Comedy for a half century

Don't Shoot, It's Only Me
 Bob Hope with Melville Shavelson

This rambling memoir is Bob Hope's personal military history of America from the late 1930s through 1991--World War II; the Korean War; the Cold War; Vietnam; Kuwait; the Persian Gulf.  In all of these conflicts--and many other world events--Bob Hope was there. Entertaining the troops, dodging bullets, writing skits on an aircraft carrier, and making bad jokes at the expense of every major world leader.
The best parts of this book are the the short recitations of the jokes he told,
       Discipline in very strict in the Marine Corps. They're not allowed to turn their elelectric blankets above "just friendly."

Plus the way he has of slipping in a funny or two in every paragraph.  In some ways the whole book reads like a standup comedy act.

And the worst part is when he does a show in Lai Khe, Vietnam, near the end of a police action that has dragged on too long for everyone.  His joke leads off with the phrase, "be home before you know it."  But they don't know it. They don't think they will ever make it home...he is just another liar in a nation of lies.

Lack of a status update

Rain and not getting home before dark.  The only think I could possibly have to post is a book review, and I'm in the middle of two books (paper) and one audiobook.

How about a plan?

No good.  There is a lot of blank space between now and the next holiday.

Very unfair review--didn't meet expectations

Might as well review Cheaper By The Dozen now.  I just finished skimming the ending.

I'd never, by any whim of a wildest imagination, call this a teen classic.  For one thing, a teen classic is about teens.  This isn't about teens, it's not even about kids.  It's like a...documentary about a very unusual and eccentric man who happens to be the father of twelve children.  By choice, too.

So there it is--twelve kids being raised by a wildly eccentric father and a smart, solid, (and flatly drawn!) mother.  It's a historically significant documentary .  It tells much about American history and family life of the era, and becomes especially interesting toward the end when the girls start wanting bobbed hair, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers.  Dear father is aghast.

All that said, it's not a teen classic and I'd never have read this book as a teen.  I might have picked it up at some point but I'd never have finished it.  Thank heavens it was short.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

I've been reading a lot about drinking lately, so it was an odd coincidence that this book came up on the list.


 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 

by Sherman Alexie
illustrated by Ellen Forney

It's about a kid trying to escape from his home before it's too late. While he still has enough fresh hot air in his balloon to pull him out of the suck that is reservation life.  He's a kid who loses most of his battles but seems not to know when to stop fighting. A kid you gotta pull for.

The drinking connection comes in when he quotes his grandmother,

          "Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say.  "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?"

I can answer her question--to stop seeing a world where some children die for lack of food and other children suffer from too much food.  To stop hearing the creaks in your joints as they rust and decay and you know a day will come when they don't carry you through another day.  To blunt the feelings of bone-weary boredom when you work at a dead-end job that pays too little to keep gas in the car that drives you to the job.

But I digress--this isn't what the book is about.  It's a funny book, and a good one.  I recommend.

Saw a movie with Edward today

 and what a movie it turned out to be!  Gravity!  Sandra Bullock is my hero.

I'd been forewarned about how intense it was, so I found myself holding back, simply observing, for the first half of the experience.  About the time of her little--shall we say--cat nap--I became an active participant, not an observer.  I don't think I breathed deeply for the rest of the movie.

I'll save the book reviews for tomorrow.

Huge, mindblowing things

Tiny Beautiful Things
Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar
by Cheryl Strayed


Just because a book makes you cry doesn't mean it's a great book. A book can make you cry; chuckle; laugh out loud; pause the IPod so you can think about what it said; turn the IPod completely off because it's getting too personal and you need a break before continuing...all of these things can be true and the book still not be a great book.

So what am I saying? Is this a great book or not?

I haven't a clue. I just know it made me think, really think, really think hard, really think really hard etc., about my life and the choices I've made and the choices I'm going to make in the future. I think every single person in the world should read this book at least three or four times during their lifetime. They may not always agree with her advice--but they need to hear it.

Definitely not my garden

                        The Secret Garden
                        by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I should have read this as a kid.  It has a strong, smart heroine who makes things happen, and even though the plot meanders like a heavily silted stream, her curiosity and determination keeps it moving on.  It's as old-fashioned and sweet as Five Little Peppers and nearly as charming.  Such an imagination dear Mrs. Burnett had!  An old house with hundreds of empty rooms, lost and lonely on the moors, and eight--count 'em--eight walled gardens.

After writing this, I looked back at the author's bio to see whether to refer to her as Miss or Mrs. All things considered, she might have preferred a "Ms."  Twice divorced, she was living on her own when The Secret Garden was published in 1910.  She supported herself and, it appears, her family.

But I also learned that she was interested in Spiritualism and Christian Science, and that knowledge poisoned the book for me. It's no longer a sweet, whimsical, children's story--it's a sermon. I'd noticed and overlooked a certain preachiness in tone, but knowing what I know now, I don't think I could ever read it again. I, too, believe in the life-altering powers of nature, fresh air and exercise.  But I wouldn't write a book to brainwash children about them. The true healing in this book came from love, friendship, and laughter--not mystical magic.

Is this sour grapes? Am I mad at my garden?

Notes From An Italian Garden

by Joan Marble

I wanted to like this book.  Wanted it so much that I slogged through to the end and even read the epilogue, a slightly preachy summation where she touted gardening as the cure to every modern ill--pollution, noise, haste, spiritual ennui.

But you can guess that I didn't.  Endless listings of beautiful blossoms did little for me when I didn't recognize the flowers and couldn't build mental pictures of them.  The written descriptions didn't jump off the page and open up in my mind.  If I were an aficionado of flower gardening or if I'd read it with a seed catalog handy, I might have had a better experience.   I guess I'm just too prosaic--I like pretty flowers but I prefer my garden to be toothsome.

The funny parts were funny.  Especially the animal invasions.  If you come across a copy of this, read the funny parts but skim the flowery ones.

Quitter!

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

by Joan Aiken

I've read three chapters and I'm quitting.  Quitter!

Seriously, though--according to the rules, I'm allowed to give up a book after two chapters, provided I replace it with a similar one.  So I'm replacing this with The Misadventures of Maude March, which was also a story of old-timey girls (They Wore Bonnets, Didn't They?) that was written in modern times.  The main difference between the two books is this--The Misadventures of Maude March, once picked up, was hard to put down.  This one, once put down, I can't stand to pick up again.

What's wrong with it?  It's...just...all icky. It appears to be about two girls.  One of them, who seems to have some serious impulse control issues (a.k.a. spoiled brat), has parents who are going away and leaving her in the care of an unknown relative.  You know from the start the relative is an evil b----, but the author was too big of a coward to take the step of making her a real witch and giving her some magic spells.  She's just an unpleasant old woman.  Boring stereotype!

The second girl is a scared little mouse, traveling to live with her country cousin.  On the way, her train is besieged by wolves.  Not werewolves; wargs, or even nasty trolls, just plain old wolves...who crash through plate glass windows in their ferocity to eat the frightened travelers within.

The plot, as described, could have been good (except for the wolf nonsense and a minor historical mistake near the beginning.)  But the book is shallow and the characters are skimpy.  I hope the wolves eat them all.

The Little White Horse

                           


by Elizabeth Gouge

  Beautiful, friendly little gem.

I thought it was a little too beautiful at times. The movie they made from this book changed the plot considerably--I like the book's plot better.  The book's adversaries are "wicked" men who steal cattle and sheep from the decent, hardworking villagers.  But in the movie, the wicked men are simply an estranged family who live by hunting and trapping.  No mention is made of wickedness or theft.

But the movie kept the quirky characters nearly true to form--Maria, Loveday, Mrs. Heliotrope, Digweed and Wrolf are all there; and the moviemakers created the enchantment of Moonacre Valley with magic and inspiration.   And you have to love Marmaduke, the dwarf, master chef and housekeeper who makes up for his small stature by his monumental vocabulary.   Marmaduke is a hoot.

If I'd read it as a kid, I'd have been enchanted. And as usual, the story would have gone on in my head to places yet undiscovered, adventures unknown.  What better praise can you give a book?

As soon as I finished, I gave my copy to the library.  There was no point in it languishing on my shelves when it could be passed on to a kid who might love it as I would have.

Listening like one possessed

I typically only listen to audiobooks when I'm in the car, but yesterday I reached match point--a point of no return--in The Earth, My Butt, And Other Big Round Things.  I jerked the IPod out of the car and dug up some earbuds so I could go on listening, and that is what I did.  I listened while jogging, checking email, fixing supper and at the end, while eating supper, I turned off the Supernatural episode I was trying to watch and put the earbuds back in.

Needless to say, I finished it.   Note about supper: I finally tried the Tuna Tapas recipe I'd saved long ago and it was pretty boring.  Not worth another trial.  I gave the remainders of Callie's sandwich to my dog Izzy and even she rejected it...or maybe it was the white bread on the sandwich I made since tehre was no way Callie would eat the tapas with chips.  Izzy pulled a piece out of the bowl, put it on the floor, and went into her dog cage and fell asleep.

Wish I had a (certain) dog's discerning palate--I ate the leftovers with some tortilla chips.

Anyway, back to the book.  Is Ms. Mackler chanelling Judy Blume or what?  This was just so good.  She writes with all of Judy Blume's brutal honesty and then puts an ending on it, eliminating my only gripe about Judy Blume's books which is that they never seem to end--they just stop.

I'm not saying it's a clean and tidy ending, but it's an ending. You're not disappointed that it stopped there.  But if I'd created this cornucopia of fascinating characters, I'd be tempted to write a sequel.  Or two.  I'd like to see if the father ever developed insight; if the mother ever overcame her rigid self-denial; if the brother ever got a grip on his aggression; if the older sister came back and became a forever friend.  And Froggie--how did that relationship end up?

I see that Caroline Mackler has written five other books.  I must have them.

Sneaking in a kids' book, just because.

                Me And My Little Brain by John D. Fitzgerald
                         (beautifully) illustrated by Mercer Meyer

Lovely!  I wish the kids were little again!  I'd read them the whole series.
It's set in a time away back--maybe turn of the century--and a place far away, Utah.  Yet it feels right on.

Rant and review

Damn Whole Foods Market is so disappointing!  Okay, they had the pork butt roast I wanted--fine.  But they didn't have any hoagie rolls and paying 2.50 apiece for avocados really got my gut, if you know what I mean.  I went ahead and bought what I had to, for supper tomorrow night and Friday.  Blah!
Maybe Callie and I will check out this Sprouts Farmer's Market.

Well, I just don't know.  After having this on my wish list for eleven months, I finally read Scott Pilgrim Vol.1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life.  Do I really want to read any more of these?

Pro:  They only take about an hour.  I'm curious to see what happens next.  I think they get better as they go along.  They're shaking up my tired, old brain.

Con: They take an hour that could be spent reading something else.  There are six in the series, so that makes six hours.  I'm not liking them as much as the manga on my list, and the manga is something I can share with my daughter.  I'm not "getting" any of the video game references.

Okay...one more.  Next time I go to the Davis library, I'll get #2.

The usual reading report

 

Becoming Naomi Leon by Pam Munoz Ryan

Such a sweetie!  It reminds me of Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming sequence a little.  Naomi is a fairly normal little kid but somewhat lacking in spunk.  Her little brother has a physical handicap and has apparently been neglected in his early life, because he has adopted some peculiar behaviors for coping with stress.  And their dedicated, determined Great Aunt who is raising them--all together, they go on an adventure--a quest, you might say. 

The family dynamic is superbly drawn and the faithfulness of friends a lifesaver. It would make a wonderful reading assignment for middle school--it teaches lessons without being preachy.  Example: Naomi makes a list of what she knows about Mexico, starting with things like "you can't drink the water."  Her list expands as her horizon does, but never does the author interject a know-it-all editorial comment.  You just get it.


I followed that up with a couple of GNs:

Fables, Vol. 4: The March Of The Wooden Soldiers

Pretty gory; not a lot of plot.   Loved the witch--was Frau Totenkinder her real name or what?

 


Fables, Vol. 5: The Mean Seasons

Darn it--he ended on a cliffhanger!  I'd been about to quit on Fables for a while, but this one left so many plot threads hanging, you can almost call it a continuing story.  Of course, they all are, sort-of, but each of the previous four ended on an ending.  Blah!

Starting on the Girls In Bonnets section

An Old-Fashioned Girl
by Louisa May Alcott

I think the reason I found this book so hard to put down was that it reminded me of my old friends Little Women and Little Men.  I've read those books to pieces and wished they were ten times as long.  Jo's Boys, the sequel to Little Men, didn't have the same indescribable something that kept me coming back.  Louisa May Alcott was much older when she wrote Jo's Boys, 15 years older, to be precise.  Her health was poor and her youthful optimism waning.  I found it a very sad book.

But An Old-Fashioned Girl, written right in between the first two, is as bright and cheery as a bouquet of daisies.  It's sweet, optimistic, and even a little daring in the way it portrays young women striking out on their own to make their way in the world, unsupported by fathers or brothers or uncles or rich, widowed aunts.  The young women cooperate in a sisterhood that lies completely under the radar of the men who control the purse strings.  I'd think this book might have been a little shocking for the times, with its description of artistic young women pursuing their independent careers, finding fulfillment in a paintbrush or a pen rather than a husband and family.

These shocking, unnatural women don't dominate the story, so maybe the morality police missed them.  Polly and Fanny both fall in love with honorable men and marry, just as women ought to--
                   And so they were married, and all lived happily till they died.

No doubt they died of childbed fever after birthing ten sickly babies and burying five, but that's a different story.

More reading "off" the plan

I might as well write a review of A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voigt while I'm still misty-eyed from the last page.  It's even better than Dicey's Song if that is possible.
Since these books are "critically acclaimed", I kept expecting incest or abuse or other issues deemed significant in the eyes of people who review children's literature.  But no such extremes of malfunctioning behavior was necessary--the story of (not so) ordinary people surviving (not so) ordinary conditions and coming out on top (or not) made me cling to the page even as I groped for the box of tissues.

I'd advise you not to read a synopsis of any of these books before beginning.  Just open to the first page and let Ms. Voigt take you wherever she pleases...I think you'll enjoy the ride as much as I did.

Movie for the week

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2

Standard kid's fare with beautifully imaginative drawings.  Food gone bad is the meat of the story--really bad puns are the gravy.


We also rented Shaun Of The Dead.  Guess I'm not really a fan of the Wright and Pegg movies.  Oh, well.

Two heartwarmers

I read the next two books back to back--Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt and The Moon By Night by Madelene L'Engel.  The temptation to compare them is strong, but how is that going to be possible?


Both are told from the perspective of a female, a teenager on the verge of womanhood; both are written in third person but stick solidly to the heroine's point of view; both deal with the internal and external conflicts you endure when you're held closely in the arms of a loving family but needing to grow up and become your own person...without hurting anyone too much.

With all that in common, they are so drastically different as to defy comparison.

The Moon By Night, which is, incidentally, the only Madeleine L'Engel book I actually like, takes the heroine on a family camping trip around America.  Skunks, bears, and boys are the major difficulties.  Vicky is drawn into a love/hate relationship with a handsome but slightly disturbed boy she meets on the road.  Her curiosity about him--and about this "boy friend" thing in general--forces her to break apart from her smothering family.  Not very much apart, but apart enough to be alone and let young love work its will.  The romance should be boring but it isn't...if only I were fourteen again....

Dicey's Song stays in one spot, geographically, but emotionally it ranges far.  Dicey, who's been acting as mother to her two brothers and one sister, needs to learn to share the responsibility with her Aunt with whom they've come to live.  After all the years of shouldering the responsibility and worry alone, Dicey finally gets to be a kid...but it's not that simple.  Finding a balance between being a person and being the big sister--between letting go versus holding on--that is Dicey's journey.  The journey seldom gives her the chance to be a normal teenager, with friends, boys, and struggles at school.  But you keep hoping for her.

So here's my heart-thunk of what's different between the books.  The Moon By Night makes you slightly nervous along the way but you know everything's going to come right at the end.  Dicey's Song is warm and funny as the story unfolds, but you worry about just where it might end up.

Post mini-break blues

For supper last night, after eating 3/4 of a zone bar for breakfast and a handful of pistachios for lunch, I ate pizza.  The first slice of that gooey, thick Pizza Hut Pan Supreme tasted awesome.  The crust, with its lingering edge of garlic and yeast, made my taste buds smile.

The second slice made me feel all full inside.

The third slice was okay.  I consumed it greedily, barely thinking about the taste.  Just feeding the emptiness.

The fourth slice was vaguely nauseating.

So answer me this--where was the "emptiness" the third and fourth slices were feeding?   (Hint: not in the stomach)

No progress on the reading challenge because I've been

Fishing.   These guys helped...

Then I was mobbed by a herd of angry ducks

And brought home

a few fair pics

Miracles haven't ceased

Edward actually complimented my cooking.  And willingly ate leftovers!

I'll have to save the recipe -- Mark Bittman's Paella With Chicken And Sausage.  Sadly, I read today that some researchers (whfoods.org) think that heating extra-virgin olive oil to the temperature required for frying--say to fry the chicken--destroys its healthful phenols and vitamin E.

Sadly, those properties were probably already lost in storage.  I guess I'll have to buy olive oil pressed in Texas from now on...and hope it's really fresh.http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/09/30/226844915/to-get-the-benefits-of-olive-oil-fresh-may-be-best

Fragile Beginnings

When I started this book I was fascinated to the extreme.  The treatment of premie babies, the challenges and decisions and precision of needle-sharp skills required to keep them alive and growing outside the safe womb--it was impossible to put down.  The historical passages were illuminating; the descriptions of the medical procedures fascinating; the progress of development of a baby's independent life systems, from lungs to temperature regulation to the all critical phases of brain development and specialization...wow.  I was ready to buy a copy and loan to my friends.


But at three-quarters through, the story skipped.  The story of the one infant, not just "infants" in the abstract but the author's own little girl--the story that ribboned through the textbook and made all the plain facts come alive--it broke up into sound bites.  I mean...he talked about holding her and finally, after so long, feeding her that first bottle, but it didn't mean anything to me.  Was it just me?

It was me, a little.  I wanted more details at a time when they didn't have more details to give me.  The baby Larissa's growth after she went home from the hospital wasn't so meticulously measured and weighed against advances in medicine.  The section on breast milk, for example, wasn't woven into the story but sort of tacked on near the end.

So to sum up, good book--very good.  Left me wanting more.

Bravo!

Also at the fair, we saw Big Tex and the petting zoo and the butter sculpture, but the coolest thing we saw was Toothless!  A plushie reproduction and absolutely gorgeous.  I want to make one for Callie.

I did eat the deep fried Cuban roll...it was okay but not as great as I expected.  Fried avocado slices were scrumptious until they started getting cold.  (A cold front came through and drizzled bits of drippy on us most of the day.  But not until we got off the train in Plano did it seriously start raining.)

But the fried millionaire pie?  OMG.  Artery clogging ecstasy.

Book number 78--slow down!

Fair tomorrow!  I'm all hyper and Callie's like, big deal.  It's a sad coincidence that our Lion King musical coincides with Comic Com at the Irving Convention Center.  Even if we tried to go, we'd miss four hours of a festival that only lasts eight.  Plus travel time--on the Dart Rail, a half hour there and back.

So, here's another teen read from the Him She Loved chapter.






                                                  In Summer Light
                                                   by Zibby O'Neal


 Kind of what I expected from a teen classic.  It's more about finding yourself than it is about finding your true love, and I enjoyed the self-discovery aspect immensely.  The love angle wasn't half as well described as the girl's yearning to paint pictures.  And the relationship (or lack of) between the girl and her father was superbly depicted--not in a preachy, "telling the story" kind of way, but in the best tradition of uncovering the truth by "showing the story."  Superb.

Not that I'd call this a great book, but it was well worth the 99 cents plus four dollars shipping and handling I paid for it.  I wish these mail order places didn't need to handle things quite so much.

Preparing for diet disaster

I'm really working hard on the extra exercise to make up for what I did last weekend and what I'm going to do this weekend.  Saturday--State Fair of Texas!  I'd be a criminal not to sample the winner of the 2013 Big Tex Choice Award.  Deep Fried Cuban Roll.  Yum!

I also wanted to try the Golden Fried Millionaire Pie (cream cheese, pineapple and pecans in a pie crust) and the Deep Fried King Ranch Casserole and some roasted corn on the cob and freshly squeezed lemonade and if I'm not puking by then, the Fried Avocado chips....

Next up on the reading challenge is
My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel.

Lizzie Skurnick puts this in the "Him She Loved" category but I would have been inclined to put it in the "Very Afterschool Specials."   Not that I've ever seen an afterschool special.

In any event, the book is impossible to classify.  It's about teenage love and parental disappointment, and it stars Paul Zindel's usual cast of characters--a smart boy with a father who doesn't seem to know or care anything about being a father.  A pretty girl with a wimpy mother and a borderline-abusive stepfather. An ordinary boy suffering the agonies of the dating sceen.  And an ordinary girl with decent, but clueless, parents.

Published in 1969 and so much a book of the times--the adults just don't get it.  It--anything--ever--it.  They never understand and don't seem to want to try.  Was this normal for adults of the time?

Possibly.  It makes me want to find a book about social history of America from the fifties to the millennium.  A book like Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday, books about the 20s and 30s, but set in modern times.  The parents in Paul Zindel's book were post-baby boon generation, older than me but younger than my parents.  My parents considered me and my brother as the star players of their lives--it was all about us.  We made them laugh; we fulfilled them; our triumphs were their triumphs.  Maybe they cared too much, but we always knew they cared.

The attitude of parents in Zindel's books is more like, kids are just something I have because everyone else has them.  They're cute when they're little, but embarrassing as heck when guests come over--I'm going to put them outside until they're housebroken.

Nancy Farmer's third book of the trilogy

                                       
                                                The Islands of the Blessed


had a very strange ending that almost made me change my overall opinion. (For the better.)  But I won't...it was good to visit with Jack and Thorgil again and go on an adventure; it was good to meet up with old friends and share a song; but overall, it was too much icing on a third batch of cupcakes.   It was a satisfying conclusion to the series, but not a really good book on its own merits.

I suspect many will disagree with me and that's okay.  I was just disappointed--there wasn't much that was new, intriguing, or awesome; the characters didn't grow; the plot seemed just to plod along.  Sorry.

Tarantula sighting and no darn picture!

I saw a tarantula today, and when I announced that fact, Callie said she almost ran over two tarantulas on Sunday.  Is it correct to assume they come out after a rain?

Also finished
Time For Outrage Indignez-vous!
by Stephane Hessel

All 29 pages of it.  It's got to be the shortest book for adults ever written.
While I wasn't disappointed by the length of it, on account of some of the other hefties on my to-read list, I was a little disappointed by the contents. I agreed with his every word...but there just weren't enough words to agree with.

But I respect his right to speak out.  At ninety-three years old, he's got a right to speak and we have an obligation to listen.
~