Coming Soon, to a School Near Me!

When you're unemployed, the daily mail sucks. Whether it's an angry letter from the electric company, or what I call a "fuck-you letter" from a job I applied for ("We received your resume. Unfortunately for you, we hired someone way better than you. We feel a bit badly for rubbing your face in it, so we're going to lie to you and say we'll keep yours on file for future vacancies, which we actually don't anticipate anyway. I wouldn't wait by the phone if I were you.")

Sometimes, even the circulars kind of suck. When you get a good one, for Macy's or Raymour and Flanagan, it just reminds you of all the stuff you can't afford to buy. But today, I found something exciting in my mailbox. Tony Horwitz, one of my very favorite authors, is coming to the Nichols School (posh private high school) next weekend. It didn't say anything about a cost, so HELLS YEAH I'm going to be there. It's too bad my copy of Confederates at the Attic is in such poor shape, or I'd bring it for him to sign. But I don't even care. I'm really looking forward to seeing him. If any of you are fans and in the Buffalo area, perhaps I will see you there!

Yesterday's Library Haul

Well, I hope everyone else enjoyed National Asshole Day yesterday. I didn't even know it was going on, but there were celebrants everywhere I looked. Not one, but TWO cell phone douchebags in the library. A cabbie parked in the middle of the road during rush hour. Many, many of them in World of Warcraft last night, even more so than non-players may suspect. Quite a few on the roads. Several in IHOP, despite the restaurant being virtually empty. Even in sleep, I didn't get away from them: my upstairs neighbor decided that 3:30 AM would be a fine time to rearrange the room above our bedroom. Even my cats joined in, providing an excellent wake-up call by jumping on my dresser and knocking everything off of it, one item at a time. Grrrr.

But, some good did come out of it. I mentioned the cell phone douchebags at the library. I got a decent haul despite the emotionally needy man alternating calls between business calls ("I offer musical entertainment and will be in your region next week. I'd love to get together with you and talk about the possibility of performing at your venue") and harassing some poor woman ("Me again. I just want to be assured that you're not mad at me. You promise? I thought I detected a tone towards the end of the last conversation there five minutes ago. OK, good. I'll probably call back in another five just to make triple-sure you're not mad.") I swear, I tried hard not to listen to that shit, but it was hard since he was right in the middle of the fiction section, talking loudly. (The other cell phone d-bag was describing in detail how they got the bullet out of him. Ah, the downtown branch!)

As per usual, every single book I'd intended to get was checked out. So I improvised and got a lot of stuff I didn't plan on. I succumbed to the second trend in a week (first was joining Facebook) and checked out The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. You might say this seems to be this year's Snow Falling on Cedars: read by every book group, sold even in places where they don't normally sell books. How this book is in and Slash's autobiography isn't, I just don't understand. But it's mine for the next six days.

Also got:

The Deal by Sabin Willett. I read another novel of his, Present Value, and surprisingly learned something about economics from a book that was actually fun to read. I bumped into it while trying to get away from the cell phone guy, who was up in the new books section near the A's.

East of the Mountains by David Guterson. I said I'd try something else by him. This one looked good.

The Bearded Lady: A Novel by Sharlee Dieguez. I'm a sucker for circus stuff.

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald. I liked The Bookstore (Bookshop?) and always meant to try another one by her.

Since Sawtelle is the longest, and due back the soonest, I started there this morning. Pretty good so far.

Shortest BTT Ever!

Well, today's question was super-easy for me:

Graphic May 7, 2009

Suggested by Vega:

Last Saturday (May 2nd) is Free Comic Book Day! In celebration of comics and graphic novels, some suggestions:

- Do you read graphic novels/comics? Why do/don’t you enjoy them?
- How would you describe the difference between “graphic novel” and “comic”? Is there a difference at all?
- Say you have a friend who’s never encountered graphic novels. Recommend some titles you consider landmark/”canonical”.

The answer to the very first question is, "NO!" I don't read graphic novels. I don't even not read them in an interesting way. I don't actively shun them. I don't avoid them because they stole my bofyriend or other such trauma. I just don't read them. For no reason at all.

I shouldn't say that. I was, for a little while, reading one. Back when we were flush with cash, my boyfriend and I used to go every week to Parkside Candy on Main for ice cream, and then walk over to the comic book store down the street. He liked looking at all that stuff and usually left with something. To entertain myself, I was reading this graphic novel in the store. I can't remember what it was called, but it was the life story of this boy who was very Christian and was abused. He had a long-distance girlfriend that he'd met at Christian camp and went to visit her, and found out she had developmentally delayed siblings and also that she was one of the cool kids at her high school. There was much, much more to it than that -- that was the beginning of the book -- but then he lost his job and I lost my job and we stopped going.

So, I guess I don't really have an opinion one way or the other on graphic novels. The best I can add to this discussion is that one time, I saw one that was pretty decent. Pretty lame, huh?

Hot, Hot, Hot circa 1995!

image from amazon.com
Travel back in time with me, fourteen years ago or so. Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office, but no one yet knew who Monica Lewinsky was. Pearl Jam and Nirvana were on the radio. Braveheart was stirring the hearts of moviegoers, while Twelve Monkeys was scaring the crap out of them. And the book everyone was toting around was Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson. It's been on my personal TBR list for a couple of years, and I finished it the other day.

Snow Falling on Cedars was not really a "traditional" TBR for me. Rather, it was in with a bunch of books my parents asked me to drop off at the library for them. The library closest to them also sells used books donated by patrons, in a separate room off the main floor, with all proceeds going to the library. My father taught social studies and my mother taught English, so I grew up with scads and scads of books in the house. They get rid of more than most people own, and I went through the boxes first to see if there was anything that interested me. Snow Falling on Cedars was one of the ones I grabbed. I knew nothing about it except that I liked the title and that, at one point, it had been one of those books everyone was reading.

I could see why almost immediately. It's set on fictional San Piedro Island, off the coast of Washington state in 1954. It starts with the murder trial of a second-generation Japanese man, accused of killing a white man. At the beginning of the novel, you get little more information than that. It slowly spirals out, back in time to before World War II, when all the principals were young and life was open. The reader slowly learns of the links between the accused and the deceased, and of the doomed teenage relationship between the wife of the accused and a white reporter, and how the war changed them all.

The fictional island had a large Japanese-American community, and the novel deftly explores the relationship between them and the whites, and how the war changed it. During the war, all of the island's Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to the Manzanar internment camp. In high school, we had to read another book on this topic called Farewell to Manzanar. Maybe it was because I was a callous 15-year-old, or maybe the book just wasn't very good, but it failed to make much of an impression on me. It could have also been something in the way it was taught, paired with a Nazi concentration camp memoir. Internment didn't sound so bad next to that.

But this book made me "get it" much better. The defendant's family had an under-the-table agreement to purchase land from their employer, and were two payments away from outright ownership when they were interred. Because law prohibited first-generation immigrants owning land at the time, the agreement was under the table. Their employer (the parents of the deceased) sold the land from under them. Also lost to the war, and to the general culture, was the teenaged romance between the defendant's wife Hatsue, and the son of the local newspaper publisher, Ishmael. Hatsue's family wanted her to marry a Japanese man, so she did. Ishmael never got over it.

The scenes where the main characters were forced out of their homes were very moving. Guterson describes an FBI visit to Hatuse's home, where much was made out of innocuous family heirlooms and dangerous but common faming implements and chemicals. He describes the hive of activity between the time the notice for relocation went out and the date of the transport: how the community worked together to round up and secure everyone's furniture, how the Japanese businessmen were selling down to the walls at cut-rate prices and trying to arrange promises from their neighbors to watch over their crops. I'd say that these portions of it are much more moving than Farewell to Manzanar, at least as far as I remember.

But lest anyone mistake it for an "issues" novel, that's only a portion of the story. There's the murder trial, the love lost, and the lush depiction of the fictional island. I was really disappointed to learn that it wasn't a real place, because in the novel, you could practically smell it: the strawberry fields, the heavy vegetation, the rain and the sea. I wanted to visit someday. The peaceful beauty of the title extends to the whole book, even in the more violent war scenes. The book is about a wide range of topics, ultimately all of them human. I'd say it deserves its reputation, and I'm curious about what else Guterson has written.

Confidence Game; or A Post About A Book

I finished a book that's due back pretty soon, and also haven't been in the mood to scan photographs, so I'll take a short break from my "New York State Photos" series to talk about Plain Heathen Mischief by Martin Clark.

Plain Heathen Mischief opens on one of the worst days of Pastor Joel King's life. He's delivering a last sermon to his congregation before he begins to serve several months in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, tasty 17-year old Christy. His wife, naturally, kicks him out of the house and serves him with divorce papers on the day of his release from jail. He heads west to live in his sister Sophie's basement and attempt to start all over, from absolute scratch.

Fate, or Edmund Brooks, intercedes. Edmund was one of Joel's few and staunchest supporters, and volunteers to drive him west to Montana upon his release, as he's going that way for "business". Turns out, Edmund's a con man. Despite his extravagant support of Joel's church, he's been scamming the system for most of his life. And he offers to cut Joel in. Joel resists temptation at first, but with an expensive divorce, a needling -- and needy -- sister and nephew, and a $5 million lawsuit from Tasty Christy looming, it's not long before he succumbs.

Anyone who collects stupid criminal stories (like I do) can spot a simple truth: it's easy to commit a crime. The challenge comes in getting away with it. Inevitably, things get rough, and Joel is a minister at heart, an intellectual who enjoys fishing and doesn't use swear words. These scenes reminded me at first of the part in Office Space where the three main characters are looking up money laundering in the dictionary.

But something about it became uncomfortable. Joel's a decent, likeable guy who's just trying to make everything work out. There's very little good in his life. His sister (in some of the weakest parts of the book) is constantly on his case, putting down his chosen vocation, riding him about the sex scandal he became embroiled in, angry that he can't contribute more around the house. And she's his closest ally. The book was trying to be both comical, and a serious examination of faith. The funny parts were pretty good, but Joel's overall situation is more sad than anything else. The parts about faith fall flat, as his sister Sophie is playing the "devil's advocate" but comes off as a two-dimensional character, existing merely to argue with him.

Still, the book was decent overall. Martin Clark made Tasty Christy a pretty intriguing character, one that I would have liked to see more of. Edmund's good, too, as a genial, religious con man. There was a good side plot about a case of domestic violence that Joel witnessed, and the story arc of Joel's attempted con was pretty good too, even with all the misery it contained. Martin Clark's got a few other books. This one wasn't perfect by any means, but good enough that I might give one of his others a try sometime.

Central New York

It's weird. There are some places that you have to get away from in order to appreciate. When I lived in central New York, I didn't like it much. I had a hard time meeting people and finding things to do. Most of the people my own age had grown up in the area and had a set group of friends already, not to mention kids and family. There was one bar, and it was pretty lame. The nearest movie theater was a half hour away. My apartment building was full of old people who bitched to the apartment manager if I vaccuumed after 7:30 at night. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Now that I am out of there, I appreciate it more. It was very pretty and peaceful. It had Sylvan Beach, a great summer hangout with rides, bars and good food. It had some historic interest. There were a lot of scumbags living there: the police blotter was full of DWIs, domestic violence calls, and welfare fraud complaints. You could see a lot of this stuff firsthand whenever you went out, actually. But looking back, I often think that perhaps I counted the place out too soon and didn't give it enough of a chance.

Geese on the Irrigation Pond, waiting to take off, Fall 2006

Spring Comes to Downtown Oneida, 2007


Sunset over Lake Oneida, 2006

Fire Escape, Oneida, 2007


Sylvan Beach bar interior

Skee-Ball at Sylvan Beach


One of the Oldest Dark Rides in the State


The Galaxi at Sylvan Beach

Disappointment

Worse? April 30, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:01 am

Which is worse?

Finding a book you love and then hating everything else you try by that author, or

Reading a completely disappointing book by an author that you love?

This is an interesting question. I don't think I've ever had the first experience. I have had authors wear on me, though. For a while after I read My Sister's Keeper, I got into Jodi Picoult. I read the one about the Amish girl accused of killing her newborn baby. I read the one about the teenaged boy who was on trial for murdering his lifelong friend and girlfriend. I read the one about the twice-accused, never-guilty-of-pedophilia teacher and the girls who dabbled in witchcraft. Somewhere in there, they all started to blur together. She's got a formula, and once I could spot it, I lost interest. I felt I'd gotten all there was to get out of her books, at least for me.

I do hate reading disappointing books. A. Manette Ansay's book Blue Water leaps to mind, probably because it's in the stack of books I'm going to sell on Amazon, here on my desk. I loved all of her other books. I've read Vinegar Hill and River Angel many times. I thought the latter was an excellent novel about religion and faith, that should appeal to Christians without being overly preachy towards agnostics and atheists. I thought of it when I started that horribly cheesy "Christian" novel, Doesn't She Look Natural? last winter. Nothing in the first half made it Christian except for a few hackneyed references to the main character's belief in God and an unfortunate intolerance of homosexuality.

So, I had very high hopes for Blue Water. I was disappointed. I didn't find the main characters terribly engaging, nor did there seem to be much driving the story forward. You can read my review of it here. It wasn't horrible on its own. If my expectations had been lower, I might have even been keeping it instead of selling it.

So I guess I don't know which is worse. They're both pretty disappointing. But I'd say it's worse to be let down by an author you really like, than to merely find out you don't like a particular author after all.