i have a phoenix

Lyrical Life: A Rock'n'Roll Love Story Told in 200 Song Lyrics, Casey Jones, 2003

2005-02-22T19:38:00.000-06:00

I'm generally not a reader of graphic novels, but I liked this premise enough that I picked this one up when I heard about it at a YA literature workshop I attended in December. It's a short boy-meets-girl story whose only words are taken from song lyrics. When Boy sees Girl in the Sad Café, for example, the page reads, "And then I saw her face..." When Boy is angry at Girl, he yells, "De-doo-doo-doo, de-da-da-da, is all I want to say to you!" When Girl is caught cheating on Boy, she says, "Oops, I did it again." Their first date happens at MacArthur Park, and when Boy stays in a mental hospital for a while, his room is labeled "Soft Cell." Very cute. Sure, the lyrics used were a little Eagles-intensive, but whatever.

The Devil You Know: A Novel, Wayne Johnson, 2004

2005-02-19T22:22:00.000-06:00

This is the story of fifteen-year-old David, who lives with his mother and his seven-year-old sister Janie. David's dad, Max, was an abusive drunk that left the family a few years before the story begins. David has a quick temper himself and takes some shit at school for standing up to a bully that's picking on another kid. In the middle of all this, David's mom announces she's trying to work things out with Max, and they all have dinner tomorrow and David can't decide if Max has truly changed or if he, David, is just a pussy for thinking that.

So Max takes David and Janie on a camping/canoeing trip, and they run into a bunch of assholes with their own internal drama, i.e. some of them are stealing from the meat-packing plant at which they work, and they think one of their number has ratted them out. The assholes decide David and his family know too much about them, so they set out to kill them. The rest of the book is action-packed, with David taking charge of moving his badly wounded father and sister via damaged canoe to try to find shelter and medical care while simultaneously avoiding the four dickheads. And then it starts snowing, and no one's prepared for it, and it gets very intense and riveting.

Parts of the book are pretty bad. It started out very slow, and I thought about abandoning it a few times. And many of the descriptive passages are overwrought as fuck; I can't believe Johnson's editor let them stay. Still, the second half moves quickly and is written well, and I cared a fuck of a lot about David by the end. His incredible tenderness for his little sister made me love her too.

The best part by far, though, was the interaction between David and Max. David resents Max for beating him up occasionally when he was younger, but Max does show signs of changing. But then Max will be in a bad mood and will revert to his old ways; he doesn't become violent, but he's aggressive and unable to take criticism, and there are times when David really needs Max to be able to accept constructive advice, like when Max buys all the wrong supplies for a camping trip and David, the experienced outdoorsman, knows better but is afraid to say so. What's especially well-done here is David's range of emotion: he wants the family to have the right gear for their trip, but he doesn't want to piss off Max, and he also doesn't want to be a wimp that doesn't stand up to his dad, especially when his younger sister's first camping experience and perhaps even safety are at stake, but he really does want to get along with him for the sake of their mom and Janie, and he also wants his dad to acknowledge his greater familiarity, and...you just know the author has been in a situation like this himself, and he renders it beautifully.

(Admin)

2005-02-05T09:35:00.000-06:00

So in the interim between my last post and today, I've (1) had a kidney infection that wiped me out for a week or so; (2) begun nonstop Mardi Gras festivities; and (3) gotten thoroughly sick of book reviews. And I've begun to miss my old blog, the one that got me into Big Trouble at work. So, while I will continue to update this space on occasion, I proudly unveil I Been Havin' a Snake.

Among the Hidden, Margaret Peterson Haddix, 1998

2005-01-16T19:03:00.000-06:00

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.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brönte, 1847

2005-01-11T15:57:00.000-06:00

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?

America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, Jon Stewart, 2004

2005-01-07T21:19:00.000-06:00

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.

Tokyo Bistro, a Japanese restaurant in the Garden District

2005-01-07T18:03:00.000-06:00

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.

Conversations with J.K. Rowling, Lindsey Frasier, 2000

2005-01-07T18:01:00.000-06:00

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.

Insomnia: 50 Essential Things to Do, Theresa Foy DiGeronimo with Frank DiMaria, 1997

2005-01-07T17:56:00.000-06:00

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.

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, Timothy B. Tyson, 2004

2005-01-07T17:49:00.000-06:00

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.

(Admin: 2004 stats)

2005-01-03T20:56:00.000-06:00

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

(Admin: Best books I read in 2004)

2005-01-01T23:42:00.000-06:00

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.

TGI Friday's frozen spinach/cheese/artichoke dip

2005-01-01T22:27:00.000-06:00

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.

The Hole, Guy Burt, 1993

2005-01-01T19:16:00.000-06:00

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.

My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, Maria Flook, 1997

2004-12-29T22:04:00.000-06:00

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.

The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, Elizabeth Kendall, 1981

2004-12-29T21:55:00.000-06:00

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.

Election, Tom Perrotta, 1998

2004-12-29T21:45:00.000-06:00

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?

100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Melissa P., 2003

2004-12-29T21:40:00.000-06:00

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.

Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents, Bob Greene, 2004

2004-12-29T21:04:00.000-06:00

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.

Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive, Emily Colas, 1998

2004-12-20T13:38:00.000-06:00

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.

The Anybodies, N.E. Bode, 2004

2004-12-19T22:49:00.000-06:00

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.

Because of Winn-Dixie, Kate DiCamillo, 2000

2004-12-18T15:18:00.000-06:00

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.

Slumming, Kristen D. Randle, 2003

2004-12-17T20:01:00.000-06:00

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.

Olive's Ocean, Kevin Henkes, 2003

2004-12-17T16:48:00.000-06:00

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.

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters, Mark Dunn, 2001

2004-12-17T13:00:00.000-06:00

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.

Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir, Neely Tucker, 2004

2004-12-17T09:37:00.000-06:00

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.

Goat: A Memoir, Brad Land, 2004

2004-12-16T13:14:00.000-06:00

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

Through the Narrow Gate (1981) and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004), Karen Armstrong

2004-12-13T21:13:00.000-06:00

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

Kyoto, a Japanese restaurant in uptown New Orleans

2004-12-09T18:31:00.000-06:00

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.

A Network of Public Libraries in New Orleans, John Mackenzie Cory, 1963

2004-12-06T21:12:00.000-06:00

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.

Hoop Dreams, Ben Joravsky, 1995

2004-12-06T21:05:00.000-06:00

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.

Encore, Eminem, 2004

2004-12-04T08:52:00.000-06:00

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."

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris, 2004

2004-12-03T19:38:00.000-06:00

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.

Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago, Alex Kotlowitz, 2004

2004-11-30T21:24:00.000-06:00

Pinky's mom assigned me Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here when I took a high school history elective with her, and I absolutely worshipped it as only a sixteen-year-old can do. That book followed the lives of two brothers growing up in the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago's West Side, and I marveled at how different their lives were from mine, since I lived only a few miles from them and went to school twelve blocks away. There was even a passage where Kotlowitz described how many people grow up in that particular housing project, only two miles or one ten-minute bus ride from the Chicago Loop, and still have never been to the downtown area. That shocked me for a while, and then I realized I've never been to Horner either, although it would be just as easy for me to get there. Easier, because I had access to a car.

I read Kotlowitz's second book last year. It's called The Other Side of the River, and it's about a murder that happened in the twin Michigan cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. It was good, because I love true crime and Mr. K., and a disappointment in a sense, because there's little resolution in the end. Still: good.

I have to say, though, that this new book goes downhill a little. It's still a good read and I look forward to the author's next book, but this one was too heavy on vignettes. I think Kotlowitz's strength lies in his ability to get in deep with the people about whom he writes, and this book didn't really give him the opportunity. When I was done, I read the back cover, and it turns out that this is one in a series of books about American cities by different famous authors, like Chuck Palahniuk on Portland and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans, so maybe this wasn't the way Kotlowitz envisioned the book.

SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, Peggy Orenstein, 1994

2004-11-29T19:58:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to get through a to-be-read list that dates back to 1997, when I was an earnest young women's studies major, and when this one came up I was pretty sure I'd abandon it. It seems like the kind of thing I'd have picked out when I was twenty, but that wouldn't be such a riveting read these days; it's about how schools and teachers treat girls vs. boys, and how girls experience that.

Turned out to be a real page-turner...really. It's not theory about gender education or a how-to manual for teachers; it's two long case studies and they're fascinating. Both take place at Bay Area public middle schools; one school is largely Black and Latina/o, and the other is mostly white with a big economic range. Orenstein spends her days hanging out in classrooms and playgrounds and talking to girls (and a few boys) at home, in the cafeteria, and on the phone. She also observes them talking to each other and, in one case, reads a girl's diary. She befriends lots of the students and promises them she won't ever tell their parents or teachers what she finds out, although she has to go back on this promise when she finds out a girl is suicidal. She learns all kinds of shit about how teachers with the best intentions end up rewarding girls for being quiet and raising their hands, but encourage boys to talk out of turn, and she teaches the educators some stuff as well.

Plus, I got to know a bunch of the girls through their stories, and they're so...twelve. They break your heart and then you turn around and laugh at their bullshit, but mostly you just pull for them and want to know what happened. I'd love to read a "Where are they now?" about all of them really, but especially April, LaRhonda, and Lisa. I wonder....nah, Googling doesn't turn anything up.

Wifey, Judy Blume, 1978

2004-11-27T15:36:00.000-06:00

I picked this up because I've read and loved all Blume's juvenile and YA fiction for years, and although I didn't think much of her recent adult novel Summer Sisters, Wifey has quite a reputation. So I breezed through it. It's light and funny and way, way sexier than I'd imagined, but ultimately the best thing I can say about it is that it's very, very seventies: a woman raised to be a housewife now wishes for a world beyond her husband, her children, and the country club. A trifle.

Ethnic Gourmet's Vegetarian Peanut Satay Wrap

2004-11-27T15:11:00.000-06:00

Two thumbs down. The blurb on the box promotes this as "vegetarian chicken stir-fried in a Thai peanut satay sauce with vegetables. Wrapped in a lemon & cilantro flavored gourmet flatbread."

To dissect this piece by piece, then: The veggie chicken sucked ass. It was stringy and lean, with no flavor whatsoever. There was no peanut sauce. Really, there wasn't any at all. I would happily feed this to a child with a deathly peanut allergy. The vegetables consisted of water chestnuts, which I loathe; green bell pepper, which is a cheap way out; and carrots, which, all right, fine. The lemon-cilantro flatbread tasted like a plain flour tortilla to me. And I paid $2.69 for this shit? Never again.

Singularity, William Sleator, 1985

2004-11-27T11:36:00.000-06:00

I read Sleator's House of Stairs back in library school and adored it. I got into the bathtub with that and a beer, and didn't get out until I was finished. Every word was mesmerizing. Somehow, I never investigated his other books until now. Someone on PUBYAC mentioned Singularity, and so I grabbed it off our shelf one day. It's not quite as good as House of Stairs, but good enough that I'm going to work my way through the Sleator back catalogue.

Like House of Stairs, this one mixes psychological drama (rivalry between twin teenage brothers) with bizarre phenomena (an abandoned house in which time speeds up) with delicious results. The story is told by Harry, the meeker of the twins. Their parents agree to let them spend two weeks as caretakers of their deceased, eccentric uncle's house in rural Illinois. Harry hadn't wanted to go, but Barry, the bullying twin, insisted, and he always gets his way. They discover this house and its unusual properties, and then Barry threatens to go in the house and age faster than Harry so they won't be twins any more. Harry decides that he'll preempt this by spending a year (a few hours in the outside world) in the house himself. He prepares himself for a year of isolation, then waits until Barry's asleep and sets off for the house. His descriptions of being locked away from the outside world are what reminded me most of House of Stairs.

And I haven't even told you about the evil monster coming out of the sink. Just read the book, yo.

Mom, the Wolf Man, and Me, Norma Klein, 1972, and Saturday, the Twelfth of October, Norma Fox Mazer, 1975

2004-11-26T17:51:00.000-06:00

These two books are both YA novels from the 1970s, set in New York, with young teen girl protagonists and authors named Norma. Aside from that, they couldn't be more different. Mom, the Wolf Man, and Me is about twelve-year-old Brett, who's being raised by a single mom. In fact, her parents were never married at all. Some of her classmates think this is weird, but Brett loves it; she doesn't understand girls like her best friend Evelyn, who's pining for a father. Nor does she relate to women like Evelyn's mother, who puts all of her energy into finding a man. Brett loves living with a photographer mom who wears jeans all day and takes Brett with her to shoots at dog shows. When Brett's mom does meet a man she wants to marry, Brett tries to talk them out of it even though she really likes the guy; she doesn't want her pleasantly disordered life to change. "Why can't we all just live together without a wedding?" she suggests, and Mom and the Wolf Man (because he has a wolfhound) have to convince her that nothing much will change and marriage is, in this case, a Good Thing. I enjoyed reading this; Brett and her mom are refreshing, realistic characters that act as poster children for non-traditional families without preaching or weirdness.

Norma Fox Mazer is a pretty famous YA author, but I hadn't read anything by her, so I was eager to begin Saturday, the Twelfth of October. Zan (short for Alexandra) fights with her brother, is considered nerdy by her peers, and has to sleep on a cot in the kitchen in their crowded apartment. One day her brother finds her diary and reads all her most secret thoughts aloud to his friends. She's especially embarrassed because she's written all kinds of stuff about how she has breasts and pubic hair, but not her period even though she's fourteen.

Zan flees her apartment and runs to a giant boulder she often visits in a nearby park. She suddenly and inexplicably finds herself transported to the same spot thousands (millions?) of years earlier, and meets a young girl and boy from a primeval society. I had to stop reading when I found out that the little tribal girl also has tits and pubic hair but not "the bleeding time" or whatever. The book started to get too cheesy for me right then. I don't want to read some crap about two girls getting their periods together, and how this particular coming-of-age-signifier is all timeless and the feminine is eternal and blah. Screw that.

On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of "Straight" Black Men Who Sleep with Men, J.L. King, 2004

2004-11-25T09:07:00.000-06:00

I've never seen a man interested in this book, but a handful of women have come into the library and asked whether we have it, usually with sheepish expressions. They relax when I tell them that not only is there a lengthy waiting list for the book (47 people are currently on it), but that I too am waiting breathlessly for it.

I finally got the book a couple of days ago. I'd only heard about it via patron requests; I hadn't even looked at a summary or review on Amazon. I knew only the title and subtitle. Turned out to be a big disappointment. It's less of a "journey into the lives" of these guys than it is a how-to manual for Black women to figure out if your own man is on the down low. Lewis uses the term "on the down low" or "on the DL" to refer specificially to closeted bisexual Black men. Openly bi or gay Black men are not included in this category; it means only Black men who want, and have, all the trappings of conventional heterosexuality, usually including a wife, a girlfriend, kids, and a religious community, but also like fooling around with men.

The book isn't nearly specific enough. In fact, the case studies King presents sound phony, like they might actually be composites of several different men, or fictionalized in some other way. He presents them as fact, but they just don't ring true.

Furthermore, he seems to condone cheating on one's wife with women much more than sleeping around with men. HIV is a big concern of his, and I understand that it's more prevalent in the men-sleeping-with-men community, but unsafe sex is still unsafe sex no matter which gender you're fucking. He also recommends to women that they spy on their husbands/boyfriends by hiring private investigators and/or asking a gay male friend to make passes at them and see what happens. Something about that is pretty gross. If you don't trust your partner, it's time to get rid of him, girls.

He also talks about God way too much for my taste. He's found God, God has helped him get through this painful period in his life, etc. In King's favor, though, he is now an openly bisexual man. I was afraid he was going to learn from God that fucking other men is evil, but that's not the case; he says God gave us free will and therefore will not attack our choices, but that we shouldn't deceive someone by pretending we're monogamous when we're not. I'm down with that.

Cherry Ames, Night Supervisor, Julie Tatham, 1950

2004-11-25T08:35:00.000-06:00

Most people are familiar with Nancy Drew, amateur detective in a series of 1940s and 1950s YA mysteries, but fewer know her nurse counterpart, Cherry Ames. That must be why my library has all the Nancy books but only three Cherrys. That's too bad, really; the Nancy books veer from vapid to lurid, while the Cherry Ames series is a bit more consistent. I'm not sure why, since they were all written by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, but there you go.

This particular volume is one of the better ones in any case. It's set at Weatherly, a rural hospital struggling to survive on a low budget. Cherry's been hired as its Night Supervisor, working the 8pm-8am shift. Soon, of course, she finds herself with a mystery to solve; it involves beautiful young nurse's aide Clarice and her late father's elusive second will. It's actually sort of interesting, and plausible as these things go.

If you were a Nancy Drew or Cherry Ames fan and you haven't read Mabel Maney's delicious lesbian parodies (Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless are girlfriends!), do that right about now.

The Love Wife, Gish Jen, 2004

2004-11-24T21:25:00.000-06:00

Last month I read Audrey Niffenegger's excellent The Time Traveler's Wife; sadly, that review has been lost to history because I inadvertently forgot to save the October 2004 page of my former blog, the one from whose ashes this one sprang. I was a bit doubtful before beginning that book because of the constant perspective and time changes between pages and even paragraphs; first it would be Clare talking in 1986, and then it would be Henry from 2001, etc. I adored the book, though, and the author made the perspective changes easier by labeling each passage with the narrator's name, the date, and the ages of both protagonists.

Reading that one was good preparation for The Love Wife. The perspective switches among the five main characters: Carnegie, a second-generation Chinese immigrant and successful software developer; his wife Blondie, a white farmgirl that started a socially responsible investment firm; their two adopted daughters, conventionally rebellious fifteen-year-old Lizzy and sweet, bullied nine-year-old Wendy; and Lan.

When Carnegie's overbearing mother, who never liked Blondie much, died, her will specified that Wendy would inherit an important family heirloom if, and only if, the family agreed to sponsor distant relative Lan to come over from China and help care for the children. Blondie, often the most likeable character, wonders secretly whether Carnegie's mother intended Lan to be a modern-day concubine, but she tries hard to help Lan adapt to America.

The constant perspective changes made the book spectacular; we got to know what everyone was thinking, although Lizzy never really developed as anything other than a teenage brat. The family's struggles to live a normal life despite this intruder, and Lan's attempts to understand the family, the town and the country, were compelling as hell. The twist at the end was totally unexpected, in no small part because I hadn't guessed there would be a twist at all; it's not exactly a plot-based novel.

The nearest grocery store

2004-11-21T20:36:00.000-06:00

Pros:
1. It's literally a hundred feet from my house. It could not be any closer, really.
2. They have a hot food counter that's pretty good; it's almost all meat, but you can get vegetarian wraps for lunch and eggs for breakfast, and the salad bar is decent and includes quesadillas. And feta and walnuts and sliced almonds.
3. The produce department is big compared to the size of the store, and so is the pet area; they have several kinds of bones, rope bones even, and a couple brands of premium cat food, and a ten-pound bag of litter for $1.45.
4. They have almost every flavor of Diet Coke there is, and they sell individual beers.
5. There are little staples in the ground outside where you can tie up your dog to wait for you while you shop.

Cons:
1. They close at 8pm. Did you ever?
2. Vegetarian food is sparse. They have, like, one brand of cheese pizza, and all their homemade soups and even their potato salad and lasagna and shit all have meat in them.
3. They do not have twelve-packs of twelve-ounce cans of Diet Cherry Coke.
4. It's expensive. A box of Morningstar breakfast patties is $4.05, compared to $2.96 at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, a bottle of Yellowtail Shiraz/Cabernet blend is $5.99, compared to $7.49 at A&P.
5. They stopped carrying fresh pico de gallo, but that's sort of okay because they still have a smoky jarred salsa that works almost as well for nachos.
6. They don't carry a decent brand of tortilla chip. Tostitos are unacceptable. I still have to go to Whole Foods for tortilla chips, and since nachos are a critical element of my dietary regimen, that means I have to go to Whole Foods once a week, and that's not convenient.
7. It's a pretty big store, but much of the square footage is taken up with overpriced furniture. Like, you can furnish your entire house at this place. I seriously doubt they do enough business to warrant this; why not get rid of that shit and start stocking tofu packed in water? Yeah. They don't have tofu packed in water at a major urban grocery store. All you can get is that vacuum-packed shit that's only good for desserts.

(Administrative note)

2004-11-21T20:32:00.000-06:00

I've just finished adding all the reviews from my old blog, which had to be hastily deleted after it got me into quite a bit of trouble at work. But that's a story for another day, a day several decades in the future when I've finally gotten over the shame of it all.

Welcome to I Have a Phoenix. I'll review a lot of random shit, mostly books. Thanks for reading.

Le Tigre, This Island, 2004

2004-11-21T19:34:00.000-06:00

9 out of 10. This one doesn't have all the homemade sass of their debut, but it's a lot more fun than Feminist Sweepstakes; it starts off a little slow, but the highs are so very high as to make it the best record I've heard in a long-ass time.

"On the Verge" This is one of the weaker tracks, but it sets the eighties synth-pop tone for the whole album. The shouted refrain "We're on the verge of...!" is nothing special, and neither are the other lyrics, which are supposed to confuse you about whether they discuss sex or activism.

"Seconds" Starts off a bit too Bikini Kill for my taste, but Kathleen's yelling smooths out into a more Deceptacon delivery by the middle. It ends up rocking. "You make me sick! Sick! Sick!"

"Don't Drink Poison" I wish I knew more about music so I could tell you exactly what this reminds me of. It's cute. The lyrics are about not trusting the music media or maybe the music industry.

"After Dark" I have never heard anything that sounds more like Stacy Q, and I mean that in a good way. "I got your name and number/You seem kinda surprised/Maybe it's 'cause I can be/you know, like cold as ice..." One of my favorites. Too long, though, at 3:35.

"Nanny Nanny Boo Boo" This is the album's best, I think. The lyrics are a smorgasboard of words like "Dude, Yr So Crazy," and they manage to get away with namechecking Cynthia Plastercaster in the middle of a lot of computer lingo ("batch capture," "hard drives"), but the real energy comes from Kathleen's perfectly snide delivery in the refrain: "It's just a joke, man/It's just an interview/You'll never get it/I guess this shit is too new."

"TKO" Sort of a throwaway. Nothing really special about this one.

"Tell You Now" This is a bit sad and defiant but still very pop overall. It seems to be a confrontation with a rapist or abuser, but I can't be sure.

"New Kicks" The big single. It's fun and inspiring, a collage of different activists and clips from newscasts and soundbites of girl-on-the-street interviews. I love it, sort of against my will. I don't even mind how long it goes on.

"Viz" This one is about passing as a man: "They call it climbing, I call it visibility/They call it coolness, I call it visibility." You know, this is sort of what I hoped for when I heard about Liz Phair's big pop album. That one was shit, though; this one is the shit.

"This Island" It's the "Generator" of the album, and it works as a fast-paced dance number. It seems to be about encouraging a messed-up friend to get her shit together; I guess it's a dance corollary to Ani's "Fixing Her Hair." "Stop smoking those cigarettes, baby/Next time it's your turn to save me/Splash some water on your little face 'cause you're a mess, you're a mess, you're a mess."

"I'm So Excited" Yes, it's a Pointer Sisters cover, and they did an awesome job, making the song their own while retaining the exuberance of the original. Good work, guys.

"Sixteen" Like early Madonna in a pensive moment; think "Love Don't Live Here
Any More" or "Pretender" or "Open Your Heart." The lyrics seem to indicate that the narrator was a bitch in high school and now a child of a lesser caste is dead. "So they say I was sometimes cruel/I don't know if I would say that too/I don't know about that."

"Punker Plus" "Cinna-mint, Internet, cinnamon and butter-buns!" How can you not love a song with that line and that name? It's a feisty little sketch of life on the road with the band. A-plus. (November 2, 2004)

A is for Aarrgh!, William J. Brooke, 1999

2004-11-21T19:33:00.000-06:00

I want to call this a parable, but it isn't; it's a story used to describe the origins of spoken language, and that's just what it seems to be, so parable isn't the right word. Myth, maybe, or folktale. I'll go with folktale.

It's fabulous. There's a bunch of cave people that mainly communicate by grunting and clubbing one another on the head. Then a little boy starts giving things names. The sun is first, then the other nouns, then adjectives and verbs, and with these tools, the cave people can communicate with one another, which makes it easier to hunt, to cook, etc. Verbs soon lead to tenses and the conditional, though, and with the ability to describe what might happen in the future and to debate what could have been done differently in the past comes planning. This is all well and good until stockpiling for the winter ahead means that the community has a surplus, and the creation of more specialized jobs (Food Divider, for example) leads to hierarchy, an' shit. And I haven't even told you about the Strange Little Girl. Read this one; it's easy and meaningful and purely enjoyable. (November 5-6, 2004)

Plan B, Jonathan Tropper, 2000

2004-11-21T19:29:00.000-06:00

I love spending a whole three-day weekend reading. I started Plan B late last night, and I read until my eyes got tired, which wasn't long. I woke up this morning at 8:30 and immediately grabbed the book off the nightstand and continued reading. I paused to eat a Croissant Pocket and to take the dog for a walk, but I finished just now.

I loved his The Book of Joe, and so did Becky, but this one was even better. It was more plot-based, I guess, and more like The Secret History. There's a group of five college friends, now turning 30. They all live in New York except Jack, who's an action movie star. Jack's become a bit of a cokehead, and when a classic intervention doesn't work, the other four friends kidnap him and bring him to a summer house in upstate New York to try to detox him and talk some sense into him. So they do that, but Jack's agent is trying to find him, and the press and the local cops suspect something's going on, and a little kid next door gets involved, and so on. Excellent.

As with The Book of Joe, though, I really hate the idea that everyone has to find romantic satisfaction in the end, and I particularly loathe the cliché that one's first love is the truest and can never be escaped. What.ever. (November 6-7, 2004)

The Mammoth Cheese, Sheri Holman, 2003

2004-11-21T19:26:00.000-06:00

I give this one a solid B. It's a slightly John Irving-esque story about a small town in Virginia. The main characters are Margaret, a dairy farmer on a family farm that's been steadily dwindling over the last hundred years; her assistant August, who's secretly in love with her and spends his free time impersonating Thomas Jefferson and delivering historical lectures; her thirteen-year-old daughter Polly, who has a crush on her vaguely leftist history teacher; and Manda, a local working-class woman who has just given birth to what can only be called a litter of eleven babies, thanks to fertility drugs.

It's an election year, and the Democratic candidate has come out strongly in favor of small family farms, proposing to grant them amnesty from all their debts in order to bail them out. Margaret campaigns hard for him, and when he wins, she and August decide to make a twelve-hundred-pound wheel of cheese and deliver it to him in person. Apparently some people did the same thing for Thomas Jefferson in 1802. But as the plans for the cheese's manufacture and transport are being made, it turns out that the President may not be going to keep his promises. And Manda's babies keep dying. And Polly's teacher kisses her. And, well, I ended up liking this one more than I thought I would. Basically, I agree with Becky. (November 7-12, 2004)

And Now You Can Go, Vendela Vida, 2003

2004-11-21T11:21:00.000-06:00

I read about this one on Caroline's blog, and I wasn't sure at first whether I'd like it. It felt a little too detached, and I couldn't really get a feel for the narrator, and I thought it might be a touch too metafiction for me, but I ended up really liking it.

It opens with this chick Ellis being held up at gunpoint in a park, and then follows what happens to her over the next couple of months. Basically, she avoids her boyfriend, sleeps with various people, visits her mom and sister, talks to her doorman and her best friend, gets little rhyming do-your-chores notes from her roommate, and tutors art history students. I particularly liked the descriptions of her dates, because she calls the boys things like "representative of the world" and "ROTC boy" not in a cutesy way, but just because they're not all that incredibly important and you get the sense that the author just didn't bother naming them, not that she was trying to say anything about the boys in question or about the narrator or about characterization in novels or anything like that. I don't know...it worked.

Also, when I finished the book, I looked at the author photo on the back flap and was surprised to see she's hot. (November 12-13, 2004)

Harry Potter

2004-11-21T11:19:00.000-06:00

You know one thing I really hate about the Harry Potter books? How everyone is Good or Evil depending on who their parents were. Harry's parents were heroic and wonderful, and so is Harry. Ron's are traditional and hardworking and good-humored, and so are Ron, Ginny and the twins, although admittedly not Percy. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon are ridiculous, and so is Dudley. Lucius Malfoy and Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle were all Death Eaters, and so their three sons are asshole Slytherins. Does no one transcend their evil family and become good? I'm waiting for that to happen, especially in light of the whole "you are what you choose" theme about Harry almost being sorted into Slytherin.

I'm listening to all five books on CD. I get a lot out of them that way, and sometimes I don't even want to get out of the car after work until the chapter is over. I listened to Goblet of Fire on my trip to Chicago, and as soon as I got back I got Sorcerer's Stone and now I'm halfway through Chamber of Secrets. I'm thinking of trying Lord of the Rings on CD since I've never been able to get through the print version. I think I'll listen to The Hobbit first to get me in the mood. But first I have several more CoS disks, then ten for Prisoner of Azkaban, and then twenty-fucking-three in Order of the Phoenix. (November 13, 2004)

Pages for You, Sylvia Brownrigg, 2001

2004-11-21T11:18:00.000-06:00

When I was twenty-four, I fell madly in love with a beautiful redheaded grad student. Madly in love...puppy love, though, really. She was my first girlfriend and the first girl I'd ever kissed and the last person I ever loved like that, so far. I felt, well, like every other person in the entire world feels when they fall in love with their first girlfriend. It only lasted a few months, mostly because I'm a huge fuckup, but whatever.

So now I'm reading Pages for You and it's the same thing, the very same thing. Seventeen-year-old Flannery falls in love for the first time with twenty-eight-year-old Anne. Anne's a grad student, like my first girl was; she's eleven years older than Flannery, and MFG was fifteen years older than I was. They're both redheads, MFG and Anne, and Flannery is blonde like me. Anne and Flannery fall in love over the holidays, just like I did, and while Anne is short, I keep imagining her being five foot nine like MFG. So right now I'm in the middle of the book and it's the holidays and they're still in love and I have this feeling like once school starts and they have less time to spend together, everything will fall apart just like it did with me and MFG.

Most of the thoughts I've had about MFG over the last four years have been pretty negative; it was a lousy breakup really. But now, reading this book, I feel grateful toward her; the book takes me back to when everything was....you know. (November 13-14, 2004)

Letting Go of Bobby James, or How I Found My Self of Steam, Valerie Hobbs, 2004

2004-11-21T11:16:00.000-06:00

I had to read this new YA book because of the title, but it was really a little trifle of a book. I mean, it was all right; it held my attention throughout, but that had a lot to do with its brevity. There wasn't anything particularly new about the plot: teenage girl runs away from her abusive husband and finds a job in, of course, a diner, and she befriends a pregnant girl who's not sure whether she's going to keep her baby, but the reader is sure from the very first page, and of course the pregnant girl gives birth during a hurricane when the phones are down and of course the runaway delivers it perfectly, and then the two of them move in together with a cat, and of course at the end, the abusive husband comes back and the runaway almost goes home with him but in the end, her "self of steam" pulls her through. What.ever. If this is the kind of stuff you like to read, you might also try True Confessions of a Heartless Girl. (November 15-16, 2004)

The Murder Artist, John Case, 2004

2004-11-21T11:13:00.000-06:00

John Case is the pseudonym of a husband-wife writing team. That concept turns me off a bit; acquire discrete hobbies, people, or at least pursue the same one separately. Give each other some room.

I loved the book, though. Alex and his wife Liz have recently separated, and their six-year-old identical twin boys are visiting Alex for a couple of weeks. They go to a Renaissance fair, and the twins disappear. When the police investigation cools off, Alex, a newscaster, takes a leave of absence from his job and searches for the boys himself.

That's a pretty standard thriller plot, but this one really did rise above the genre. The authors just got the details right, I thought. Like, the day after the abduction, when Alex and his wife make the traditional on-air plea to all of America to help them find their kids, Alex feels like his experience as a broadcast journalist makes him sound too canned, so he lets Liz take over. Something about that rang true. And you might think that Alex and Liz would get back together, or at least that one of them would make an attempt in that direction, but nothing like that happens. And while the entire voodoo angle could have been completely removed without affecting the plot -- the initiation scene with the coffin was about as
gratuitous as they get -- I loved the stuff about the old-time stage magicians, especially when I just read Carter Beats the Devil a couple of months ago. And the end is perfect. Of course Alex finds the boys -- I'm not giving anything away when I say that. This is still a genre thriller. But right after he finds them, I mean right after, like five minutes after, the book ends. There's no chapter to tie up loose ends, no seeing the kids reunite with their mom back home, no romantic interest for Alex, no media coverage, no therapy sessions for the boys, not even any description by the twins of what happened to them while they were gone. Nothing. It's awesome. (November 16-17, 2004)

The Cases That Haunt Us, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, 2000

2004-11-21T11:11:00.000-06:00

Douglas is the FBI agent that invented profiling way back when, and since then he's written a jillion books about what it's like to catch serial killers. I love that stuff since I'm a true-crime fan, but I do think he's (1) a bit egotistical, although I don't really mind, and (2) too vague about how profiling actually works. This was a different kind of book, though. In it, he took on eight or ten unsolved cases, ranging from Jack the Ripper to the Lindbergh baby to JonBenet, and gave us his take on who could or couldn't have done them (e.g. he doesn't think it was JonBenet's parents, and makes a very compelling case why). (September 1-6, 2004)

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters, Joan Ryan, 1995

2004-11-21T11:03:00.000-06:00

So fascinating that I finished it all in one glorious day of couch-lying and bath-taking at my mom's Chicago apartment. The title says it all: Ryan describes the lives of the little-girl gymnasts and college-age figure skaters and the pressure on them to be thin and perfect, to work through injuries, to be beautiful and fashionable as well as technically perfect, etc. She lays into Bela Karolyi especially hard, and I like that.

As my college best friend Lauren once said as we watched pregame interviews during the 1998 NBA Finals, "I like behind-the-scenes looks at anything." So here's Karolyi's philosophy, in his own words, and what it's like to be one of his gymnasts:

Injuries had no place in Karolyi's carefully designed formula for producing a star every four years. He built his program around the girl with the most talent. "Your top athlete is a very strange little creature," Karolyi explains. "Of course, I never studied philosophy, but through the years these little guys taught me. We paid our dues on [our] own mistakes, praising our little guy and cheering and clapping and showing our enthusiasm and babying them. And those are the ones who turn around and show disappreciation, ignorance and even arrogance. They take advantage of your sincere urge to show your appreciation. Give them everything in the world and surely you're getting a big, big, big, big slap. She is the first to turn her back."

So Karolyi constructed a training environment that kept his star athlete questioning her worth. In selecting five other gymnasts to train with her, he carefully chose each to play a specific role. Perhaps the most torturous position was that of the secondary star: like the understudy in a play, the girl was just talented enough to present a threat to the star's status. Nadia had Teodora Ungureanu, Dianne Durham had Mary Lou Retton, Kristie Phillips had Phoebe Mills, and Kim Zmeskal had Betty Okino. The four remaining gymnasts were "the crowd," as Karolyi called them, chosen as much for their personality traits as their talents. One girl from "the crowd" was always chosen as his pet. She might be the least talented, but she possessed the qualities he wanted to reinforce in his star: hard work, discipline and stoicism. Karolyi would praise her lavishly and hold her up as an example, angering the more talented gymnasts, who resented the favoritism. Anger, Karolyi knew, was a powerful motivator. He had built his own career on it....

He would play all six girls like chess pieces, every more designed to toughen and sharpen the queen. He would pit them against one another. "If someone else wasn't getting a skill and you got it, or if someone fell and you didn't, it made you feel good," recalls one gymnast. Karolyi would shun one girl in order to teach another a lesson. He'd make one gymnast do extra work for a teammate's mistakes.

(September 6, 2004)

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer, 2003

2004-11-21T10:59:00.000-06:00

I picked this one up after reading an Aaron Is Not Amused post, because I thought it'd be straight-up true crime. Instead, it was really a lot of religious history, which bores me, and besides, I can't say I liked how the most extreme elements of Mormonism were highlighted in the beginning. I understand that the bizarre is what makes for interesting reading, and I was glad that Krakauer made a huge point of explaining how fundamentalist Mormons are not accepted by, let alone the same as, the members of the mainstream LDS church, but I feel a bit defensive of Mormonism because one of my best friends is a member of that church, and also as a matter of fairness because I'm an ex-Catholic, and Catholicism is, of course, an extremely bizarre Christian sect that, nonetheless, isn't seen by outsiders as being as weird as Mormonism. So I didn't get very far into this one before abandoning it. (September 8, 2004)

Rundown, Michael Cadnum, 1999

2004-11-21T10:55:00.000-06:00

It was okay. Well, it really wasn't that great. It's the story of a teenage girl that fakes a brush with a serial rapist in order to get attention right before her sister's wedding, like the dark side of Sixteen Candles, but even though it's first person it's told with that narrative distance I so loathe. I want to understand why the character did it, but I don't. And I don't even care.

I'd expected to enjoy it, too, because the issue of falsely reporting rape is an important one to me, for two reasons. For one thing, I was a women's studies major and, later, a WS grad student, and one thing I always hated about taking beginning WS courses late, like as makeup courses when I was older than all the other students, was how so many of the students were so fucking retarded about, well, everything. About what feminism is, as if it means you have to stop shaving your legs, as if boys can't be feminists, as if a group exists, called "feminazis," that want people to have as many abortions as possible...but especially that most, or many, or a reasonably high percentage, of rape reports are lies. Fuck that. Fuck
Katie Roiphe, too, while you're at it.

Plus, on a totally unrelated note, my dad grew up with Gary Dotson, the man falsely accused of raping Cathy Crowell Webb. When I came across the book she wrote, Forgive Me, I ate it up. Cathy thought she might be pregnant, and to cover up that she'd been having sex, she went to a park one night after work and scratched herself up and then found a cop and told him she'd just been raped. Then she picked Dotson out of a lineup, and he went to trial and, eventually, to jail. Then Cathy found god and repented and said it wasn't really him, but no one believed her this time, ironically. Totally fascinating book. It's out of print now, I believe, but I ran across my copy tonight while cleaning out my closet. (September 6-8, 2004)

Old School, Tobias Wolff, 2003

2004-11-21T10:51:00.000-06:00

Truly excellent, but then I expected to think so. It takes place at a prestigious boys' boarding school around 1960, and the protagonist is a budding writer who idolizes Hemingway and, briefly, Ayn Rand. He's a senior, and each year, the school schedules three writing contests, the winner of each to be selected by a famous writer, who will then come to the school, be photographed and interviewed for the newspaper, and then have a private audience with the writer s/he selected. The first writer is Robert Frost, to give you an idea of the celebrity level with which we're dealing here.

It's a bit of a coming-of-age except that the boy (who I believe is unnamed) doesn't actually mature. I mean, he's pretty mature to begin with, but then he does something retarded. I guess it just seems like a coming-of-age because it's narrated by the man as an adult, looking back on high school with nostalgia and regret.

"The prose is exquisite," I want to say. Oh, I just did. I also loved the buildup of Ayn Rand as a controversial, but ultimately defensible, figure, and then her appearance at the school and the narrator's loss of respect for her. It was portrayed vividly and in, well, exquisite writing.

Weirdly, though, at the end the story takes a weird turn -- not a plot twist, but it fades into the story of Dean Makepeace, a peripheral character in the old story, and never goes back to the narrator's point of view. I'm not sure, because I haven't read very much Hemingway, but what I have read, I see mimicked in Wolff's tale...mimicked with great skill and forethought, and displaying both homage and irony, and very much relevant to a story that's itself about the idolization of authors. So I suspect this end bit is also a Hemingway twist. Is it, English majors? (September 12-13, 2004)

If Daddy Only Knew Me, Lila McGinnis, 1995

2004-11-21T10:48:00.000-06:00

I read about this picture book on PUBYAC and couldn't believe the description of the plot, so I decided to check it out for myself. It's...awful, and heartbreaking, and no child should ever read it. It's a picture book about two sisters, Kate and Glory, who live with their single mother. When Kate asked her mom what happened to her dad, Mom says, "'You know he moved away when you were just this big...He didn't want a family anymore...At least he sends the checks on time...Last year he changed his mind again, and now he has a new family. But I love you, Kate....You don't need a daddy.'"

So Kate and Glory walk to their father's new home across town and find the man mowing his lawn. His new baby sits in a stroller, watching. Dad doesn't recognize Kate and Glory; he just tells them, "'Don't touch [the baby], kids," and keeps mowing. Glory asks, "'Is that the only kid you have?' [D]ad grinned. 'Just the one,' he said."

Awful, eh? Imagine if I read this one at storytime. (September 24, 2004)

Jennifer Government, Max Barry, 2003

2004-11-21T10:43:00.000-06:00

I keep going back and forth between whether this one was excellent or just okay. It reads like if Douglas Adams wrote Snow Crash, and while I think both Adams and Neal Stephenson are brilliant, I had a hard time with Snow Crash and
Jennifer Government because of the constant perspective switches, especially during the action scenes near the end, and I think there were just too many characters. Barry writes in his afterword that a friend got him to completely eliminate one much-loved character and that he agrees the book needed it, but I think he could have gone a little further. Was Billy NRA really critical to the book? His sole motivation is that he wanted to go skiing, and that's not especially interesting even if it wasn't mentioned like fifteen times. And what about Claire and Buy? Were they really anything other than romantic interests for Hack and Jennifer? I hate it when a nice action-packed anti-capitalist book ends with everyone falling in love. Fuck that.

I did enjoy most of it, though, especially Violet. I liked her even though I wasn't supposed to; I particularly liked when she thought, "Hack had dallied with Claire, with shy, quiet Claire, but Claire wasn't enough for him. Hack needed someone like Violet, who could take charge of him. She'd told him that a thousand times." Heh. (September 26-29, 2004)

Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, 1995

2004-11-21T10:42:00.000-06:00

Good read, although I wish there were more descriptions of how exactly Douglas comes to the conclusions he does about various criminals. He's big on patting himself on the back, like he'll point out that he predicted the criminal would drive a blue or black car, have a stutter, be recently divorced and would visit the gravesite soon, and then he'll point out all the ways in which the eventually-captured murderer does in fact fit this profile. But I want to know how he got there. He talks about this a little bit, but not enough. (July 29 - August 2, 2004)

The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall, 2001

2004-11-21T10:38:00.000-06:00

This novel is billed as an "unauthorized parody" of Gone With the Wind, but it's not really a humorous book. I sort of expected it to be poorly written like Scarlett, the unfortunate, even preposterous, Alexandra Ripley sequel for which I'd held such high hopes back in high school, but it's excellent. It's told by Cindy, the daughter of Planter (Gerald; almost all the names are changed to prevent lawsuit by the Margaret Mitchell estate) and Mammy, whose name is unchanged, and therefore is Other (Scarlett)'s half-sister. All the other characters are the ones from the book; Cindy's the only new one until later when she meets a Black Congressman as well as Frederick Douglas. It's set immediately after the original, when Other has just gone back to Cotton Farm (Tara, of course; heh) after R(hett) leaves her.

I think the parody label was a copyright requirement, and I guess I don't know the strict definition of parody, but again, this is not a funny book except for certain, sudden flashes of black humor that made me gasp and laugh simultaneously. One of these moments came when Cindy decorously tells R, now her lover, that she is aroused; she tells him so by murmuring, "The morning dew is on the southern lawn." Hee.

Yeah, the book is much too sophisticated to be a simple parody. It's more like Randall takes the original cast of characters and gives them a whole new story. This one has a great deal to do with Cindy realizing she loves R mostly because he prefers her to Other, to whom she's always in the past come out second-best. Randall also puts to work Black feminist theories about how women of color are often seen as exotic by white men, and Cindy struggles with whether to leave R, whom she does truly love, for a Black man so she can live a quiet life rather than one as a Black girl showpiece.

At the same time, Randall does toss barbs at Mitchell's work from time to time: remember how Gerald and Ellen had three baby boys that died? What really happened to them? Why did Ashley resist Scarlett's vivacity in favor of Melanie (who's called "Mealy Mouth" in this book)? Remember the poker game in which Gerald won Tara? Turns out that was fixed. These little secrets are fun to read, even though they're not the point of the book.

You might notice that in the paragraph above, I refer to stories Randall tells as if they were the "true" sequence of events that happened after Rhett left Scarlett at the end of Mitchell's book. That's because I really do feel that way. Fuck Alexandra Ripley and her stories of tea sets and extramarital sex and trips to Ireland. Boring and irrelevant. This is what really happened. (August 2-4, 2004)

Crossing California, Adam Langer, 2004

2004-11-21T10:29:00.000-06:00

The California in question refers to the Chicago street, not the state, and the book takes place in West Rogers Park, which is not quite the neighborhood I grew up in, but it was one mile away and had the closest library. In fact, a character in the book works at that library. It also mentions such adolescent haunts of mine as Gulliver's, a pizza place/Mexican and Italian restaurant bedecked with gaudy chandeliers and nude statues; Wolfy's, a hot dog stand on Peterson; Fluky's, next door to which my mom lives now; and Mather, where my sister went to high school. It even mentions the Nortown, a movie theater on Western I frequented in junior high but is now sadly closed. The book is set in 1979 and so far tells the stories of a bunch of junior high and high school kids. Pinky, it has your name written all over it, doesn't it?

The opening paragraph:

The day after an estimated seventy Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Jill Wasserstrom paused on the corner of North Shore and California Avenues to contemplate the accuracy of what she had proudly declared to Lana Rovner during recess at K.I.N.S. Hebrew School. What she had told Lana hadn't been quite true. She hadn't given Muley Scott Wills a big old hickey after eighth-grade phys ed at Boone Elementary School. She hadn't given Muley Scott Wills any sort of hickey at all. What had happened was that Muley Scott Wills had asked her if she wanted to go with him to Sun Drugs to pick up some items for his mother. She'd said sure, she had time before she had to go to Hebrew school, so she'd gone with him to buy a heating pad, a bottle of aspirin, two blocks of Neapolitan ice cream, three packs of Now and Later's, and a bag of Warner's spice drops, which they consumed before he said goodbye to her in front of K.I.N.S. But, Jill realized as she continued walking south on California, Muley Wills was unlikely to deny any story that made it seem as if relationship was more profound than it actually was, which was why it had been a safe bet to tell Lana Rovner she'd given Muley the hickey. If Lana -- who was always asking intrusive questions about Jill and Muley's relationship -- actually went up to Muley some day in the future and asked if Jill had given him said hickey, no doubt Muley either would say nothing or would immediately confirm the story to conceal the fact that Jill had never given him a hickey. Or anything else for that matter.

(August 6-9, 2004)

The Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town, Jacqueline Guidry, 2001

2004-11-21T10:27:00.000-06:00

Pretty good for a summer book. It's yet another novel set fifty years ago and featuring a white Southern child discovering how racial integration can really fuck up a small town, but it's a breath of fresh air that the little girl that narrates at least has some prejudice at the start of the book. I find it less than realistic that the small white child that tells every other Civil-Rights-Act-affects-a-sleepy-Mississippi-village book is always a paradigm of color-blind innocence herself, generally due to the influence of a loving, hard-working, and, of course, "dignified" Black woman that cleans said white child's home. This little girl, though, thinks that colored people should stay with their own and not try going to white people's church, which attitude is despicable in itself but realistic for a kid in southwestern Louisiana in 1957. So apparently two Black nuns are going to begin teaching at the girl's Catholic school, so we'll see what happens. Moms yanking their kids from school and crosses aflame on campus, I wager. Also the little girl's name is actually Vivien Leigh Dubois, which pleases me. (August 13-14, 2004)

The War Against Silence

2004-11-21T10:20:00.000-06:00

The last issue of The War Against Silence just came out. Glenn McDonald, writer of the erudite, esoteric music column, went and got married on us and has ceased weekly publication to move on into a life slightly less obsessed with bands like Smart Brown Handbags and Zeppet Store. Even though our musical tastes do not tend to overlap (I'm not much on Roxette and Kansas, and he couldn't stand Elastica's The Menace), in the cases where they do, he's far better than I'll ever be at putting into words why a band, song or his We Are Shampoo review. And we like some of the same books, at least; in particular, we're fans of Harry Potter and Elizabeth Wurtzel. Good luck, man. (August 26, 2004)

The Coldest Winter Ever, Sister Souljah, 1999

2004-11-21T10:15:00.000-06:00

My sister Tal recommended this one almost three years ago. I loved it then, although I was sure I wouldn't, and I put a hold on it again a couple of months ago. It took this long to come in even though it was published in 1999 (generally only brand-new books have lengthy wait lists), but it was worth the wait. Go pick it up. Your library has copies, I promise, unless they've been stolen, which is actually sort of likely (many of ours have disappeared). Here are a couple of excerpts.

"Let me ask you something, Will."

"What?"

"You supposed to be a great businessman right?"

"No doubt," he said confidently.

"You watch how your money moves, look out for people tryna pinch the stash, don't want to make moves with no small-timer with small money."

"Yeah? What you tryna get at," he asked slightly aggravated.

"So why does a man who works so hard for the dough drop three Gs on a bitch like Natalie for a Chanel suit."

"Damn, that suit really got you heated, huh," he joked.

"No seriously, it's no secret that Natalie fucks around with anybody. You supposed to be a man who watches the company he keeps and look who you end up in box seat with."

Will was aggravated. "Look, you wanna get raw with me, I'ma get raw with you. I'ma talk to you like you one of my boys, now. Natalie sucks my dick like no other hoe ever sucked my dick."

"Yeah, but you could've got your dick sucked on 42nd Street."

"No, not like that. There's an art to sucking a dick. Natalie got that shit locked down. She gets the whole dick in her mouth and still finds room for my nuts. When I bust in her mouth, she swallows like it's pancake syrup. Hell, she earned that three-thousand-dollar suit." (pp. 166-167)

House of Success was a group home for teenage girls aged thirteen to eighteen...wasn't like the movies, though. In the room I was assigned to, I met all kinds. First, there was this girl from Haiti. The only thing I could say about her was that she was the greasiest person I ever saw. She had a dogged-out, uneven, jheri curl with all the grease activator and gel that comes with it. She had the jheri curl grease colliding with the Vaseline on her face. She had greasy lotions for her hands and feet, and in general always looked wet. Her name was Claudette. There was no worse nightmare than the clothes she wore. It looked like she picked a year from the past, let's say 1975, and decided all her clothes would be from that time. To make it worse, she just said fuck the color scheme. I'll wear a purple shirt with green gauchos with a yellow hat with a big pink flower on it and I'll top this shit off with some wooden platform open-toed shoes so I can show off my big maroon bunion. (pp. 176-177)

(August 26-27, 2004)

Frindle, Andrew Clements, 1995

2004-11-21T10:11:00.000-06:00

I'd heard good things about this juvenile chapter book, so I put a hold on it and when it came in I ate it up. It's about a mischievous fifth-grader that's conned by a clever teacher into giving an oral report on etymology. When he learns that language is created by people themselves, and that their conventions end up in the dictionary, he decides to stop using the word "pen" in favor of saying "frindle" instead. He's more successful than he dreamed, and...well, the last couple of chapters are especially cute. Read this one; it'll only take you half an hour. (August 26, 2004)

Little Children, Tom Perrotta, 2004

2004-11-20T23:47:00.001-06:00

I remember I saw the movie Election a few years ago when I was on a movie-watching kick similar to the one I went on last July, except the 2000 version involved my VCR and gin instead of a movie theater and weed. I liked it, although I haven't really given it a thought since then. And when I requested Perrotta's Little Children via the library hold system after reading a review, I had no idea that there was a book called Election upon which the movie was based, let alone that it was by the same guy. And my library's only copy is missing, so I'll have to wait quite a while before I read it, like until I can afford to buy books or until I get around to ILLing it.

But Little Children is wonderful. I started it yesterday morning and wouldn't turn out the lights last night until I'd read the last page. I knew I was going to like it from the opening paragraph:

The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were. This was one of their favorite topics, along with the eating, sleeping, and defecating habits of their offspring, the merits of certain local nursery schools, and the difficulty of sticking to an exercise routine. Smiling politely to mask a familiar feeling of desperation, Sarah reminded herself to think like an anthropologist: I'm a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself.

(August 5, 2004)

The Sunflower Forest, Torey Hayden, 1984

2004-11-20T23:31:00.000-06:00

Unexpectedly wonderful. The book tells the story of Lesley, a Kansas girl about to graduate from high school, and it's a bit of a coming-of-age novel (first boyfriend, loss of virginity, realization that high school isn't the most important thing that
ever happened to anyone, etc.) but it's set against the backdrop of her unusual family. Her second-generation Irish father works at a garage, but dreams of the day he'll have an office job and bring home paperwork to do in the evenings; in each of the family's various homes, he sets aside one bedroom as his study, even if it means Lesley and her younger sister have to share a room.

Her mother, though, is the main focus of the book (seen through Lesley's eyes). She's Hungarian and a survivor of World War II, where she was forced to procreate with Germans because of her traditional Aryan beauty. She bore two sons that she never saw again. Now she becomes obsessed with a little boy on a local farm, telling him he is her lost son (despite the fact that he's six and the son in question would be nearly forty) and that she's come to take him away from his poverty to live with her.

Then all hell breaks loose, and Lesley goes to Wales to visit a cottage where her parents lived for a short time after they got married. I don't want to spoil yall for the ending, because I really want you to read it. It's out of print, but check the library.

This is the first time I've read The Sunflower Forest even though I've read all of Torey's other books multiple times. This is her only fiction excursion, according to her Web site and my prior research, but just this week I've discovered another one via, of all things, my library's IPAC. Maybe it's a different Torey Hayden, but the plot summary reads, "David has never had a permanent home or a real friend, but when he decides to try to hatch an owl egg with the help of a classmate, his life slowly begins to change for the better," so I doubt it. Torey's nonfiction books are about her experiences as a teacher of emotionally disturbed children, particularly those with a disorder known as elective mutism, in which the child is physically able to speak but refuses to do so.

I like the Welsh part of The Sunflower Forest, though, in part because I got a kick out of the (fictional, but obviously based to some degree on Wales) country Qwghlm. Plus, Welsh is funny. And there's Welsh rarebit, which I've never had, but I believe it's a big pile of bread and melted cheese, which sounds good. (July 1-2, 2004)

Three juvenile nonfiction books about astronauts, Ruby Bridges, and snow dogs

2004-11-20T23:16:00.000-06:00

The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins, Bea Uuma Schyffert, copyright 1999 in Swedish, 2003 in English

Through My Eyes, Ruby Bridges, 1999

After the Last Dog Died: The True-life, Hair-raising Adventure of Douglas Mawson and His 1911-1914 Antarctic Expedition, Carmen Bredeson, 2003

The best of the bunch was The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon. It tells the story of Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 trip...he stayed in the spacecraft while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked around on the moon. It's very well-told; it's fairly nonlinear, so can be picked up and read from a variety of points, but it's not just scattered bits of information, either. Text describing Michael's time in space is placed opposite black-and-white pictures of the spacecraft; this goes on for a few pages and then there's a full-color spread of Michael's wife, kids and dog, and then a chart detailing the different types of food eaten in space (freeze-dried, powdered, wet-packed and spoon-bowl) and a list of the menu (includes Canadian bacon, banana pudding and bite-sized coconut cubes). Lots of attention is paid to the way the astronauts peed in space; I guess Schyffert knew what kids would want to hear about. ALSC gave this book a Batchelder Honor award for being the best "originally published in a foreign language in a foreign country, and subsequently translated into English and published in the United States" this year.

Also good was Through My Eyes. In 1960, Ruby integrated New Orleans public schools at age six, all by herself, and now she makes a living as a speaker. She's sort of politically untouchable...everyone loves her from fundamentalists to radicals because there's no controversy involved nowadays. She was just a tiny little girl that wanted to start first grade like everyone else, and instead no white parents would let their kids come to school with her, so she had a class all to herself. Her book is well-written and full of excellent photography...Ruby in a starched white dress marching up the stairs to school, surrounded by federal marshals with huge guns; a crazy white lady, a reasonably attractive twenty-something woman, holding out a scarf and screeching that she's going to strangle Ruby; and a picture of Ruby's mother accompanying her to school on the very first day. For some reason, I expected Ruby's mother to be the age of my own mother, because Ruby's text portrayed her as wise and tough and determined to get her daughter the best education possible, but of course I'm 28 and Ruby was 6 so her mother's only about my age.

The other part I found interesting was how Ruby was selected: all the Black kids in New Orleans were tested the year before, and Ruby was one of the highest-scoring kids, so the NAACP visited Ruby's parents to try to talk them into letting Ruby attend a white school in the fall. Mr. Bridges didn't want Ruby to do it, and eventually he and Mrs. Bridges divorced (five years later) and that was part of why.

What I didn't like was the excess of sidebars, captions, and quotes that interfered with my reading flow. All of the material was interesting and I wanted to read it, but then I'd forget where I was in Ruby's narrative, and that wasn't cool.

This book won the Woodson Award for social studies and the Jane Addams Children's Book Award.

Much crappier was After the Last Dog Died. The subtitle pretty much describes what the book was about: man & crew travel through ice and snow, get hungry and cold, some people die and some survive and are treated as heroes. The problem was that it was told in a stiff, boring fashion, like a crappy social studies book. The reader doesn't get any picture of what it was actually like to be on an Arctic expedition; we are, instead, told about the bravery of the men that went. There are plenty of pictures and captions, but they often don't make sense in context and aren't nearly as powerful as the images used in Through My Eyes and Far Side of the Moon, although I guess since this book is set in 1912, it can't really be helped.

Also, the men killed their dogs and ate them in order to survive. Not only is that gross and horrible, and not at all treated with anything other than blind reverence in the book (seriously), but it makes the title seem a bit disingenuous, doesn't it? "After the last dog died," or "After I killed the last dog and ate his liver"?

This one won no awards that I know of, thank god. For a book about snowy turn-of-the-century expeditions in which dogs are depicted as the heroes they are, read The Cruelest Miles. (July 2-3, 2004)

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847

2004-11-20T23:12:00.000-06:00

It was my first time reading this book, oddly, and I liked it quite a bit, although it wasn't quite what I'd expected. From such snippets of pop culture as Katie John and Heathcliff, I'd thought it was simply a torrid Gothic love story that took place in the moors of England. But it turns out that one of the leads dies, like, a third of the way into the book, and it's really more of a family saga, although a good one. And Heathcliff is cruel and disturbed! I thought he was the romantic hero! I mean, I knew going in that he wasn't a sensitive guy or anything, but I thought he was just a bad boy, not a sadistic freak. (July 3-8, 2004)

French Quarter Festival

2004-11-20T23:04:00.000-06:00

FQF? That's a terrible acronym but I guess it's what you'd call the French Quarter Festival if you wished to abbreviate it. I went yesterday and it was pretty cool. Not much vegetarian food, but I had guacamole and spinach-artichoke bread. And "Oreo bread pudding," which contained exactly one mini-Oreo, the size of a penny. And I had some beer and a peachy Southern Comfort drink. There were some bands playing an' shit and some kids got their faces painted. Sort of like a smaller version of Taste of Chicago except New Orleans is smart enough to have theirs in the spring instead of Fourth of July when it's a hundred degrees in both cities. (April 16, 2004)

Fahrenheit 9/11

2004-11-20T22:01:00.000-06:00

Okay, it's true that I've never been to the movies by myself, that I can remember. And it's true that in the last five years, I've seen about five movies at the theater, and in every case I was led by someone whose idea it was and who took care of all the details. And it's true that I've never gone to the movies in New Orleans.

Still, I didn't think I was totally retarded, but it turns out to be true. I decided on a recent patriotic holiday that what I should do on this fourth day of July was, of course, see Fahrenheit 9/11, or maybe Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at IMAX. I wished to know at what time these events would occur, so I opened the phone book and found the number for the Prytania, the theater Ignatius frequents in A Confederacy of Dunces. I expected to be presented with a menu of choices; instead, a living person answered and said Fahrenheit 911 was not playing therein.

I was at a loss, then, for how to proceed. How the fuck do people find out where the movies are playing that they might want to see? I remembered the existence of a device called Moviefone which one calls to find out the times and locations of a variety of movies, but that was ten years ago in Chicago and I had no idea what the local phone number was or if such a thing still existed. I started making up URLs (moviefinder.com, movielocator.com, etc.) and typing them into my browser, but to no avail.

Then I remembered that when I was in junior high, one found movie information in the newspaper. I got up and went to Robért and bought the Times-Picayune and started perusing it. I got through most of the likely sections before thinking,
"Fuck it," and went to imax.com and found out the times for HP3. They don't allow online reservations, for some godforsaken reason, so I again had to dial a phone number and speak with a human, who charged me $12 for a single ticket. Parking will be an additional $4. What the fuck?

Later I found that movie information is hidden within the Living section of the Times-Pic. I'll remember that for next time. Am I a crazy old lady with no conception of what modern life is like?

Once I got to the theater, though, I was pretty happy about it, because you know what's really great? Going to a movie. You get two hours of entertainment, popcorn and candy, a big Diet Coke and a comfortable chair. It's the best. You should try it.

I have to go back, too, because you know what else is really good? Previews. So now I have to see four of the five movies whose previews I viewed: She Hate Me, Coffee and Cigarettes (why did no one tell me Jack and Meg White were in a movie?), Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and Maria Full of Grace. I'll skip Before Sunset, though, thanks.

The movie was awesome, of course. Everything about it was great. I even went back a few days later to watch it again, and I think the only other movie I've ever seen twice at the theater was Gone with the Wind, and that was two different special showings some years apart. I've definitely never seen a movie at the theater twice within a week.

I still don't understand, though. Exactly where did all that footage of American soldiers in Iraq come from? I mean, in Fahrenheit 9/11? You know, the soldiers that listened to the "burn, motherfucker" song while they were doing their jobs of killing people, but also the other soldiers that dressed up like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and the ones that said, basically, "War is hell," and the one that said that he would never return to Iraq as a soldier even if he faced jail time? Where did Moore get that footage? He didn't shoot it himself, so where did it come from? His Web site doesn't tell us; the "Notes and Sources Archive" gives us all the backup about what Moore says about Bush & Co., but doesn't credit the people that shot the footage I just described. Maybe the movie credits would've helped me out if I'd stayed for them on either excursion. (July 4 and 11, 2004)

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

2004-11-20T21:36:00.000-06:00

This collection of seven essays was magnificent. Fuck Steven Pinker; I now want to marry David Foster Wallace. I absolutely adored this book and I must now read every single thing he's ever written.

Each essay deserves its own review. Here we go.

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"
At 18 pages, this is the second-shortest essay in the book, and it's a great way to kick things off. It consists simply of some musing about what it's like to be a teenage tennis star, on the one hand; on the other, it talks about the insane winds that sweep the prairies of east central Illinois, and how this affects one's tennis game, and how the author learned to work the winds to his advantage even though he really wasn't that great a player. I was particularly interested because I lived in Champaign, Illinois, for the three years it took me to scrape my way through library school, but I think I would have enjoyed this article even if it had been set in South Carolina or Idaho.

What the essay was really about, though, was introducing the other six. Later in the book, when I was confronted with much longer pieces about movies I hadn't seen, athletes I'd never heard of, and the nature of the author (the generic Author, not DFW), I went in with less trepidation because I knew DFW was capable of making any esoteric topic relevant, interesting, and hilarious. I also got used to the footnotes and abbreviations that are the hallmarks of his style. I wonder whether he put this short, readable essay first on purpose. If so: good choice.

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"
This was my least favorite and it was very long, but I slogged my way through it. The overall premise was that since everyone hates TV but watches it anyway, they necessarily do so with ironic detachment, whether they realize it or not. This in turn has led earnestness in general to not be taken very seriously by intellectuals and creative types, including writers of fiction, and so fiction itself has become all self-referential and ironic, all because of TV.

It was in this essay that I began folding up the bottom corners of pages to mark them for later analysis. One such fold brings me to this:

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people that compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

This opinion struck me because just the day before, I had been reading Becky's excellent reading log and thinking about how just the opposite was true in our case: Becky and I both read tons, and we like a lot of the same, you know, "literary" books a whole lot. But for our junk reading, we have very different preferences: Becky likes chick lit and detective stories and genre sci/fi and fantasy, whereas I like true crime, detective stories but only ones with female detectives, and juvenile serial fiction, which is a polite term for Babysitters Club. So it was just a weird coincidence that DFW said something similar that I read the very next day.

A bit further on, DFW says:

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change.

I guess I do, though, on two counts: First, I don't think I want to have "common beliefs" with all other Americans. In fact, I'm sure I don't. Second, I think that's one excellent reason to be a watcher of TV: so you know what everyone else is talking about, and you have mutual references. So that when your civil service class teacher alludes to The L Word, or when the owner of the crack house around the corner talks about the commercial for allergy medicine with the cute little dog in it, or when someone calls your new haircut a Rachel, you know what the fuck they're talking about. The content of TV is knowledge almost everyone has in common, and that's cool: at least we have something in common.

DFW, by the way, wrote this essay in 1990, before there was mass consciousness of, let alone mass access to, the Internet. This is obvious when he talks about "media futurologist" George Gilder's hypothetical invention, the "telecomputer." Gilder says the big problem with TV today (fifteen years ago, really) is that the "expense and complexity of [the technology] used in television sets meant that most of the processing of signals would have to be done [at the networks, which meant that] television would be a top-down system...A few broadcasting centers would originate programs for millions of passive receivers, or 'dumb terminals.'" Gilder's solution was to create a system whereby users would control their own programming, and they'd help one another do it.

DFW describes this idea of Gilder's as "allow[ing] people's TV sets to be hooked up to one another in a kind of interactive net instead of all feeding passively at the teat of a single broadcaster." DFW doesn't think this sounds so great. He says:

It's tough to see how Gilder's soteriol [sic] vision of having more "control" over the arrangement of high-quality fantasy bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend I'm not dependent. Whether I'm "passive" or "active" as a viewer, I still must cynically pretend, because I'm still dependent, because my real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead's is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner. My real dependence is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images both available and fantastic....The more enhancing the mediation - see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or "moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images" [quoted from Gilder] -- the more direct, vivid, and real the experience seems, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence are.

Either DFW or I am missing the point here. I suspect it is he. The real beauty in the interconnected telecomputers is the increased potential for communication with other humans, right? I mean, I see what he's saying about the addiction of the advantages technology brings us -- here I am, sitting alone in my room typing random thoughts into a computer terminal -- but surely this view is too cynical.

Or maybe I'm the one in error here, and the real decade-later manifestation of Gilder's prediction isn't the Internet at all, but satellite and cable TV. Here the viewer does seem to have much more control, if control means choice...and here DFW is correct, because the same old master/slave metaphor fits this situation as well. The slaves have no input. I don't know. What do you think?

"Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All"
Heh. I loved this one. It's a hilarious narrative of DFW's trip to the Illinois State Fair. He technically has a premise here, which is referenced in the title and is pretty much that city dwellers like to go to peaceful and out-of-the-way places on vacation because they're sick of the daily rush, but that farmers and such prefer crowded events like state fairs where they can both hang out with and show off to the peers they rarely meet in such numbers in daily life.

Really, though, it's just a funny story. I didn't even fold up any page-corners in this one; I just giggled through descriptions of hostile and dumbshit carnies, all-butter fudge, cattle-judging contests, and baton-twirling competitions. If you only read one essay in this book, make it this one; and after you read this one, you'll change your mind and want to read the last one too.

"Greatly Exaggerated"
Probably everyone reading the book skips most of this one. I liked it okay, but if it had been any longer than its actual seven-page length, I would have given up. It covers, briefly, the birth of critical theory, the advent of postmodernism, and most specifically, a book by H.L. Hix called Morte d'Author: An Autopsy (1992).

Hix's work is about the fact that many contemporary literary theorists, drawing on a decades-old body of criticism of the school of realism, object to the positioning of the author of a work as somehow integral to the work's aboutness. This is hotly debated, with various people arguing about the value and role of authors. Hix proposes that instead of fighting to the death about what exactly the author does bring to his/her writing, and therefore what exactly an author is, the thing to do is to see how the term "author" is actually used and what it means in context, and go from there.

If you didn't like that paragraph, you won't like this essay, but that really is what Hix's work is about. DFW basically reviews Hix's book. His conclusion is that Hix had a good idea, but executes it poorly, but that's okay because all the author-arguing is pretty nuts anyway.

"David Lynch Keeps His Head"
This one was super-long and I almost skipped it because I'm not very interested in movies and I've never seen anything directed by David Lynch, with the exceptions of (1) Fire Walk with Me as a junior in college, while quite stoned, with several of my sorority sisters who were tripping on acid, and (2) most of the first season of Twin Peaks on TV when I was 14, only because Lara Flynn Boyle used to babysit for me (true story).

I'm so, so glad I decided not to skip this one, though. It turned out to be almost my favorite; I still like the funny ones better, but I knew I would. This essay, on the other hand, is the one that convinced me of DFW's genius, because he made me totally engrossed in a subject I had zero interest in before reading his 66 detailed pages.

Basically, DFW went to the set of Lost Highway and also got to read the shooting script and watch some of the editing, and he uses all of that as a backdrop to his story about how awesome David Lynch is, and how he felt when he first saw Blue Velvet. This was also DFW's first time on a movie set, and he makes the same kind of wry observations that he does at the Illinois State Fair in "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All" and on a Caribbean cruise in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." I folded down quite a few pages in this one. And I totally want to see Lost Highway now.

p. 148: "Mysteries of Love," by Julee Cruise, "has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time -- well worth checking out," says DFW. KaZaA doesn't have it, though...does any of yall? I have the Twin Peaks TV show soundtrack on cassette somewhere, but I don't know whether this is on there or not.

172: This seems to be DFW's first trip to Los Angeles, and he marvels at how it lives up to all the clichés about it. He can't get enough of this. "L.A. has a big city's street musicians, but here the musicians play on median strips instead of on the sidewalk or subway, and patrons throw change and fluttering bills at them from their speeding cars, many with the casual accuracy of long practice. On the median strips between the hotel and David Lynch's sets, most of the street musicians were playing instruments like finger-cymbals and citterns. Fact: In my three days here for Premiere magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon."

174-5: He goes on a long rant about Balthazar Getty that's beyond hilarious, considering that whenever I think of "Balty" I think of the enormous and longstanding crush that my best high school friend had on him back in the day (1991). Therefore I must recreate the Balty paragraphs in their entirety.

(...Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He's not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway's footage because he has extremely poor posture and David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?) and really good in a surly bit part in Mr. Holland's Opus.

To be frank, it's almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty's going to be in Lost Highway from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it's probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he'd annoy hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody's cellular phone for an "emergency." I'll confess that I eavesdropped on some of his emergency cellular phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody "But what did she say about me?" three times in a row. For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about 1% of what he was making on this movie. I admit that none of these were exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Getty also suffered from comparison with his stand-in, who was apparently his friend and who always stood right near him, wearing an identical auto-shop jumpsuit with "Pete" sewn in cursive on the breast and an identically gruesome ersatz carbuncle on his forehead, and who was laid back and cool and very funny -- e.g. when I expressed surprise that so much time on a movie set was standing around waiting with nothing to do, Balthazar Getty's stand-in was the one who said "We actually work for free; it's the waiting around we get paid for," which maybe you had to be there but in the context of the mind-shattering boredom of standing around the set all day seemed incredibly funny.

OK, fuck it: the single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that whenever David Lynch was around Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and asskissy, but when Lynch wasn't around Getty would make fun of him and do an unkind imitation of his distinctive speaking voice...that wasn't a very good imitation but was clearly intended to be disrespectful and mean.)

189: Okay, now this is weird. Section 15 of the essay is entitled "Addendum to (14) re Lynch and race," and it begins, "Except now for Richard Pryor [who has a role in Lost Highway, has there ever been even like one black person in a David Lynch movie?" A footnote adds, "And Richard Pryor's in the movie as Richard-Pryor-the-celebrity-who's-now-neurologically-damaged, not as a black person." Another footnote says, "(There were also, come to think of it, those two black hardware store employees (both named Ed) in Blue Velvet, but, again, their blackness was incidental to the comic-symbolic value of one Ed's blindness and the other Ed's dependence on the blind Ed's perfect memory for hardware-prices. I'm talking about characters who are, like, centrally minorityish in Lynch's movies.)"

What DFW seems to be saying is that Black characters in movies can't just be characters; they have to be characters that experience an act of racism during the movie, or fight for civil rights, or begin to ironically call themselves Nigga Number One, or something. You can't just have a Black hardware store employee? The actor, or character, somehow must symbolize her/his race? Is this really what DFW is saying? It's hard to justify, and furthermore, I'm not sure he believes it himself. I'm pretty fucking steeped in DFW prose at this point, and he seems just a bit more gimmicky and less self-assured than usual when he addresses this topic, although that may just be the white person's typical uneasiness when discussing race at all. Or it could just be me.

197: "Trivia tidbit: It is very hard for a hot director to avoid what Hollywood mental-health specialists term "Tarantino's Disorder," which involves the sustained delusion that being a good movie director entails that you will also be a good movie actor." Hee.

Also regarding page 197: Okay, you know what? You know what? I don't know who Jerry Lewis is. I have very little idea who he is, anyway. I think he's some sort of actor or comedian or both. You know what I DO know about him? That French people love him. I hear this ALL THE TIME. I'm sick to death of hearing this. Even DFW falls into the trite old trap of mentioning this in a footnote on this page.

Okay, and I had four other page-corners folded up, but upon rereading them I have no idea what the fuck I wanted to say about them.

"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness"
This one is much like the last in that it concerns a topic about which I know very little, but it totally drew me in. I was expecting this, though. After finishing the David Lynch chapter, I was like, "Okay, now even if the next essay is about quantum physics or rose gardening or professional wrestlers, I'm still going to love it," and I was right. DFW picked a tennis player that's world-class but not a famous superstar, and followed him through the Canadian Open.

What I liked most about this essay was how DFW made tennis seem beautiful, the way an old friend of mine taught me to look at pool. Tennis is played overtly in three dimensions; pool, most think, only happens in two, although that's actually not true -- follow and draw (top and bottom spin on the ball) make it 3-D even if you don't count jump shots -- but I loved DFW's description of the combination of variables that's necessary to make even a single shot: "Given a net that's three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is influenced by still other variables -- for example, a shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the net itself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racket face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings."

I won't bore you with a similar description of the elements that influence a pool shot, but I will say that the emotional factors DFW describes as being so critical to competitive tennis (both in this essay and in "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley") are just as relevant in pool. We poolplayers talk about "heart," or the ability to play well even with thousands of dollars/the world championship/whatever on the line, and DFW covers that too.

Another point DFW made was the enormous gap between players that are just very, very good and players that are great. He writes, "Pros simply do not make unforced errors -- or at any rate they make them so rarely that there's no way they're going to make the four unforced errors in seven points necessary for me to win a game. For another thing, they will take any shot that doesn't have simply ferocious depth and pace on it and -- given even a fractional moment to line up a shot -- hit a winner off it." I can totally relate to this. I am, of course, not a great pool player, and I'm nowhere close to being even a very, very good one, but I have played in tournaments against people that are many, many levels above me and I know how this feels. I can't miss, because my opponent will run out (make all her/his balls and win). I can't make even one error, because my opponent will always, every time, turn it into a win. My opponent, on the other hand, will never make an error that I could turn into a win, and even if s/he could, I couldn't turn it into a definite win because I'm not always, or even often, good enough to do that. It's both humbling and awe-inspiring to play a professional pool player.

The final interesting thing about this article was about how professional athletes have an extremely narrow focus, one that's probably been lifelong, and the public hates this. DFW notes that profiles of famous athletes "strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life -- outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport." We can't accept someone as fully human unless they do something, anything, besides tennis/gymnastics/math. Yet the players that are the very best in the world have lived and breathed their sports since they were toddlers. Pinpoint focus is necessary to make them become what they are. Is this wrong? I guess it isn't, although up until I read this article I would have cheered for well-roundedness, I think. But now I agree with DFW that "the radical compression of [Michael Joyce's] attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art - something few of us get to be. It's allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under willing scrutiny and pressure."

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
This was the last one (relieved, are you?) and the longest, and probably the funniest, or at least tied with the one about the Illinois State Fair. The two essays are very similar - basically, DFW goes out of his element to visit a segment of American culture he normally wouldn't partake of, and he makes cutting but not mean observations while also offering a sociological position on the culture in question so we don't think we're just reading an especially witty diary. This, then, is David Foster Wallace on a Caribbean cruise.

The funniest parts are when he describes his fear of being sucked into the vacuum toilet attached to his cabin, and when he talks about his dinner-table companions (they stay the same for the duration of the cruise). He hates Mona, a spoiled 18-year-old that hates everything, including the grandparents that are paying her way, but (platonically) loves Alice, a college-aged girl that's sort of obsessed with her boyfriend, but in a way that makes DFW think she's just trying to let him know she's not available. Her mother, however, dislikes the boyfriend and attempts to hook up Alice and DFW, which creates all sorts of intra-table discomfort.

Most of the cruisegoers, though, are old people with pastel shirts and deluxe Cameras, and while I am now too tired to describe their exploits, I am sufficiently awake to advise you to read this essay posthaste to find out more. (July 8-14, 2004)

Mimi's, a bar in the Marigny section of New Orleans

2004-11-20T17:41:00.000-06:00

Why Mimi's is the best.bar.ever:

1. They have a brand-new pool table. The felt is pristine, the balls are unchipped, they provide hand chalk as well as cue chalk, and it's only fifty cents a game. The only improvements I would make are (1) hanging up a dry-erase board to keep track of who's waiting to play next, to avoid the row of anonymous quarters, and (2) moving the high-top tables away from the window side of the table so you don't have to ask people to move before you shoot.

2. They have pool players. I hung out with a couple of guys that play on a league team there and are even going to start up a weekly tournament. One of the boys I met last night brought his own cue, even, so I wasn't the only one.

3. There's plenty of street parking available, so you don't have to drive around for half an hour like you do in the Quarter, looking for a semi-legal space.

4. They have a hottie bartender that plays ESG on the stereo. ESG, for Christ's sake. I told her a long story about how I got into them via Elastica, and how I still have the case to South Bronx Story but the disc itself has mysteriously vanished, and she listened patiently and then gave me a free double Captain and Diet Coke...a $7 drink.

5. They allow dogs -- even Susie -- and, indeed, they provide a water bowl.

6. The bathroom walls feature the following items of graffiti: "Elvis died in a place not unlike this one," and "I like Soft Carrots in my butt." (July 22, 2004)

One Pill Makes You Smaller, Lisa Dierbeck, 2003

2004-11-20T17:38:00.000-06:00

Tells the story of Alice, an eleven-year-old girl being raised by her sixteen-year-old half sister in 1976 New York. The sister has an obsession with a minor celebrity, so she takes off for L.A. to meet him and packs Alice off to art camp in North Carolina. Alice is an, um, early bloomer, and she can easily pass for sixteen, and she gets all mixed up with boys way too old for her. I thought being sixteen was difficult enough when I was sixteen, but imagine how confusing it must be for an eleven-year-old. Dierbeck does an excellent job of making Alice's world seem like that of her Lewis Carroll counterpart, drawing the parallel beautifully without ever pointing it out. Makes me want to reread Dreamhouse, Alison Habens, 1997; it features another Alice analog, this one a bride-to-be that hosts a dinner party for her family and fiancé but ends up stumbling into a costume party, accidentally dosing on acid and changing her life. (April 29 - May 1, 2004)

The Scapegoat, Daphne du Maurier, 1957

2004-11-20T17:37:00.000-06:00

This one is a longtime favorite. It's the story of an Englishman named John. He's a Francophile and a professor of French history, and while on holiday in France, he runs into his double -- a Frenchman named Jean. Jean is somewhat of an opportunist, and since he's been having family and business problems, he drugs John and runs off with his wallet, car, clothes and all the possessions John has with him. This leaves John to assume Jean's identity and try to make sense of Jean's life. It's hard for me to recall another book in which I felt so deeply for the characters; when the real Jean comes back to reclaim his family and undo all the good John has done for them in his place, I wanted to scream, No! No! Go away and let them be! But I didn't. (May 2-3, 2004)

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen, 2001

2004-11-20T17:35:00.000-06:00

I love, love, love this book. It's about three adult siblings and their parents. The older generation, Enid and Albert, live together in the Midwestern town in which they raised their family. Enid is the most one-dimensional and the least sympathetic of the five leads; she's far more concerned with how she looks to her friends than with the realities of her families' lives. She's obsessed with Christmas decorations and she wants nothing more than to see all of her kids married and conventionally successful. She resents that her husband, Alfred, in the early stages of Parkinson's, won't be more aggressive with his investments. Alfred, for his part, wishes everyone would just leave him alone to wet his pants and take his baths and sit in his favorite old chair.

The kids are all spectacular failures, from their mother's point of view; she doesn't necessarily know the "problems" each child has, but she'd loathe it if she did. Denise, chef at a supertrendy Philadelphia restaurant, has just been fired for sleeping with her boss's wife; Chip too has been fired for sexual indiscretions, these involving a student in his Cultural Studies class, and plus he's an alcoholic; Gary has a drinking problem, an unhappy marriage, and two sons that hate him. Denise and Chip are slightly closer and more likely to confide in one another, but Gary's pretty much on his own.

The complicated lives of the five characters are interesting enough to make the book hard to put down throughout most of its 568 pages, although the Lithuania section (Chip accepts a job swindling American investors via the Web, but must go to Eastern Europe to do so, where the laws are not so strict) is a bit tedious and the part in which Enid and Alfred take a Canadian cruise feels a little false. Still, I laughed out loud throughout the book and cared about every character. Well, except not Enid so much. (May 4-8, 2004)

What Happened in Hamelin, Gloria Skurzynski, 1979

2004-11-20T17:33:00.000-06:00

Brilliant. It tells the story of what might have actually taken place when the Pied Piper led one hundred thirty children out of the town of Hamelin, Germany, in 1284. That apparently really happened...it wasn't just a fairy tale. The author is a scholar of German history, and while she doesn't claim her book tells what really happened, she does suggest that it's historically possible. It involves the eating of rye grains containing a strain of mold that causes hallucinogens and lower body pain that is relieved by dancing and other leg exercises, and a flutist that brings music to a town that knew none before. It's excellent. Has a similar feel to Tale of Despereaux, this year's Newbery winner, if anyone's looking for read-alikes. (May 10, 2004)

Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, Ann Head, 1967

2004-11-20T17:32:00.000-06:00

This was one of the first young adult "problem novels," the subgenre that deals with personal and social problems kids face, everything from acne to divorce to alcoholism. Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones is about July, a sixteen-year-old that finds herself pregnant by Bo Jo, whom she dates frequently but who's not her steady boyfriend. The two decide their only option is to get married, and they run away and do so, much to the chagrin of both sets of parents. It's a classic and a good one, although my library had it shelved in adult fiction, even though it's clearly YA (I changed it when I checked it back in). I guess that when we bought the book, back when it was new, teen sex wasn't supposed to be discussed in YA novels; now, of course, no YA novel would be complete without a blow job and a crack pipe.

Humorously, there isn't even any sex in the book. The baby is conceived during an incident on the beach that's described in only one sentence and as something like "the time [the narrator] got carried away." Seriously. Good read, though. (May 9-10, 2004)

Looking at Pictures: An Introduction to Art for Young People, Joy Richardson, 1997

2004-11-20T17:30:00.000-06:00

I feel incredibly stupid when confronted with art, like in a museum or something; I'm notoriously unobservant and unable to process visual information (other than text) very well, and I was looking for something that would give me an idea of what I'm supposed to be looking for in a painting, what makes a great painting great, etc. just when I was looking through an issue of (I think) School Library Journal that reviewed art books for kids. So I snagged this one.

It's easy enough for me to understand, yet complicated enough that I find it interesting. All the paintings pictured and described are in the National Gallery in London, which narrows the scope enough that the book isn't fifty thousand pages long. Each painting discussed has a section called "What's going on?" which describes the action in the painting, and one called "Making the painting" that tells about the techniques used. There's a large full-color picture of each work, with some closeups that provide detail, which is also described. Additional sections for each painting tell about unusual features of design, craftmanship, or social context. I highly recommend this to anyone age ten and up that wants an introduction to a few of the world's great paintings. (May 11, 2004)

American Gods, Neil Gaiman, 2001

2004-11-20T17:27:00.000-06:00

Everyone told me I should read this one, and I resisted because while I loved his Stardust, I only liked Coraline okay, and I couldn't get into Neverwhere at all. But everyone's like, "Oh, read American Gods. Read Good Omens." But I refused until one day I was babysitting and when the parents got home, the dad caught a glimpse of my Gaiman bookmark (in an unrelated book) and insisted that I take his copy of American Gods. He would not take no for an answer. So I took it home, opened it up, and fell in love. It's incredible.

It reminds me the most of the Stephen King/Peter Straub collaboration The Talisman, but it's also got shades of Daphne du Maurier's The Scapegoat (Salim's encounter in New York); every other Stephen King book ever (the reliance on
dreams to introduce you to the demons, and the song/poem quotes that begin every chapter, and the grizzled old small-town storytellers); Douglas Adams's Mostly Harmless (the multidimensional gods); and even Donna Tartt's The Secret History and John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany (the descriptions of the funeral at Ibis and Jacquel's have echoes in both books, and besides Mr. Wednesday's interactions with various waitstaff remind me somehow of Tartt's character Henry). Gorgeous read. I might even put Good Omens on my list. (May 13-17, 2004)

True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, Martha Brooks, 2003

2004-11-20T17:25:00.000-06:00

Totally sucked. I read a review and apparently liked the idea enough to request a copy; I wish I knew which review so I could go back and reread it and figure out what made me want to read this book. It's about a seventeen-year-old girl that drives into a small town. She's pregnant and boyfriendless, so Lynda, the middle-aged woman that owns the local coffeeshop, takes her in; Lynda has man troubles of her own, of course, so they commiserate, and Noreen-the-knocked-up-teen starts working at the diner, and a bunch of other kindly old Southern ladies start poking their noses in, and you know by about page ten that by the end Lynda's going to get
together with the sad middle-aged man with A History (he's a recovering alcoholic and his brother died twenty years ago), and that Noreen's going to get back together with her baby daddy, and they both Relearn How to Love. Yuck.

Totally a romance, too, so I wish it'd been billed as such. The definition of romance, according to my Adult Popular Fiction class, is a book whose happy ending relies on the two main characters hooking up. This book clearly could not go any other way.

Weirder still is that it won a bunch of awards -- the CLA Young Adult Canadian Book Award (2003), the Governor General's Children's Book Award (2002), ALA Best Books 2004...I just don't get it. It's not very interesting, the ending is obvious, the characters are stereotypes, and the only message is "Love is sometimes hard." (May 11-12, 2004)

Inkheart, Cornelia Funke, 2003

2004-11-20T17:22:00.000-06:00

The premise is enchanting: a man has the ability to "read people out" of books, like the characters literally come to life...but something from our world disappears into the story in exchange. When his daughter Meggie, the protagonist of Inkheart, was only three, he read some villains out of their story and accidentally read his wife into the book. Now Meggie is twelve and the villains want to be read back in, so there are kidnap plots afoot, and Meggie wants to know what happened to her mother.

This has the potential for excellence, but it turns out to be mediocre. For one thing, the book is much too long. Much too long. It's 534 pages and a lot of it is filler. I think the story could be told in about one-third of the length and it's really crippling. I love long books but only when they're packed with action and/or character development, but nothing really seems to be happening to the characters in any sense. None of them are fully developed, and they're all Pure Good, so there's no room for improvement, which ruins the whole thing. (May 17-22, 2004)

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

2004-11-20T17:15:00.000-06:00

Funniest.shit.ever. While I was lying on my bed reading it, I kept laughing out loud and making the dog jump on my face. It (the book, I mean) is hilarious. Biff's gospel is about the lost years of Jesus's life - his childhood and young adulthood - as told by Biff, an old buddy of his. Biff has been commissioned to write it by an angel that brought him back to life in 2000ish.

It's hilarious and heartbreaking, emphasis on the former: Biff reveals himself as the inventor of sarcasm as well as coffee with milk and sugar, and he tries to convince Joshua (Jesus) of the existence of gravity ("stickiness") and natural selection. Joshua and Biff spend the "missing years" (Jesus's birth to age 30) in India, China, and what is now Afghanistan, seeking wisdom from leaders of other religions, since Joshua knows he's the Messiah but doesn't know what he's supposed to do with that.

The funniest passages include the writing of the Beatitudes ("Okay, the meek inherit the earth, and mourners shall be comforted...what do the dumbfucks get?") and explain why rabbits are associated with Easter (Joshua thought it was a good idea when he was drunk). Mary of Magdalena (Maggie) isn't a prostitute; this is one way in which Lamb agrees with the Bible and not with pop-culture descriptions of the New Testament. She does become one of Jesus's followers, leaving her husband to do so, and the author theorizes that this may have led to her portrayal as a whore.

Only the last forty pages of the book are devoted to the Passion, Jesus's trial, death and resurrection, and they almost made me cry. I'm not religious, as anyone that knows me can tell you; I'm an avowed agnostic, if there is such a thing. But seeing the whole Jesus show get out of control and snowball into state-sponsored murder is scarily real. The end may surprise you; neither Jesus nor Judas dies the way we think they do.

Read this book now or I'll punch you in the face. (May 22-23, 2004)

The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, 2004

2004-11-20T17:10:00.000-06:00

Someone-I-can't-remember said this was supposed to be a lot like The Secret History, my favorite book in high school. It tells the story of two Princeton seniors that try to unravel the mysteries of a fifteenth-century Latin book. That does sound like Donna Tartt crossed with Dan Brown, doesn't it? And the authors' bio reads: "Ian Caldwell was Phi Beta Kappa in history at Princeton University. He lives in Newport News, Virginia. Dustin Thomason won the Hoopes Prize at Harvard University. He lives in New York City. They began writing The Rule of Four after graduating in 1998. The two have been best friends since they were eight years old."

Awwww. I love projects created by best friends, especially when they make themselves into characters that are also best friends. Um...Good Will Hunting. I can't think of any others actually.

Anyway, The Rule of Four is about eighty times better than The Da Vinci Code. Just a few short months ago, I declared TDVC to be one of my favorite books of 2003; since then I have pondered why I liked it so much then but consider it not even memorable now, but haven't come up with anything. Until today. The Rule of Four has made me realize that I liked The Da Vinci Code so much because of its lush subject matter -- the history of Catholicism, codebreaking, ancient books -- even though the format was standard thriller with chapter-ending cliffhangers, and even though I could break most of the codes myself, so how could they be challenging for the master cryptographers in the book?, and even though the romantic element was both obvious and gratuitous. But now, in The Rule of Four, what I've got is even better -- the same codebreaking and ancient books (I'm not sure what the Catholic tie-in is going to be yet, but the book takes place over Easter weekend, 1999), plus it happens on a college campus (Princeton, with true-to-life details like the use of the real names of their eating clubs). There are four close-knit roommates, just like in The Lords of Discipline, another of my all-time favorite books. The Secret History parallels abound as well --small group of erudite students, esoteric subject matter, professor/student intrigue, murder, elitism, worship of the old masters, etc. (May 30-31, 2004)

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, 2003

2004-11-20T17:08:00.000-06:00

I love Becky, and that, to some degree, is because I love Pattern Recognition, which I'd never have read if it weren't for her. She has something like a 96% success rate when it comes to recommending books to me, and Pattern Recognition is one of the best. It's about a woman named Cayce whose job is to hang out in Camden and Manhattan and wherever, looking to see what's cool in the street-fashion world so she can report back to companies that will then turn her observations into consumable units of cool. But on her own time, she's fascinated by a mysterious movie that's been released only in small, random segments, spread out over time, and hidden in remote corners of the Internet. Then she's hired to track down the nameless creator of the film, and there's also this thing where her father disappeared on 9/11, and yeah. Read it. (May 4-6, 2004)

Just Ella, Margaret Peterson Haddix, 1999

2004-11-20T17:05:00.000-06:00

I read her Running Out of Time on Becky's recommendation, so I picked this one up when I saw it at the library, and it's wonderful. It begins a couple of months after (Cinder)Ella agrees to marry the prince, and now they're engaged and she lives in the royal castle and receives lessons on etiquette, protocol, geneaology, etc. Also, everyone in the castle seems to believe that the fairy godmother/coach-into-pumpkin tale is true, but really Ella got to the ball all on her own without the help of any magic. Excellent. (April 9-10, 2004)

The School Story, Andrew Clements, 2001

2004-11-20T17:04:00.000-06:00

Two twelve-year-old girls, Natalie and Zoe, conspire to get Natalie's novel published by her mother's firm without anyone knowing the identity of the author. Zoe poses as Natalie's agent and later helps her with publicity. One of my favorite elements of the book didn't have anything to do with the plot; it was the New York City setting that appealed to me. Most books about twelve-year-old girls are set in Sleepyside, New York, or Stoneybrook, Connecticut, or Farbrook, New Jersey. I always wondered when I was younger why there weren't more books set in cities and in Catholic schools; I had no idea what it was like to ride a bus to school, or what a "middle school" was, or how it was that all these kids went to schools that were all white except a token Black kid. (April 8, 2004)

The Girl Who Owned a City, O.T. Nelson, 1995

2004-11-20T17:01:00.000-06:00

This one describes a plague that kills everyone over twelve, so the kids have to get together and rebuild society. There are Evil Kids, of course, that form gangs to rob the Good Kids of their food, but the conflicts within the Good Kids' realm are especially interesting. However, I'm going to have to give this one two thumbs down. It turns into a muddled, confusing story about an egocentric child that rules all the other kids by being a bitch. She's meant to be contrasted with the gangs of bullies that threaten to take over the town (Glen Ellyn, Illinois, incidentally), but her own right to power is just as arbitrary. The book doesn't have any point and the writing is sloppy; at one point, Lisa "lays down on the bed" or something like that. (April 11-12, 2004)

Feed, M.T. Anderson, 2002

2004-11-20T17:00:00.000-06:00

This one's a Becky recommendation and is as good as hers usually are. Another YA science fiction novel, it's set fifty or so years in the future, at a time when everyone's brain has a "feed" of constantly streaming commercials, chat capability, etc. If your feed goes down, you feel isolated from the world. There's a lot of futuristic faux-teen jargon, which the author apparently spent hours in malls and chat rooms researching. I think he did a decent job, too; it's fairly realistic and while I was annoyed at first, I'm used to it now. (April 12-13, 2004)

The Church of Dead Girls, Stephen Dobyns, 1997

2004-11-20T16:57:00.000-06:00

Opening paragraph:

"This is how they looked: three dead girls propped up in three straight chairs. The fourteen-year-old sat in the middle. She was taller than the others by half a head. The two thirteen-year-olds sat on either side of her. Across the chest of each girl was an X of rope leading over her shoulders, down around her waist, and fastened in the back. All three girls were barefoot and their ankles were tied to the legs of their chairs. Even so, the ropes were loose, as if to hold their bodies erect rather than to keep their living selves prisoner: meaning they had been tied after they were dead."

Are Dobyns's others any good? This one's the closest thing to The Secret History that I've ever read -- it's still remarkably different since that book is special as hell, but this one has the erudite student group led by a strange little foreign man; the mysterious death; the one kid that doesn't quite fit in with the group; the small-town politics and closeted gays; etc.

I didn't guess the murderer, although it really doesn't matter who it is. The book was a pleasure to read because of the depiction of small-town life and politics and the interactions between the characters, and trying to decipher what the narrator's up to, not who actually killed the girls. (April 13-17, 2004)

Second Ending, Evan Hunter, 1954

2004-11-20T16:54:00.000-06:00

I only picked it up because I liked his The Blackboard Jungle so much a couple of weeks ago, and the back cover of that one said this was about a heroin addict, so I put a hold on it. By the time I got around to reading it, though, I had doubts; I wasn't fresh from reading The Blackboard Jungle so I'd forgotten what I liked about that one so much: the author's voice, for one thing, and something about books written in the fifties that I've been liking lately.

Anyway, Second Ending turned out to be excellent. It's almost as good as The Church of Dead Girls in its own way. It starts a little slow -- it's 1949 and a college student, Bud, sits in his room studying when the phone rings. It's his friend Carol, wanting him to babysit their friend Andy while he kicks heroin. Bud reluctantly agrees; he's seen Andy kick too many times before and they just don't know each other that well any more, and Bud is studying for finals. Andy gets there and is loud and annoying and sick while Ben's trying to read, and then Andy escapes into the city to buy drugs, and it's pretty good but not great, and then the second section is what happened five years ago when Bud and Andy played in a jazz band together as high school students, and their first girlfriends, and....it's really good and you should go get it now. (April 17-19, 2004)

The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler, 2004

2004-11-20T16:50:00.000-06:00

I love Tyler, but this one covered some old ground; the wife is described on the jacket flap as "impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life," while the husband is "plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately." Sounds a hell of a lot like her Breathing Lessons (1988), which I read last month. Still, she does a ridiculously good job with these things -- a hell of a job. Also on the jacket flap is a blurb by Tom Shone of the New Yorker that says, "Her feel for character is so keen that even hardened metafictionalists -- readers who subsist on a diet of Robbe-Grillet and who would happily fry the whole notion of 'character' for breakfast -- are reduced to the role of helpless gossips, swapping avid hunches about the possible fates of the characters." Yeah, what he said. (May 25-26, 2004)

The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic, Gay and Laney Salisbury, 2003

2004-11-20T16:48:00.000-06:00

Pretty good overall...I love dogs, of course, so reading about cute canine heroes was rewarding, and I also love the whole man-struggles-against-nature theme. But the writing was a little weak. The authors are two first cousins and I think this was their first effort, and it sounds like they're more accustomed to writing academic papers or newspaper articles than telling a good yarn. The book should have been full of suspense, but it wasn't; in fact, it read a bit like they wrote it too dry at first and their editor suggested adding some suspense so they went back in and threw in sentences like, "And the next leg of the journey promised to be the most
dangerous yet," but it doesn't quite work.

I would also have liked to have been a bit more privy to the research process...the serum run in question took place in 1925, so the authors relied heavily on newspaper accounts, but (for example) one of the sled-dog drivers is named only as Jackscrew. No idea what his real name was. The authors just sort of let that slide. Why not tell me what you did to try to uncover who he really was? (April 21-24, 2004)

The English Roses, Madonna, 2003

2004-11-20T15:34:00.000-06:00

Why this book sucked:

It's a fucking picture book and the illustrator doesn't even get cover credit. This is unheard of, and also ridiculous since the art is excellent and almost, but not quite, redeeming.

The book is about four little girls - one white and blonde with glasses, one white and brunette, one white redhead and one Black girl. They're all jealous of a fifth girl, who is blonde without glasses and "skin like milk and honey." Could she not have selected an unconventional beauty? Even...a brunette?

The sentence "It all sounds so perfectly fun and nice."

The forced whimsy. Madonna says to the reader, "If you say [you have never been jealous], you are telling a big, fat fib and I am going to tell your mother." She continues addressing her audience in this manner throughout the book. I'm sure she thinks it's charming, but it's actually patronizing and detracts from the story, especially since there's no frame in which a narrator is established.

It's never explained why the girls are referred to as English Roses.

The moral is apparently, "Pretty girls have hard lives too." This is, of course, the message of a million fairy tales, so it's especially stupid that Madonna says she wrote the book "because there are no good children's books out there." Fuck that noise. (March 2, 2004)

Addicted, Zane, 1998

2004-11-20T15:33:00.000-06:00

Man, what a crappy book. Zoe, the narrator, is married but has three lovers (two men, with whom she's madly in lust, and a woman, whom she claims she only fucked because the chick begged her) because her husband doesn't satisfy her sexually. So she finds out that she likes sex a lot (she'd lost her virginity to her future husband, then married him when she got pregnant, so she'd only ever been with him) and seeks therapy. Her shrink tells her she's a sex addict. Later we find out this is because she was molested when she was younger by some boys in her class. There are also two murderers running around; one of them is sleeping with Zoe and one is sleeping with her best friend. It's all very convoluted and shallow and relies on pop psychology for its premises. Still, it was entertaining. I finished it, anyway. Oh, and Zoe has no umlaut, so I'm not sure how it's pronounced. (March 6-7, 2004)

Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott, 1993, and various works by Shirley Jackson

2004-11-20T15:28:00.000-06:00

Last spring I was on a true-stories-of-motherhood kick, beginning with Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, her book about the first year of raising her son. Lamott has written several novels that I've never read, and she also wrote a guide to writing called Bird by Bird that I read while pretending that I was going to participate in what Jeff insists on calling NanuNanu. Lamott is an ex-cokehead and alcoholic and now she's found religion, which would normally irritate me but she doesn't make too big a deal out of it.

Next I read Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages 1948. Jackson, of course, is famous for her short story "The Lottery" and her novel The Haunting of Hill House, but my favorite of her books is We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I saw the play when I was a college student and then immediately checked the book out of the library, and later I had to buy it. It's about a family that lives on the edge of a small town and most of the family members have mysteriously died. Two sisters live in the family house now with an invalid uncle, and the younger one goes to town every week for library books and groceries; her older sister, who's suspected of poisoning the rest of the family, won't leave the house because of her reputation. It's splendid. Here's the opening paragraph:

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be contented with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

Seems like I've read another Shirley Jackson book, too...I wish I could remember the name of it. It was similar to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Oh, and I read her The Bird's Nest back when I was on my multiple personality disorder kick. Anyway, Life Among the Savages is a memoir of raising small children. It's much sunnier and funnier than Jackson's spooky novels; in fact, it reads like a cross between Erma Bombeck and Cheaper by the Dozen. (March 14, April 6-8, and April 20, 2004)

Goofy Foot: An Alex Rasmussen Mystery, David Daniel, 2003

2004-11-20T15:26:00.000-06:00

This one was okay at best. I'd rather read a detective story with a female cop or PI like Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski or Julie Smith's Skip Langdon, and I like the old-fashioned hardboiled detective like Ridley Pearson's Lou Boldt, but Alex Rasmussen of Goofy Foot was just sort of dorky. He has all the traditional PI attributes; he's an ex-cop and a divorcee, a loner and a whiskey-drinker, and he drives an old beat-up car and doesn't understand kids these days and their crazy fictional bands like Satan Bugg. That was what irritated me the most - the character had all these interactions with teenagers and he tried to relate to them and everything, and it would have been cute if the detective got the teen slang wrong, but instead the teens (i.e. the author) got it wrong. They referred to a new nightclub as "a chill," when the author probably meant "chill" as an adjective, for example. And hackeysack was spelled "Haki Sack." And shit like that. (March 16-17, 2004)

Above the Thunder, Renee Manfredi, 2003

2004-11-20T15:23:00.000-06:00

This was one of those books in which I became so absorbed, even early on, that I didn't notice anything going on around me and then when something external happened, like the dog jumped on me, I would realize with a sad smile that this is a book that works like a drug. It's told from two different points of view and both are equally mesmerizing. There's Anna, a fifty-three-year-old widow who's estranged from her daughter Poppy. Poppy left home as a teenager to get married and Anna hasn't seen her since; she could forgive this, except that when Poppy's father was dying of cancer, Anna called her and wrote her letters and Poppy said she would come but never showed up. Anna speaks now of how sad it was to see her husband's eyes light up whenever the phone or doorbell rang, but it was never his daughter, and now he's dead. So now, years later, Poppy has left Anna several messages saying she wants to come visit. Anna considers Poppy's actions unforgivable, but agrees to let her come only because the last time she called, Anna had a friend over and didn't want to begin arguing with Poppy in front of her.

The second story, told in alternating chapters, is about a couple in their late thirties, Jack and Stuart. Stuart has been depressed lately, and Jack has been cheating, lately -- with a very young and gorgeous hooker named Hector. I'm pretty sure that soon Jack, or maybe Stuart, is going to turn up HIV positive, and I guess that will be the connection to Anna and her story, because Anna has reluctantly begun leading a support group for people with AIDS.

It's just one of those books where I loved all the characters and couldn't stop reading. Go get it now. (March 18-19, 2004)