stacks.

This transition was well underway when I wandered through the doors last weekend. Lots and lots of empty shelves. Fewer employees around, already. Very sad stuff.

Anyway, I got a fair amount of books, although it was another one of those visits where the majority of my haul was of dubious interest past the initial impulse. So here's the list:

Vamp: the rise and fall of Theda Bara by Eve Golden. I know the name from the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyworld (it features a "Teddy Beara"). Like Runnin' Wild, the documentary also inspired me to pick this one out.

Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild by David Stenn. Covered elsewhere on this blog.

Accordian Crimes by Annie Proulx. I like her a lot, and believe this is the only one I haven't read.

Hadrian's Wall: a novel by William Dietrich. It seems that I don't really see too many books about that period in England. I've seen the real thing, it'd be neat to know a little more about it.

The Blue Moon Circus by Michael Raleigh. This is a re-read. I can vividly remember getting it out of the Schenectady Library when I was doing my internship, lying on my loaned bed in my small apartment with the train noises drifting in through the open window, reading this book. It was just a joy. I bumped into it accidentally, grabbed it just to look at it again, and simply could not put it back.

Disco Boy by Dominc Knight. Goddamn this one. It was a seven-day book that I had no interest in one I got it home, but I kept it for three days too long. Nothing sucks worse than paying fines on something you didn't read.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. Part of my newspaper job is processing all the events that come in from the library, the senior center and the community at large. I think every single book club that submits has read this one. I decided to find out why.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Due to my newfound love of Charles Dickens, a recent Facebook meme about how many books you've read off a list purportedly developed by the BBC, and the season in general, I picked this one up.

Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. I have no idea WTF it's about but love the title. I also noticed that book clubs around here read this.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I'd always assumed this was some sort of crappy romantic melodrama. Then the movie came out and I found it what it was really about. Sounds cool, and creepy as hell.

I am Hutterite: the fascinating true story of a... by Mary-Ann Kirkby. The receipt cuts off the subtitle. But I picked this one out as my next read, and am currently about 50 pages in. Subcultures and religious communes interest me. I even used to work at a museum that used to be one. I like memoirs, I don't know much about the Hutterites and this one just stood out. A longer review will come, but it's interesting so far. The author does a good job of taking us inside without being too self-conscious and allowing the differences between mainstream and Hutterite cultures to emerge fairly naturally.

So that's my haul. I'm hoping there are some books there the next time I go.

An early victim of Hollywood

2010-12-06T22:47:00.002-05:00

I've mentioned before that I enjoy Hollywood stories with a heavy dose of tragedy and ruin. I also enjoy ones, from time to time, that teach something about how the industry used to be, or some inner working of it that normally doesn't get much attention (no one died of a drug overdose in The Devil's Candy, but it was terrific to learn so much about how films are made). Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild by David Stenn does both. It's not only a portrait of a very tragic Hollywood heroine, but gives some clues as to what it was like in the early days of the film industry.

I got the idea to look for this book by watching the TCM documentary "Moguls and Movie Stars," which chronicles the first 60 or so years of the industry. Clara Bow was briefly mentioned in one of the chapters, how her wild reputation caught up to her and she was forced into retirement well before her 30th birthday. It got me wanting to know more, so when I saw this book at my library, I was all over it.

David Stenn did meticulous research on it, and one feels, did it just in the nick of time. The book came out in the late 1980s. An epilogue tells what became of all the players. In 2010, one can probably say pretty safely that the short answer is "they all died." He was able to conduct a few interviews, access fragile primary sources like fan magazines before they disintegrated, and it's a good thing he did. It's a fascinating story, and one that shouldn't be lost.

Clara Bow came from about the most awful background imaginable. Alcoholic and abusive father, volatile, weak, mentally ill mother who only gave birth to her as a sort of suicide attempt, grinding poverty in a bad part of Brooklyn -- that was Clara's background. In an incident that not only could have been the plot of a film, but I think actually was the plot of several, she won a contest at the age of 16 sponsored by a film magazine, with the first prize being a role in a movie. That was her big break.

Stenn shows her as exploited by nearly everyone around her. The film studios realized almost immediately that she was a huge draw and that she was uneducated, naive and easily taken adavantage of. So they did, working her as hard as they could for as little money as possible. Her father spent the rest of his life both controlling her and sponging off her. Many of the men she was romantically linked with were more interested in headlines than in a relationship.

He also plays up what a big star she was, in a way very different from the megastardom our own fragmented culture has to offer. Most of the country went to the movies every single week during the 1920s. And it was proven over and over that people would go see any piece of shit starring Clara Bow. Stenn says that she was caught in a very odd conundrum: being such a strong draw through her personality, the studios were unwilling to squander a strong script on her, since audiences would turn up to watch her wash dishes for the length of a film. Hers didn't need a good leading actor, a strong plot or anything else, just her. As a result, most of her movies were rather crappy and few survive.

An inside view of the calamity that talkies caused is also a high point of this biography of Bow. Stenn relates how the only man in Paramount Studios who understood sound recording suddenly had his salary increased tenfold and became the most feared and respected man on the lot until Paramount wisely took away his power by getting more people trained. The early technology was cumbersome and overly sensitive and actors had to learn their craft all over again.

Clara suffered from persistent "mike fright" that would tie her tongue even on simple lines. On the set of one of her final films, she breaks down over her inability to read a line after repeated tries, grabs the boom mike and punches it until crew members pry her off, at which point she flees to her trailer and collapses. The line she was trying to say? "You can't do this to us."

There was a great deal of scandal about Clara, too, at a time when that was not tolerated at all. The scandal, her mike fright, and the fact that the studio had pushed her too hard for too many years combined. She did indeed leave film at a young age. She married Rex Bell and had two sons with him, but it turned out that her problems were more serious than overwork and a high-pressure environment. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic at an inpatient facility. She lived apart from her family with a nurse after that, and died in the 1960s of a heart attack.

I mention this because I thought the denouement was just as interesting as the rest of her story. I'm glad that Stenn went into the amount of detail that he did (there are over 40 pages of notes). It's a lively story, and will join the ranks of the autobiographies of Lana Turner and Lillian Gish for well-told Hollywood tales.

Shop local today

2010-11-27T12:56:00.002-05:00

You may have seen the AmEx ads on TV that indicate that today is Small Business Saturday. Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it's a day to go out and support your local small business.

I didn't know that this was all AmEx's idea, but it's a good one. These days, chain stores seem to offer everything. They have the huge parking lots, the extended hours, the deep discounts, and the proximity to coffee shops and bars. The downside is that you deeply need a drink after going into one of those, especially during the holiday season. I don't know about you, but I always leave feeling stressed out and reminded of how much more I have to do.

Another thing chain stores can't offer you is diversity. Someone on your list has asked for new living room lamps, for example, so you go to look at them at Target or Home Depot. As you pick one up and hold it, imagining it in your friend's living room, millions of people across the country are doing the exact same thing. There's nothing special, really, about the lamp you're going to buy.

To tie it in to books, it's even worse in bookstores. Recently, I visited my local indie bookstore for the first time in about a year. On display were a plethora of books that Barnes and Noble just doesn't carry. Books on radical politics, the history of the LGTB movement in vaudeville, interesting things like that. Why would they? There's no profit margin in it. Speaking of which, ever look for anything in there recently that's not a novel, a children's book, or some sort of study guide or computer book? Their nonfiction section seems to be smaller every time I go there.

And I know the argument is that you can just order it online, but that takes the serendipity out of it. A few years ago, I read a terrific book about tortoises. I didn't read it because I woke up one morning in the mood to know more about tortoises. I didn't decide to seek out a book on tortoises. I just ran across it at the library. It was a terrific book. I learned more than I ever thought there might be to know about their role in human history.

And as far as economic arguments go for shopping local, other people have made them much better than I ever could, with far more math and better statistics. The bottom line is that if you buy local, local people work. They reinvest in the community at a higher rate. If you live in a struggling city like I do, your support may help make the difference between the business owners staying in town and packing up to move someplace with more promise. It also helps make your community cooler. Who doesn't love the charm of a strip of funky, locally owned stores?

So, go out and support yours today. Invest in your community and get unique gifts for your family and friends in the process!

A failed experiment

2010-11-26T18:22:00.002-05:00

When I settled in Monday night to wait for my dinner with my library book, a slow feeling of horror began to wash over me. It was the exact same feeling I'd get when I was doing my internship in Stockbridge on Saturday mornings. There, we had no TV or internet, my roommate Sophie and I were reliant on books and on one another for our entertainment. The library closed at 1 p.m. on Saturdays and didn't reopen until Monday. So that was my last chance to find something or else it'd be a long weekend indeed, and not the good kind.

I realized almost immediately that Shelly Jackson's "Half Life" was going to be terrible. But I had nothing else with me and was going to be there for about 45 minutes. So I read about 75 pages of this failed experiment.

It could have been interesting. The jacket said it was about siamese twins Nora and Blanche. It said that they were very different: Nora was lively and outgoing, whereas Blanche had been sleeping for 15 years. I was unsure of what that might mean, but it turns out that it's as literal as anything gets in this quicksand of a book. I tried to explain this to my co-worker:

"Wait, so she's dead?"
"No, she's just asleep."
"You mean, in a coma?"
"I guess...sort of...but I don't think so. I think she's just asleep."

Meanwhile, Nora has been going about her life. She is not alone as she would be in our society. "Twofers" have become more common, and it's vaguely explained that "the radiation" has something to do with it. There's a movement, actually, and a community. It seems sort of satirical at first: there's a big convention in town, and radical people like to address her as 'tyou,' as in 'Are tyou going to the film premiere tonight?' Her roommate is described as a 'twin hag.' I guess it had promise.

I'm at a loss to explain why it didn't work, maybe it was the muddy, confusing failed magic realism of Nora and Blanche's birth and conception. Maybe it was because Nora wasn't fleshed out enough as a character, either: we know that she plans to seek separation, that she does phone sex for a living, and that she has two roommates (not counting the permanent one), also, that she's a lesbian, but that's about it. Or maybe it's the rest of the world that's not fleshed out enough. I don't know. It was an odd book, and maybe others will want to give it a go, but it wasn't for me. It's going back, unread, this weekend.

Thankful Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T14:32:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to pop on to wish whatever readership I may have a happy Thanksgiving!

Usually people who make blog or FB posts on Thanksgiving list what they are thankful for. And it's not that I'm not thankful for all of the positive things in my life, but today I wanted to talk about something a bit different.

When I was growing up, my mom's mother lived about 20 minutes away from us. She had a small house with a finished basement and a garage you could hang out in during the summer (I've since learned that this is purely a Polish phenomenon. People of other ethnicities just don't do this, even if all of their neighbors do.) We spent all of our Thanksgivings with her when I was growing up. We'd have dinner over there. She'd turn the kitchen table into a buffet and we'd take our plates downstairs. My aunt and uncle would be there with their two sons that were much younger than us. I don't have distinct memories of hanging out there all day or anything, so I'm guessing we didn't do that.

My grandmother died when I was 12. She had lung cancer (please everybody, quit now if you smoke, and don't even think about starting if you don't. She wasn't even old enough to collect Social Security yet.) As it happens when someone dies, over the years, they become less and less of a presence in your lives and your minds. The holes they leave in your lives close slowly. You make new traditions, the holidays change but they're still good.

Thanksgiving was one that never really closed for me. It's never been the same since. My aunt, uncle and cousins started having Thanksgiving with my uncle's side of the family. My other grandparents live on the other end of the state. Until their death, we made an extended visit out there at Christmas, and going at Thanksgiving too wasn't practical. For a long time, my parents and sister and I would go see a movie on Thanksgiving. Somewhere along the line, my sister generally stopped coming home for Thanksgiving, and the three of us would go...or we wouldn't.

I read a column by Mitch Albom a couple of years ago where he talked about how much Thanksgiving had shrunk as he got older, how fewer and fewer people came every year and spent less time, and now the focus for a lot of people was just going through the Black Friday sale fliers and going to bed early enough to be up for the 4 a.m. sales. He referenced the great, underrated 1991 movie "Avalon," which profiled a large immigrant family over the years. In the opening scene, at the dawn of television, the family was bursting out of the dining room, chairs and tables were pulled from everywhere, the famous kids' table all the way in the living room, where mayhem ruled. By the end, it was a handful of people clustered around the TV, eating off trays.

In that family, it was mostly feuds, people moving away, and TV itself that caused the demise of Thanksgiving. I guess in ours, it was just that some losses, you never quite recover from. Our tradition with my grandma wasn't big and mythical. There weren't really any funny stories or memorable stories that came out of it. It was just being together that made the day special. I still appreciate that with my own family. This year, my sister will have it with us for the first time in I don't know how long, and I'm looking forward to that. But I'll always think of my grandma on this day.

Caution: do not read after midnight

2010-11-21T15:10:00.002-05:00

It's become a Halloween tradition for me to watch Turner Classic Movies' lineup while I pass out the candy and eat my dinner. They always show terrific old scary movies. This year, I watched the majority of "House of Wax" and caught the end of a really old one where Vincent Price played a deranged magician and set himself on fire at the end. But next up was "The House on Haunted Hill," which I'd just caught the Rifftrax/Mystery Science Theater version of not four days earlier. I took a break from the scary movies and came in on the last half hour of "The Haunting." It was super-scary, though, and I went to the library the next day to get both the film and the book versions.

Both were terrific. Both are still extremely scary, despite the movie being 45 years old and the book being closer to 60. And both are psychological thrillers. There's no gore whatsoever.

The story is the tale of a party of four, come to research supernatural phenomena at Hill House one summer. Luke Sanderson is the spoiled playboy heir of the opulent, creepy home. Dr. Montague is the academic who put the whole thing together. Theodora and Eleanor are two very different women who were selected from a pool of people by Dr. Montague that had been associated with past supernatural phenomena. Theodora created a sensation by participating in an experiment where she sat in a room and tried to guess which card a researcher was holding up in a separate room. She guessed nearly all of them right. Theodora is outgoing, fliratatious and funny.

Eleanor is the opposite. When she was a child, a storm of rocks fell on her home, and only hers, for days. That was the last interesting thing to happen to the repressed 32-year-old woman. She spent most of her adult life controlled by her invalid mother, waiting on her slavishly. Had it not been for the invitation to Hill House, she probably would have spent the rest of it under the thumb of her sister. And it's her that the house ultimately wants as its own.

The four start out on friendly terms, enjoying one another's company, gently mocking the creepy caretakers and playing chess and bridge. As the house begins to work on them, they begin to quarrel more. It has a strange, unpredicatble effect on them. It doesn't merely scare the shit out of them. That would be too obvious, too simplistic, and would raise the question of why they don't just leave. Their nights fill with terror, but their days fill with euphoria and peace, leaving them to doubt what happens at night, and to doubt one another.

The differences between the book and the original film are not huge. (I have yet to see the remake with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor). I was hoping for a bit more backstory on Hill House in the book, as they give you just enough to pique your curiosity. The character of Dr. Montague's wife is probably the largest difference. In the movie, she's a skeptic who gets sort of kidnapped by the house. In the book, she's an avid psychic researcher, but of a different sort, fond of using a planchette and telling the spirits how much she loves them and how she is their friend. They both leave me craving more, and both like to replay in my head when I wake up at 4 a.m.

HP7

2010-11-20T10:12:00.003-05:00

I think I've talked on here before about how much I generally hate the Harry Potter movies, even though I love the books, even though I went to midnight release parties for the last three books (I got interested in the series the summer Goblet of Fire came out). Most of them have been pretty terrible. Although the casting has been terrific, they cut out all the wrong things. I knew we weren't going to get along from the first movie, when they eliminated Hermione's hero scene, where she solved Snape's logic puzzle.

I hated how in the third movie, he figured out the Patronus spell right away. It took him most of the term in the book, it's like an eighth grader trying to calculus, and it took away from the psychological journey of it all, because that was the book where he had to confront what happened to his parents and decide how it would affect the rest of his life.

In the fifth movie...I don't really remember the fifth movie.

In the sixth movie, they actually cut out the fight scene back at the castle following Dumbledore's death. They had Bellatrix smashing shit in the Great Hall, which is totally out of character. Bellatrix is a sadist and a suck-up, and I always thought she was a bit in love with Voldemort. She's not the type to just break stuff out of spite. They didn't show enough backstory about Voldemort, and they cut one of the scariest scenes in the books, where Dumbledore drinks the potion and trips out and starts pleading with some unseen attacker and asking him, or Harry, to kill him.

But they finally got it right in the first part of HP7. They staged some stuff that just happens in summary dialogue, probably most notably the scene at the beginning when Hermione modifies her parents' memory for their own protection, editing herself out. The Death Eater's meeting is scarier onscreen than it is in the book. All of their interiors were terrific: the Burrow, Malfoy Manor, Bathilda Bagshot's home, the Lovegoods' house. Because there's so much travel in this one, they get some great exterior shots too.

I absolutely loved this movie, in fact, the more I think about it. Sure, there were some things I would have liked to have seen that weren't there, but overall, they made excellent choices about what to film and what to cut. The characters were more true to the books: Fred and George were funnier, Hermione seemed smarter and nicer, Ron was much more lovable. I actually think I'm going to see it again, and I've never done that for any other Harry Potter.

The Rich are Different: the tale of the Vanderbilts

2010-11-17T17:47:00.002-05:00

Dead End Gene Pool, a memoir by Wendy Burden, was the sort of book I wanted to read from the moment I heard about it. As she says in her introduction, the rich behaving badly are fun to read about it. After I finished the book, I'm not 100% sure that 'fun' would thoroughly describe it.

Wendy is the great x8 (or something like that) grand-daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In the introduction, she traces her lineage more precisely. But her dad's side of the family is definitely Old Money. For all that, though, her dad gets almost no screen time, and that's reflective of Wendy's life: he killed himself when she was only 6. She spends the next three years in Burdenland with her grandparents and her brother, whom they favor almost to the point of cruelty.

Those parts are a little hard to read, but nevertheless, they're engaging, populated as they are with vodka-swilling servants and crazy uncles. The most complex character that emerges is Wendy's mother. When we first meet her, she seems sort of stereotypical: after her husband's suicide, she becomes a sort of wealthy playgirl, obsessed with tanning, fashion and alcohol, never around much for her kids, more interested in the man of the moment. All this changes when she marries her late husband's autocratic, arms-dealing best friend and moves the children back in. It changes again when they move to England and she enrolls in Oxford to earn a Ph.D in numismatics. Your opinion of her sort of shifts, too.

In some parts, the book is a bit incoherent. I recently got to interview another memoirist, Catherine Gildiner, and she advised memoir-writers not to worry too much about an inability to remember everything, just start with what they did remember and look to draw connections. Sometimes, I think Burden forced the connections too hard, brought in things that weren't really there. The end, with her once-formidable grandparents much reduced by age, and her brothers descending into drug and alcohol addiction, is heartbreaking.

I did enjoy the book overall, though, even if it wasn't exactly the lighthearted romp or even the dark tale I expected.

World of Warcrack

2010-11-09T20:01:00.004-05:00

When I first saw Ryan VanCleeve's Unplugged at the library, I was pissed. I think I might have even kicked the shelf. I didn't look at the book too closely, I just noted the subject matter, saw it was similar to the book I've sort of been planning to write, and saw red. Good thing I did the next step, which was to actually take it home and read it. Because it's actually not similar at all to the one I want to write, in fact, it sort of gets to why I want to write it.

And therein lies my dilemma in blogging about this book. The book was well-written and absorbing, funny in some parts, heartbreaking in many others, with a very vivid voice. But it also bothers me, because books like Unplugged, chronicling the author's descent into gaming addiction, are the predominant image of people who play online games. It was months before I told my co-workers that I liked to play WoW, and when I did, the first thing they asked is if I was one of those addicts. Positive stories about the game are very, very rare in most media.

Probably the best known is that of Ephoenix. Ephoenix was a character created by a young boy and his father when the boy was very ill with cancer. Between all the treatments, gaming was one of the few things he was still capable of doing. His Make-a-Wish was to visit the Blizzard studios in California. They created a special epic weapon just for him and allowed him to design a quest, which is still in game. (The quest in the tauren starting area where you have to help the farmer find his dog.) Beyond that, though, you never hear the smaller stories about people who fall in love through the game (well, unless one of them is a minor), the people who are disabled or live in the middle of nowhere and have no other way to socialize, and just the people who build strong friendships through the game.

But anyway, the book isn't about that, although to Van Cleeve's credit, he does touch on some of the more positive aspects near the end. It's basically a memoir of his life as first a casual gamer, and then as a true addict, who did 24-hour marathon sessions and neglected his family to play. Interestingly, Van Cleeve doesn't feel that gaming addiction gets enough attention, or is taken seriously enough. I think it's just hard for people to tell the difference.

If you come home from work every day, log right in for 3 hours, then spend the rest of the night puttering around, I think I'm right in saying that's not an addict, anymore than someone who watches TV or reads for those 3 hours is an addict. If you play into the wee morning hours, call off work with gaming hangovers, get the shakes when you can't play, sneak away during your kid's birthday party or your anniversary with your husband to raid, dream about WoW when you're asleep, think about it constantly while you're awake -- that's an addict. That was Van Cleeve.

I don't know how much this book will interest non-gamers, but as a gamer, there's definitely a lot of stuff to think about. I like how he talked to different people about why they responded to the game, and how he analyzed it himself. I honestly have to agree: the best thing about WoW is that, unlike the real world, it never disappoints. The work you put in is rewarded, every time. Work towards raising your reputation with a faction, and you hit exalted, every time. Work towards completing every raid, you'll do it. In The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the main character observes the woman in her house knitting, embroidering, doing some sort of craft, and comments on how good it is to have small goals that are easily achieved. When you break it down, that's what the game is.

Out in real life, you can work extremely hard and do well and still not get promoted. You can put in a lot of years at a job and suddenly lose your position to budget cuts or outsourcing or any myraid of things. You can work really hard at a marriage, and your spouse will get bored and cheat. You can try for years to have a baby and not be successful. It's nice to have a break from all that murky, messy uncertainty. It's also easy to see how someone could never want to leave.

Good and Bad Writing

2010-11-06T12:52:00.002-04:00

I feel like blogging today, so I pulled up this week's BTT. And it's a tricky one:

Suggested by Barbara:

I’ve seen many bloggers say that what draws them to certain books or authors is good writing, and what causes them to stop reading a certain book or author is bad writing. What constitutes good writing and bad writing to you?

Good and bad writing is so hard to define. But I think in a lot of cases people agree on what it is. There is a co-worker whom I admire very much that can make any turkey of an assignment interesting. If her article is boring, you know it's the fault of the topic. She's good at bringing out what's important, even when she's been assigned to write about a spaghetti dinner at some church.

She'll find a way to make it interesting. She'll track down some of the people who've benefitted from the funds raised at previous spaghetti dinners and talk about the affect the church's programs had on their lives. She'll manage to make you feel that even though there are a million spaghetti dinners in our coverage areas every week, this one matters.

Bad writing is a lot easier to define. It's clunky. It trips you up. It's cliche-ridden. It's boring. Often, it's not honest. It kills even an interesting subject, like when you read something that's allegedly a celebrity tell-all, and you know the person's had multiple arrests and stints in rehab, and it's very short on details of that to talk mostly about how they found Jesus.

It dwells on all the wrong things, which was my main complaint with The Swan Thieves. And, incidentally, which is the main complaint about another co-worker, who has a penchant for attending a town board meeting where both a rezoning for a McDonald's is approved and a department head is fired for getting caught having sex with a 19-year-old employee on his desk...and guess which one her story will focus on?

Good writing has the power to make you care passionately about things you may not have even known about. There was a segment a few months ago in the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section about bats. ZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZbats, right? The segment talked about how bats were dying in record numbers from some sort of fungus. The author went with some bat researchers who do a bat census every year and described in vivid detail how unexpectedly quiet the cave was. The last line of her segment described how they walked out of the silent cave, with tiny bones crunching underneath their feet. I had tears in my eyes after reading that. I guess that's what good writing does.

Currently reading?

2010-11-04T18:05:00.002-04:00

Last weekend, I was supposed to go to the library on Saturday, but I got a terrible migraine and spent most of the afternoon lying down. I haven't been able to make it there since, but what I do have are piles of partially read magazines floating around, making my house look like the Collyer mansion. Rather than pull of my TBR shelf, I decided to dive into some of them and clean up the joint at the same time. Here are a few things I've read about lately:

A so-so article on Lindsey Lohan in Vanity Fair. Not as dramatic as I'd expected.

A fascinating article on Sarah Palin in the same issue of Vanity Fair. Quite possibly contains the most negative stuff I've ever seen about anyone in one place. It paints a picture of her as controlling, unpredictable, nasty, and manipulative to everyone, even her husband and children. The article noted, most of all, that while hundreds of people have gone on the record to tell what they know about other major political figures like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, hardly anyone would talk for this article, or in general.

A boring article on leaf-blower controversy in the New Yorker. Not the writer Tad Friend's fault. I just think it's a crappy subject that didn't improve with investigation. I mean, really. People have real problems, and rich people annoyed with the noise that other rich people's gardeners use when maintaining their 'hardscapes' is just awfully difficult to give a crap about.

A well-constructed short story about a stakeout. It had the feel of a real stakeout, where nothing happens for lengthy stretches of time until all hell breaks loose.

An Alice Munro story about a long-term affair. It didn't stay with me the way her stuff usually does.

An insightful article on "the cancer industry." It was one of the New Yorker's terrific book reviews with extended commentary on the subject matter. There is a new book that explores how the disease came to have such a prominent place in our society and our collective unconscious. Given my recent heightened awareness about toxic chemical in daily life, I was pleased to see that the article pointed out the fact that many cancers were tied to toxic exposure, and that to truly win the 'war on cancer,' this will have to be addressed.

An article on Lady Gaga. She interests me. I haven't finished the article yet, in fact, I came up here to post this instead. The thing I would like to know the most about her is how her parents view her success. After all, she attended Catholic school and was only 23 when her current album came out.

BTT: Halloween Horror?

2010-10-30T12:57:00.003-04:00

This week's question:

In honor of Halloween this weekend:

What reading skeletons do you have in your closet? Books you’d be ashamed to let people know you love? Addiction to the worst kind of (fill in cheesy genre here)? Your old collection of Bobbsey Twin Mysteries lovingly stored behind your “grown-up” books? You get the picture … come on, confess!

Honestly, I don't have any books that I'm ashamed to let people know that I love. I shout them loud and proud, pretty much. I love the "Flowers in the Attic" series by V.C Andrews. I still reread them every couple of years. I love "The Dirt" by Motley Crue, and I really want them to write a sequel (I don't think Nikki Sixx's "Heroin Diaries" counts). I enjoy reading Hollywood biographies and autobiographies, but only of the messes. Someone who worked consistently from the age of 25 until their 60s or beyond, stayed married to the same guy she met in her late 20s for her whole life, and enjoyed raising her three happy kids in their beautiful Hollywood home? ZZZZZzzzzzZZZZZ. I want to read about the starlet who was an overnight success, slept with half of Hollywood, lost it all and was found in a seedy motel with a needle in her arm at the age of 27.

But I'm not ashamed of it. Even though I list some "guilty pleasures" on my author list. I'm not ashamed of liking whatever it is I like. I don't think anyone should be. We're programmed so heavily to always act a certain way all the time, and I'm saddened to think this extends to our 'me' time. Can't let anyone know I'm reading Danielle Steele, no way world, I am a Phillip Roth kind of girl! "Keeping up with the Kardashians?" UGH! I was just passing through on my way to PBS. I'm kind of saddened to think that people restrict themselves so much.

Reading is kind of a private thing, typically done in the home, so who are you hiding it from? Your husband? Your kids? I say, let it all hang out, and don't be ashamed to check out those bodice-rippers or spy thrillers or cheesy Hollywood bios along with the rest of your usual fare.

A scary book, just in time for Halloween

2010-10-24T14:27:00.003-04:00

I'm a few pages away from finishing the scariest book. I know what they mean now when they talk about not being able to look away, because as scary as it was, I just had to keep reading. The book was about a world where these large faceless corporations were in total control. Somehow, many of the people that lived there were unaware of this. The people at the bottom were forced to do dirty, backbreaking work with toxic chemicals for pennies. The people at the top were manipulated and controlled into working long hours to give most of their money to these corporations in exchange for the things made from these toxic chemicals.

What's the worst part of this story? It's a nonfiction book, and it's about you and me. The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard, tells the tale of all the mundane items we're surrounded with, how they're made from carcinogenic chemicals and resources extracted at great price by poor people. She shows how we're manipulated into buying more and more, through planned obsolescence and advertising, and how our so-called durable goods have been so complex that no one can fix them when they break. She shows how most of the Stuff we own is generally thrown out fairly quickly, how we've poisoned the earth and trampled on people in third-world countries to obtain all this crap that never really goes "away" once we kick it to the curb.

Leonard does a good job of portraying how we're all sort off caught in a web. She doesn't aim to make an individual feel bad, because there's no real way to be "good" in this sort of system. No way to avoid consuming the carcinogenic chemicals that are in virtually everything we buy. No way to truly reduce your environmental impact to zero.

And yet, throughout the book, she continually offers alternatives and shows signs of hope. A flooring giant has begun taking responsibility for its products through its entire life, offering a sort of "tile" model for its carpets, since anyone who's recarpeting is really just looking to address the worn portion where the traffic pattern was, and the parts that were under furniture usually still look decent. They also experiment with renting carpets to offices the way they rent copiers: the company will service it and replace it when it's worn. A professor has developed the GoodGuide to help people consume better.

Other people are simply realizing that buying all that crap is stupid and choosing to define themselves more as parents, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, Kiwanis members, hikers, literacy volunteers, Catholics, etc. than as Gap shoppers, iPhone users, Balenciaga devotees, etc. It's a growing trend, coinciding neatly with the recession and people's reduced ability to buy crap. Also, the people in Third World countries that always get dumped on are beginning to fight back. Leonard calls Bhopal the "resistance capital of the world" as its residents continue to agitate to force Union Carbide to clean up its mess. Leonard writes of working with communities in Haiti to force the city of Philadelphia to take back its incinerated garbage ash from its beach (incinerated garbage ash is loaded with toxic heavy metals and carcinogens).

This is a very difficult book to read, not mentally, but emotionally. And heaven help you if you have to buy shampoo or anything in the middle of it. I had to, at the end of a very long workday, with no time to research how bad the product I planned to buy was. I wound up just getting what I always getting, washing my hair with it next to my toxic PVC shower curtain, drying it with a dryer probably made by Third World people forced off their land into factories, then laying my head down on my toxin-laden pillow, pulling the sheets dyed with carcinogenic chemicals over my head, and curling up next to my toxin-laden mate with my toxin-laden cat.

That's how you'll start to look at everything. When I went into work the next day, it was hard not to warn my co-workers against getting their cans of pop from the vending machines. (Aluminum cans, along with PVC, are the things Leonard tagged as "stupid stuff" that are so costly and dangerous and pointless, they should just be eliminated. I wanted to scream, "Don't you know how they made those!" but of course, they probably don't).

But it's definitely an important book. It's one everyone should read, because I don't see how you could read it and not want to help. Leonard gives lots and lots of advice as to how. It will scare you, but not nearly as scary as the alternatives.

She's Not There

2010-10-09T12:40:00.002-04:00

It takes a talented writer to bring out the humor in a serious topic, even more so when it's something that happened to the writer him (or her) self. I think society has made a lot of progress towards understanding and accepting homosexuality. But transgender is a whole other thing. It strains the tolerance of otherwise accepting people, who just don't get it. Their issues get lumped in with gay and lesbian issues, but it's a whole different thing.

Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There is something I encourage everyone to pick up, then. Not just because it'll help towards understanding, but because it's a good and funny and heartbreaking read as well.

Boylan's best friend is a favorite writer of mine, Richard Russo. They taught together at Colby College and remained friends all their adult lives, even as the guy Russo knew as Jim got to the point where he could no longer deny what was inside of him and began going through the process of becoming a woman. Despite the presence of a crossdressing villain named Finney in Russo's novel about academic life, Straight Man, I wondered if Boylan was more the model for Hank, the protagonist pain-in-the-ass prankster. One of my favorite moments in She's Not There was a reproduced email correspondence between the two when Boylan was in transition. Russo poured his heart out about his difficulties in trying to readjust to the fact that his best drinking buddy was now female and closed it with something like "Then again, my biggest problem has always been myself." Boylan shot back with a one-line reply: "Funny, my biggest problem has also always been yourself."

One great thing about Boylan's two memoirs that I've read so far is that they read like novels: great characters, a plot that really moves, lots of detail. I like how, in this one, Boylan takes advantage of her unique perspective. Anyone who's ever wondered whether women get discriminated against in buying cars, who has an easier time shopping for clothing, if men and women actually think differently, etc. can actually find some answers in this book from someone who's in a position to tell you. It's a wonderful book, I highly reccomend it.

Adults only? An interesting debate

2010-10-03T13:04:00.003-04:00

There's an interesting debate about library use and rules going on at Free Range Kids right now. You can read the post that sparked it here, but basically, the author of the post (who is also an author of children's books) and her husband were shooed out of the children's section of their local library because they didn't have a child with them. The rationale they were given was that "we can't have people hanging around and looking at the kids."

Based on that, I knew what I thought. I think society has gotten incredibly hysterical about "stranger danger" and has made all sorts of normal behaviors suspect, from sitting on a plane next to a child to giving out Halloween candy, to just smiling at the sight of someone else's kids having fun in public. This seems to be another sad and pathetic example of that, especially since the library was deserted when the writer and her husband were shooed away. There weren't even any kids for them to ogle.

But then I read some of the comments, especially those from public librarians. They stated that the goal was to provide a separate space for the kids, away from both the creepy people that genuinely do like to hang out at libraries and the overbearing yuppies who treat it as their personal office. They want it to just be a sort of "adult-free zone" where the kids can get into books without any disapproving stares, and from a practical standpoint, without having to fight for space with people who have the entire rest of the library.

I can see both sides of the issue, I guess. I always think it's bad to keep anyone away from any kind of book. But I also confess that I've been irritated many, many times by the screams of a bored child whose mom, in her infinite wisdom, dragged her into the adult section while she looked at adult books when the children's room was RIGHT. FUCKING. THERE. and full of things Young Screamer would have found more to her liking than the newest Lauren Weisenberg. Maybe if that mom had felt better about leaving her kid in there, the rest of us wouldn't have been treated to her Symphony of Boredom.

And while Lenore's blog focuses on overprotective parents, there are the other kind, too. The kind that see any supervised, kid-friendly environment and think: FREE BABYSITTING. The kind that will leave their three-year-old in the Kid Zone at Barnes and Noble while they go get their hair done. Those parents love libraries, too, and you know that if "something happened," they'd suddenly take a huge interest in their parenting duties and would sue. Maybe the policy was to address that issue, too.

I think it has to be applied judiciously, though. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons to want to use that space. In my city library, I see lots of new immigrants there who are trying to learn English. When you're switching entire alphabets, "Make Way for Ducklings" is probably a more appropriate place to start than the newspaper. Teachers use it to get books out for their classes. Museum educators use it to get books out for programs. Parents may want to use it when their kids are elsewhere. Students taking courses in children's lit, teens who have to babysit, there are a million reasons why. Many commentators pointed out that it's often simply the most attractive place in the library. Would you rather read your book in a beanbag chair by the 10-foot tall windows that overlook the park, or in a dimly-lit 1970s fake-wood cubicle?

I guess, sadly, a policy is needed to make sure adults are considerate, though. I think the librarian in the original example went a little overboard, kicking out obviously harmless people when the library was empty. But you see so much selfish and bizarre behavior in libraries that, sadly, there needs to be some way to curb it. No, you can't keep kids safe forever, and yes, the people who flock to libraries that need social services have the right to be there too. But you don't want to chase out the library's core audience just because our society fails so miserably at mental health care.

Currently Reading

2010-09-26T14:00:00.002-04:00

Felt like blogging, didn't really know what to say, so turned to BTT. And they had a ridiculously easy one up:

What are you reading right now? What made you choose it? Are you enjoying it? Would you recommend it? (And, by all means, discuss everything, if you’re reading more than one thing!)

(I’ve asked this one before, but, well, it’s not like the answers stay the same, and darn it, it’s an interesting question!)

So right now I'm reading Private Life by Jane Smiley. I chose it because of an ad in The New Yorker. For a long time, I've had an irrational prejudice against this author because I really hate her last name. I know it's stupid, but I find it annoying. I did actually try one of her other books once, called Moo. And she did that thing I hate, when she makes an animal a symbol of something negative, like loss, or the toll that neglect and someone's whims takes on something. It always makes me miss the point.

So, to me, Moo is about a pig who's stashed in an unused building at a college and meticulously cared for by a student who bonds with the pig because he grew up on a farm and kinda misses it, and then after being stashed in the dark for months, they tear down the building because no one knows the pig was in there, and the pig (who's been depressed for a while) gets so excited to see the sunlight and smell the fresh air again that he goes running across campus, except he's big and fat now and can't really run and dies.

So anyway. Private Life. So far, I'd give it a meh-not-bad. It's another family saga, and I'm beginning to think maybe I checked out too many of those. It's about three daughters, especially the youngest, who were born in the late 1800s, and their marriages. Two of them stick close to home and make financially advantageous, conventional matches. But who cares about THEM. This book is about Margaret, consigned to old-maidhood until a naval astronomer (the joke is that they're never sure whether to address him as Dr., Captain, or just Mr.) marries her and takes her to California. All this is a rather slow burn, and I'm substantially into the book at this point. Hard to think of what to say about this one.

Salt and Sand

2010-09-25T20:36:00.002-04:00

The House on Salt Hay Road appealed to me as a family saga, but it turns out it's just as much of a time/place saga. When you read this book, you'll smell sea salt, you'll feel the mosit wind lashing your face, you'll hear the cry of birds and you may just be the tiniest bit irrationally cautious of where you read the book, lest you get sand in your bed or your car.

This is a first novel by Carin Clevidence. It's set in the late 1930s on coastal, rural Long Island. It's a family saga, like I said, about a blended family. Nancy (age 20) and Clayton (age 12ish) are brother and sister. Their parents are both dead, and they've been living for several years with the grandfather, whom everyone calls Scudder, their aunt Mavis who was abandoned by her drunken husband and now works as a domestic at a lodge, and their uncle Roy, whose first girlfriend died when he was about Nancy's age and heralded his permanent retirement from all that, and from many other things.

It's their story over a few years. Nancy feels trapped. Clayton loves it, being a real nature type who loves fishing, crabbing, clamming, drawing dead animals, hunting birds, feeding live birds (Mavis' employer has a ton of them) and all variety of outdoor pursuits. Scudder inevitably ages and declines. Roy gets forced out of his comfort zone for one. Mavis confronts all the unpleasantness in her marriage that she's worked hard to ignore for years.

Nature plays a major role in their story. The book opens with an explosion at a fireworks factory and essentially closes with the biggest hurricane the region had ever seen, although there is denouement. I give this one a strong reccomendation. While it wasn't one of those that impelled me to read late into the night or one that I was thinking about when I wasn't reading it, it was a beautiful, realistic novel that felt like life and has one of the stronger senses of place I've ever seen in a book.

Today's catch at the library

2010-09-19T15:48:00.002-04:00

It was a good day there. I found parking right away, I got a large quantity of books, and as it turned out, didn't owe them any money. I did have a secret weapon, though: the spring fiction issue of the New Yorker. It is to readers what the September issue of Vogue is to fashionistas. It tells you what's going on in the book world and why. It's as valuable for its ads as it is for its editorial content. It has the added advantage over Vogue, though, of being in reach of anyone with a library card, whereas the average Vogue reader will probably have to wait for the knockoffs to come to their local mall, or seek out a vindictive ex-husband of a wealthy fashionable woman who's putting all her purses on eBay for $50 each.

I noticed a couple of interesting things at the library today:

1. They're putting in a handicapped entrance near where I usually park. OK, I guess it's not that interesting, but it's disrupted things a bit.

2. You can make anything sound trendy and modern by sticking an "i" in front of it. Like iPoe, who is the subject of the local Big Read. Calling him ePoe would have made more sense, but I'm not in marketing.

3. If you eat right and try to exercise on an increasingly regular basis, "as many books as you can carry" becomes less of a solid benchmark for what your personal limit should be. Today, I could carry ten.

So, what'd I get? I'm so glad you asked.

The House on Salt Hay Road by Carin Clevidence. Just because it sounds cool.

Lockport Boy: a memoir of a magical time and place by Frank Bredell. I like to read books about the area, and this just sounds like such a joyful one. It was on their staff picks table, proving again that their stff has great taste.

She's Not There: a life in two genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan. I read her other book and thought it was terrific. This has been on my mental list for a while. Since I actually came with a paper list this time, I remembered to look for it.

Private Life by Jane Smiley. This was in the New Yorker issue that I mentioned. It sounded very good. I only read one of her other books, and it had an animal subplot that was so compelling and upsetting that I completely missed the point of the rest of the book.

The Family Beach House by Holly Chamberlin. A sort of quandary, because it's a family saga, which I tagged as suitable for fall, but about a beach house, which makes it more summery. I figured this in-between period would be perfect.

Midnight on the line: the secret life of the US border by Tim Gaynor. I passed it looking for something else and I thought it seemed like a valuable thing for a Northerner to read. We hear so much about border issues up here, but they don't really affect our lives to the point where we might have an informed opinion. I want a better understanding of why this is such a big issue, and if it's a real issue or just a 'wedge' issue like the so-called Ground Zero mosque or gay marriage.

Glass, paper, beans: a revelation on the nature of... by Leah Hager Cohen. I also found this on the way to something else. I guess it tracks the sources of these three things or something. Looking at my list, I would dub this one Most LIkely to Be Returned Unread, especially since it's so similar in subject matter to what I was really looking for, which is...

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. Consider me her Colbert Bump: this is where I heard about her book, but it's a topic that's sort of interested me for a while: how the poorest Americans have tons of shit, where it comes from, and what happens to it when we're done with it.

The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute. I guess this was the It Book one year in the 80s. My parents had it, and as a little kid, the title confused the absolute hell out of me, especially since on closer examination, the book was not set in Egypt nor did it have anything to do with beans. I think it's about white trash, actually. I also think I've tried it before and not gotten far, but I'm interested in trying again.

Rest area: stories by Clay McLeod Chapman. This one had me at the description of the story in which preteen boys pretend that the lifeguard at the pool is a witch and they have to safely get to the bottom of the slide to defeat her. It's been a while since I read a good short story collection. I hope this qualifies.

Characters welcome?

2010-09-14T18:22:00.002-04:00

Despite my belief that long books are better in the winter, I dove headfirst into David Copperfield three weeks ago. I don't know why. I bought it at Barnes and Noble a few months ago, and suddenly, there was nothing I wanted to read more. I finished it over the weekend.

I liked it, overall. But I know this is one book that frequently has the "boring" charge brought against it, and I can sort of understand why. Most of the stuff that happens develops rather slowly, and there is quite a bit in there that's not relevant to the main plot, which in itself is hard to define, since it's just a coming-of-age story and you could argue that everything that happens to you while you're growing up is relevant in a coming-of-age story.

And it's all there in David Copperfield. We get treated to accounts of what he ate in the inn on his way back to boarding school, what the interior was like of every door he darkened, and lengthy scenes with random characters. I think Charles Dickens liked making interesting characters so much that he just couldn't restrain himself.

And all of the random characters are pretty interesting. His beautician-dwarf made me think of the beautician-dwarf in the Tales of The City book where Michael goes to London. The cheerful funeral outfitters were interesting too. My co-worker was coincidentally re-reading it at the same time and pointed out that there was a great deal of foreshadowing in the book, and she's definitely right. Steerforth is described in too glowing terms not to have a dark side, and Uriah Heep is just shady as hell. But really, the cahracters make this one. And I love character-driven books.

Even though I liked Great Expectations better (it was much funnier), I enjoyed David Copperfield so much that I picked up Our Mutual Friend and Ye Old Curiousity Shoppe this weekend at B&N.

It happened to me

2010-09-11T14:41:00.003-04:00

So my whole adult life, basically, I've heard about people having computer problems. Viruses. The screens on their laptops failing. Hard drives crashing. Fried memory. But when it came to my own computer, I had this bizarre, magical yet persistent belief that I. Was. Bulletproof. I've had my own machine since 2002 and been problem-free the entire time.

Until the past few weeks. There were signs. I got the infamous "Blue screen of Death" a few times. My SO convinced me that the problem had to do with the fact that my virus protection expired two years ago, so I bought new virus scanning software. I ran several scans, it found a few things, and I figured that would be the end of it. Then. THEN. One day, I got the BSOD three times in a row. It happened so fast that I didn't even see the second time, it was still rebooting from the first time and I was turned around in my chair, talking to SO.

He messed around with it for a little while, imparted to me the surprising fact that it was not only possible to clean a computer but imperative to do so, and...he didn't fix it. Every time we tried something, it got progressively worse. We tried implementing some of the suggestions of our WoW friends, most of whom work with computers, but didn't get very far. It's fried. Windows now won't load at all. I've got to take it somewhere to get it fixed, but until then, it's just sitting on my kitchen table like a big, expensive paperweight.

So if there are no blog posts for a while, that's why.

On throwing in the towel

2010-08-30T18:13:00.002-04:00

One of these days, I'll actually do one on Thursday again, but here's this week's BTT question:

Giving Up August 26, 2010

If you’re not enjoying a book, will you stop mid-way? Or do you push through to the end? What makes you decide to stop?

For many years after one of my graduate school professors died, I stopped wasting time on bad books, or thought I did. His goal was to read every book, and judging by the state of his office and the fact that it took his widow the rest of the academic year to go through and determine the disposition of all of his books, he came as close as anyone.

I've said often on here that it was the suddenness of his death that was the most shocking. He was killed when a young heroin addict drifted into his lane and hit him head-on. The heroin addict was also killed. When we found out, we were all at a barbeque to welcome the new students, wondering why none of our professors had shown up yet. Then, someone came to tell us. I kept asking people how he could possibly be dead when I'd just seen him yesterday, even knowing how stupid that sounded. And I kept thinking how he'd wanted to read every book, and wondered how much time he wasted on bad ones, and vowed to myself not to do that.

Except. Sometimes it's easier said than done. When it's a random book from the library and it proves to be bad, I have no problem putting it away. I have no particular relationship with it at that point. It looked interesting, but it wasn't, oh well. It's when I've been looking forward to the book that it's harder to pull the plug. For example, The Swan Thieves. I could tell early on that it wasn't good. But yet, I turned the last page, still surprised that it never gotten any better.

I also made a very valiant attempt with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart because it's considered a modern classic and an important piece of colonial literature. And to say I don't like a book like that makes me sound like a whiny high school sophomore who thinks that Shakespeare is a shitty writer. But I couldn't do it. I tried repeatedly, much harder than I would have tried if it was just a random book and not something I'd wanted to read ever since I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

So, to sum up, it depends on whether or not I think the book has real potential or is at least something I should read before I plug-pull.

"This place, and everyone in it, is disposable:" On modern Miracle-Mile culture

2010-08-28T15:29:00.003-04:00

Take a trip with me in your mind down the Miracle Mile you frequent the most. While you're stopped at the light, look to your left. What's there? OK, now what was there last year? Three years ago? Five, ten, twenty? How many times do you suppose it's changed over since you started using this particular Miracle Mile? Why, and what happened to the people that worked there?

These questions are raised by Stewart Nan's brief and haunting Last Night at the Lobster. Told from the third-person viewpoint of Manny, the general manager, it takes us through the final day of a Red Lobster in Connecticut.

Manny has no idea why it happened. They were supposed to close for remodeling, and then corporate just pulled the plug. He is among the lucky ones, he'll go to the Olive Garden a couple of towns over, along with five of his best employees. Everyone else is looking for work.

The staff is a cross-section of "everyone else:" the hostess, who is putting herself through college with this job. The cook, an ex-military guy. The young, unsettled line workers with a bent for trouble who will probably through three or four similar jobs in the next year. The system-breaker, waitress Roz, who's the only one vested in the company's retirement plan. Nicolette, another waitress, who doesn't take any crap from anyone and once chased patrons across the lot to get her pen back. Jackie, who used to date Manny and now dates some dangerous cricket player.

Manny has been fair to them, a good guy, and that's why they all bother showing up. Manny himself is meticulous and utterly competent, in addition to being such a fair good guy, and one might wonder why he doesn't have a better job, though it's hard to see what else, exactly, he might be suited for.

Nan puts the soul in the machine with this book. Manny is such a good general manager, doing everything exactly by the book until it's lights out, that it's heartbreaking to see how little corporate loves him back. In fact, they don't care about anyone: not what will become of the struggling mall in which the Lobster's located, nor what their regular patrons will do for their lunches and dinners.

Their closing, you see, was not publicly announced. After their final lunch and dinner, Manny will get to return the next day, alone, and stand outside in the snow with coupons for the Olive Garden, as if the closing is his fault. The book is a thought-provoking exploration of the human cost of the Miracle Mile way of life that we are all part of, like it or not.

Jasper Fforde: A PSA

2010-08-23T11:05:00.002-04:00

If you already know the Jasper Fforde books, this blog post is not for you. Rather, it's to raise awareness among the millions that are scratching their heads and saying "Fforde? Is that supposed to be Swedish or something? Nah, screw it, let's see what's on Lamebook."

I've reccomended these books to virtually everyone I've run across since the first time I read them. It's not uncommon to find a book that's kinda different, has some unusual element to it, or finds a way to reverse an expectation we didn't even know we had. The two white girls obsessed with flamenco in Sarah Bird's The Flamenco School. The loveable, aimless, semi-alcoholic dad in Tawni O'Dell's Fragile Beasts. The presence of Turner's Syndrome (which I'd never heard of before) in Jennifer Haigh's The Condition.

Jasper Fforde's books are something else altogether. You'll find them miscategorized as mysteries, but they're really about the journey, not the destination.

Thursday Next lives an a sort of alternate reality, similar to our own, but with some key differences. Wales is a Socialist Republic, life is dominated by evil corporation Wal-Ma.....I mean, Goliath, the Crimean War dragged on for decades and claimed thousands of casualties, and literature looms large in everyone's lives. There are WillSpeak machines on streetcorners: put a quarter in, and you get a soliloqy. People attend Rocky Horror-style performances of Richard III ("WHEN is the winter of our discontent?"). And crimes relating to fiction are serious matters.

That's what Thursday starts out doing. Then, she is recruited by Jurisfiction to police matters internal to books. For instance, keeping the Mispeling Vyrus under control (it disfigured Uriah Hope from David Copperfield, who became "cadaverous" instead of "courageous," etc.). She also runs Rage Counseling Sessions in Wuthering Heights and in an inspired sequence, gives a happy ending to a child's tale about a blind dog.

The books are nothing short of brilliant. They're funny, clever and totally original. You can read one in an afternoon. Knowledge of literature is somewhat helpful, but not necessary. It actually inspired me to read several of the classics. After meeting Miss Havisham as Thursday's mentor (who liked to sneak off in her moldy wedding dress to attempt to break the land speed record before Mr. Toad could), I read Great Expectations and found it to be surprisingly funny, much more enjoyable to get through than I ever would have imagined, and actually not terribly different from today's better-written novels.

But if you're not in the mood for a Dickens and are looking for something a bit different, try a Jasper Fforde book. The Thursday Next books are: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, and Thursday Next: First Among Sequels. Enjoy!

A Reading Meme, a long BTT

2010-08-21T11:02:00.002-04:00

So, Big Exciting Issue finally drew to a close. I posted my story to the web at a quarter to midnight Tuesday, got out of work 2 hours early on Thursday, been working on my wrap-up story ever since. And reading in-between! Thought I'd do a BTT and it's a loooong one, so brew a pot of coffee, and happy reading. I formatted it a little differently this week because of the nature of it, but y'all are smart enough to know that I didn't make up the below questions and my answers to them are the original part. So, enjoy, and feel free to play along on your own blog.

1. Favorite childhood book?

The Changeling by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Good ol' Zilpha, haven't thought of her in ages. I think I liked it because my best friend and I used to play like those girls all the time.

2. What are you reading right now?

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde. Re-reading, actually.

3. What books do you have on request at the library?
I generally don't do that.

4. Bad book habit?
Checking out books like a drunken sailor, getting them home and being like "what the hell?", then failing to return them on time.

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library?
Bah. Well. There's the two Thursday Next books, the above-mentioned and The Well of Lost Plots. Fragile Beasts was on that charge-out, but has gone back. The rest? Not sure. See above.

6. Do you have an e-reader?
hell no
7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?
One at a time

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?

Yes. I don't do as much re-reading as I used to, and I analyze the books more as I'm reading them. It didn't take me long to start thinking about how I'd write about it as I read.

9. Least favorite book you read this year (so far?)
That would be The Swan Thieves.

10. Favorite book you’ve read this year?

Tough question. Would be either The Art of Racing in the Rain (although I cried buckets) or The Condition by Jennifer Haigh.

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone?

Odd question, if I read outside it often, it wouldn't be a comfort zone, would it?

12. What is your reading comfort zone?

OK, I know the point of these questions is to think about them a bit, but after giving this one a bit of thought, I'm still not sure. I avoid horror and mystery but it's not really because they make me uncomfortable.

13. Can you read on the bus?

Yes, but I haven't been on a bus in ages. Public transport is really lacking around here, and I'm supposed to have my car at work anyway.

14. Favorite place to read?

My front porch! I even bought a special pair of pajama pants that look like regular pants so I can go out there first thing in the morning on weekends. I'm wearing them now, in fact.

15. What is your policy on book lending?

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. I bet everyone who did this meme answered it like that.

16. Do you ever dog-ear books?

I try not to.

17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?
No!

18. Not even with text books?
OK, you got me.

19. What is your favorite language to read in?

English, it's the only one I understand!

20. What makes you love a book?

Usually, it's strong characters. I can forgive an implausible or lackluster plot. I can't forgive cardboard characters who behave in inconsistent ways to move the story forward.

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book?

Usually, its originality. If I've never read anything like it, I'll reccomend it to others.

22. Favorite genre?

Just simple old boring realistic fiction.

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did?)

I wish I could get more into fantasy. I like it in theory, and I could participate in the coversations about it that happen in my World of Warcraft guild, since all my fellow guildies love reading fantasy. I tried recently and couldn't get into it. Same cardboard character issue.

24. Favorite biography?

The Dirt by Motley Crue. I should probably be a little more ashamed to admit that, but it was awesome.

25. Have you ever read a self-help book?

Yeah. It didn't help. It was supposed to help me make up my mind about having a kid. It gave me some food for thought, though.

26. Favorite cookbook?

HAH! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HA!

27. Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?
(answer here)

28. Favorite reading snack?

Cheese and crackers, also the answer to "What's your favorite snack in general" and not infrequently, "what did you have for lunch."

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.

I really can't think of one.

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?

I wouldn't know, I don't often read reviews.

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?

The only time I minded was when I had to say some bad things about a book I'd been sent to review. It seemed more personal. I liked that book overall, but it wasn't perfect and I said so.

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?

Chinese. That would be impressive as hell.

33. Most intimidating book you’ve ever read?

Definitely Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory. I read it during my semester abroad for one of my courses. My advisor tried to talk me out of registering for Arthurian Legend, saying I'd have to read an 800-page book. I told him that having guidance through that particular 800-page book was what attracted me to the course in the first place. I loved it.

34. Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin?

I can't really think of one. Does the manual for my SL-R camera count?

35. Favorite Poet?

Not much on poetry. I guess I don't really have one.

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?

Usually five to seven. I stop when I can't carry anymore, so it depends somewhat on their size.

37. How often have you returned book to the library unread?

Almost every time, so about once a month.

38. Favorite fictional character?

I'm not sure. I usually say Eilonwy from the Prydain books when asked.

39. Favorite fictional villain?

I really don't know. Mordred from The Once and Future King was a great villian. Isn't it odd that I turned to fantasy for the answers to both of those questions, even though I admittedly rarely read it?

40. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation?

To me, a stop at the library is as essential a part of trip planning as doing laundry and packing. I like to bring a lot of books and try to get an assortment of new books and old favorites, in case the new ones all suck. The old favorites I select depend on my mood. Sometimes, I like to go back to a one I've only read once or twice but loved. Other times, I go for ones that I've read so often, I barely even need the book anymore.

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading.

Not sure, but I bet it was when the new World of Warcraft expansion was released!

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.

The most obvious answer, I've already used in an example about the one that made me angry (I skipped around). There were a few recently that I realized I was simply not in the mood for, like Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, or the David Guterson about the dying man that was going to kill himself. Those aren't forever, though, I do intend to try again.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?

Just life. Being tired, working too much, having a lot going on.

44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?

I gave this one a lot of thought, and I'd have to say the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I had a hard time getting into the books, but the movies were marvelous.

45. Most disappointing film adaptation?

The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander was turned into the most dreadful Disney movie ever produced. It could have been terrific. They had great source material, very deep, tackling the true nature of heroism. They chose to water it down, to make the Eilonwy character a simpering suck-ass, Gurgi a colorless sidekick, and Taran really brave and really smart.

46. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?

When my mom retired, she got some sort of cash bonus. She used part of it to give us each $50 to blow at Barnes and Noble. It was so much fun. I can't remember what I got, but I remeber the evening well.

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?

Never.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?

It could be anything. I do it a lot. Boring, laggy plot, terrible characters, simply due back at the library, anything at all.

49. Do you like to keep your books organized?

I like to, but I rarely do.

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them?

I always keep them.

51. Are there any books you’ve been avoiding?

The Twilight saga. I am afraid I will like them.

52. Name a book that made you angry.

Well, I actually threw Doesn't She Look Natural across the room. It was meant to be "Christian fiction." I was offended by the presence of a character who was attracted to men, but "because he loved the Lord," lived a life pretty much free of love from anyone except his mother. The main character, who had inherited a funeral home and who also loves the Lord (we knew because we were told, repeatedly) had wanted him out of her house and away from her sons until she learned that about them. Narrow-minded biddy.

53. A book you didn’t expect to like but did?

I was surprised at how good Snow Falling on Cedars was. I had it on my shelf for ages without even knowing why or where it came from. I finally read it last winter and was fairly blown away.

54. A book that you expected to like but didn’t?

I thought I'd like Edgar Sawtelle more. It was fairly crap, though.

55. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?

James Herriott's books will make anyone feel good. I just love them.

Evolving as a reader...or not: the return of BTT

2010-08-14T14:12:00.002-04:00

I was in the mood to do one. I'm going to try to blog more regularly, especially since the conclusion of Big Exciting Issue is on the horizon at my newspaper. Big Exciting Issue has been with me literally since I started the job. I've written probably 20 stories on it, at least, which is a lot for a weekly newspaper. But the people in the community I cover vote on Big Exciting Issue in four days, and after it's all over with, I anticipate having both more time and energy, and yes, possibly a little hole in my life to fill.

So without further ado, I give you this week's BTT question:

Evolution August 12, 2010

Have your reading choices changed over the years? Or pretty much stayed the same? (And yes, from childhood to adulthood we usually read different things, but some people stick to basically the same kind of book their entire lives, so…)

I never really thought about it too much until now, but it's an interesting one. When I was little, I liked fantasy a lot, especially the Narnia books and Lloyd Alexander. My best friend and I spent hours searching for the gateway to Narnia (we ruled out everywhere near both of our houses, fyi). As an adult, I read the Harry Potter books and the His Dark Materials trilogy, but I'm not a fantasy buff. My few forays into adult fantasy were rather disappointing.

I hated sci-fi then. I still do.

I went through a brief Agatha Christie stint (article in the New Yorker about her this week, WHUT WHUT) but never really got into mysteries. I'm still not.

I had an 'incident' with a Stephen King novel when I was a teenager. I still avoid the horror genre.

So all that pretty well narrows it down to realistic fiction. But I definitely find the kinds of books I've been drawn to changed as I got older. I'm ashamed to admit that I've never been able to get into fiction set in a radically different culture than my own. (I still think Mr. Library Diva's inability to get into a book with a female protagonist is worse, but still). I like character-driven fiction better than plot-driven. But I don't know if that's always been true or if "Stranger Than Fiction" just made me think about it a little more and realize my preference.

So I guess I'd say in general that I've always basically enjoyed reading about people that were similar to me, that I could relate to, with the occasional outlandish twist thrown in. I love the Jasper Fforde books, and am actually re-reading them now. And I liked some of Sarah Bird's novels for her ability to throw in something unusual to a normal life, like a flamenco school or a burgeoning career as a romance novelist. Just like I enjoyed Janet Evanovich's books about a girl with a quirky family, complicated love life, and oh yeah, that whole bounty hunter thing as a career.

Fragile, and slightly disappointing, Beasts

2010-08-12T16:36:00.002-04:00

It's always a disappointment when a long-awaited book turns out to be not what you're hoping. It's worse when it happens right towards the end of the book. It's worst of all, though, when it's by a new writer you promote often and would quit your job to do PR for.

Such was the case with Fragile Beasts, the new Tawni O'Dell. Yeah, you heard me right, the new. Tawni. O'Dell. I saw it in the new books section and it was all I could do not to scream out "Fuckyeah!" in the middle of the library (and since it was the central branch, I wouldn't have to worry about getting thrown out).

Fragile Beasts is vaguely linked in with all the rest of them, taking place in the same fictionalized depressed Pennsylvania coal town area. It's the tale of three people: Kyle, Klint and Candace. Kyle and Klint are teenaged boys whose father just died in a drunk-driving accident. Their mother had ran out several years before and is now suddenly back to lay claim on them and spirit them away to Arizona, where she's living now with their little sister, who she took with her, and the guy she ran off with.

This is a disaster. Not just because the mother is a total trainwreck, but because Klint is a hotshot baseball player, who's been heavily scouted even as a junior, and needs to stay with his team for his future. Enter Candace.

The boys have been fortunate enough to make friends with Shelby, who's the niece of rich, reclusive Candace. Now 77, Candace has never married or had children, has a ton of money, and remains on her enormous estate just outside of town with her staff and her bull. Shelby convinces Candace to take the boys in.

You can probably guess at a fair amount of the rest. There are a few surprises, though. The father who died in the drunk-driving accident emerges as a likeable, caring man, just a man without very high aspirations or direction in life. Candace is billed as Having A Secret, but it's not a real secret. It's just one of those things in families that isn't discussed, much like how I knew that my great-uncle was a PTSD victim who spent most of his life institutionalized, but knew none of the details (and now that everyone's dead, never will).

Candace coughs up Her Secret early on (the book alternates between her perspective and Kyle's) and as it turns out, the evidence of it was pretty much everywhere and could have been uncovered through a Google search. By the way, am I the only one who's thrown off when a book will casually mention a specific website or video game? It's like books don't mix with those things, to me.

Anyway, so you may be wondering, where's the disappointment? Well, readers, it is in the melodramatic final 50 pages or so, which contain a suicide attempt, a real death, and the revelation of An Actual Shocking Secret that was totally unneccessary and cheapened the rest of the book, in my opinion. It didn't seem to fit, before or after. It's like O'Dell just threw it in because she needed something to drive the book to its conclusion.

I wouldn't tell people not to bother with this one altogether. But if you've never read one by Tawni O'Dell, start with Sister Mine. Don't start here.