Team Brennan

Team Human
by Sarah Reese Brennan

Another teen vampire zombie novel?  Uh, huh.

This one escaped the triple stigma of been there, done that, and not again!  due to the charming humor of the writing and the honesty of the emotions depicted.  Even though they were teenage emotions--violently passionate, overwrought and out of control--they were real enough to raise a hint of moisture in the farthest corner of my left eye.

It's pretty funny, too.   I'd actually consider reading a second one by the author, if she's done one.  The characters are cool.

Football and life

The Off Season

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock 
 


Like, wow!  In some ways better than Dairy Queen.  I wish the heroine had learned a few more lessons from her experiences in the first book, but who ever does?

 She's grown up a little--that's clear--but there are always a couple of things you have to learn over and over before you get them down.  Like talking to people.  And admitting you screwed up royally instead of hiding under the covers and hoping the icky stuff will just go away.

Ms. Murdock is dealing with some serious human emotions here, so don't expect to get through it dry eyed.  And don't expect to learn much about football--she mercifully skips over the intricate details and just assumes you're a football fan too and you'll "get it" without much explanation.

Well, I didn't get any of the football references.  But I can attest that you don't have to in order to enjoy this series.

Funny and forgettable

The Exiles by Hilary McKay Makes me wonder if Ms. McKay made a bet with her children, something on the order of "you can too live without books," and she wrote this book as an I told you so

It's sweet and funny and very suitable for the kid audience who don't have their heads full of superheroes and smash-em-up video games. I didn't fall in love with it like I did the Caisson family series, Saffy's Angel and etc. Those kids were so different you could tell who was speaking just by the words and tone--these kids sort of blend together and don't jump out as individuals. Listening to the audiobook might have helped with that--maybe I'm a lazy reader.

Two centuries of #!&%*&#

For Her Own Good:
Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English

This turned out to be a dense, scholarly book.  I enjoyed it immensely, but I'm not enough of an expert to comment on it.  I think it's sound, quite sound.  Some of the theories may lack support, but I took them as theories, not conclusions, and so was not perturbed.

I especially appreciated the author's determination to refrain from making snarky comments about the aburd, ridiculous or downright hateful nature of the experts' advice.  Ninety-nine point nine percent of it was pure bullshit--in a cultural context.  Losing the race to the moon?  Our children needed more discipline to grow up to be engineers.  Or...

First--as she outgrew her girlhood--a woman had to renounce the pleasures of the clitoris and transfer all sexual feeling to the vagina. [...] When a woman accomplished the task of renouncing the clitoris, she symbolically set aside all masculine strivings (penis envy) and accepted a life of passivity.

That definition of the woman's role--passivity, lack of pleasure except in service to others--resulted in the ultimate stupid theory of all stupid theories:  women were inherently masochists, and menial labor and sexual humiliations were what it took to make her truly happy.
The authors did remark, at that point:
(The explanation of "masochism" is so convenient and totalistic that we can only wonder why the psychomedical experts didn't think to extend it to other groups, like the poor and racial minorities.)
I'll let 'em have that one.  How can you not get a little snippy in the face of so much well-meaning (or ill-meaning) stupidity?

Short trip over the pond

Diary of a Provincial Lady
by E.M. Delafield

Lovely little funny, apparently published as a "real" diary since it's in the non-fiction section at the library.  All entries are highly tongue-in-cheek, written by a not-at-all rich but aristocratically not poor, wife and mother in a small English country house in the late 1920's.  Our lady appears to be an excellent mom, which endears her to me, as well as an aspiring author who tries to move in "literary circles" without taking time away from her household management, her clueless and boring husband, and her bulbs.  Yes, bulbs, as in flowers forced indoors into premature bloom.  It appears to be a peer pressure challenge--something everybody does if they want to be "in."

Her writing will always make you smile, sometimes even laugh.  For example, a friend lures her to the beach and they attempt swimming to an "immense and distant rock"

...Long before we are halfway there, I know that I shall never reach it, and hope that Robert's second wife will be kind to the children.  Viscountess, swimming calmly, says, Am I all right?  I reply, Oh quite, and am immediately submerged.
Continue to swim.  Rock moves further and further away.  I reflect that there will be something distinguished about the headlines announcing my demise in such exalted company, and mentally frame one or two that I think would look well in local paper.

Strong stuff

A Raisin in the Sun
a play by Lorraine Hansberry

I think it's possible I read this a long time ago, but I'd forgotten all the details so the players were new to me.  Only the ending seemed familiar.

The cover blurb compared it to three other great American plays, rating it equal to them, but I'd rate it better if I'd read them all--Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and The Glass Menagerie.  This one has a strong, positive ending.  Not fairy tale, but a chance of some real happiness at last.  The odds were against these guys, but there's room to hope.

Let's mess with the monarchy

 The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett

Delightful little book!  What would happen if the Queen of England took up reading for a hobby...and liked it?

I won't say much else--it was very short and very amusing, and so delightfully British.  Reminded me a little of Wodehouse.

 

Didn't put this down willingly

Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler




Time-travel story--modern-day woman goes back to experience slavery--without cliches.  How'd she take such a subject and create a novel so convincing, so god-awful realistic, and so impossibly unpredictable?

I'm at a loss for words.

Remember this if you're trying to decide whether to read it--this isn't history.  It's historically authentic (with an occasional slip-up in language), but it's not telling anybody's "universal" history.  It's a woman heart in the breaking--not a man's great American novel.  You'll experience the facts and feelings that made the institution of slavery corrosive and corrupting, bringing out the evil in the best of humanity, but you won't come out with any "lessons learned."  It's not that trite.

Audibook hell

No Biking In the House Without a Helmet
by Melissa Fay Greene

Fascinating story of a family adopting five orphans from overseas...buried inside a dull-to-the-point-of-nausea story of an author's self doubts, family tales, and pets.  I think it was the pets that finally did me in.  Her self doubts prior to the first adoption and her depression that followed it seemed to be an important part of the story.  She was trying to be honest with us, the readers, so it was interesting in spite of her bludgeonish writing style.  Someone must have told her, why tell something once when you can say it over and over again, hardly varying the words, ad nauseum?

The family tales--mostly about her biological children--were kind of interesting, but not what we were there for.  At times she was trying so hard to be funny that it grated.  What kind of mother honestly doesn't recognize that there was a reason why a music store wouldn't sell her pre-teen daughter a CD unless the parent came in the store and paid for it?  How out of touch could she be?

And--oh my god--the pets.  I really, really NOT wanted to hear about her dogs.  Not to mention squirrels, hamsters, guinea pigs, ducks...none of which seemed to be told in any relation to the adoptees and their reactions to the menagerie.

i I finished it.  I'd highly recommend reading the book instead of listening to the audiobook, especially if you're the kind of person who can skim over her endless listings of items.  At one point she goes to an Ethiopian market and proceeds to list every single item sold there.  Honest to god.  I must have taken up half of a page.   It's never good enough to give three examples--she always gives thirty or fifty or who knows?  I lost count after ten.

So...I take back my initial comment:  "Fascinating story...."   This could have been a fascinating story--with editing.

On a deeper note: is it right for a person, however deeply religious they may be, to adopt children from another religion and forcibly convert them?  Maybe with a baby or maybe even a five-year-old, but a nine-year-old?  Isn't that like saying, I applaud your heritage, but it's wrong?

Another deeper note: I have no right to criticize her family--only her book.  But I had some real issues with her family, especially her hands-off husband, her own inability to learn from mistake, and their "rules" that never were enforced.  I can only hope that some of the really bad parenting she describes is simple over-dramatization, put in to try and make the book funny.  It wasn't.

Caitlan Moran rules. A bit.

How to Be a Woman
by Caitlin Moran

Confession: I decided to read this book because the author was British.  British people are funny, with their jumpers and knickers and best of all, their nudie pants.  And I had no disappointment, there--even for a Brit, she raises the bar on funny ways of saying things.

It starts out biographical--first period, hairy pits, etc., but as she ages it become more topical.  For example, Why you should have children followed by Why you shouldn't have children.  And you learn that the the one question every female celebrity will always be asked is, "When are you going to have children?"   Two points made there--not "are" but "when", and female celebrity.  Imagine asking Albert Einstein that question.

She took advantage of the medium to make a few poignant points near the ending, off topic from feminism--

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world--famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turnng piss-yellow and filling with ring-pulls and shattered fax machines--it's right there.  Heaven.  The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

Yeah.  Right there with ya.

Should've quit halfway, but just good enough to finish

Lost in Place: Growing up Absurd in Suburbia

by Mark Salzman

Mixed bag, here.  Mark Salzman tells the story of his early teen to college age years.  He was a most peculiar character.  And his friends and teachers were so unique, so sublimely weird--his Kung Fu master, his best friend who used to beat him up, and especially his dad--they made a story themselves.  His dad is a hoot.

I get the impression that with the notable exception of  a Chinese Studies professor, Mr. Salzman's relationships with women were uniquely flat.  His mother was a concert celloist yet we know nothing about her.  She's just there, like a plate on which you pile a slab of roast beef and onions.  Who cares about the plate?  It's just a flat thing to pile yourself onto.

I'm not being a sexist pig about this.  His two girl friends are also, just "his girlfriends".  He spends hours and hours hanging out with them and yet we don't know anything about them.  I just didn't get it.

So...I guess you get the idea. If you're a guy who grew up in the era, you might enjoy it a lot.

Ha ha--you got to read it to understand the title!

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
by Ellen Meloy
   

Poetry in prose so beautiful I can't write about it.  I'm not good enough.
It's a loosely structured ode to the Bighorn Sheep of North America--both the Blue Door band that the author is watching and the other small enclaves widely scattered around, occupying a tiny portion of their original range.  I can't imagine a world in which I'll never have the hope of hiking the canyon and coming unexpectedly on a band of bighorns...or canoeing a remote river and or catching sight of them edging down the cliffs...but it might happen.  Contact with domestic sheep leaves them sick with diseases they have no resistance against.  Only the determination of wildlife biologists--and the stubborn nature of bighorn--that gives them a fighting change.

I lost the many bookmarks of momentous passages, whimsical and weighty writing, all of which made her words sing like angels.  Only a few of them remain, and not the best:

Chukars...[...] they have in tow six windup toys--tiny speedy chukar chicks, the avian version of loose electrons.
The gulls fuss and shriek over the entrails of the day's catch.  Frigate brids move in and make the whole scene edgier.  A gull nonchalantly swallows an entire fish head and bulges with meat.  Too heavy to get off the ground, it sits on the sand like coyote fodder, shoulders hunched, belly distended, looking as if everything would be fine if it could just belch.
It's impossible to give a start marking to a book like this, so I'll default to 5.  I'm missing the little bit of personal connection that I would usually require to mark a book 5 instead of 4, but that's me, all me.

Having fun working off the reading backlog

Kat Incorrigible
by Stephanie Burgis

Good plot twists.  Decent action.  Great story.

For the umpteenth time, if I were a pre-teen again, I'd have its sequels on my reading list and be planning my return trip to the library already.  Angeline, Elissa, Katherine, and a brother who never appears onstage are the children of a (whisper) witch who died when Kat was born.  When Angeline employs a love spell to bring her a husband who will pay off the brother's gambling debts and thus prevent her sister Elissa from making a martyr of herself by marrying an evil old dude, Kat has to rescue them both.

Very good present for a pre-teen reader in your family.  But save yourself the trouble and buy the whole series.

Quick and delightful

Vegan, Virgin, Valentine
By Caroline Mackler

A book to be neither savored nor sampled, but raced through from cover to cover.  Hey, it takes all kinds of books to make a world.

Aside from the terse description, "teenage girls with problems," this is not at all like The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things.  It takes all kinds of teenage girls with all kinds of problems to make a world, too.

Some, like Mara Valentine, are driven by a need to please a pair of overprotective but well-meaning parents.  They won't admit it, but they're carrying a lot of guilt about "messing up" with their first daughter, Aimee, who dropped out of college and got pregnant at eighteen.  The fruit of the pregnancy was Vivienne Vail Valentine, who wisely chooses to go by the nickname, "V".

When Mara's parents bring Mara's niece V to live with them and attend Mara's high school, it's probably the best thing that ever happened to V.  Possibly the worst thing for Mara, though.

A brief indulgence in birder's porn

Raptors: North American Birds of Prey
by Noel and Helen Snyder

Lovely, detailed, and sprinkled with first-hand observations.  My favorite was when they encountered a grizzly bear on their way back from observing Merlin in the mountains north of Fairbanks.  Education and adventure--a marvel of pairings.

I didn't realize Owls weren't considered as raptors, at least not in this book.  When I picked up this book at the library I saw a copy of Owls: Their Natural and Unnatural History.  That's a book I remember well and fondly.

So back to my review of Raptors.  Very good.  Could have been better, but definitely worth the reading.

Swords and sorcery. Oh my!

Alanna: The First Adventure
by Tamora Pierce

Pretty good YA adventure.  Set in a make-believe world reminiscent of the middle age knights of chivalry, it's the story of a brother and sister who swap roles.  He becomes a religious and studies to be a sorcerer; she becomes a knight.  That is to say, eventually he becomes a sorcerer and she a knight--this book begins the story, but you sense many more to come.

I've said this about several YA novels but it's still just as true--and not at all demeaning--

If I'd read this as a kid, I'd be hooked for the duration.  As a jaded, seen all, been all, done all grownup, I can live without the rest of the series.  I'll put the second book on my to-read list as number #176 and see if it ever bubbles up to the top.

Dog of the year. Any year.

A story of a dog but not just...it's equally as much the story of Farley Mowat--boy meets Mutt.  Humor ensues.

I loved it--it made me laugh...and it had the power, at the end, to make me cry.  Don't forgo the laughter and the adventure on account of the tears at the end.  They're brief and not as bad as they could have been.

Mutt lives on!  I wish I had Farley Mowat's skill at writing.

HIstory to the heart

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

Six drinks that changed the world--beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca Cola.  Who'd have thought it?

A lot of interesting history is crammed into this short book.  It's easy to read and only very occasionally skipped over a valley that I wished it had slogged through.  A couple of points to ponder:

- In the olden days, beer and wine were safer to drink than water. Coffee and tea, too, since they were made from boiled water. And I guess spirits mixed with water had a germ-killing effect.

- The history classes that they forced me to take in school completely downplayed the role of the East India Company in destroying Chinese civilization for years.  All I learned about trade patters was molasses--rum--slaves.  What about opium--gold--tea?

- Distilled wine was called aqua vitae and credited with magic powers. "It prolongs life, clears away ill humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth."  We feel sorry for those poor people, so desparate to clutch at any remedy for the mysterious diseases that wasted away their loved ones' lives. We think we're so much better off than they--we think medicine has conquered disease and can cure all harm...but how much like them we are at the end.  Still helpless before death; still looking for a  miracle cure.  And it isn't aqua vitae.

Why did I never read Virginia Woolf?

.

Should have been titled 500 pounds a year and a room of one's own, because that's what it's all about.  It's a brilliant set of essays put together into a short book, and well worth the reading by anyone.  Anytime.  Anywhere.

Where are the great women writers, prior to the nineteenth century?  What would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister?  Why don't women take their places in the world of science and philosophy?

They've been too busy keeping the human race running.  And great thought--or writing--doesn't grow from a crack on a sterile sidewalk--it needs the piled up compost of a ten century long cultivation.  Exactly what women didn't have. They do now--and they better make use of it.

Wish I had a monster

             A Monster Calls
               by Patrick Ness 
               inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd
               read by Jason Isaacs

I suffered through the absolutely brilliant rendition of this book on audio by Jason Isaacs, so even though I missed out on the illustrations I got the extra dimension of hearing a gloriously gruff monster growl.  And by suffered, I do mean suffered.  It's a painful book written about a painful experience and that exactly what it needs to be.  When your mum's suffering from cancer and the treatments aren't helping, how do you cope?

Call up a monster.

(I'm suppressing my next statement violently with both hands. No leaks!  No hints.  No telling!)
Apparently they're going to make a movie out of this.  It deserves one.  I don't think I'll go see it, but I really hope they don't screw it up.

Deep reading

Hate List
by Jennifer Brown

Why are the surnames Brown, White and Green common but not Yellow, Orange or Red?  Who knows.  And I'm off-topic.  For a reason.

Reason being that once I read a few novels by an author whose surname was Brown.  I don't remember her first name and don't see any reason to.  They were dreck. Chaff.  Fluff at best.  Thrill rides on the imaginary rollercoaster of romantic love.

Those were books.  This is a book.  Both are cataloged under the general category of words on pages sandwiched between cardboard covers.  But, in my very humble opinion, this, is a book.
From the cover blurb,

• Five months ago, Valerie Lefman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria.  Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertantly save the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create.  A list of people and things she and Nick hated.  The list he used to pick his targets.

The story unfolds in both present and past, with the facts of the shootings as chapter notes before Valerie's current day existence--if you can call it that.  It's more like a quest for existence in a suffocating swamp of guilt and shame and confrontations with all the people who just can't understand. To people who lost their best friends, Nick was the embodiment of pure evil--how else could they deal with their pain?  Evil had taken their friends--not random chance or mental illness or a small-town teenage culture of bullying.  But to Valerie, Nick was not the ultimate evil.  He was her boyfriend--kind, funny, gentle and loving.  No more evil than you or me.

And her family is so damn real you just want to smack them!  There are some things the author leaves unspoken and I hesitate to put my own feelings into the story, but I came away with a strong theory that most of her father's animosity is based on guilt of his own, guilt he will never admit.  If he'd been there--if he'd been a real father--would she have made "better choices"?  Would his own name have been left off the Hate List?

Better shut up.  I'm telling too much.  All I can say to recommend it is this: I read three-quarters of it in one sitting (300 pages); I bawled my eyes out when I re-read the ending; I wanted there to be more closure but won't complain.  Real life doesn't have closure.  It just continues.

Graphic novels for grownups.

Alan's War

The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope

 
by Emmanuel Guibert

Emmanuel Guibert met Alan Cope in 1994 on an island off the coast of France.  They struck up an immediate friendship--the 30-year-old graphic novelist and the 69-year-old ex-GI with a knack for telling stories of his life--and this book was conceived.  To bring it to life must have taken the metaphorical nine months of a human pregnancy following by some number of hours of hard labor, but the results are substantial.  Maybe men can birth babies after all.

If you're a history buff or a world war II fanatic, I recommend this.  Maybe.  Possibly as a antidote for the machine-gun fire and gut-wrenching reality of modern-day movies.  (Anyone seen Captain America?)  It's a reminder that every single man saw a different war.  This one may seem a little tame by comparison but it's never boring...and it has pictures!

Crestfallen

Cress
By Marissa Meyer

Damn and blast!  I thought it was a trilogy!

Not saying it's not my own boneheaded fault.  For some reason I thought this series was a trilogy and this would be the book where the battle against evil Queen Levana was going to finish up.  Well--no spoiler here--it doesn't.  And I'm hooked for the duration.

(Maybe that was a spoiler--I'll mark it thus on Goodreads and the review will be hidden.)

Somehow Ms. Meyer manages to write action scenes that keep you on your feet and write sappy love scenes that don't make you roll your eyes and skip to the next page. And her technology is realistic enough to accept without question.  She's that good.  They should absolutely make this into a TV series.

Some serious reading

As a Driven Leaf
by Milton Steinberg

Absolutely gripping narrative of the life of Elisha ben Abuyah, a rabbi turned philosopher in the early years of the CE.  He was described in both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem, and from the slim details in those documents plus a lot of historical data, the author has fleshed out a living, breathing person.  Elisha is neither a hero nor a heretic, but a brilliant philosopher who trusted that the sure proofs in Euclidean geometry would carry over into the realm of human--and godly--existence.

Milton Steinberg does an unbelievable job of making ancient times seem real.  Of course, since he was writing in 20th century English, there were a couple of places where he used a term or description that sounded a little too modern.  But that's being picky.

I'm reminded of both Siddharta and Arrowsmith...to say any more would be spoiling.

Cheating a little...a short book is still a book

Queen of the World
Babymouse #1
by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm

I would totally have read this to my kids and you should too.  Babymouse is a fourth-grader with a wicked imagination and a keen sense of fair play.  And she's not a bad dresser, either. Only the naturally curly whiskers keep her from being a real queen...or maybe not.

Makes you want to go on a cruise

The Sea Around Us
by Rachel Carson

The classic natural history in a 1961 update, with footnotes, introduction and an afterword.  The introduction was by Ann H. Zwinger; the afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton.  It doesn't say who wrote the footnotes so I assume it was Rachel Carson herself.

This is the kind of book that taught me to love natural history writing long, long ago.  A 2014 rewrite would be cool.  Some things never change--wind, water and waves--but our understanding of them does. It would be a different book today...but not so different as to render this one pointless.

Does my admiration for this lovely, lovely book give me a right to gripe, just a little?  It was published by Oxford University Press.  I don't know if it's their fault or the author's (when in doubt, blame the publisher), but the whole 243 page volume contains exactly one illustration.  There may have been two but I don't think so.  One measly little map!  It should have had a hundred.  No map of Pangaea--no diagram of wave motion--nary an illustration of undersea volcanoes or the moon-sun alignment that causes spring tides.  That last fact NEVER made sense to me until I saw a drawing of it.  So why not here?

Listened long--every gory detail

After the Fire

by Robin Gaby Fisher

Okay.  Here goes.

A story of a college dorm fire and its aftermath. A story of two friends,  A true story--so be prepared.  I don't want to give away even so many details as the cover blurb did, so that is all I will say.

I will suggest that you read it rather than listen to it.  Listening seemed to drag on and on and repeat itself a little too often--which is to say, a whole lot too often.  Sometimes, I just wanted to skip to the end.  But I applaud the author's attention to detail, and especially the even-handed treatment of all the players involved--victims, families, doctors, nurses, girlfriends....  It was a lot of ground to cover and she did it excellently well.  You will NOT be disappointed.

Reading is about all I can do, so I'm reading

After All
by Mary Tyler Moore

A candid autobiography from one of television's favorite straight women.  I really liked it at first but then it digressed to so-so. Too much breadth; too little depth.  I think I'm giving up on celebrity biographies.  So much of it seemed to be looking back, not living in--told, not lived. I wanted more blow-by-blow memories of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. but it only had the tiniest handful.

I do think she's a totally cool person.  If anyone deserves to write an autobiobraphy, it's she.  I wonder if she dredged up the history from letters and memories rather than having been a diary-keeper?  Maybe only diarists can do good autobiographies.

The Egg and Her

  
Everyone warned me that this book was impossibly racist; that the narrator was a stuck-up snob; that the humor was more cruel than funny. I didn't get any of that.  It was just a case of a person out of place and time trying to cope with a life she'd never have chosen for herself.  I kind of liked her.

Her neighbors The Kettles were hilarious. I wonder if they were some sort of inspiration for the classic "Ma and Pa Kettle" movies.  (Which were hilarious, by the way.)

I don't exactly recommend it, but I didn't hate it.

A classic I was lucky to miss

A Girl Of the Limberlost

by Gene Stratton-Porter

It might make me lose my reading challenge to do this, but I'm giving up on this one.  It is so dreadfully awful!  What can you do with a book that starts off the first chapter using the following declaratives, in order:
demanded
faltered
cried
jeered
replied
said    (Finally!)
In later conversation we find: panted, begged, inquired, sobbed, and suggested....  But you're used to them and hardly notice them...most of the time.

People who loved it as children will hate me for this, but to be honest, I can't imagine liking this book at any age.  There are certain books I count as childhood favorites that I might consider outdated for the modern audience.  The Pink Maple House, Little Men, The Five Little Peppers, The Horse Without a Head--I loved them to death but I wouldn't force them on a modern-day child.  (I might offer them, nonchalantly.)  But those books have plot, charm, and a writing style that doesn't grate on the nerves.  They're real novels about real people, not made-up crap about impossibly saintly people or unbelievably cruel people who have a mystical conversion and become impossibly saintly.   They're books that if I read them for the first time now, I'd at least be able to finish them.

A Girl Of the Limberlost--abandoned.

Teen book that's good enough for a grownup

The Running Dream

by Wendelin Van Draanen

Such a sweetie!  I hope it was researched as well as it seemed--I'd hate to think all of the information about track and running and prosthetics was made up, because it was absolutely fascinating.

If I were a high school English teacher I'd assign it.  Twice.

Another much needed comfort book

The Dirty Life
On Farming, Food, and Love
by Kristin Kimball

Not for the squeamish.  

No, seriously--farming isn't all about bovine contentment and clucking chickens and ripe red tomatoes eaten straight off the vine.  Food isn't all about a well-stocked grocery store with forty-one varieties of imported Balsalmic Vinegar.  And love isn't easy.

All the same you can hear the love singing through every page.  Farming is hard and rewarding and gets under your skin.  Ms. Kimball pulls no punches, spares us no gory detail...nor beautiful one, either.  Her farming live grows on her, and with it, she grows too.

To sum up: great book; I kind of want to give it five stars and I definitely want to read it again.
(As soon as I forget the scary parts.)

History at its best told

My Father's Paradise:
A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

by Ariel Sabar

 
One of those great books that is so much more than any title can describe.  It's a family history of Mr. Sabar's great-grandfather, grandfather and father, told in chronological order up until the present, when focus shifts to the author and you learn how the story came to be told.   It's also the story of the lost tribes of Israel.  And it's the story of Aramaic--the language of the mighty Assyrian empire for over seven thousand years, but known to 1900's era scholars only by a few writings and a root in the linguistic family tree.

But Aramaic was alive and flourishing at the time--it lived in the everyday speech of the dispersed Jewish populations of northern Iraq, such as the Jews of Zakho's island.  Zakho's island--the old part of the town of Zakho--held at most 2400 Jews, five percent of the total population.  But for a time they called it "the Jerusulem of Khurdistan"--a holy place--a homeland. .

Miryam and Rahamim Beh Sabagha, the grandparents of the author, were born there and  lived until they were forced to leave Iraq in 1951.  Their son Yona was the last boy bar mitzvahed in Zakho, an act his father did in a a rush just as they were preparing to emigrate.  The boy was not yet thirteen, but somehow his father sensed it was best to do it then and there--at home.

Israel, the Holy Land, was populated with European jews who didn't exactly welcome the uncouth barbarians of Iraq.  People like the Beh Sabagha family were crammed in hastily built towns remote from the main centers of business, making it nearly impossible for the newcomers to find decent jobs, go to school and pray in a synagogue.  Their great-grandfather Ephraim's search for a synagogue to pray in sent him out late one night on a walk of several miles to Bethlehem...but he turned away short of the goal, uncertain of his reception late at night in a town under Jordanian rule.  He said the great queen Rachel herself told him to stay away--and you don't argue with mother Rachel.

Back to present time and the recognition by the author that a family history was vanishing before his eyes.  Soon it would be too late to hear his father's stories and visit the land that shaped his soul.  Mr. Sabar is a great journalist and I praise his brains, guts and skill in recording and reporting the story so well.  I wish I had done the same for my parents' stories...but I know it's too late.

Nostalgia lane. Bleah.

Old Town in the Green Groves
by Cynthia Rylant

Ms. Rylant, a Newbery Medal winner, has taken on the job to recreate the lost book of Laura Ingalls Wilder's family history, the saga that begins with Little House In the Big Woods and stops with The First Four Years. She attempts to tell of the years between Plum Creek and Silver Lake, when the family moved from Walnut Grove to Burr Oak and Pa worked briefly as a hotel manager and then as a feed mill operator. I assumed she gathered material from as many sources as she could--Laura's journals, letters, historical records.

She tried--I'll say that for her--but I would have rather read the journals. I devoured the facts avidly but her attempts at making stories out of them were feeble at best. And her occasional borrowing of phrases and expressions from the other books irritated the heck out of me. If those came straight out of Laura's journals, she should have recognized them and skipped them--once is enough, no matter how poetic the language. But if those phrases were borrowed from the other books, for shame. Be original.

Maybe it's my age--maybe as a kid I would have treasured this with the others--maybe possibly very likely. But maybe is the best I can say.

Murder and mahem galore!

A Brief History of Montmaray
by Michelle Cooper

This is a tough nut to crack.  It's a YA novel about a family who are the owners, rulers, and last remaining inhabitants of the Island Kingdom of Montmaray, which appears to be off the coast somewhere between Spain, France and England.   Told as a journal of the second-oldest girl Sophie, a young girl coming of age in the time of the Spanish civil war, right before World War II.

Fascinating, huh?  But half-way through I decided it was a poor imitation of I Capture The Castle and only worth finishing because I had it on the IPod and needed something to listen to in the car.

Well, it got good.  So good, in fact, I want to read the sequel.  Sophie is a gem of a girl--when in a creepy tunnel she imagines that mice or bats are making the rustly sound--rats would be unthinkable!  Yeah, but a few minutes later, rats are the least of her worries!  Her writing is so prodigious that I'm reminded of a comment made about Samuel Richardson's Pamela--how'd the heck did they find time to do anything other than write letters all day and night?

Broken brain detective

A Lethal Inheritance
A Mother Uncovers the Science behind Three Generations of Mental Illness
by Victoria Costello
A Lethal Inheritance
subtitled A Mother Uncovers the Science behind Three Generations of Mental Illness
Victoria Costollo

Through no fault of the book's, I somehow convinced myself it would be more history and less science.  Thus I was disappointed...but only the tiniest little bit so.   You can't manufacture family history to make a great story better--but you can tell the truth.  (She did.)
It's a story of one mother and her difficult fight for her two son's mental health--and ultimately her own--but it's also a story of the science, research, history and future of mental illness in the world.  I can't even list all off that topics that pop up in this book--genetics, environmental factors, schizophrenia, suicide, recovery, early detection and prevention, family secrets, Roscommon Ireland, the Catholic church...  It's not a long book in pages but I didn't feel that any topic was given a shallow treatment, either.   In fact, for the first time in a long time, I'm going to flip through her bibliography and see if anything belongs on my to-read list.

Something real to read about

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

By Conor Grennan

Lovely book--true story--wish it had been longer.  A compassionate young American interrupted his trek around the world to work a three-month volunteer job at an orphanage in Nepal.  But the children he found weren't orphans--they were the victims of a child trafficking scam.   Criminals--one in particular--would extort large sums of money from parents to take their children away from the civil war; take them to safe homes, places where they would be well-fed, schooled, and loved.

The children ended up as slaves or beggars on the streets of Kathmandu, but a fortunate few ended up at the Little Princes Children's Home. And Conor Grennan ended up with a life's mission he'd never imagined--reuniting children with parents they'd nearly forgotten...but who'd never forgotten them.

Reading resumed, not life

The Nazi Officer's Wife
by Edith Hahn Beer and Susan Dworkin

Trained to be a lawyer, Edith Hahn survived the Holocaust by being a Hausfrau.  A meek, well-behaved wife--shopping, cooking the meals, keeping the floors spotless and the sheets well aired. But that's skipping to the middle and there's a lot more to the story.  It's rich and full and devastatingly honest--she doesn't try to hide the goodness she does nor gloss over the evil she shies away from.
I'll be reading it again, soon.

Book enjoyed--not read

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens




This was on my currently-reading list but I can't say I was reading it.  I'd picked up a sound recording at the library, thinking it was an audiobook.  Instead if was a dramatization of the story, greatly abridged, with voice actors and sound effects.
Once I started listening, I couldn't stop.  And now the book is ruined for me--I know the ending!

Okay, that last comment was an overdramatization.  I'd still enjoy reading the book--I know they left out pages and pages of the stuff Dickens does best--vivid characterization, droll humor, and melodramatic observations in the author's omniscient voice. A Dickens book is a lot more than story, however good the story may be.

Book review, finally

 
Appetite for Reduction by Isa Moskowitz.  It's hard to say I "read" this because I don't really read cookbooks.  I read the chapter introductions, most of the headnotes, and the little popup blurbs that decorate the pages.  And I look at the pictures--does that count?

I liked the book but not enough to want to own it.  I copied out a few recipes and tried two of them.  The braised collards recipe, which I made with Kale, was good but not exceptional.  I ate it for several meals, but never enjoyed it enough to go back for a second helping. 

The second recipe was a Vegetable Korma which called for garam masala--a spice mix that had been on my "to try" list.  Coincidentally, I read this recipe the same day I saw The Hundred Foot Journey.  And coincidentally, I had all of the ingredients for it except the garam masala and frozen green peas.  Could have subbed for the peas but I was NOT going to leave out a critical spice.  So I made the base of the dish and popped it in the refrigerator, then on the next day I procured the missing ingredients and finished it up.

It tasted really good...but you know...I checked online and found almost identical recipes everywhere.
Loved her tone, her attitude, her precision! in specifying exact quantities but suggesting things you may want to change to suit your own tastes.   Some of the ingredients were listed in both pounds and cups--perfect for someone who might be buying it at the grocery store or might be at home pulling it out of the salvage bin.   (a.k.a. fridge vegetable compartment)

So I loved it, I recommend it, but I don't want to buy it.

Birthday dinner

Osaka Sushi Steak & Grill



Nosteak for me, but sushi and finally the scallops I've been craving. 

Best birthday present ever!

         Three days of dirty dishes--gone!

Poor Izzy.

Just doesn't get the point of cats.

Eating well. Very well.

The aliens are making mess of our road.







I cheated on The China Study Cookbook and cooked out of Isa Chandra Moskowitz.  But I still have a New Ingredient of the Week--

garam masala


Smells heavenly!  It's a mixture of toasted spices, commonly turmeric, peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, cumin seeds and cadamom pods.  Choose your colors on the peppercorns, cumin and cardamom.  I have all of these ingredients separately but putting them together and toasting them would be a pain.

Oddly enough, the recipe added cumin along with curry powder and coriander.  I wonder how differently it would taste with different flavors of garam masala.  I wonder if I could even tell the difference.

Friends new car

Sleek!
            






Happy driver (bad photographer

Unlikely!

Movie day with Theresa!

Good one, too!  A little sappy and simplistic but a lot of fun.  Full of food and all I had to eat was boring popcorn and chocolate candy.  Yummy but it wasn't vine-ripened tomatoes, freshly squeezed olive oil, and sea urchins.




 
Pictures of Theresa and Bob's new car coming tomorrow.