i have a phoenix

Becky recommended Haddix's Running Out of Time, which I liked but did not love. The concept was excellent - kids growing up in a nineteenth-century human exhibit are made to believe it actually is the nineteenth century, but then when some of them catch a disease (I think smallpox) that's not curable until the present day, some of the parents sneak the heroine out to get help. I loved this idea, but Haddix didn't flesh out the characters well enough ahead of time, so we didn't even get to know the protagonist or what her life was like in the nineteenth century before getting all caught up in the plot.

I liked Among the Hidden better. It's The Near Future in a vague sense, and Luke is the third child in his family, which isn't allowed because of population controls. He has to stay in hiding all the time without going to school or playing outside. Gradually the restrictions increase and he has to live in the attic and can't even eat with his family, so he spends all his time watching the neighbors out of a peephole in his bedroom. One day, he sees a face peeping back, only he's already seen the parents and two boys leaving for the day...so this must be another Third Child.

It's the first in a series that I think is up to the fifth book. Of course, my library sucks ass, but I'll keep looking for the others.

I can't believe I never read this book in my childhood. I read all the other old-fashioned girly books - Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, Gone with the Wind, The Secret Garden, Pride and Prejudice, Heidi...all that shit. And yet I never read Jane Eyre? Bizarre.

I finished it last night, though. I absolutely adored it. It's the story of little orphan Jane, who lives with her aunt and cousins because her parents are dead. Her new family can't stand her and relegate her to outsider status until they finally send her away to a rather Dickensian boarding school. When Jane finishes school, she stays on as a teacher there for a couple of years, and then she decides to seek a position as a governess in a manor outside a large town in a different county. That's how she reaches Thornfield Hall.

At Thornfield, she befriends Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, and teaches Adele, an orphan living with the house's owner, Mr. Rochester. Rochester himself is rarely around, at least until Jane moves in; then they become close friends and, of course, Jane falls in love with him. I want to say more but I can't because I really want anyone that hasn't read this book to go get it NOW and I don't want to spoil it.

I loved the language; the book is over 500 pages, but except for the occasional description of nature, every word has meaning. There are no throwaway conversations, and not a word is wasted. The atmosphere of the whole thing is a bit spooky, too, like in The Secret Garden or The Ghost Writer or something by Daphne du Maurier.

One quibble: what's up with the bad grammar? Or is it just hopelessly dated grammar? Throughout the book, there are passages that say things like,

Jane asked the housekeeper for a glass of water. The housekeeper said "she would get it as soon as she stoked the fire."

Like, with the quotes not accurately representing what the housekeeper's actual words were ("she" instead of "I"). What's up with that?

Jeff got this for Christmas and said it was hilarious, so I gave it a shot. It's pretty funny in spots, but sort of lame in others, and it's sort of hard to read continuously because there's no narrative to pull the whole thing together. It took me eleven days, but I have now conquered it.

It's a mock social studies textbook, which is a funny concept because, of course, most history textbooks are mind-numbingly boring and full of inaccuracies. I liked the history sections best; I found the chapters on government and the media to be pretty dull, probably because I'm too ill-informed to get the jokes. But once you get through those, you have "The Future of Democracy" and "The Rest of the World," which are funny as hell. The first, obviously, is about the America of the future, and the second, while it relies heavily on ethnic stereotypes, is still riotously clever. Recommended.

I checked this place out on the advice of Rudolph and r (via Jeffrey) after my last Japanese restaurant review. It's very near my house, and in fact I would have walked if I hadn't been unsure whether they closed down between lunch and dinner, and I wished to dine at 4pm. They didn't answer their phone when I tried phoning first; minus one point for that.

The place was half-full despite the odd hour, and I was given the lunch menu, which I presume is cheaper than dinner. It was very reasonably priced, but the sushi order form did not include explanations of what was contained in each roll. Now, I get that many people know what oshinko maki is, or what's in a California roll, but there are many that do not. And surely no one's expected to know what the Uptown or the Metairie is. I asked the waiter which were vegetarian, and she said only the avocado two-piece, egg two-piece, vegetable roll and asparagus roll fit that description. This was a mild disappointment considering the lengthy list of meat-containing sushi, but hardly a surprise.

I was curious about this egg thing. "What's in that besides eggs?" I asked the waiter.

W: Just eggs and rice.

Me: Okay. What kind of eggs? Like, scrambled, or...

W: Egg cake.

Me: What's that?

W: Egg cake.

Me: I don't know what that is.

W: It's, um, egg cake. It comes that way. I don't know what's in it.

Me: You don't make the sushi here?

W: No, we do, but the egg cake comes already processed.

I still had no idea what it was (anyone?) so I ordered a two-piece avocado, a vegetable roll, and veggies tempura. Very impressive. The two pieces of avocado sushi contained probably half an avocado, very fresh. The vegetable roll was perfect; I'm not sure what vegetables were in it (I think cucumber, radish, and a tiny bit of pickle), but I know there wasn't any carrot, which too often ruins a good veggie roll. Carrot is too tough and chewy to form the middle of a delectable piece of maki.

The tempura vegetables were delicious as well. The portion was extremely generous for $5.25; there were two pieces each of eggplant, onion, sweet potato, carrot, green pepper and zucchini. All were perfectly done except the sweet potato, which is generally my favorite veggie tempura but in this case was cut a little too thick to get the desired tenderness. The tempura sauce was weak; I added soy sauce to it to give it a little more flavor.

My bill came to $13.61. Excellent meal. I'll be back.

This very slim question-and-answer book doesn't really reveal anything the Internet can't tell you about Rowling or Harry Potter, but it was a nice quick read. She's a bit less clean-cut than the media sometimes paints her -- not much, but a bit. This book, though, is more for kids to understand that books are written by human beings.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to stop using alcohol as a sleep aid. I've found it difficult to fall asleep on my own since I was very young -- I have memories of elaborate rituals I would devise to keep myself entertained in the hours between my bedtime and when I would actually fall asleep -- but it was only post-college that I began relying on a few beers to do the job. Obviously, this is less than desirable, but the idea of lying awake for hours was unappealing too, so I picked up this book.

It didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know - use your bed only for sleeping and sex (impossible in a studio apartment), drink herbal tea at nighttime, cut out caffeine and naps, try acupuncture if you're that sort. I'd recommend it as a primer if you don't know a lot about the subject, but it's not especially good for those of us that have already tried the obvious.

Tells the story of the race wars in Oxford, North Carolina, in the 1960s and 1970s, ending with the brutal murder of a young Black man that flirted with a white woman. Three of the woman's family members chased the kid down, beat the crap out of him, and then shot him while he was unconscious.

Tyson, a young white kid growing up in Oxford when the story takes place, sets it in a context of racial clashes going on in eastern North Carolina at the time. His history of a few small towns tells how the move from Dr. King's nonviolence dictum to the looting and arson of later activists affected what happened the night of the murder. Tyson went on just a little too long in the middle with all the background he provided, but when he was done, I felt like I'd gotten an education in 1970s race politics in the South via library research and lots of oral history. He intertwines this with tales of what it was like growing up with a white liberal preacher for a father. Highly recommended.

Of the 268 books I began this year, eleven were my favorites, as indicated in the last post; 86 were books I can honestly say I loved; I finished 141 others, but did not love them, although I may have liked them a lot; and 30 were so bad I didn't finish them.

Breakdown by genre:

76 nonfiction: 1 favorite, loved 26, 39 other, didn't finish 10
59 literature*: 6 favorites, loved 30, 18 other, didn't finish 5
49 juv. fiction: 2 favorites, loved 7, 39 other, didn't finish 1
35 YA fiction: 1 favorite, loved 11, 21 other, didn't finish 2
11 classics**: loved 4, 3 other, didn't finish 4
9 mysteries: loved 2, 3 other, didn't finish 4
8 science fiction: loved 4, 3 other, didn't finish 1
6 audiobooks***: 6 other
4 essay anthologies: 3 other, didn't finish 1
3 fantasy: loved 1, 1 other, didn't finish 1
3 essay collections by a single author: 1 favorite, 2 other
2 plays: loved 1, 1 other
2 short story anthologies: 1 other, didn't finish 1
1 short story collection by a single author: 1 other

*Fiction that doesn't fit into another category
**Books twenty years old or more with popular appeal and critical acclaim
**Most of these were the Harry Potters, which I do love, but I didn't mark them "loved" because I've read most of them in print this year

I began 268 books this year, but I abandoned thirty of them. Of the remaining 238, I've selected eleven as my very favorites.

Those not reviewed below include links to where I reviewed them during the year.

11. Pages for You, Sylvia Brownrigg, 2001.

10. School Story, Andrew Clements, 2001.

9. What Happened in Hamelin, Gloria Skurzynski, 1979.

8. Dolores: Seven Stories About Her, Bruce Brooks, 2002.

7. House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III, 1999.

6. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace, 1997.

5. Affinity, Sarah Waters, 2000. This is the story of Margaret, a privileged woman that volunteers as a sort of mentor/good influence on women in prison in Victorian England. She falls in love with one prisoner -- Selina, a psychic convicted of fraud -- who asks Margaret to help her escape. Like The Ghost Writer (see below), the beauty of this book is that I wasn't sure until the end whether the twist was going to be supernatural or not. Supernatural, I felt, would have been a copout. Well, it wasn't.

4. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, 2003. Henry is among the first humans to have Chrono-Displacement Disorder, meaning that at various moments in his life, usually when he's feeling anxious or sad, he's sucked back or forward in time to a different point in his life. The time he reaches is generally also a meaningful occasion. So he goes back and forth in time and meets his wife, Clare, as a child. Clare as an adult has to deal with Henry suddenly leaving for times unknown; the two of them hope like hell he won't vanish in public, particularly, say, while she's walking down the church aisle toward him at their wedding. Clare as a child has to wonder whether this mysterious man that visits her near her family's estate in Wisconsin is real or what, although Henry eventually convinces her that he is in fact her future husband.

What's the difference between a love story and a romance? A romance, that genre I loathe beyond all others, involves two people that at first dislike one another, but then get together in the end. The definition of the genre is that the happy ending relies on the protagonists beginning a relationship. A love story, on the other hand, I couldn't have defined until I read this book.

3. Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich, 2002. My favorite nonfiction read of 2004 was the mesmerizing story of a bunch of MIT students that figured out a way to win thousands, even millions, of dollars playing blackjack in Vegas. Their theory is that counting cards only gives you an advantage of 2 percent or so because you can count cards all you want, but all it does is let you know whether the deck is in your favor or not. But if you have several accomplices working other tables, and more kids sitting down at the end seat of your own table and talking in code to let you know whether you've got the best deck or not and then passing that information on, then you can win tons. Not only is the strategy fun to read about, but the actual adventures of the kids as they boarded airlines with thousands of dollars tucked under their clothing, avoided casino security, wore disguises, pretended to be drunken tourists, etc. are fascinating.

2. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore, 2002.

1. The Ghost Writer, John Harwood, 2004. My favorite book of this year is, as usual, a Becky recommendation. This creepy story involves a young boy living in Australia with his distant, haunted mother. As an escape, he joins a pen pal society and begins writing to Alice, who lives in an English orphanage. Their letters seem straightforward but keep you guessing. And then there are the ghost stories the boy finds hidden among his mother's things; they're Victorian and spooky and at times seem to come true, but...ooh, I can't tell you any more, except that I'm not a horror fan and this isn't horror. Just...mmm.

I'm a big fan of spinach, cheese, and artichokes. I also love homemade artichoke dip, the kind you make by simply mixing one cup grated Parmesan, one can sliced artichoke hearts, and one cup mayonnaise in a pan and baking for twentyish minutes at 350 degrees (eat on Triscuits). So when I wanted to indulge in a high-fat snack product for this evening, I confidently grabbed this product out of the Robért freezer section, along with some giant crouton-esque things for dipping.

Bad idea. This product looks like vomit, smells like meat, and tastes like salted canned soup with chunks in it. Avoid.

I'll never get enough of the throw-five-teenagers-into-a-room-together, don't-let-anyone-else-in, see-what-happens plot. I loved Susan Wallach's Operation Isolation, William Sleator's House of Stairs, and, of course, The Breakfast Club.

The Hole is a little different from all of these in that it uses a variety of perspectives and distances to retell the story of what happens when school prankster Martyn locks five classmates in a cavelike basement room, promising to come back in three days, and then (of course) doesn't show up. The book is less concerned with the psychological aspects of creating a new society than House of Stairs; it goes more into figuring out how the fuck the kids are going to get out of there. It's told mostly from the point of view of Liz, one of the five, who's writing a memoir about that time, but there are also interspersed tape recordings by Lisa, Martyn's girlfriend. And Liz narrates in the first person in the present day, but the third person when writing about what actually happened in the Hole. And at the very end, there's a twist that creates more questions than answers.