i have a phoenix

Weird and a bit long-winded. Flook also wrote a true crime I'm anxious to begin, and she writes fiction as well. I can't remember how I heard about her, but I bet it was in one of the review journals, probably Library Journal. But this one purported to tell about her sister vanishing from their family home when she was fourteen and Maria was twelve; how interesting is that? Answer: very. So I grabbed it but it was fairly slow going. Flook is a good writer, and I can understand writing a huge book about your family once you get started because my own is, you know, as weird and chaotic as yours surely is, but she really did go on a bit too long.

What happened is that the sister ran away from home and became a teenage prostitute. Her life became pretty shitty; she became a drug addict, took money for sex, etc. It's a pretty typical story, and I think Flook thought it was more interesting than it was because they came from a fairly ritzy (though not wealthy) home, but actually that was fairly typical in the late sixties: the kids grow up and get all rebellious and their parents flip out. Maria too was sort of a slut and experimented with drugs, but it was 1967, for fuck's sake. What was she supposed to do? Become a nun?

So Maria draws all these parallels between her sister's life and her own, and I guess that's what the title's supposed to mean, but it's kind of lame. Maria went to college and did her experimentation there, while the sister grew up in a whorehouse and was repeatedly raped and robbed an' shit. I mean, they both had babies at about the same time, and they experienced some twinnish intuitive moments while bad shit happened to both of them at the same time, but ultimately their lives are very different, and that's only highlighted by the fact that Maria published a book about it and the sister didn't.

I have an obsession with Bundy that grew out of reading Ann Rule's fascinating The Stranger Beside Me. Rule, of course, is the creme de la creme of true crime writers; she's an ex-cop that's been setting the true-crime writing standard for years. So back in the late 1970s (I think), she volunteered at a crisis hotline, and her officemate was Ted Bundy. It was just a bizarre coincidence. He hadn't been accused of anything yet, and they stayed friends throughout his arrests, trials, jail time, etc. She sent him money and gifts in prison, even. Best.book.ever. Plus I was a Chi Omega, and that's the sorority into which Ted sneaked and raped and murdered a bunch of girls in Florida, and supposedly that was why we weren't allowed to have boys above the first floor at our sorority house in suburban Chicago, and I guess all of this explains my Ted fascination.

So this book is written by the woman with whom he (sort of) lived and with whom he was in love throughout all the murders....the woman that eventually turned him in to the police. Ann Rule calls her Meg Anders and says she's a shy, insecure little woman that thought of Ted as a good catch. Elizabeth (her real first name; Kendall's a pseudonym) says, both in Rule's book and her own, that Ted was never violent with her. She says he was a petty thief and often disappeared for a night or two, but she just assumed he was cheating on her, which he often was. Rule paints Ted as a sociopath, but Kendall seems to think he really did love her. Hard to tell; Kendall is biased, certainly, but wouldn't she know better?

The book doesn't give much background about Ted's victims, methods, trials or imprisonment, and doesn't provide much insight about any of Ted's relationships except with Kendall. I highly recommend the book, but not right away; first you must read Rule. Then you won't be able to resist The Phantom Prince.

I remember really liking the movie with Reese Witherspoon, and then I read and loved Little Children, and then Becky recommended the excellent Joe College, and I thought this one was a definite winner. I was disappointed. It was a quick little read, but I didn't think it got to the guts of Tracy's personality like Reese and the movie did. And the whole adultery subplot seemed extraneous instead of like a natural extension of the character like Matthew Broderick made it seem. Wow, I think this is the first time I've ever liked a movie more than the book it was based on. I wonder if it would have been different if I'd read the book first.

Oh: Why did Paul and Tammy's last name change from Warren in the book to Metzler in the movie?

Ugh. This was hailed as the diary of a beautiful teenage girl in Italy discovering her sexuality and writing about it all hot and wet. The book was billed as "shocking" and "revealing" and "true." None of these adjectives is correct.

For one thing, it's a "fictionalized memoir," meaning it's actually not true. For another, it's really pretty boring: Melissa fucks a bunch of people, including some people she doesn't want to fuck but later she's glad she did. She never actually regrets anything, and she's constantly showered with gifts of expensive lingerie or leather bodysuits, and she's always being blindfolded and fucking five guys, or screening calls from some forty-year-old dude that has set up an apartment for her specifically so they can fuck, or whatever. It's particularly banal when you remember the "fictionalized memoir" part, so it's really just some girl's fantasies, and, I mean, we all have fantasies. We don't all pretend they're publishable.

Plus, in the end, she falls in love and stops sleeping around. Not only is that way too Cinderella for one thing, and unfairly demonizes sex without love for another, but also, I mean, I'm sure she's found her lifelong monogamous mate at age 18. Raise your hand if you're skeptical.

Bob Greene was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune for thirty-one years until he got fired for fucking a teenage intern. This is weird, because while he didn't go around preaching family values or anything, he was one of those men of a certain age, nostalgic for the allegedly simpler times of the 1950s, marveling at technology, etc. I wasn't a huge fan of his column because it tended to be a bit melodramatic and sappy, but I loved his Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan and its sequel. Those books not only got inside Jordan's head but also let the reader see Bob's excitement and awe at getting to spend so much time with the most famous man on earth.

I wasn't sure I'd like this book, because I tend to be bored by politicians (as opposed to politics, by which I am not bored but am admittedly woefully ignorant). But Jeff is working his way through a series of books about U.S. presidents, so I had to keep up. I didn't think I'd finish it, but I did, and loved it.

Greene visits five presidents over a span of twenty years: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Elder. He makes a point of not discussing Watergate or pressing anyone for details of scandals or infamous bad decisions; he just wants to hang out with these dudes and see what their lives are like. He asks them whether they want their children to go into politics, what it was like when they first moved into the White House, whether and how they pray, who was President when they first became aware of the existence of such a thing, what it was like to vote for the first time, etc. It was a very readable and enjoyable book.

Consists of a series of vignettes about the author's struggle with her fear of disease. There's not a lot of self-scrutiny here; it's just anecdotes, and they're funny, and it's a very quick read. Recommended.

I make a point of not reading any reviews of a book before I post about it, but I can only imagine that everyone's writing about this one, "Could it be more Harry Potter?" It's about Fern, an elevenish kid that lives with her boring parents, the Drudgers, and she can't really relate to them. Doesn't feel like she belongs. And all throughout her childhood she occasionally seems to have mysterious magical powers, but her parents deny it and even get mad at her when she's insistent, so she learns to cover it up. Then one day, during a dinner party her parents are having for their boss, Mr. Beige, and his wife and son, the doorbell rings and it's her real father, Mr. Bone, who takes her away into a magical world.

It works, though. Yeah, it's very Harry, but I love Harry. And it's even more Inkheart, which I totally hated, but this takes only the good parts of Funke's monotonous, vapid book. Fern, like Inkheart's Mo, has the ability to make characters and objects from books real; Meggie's dad does it by reading them out, and Fern simply shakes the book until they fall out, but same difference, and there's similar fallout: people that get read/shaken out often want to go back in. Meggie's aunt lives in a house entirely filled with books and likes books more than people; so does Fern's grandmother. Both Meggie and Fern are motherless, although Fern doesn't know it until The Anybodies begins, of course, because she thinks Mrs. Drudge is her mom.

Much more importantly, Fern is a lovable character, not a boring one-dimensional one; Mr. Bone and Mrs. Appleplum are real, not cardboard Good Person cutouts; and this book is 276 exciting pages, not 534 dull ones. The intrusive narrator was a bit cute, but overall I liked her. And I loved Howard, the kid that was switched with Fern at birth; he'd always tried to get Mr. Bone organized and he liked math an' shit, so the Drudges seemed like the ideal family for him.

Another highlight was how Bode (actually a pseudonym, of course, for Julianna Baggott) throws in all kinds of literary references, mostly to children's books. The characters that Fern shakes out of books include Templeton from Charlotte's Web and some hobbits. Mrs. Appleplum gives Fern a test of sorts to see whether she's worthy of living in the book-filled boardinghouse; it involves serving her green eggs and ham and asking whether she's scared to drink from a bottle with a "Drink Me" tag, and the boardinghouse has Borrowers! And in the very beginning, Bode acknowledges her influences in this early passage, when Fern is riding away with Mr. Bone, who has just revealed himself to be not entirely trustworthy, and his friend Marty:

Here you could possibly decide that this is an altogether bad book. If these two have abducted Fern in any way, shape or form, then this should be a story with a lesson to girls about always being on guard and never straying from home. If Fern were a boy, this thought probably wouldn't cross your mind. What if Stuart Little had been a girl? We would have arrested her parents for allowing a young girl to set off alone in a motorcar, that's what! What if Harry Potter had been a girl, spirited away by a giant of a man with a magical umbrella? We'd have said, "No, no," and "Tsk, tsk." You may think that girls are better suited to stay in little houses on prairies and within the confines of secret gardens. Or at least working within a buddy system. Wendy couldn't have gone off with Peter alone, you know. Would you have put up with Violet Baudelaire being hunted, on her lonesome, by that man with the singular eyebrow? And there's always that foursome traipsing around in Narnia -- Susan, Lucy, Edmund, and Peter -- which is fine, because at least they're trying to stick together, protected by their older brother. But Fern isn't a boy. She's a girl and she isn't in a buddy system. She's alone. Yes, she's in a car with two men, one of whom was dressed like a woman moments ago -- evidence of trickery. But you'll just have to see it through.

Oh, and what happens to the Drudgers while Fern's gone is great. Oh! and at the end, just when I had decided the Great Realdo thing was lame...well, never you mind.

This is the Newbery Honor-winning story of ten-year-old Opal, who moves to Florida with her preacher father, and has a hard time making friends until she meets a stray dog at the grocery store. She names him Winn-Dixie, and he trots around town beside her for the next few weeks, making it easy for her to meet people. There are a couple of kids her own age she befriends -- the bullying Dewberry boys and "pinch-faced" Amanda -- but most of the group Opal collects are adults, like the elderly librarian, the ex-con manager of the pet store, and a woman the Dewberry boys are convinced is a witch.

It was nicely done -- a tad heartwarming, but without being cheesy -- but it's ultimately too young for me, I guess. YA is about my lower limit for a realistic book. DiCamillo's most recent novel, the Newbery Award-winning The Tale of Despereaux, was more my speed because of its fantasy nature. I was glad to read this one, though, because it increased my respect for DiCamillo; it's hard to write such different stories in such different voices and win awards for both books. And I'd recommend Because of Winn-Dixie to a kid any time.

This is a YA novel about three best friends, two months away from high school graduation, that decide to each select a person to make over...someone who has unrealized potential. They don't specify that each person should be of the opposite sex, but they do say they're going to take the makeoverees to prom, so I guess it's implied.

Right away, alarms went off in my head at the whole makeover thing -- Jawbreaker? Ten Things I Hate About You? Grease? Can't Buy Me Love? The Breakfast Club? But it turns out to be not quite like that. For one thing, the three best friends -- Sam, Nikki and Alicia -- aren't the most popular kids in school and they're not looking to make over the geeks. Nikki actually does choose a conventional nerd, but she's the only one.

Alicia, the only member of the trio who needs some serious help herself, selects a makeover candidate that doesn't actually need help. In fact, we never really get to know Morgan; he appears to be the archetypical handsome rebel, but he's always kind to Alicia when she appears at his side to tell him that if he ever needs anything, he can just call. Alicia's all fucked up because her mother has abandoned the family, and it seems like she's picked Morgan because she thinks he can save her, not the other way around.

Sam's story is the most dramatic. He picks tough, bitchy, pierced, combat-boot-wearing Tia, and while she rebuffs him at first, she eventually lets her drive him to the state hospital where her younger brother lives. He has Down syndrome and his parents never visit, so Tia goes there every day after school to read to him and play with him. After she begins to trust Sam, she lets him in on a big disgusting secret about her family life, and Sam has to decide what to do about it.

The story alternates among the points of view of the three main characters, a device that can sometimes be irritating but in this case really works. The reader needs to be inside Sam's head because of the intensity of his story, but if we didn't see Alicia's and Nikki's perspectives on the boys they chose to make over, their stories would come off as teenage fluff, and that's really not the case. Well, they are compared to Sam's, but whatever.

What makes the story especially unusual is that it happens to three Mormon kids, the only ones in their school system. That's why Sam, Nikki and Alicia are best friends -- they grew up going to church together. The book doesn't focus on religion, but it's always in the background: Sam occasionally prays when he has to make a big decision; Nikki's brother gets his call to be a missionary; shit like that. The only thing that irked me was that because of this, the book refused to swear. Even words like "bitchy" or "pissed" were deleted from Tia's letters with substituted euphemisms in brackets. Still, there was no pro-organized religion message or anything like that. A good read.

I learned about this one at the YA lit workshop I attended last week. The presenter described it as the story of Martha, beginning with the day her doorbell rings and it's the mother of a girl named Olive that had been in Martha's sixth-grade class. A month earlier, Olive had been killed in a car accident on her bike. Martha hadn't really known Olive, but Olive's mother hands her a sheet of paper torn from Olive's diary that says, among other things, that Olive hoped to get to know Martha better and be her friend.

That all sounded intriguing and that's why I checked out this book, but really it's much more the story of Martha's vacation that summer on Cape Cod, and how she bonds with her grandmother. It's also about how Martha likes a boy named Jimmy but his brother Tate likes her, and Jimmy does Something Awful and then she hates him. It's only a little about how Martha wants to do something for Olive's mother, so she fills a jar with ocean water to bring home for her. It was a nice little book, really more tween than YA, but it didn't particularly move me.

LoveloveLOVED this one. There's this island just off the East Coast that's named Nollop in tribute to Nevin Nollop, the creator of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." That sentence, of course, is used to test typewriters everywhere; it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet with minimal repetition. It has only 35 letters total.

The sentence appears at the top of a monument in Nollopton, and one day, the tile bearing the letter Z falls down. The island government take this to be a sign that Nevin Nollop has spoken from beyond the grave; they declare that Nollop clearly doesn't want the letter Z to be used any more, ever. Not in writing, not in speech. In fact, every piece of writing containing a Z must be destroyed. Almost everything is removed from the library and burned; only instrumental CDs and cassettes (without liner notes) and some picture books remain. Then, of course, another letter falls down. And another.

The real delight, though, is that the book takes place in a series of letters among a close-knit family. Ella, her parents, her Aunt Mittie and her cousin Tassie write to one another frequently, and they're very articulate and almost Victorian in their writing -- they have large vocabularies and complex sentence structure, yet I can't call their letters formal because they display such affection for one another. They're lovable people caught up in this crazy mess.

The letters they write, of course, stop including Zs early on, and as other letter-tiles fall, the notes they write exclude those characters as well. When I read the book description, I thought the forbidden characters would be replaced with asterisks or dashes, but that's also illegal. Instead, the members of this verbose family must resort to synonyms and alternate constructions (past tenses get hard once D falls) to continue writing to one another.

A group of Nollopites that are against the restriction convince the government's most flexible member to allow them a few months to come up with a sentence that beats Nollop's; this sentence must contain all 26 letters of the alphabet with such minimal repetition that the sentence itself is no more than 32 letters long. Various Nollopites try their best, but with limited success, until....something happened in the middle of the book that made me laugh aloud with joy. But never you mind. Read the book.

I've been way into nonfiction lately, but I was delighted to rediscover the joy of a damned good story. Don't miss this one.

I was off sick yesterday (sore throat; better now, thanks) and I read this one in its entirety. Very, very good: an American journalist and his wife try to adopt a baby in Zimbabwe. That's the simple, one-sentence plot of this memoir, but it's much better than that description implies. Neely is a foreign correspondent for a Detroit newspaper, and he's stationed all over Africa and the Middle East, but eventually he and his wife Vita settle down in Harare. They decide to volunteer at a local orphanage and immediately fall in love with three-month-old Chipo, a baby girl abandoned in a field on the day she was born. She has pneumonia and what in America would be called "failure to thrive," and there's a good chance she's HIV-positive as well, but they take her home anyway.

In most countries with sky-high infant mortality rates and adult life expectancies of 38, it's fairly easy for Americans to adopt. Not so in Zimbabwe. Neely is a white American, rich by local standards (though just middle-class in the U.S.); it helps a little that Vita is Black, but she's still a woman and American, and even though she's tough as hell and doesn't hesitate to run around town ripping bureaucrats new assholes in an attempt to get to keep this baby she's fallen in love with, her efforts often fail. This is a culture in which women learn to be so submissive that another baby from Chipo's orphanage died in the waiting area of an emergency room because its caretaker was too shy to speak up and tell the staff that the baby had stopped breathing. This is a world in which women insert herbs and newspaper into their vaginas to dry up their natural fluids and heat up the tissue because their husbands/clients prefer "dry sex;" never mind that this is painful for women and also spreads AIDS because of the increased risk of vaginal tears.

So it's largely up to Neely to get the Zimbabwe government to let them keep Chipo, and you wouldn't believe how difficult it is. There's no specific law against foreigners adopting, but everyone in power is against it, so the Tuckers' file is repeatedly lost, or put aside, and no one will see them to make appointments, and then the bureaucrats don't show up for the appointments they're finally able to make, and this lasts years. They are repeatedly accused of bribery, even by people they considered friends. They are forced to re-submit notarized copies of police reports they've filed months before, and at one point, Vita spends two days crawling around on the floor of a file room trying to find their allegedly misplaced folder. No one seems to care that they've saved the life of a baby that the doctor told them would die if she were returned to the orphanage. As Neely says,

[W]hile social workers had been poring over files and records for a year -- or just ignoring them -- they had never asked to see Chipo. It was odd. There was no document about Vita or me that was too arcane for inspection -- for example, they had our marriage certificate but demanded that Vita produce evidence that her first husband had actually died. Persuading Health Department workers in the city of Detroit to issue a death certificate for a citizen who had died years before, via a satellite telephone call from sub-Saharan Africa, and then convincing them to mail a certified copy of the same to Harare, Zimbabwe is not a task for the faint of heart. But it can be done, and was, and the document was placed on the appropriate desk. But nobody -- and I mean nobody -- ever asked to see the object of this whole process. They never asked us to bring Chipo in for an evaluation; they never checked to see if she was bonding to us or even if she might have been abused in some way. They did not ask to see her health card, her schedule of immunizations, or any proof that we were taking her for checkups. After the foster hearing, they didn't ask to see her at all. How is Chipo? they would ask. Fine, we would say. Chipo could have been summering in St. Tropez for all anyone knew.

This is one of those books with unrelenting pain all the way through, with very, very few funny or heartwarming moments to break up what would be monotonous if it weren't so dramatic. It wasn't quite as harsh as Angela's Ashes or Leaving Las Vegas, but it hurt. And it's all true.

Brad is a nineteen-year-old struggling with living in his brother's shadow, even though Brett is a year younger. We know very little about Brad's life before the story begins or after it ends -- there aren't any prologues to detail an idyllic childhood or afterwords to reassure the reader that the author is okay now -- so we don't know for sure, but it seems like he's been struggling with depression for a while. He gets kidnapped, robbed, badly beaten, and left for dead by two thuggish but rural types, and he doesn't really deal with the emotional trauma this involves, and then Brett goes off to Clemson without him.

A semester later, Brad arrives at Clemson too, where he very much wants and desperately doesn't want to pledge Kappa Sigma, Brett's house. He does, and is subjected to the physical and mental torture of hazing. He lives in fear of each contact with the Kappa Sigs; although he doesn't explicitly draw the parallel, it's clear that to him, this is just as bad as the kidnapping back home. Plus his brother isn't especially sympathetic. In the end, someone dies. And again, this is an entirely true story.

It was good enough, though, that I didn't even mind the lack of quotation marks. And one of the few light moments was a song the Kappa Sigs sang about my former sorority house, Chi Omega:

Chi-ho, Chi-ho
It's off to bed we go
With a Lambda Chi between my thighs
And an SAE on top of me
Chi-ho, Chi-ho

Becky's review

Wow, do I ever love Karen Armstrong. I'd never heard of her until Jeff was reading The Spiral Staircase last summer and kept on telling me I'd love her and that I should read that book before he returned it because it had a long waiting list. I declined not because I wasn't interested, but because once he told me Karen was an ex-nun that wrote about entering a convent at seventeen, I wanted to read Through the Narrow Gate first. I ate it up and then demanded that my library system provide me with a copy of The Spiral Staircase. That was six months ago, but since we only have one copy and there was a wait list, I didn't get it until this week.

It was well worth the wait. I even re-read Through the Narrow Gate over the weekend to brush up on Karen's life. Man, is she a good writer. The two volumes I review here were written 23 years apart; they're her first and last books. In between, she wrote eleven books about religious history, most famously The History of God, which I plan to read as my next Karen book.

Through the Narrow Gate is fascinating in its own right as a glimpse into the pre-Vatican II world of a strict Catholic convent. Living there as a seventeen-year-old girl in 1962 changed Karen permanently, of course; today we would probably condemn her order as an abusive cult. Certainly she was obliged to give up herself in pursuit of someone else's god; she thought this god was hers, but the ways in which she worshiped were dictated to her by people with whose ideas she disagreed, although she didn't know it at the time. She thought the route to holiness and personal transformation was the road more traveled, the way that all the other sisters had done it before, and that if she didn't succeed, it was because she wasn't good enough.

The Spiral Staircase is the story of her path back to religion after abandoning it entirely after leaving the convent at age 24. The two books are very different; they're both straight-up memoir and very well-written, but the second one shows what I imagine is Karen's established voice. She didn't seem as self-confident in the first book, with good reason; she had only just left college, had never written anything that wasn't a school assignment, and wasn't sure what the greater point of her struggles in the convent were. She wasn't self-assured enough to look for a pattern in her time at the convent other than the cliché of her generation: that she was trying to transform herself via religion at the same time her peers were "dropping out" of conventional society via protests and drugs.

In the second book, Karen's theme is anti-certainty: she believes that the downfall of most traditional religious people is that they are convinced that their own ways are the correct ways. This, and not the particular belief in question, is what leads to hatred and all the other problems religion is supposed to solve. This isn't a novel realization, but it's quite a turnaround from being a Catholic nun, and she also didn't come to it lightly: she wrote a dozen books on comparative religion and faiths other than the one in which she grew up, and when she says she's decided this is the right route, she's more believable than pretty much anyone on the planet.

The other tenet of her new outlook is based on a Jewish scholar she met in Israel, who explained to her that much of Judaism is based on practice, not belief. In other words, Jewish people, according to this guy, don't have in common a set of doctrines; instead, they live life for other people, and that's religion.

Karen doesn't even bother spelling out that this whole living-for-compassion practice she develops in the early nineties directly contradicts the restrictions placed on her in the convent. Yeah, it really was a cult; in particular, she wasn't allowed to have "special friendships," which isn't a euphemism for lesbianism, but rather a restraint on having private conversations with people, spending time with anyone in particular, or thinking about anyone except "God," ever.

Yet her rejection of a single set of beliefs isn't just a 180-degree reversal of the way she used to be; she went through an anti-god phase right after the convent, which she discusses at length in The Spiral Staircase, but she got over that via her intense study of what she calls "the three Abrahamic religions" -- Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Studying these faiths as well as living their practices, not believing their creeds, has earned Karen the transcendence for which she's been searching since adolescence.

A few things are left out of the books. She doesn't mention any boyfriend or girlfriend, ever. I support that, but part of me wants to know. And The Spiral Staircase doesn't mention her family after the early pages that reveal her sister Lindsey as a soap star. And, well, she's told her whole life that she's ugly; she relates this in a tone in which you utterly believe her without feeling sorry for her, because she doesn't feel sorry for herself. But is this an ugly woman?




Further reading:

Becky's review
Jeff's review

My branch closed down today because all three toilets began spewing water, so I was shipped off to the snooty uptown branch. The library itself is located in a decaying mansion on a street lined with privately owned, better-maintained mansions. All the patrons are white. Everything is boring.

When I left for lunch, I'd planned to drive down to Whole Foods for a healthy vegetarian meal the likes of which are not available in the part of town in which I usually work, but scarcely a block away, I caught sight of a restaurant called Kyoto. Japanese food is also hard to come by out in the quasi-suburb where I usually scavenge for food at noon on weekdays, so I eagerly parked the car and ran in.

I've only eaten at one other Japanese place in New Orleans, and they have a delicious lunch special that involves grilled vegetables, a sushi roll, soup, salad, rice, and I think something else. I forget what. But this place was seriously lacking in non-animal-based food. There are only four lunch specials and they all involve a meat main course. I could have ordered a dinner, but the only thing that caught my eye was vegetable tempura, and I was in the mood for something lighter. So I ended up getting three rolls of the only vegetarian sushi available: cucumber roll, vegetable roll, and two-mushroom roll.

They were all right. I mean, they tasted fresh and arrived fairly quickly considering the crowded restaurant and the intricacy sushi requires, and I'd never had maki with pickled mushrooms in the middle before. But the waiter forgot to bring my miso soup until I was almost done, and he also forgot to provide me with a dish for soy sauce, and I had to wait a while before ordering and then for my check, and I just don't think it should take a full hour to eat lunch. The place was seriously two blocks from the library and I still barely, BARELY got back in time for my 3pm desk shift.

Summary: eh.

I'm not even sure this fits the definition of "book," but it's a bound circulating item at the main library, so I'm counting it. It's a survey done forty-one years ago by a consultant hired to evaluate the branches of the local public library and determine what needs to be done. Mr. Cory explains how the main library, brand-new at the time, made the older neighborhood branches look bad in comparison, and made specific recommendations as to where new branches should be built, how big they should be, how well they should be staffed, and even such minor details as "Wall electric clocks should be provided for easy viewing in all public areas...All clocks should be on one circuit, this circuit to be reserved for clocks exclusively." He also recommends that supervising librarians be paid $7,000 and should be specialists in children's services, reference, readers' advisory, young adult services or adult education.

My own branch was built as a result of this study, and seems to follow Cory's specifications, although I can't say for sure about the clock circuit. And my salary is more than $7 grand, although (obligatory joke) not much more.

I went to high school at St. Ignatius, a nationally ranked Catholic school in Chicago that drew kids from all over the city and suburbs and even from Indiana. Many of the students had their own cars or had stay-at-home moms to drive them to school. I didn't, so I woke up at 5:30 so I could catch a 6:30 bus, which I took to a train, then transferred to another train, getting off only to catch another bus. I arrived at school just in time for the 8:05 bell.

All of this fuss was because I lived in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood on the far North Side of the city, but my school was in the hood. It was built in 1869, when there was no such thing as a housing project in Chicago, and since the building is historic (one of only five to survive the Chicago Fire), it's stayed there despite the worsening neighborhood and high crime rates. We were never allowed to leave the school, even for lunch; we were locked in at all times.

William Gates, one of Hoop Dreams's two protagonists, made the opposite journey in order to play basketball for white suburban St. Joseph. He left home at the same time I did every day, and his classes also started at 8:05, but he traveled from Chicago's West Side to Westchester, where he had the chance to play basketball for the school Isaiah Thomas attended a few years previously.

My relationship with basketball has always been tumultuous. I have zero athletic ability, but I wanted to hang out with my jockier friends, so I became the scorekeeper for the girls' team at my grade school. Statistics were more my thing, and I could appreciate the beauty of the game even as played by a bunch of gawky eleven-year-olds. Soon I fell in love with the sport; I don't see a lot of movies, but I have seen Hoosiers and He Got Game. Never saw Hoop Dreams, but when I saw the book (who knew there was a book?) on the shelf at my library, I grabbed it. A book about basketball featuring two kids from Chicago's Cabrini Green and West Side that took two different paths through high school sports (the other kid started at St. Joseph's with his friend but ended up at his local public school when his parents couldn't make his tuition)...this was made for the likes of me. I ate it up.

Strangely, the movie was never mentioned until the very end, despite the fact that it was made before the book and, in fact, is the entire reason for the book. I don't get why that was the case. I must investigate.

And is the movie good? If so, I'll add it to my list.

I pre-ordered this a month ago, but (according to Amazon) it got lost in the mail, so I only got it a couple of days ago. I put it on in the car for my 15-minute drive to work, and when I got to the library I began waxing rhapsodic to Jeff about how wonderful it was to be only 20% of the way into a brand-new CD by one of your favorite musicians and to have it be so totally awesome that you can't wait for the drive home because you still have like an hour of fabulousness to go that you've never ever heard.

Turns out the beginning was the best segment, though. But first, a little history: I fell in love with Eminem after hearing The Eminem Show (2002), and so immediately obtained his previous two CDs. The Eminem Show remained my favorite, though. It's alternately angry without being obnoxious and funny without being silly, and Dre's production dominates but doesn't quite take over; it turns the record into a polished, sophisticated work that nonetheless allows the rawness of Em's rhymes to come through.

The Slim Shady LP (1999) is nearly as good. It was Em's first major-label effort. Excessive use of the Shady alter ego here makes him more of a class clown than a serious presence. His burgeoning talent is obvious, but he wasn't quite ready to be taken seriously, and it shows.

2000's The Marshall Mathers LP was pretty lame, though. Em sings way too much (he admits on The Eminem Show that he can't sing, and limits his attempts to one song) and some of it is truly pathetic, as in "Marshall Mathers," where he whines, "And I'm just Marshall Mathers/I'm just a regular guy/I don't know why/All the fuss about me" over and over. Stick to rapping, kid. Then there's the unlistenable "Kim," where he screams death threats to his ex-wife for more than six minutes, and the equally unbearable "Ken Kaniff," in which we're treated to loud slurping noises and such sweet nothings as "Oh, yeah, suck it" as Insane Clown Posse give head to another Eminem alter ego. There are some decent tracks -- "Stan" is the best, of course -- but unless I keep my finger on the "next track" button, it's not a CD I play too often.

Encore alternates between incredible and very weak. Inconsistent would probably be the best word for it. Track by track, as is my wont:

1. "Curtains Up" This is just a prelude - forty-six seconds of hearing Em approach the stage as the crowd yells "Em-I-Nem."

2. "Evil Deeds" Awesome. I was so excited when I heard this for the first time; I thought the whole record would be like this one. He gives us some more background about his rough childhood, rips on his parents a little, but then admits, "Poor Marshall again/Whining about his millions and his mansion and his sorrow he's always drownin in/And the dad that he never had/And how his childhood was so bad." Also includes a funny bit about the word "predominantly," as in "predominantly black neighborhood."

3. "Never Enough" Also excellent. It's in the long-standing rapper tradition of "I'm the best and y'all better not say otherwise or I'll kick your ass," but it's done cleverly and also features 50-Cent.

4. "Yellow Brick Road" Takes us back to Em's high school days, when he was getting started as a rapper. "That's about the time I first met Proof/.../I told him to stop by and check us out sometime/He looked at me like I'm out my mind/Shook his head like, 'White boys don't know how to rhyme'/I spit out a line and rhymed 'birthday' with 'first place'/And we both had the same rhymes that sound alike/We was on the same shit/That Big Daddy Kane shit where compound syllables sound combined." He segues into how he dated the hottest girl in school and how she was Black, and when she dumped him, he made the infamous tape discovered by The Source where he talks shit about Black girls. In "Yellow Brick Road," he says, "People say they heard the tape and it ain't that bad/But it was/I singled out a whole race and for that I apologize."

5. "Like Toy Soldiers" By turns angry and pleading, this dissects the Big Rap Rivalry between 50-Cent, Dre and Eminem on the one side and Ja Rule and crew on the other. Em waffles on the subject, saying first, "Fuck it, 50/Smash him, mash on him and let him have it," and then, "I can't think of a perfecter way to word it/Than to just say I love y'all too much to see the verdict/I'll walk away from it all before I let it go any further/But don't get it twisted/It's not a plea that I'm coppin/I'm just willin to be the bigger man/If y'all can quit poppin off at the jaws/Well, then, I can, 'cause frankly I'm sick of talkin."

6. "Mosh" This slow, intense rap doesn't exactly break any new ground in its criticism of George W. Bush, but I can hear that guy ripped on all day long. "Let the President answer a higher anarchy/Strap him with an AK-47/Let him go fight his own war/Let him impress Daddy that way/.../Look in his eyes/It's all lies/The Stars and Stripes have been swiped/Washed out and wiped/And replaced with his own face." He also reminds us that the Presidency is finite, so let's do better next time. I wonder whether he had another song lined up to stick in here if Kerry had won.

7. "Puke" And here's where it all starts to go downhill. The song opens and closes with very realistic puking noises. Over and over, we hear Em retching and spitting and the sounds of liquid falling into liquid. Then he says, "There I go thinking of you again." The song itself is weak; it has some funny moments, like when he chastises himself for getting a second "Kim" tattoo, but largely the song comes off as whiny. And come on, dude, you're a rapper. Don't sing. Please.

8. "My 1st Single" I like the sample, whatever it is; it sounds like plastic sticks scratching against one another. And I like the sentiment: the chorus goes, "This was supposed to be my first single/But I just fucked that up so/Fuck it/Let's all have fun/Let's mingle/Slap a bitch and smack a ho." But he burps after the first two lines of that, and farts in particularly gross ways after the second two, and they're repeated again and again and do I need to listen to that? No.

9. "Paul" (Skit) The Paul Rosenberg skits are always excellent additions to any Eminem CD. They usually involve Rosenberg, Em's manager, leaving him a voice mail in which his voice quivers with suppressed rage. In this selection, Paul sounds almost too calm as he informs Em that Michael Jackson is displeased with the "Just Lose It" video, and also "Someone told me they heard a rumor that you got a new gun. I know it's probably not true, but I just need to talk to you about that." Hee.

10. "Rain Man" Heh. I like this one more the more I hear it. It contains the album's second slam on Christopher Reeve and its second anti-Bush statement, but it's largely Em making fun of himself. "Goddamn it, Dre, where's the goddamn beat?" Em makes fun of evangelist preachers that attack gay people, and points out the gayness of football. And the track only includes one brief farting sound.

11. "Big Weenie" I don't like the chorus of this one, because as in "Puke," it makes Em sound like a big whining baby. And the theme of the song is how everyone's just jealous and that's why they're so mean to him. That's kind of stupid. Early in the song, though, he gets in a jab at, well, me: "Pippity ca-ca poo-poo/Psych! I'm kidding/I just wanted to see if you're still listening." Again: hee.

12. "Em Calls Paul" (Skit) Now, okay, the stuff Em says in his reply to Paul's message about Michael Jackson and the gun is pretty funny. But he's sitting on the toilet while he says it, and we can hear everything. Ew.

13. "Just Lose It" This was the first single. It's pretty funny; he samples some of his own older songs a couple of times and makes fun of B Rabbit, and talks a hell of a lot of shit about Michael Jackson. Largely, though, it's a comment on dance singles: "Now this is the part where the rap breaks down/It gets real intense/No one makes a sound/Everything looks like it's 8 Mile now/The beat comes back and everybody lose themselves." Fart count: only one.

14. "Ass Like That" Great title, right? The song is lame, though. The chorus involves the words "The way you move it/You make my pee-pee go da-doing-doing-doing." The verses are all sung in what sounds like a Russian accent, and it's all about getting hard-ons from looking at teen movies and shit like that. Just sort of lame. At the end, Dre goes, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

15. "Spend Some Time" Eminem, Obie Trice, 50-Cent and Stat Quo rap about all the bitches that ever screwed them over. It's pretty good. Em: Don't sing.

16. "Mockingbird" Starts out cheesy, but it's really a sweet song (But Em: don't sing) to Hailie and Lainie (Em's adopted niece). He actually expresses some kind sentiments about Kim here, telling Hailie how Kim saved a thousand dollars for a college fund for her, and saying their breakup was mutual. Ends on a funny note.

17. "Crazy in Love" This is a weird one. When did he write it? It's all about his and Kim's tumultuous relationship, but he says he still loves her, and he says she's only 24, and I thought they were about the same age. He's currently 32 and Hailie is like 8 or 9, so how could Kim be 24 in the present day? Weird. And he samples Heart, which is funny. Hey, Em: don't sing.

18. "One Shot 2 Shot" It's about rapper-on-rapper violence in clubs. The chorus goes, "One shot, two shots, three shots, four shots/All I hear is gunshots/This is where the fun stops," but the song actually makes gunfights sound like fun. It's a dance song.

19. "Final Thought" (Skit) I don't really get this. It's thirty seconds of footsteps and ripping paper, with some crowd noise in the background.

20. "Encore" Another club anthem, this one by Eminem, Dre and 50, that plays with the concept of club anthems. It's pretty goddamn good, though. "That's why we always save the best cut last/To make you scratch and itch for it like fresh-cut grass." It rocks, really, and then at the end Em shoots the whole audience and tells them he'll see them in hell.

There's also a three-track bonus disc.

1. "We As Americans" Fairly standard anti-cop song, and some of it doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's decent and I like the beat.

2. "Love You More" This is yet another one about his violent, doomed relationship with Kim. He loves her, he hates her. We get it. He knows we get it: "They're probably just tired of hearing it all the time/On every song, every lyric and every rhyme/All the hoopla/All of the whoopty-whoo/What you put me through/Fuckin whoopty-doo." Funniest line: "You're the only one I could fuck without a condom on," he assures Kim. Awww.

3. "Ricky Ticky Toc" Classic Eminem. The song covers how people are only mean to him to get famous, people are only nice to him to take his money, Anna Nicole is fat, he's a white guy making Black music, and he's been rapping since "back when they made Maxell cassettes."

I don't like Sedaris's books as much as I ought to. Oh, I do like them, of course; who doesn't? He's funny and smart, and I love listening to him on NPR, but his books have the rhythm of short-story collections: too many peaks and valleys, not enough slow building toward the end.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed Corduroy and Denim. I think my favorite was the sleepover vignette, the one where twelve-year-old budding gay boy Sedaris, afraid to play strip poker lest he get an erection and out himself to the other boys, pounces on their weakness: none of them actually knows the rules of poker. So he manipulates the game so he keeps his pants on and they're all running around in their scanties. Pretty witty.

I also liked "Blood Work," in which David cleans houses for a living, and visits the home of a man that thinks he's with some sort of erotic maid service. The man is also socially inept -- more so than even I am -- and thinks that wishing to test Sedaris's blood sugar passes for small talk.

And, okay, overall I like the way Sedaris presents his stories. They're all true anecdotes, but he knows how to pick them, and he also knows how to tell them: without being cutesy or distant or self-conscious.