Loved everything except the food

Stranger in the Forest
On Foot Across Borneo
by Eric Hansen

Yes, it took me seven weeks to finish this 280 page book, but don't take that as significant.  I left it at work and only read it during bathroom breaks.

So much you can experience in a solo travel through a jungle island in the 1980s.  I was shocked when I looked back and saw the date of his travels--while reading, I fell into a "feeling" that this was happening in the middle of the twentieth century sometime.  Say, 1952.  NOT 1982--but so it was.  As another reviewer points out, shotgun shells were his most valued trading commodity.  Aeroplanes and sewing machines and telephones existed, but not a lot of people had seen them.

So much, as I say, and it's too much to mention.  Jungle vistas, friendship, fear, really sore feet, storytelling over a camp fire built for smoke, not warmth (smoke to drive off insects), hunting with a spear, human greed and amazing human kindness.  Get the idea?  He was a true traveler--a sojourner--chooser of the road less traveled by.  His journey will never be repeated.

Twin tales # 1

A Nun In the Closet
by Dorothy Gilman


I had this bright idea of reading these two books, A Nun In the Closet and Nun in the Closet, back to back, so I could review them together.  Compare and contrast, you know.

So here's the compare:  they have similar titles.  They're both mysteries.  So far I'm liking them both.
And the contrast: everything else

Ms. Gilman (yes, author of the Mrs. Polifax books), writes the careless adventure of a pair of nuns sent to take possession and evaluate an old house which has just been donated to their order.  Her characterization of the nuns, the people they meet, the odd discoveries they make and how they react to them--that is the story.  The mystery part is not all that great.  You pretty much know from the beginning what's been going on with the house.  The only question to be answered is what part did the "third nun" play in it all.

To sum up, it's a good, solid so-so.  But it makes me curious to try one of the Mrs. Polifax books.  Clearly she's a good writer--did she ever improve as a mystery writer?

Instant enjoyment

Instant Mom
by Nia Vardalos

If I approved of nouning the verb “read”, this would be one.  Lightning fast and light in tone, it tells the autobiography of Nia Vardalos from the time when she “broke into” show business through her struggles to have a child to the first few years of motherhood.  And it’s a joyful ride--the inevitable ups and downs of live, love, children and show business.  (What’s the difference between children and show business?  Dunno—they both kick you in the shins.)

To say I read it quickly would be an understatement.  Certain kinds of autobiography just grip me that way.  I read it in a couple of days, while I’ve been slugging through a biography of Griffith Pugh for seven weeks now.  In fact I’m thinking about reading this over again before it has to go back to the library.

If you’re not interested in pregnancy, IVF, motherhood, adoption, working moms—that kind of thing—you probably won’t love this book.  And as I mentioned, it’s not exactly “deep”.  But it’s as deep as it needs to be to tell a rollicking good story. 

So now I know. And it's off my to-read list.

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth (Illustrator), Mike Dringenberg (Illustrator),  

Malcolm Jones III (Illustrator), Todd Klein (Letterer),  

Karen Berger (Introduction/Editor)

I was mostly captivated throughout.  I only occasionally thought of giving up.  But...that's me.  I'm too old for this.

At a much younger age I would have stolen this from the library to read and re-read by the uncertain light of a flashlight under the covers.

The Sandman himself--Morpheus--is beyond cute.  I swoon.  (Metaphorically and in hindsight.)

(Just kidding about the stealing.)

Lot of title on this one

Down and Dirty Birding

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous, Here's All the Outrageous 

but True Stuff 

You've Ever Wanted to Know About North American Birds

by Joey Slinger

Did you know that the best way to see a Merlin was to watch pigeons and if one of them suddenly turns into a hawk, you've got it?   If you're a real birdwatcher, you'll know this isn't really a joke.  It sounds funny...until you've been there.

Here's a book full of good advice.  And jokes.  And sometimes you can't tell the difference...unless you've been there.

As a funny book, it's pretty darn funny.
As a how-to book, I wish he'd spend a little less time on the "parts of birds" chapter and added a chapter on field technique.  I'd love to read his pointers on squatting, crawling, climbing, and what to do when your binoculars are assiduously scoping out the Rufuous Hummingbird at your neighbor's window and they suddenly espie a pair of human eyes looking back at them?

It's a dangerous job, bird watching.  Don't venture forth without reading this first.

Dog tales

The Lost Dogs of Michael Vick
and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption
by Jim Gorant

Apparently pit bulls have a bad rep.  Of some 49-odd animals rescued from the dog fighting operation of NFL football player Michael Vick, twenty-two were recommended for adoption.  Eighteen went into sanctuary with a good chance of being adoptable, someday; seven others went into sanctuary little chance of being adoptable.  Only two were put to sleep--one for ill health and one for aggression.

I thought pit bulls were hopelessly aggressive and too dangerous to ever be kept as pets.  The national statistics show pit bulls and rottweilers as the two breeds responsible for over half of all reported attacks on humans.  Case-by-case analysis of fatal dog attacks showed that most of the human subjects were very old, mentally impaired, or very young.  An analysis of one group of attack reports, in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, identified a pattern of contributing factors, such as: (a) lack of supervision of vulnerable humans (b)  dogs not socialized for human interactions (c) owner history of abuse or neglect (d) failure to neuter adult male dogs, and a couple morewhich overlapped the four listed above.  They found that four or more of these factors were co-present in 80% of the incidents.

But assuming that human beings are too damn stupid to change their behavior--

Sounds like  Jurrassic Park, doesn't it?  let's selectively breed a meaner dinosaur, teach it to hate humans, and trust the general population to stay out of its cage.

--still, it is probable that pit bulls have issues.  Some pit bulls.    The news media blow it all out of proportion, as usual.  "Pit bull mauls child" is big news, but the dog's state of health and lack of proper training is not. Before Pit bulls had the bad rep, there were German Shepherds.  And before German Shepherds, Doberman pinschers.  And bulldogs.  Can anyone convince me that a bulldog is too vicious to be a household pet?  Too dumb, maybe!

As to the dogs in this book, if there were a gene for "vicious behavior", these dogs didn't have it.  They weren't even all that good fighters.

The book is all too clearly written by a dog lover, and the first few chapters are way overdramatized.  Skim through that part, and get quickly to where the animals are taken from their kennels and spread out over temporary shelters.  And there a lot of the damage was done--at its best, an animal shelter is a stressful place to be, and these dogs suffered for it.  But more than half of the book contains the dog stories.  The humans helped, but the dogs did the hard work.  Dogs are amazing!

And then there were five

Sisterhood, Everlasting
By Ann Brasheres

Loss and redemption.  Suffering and joy.  Confusion and obfuscation, clarity and purpose. From the depths of despair to the top of the world--that's the journey for Ann Brasheres' girls, the "Septembers" from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  They don't always recognize the depths of despair when they're in it, but we do.  We love these girls too much. We ache for their losses and long to give them a big dose of courage, the one thing they need most. Let's hope they find it on their own.

I call them girls, but they're women in this book. In age, if not in behavior.  There's an interesting theme running through the stories--how and when does a person stop thinking of themselves as a child and truly become an adult?  There's no one answer here, but there might be a couple of them.

p.s. if you didn't read and love all four Sisterhood novels, I don't think you'll like this.

All this and secret lives, too

The Secret Lives of Dresses
by Erin McKean

I adored this book!   I even misunderstood what it was going to be about and still adored it! 

I thought it was going to be dress-centric rather than people-centric.  But no--It's about a granddaughter who comes back home to visit her grandmother in the hospital.  She ends up keeping the grandmother's store running for a time, with the help of a couple of her grandmother's colorful and amusing friends.  And, oh!  What she discovers!

It's sweet but never sappy, full of people you either love or want to punch out, and it's even a bit mystical.  Vintage clothing has a past, you know.  Like adopting an adult dog--you end up with some really odd behaviors that you can't much explain...you can only wonder.

Conspicuous consumption

Last year I was playing a game of how many new foods I could try.  I don't feel much like games anymore, but just for the record, last week's CSA box held:

I'm gonna eat them all!    In appreciation for their image, here's their web site: Red Moon Farm

Didn't know how much I wanted this until I got it

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography
by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Pamela Smith Hill (editor)

If you're a Little House nut like me, you're going to read this.  And no matter how many footnotes there are, you're going to want more.  It would need to footnote every noun and half of the verbs to make me happy.

Editor Pamela smith Hill has taken the unpublished autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and added a buttload of background information in the form of annotations that usually take up more space than text.  The autobiography itself had been rejected by publishers, which you will understand when you read it.  It had no chapter divisions, no coherent flow--it's like a series of diary entries.  Sad as the rejection must have been for Laura and her daughter, it was a good thing for us.  Rose Wilder Lane (daughter) had a reputation for blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction.  Rather than letting her rework and rewrite and fictionalize the original manuscript and end up with something more fiction than non, the rejection spurred Laura to start over and author the Little House series.   Freed by fiction but bound by honesty, she did a beautiful job!   And the original autobiography is left for serious readers to see the fact behind the fiction and marvel at her accomplishment.

The only thing I wish, if history could be reversed, is that Laura had gone back over her original autobiography and fleshed out some of the details.  The act of writing the series probably reminded her of things she'd forgotten--it would be nice to have them put into their true places.

as to the book in my hands...what do I say?   I'm ecstatic to have it.  I'm grateful that Ms. Hill and her collaborators did the research and expended the hours of labor in compiling all of these historical details, biographical snippets, and comparisons with the fictional series that put these dry details into their place.  I don't think there's a single person mentioned that they didn't attempt to track down in real life.

But a couple of things were disappointing to me, so I'll mention them here in hopes that there might be a second edition, revised and expanded.   The editor's referring to Laura as Wilder and Rose as Lane--that was annoying as heck.  Some biographers do use the surname of their subjects, but just as many use the given name and a few vary between the two.  (Which is also irritating.)  But doing it here was just plain stupid.  Laura wasn't even named Wilder until the last few pages!  Would you write a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and refer to her as "Roosevelt"?   Every single time I read either name--Wilder or Lane--I had to stop, back off, remember who it was talking about, and resume.  Irritated at the interruption.

And while I was thrilled to get the biographical details, I wanted more physical details.  more natural history--more about the animals that Pa hunted or trapped; more about the gardens; more about the plants of the landscapes; more more more.  What else was happening at that time, in the country and the towns of Burr Oak, Walnut Grove, and De Smet?   What were the distinctions between the various religions and churches at the time?  Since Laura spent so much of her young life in school, what were schools really like, in the day?  Some of the things are completely foreign to us nowadays--recitations, mental arithmetic, and diagramming sentences, to name a few.

I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of detail, because there was.  I'm just insatiable.

Dusty diversion

Dust Bowl: the Southern Plains in the 1930s
by Donald Worster

Not exactly a page turner...
:-)

But I enjoyed every page of it.    I was expecting more lurid tales of scoured automobiles and blackened skies, but that part was over with quickly and it concentrated on the four-way collision of politics, economics, bad science and Mother Nature that resulted in the near-destruction of America's low-grass prairie.   First time, then again, then again....

Some lessons were learned and some still need to be learned, for instance, in our management of the California desert.   Current drought conditions are forcing the huge farms to find their irrigation water from farther and farther away,  but they'll go on doing so as long as they can afford to pay for it.  Of course, it's we who pay for it.  The fuel--and the fertilizer--that goes into creating a perfect head of lettuce in the middle of a desert and transporting it 1700 miles to a Texas Walmart store--well, it's inconceivable.  We pay for it in our tax dollars, not our grocery budget.   If we had to pay what it really costs, farmer's markets would start to look awfully cheap.

ya fic as it ought to be

Out of the Easy
by Ruta Sepetys

Is like no other book I've ever read.  Yes, I said that about Code Name Verity and The Thirteenth Tale and countless others, but I'm saying it again.

The people are just what they are and you love or hate them on sight.  of course there's a stereotype or two--the archetype bad guy and two faithful servants come to mind--but nobody else fits into an easy mold.  The heroine Josie is a young Cinderella who likes pretty dresses; longs to go to parties and have friends and be treated just like anyone else, but she doesn't waste time moaning about it.  She makes excellent grades in school, works at two jobs, saves her money, reads voraciously, and aspires to run away...to college! 

Her low-life mother may be a total sh*t, but you kind of understand how she got that way.   The madam of the whorehouse doesn't have a heart of gold.  The owner of the bookstore where Josie works is too loony to be allowed out of his room.  The son of the bookstore owner is handsome and flirtatious but seems to be hiding something.  The rich stranger who comes into the bookstore....

I could go on for a while.  Lot of mystery, excitement, a touch of romance, and a heroine who isn't afraid to strap a 38 on her leg when she's in danger.
It's a keeper.

Making food difficult

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
by Laura Schenone


A man goes on a journey.  Classic start, right?  Too boring, though...let's make it...
A woman goes on a quest for her family ravioli recipe.
Better, but better still is...

A woman wants to reconnect with something real, something from her family history, and uses a mystery ingredient in a ravioli recipe as an excuse to dedicate years of her life to research, travel and interviews.  It's a deranged assignment, as Julie Powell says.  And like Powell's, it makes a darn good story.

With recipes.  I'm sure the recipes are great, too, but they're almost all to difficult to contemplate.   Too much mounding and rolling and kneading and flipping.   Even if I went to the machines--the stand mixer and the pasta machine (which I don't have), could I do it?

Nah.  I'll leave fresh pasta to the Italians.

Fan-FICTION-girl

Fangirl
by Rainbow Rowell

I loved everything about this book except the name.  I'd have called it Fanfic Girl.  You all do know what fan fiction is, don't you?

I'll tell you.  It's an alternate universe created by those who really, really don't want to let the story end.  Give me a book/movie/manga/anime that's popular with young people, and I'll find you a fan fiction site dedicated to it.  People write their own stories based on the worlds and characters they know and love so well, and the story just keeps going on.  Or backward, or sideways, or upside-down.

And in the case of Cather, our just starting college freshman, writing fanfic can be better than real life.  Or maybe not--we'll see.

There's a lotta lotta romance in here--it's not for the faint of heart.  I talked back to the narrator a time or too--enough with the mushy stuff!  Get on with the story!   if I'd been the editor I'd have trimmed out a lot of the repetition toward the end.  There's only so many times I can read about what part of his face she kissed and how that felt.  Yuuck.

The end, while not exactly disappointing, left one of the subplots wide open.  Could we possibly convince the author to write a sequel from the perspective of Ren, the sister?