Hilarious and not so much

The True Meaning of Smekday
bu Ada, Rex

Sometimes you have to quit trying to make sense of it all.  Trust the author--she'll get you where you're supposed to go. And then you'll think it's wicked funny when the alien learned his English from very old TV programs and insists on using 'wicked' as his superlative of choice.  And when the alien and the little girl get into a bluffing war about their super powers, including explosive laser eye beams. And putting a cloning machine on an endless feedback loop--
    IT ALL MAKES SENSE.
But if it doesn't, you need to read this book.



 
How Angel Petersen Got His Name
by Gary Paulsen

This was a very short audiobook--kids doing extreme sports before the phrase had been invented.  Not nearly as funny as he wanted it to be.  Maybe it was the reader--there were several episodes that ought to have been hilarious, but hardly a chuckle.  Maybe it's me.  Try for yourself.

Two good ones

The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley

I haven't given a book 5 stars for a while--but this is it.  Nature, history, travel and imagination pass on and off-stage so smoothly you hardly get a breath before one scene ends and the next jumps in.  It's near impossible to put down.

The writer lives in Scotland, a land where the last living wolf was killed in 1743...according to legend.  There's a lot of legend and not much fact.  He starts off with a quick reminder of just how accurate legend tends to be--especially legend associated with such a colossal subject of imagination as The Wolf.  He travels around his home land in search of the legend and finds many amusing variants of it, all of which happened right here.  But he also searches for the wolf's imprint on the land, the trees, the very winds that blow...I think he finds it.


Other chapters of the book take him to Yellowstone and Norway, places where wolf reintroduction is happening.  He tells an awesome account of the changes that the top predator makes on the food chain, the plant succession, and even the mist of the mountains--and those changes are powerful.   it's possible that man can keep a elk population under control.  But deer are a different story--they get fat and happy, overgraze and destroy whole ecosystems, even eating the little trees spawned from a brush fire.  And both get lazy, moving along only when one foraging ground is picked to the bare earth.  It's common knowledge that wolves keep a prey population healthy by weaning out the sick, the weak and the elderly.  But we're only just learning that wolves keep the population moving, too--it's how they find which animals to cull.   And that gives the earth time to replenish and regrow...thus the mist on the mountains.

I'm telling too much.  You need to read his words.






News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories
by Jennifer Haigh

I both love and hate the kind of writing that makes me forget to read. Makes me forget to slow down and savor--forget that it's going to be over soon and I'll never be here for the first time again.  Forget to think, too--it's all story and feeling and then it's the end.

So that's this.  The stories are thoughtful, meditative--they unfold rather than happen.  The real action is in the heart and head.  The head thinks, but the heart, unknown and often unknowing, rules.  At least in the people you care about most--the ones who listen to the heart.

Great research; okay book

Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers
by Mary Roach

I was way off on this one, thinking it was going to be about specific cadavers and their travels (or travails).  Like Speedy Atkins, the mummified man who used to grace a funeral home in Paducah.  Don't make that mistake--this is a book about the science of dead bodies.  And there's a lot of good science here.

You'd expect that dissection for medical research would be a big topic, and it is.  But also covered are historical use of cadaver parts in "medicine"; the definition of death; organ transplants; crash test dummies and traumatic injury research; rates of decay; and alternative methods of "cremation."  Don't take this on a full stomach.

Lost me

Lost Languages by P.E.Cleator

What a shock to find a book published in 1959 with a writing style I'd thought disappeared in the last century!  Just listen to this:

    Inasmuch as the active application of language is speech, it is upon speech that writing, essentially a secondary means of communication, is dependent.

I got what he was saying--after a, "Huh? Back up, there," moment.  When I went on to finish the paragraph, what he was saying made sense--basically this:  While written language is cool, it ain't shucks to spoken language. 

First line of book, by the way.  I should have ran away screaming.

But when you get used to the style, it's like poetry.  Phrases like, "...though this did not preclude them from acquiring other wives as well."  Why not, "...stop them from taking"?  Because it's style!

I just hope I'm not talking like that when I finish reading it.   Or in other words, "I am fearful, but beg the apprehension may be ungrounded, that my own oral language will soon acquire the characteristics of the author's pedological one."

Now that's out of my system.  I have to decline to write a meaningful review.  The subject matter was way out of my league.  I couldn't begin to guess if it was accurate or just pure baloney, but all signs indicated accuracy, completeness, and comprehensiveness.  I did gain an appreciation for the difficulty scholars face--if the language is known but the script unknown, or the script known but the language unknown, deci

phering is hard enough.  But how about tackling an inscription of language unknown  and script unknown?  Fun, indeed.

Still a child at heart...at least for good books.

Memories of a Bookbat
by Kathryn Laskey


If you have Harriet The Spy on your all-time favorite book list, you should have this on there, too.  I'm not comparing the two--other than the age and sex of the protagonist, the books are completely different--but rather, my reaction to them.  I read Harriet over and over, re-read as an adult, and would still be reading it now if I hadn't practically memorized the whole thing.


If I'd come upon Bookbat at the same age, 10 or so, I'd have done the same.  (might still) And it might have induced me to seek out and explore some of the books she mentions in here. 

Nutrition check

Vegan for Life:
Everything You Need to Know
to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet

by Jack Norris and Ginnie Messina

Very detailed study of the vitamins, minerals, and essential elements needed for a human body and how a vegan diet could supply them.  Nothing I didn't know already, but nothing ridiculous, either.  I love the way they dismiss the notion that a vegan diet isn't natural because our far remote ancestors ate meat--

There's no doubt that hominids at meat. . .The argument for veganism has always been primarily ethical, and ought to remain that way.  It's based on a concern for the future, not an obsession about the past.

Actually, that's a quote of a quote.  They say,

The assumption that there is one natural prehistoric diet, which can be approximated today and would be optimal for modern humans, is dubious as best.  Today's commercial plant foods and meats are different from the foods available in prehistoric times.  We eat hybrids of plants and we feed foods to animals that they would not normally eat....

A little more discussion on vitamin B12 supplements, why they're needed and especially why they're needed for people over 50.  I guess I'll start taking them.  Good thing I went back and reread that chapter, while writing this review.  They recommend one of the following:

•  Two servings per day of fortified food providing 1.5 to 2.5 micrograms of B12
•  Take daily supplement of 25 micrograms (25 - 100)
•  Take a supplement of 1000 mcg three times a week.

On first reading, I thought it said all three of the above.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 



Can I rant off topic for a second?  How come every time I research a supplement and come up with an appropriate dosage for me, the stores only carry pills with 100, 200 or even 1000 times that dosage?   I went to the store to replace my 1000 IU Vitamin D3 tables and the smallest they had was 2000.  This is a vitamin that's stored in the fatty tissues--whatever I take, it's going to be with me for a long time.

Admitted, I went back and checked--a 1600 IU daily dosage is the current recommendation for a person in my latitude, so the 2000 is reasonably appropriate.  When the bottle runs dry, I fully expect to go back to the store and find nothing smaller than 10,000.

Also on my list was Vitamin B12; I was looking for the 25-100 mcg mentioned about.  I found 500.  Would 500 mcg six times a week be equivalent to 1000 mcg, three times?  Or do I attempt to cut them into 1/10 ths?

Should have gotten a Pulitzer in 1946

The Member Of The Wedding
by Carson McCuthers

Shockingly intense...and weirdly cozy at the same time.  I mean, in the same book, not literally at the same time.  One moment she'll be setting down at the table, having a quiet meal with the colored cook Berenice and her little friend John Henry; next moment she'd be off on a quest for The Monkey Man to tell someone her shocking news--I'm leaving and I'm not coming back.

Strange stuff moves in the mind of a twelve-year-old girl who has no best friends (her age), no mother or aunt or big sister to model after, and no stack of inappropriate books to devour.  Frankie is shockingly naive and oddly adult-minded.  The cook Berenice could be a sensible and not unimaginative role model, but Frankie doesn't see her as such--probably on account of the race difference, but it could be because she's hired help or even just because she's so much older.  Frankie's young friend John Henry has a good bit of sense, but she doesn't recognize it.  She just skitters on, delusional until doom falls.

The cover blurb called it achingly real.  Pretty accurate.

Not cold at at all

Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons






Okay, so you're judging the Olympics.  Along comes a balance beam contender--a sharp, sassy little girl who gets every movement right with precision and easy grace, throws in a triple flip with a one-handed stop, hops twice backward to dismount and--
Fails to stick the landing!
What rating do you give that one?  And more to the point, what rating do I give this?

I'm a sucker for the triple flip--I'd take off a token point but still rate it high.  So in the case of this book, I'd recommend it but give you a warning--she's going to drop out at one point and disappoint the heck out of you.  I can't be more specific other than to say that the runner crossed the finish line but apparated from the three-quarters mark to the seven-eighth.  She got there in the end, but missed a serious bit of detail.  The missing detail is later explained--in one short sentence that I missed the first time through--but you don't get one iota of the fun out of that short summation.

Hmm...this review is missing a bit of detail, too.  So here goes.  Flora Poste is like a female P. G. Wodehouse original.  Smarter than the average, nosy, opinionated (but not overbearing), and determined to do some good with herself, she invites herself into the family at Cold Comfort Farm and immediately starts to improve their situation.  You're not sure whether she's doing it to help the others or just to help herself to a cleaner, more agreeable lifestyle; but the results are the same in the end. 

She starts in first on the old servant, Adam, by suggesting he speed up his dish-clettering (washing) by replacing the thorny twigs used for scouring,  with a little mop, with a handle.  When he protests that he has no use for the extra time, she cleverly points out that he might spend more time in the cowshed attending to his beloved beasts.  He won't admit it, but he starts thinking.

And on she goes--to Amos, the eldest, who runs the farm but has a secret life of the evening; Seth, the idle lady-charmer with a secret passion of his own; Meriam, the hired girl, working on her fourth baby out of wedlock--does Flora has a remedy for her!  Then Reuben, the only son who really cares about the farm and is deathly suspicious that Flora is here to take it for herself.  We know how unlikely that is, but how can she convince him?  And sweet Elfine, the seventeen-year-old beauty running wild in the forest and just crying out for a good fairy Godmother to turn her into a princess.  And Judith, the nutty mother, and of course the reclusive and overbearing Aunt Ada Doom, who lies in her bed upstairs and controls the farm with unseeing eyes.  Open them suckers, Flora!

Loved, loved, loved this book.

And I remembered her as the whiney replacement for Norma Jean

Dolly:
My Life and Other Unfinished Business
by Dolly Parton -- of course!

Her stories of the early years back in the hills of East Tennessee make this book worth the reading.  All the rest is good, too, but that first part is hilarious.  Haint tales...store-boughten shoes measured with a stick...digging to China...

1. We picked a spot up on the mountain.  You'd think if we were going to dig all the way to China we would at least have given ourselves the advantage of starting in the lowest holler we could find.  Kids gullible enough to try to dig to China in the first place are not likely to think of that.

About halfway through, I feared it was degenerating into the typical my life narrative--the "I did this. I met so-and-so.  So-and-so was a great friend.  My other best friends of the time were such-and-such."  Blah, blah, blah."  And it did--but only for the briefest of short paragraphs.  Then we were back into her thoughts and experiences with detail and feeling.

Two final points.  I wish it hadn't stopped so soon.  And, I wish all autobiographies were this good.

Inspiring. And a little scary.

It's So Easy
and other Lies
by Duff McKagan

Duff McKagan was the bass player for Guns N'Roses during their flaming twelve-year existence.  He went on to co-found Velvet Revolver and do a solo album and collaborate on many others.  So that's a reason to listen to his music, but why should anyone want to read his autobiography?

Because he quit cold turkey from an alcohol and drug habit of near legendary proportions and he stayed off.  For good. One short lapse into a prescription drug addiction reminded us, the readers, that he was a real human being, and reminded him, the addict, that he's always going to have to fight it. 

It's an amazing story of an amazing life. We all face the demons, but some of us are wimps and some are warriors. It's good to read about the warriors.

Splat. Pfui. Drut.

Winged Leviathan
by Forrest Audobon

I thought I'd try something different and the description didn't sound so bad--
                    SINISTER WINGS FLAP IN THE DARKNESS...

But then came The March Of The Cliches.

• Edward had become strong and handsome and Galina had become excruciatingly hot.
• ...piercing brown eyes that knew no fear.
• They were the Lucky 13, one of baddest squads in all of the Marines.

And then came the predictable and inane interactions of the characters.

• Galina and Edward go swimming.  She pulls him under water and holds him until he thrashes.  He pushes her underwater and holds her while she thrashes.  After this minor bout of S&M, they laughed.  They kissed.  They both got sucked down in a huge vortex....

Well, the latter part was unexpected.  But by then, I was more than ready to see them die.

I made it to Chapter 3 and decided to end the torture.  Pfui.

Sweetheart of the YA novel

Honey, Baby Sweetheart
By Deb Caletti

I'm having so much trouble not comparing this to The Moon By Night by Madeline L'Engel...but that would be so very unfair and I'd probably get flamed.  I'll only say that the plot is vaguely similar--good girl meets bad boy--but this one went so very many places that that one did not. This heroine has brains and hurmor and she makes a conscious choice to "go wild" rather than simply wallow helplessly in an adolescent identity crisis.  She has a mother who both cares and communicates but also gives her the freedom to make choices, interfering in a kindly way that teaches lessons.  And possibly the mother gets a chance to learn something for herself.

But enough with the comparisons.  Standing on its own, it's funny and exciting and the heroine gets a chance to get out of herself and do something real, something to give her some perspective on what rebellion really means.  And it's a hoot, too.

Meh to the meh'est

The Poisoned House
by Michael Ford

Clever tale, cleverly told.  A hundred years ago, this would have satisfied the children's audience for whom it was intended.  It started off well, but soon you discover that the bad people weren't all that bad and the ghost didn't have a sense of humor and the plot is awfully contrived and the characters weren't ever going to get interesting motives.  He could have added a love interest, at the least.

Sorry to be so negative. a lot of people loved this book.  Wish I knew why.

Mahem reminiscent of Supernatural but without wimps

The Haunted Air
by F. Paul Wilson




I think I'm coming in in the middle of a series here and I don't even care.  This was great!  Everybody kicked butt, even the Chihuahua. Guns and bombs and hurricanes; witches and hexes; mutants and normal people with twisted motives--it's got it all.

Repairman Jack is a man without an official identity.  We don't learn why in this book, but I suspect the first one in the series told it. Or one of the first books--it appears to be one of those series where the author went back and wrote several prequels. I actually set out to get the "real" first book (The Tomb) but either the library catalog was wrong or else someone had picked it up right before I got there.  So I grabbed this one.

Hmm...correction to that. This is supposedly the sixth book in the series.  I have a lot of catching up to do.

The P is silent

It's not Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.  But it is pure Wodehouse.  His star is a fast-thinking know-it-all who titles himself Psmith--the P is silent--and his costar is plain, unimaginative cricket-loving Mike Jackson who's just been removed from Cambridge and sent to exile at a rather boring bank.  Psmith follows him there and takes him on a merry ride around and over the stolid bank administrators, culminating in a county cricket match and oops--

I almost gave away the ending.  But you'll guess it.  Not to say that anything at all in this books is predictable.  Not as funny as the Jeeves series, but bone-cracking.

Great biography, great man

Jim Henson: The Biography
by Brian Jay Jones


How could a biography go wrong, given such a subject?  Well, It didn't. It was dense and detailed and almost as funny as the man and his creatures.  He created and performed near nonstop for all his short life, but it seems that his greatest talent was recognizing great people and bringing them together.  I never really thought about the whole teamwork thing--after all, they're identified as "Jim Henson's Muppets--but there were a lot more muppets (and creatures) than a single guy could ever have invented.  And that may have been his biggest gift.

Did you know the Muppets started out doing commercials with the basic script "Do you use our product?  No?  Then take this!  [Explosion]".  Do you know Kermit the frog was originally a lizard-like creature?  And that he was intended to be dropped from Sesame Street after the first season?  That Miss Piggy (voiced by Frank Oz)  started out as a minor character in The Muppet Show?  That The Muppet Show struggled at first with the Fozzie Bear character, another creation of Frank Oz, because he was too pathetic to be funny?  That The Dark Crystal was "successful" but The Labrynth was not, despite great reviews?

If any of this interests you, you need to read the book.