Dallas Summer Musicals!

Flashdance!   So not what I'd expected.

Performances, music, and yes, dancing,

Great.

A kid's book unlike any other I've ever read

Finished Isle Of The Blue Dolphins at work today, while everyone was at a farewell luncheon for our secretary.  I like her but I just couldn't face another farewell luncheon.

Good book.  Great book.  It made me cry a little.

Based on a true story but just an outline of a story--an Indian girl is left alone when she goes back to get her brother after the rest of her people float away on a big ship.  And so she stays, alone...but for the wild dogs, sea otters, birds, and assorted other hard-working creatures.

I wonder how much Nim's Island owed to this book.

A book, just a book. Sad, isn't it?

Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much About Geography was a book assignment for one of my high-school kids.  I obediently bought a copy, then I read the cover and decided I wanted to read it after he was done.   I don't think he ever opened the book, but I just did.

Good points: the famous people quotes.  The state names appendix.  The comparative measures appendix (wish it had been longer.)

 Bad points:  face it--it's boring.  It starts off with a 10-1/2 page introduction which is guaranteed to put any high-school kid to sleep.  The chapter titles are funny and the occasional joke spices it up, but in general, it didn't tell me a whole lot that I didn't already know.

In addition, the boundary between geography and history was breached so many times that I don't think it really taught the subject that it purported to teach.  Geography shapes history, molds history, and frequently even determines history--but that doesn't mean it's okay for one third of the book to recite clever historical facts that are only dubiously connected with geography.  Lots of times I'd think to myself, "Well, this is some interesting history here...but what's it doing in this book?"

So many times I wished he'd explained how geography had influenced history, social development, or even culture...but he seldom did.

Sorry not to like this better.   I hope my failure to appreciate doesn't mean that I'm such a know-it-all who I can't be taught.  I don't think so.

Still working on Don't Know Much About Geography

No book review and no food pictures to post.  Sunday's cooking was the same old shrimp spaghetti that I've made several times before.  It came out strangely bland.  On Monday I created an omelette but the filling overwhelmed the eggs.  It was more of a bacon-ham-mushroom-cheese frittata than an omelette.

Next cooking adventure--
Tacos.  Boring!

Short book; short review

It's Not The End Of The World

The other Judy Blume books have made me a fan, but I have to admit I didn't like this one. It's more dated--less relevant--and everyone was flat--even the heroine. And like so many other books I've read for this project, it's a kid book, not a teen book. Not that I don't like kid's books--it just wasn't a good kid's book.

In it's favor, it does deal with one universal theme--what does a kid do when the grownups won't tell you things? Answer, and a good one: you ask. And keep asking until you get answers. Even if you have to plop yourself down in front of the bathroom door and wait a person out.  That, I liked. It reminded me of the scared and lonely feelings I had, back when my mom went through a strange couple of years where she'd go into crying fits and hide away in her bedroom. No one mentioned menopause back then--I thought she was going crazy.

Bertie and Jeeves, my new obsession

The next two books come as a pair--The Inimitable Jeeves and Very Good, Jeeves!  I'm going to read the third one in the collection, too, but I won't take credit for it.  It would be cheating to eliminate a book (Go Ask Alice) and replace it with two more.

And all I can say about them is this: Why the heck did I never read these before?


All of that reading I used to do, classics and the what-not, and I never could pick up a single one of these?  I even read The Pickwick Papers, Tom Jones, and I tried to read Sam Johnson's autobiography.  Why not these?

The Jeeves books are collections of short tales of Bertie Wooster and his invaluable gentleman's personal gentleman (as Jeeves prefers to identify himself.)  In each so far, someone gets in a pickle--either Bertie, his friends Bingo, Tuppy, or other people including his overbearing aunt Agatha and uppity Aunt Dahlia.  Bertie comes up with a brilliant plan which almost invariably fails, and Jeeves saves the day.  Very Good, Jeeves!
Add on top of that the writing, like creamy, thick cake icing:

1. "This club," I said, "is the limit."
   "It is the eel's eyebrows," agreed young Bingo.  "I believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days, but I don't like to mention it to anyone."

or regarding the proper tieing of neckties,

1. "What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?  Do you realize that Mr. Little's domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?"
   "There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter."

or on realizing a glitch in the plan,

1. ...and a most unpleasant feeling it was -- rather like when you take one of those express elevators in New York at the top of the building and discover, on reaching the twenty-seventh floor, that you have carelessly left all your insides up on the thirty-second, and it's too late now to stop and fetch them back.

Enough reviewing--back to reading.

Big ol' spider

Finally got out to the beans.  They're huge and turning yellow. The pods, not the plants.  They're being shaded out by the enormous clumps of grass between the rows.  Not much I can do about that tonight--well, not much I care to do about that tonight.  If they hold on until the weekend I'll get rid of the grass and pick them over..

Caught this little feller out yesterday evening.  I thought tarantulas only prowled in the fall, but this is the third or fourth one I've seen this spring.

Last after school special

What to say about Are You In The House Alone?  Truly an afterschool special.  Manipulative; message-based; preachy at the end....




and good.  The people made sense, you know?  Everyone was a person I knew--everyone talked and acted just like my own parents and friends might have, back in the seventies, when confronted with a ugliness outside their experience.   There were no villains, not even the perp--he was just as much a victim as his victims.  It was real as real and twice as life-size.

I'm scared to recommend this to a teenager--it'd keep them up all night.  First reading and then checking the windows.

Slowest cook on the face of the planet

Started at 4:50, finished at 8:15.  Nearly three-and-one-half hours on my feet.  There's a load of clean dishes in the dishwasher, but there's half of a load of dirty ones on the counter.

And I forgot to take a picture.  It wasn't much to look at--just Father's Day steaks, cauliflower casserole, and fried mushrooms.  I also cooked a Goulash to have later on in the week...we'll see about that.  I think the paprika is overpowering and I can only hope the twang will tone down during three days of refrigeration.

Movie review

Epic

Beautiful!  Maybe not as funny as they wanted it to be but we did laugh from the belly a couple of times.  The snail/slug gross-out factor would have been hilarious if we'd had a couple of five-year-olds with us.

Even without five-year-old supervision, it was definitely not a waste of 102 minutes.

Again, a teen book. Again.

Don't you hate it when a book is so heavy with "message" that it should sink like a lump of iron...and it doesn't?

Don't Hurt Laurie is one of those.  It reads like a social worker's handbook on chronic child abuse--how is it covered up; why the kid doesn't tell anyone; why people don't notice; what the giveaway signs are ....

We know it all now, but back when the book was first published it wasn't a topic on the six o'clock news.  You have to applaud Willo Davis Roberts for writing it out loud.  And, incidentally, making a good story out of it.  The nine-year-old, Tim, is an enduring hero.

I don't suggest it for an afternoon's light reading, but it's highly recommended for middle schoolers.  Sort of a reminder that people are basically good and trusting which opens the door for a real nutcase to run amok...as long as they're sneaky about it.

Only one more book to go from Chapter 5, You Heard It Here First: Very Afterschool Specials.  I've enjoyed it, but I'm looking forward to Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds and Ladies Living Off the Fat of the Land.   But first, I get a grownup book again.  Yeah

Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays --Arthur Dent

I'm going to review these next two books out of order, because I'm still not sure what I thought about the first one:


The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Man In the World

by A. J. Jacobs

Or maybe not.  I've found I don't laugh out loud at books these days, maybe I never did.  But I came oh-so-close to it on this one.  A. J. Jacobs is like Erma Bombeck--a humor writer who is also a human being, and you laugh the louder because you feel where he's coming from.  His petty sarcasm is your petty sarcasm.

So I liked this, a lot..  I followed his odyssey through the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 33,400 pages of it.  I loved his subtle rivalries with his father and his brother-in-law Eric, the biggest know-it-all he knows.  I shared his embarrassment at a Mensa meeting and a school visit.  And I adored his family, every kindly and kooky one of them.  And despite the chapter titles A-Z, the book actually had a plot.  Several--my favorites were the pregnancy pursuit and the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? melee.   (Sorry, tiny spoiler there.)

The second book, which I devoured in a long session this afternoon, will be reviewed tomorrow.

My precious

The most beautiful tomato ever conceived...and probably the only full-sized tomato I'll get this year. There's one more turning yellow on the vine but I think it's ripening because of sunscald--I'm scared to look closely.

And one beautiful little pestilence. Not a friend to gardeners, but cute as a button. He wasn't happy when I plucked him off and tossed him into the grass.

I'm adding books to my to-read list a lot faster than I'm marking them off.  Was it smart to start reading a librarian's blog while I'm locked into a 100-book challenge?

A teen read worth reading

by Patricia Reilly Giff


I should review The Gift of the Pirate Queen while the tears are still streaming out of my eyes.  I'd rank it right up there with Ellen Tebbits and The Boxcar Children, two books I read over and over again in grade school.  I actually own a copy of each, picked up long after I left home and moved into an apartment.  An adult, theoretically.

Gift of the Pirate Queen would have been another of them, if I'd encountered it.  But did it belong in Shelf Discovery: the Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading?  Probably not--it's a classic but hardly a teen classic.  When I was a teenager I was reading Barnabas Collins and Fahrenheit 451 and The Warlock In Spite of Himself.

But if you're twelve, read it.  It is a funny, friendly story of a girl who thinks she's lacking in courage but isn't; who wants to be a veterinarian; looks after her goat and her adopted dog; takes care of her diabetic little sister Amy; does the cooking and cleans the house (maybe not perfectly but perfectly well enough); and does her homework.  With all that, suddenly her Father decides to bring his cousin Fiona, unmarried, elderly and a little strange-looking, over from Ireland to take care of the girls.  Grace is having none of it.

Teen interrupted

Deenie by Judy Blume.


Judy Blume has a true gift for getting down whack-job parents and the screwed up kids they create.  You might think Deenie is a story about a girl with sciliosis, but in Ms. Blume's own words,

1. I think of the story as one about parental expectations. Deenie's mother says, Deenie's the beauty, Helen's the brain.  What happens when a parent pigeonholes her children that way?

Goes to show you don't have to be unloving or abusive to raise up a messed up kid.  I got the impression Deenie and Helen will get past it, eventually.  Maybe with a little therapy.  It sure makes me think about my own parenting weaknesses and long string of failures.  Good intentions and the road to hell and all.

This is a book I'd recommend to any young teenager.  If possible, read it in a book group with discussion.  In a perfect world, with a little guidance from an older person, say a big sister or brother.

Saturday musical!

Nothing like the movie songwise and not nearly as funny as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but some of the numbers were out of this world!  Literally.

I still want Callie to see the movie.  I consider it charming.

On track and even slipped in a freebie

Next book review,

Beat the Turtle Drum by Constance C. Greene


How about reading an out-of-print, mass market teen paperback from the seventies...with a massive spoiler on the back cover? 

From the first page I knew how it was going to end.  I just didn't know the particulars.

It was surprisingly well-written and the characters were surprisingly endearing.  Vivacious Joss.  Her observant, thoughtful sister--the narrator--I never did catch her name.  Slightly slow Tootie, out of place in his brainy family but quick to recognize the beauty of a true friend.  Conventional Sam.  The bizarre couple, Mr. and Mrs. Essig.  I liked them all.

But overall, for an adult reader who didn't grow up with the book, it was short and shallow.  I'm sure there are a lot of teen books an adult can read and love, but this wasn't one.
It's for thirteen and under.  But recommended.



As to the freebie--I read The Pigman's Legacy and it was awesome!

It misses it's Mommy.

Huh--when I was snapping this shot (this is my garden, by the way), I didn't even notice the nice big banana pepper.  On the right, just below center..   I don't feel up to venturing out there again tonight, but Friday afternoon is going to be

GARDEN TIME!

Challenging reading

Stephen Jay Gould
An Urchin In the Storm


I wanted to give this 4-1/2 stars because it deserves better than a four; I'm not allowed to use fractions; and  I just can't--honestly--give it a 5.  I just didn't enjoy it as much as the other two of his books I've read. I'm not sure if it's me or the book--could be me--my brain's not as sharp as it used to be and my vocabulary scores are falling.  It was hard.

Halfway through, I was even considering removing this from my bookshelf...and then I read the last three essays--

Keeping it.  I want to read this again some day:

1. Perhaps the asteroids Dyson hopes to colonize are miserable, useless hunks of rock.  Perhaps we will exterminate ourselves before we ever get there.  But Lord help us if we lose interest.

The essay Integrity and Mr. Rifken kind of gave me the creeps. I wouldn't dare to argue with such an esteemed thinker...but then, I don't dare *not* to argue, do I?   I kind of think Mr. Gould would appreciate it.

He writes,

1. If we could, by transplanting a bacterial gene, confer disease or cold resistance on an important crop plant, should we not do so in a world where people suffer so terribly from malnutrition?

Well...we can.  And we have.  We're especially motivated to transplant a gene to make corn plants resistant to the herbicide Round-Up. And when we do,  we learn again and again--

                          we don't know what we're doing

We end up with high levels of glyphosate in the food supply.  We end up with "golden rice"--"super weeds"--an epidemic of gluten intolerance.  (Okay, the high level of gluten in modern wheat isn't the result of genetic engineering but rather of selective breeding for high protein content, but it's still a prime example of science ignoring sense.)

I'm not arguing "don't do it" but I am arguing, "think about the side-effects."  Test the results before dumping them on hungry people.  The cheapest way to feed the hungry would be to send them high fructose corn syrup and hydrolized corn protein.   It's especially cheap when you don't add the cost of the taxpayer-subsidized petroleum.

So, back to the book.  IMHO, it's a book to be savored, not gulped.  Enjoy the occasional crossword puzzle moment.  For example,

1. Long before P. T. Barnum drew the correct equation between the birth of suckers and the passage of minutes...

Huh?  Oh!  There's a sucker born every minute.

Book 42? Lost track.

Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers asks a lot of questions and gives very few answers.

The questions are the knotty ones--the life/universe/everything kind of questions that you started to ask in your early teen years.  They sent you into fits of screaming rage, monsoons of silent tears in the emptiness of your bedroom.  Sent you rushing out the door to run, run, run--outpace the demons of despair; to go on walking or running or cycling until your legs hurt more than your head.  Sent you climbing up to the roof to rail at the uncaring universe and find no answer there. 

The questions are voiced by a trio of college freshman girls, roommates thrown together by fate...or is it random chance?  Their families are simple stereotypes--one girl has the loving mom and dad; another, the absent mother and the rich but uninvolved father; and the third, the stolid, hardworking farmer who teaches his daughter her place in the world but reveals nothing else.

No men come on stage--except Plato, Shakespeare, and Homer.  There are a few other girls, one of whom gets to develop a personality, but it's mostly just the three.  And there is the mysterious, mystical dean of students, who asks even harder questions and doesn't try to explain the answers....

Maybe that's the point of the book--if a book needs to have a point--don't accept easy answers.  But there are other points I'll let you find out for yourself.  You'll probably find more of them than I did.

Ms. Skunick puts this book on her chapter called Read 'Em and Weep, but I would have called it Read 'Em and Scream.   Because I still haven't figured out the answers to the questions.

My ill-spent weekend

Saturday at the Con--murder.  In contrast with The Girl Detective's amusing posts about what she ate at the Minnesota State Fair, I'll post about what I ate at A-Con Dallas 2013.

Breakfast (on the road) - a zone bar.
Lunch - bag of chips and cappucino smoothie.
Dinner - veggie wrap, bag of chips, diet Coke
Snack - leftover cheetos and not too many of these
Breakfast - coffee and a rice crispy square
Lunch - veggie wrap (not so good this time) and a diet Coke
Supper - I'm home!   I'm going to eat pizza 'till I barf!