Update: there, it's done

Wow, that really needed to be done! I feel as good as I feel after cleaning the bathtub after ignoring it for three weeks. There was some dead wood on there that I'm not quite ready to admit defeat towards, but mostly it was books I've come across that I want to read, but haven't. The new Barbara Kingsolver, Jasper Fforde, and Jen Lancaster. All those books that my parents wanted me to give to the book sale. Some other stuff I've heard of here and there. I see the beginnings of a World War II thing, as well as further continuation of my aborted colonial history thing. Plus more trips to the library, and more posts!

When NaBloPoMo gets tough

The tough get NaBloPoMo...or something. Alert readers probably spotted the flaw in someone who maintains a blog about the books she reads participating in such a NaBloPoMo thing. I didn't spot it until early this week, when I realized I was current on all the books I'd read when I didn't have internet access and wasn't due to complete anything anytime soon. Yesterday's book was a godsend that way. I came across it when unpacking, and thought: I know! Children's short stories! That'll go fast! It did, too. It only took me about an hour to read, but then I was right back where I started.

I visited the NaBloPoMo site, sure that this would be the day when I fail. Then I came across a new group: List Lovers...for people who love to make lists! Sweet! I like to make lists. I like it so much that I have a notebook full of different lists I've made. Some of them are things I'd like to do. Some of them are lists of things I have done (the whole list book idea started because I got tired of trying to list off every guy I'd ever kissed every time I kissed someone new). So I thought maybe this would salvage today's entry.

But after giving it some thought, I can't come up with a much better list than a new and improved TBR list. The one on the sidebar has a ton of dead wood and mostly came from this post, where I went through my book collection and set aside the ones I'd never actually read. Maybe it's time to admit that my interest in some of them has passed, that I'm never going to pick them up, and that it's time to pass them on to someone who will read them and take them off my list. At the same token, there are some books that I do want to read that aren't on there. Also, I could cheat and put the book I'm reading right now on my list just so I can vanquish it right away, a trick I frequently employ with my more mundane "to-do" lists.

Another TBR book vanquished!

Books can join a TBR list in a variety of ways. Maybe it's one that a friend recommended, or a professor assigned the week you had three papers and two projects due, or that you heard about on NPR or in the New Yorker or someplace equally tony (I certainly never put books on my TBR list after hearing about them in People magazine or on Craigslist, not that I even know what these things are!!!) Others may come into your life in a more passive way: you receive them as gifts, or your parents were going to donate them to the library and you decided to keep them. The Book of Changes by Tim Wynne-Jones, came into my life in about the most passive way imaginable. Six years ago, I presented at a librarians' conference about the services my museum offered to school libraries. Each conference participant got a goody bag. I would imagine it was the librarian's version of the goody bags guests to the Oscars receive: in addition to the boring branded letter openers and tape dispensers, there were notecards with animals encouraging people to read, this roll of shiny silver tape, and best of all, the chance to receive one book from a selection of seven or eight. They had extra bags, so I got this book.

Your first question may be, does this Tim Wynne-Jones have anything to do with Diana Wynne Jones? After looking at about fifteen different websites, I still can't tell you for sure. I visited both of their official websites and read their autobiographies. They don't match. Diana is much older (hers dwells mostly on memories of her childhood during World War II), whereas Tim has young children. However, Tim does have a sister named Di, which could be short for Diana, so she could be a relative. None of the websites mentioned any relation between the two, but how many "Wynne-Jones" can there be out there?

Tim does have an interesting background, though. He grew up in England (Diana is British, too...) and emigrated to Canada with his family as a little boy. He played in a rock band and wrote music for "Fraggle Rock." How terrific is that? He's an author and editor of children's books, and designed his own home.

The Book of Changes is a book of short stories, aimed at older children. There are seven stories in the book, and each deals with themes that kids can relate to. "The Clark Beans Man" is about negotiating the complexities of the social scene at school. The kid in "Madhouse" feels his family stacks up unfavorably to that of his friend -- until he takes a closer look. The kid in "Hard Sell" learns how good it can feel to defend someone else.

My favorite was "The Ghost of Eddy Longo", for its supernatural element. It was the tale of a teenaged hockey phenom, a goalie who had never been scored on, a third-generation local hockey great. His grandfather was so famous in town that there was a statue of him outside the local arena. His father, however, for all his promise, had disappeared the night of the unveiling of the statue...or had he? It was much less "lessony" than some of the other stories, and more human, but still conveyed its central moral: that it's not about winning or losing, but about how you play and how much fun you have.

The title story, "The Book of Changes", was also clever, and evocative. The main character had to do a project on some aspect of Chinese culture. The day before it was due, he still hadn't started. The girl who presented that day was presenting on the I Ching, and he boldly asked the I Ching what he should do for his project. It actually had an answer for him, too, although it wasn't apparent right away. As he sweated through the night, made false start after false start, procrastinated, worried, I was right back there in fifth grade (or grad school, or NaBloPoMo) facing an impossible deadline.

But yet, I feel I missed Tim Wynne-Jones's target audience. I don't know if kids would like these or not. I didn't dislike them, I just felt that they weren't aimed at me. Which they weren't, but still, I don't feel that way when reading the Harry Potter books, or books by Phillip Pullman.

If anyone can enlighten me on whether a connection exists between Tim Wynne-Jones and Diana Wynne-Jones, please do so!

From vaudeville to late-night video

For some reason, I've always loved Hollywood tales, true or not. I've read several biographies of Marilyn Monroe, each with their own theory about how she died, from murder to a mishap involving enemas, sleeping pills, lack of fluids and overwork. I read Lillian Gish's account of the dawn of the moving picture, back when the concept of close-ups and feature-length films were new. I enjoyed Lana Turner's autobiography, as well as seamier stuff like that of Tatum O'Neal and Danny Bonaduce. In fact, I still have a booklet I received in my Easter basket as a child, published by one of the tabloid magazines and called "Hollywood Mysteries," where I first learned the stories of the Black Dahlia, the unsolved murder of Thelma Todd, the mysterious death of the first Superman (whose real name I don't remember), etc.

So when I saw Niagara Falls All Over Again, a novel by Elizabeth McCracken, I decided to check it out. This novel follows the careers of the fictional comedy team Carter and Sharp, told from the perspective of straight man Mose (or Mike, as he's known professionally) Sharp, from vaudeville to movies, radio and television.

The story makes the typical arc of any show-biz tale. There are the early years, full of struggle and optimism. The future icons have nothing but dreams and hopes. They work hard, travel a lot, sacrifice all material comfort in pursuit of their ambition. Then, the big break comes. They ride high, they get all the material comforts they want and then some. This period cannot last, though, and then there's the long fall from grace, often fueled by drugs and alcohol. If it's an autobiography, it usually ends with the main character getting clean and vowing (if not actually succeeding in) a comeback. If it's a biography, that usually means that the subject didn't survive, and died of an OD, often in a run-down hotel room, or the beat-up Chevy in which they were forced to live.

The end of Carter and Sharp's tale is free from that particular melodrama. Rather, it ends with the more mundane issues that dissolve the partnerships, careers and attachments of an average person. One person changed while the other one didn't. Committments to home and family take over committments to friends. One person starts to feel taken advantage of, which makes the other one defensive. There's alcohol and infidelity involved, but it plays a secondary role.

There aren't really a lot of novels on male relationships. I guess there's something in our culture that makes it almost impossible for straight men to admit they love one another, although women are free to declare their love for their female friends without having their sexuality questioned in the least. That was one thing I enjoyed about this book. Despite the fact that their partnership doesn't end on the best note, Mose isn't shy about proclaiming his love for his larger-than-life partner, who he still misses well into his eighties.

Vaudeville is fading from our collective memory. There aren't many performers left who got their start that way. Those that did, like Gracie Allen and George Burns, or Laurel and Hardy, belong to a whole other generation, existing in the collective subconscious (as Mose points out Carter and Sharp did) only as answers to crossword puzzles, or names on DVDs in Wal-Mart's dollar bin. The early chapters of the book introduce it to the generations like my own, whose grandparents didn't even get to see vaudeville live. You get to experience the surreal quality to the acts (like the one-legged contortionist), the sweat and hard work, the impermanence of it all (Mose goes from replacing a straight man who left the industry, to stepping in for anyone who was sick, and gets his big break stepping in for a straight man who was too drunk that night to go on -- virtually none of it under his own name).

That's always been one of my favorite things about fiction: the way it can preserve the past like nothing else can. Museums can save the material pieces of the past. Documentarians can describe what the past was like. But a good novel, like Niagara Falls all over again, can actually take you there.

It'll make you LOL: a blogger makes it big

A few days ago, I alluded to a faboo book that I couldn't stop reading, even after I'd read it. That book? Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster.

Jen's tale is, as she describes it in the author's note, "a modern Greek tragedy, as defined by Roger Dunkle in The Classical Origins of Western Culture:...in which 'the central character...suffers some serious misfortune which is not accidental and therefore meaningless, but is significant in that the misfortune is logically connected.' In other words? The bitch had it coming." Jen is high on life and success as the book opens: she just won a corporate award for her sales presentation, and plans to spend the large cash prize on more designer everything. She's living the sweet life, in a sweet pad, with her similarly successful live-in boyfriend.

Then, the unthinkable happens. Two weeks after September 11th, she's laid off. Her job hunt starts out confident, then grows increasingly desperate as her unemployment runs out and her boyfriend (husband by then) gets laid off too. Many people who've hunted for jobs recently will recognize her misadventures: there's the startup that asks her to prepare a business plan to help them make their decision, takes notes a little too ardently when she presents it, then never contacts her again. There are the offers taht mysteriously and inexplicably vanish like fireworks. There are the mind-dulling temp jobs, the Nordstrom managers who won't hire you because you don't have enough experience. For some reason I've never understood, tales of the working world interest me a great deal, so I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the book.

The best part about it, though, was Jen herself. Judging from the description on the back, I'd expected to hate her and cheer when she failed, but I didn't. She has such a forceful, charismatic personality that it reaches right through the page at you. Her intimate tone (which I suspect may come partly from all the blogging) makes you root for her. Even when she's at her most shallow and materialistic, you know that she's also a human with feelings and admirable characteristics too. She's able to laugh at herself throughout the book, which (like I said in the title) will also make you LOL at some of the stuff she does (I loved the drunken Big Lebowski story). At the same time, however, she's clearly an intelligent woman who deserved her past success, which made me respect her.

Another great thing about this book is that she learns something. One thing that made the horrid Citizen Girl and the Plum Sykes books so annoying, is that the protagonists (and I use that word loosely) fail to learn anything. This despite the fact that blindingly obvious lessons are repeatedly shoved in their faces throughout the tale (The kind most of us learn in junior high, too: Don't Date Men Only Because They're Rich or Good-Looking, It's Not All About You, Success Doesn't Happen Instantly, etc.). Jen changes a lot throughout her journey. As she admits, she was defined by her job and her possessions. When she was stripped of both, she had to find new things to define her. And yes, I know that this is a true story, whereas Citizen Girl and the Plum Sykes books are more fanciful than your average JRR Tolkien tale. But the point is that a reader can get something out of Bitter is the New Black. The ending is much more satisfying than CG's continued martyrdom, or seeing a Plum Sykes protagonist rewarded for behaving like a stupid bitch. It gives you hope for people.

As a big animal person, I'd also like to mention an aspect of the story that I loved: Jen's work with rescue dogs. Desperate for a way to occupy her days, she volunteers at an animal rescue. She starts out terrified of the pit bulls, and only stays after the volunteer coordinator challenges her committment. But she grows to love it, and states flat-out that all the crap in the media about vicious pit bulls is that, exactly: crap. She even takes in two dogs from the shelter. I hope that the pit bull advocacy people have taken note of this. With these dogs being overrepresented in shelters and vilified in the media, they need all the good publicity they can get. Her chapters on Maisy and Loki may have just saved a life or two.

A final note: if all of this intrigues you and you want to test her out, she also maintains a blog. She too is doing NaBloPoMo (that's where I heard about it, actually). If you like, you can visit her at www.jennsylvania.com. The URL is also on my sidebar. I recommend it, she's a good writer, and probably a fun person too!

Gone Underground

After languishing for over a decade on my TBR list,I'd enjoyed Bastard out of Carolina. Seeing that Dorothy Allison had written several other books, I was determined to give one of them a whirl. I wound up with Cavedweller. I'm still not sure what to make of it.

I loved Bastard out of Carolina for its honest, unflinching look at both childhood and poverty, and for its vivid, complex characters. Cavedweller's characters were outstanding, but its aim less focused, its purpose less clear. It promises at first to be somewhat of a darker and more white trash version of the Reese Witherspoon movie Sweet Home Alabama: the main character, Delia, had run off to L.A. over a decade ago to seek her fortune as a singer and escape an abusive marriage. After the man she left home with dies in a motorcycle crash, she takes their daughter home to Georgia to reconcile with the two daughters she left behind when fleeing her marriage, and to face the rest of her old demons.

However, the tale doesn't stop there. I've read books that I felt took way too long to get to the point, 1000-page tales that could've been told in less than half of that. This is one of the only books I've read where the tale itself seems to spin out for far too long. Somewhere, the story stops belonging to Delia, and the disparate tales of her three daughters take over: Amanda, the religious fanatic who chooses early marriage and motherhood; the rebellious Dede, who sluts around and works a variety of jobs before settling down with someone most unexpected; and Cissy, the daughter from L.A., who finds herself at the bottom of the town's network of caves. Delia becomes barely a secondary character in her own story. Everything from her tale fades: her daughters grown, her abusive husband dead, the grandfather who raised her barely making an appearance.

If this was meant to be an epic, there's not enough "epic" here: barely any struggle in the lives of the girls, including the struggle to find themselves (they all seem pretty damn sure) or become a family (which they never really achieve: Dede and Cissy have a more friendlike relationship, while Amanda rejects the sinful duo in favor of her more godly church pals). It's a rather long denouement to what starts as an exciting tale, and only Allison's skill as a writer keeps you intrigued.

Ahhh...domestic bliss

I'm pleased to report that the first 24 hours with my guy have been fantastic, in a very ordinary sort of way. It wasn't so much what we did, because we haven't done anything super-special. We had a nice dinner at a neighborhood restaurant last night, we worked on unpacking stuff, I worked today, and tonight we went grocery shopping and reconfigured the computers. He cooked dinner while I did the laundry, and then we watched a movie while we ate. It's boring as hell, but it feels so good to have someone to come home to, and to not have to do all that stuff alone.

He also assembled my pretty new computer desk! I'd been in the market virtually ever since I bought my Wal-Mart POS. It didn't hold up well to the multiple moves I made with it, and it was ugly and too small to begin with. I finally got a new one for my birthday this summer. It has a tempered-glass top, a gray keyboard tray, and side shelves for my tower and printer. I wish my work desk was this nice!

I am concerned that with everything going on, I'm going to run out of steam before NaBloPoMo is even a week old. I have two books "in the pipeline" right now, and I'm reading a third. Still, if I write about one tomorrow and one Tuesday, I will have had to finish my current book by Wednesday in order to have something for that night, and even if I do, what about Thursday? My sister still hasn't called me back, so I don't know how the party went. We'll see, though. I'm going to make a real effort to find new topics and stretch myself, because isn't this what NaBloPoMo is supposed to be about?