The course of true love...

I'm In No Mood For Love - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Calling Romeo - Alexandra Potter (Downtown Press, 2002)

I needed a romantic reading fix, so took a trip to the library and ended up with these two, figuring I was safe with both authors. And now I don't have that much to say, except that here they are. Gibson ran more or less according to romance genre conventions, but I found both characters appealing. Potter offered a really interesting look at how a love story almost falls apart, and what's required to make a relationship work. Fairly or not, I found one character loads more sympathetic than the others, but a happy ending for one requires a happy ending for most, so.... 

And now the pink books go back to the library, and something else will take their place.

Elizabethan Sci-Fi, except not

Shakespeare's Game - William Gibson (Atheneum, 1978)


I'd like to have someone to blame for this. Somewhere along the line, I came under the impression that cyberpunk doyen William Gibson started his publishing career with an early novel that somehow brought in Shakespeare and would be tame enough for someone like me to actually dip my toe in the genre. This is totally wrong (unless Neuromancer is somehow about the Bard). The Gibson above is an older Gibson, a playwright, who offered a structural and textual analysis of Shakespeare's plays based on years of teaching graduate students. So I guess I need to talk about him and that book, although I maintain that "Shakespeare's Game" would be a fantastic title for some sort of science fiction-esque work (or it sounds just like Da Vinci Code... one of those).

Anyway, this work. Look, 200 pages of analysis is not going to be exciting, no matter how much Shakespearean iambic pentameter you include.Well, not exciting to me at any rate. And so I may not have been the close reader that this book deserved. Even so, I found things to learn, having not studied Shakespeare since high school. I think - think - Gibson argued that the climax of the plays tends to occur at the end of Act III (of V); everything else from this point is essentially pre-ordained, and thus tidying up to get to the inevitable conclusion. He also talked quite a bit about how deftly Shakespeare presents false antagonists, who stand in or draw attention from the real conflict. (On this note, I wish he had spent some time with Julius Caesar.) And how sloppy and nonsensical Shakespeare can be in service of other goals (chiefly entertainment); for the life of me I couldn't tell whether Gibson considered this a failing or not.

Lots of Hamlet (which will forever be the Reduced Shakespeare version to me... below) and King Lear. And then Merchant of Venice and Othello. What I realized: I don't know Shakespeare as well as I'd like. Goal: watch more. :)

Le sigh

I wish my blog got enough attention to qualify for free books. (And then to have said free flow of books threatened.) Thank goodness for libraries.

Sex and hockey in DeLillo's America

Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League - Cleo Birdwell (better known as Don DeLillo) (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980)


Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).

But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.

Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.

And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I  just couldn't get my finger on it.

Irish Times

No News at Throat Lake - Lawrence Donegan (Pocket Books, 2000)


So let's say you play bass guitar in a rock/pop band in the 1980s. But what you really dreamed of doing was writing for the Guardian. So when the band fizzles out, you do that. But then somehow you decide what you really want to do is live in a the boonies of County Donegal. If this is you, you'd be Donegan.

Despite leaving his old world behind him for a ramshackle home in an Irish cottage, he doesn't leave behind journalism, and ends up writing for the local Tirconaill Tribune. This memoir, then, is a combination of Donegan's attempts to adjust to a new pace of life, the stories that come his way thanks to this quirky newspaper, and his immersion in the world of Gaelic football.

It's light and amusing, and strangely dated feeling. The year he spent in Ireland is circa 1998, and I guess it's just hitting me now what a long time ago that really was. I wouldn't mind going back in time, and to a picturesque locale like Creeslough. Anyone with a time machine?

A different look at Egypt

In the Eye of the Sun - Ahdaf Soueif (Anchor Books, 1992, 2000)


Several years ago, I received a notebook titled "Books to Check Out" and ever since, I've made a valiant effort to keep my list of books to read in one place. (With mixed results.) Anyway, from time to time, I go back to the early entries that are yet to be crossed off, and wonder why I haven't gotten to them yet. Usually, it's because I can't find them in a local library. But now I have access to oodles of libraries in California, so I'm going back through.

My friend Mariam recommended Soueif to me early early on. This must have been shortly after we graduated, or maybe soon after she arrived in Cairo. And now, years and years later, I have finally read it. This was a challenge, with my work and life schedule being what it is. 785 pages.... thank goodness for a one-day business trip that gave me uninterrupted hours and hours to read. (I probably read 1/3 of the book that day.) But this is in some ways actually quite a quick read; the pages generally turn in a hurry.

Asya is a young member of the Cairene middle-class, I guess you'd call it. The daughter of two professors, her future in academia was never in doubt. She is romantic and headstrong, and eagerly falls in love at 17, and less eagerly waits until graduation before marrying Saif.

Thanks to the structure of the novel, which starts with 39 pages at the end of the 1970s and then doubles back to the beginning... to 1967, we know that things go wrong. And in some ways, the novel is just the path of how they get there. Asya and Saif made me a little crazy -- it's one of those love stories open to all sorts of interpretation. They met too young, perhaps. They never really knew one another, not really, and they just grew apart. A skeptic could quickly point out all the warning signs before their marriage. And yet, in another light, their love shines more brightly, and their troubles stem more from their failure to communicate. They misread one another again and again. And I longed for them to bridge that gap.

It comes out early on that Asya has an affair, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. But to say too much more may bring on spoilers. Suffice it to say that at one point I grew sufficiently frustrated that I told my boyfriend that I wanted to punch the book. Some characters...... argh.

Oh, and the first half of the book laces Asya's life with the historical events unfolding around her, these latter reported in terse, journalistic style. Once she leaves for England, though, her internal world grows larger and larger, and we learn less about not only outside events, but even the lives of those she loves.

And lastly, a quote: "This [poetry] has to be what matters. Or a large part of what matters. How can people read it and just go on as though they'd been reading the newspaper or some geography lesson[...]?"

Books for trade

I had another book swap a few weeks back. This was my take. (I also made some lovely lovely bookmarks.) And when all was said and done, we donated about 40 books to the Huntington Beach Public Library. Thanks everyone for the fun evening!

How to be a writer

Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers - Carolyn See (Ballantine Books, 2002)


I've always loved writing without really having any real conception of how I could be a writer. Do I want to be? Do I not? Reading this book didn't really help answer that question, but See is just about all you could want in a mentor. She is honest and witty and eccentric and self-aware.

The book covers the preparatory period, and ways to psych yourself up for writing. (This includes writing "charming notes" to those you admire.) It then moves on to the writing process, and how to conceive of major aspects of writing, such as plot, space, characters, etc. Her assertion that the 10 "most important" people in your life are your characters led me make my list, and realize that there were some surprising names on there. And finally, the last section is about all the work YOU have to do to get your work out there, and published, and promoted, and everything else. It all sounds exhausting, to be honest.

But if nothing else, See reminded me how much I enjoy writing, and watching words flow from my fingers onto a page (or screen). And as I said above, she really makes quite a mentor.

Hope & Faith

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (Penguin, 2005)


So the two sisters are Hope & Faith (except the family is Ukrainian, so they are Nadezhda and Vera) - this is important enough that it gets spelled out. Their elderly widower father decides to marry a voluptuous Ukrainian immigrant, to help her get her papers. And because he is in his mid-80s, and utterly infatuated with this woman who makes him feel like a man again. The sisters, unsurprisingly, are not excited about this plan.

So he marries, and then everything (predictably) goes to hell. And much of the book is a tale of how they are going to get rid of this monstrous woman, sprinkled with occasional questions of whether one should admire her tenacity and/or have sympathy for her striving. But what it reminded me of was - of all things - Catch-22. I felt that same profound discomfort and unease while reading, that same sense of being trapped in an illogical world, where life was profoundly unfair. Through the looking glass, I suppose. Or like life in the USSR, for that matter. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it played out, but I felt... well, icky.

Then, somehow, it picks up a lot of speed. Maybe because you start learning more about the trauma of the family's past. This is a family whose origins can be found in the Terror, and the terror famine, and then the War and the German camps. And somehow, being reminded of all that made me feel somehow safer. I grew to believe that Lewycka had too much sympathy for her characters to make them truly suffer again. Writing that, I can see how it doesn't make much sense, but it's how I felt all the same.

And, because in a way it both wraps up the novel and a broader project in my life to consider the importance of the narratives we create to make sense of our experiences:

I had thought there was a happy story to tell about my parents' life, a tale of triumph over tragedy, of love overcoming impossible odds, but now I see that there are only fleeting moments of happiness, to be seized and celebrated before they slip away.

Lizzie Bennet in high school

Prom & Prejudice - Elizabeth Eulberg (Point, 2011)


I was reading some RA (readers' advisory) thing about new young adult fiction when I came across this title. And the description made me howl. At work. Lovely. My library didn't purchase it, but I finally came across one that did, and here we go.

I can't figure out if it's even possible to read this book without knowing the source material. Certainly it can't be as amusing. Longbourn is no longer the home of the Bennets, but instead a very posh New England boarding school, where prom is a BFD. Lizzie is a scholarship student. Jane & Lydia are sisters, but not Elizabeth's sisters. Bingley & Darcy attend the neighboring boys' school, named - naturally - Pemberley. Other references to the book pop up in unexpected places.

Eulberg has a difficult task adapting P&P for modern teens. The grand themes of the love story are as apt as ever: pride, an unwillingness to change initial impressions, misunderstanding, stubbornness about who we think we are and what we think we want.... all of these get in the way of true happiness. But actions and attitudes that make sense in the early 1800s seem bizarre in today's climate. Bingley & his sister, for example. Are brothers really that persuadable? And Lydia.... you can have a wild child today (easy enough) but how do you demonstrate how humiliating that wildness is? Can it really bring shame on a family?

Anyway, it's cute. But I'm afraid I would have hated it had I read it as a teen.

I'm re-reading again

Reading a book on the computer is a strange experience still to me. Especially when it's a book set in the early nineteenth century. Anyway, yay Jane Austen. Yay Persuasion.

Sometimes I re-read books

Mating Rituals of the North American WASP - Lauren Lipton

This book lodged itself so firmly in my head, I had to buy it used, and to spend stolen moments here and there reading it again, falling a little bit in love. Thanks Lauren Lipton :)

Hey A's

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003)


In 2002, I lived in Berkeley. And somewhere along the line, I became an A's fan. Probably because they had this unreal winning streak, setting MLB records. I was at 2 or 3 of the games in that streak. And baseball was fun.

I've been wanting to read this book for awhile. I've picked up enough here and there to know that by using statistics in a different way, Billy Beane had upended all the typical rules about what you needed for a successful team. And could do it on the cheap. Coooooooooool.

Somehow, it never occurred to me that the book covered the same season that I remembered so well. But then, suddenly it did. And it wasn't just names like Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, and Mark Mulder (yum!) that were popping up. All the people I forgot: Dye, Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford of the craaaaaazy pitch, etc etc etc. Oh, and Nick Swisher, who joined the A's after I left for the East Coast. Ah, sigh.

So honestly, the chapter about the game where they went for the MLB record.... that was my favorite part of the book. I was at that game. It was one of the most wild sports experiences I've ever had. It rivals the hockey stuff even. Just.... oh, it was amazing. And I bet it's fun to read about even if you aren't reliving it. :)

The book itself is fascinating too. Lewis explains Beane & DePodesta's strategy essentially like this: what's most important is ability to avoid making outs. Look for players who are good at that - focus on the stats that really matter. Find the ones who are good at that who are undervalued for some reason, and snap them up. Generally these people don't "look" like baseball players, so are discounted. And thus, your 2002 Oakland Athletics.

Of course, the A's haven't been much to look at in awhile, and I'm curious about how one would analyze Beane's tenure now. Lewis is an admirer, or was in 2002-03. I want to hear more about now (perhaps I should actually go look and see what he's written).

And yet, I say Lewis is an admirer, but he may not be entirely sold, and here was his comment to Beane that stood out, even amidst all the (lovely lovely) statistics: "Every player is different. Every player must be viewed as a special case. the sample size is always one" (p. 248).

How to become a bestselling novelist

The Glamorous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder - Holly McQueen (Washington Square Press, 2008)


I really shouldn't complain, b/c this book made me laugh a lot. (It's always fun when the baristas look over at you wondering what's so funny.) And it has a cute twist. And the requisite Daniel/Mark Darcy triangle. However, I don't feel like we get to know our romantic male lead nearly well enough, and we probably should.

More importantly, who are you, Isabel??? Her antics and total inability to understand almost anything led me from chuckling to wanting to bang my head on the table. I kept waiting for some sort of personal growth, or something... but if it existed, I missed it. I probably felt this especially keenly having just left Ellie from The Last Letter from your Lover.

Lots of intriguing characters though, and I think McQueen has a lot of space to play around with the eccentric mother secretly pursuing a bizarre dream, the disapproving father, the friend who has everything together except for a totally unreasonable crush (I wanted more of this storyline!). This is her first novel, and I'll be curious to see how her next ones develop.

A little bit of magic

Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow Books, 1986)


First of all, the book is pretty different from the Hayao Miyazaki film (which I want to go back and watch again). So you should probably make sure you come across both of them, else you'll be missing out.

This was a book club selection (I finally made it to a meeting!) and received positive-to-mixed reviews from the members. There was some frustration with the abruptness of the ending, and uncertainty about whether Howl was actually a romantic dude.

But first, plot. Sophie has resigned herself to a dull life taking over the family hat shop when a witch's curse turns her into a 90 year old crone and she leaves home to ... well, that's not very clear. But she soon finds herself in the walking castle of Wizard Howl, where she and his fire demon agree to a deal: he'll lift her spell if she can free him from the contract binding him to the castle hearth.

And then adventures go from there. Howl is a dandy rather than an evil eater-of-hearts, everyone seems to have more magical power than they think, and Wales circa 1986 makes an appearance even among the towns in this fantasy land.

I am slightly embarrassed to say that Sophie reminded me very much of Bella Swan (Wow, I barely blogged about Twilight at all. I must have been ashamed) and if Stephenie Meyer didn't use Sophie Hatter as inspiration, both authors were at least trying to do the same thing. Which is? Sophie & Bella don't see their own power. Sophie believes she is plain and destined for a plain life; Bella is plain and awkward and surrounded by creatures far more beautiful and powerful. And yet, the problem throughout is that they don't see themselves clearly; they don't recognize their own beauty and strength. It's a difficult task to carry off, and both books have problems, but the trope is one of the things I like most about YA fiction.

As Time Goes By

The Last Letter from your Lover - Jojo Moyes (Viking, 2011)


One of the reasons I feel blessed to be a reader is for the feeling you get when you come across a book that makes you so pleased to be reading it. It may be romantic, or exciting, or heartwarming, or tear-jerking. But whatever it is, you are glad that the book exists, and that you exist and are able to read it.


All of which is a rather over-the-top way to say that I really loved this book. I am all about the British romances, apparently.


Story, in brief: in October 1960, Jennifer Stirling wakes up in a hospital, her memory essentially gone. She tries to return to upper-class life with a husband she feels is a stranger ... and then finds a letter. She had been having an affair, and now much begin a mad search to determine the identity of her lover, the trajectory of their love, and what her husband and friends may have known. 


Interspersed are flashbacks just a few months, to when she met the man behind the letters, all from his point of view. How he found himself desperately in love with someone who should have been only a conquest. And then time moves forward.


And then time moves dramatically forward, to 2003. Ellie, a reporter whose own "all-consuming" love affair threatens to wreak havoc on her career, finds a cache of these letters. For reasons both professional and personal, she sets out to discover what became of Jennifer & B. 


The earlier story is the more compelling, and I wouldn't blame any reader who wanted to take Ellie and shake her for being just like any other British chick lit heroine. But that is unkind, and not entirely true. (And also kind of okay, b/c this reader loves [most] British chick lit.) And Moyes does two things that I adore. The first is making a romantic hero of the librarian. (Thank you!) The second is entwining the two stories such that the resolutions of each are entirely bound up in one another.


If I only read novels like this, I'd be pretty darn close to perfectly content.

KGB-CIA Smackdown

The Charm School - Nelson DeMille (Warner Books, 1988, 2006)

My mom tells me that she went through a phase when I was a baby where she believed it inevitable that Reagan would blow us all up. And really, am I too blasé in my conviction that the Cold War was never really going to go thermonuclear?

I grew up, for all intents and purposes, after the Cold War. Born weeks after the Miracle on Ice, I knew the USSR as a place my daddy had visited as a student. Heck, he worked for a Russian businessman who - I think? - was installing laundromats in Moscow or something. It was perestroika, glasnost, and then a Wall fell, but I was too little to understand. And then a putsch. And aftermath. Drunken Yeltsin dancing on a stage. So long Soviet Union, I hardly knew ye.

Even after I became a scholar of Soviet history, I was just that: a scholar. I never had known the USSR as an existential threat, the way my professors had. Well, many of them hadn't felt that way themselves, but they existed in a world that did. (And some did. Certainly.)

But I digress. There's a book here. A spy thriller! I don't think I've ever read one of these before. It's exciting! And during the Cold War - probably set roughly around when it was written, 1988. And it takes things so seriously. And gives the Soviets points for competence that, quite honestly, they probably didn't deserve. The allure of détente vies for primacy with the deeply rooted sentiment that the Soviets would do anything to win.

Lots more for me to think about as well. Often the action (and exciting action! KGB training "Americans" how to completely pass and infiltrate our society. Car chases! Plane crashes! Lots of doublespeak! Oh, and sex) felt like just a distraction from the questions I wanted to ponder about the importance of the Cold War as an origin myth in the construction of post-war identity in both the USA and USSR. So my point is: this was fun! Seriously. Spy novels are awesome. But it also made me want to run into the garage and dig through boxes until I found all my history books.

Just a fling? Ha!

Only Mine - Susan Mallery (HQN Books, 2011)

Sometimes, when I'm reading a romance, and a woman gets involved with a guy in one of those "no strings attached, just for fun" affairs, I kinda want to take her and shake her. "Don't you ever read romance novels?!? Haven't you ever seen a romcom?!? You're totally going to fall for him." It's a similar urge to wanting to smack the characters in horror movies, who clearly have never seen a horror film before.

(Admittedly, on occasion, characters go meta and say shit to themselves like: Snap out of it [character's name]. This is real life, not a romance novel. Ha!)

But! This book has no fake marriages, although one faked relationship, which actually, for maybe the first time in romance history, makes sense. It also has both twins and triplets (two more books coming this fall, if you were wondering). And I took the book home mainly to figure out where in California the fictional town of Fool's Gold was located. I'm still going through this wistful phase where small-town life sounds really really good.

Not Alone

Midlife Crisis at 30 - Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin (Plume 2004)

I really wish I had read this 3 years ago, when it first came into my life via a bookswap. Because despite all the differences and things that "make me unique" and whatnot, I often felt like I was reading my life story.

So Macko & Rubin explore what seems the feminist mystique for my generation: that the promise that "you can do anything" turns into the expectation that "you should be everything" ... and inevitably, guilt and panic when we're not. It's a little frustrating to travel back to 2003 and 2004. Man, I wish I were building my career then; I'd happily take that economy over this one.

Anyway, a couple moments of deep identification:

• "a sense of bewilderment about why their lives felt so out of sync with their expectations, as well as a deep fear that the paths they had chosen were leading them in the wrong direction"
• "Despite my best intentions, I ended up exactly where [I did not want to be] at 30."
• "I feel like I just got divorced without ever being married." [This one. So. Much.]

and then the more helpful moments of hearing from women on the other side:

• There's still plenty of time.
• The difference between a B and an A often isn't worth the extra effort and struggle. Sometimes it's okay to settle for that B-plus.
• and from Lt. General Claudia Kennedy: "There are times in your future when you will be more beautiful than you are today; you need to get old enough to be that beautiful."

Anyone who has spent five minutes talking to me in the past 3 months knows that I needed to hear all those things right now. But really, I think just about every young woman I know needs them too. We're a bit younger than Macko and Rubin. Our generational experience is a touch different. But the questions and fears and identity crises we're facing: they haven't changed much over the past decade.

Lost in a Painting

The Museum Guard - Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

This is one of those novels that creates a deep sense of unease from the start. Maybe it's because you find out right away that something is not right with DeFoe's romantic relationship, or because of the telling of his parents' horrific death when he was a child. Not only their death, but the way that adults tried - ineptly, as all efforts must surely be - to protect him from some of the worst of the blow. Or maybe it's just 1938, and a growing awareness of the tragedies already taking place in Hitler's Germany.

At any rate, nothing feels right in DeFoe's Halifax: neither in the residential hotels where most everyone seems to live, nor in the art museum where he guards an unpretentious collection.

Much of the first half of the novel was taken up by my wondering why his girlfriend was so cruel to him. I think I used the term "jerking him around" quite a bit. I was not impressed. But as she falls further and further under the spell of one particular painting, everything gets so convoluted, that you just want the train wreck to actually occur, the crash to happen. It's like watching a disaster in slow motion.

Despite my saying slow motion, the pacing is both fast and slow. Just when I began to feel I understand Norman's rhythms, it would switch up again. Considering how consistently I've reached for cheerier books over several months, this was a departure for me. And a difficult one. I need some sunshine.

One exchange, though, between DeFoe and Miss Delbo, the museum's tour guide, stopped me in my tracks. Somehow, it seemed the truest and most familiar moment in the whole book.

Miss Delbo: Imogen is lost to you, DeFoe. I may as well state it now as later. You aren't -- forgive my bluntness -- you aren't a man who recognizes his own nature.

DeFoe: I recognize a lot of it. I just don't know what to do with what I recognize.

Stay. Or let me go.

The Playboy - Carly Phillips (Warner Books, 2003)

This is the second in the trilogy (first here) about a trio of brothers who are sworn bachelors, until mom gets in the way. And the right woman blows into town. And....

Anyway, it's cute. It's sweet. And like far too many romances, it makes me want a change. A new town. (It makes me think of the lyrics to "Boston" for that matter.)

I'll get out of California, I'm tired of the weather,
I think I'll get a lover and fly him out to Spain...
Oh yeah and I think I'll go to Boston,
I think that I'm just tired
I think I need a new town, to leave this all behind...
I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of the sunset...

Maybe change is in the air. Certainly feels like it must be.

Do you speak my tongue?

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts - Gary Chapman (Northfield, 1992, 2010)

I've been curious about this book since a friend gushed over it about a year ago. It seemed a little self-helpy to me, and my library catalog attaches it to Christianity. Also, I'm not sure what marriage I'm working on. But.

It seemed pretty self-evident to me that there are different ways to express love, and that some expressions of love mean more to different people. So I picked it up, and spent an afternoon with it and a glass of iced tea.

Here are the five love languages:

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

Dr. Chapman devotes a chapter to each one, and has lots and lots of examples of marriages falling apart that were saved by the decision to really try to speak one another's language. Cute.

Okay, fine. I get that. What I found most interesting was the relative ease and difficulty of figuring out the dominant love languages of those around me. My mom was immediately obvious, and it threw a lot of areas of our family dynamic into sharp relief. My dad was harder. Some friends became clear just as they popped into my head over the past few days, as I'd be thinking about other things. What frightens me is that I look at my past romantic relationships, and I can't say for sure what my partners' languages have been. Even more so, I can't figure out my own. He offers lots of tips for figuring it out, but all I really got to was that one of the five is definitely not mine. (This one, by the way, happens to be my mom's, which I find amusing.) So I'm still puzzling that out. (Chapman has an edition for singles, which might be worth digging up.)

What I have thought about is that I can show love and appreciation in my relationship through all these ways, and that I should, in order to really ensure the people around me know that I appreciate them. It has also been a good reminder that they show their appreciation and love in different ways too. Sometimes, when you're convinced love looks a certain way, you miss the love that's right in front of you.

Hell-o Starling

Bright's Passage - Josh Ritter (Dial Press, 2011)

I am a sucker for "Snow is Gone." I could just listen to it over and over again. I'm still discovering Ritter's other songs, but it alone was enough to get me excited when I saw he was coming out with a debut novel this summer.

Bright's Passage is lyrical and fascinating, but devoid of the joy that drew me to the songs. It makes sense; what joy is to be found in a hard world, where the trauma of the First World War is followed by the trauma of losing one's wife in childbirth and fleeing the raging inferno that has taken over your home? The chapters alternate between Bright's attempts to make his way with his newborn son and his experiences on the front lines of a war that was all over except for the brutal and senseless killing. Plus, we get a peek at the opaque menace that is Bright's father-in-law, out for revenge. As a result, the book just gets harder and harder and harder to read. Which is, I must believe, Ritter's intent.

Nothing has ever convinced me that war is anything other than hell. And this novel places it on a continuum of horrors that have followed Bright from childhood. No wonder he has picked up an angel, who offers the promise of something better. Perhaps.

The questions of redemption is left until the final pages, which is all I will say about that. Can there be such a thing as redemption in a world where such arbitrary violence is allowed to occur?

Aw, it's blue because... well, you'll see

Something Blue - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2005)

Have I mentioned anything about liking John Krasinski? Maybe once or twice?

Anyway, I'm so glad he's (I presume) going to be playing Ethan when they film this follow-up to Something Borrowed.

Um, there's really no way to talk about this book without spoiling the end of the earlier novel, so we'll have to deal with that. Darcy has spent 30 years as the golden girl, who always gets what she wants. And who is always wanted. And suddenly she finds herself alone, dumped by friends and loved ones, and pregnant. So she does what any woman would do - flee to London.

I preferred this book to the first, which I didn't expect. I never really got over my discomfort with Dex. I kept wondering... if I were Rachel's friend, wouldn't I tell her she's too good for him? That she deserves someone more willing to take a stand? In this novel, the ick factor was different. Darcy is a bitch, but she's also our first-person narrator, and it's nice to remember from time to time that shallow and selfish people aren't only shallow and selfish, that they often believe they are trying to be good, and that often enough, they are capable of growing up.

So we grow to like Darcy. And we are awfully fond of Ethan, the childhood friend who finds himself a sucker for Darcy's damsel in distress. And so it works. And works enough that I devoted an entire Saturday to devouring the book essentially in a single sitting.

You drive and you drive and you drive some more

In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 2000)

Last week I drove about 800 miles over 2 days. It made me a little cranky, and definitely sore. But I was driving between Southern California and the Bay Area, where there is plenty to see, even on that cow country stretch of the 5. So I felt a little sheepish reading Bill Bryson in Australia, where there are regular 1000+ mile drives to get pretty much anywhere.

Bryson is hilarious. I think I knew this, but here is proof. This exploration of Australia's cities, interior, features, people, culture, etc. is the result of 3 separate trips that expose him to much (and yet still just a small piece of) the land Down Under.

Themes: Places have a lot of weird stories. And when you're on the road, you get intrigued by all sorts of roadside attractions.

Australia has LOTS of things that can kill you. Lots and lots and lots. Animals mostly. And getting lost in the desert and dying.

Bryson walks a lot. He makes me wish I were better at going offline and just walking.

He also drinks a lot on occasion. Especially when traveling with a friend.

Travel plans get messed up pretty often.

Australia is awesome, and writers get to go there surprisingly often (well, to me) for book tours.

Also, you should probably find this book just for the description of cricket. I almost fell off the couch. It's most of chapter 7, although it appears here and there elsewhere in the book. This may be one of the lazier book reviews ever, but I promise, you will enjoy this read.

My Best Friend's Wedding

Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2004)

I knew the book would be different from the movie. And I wanted to see the movie - um, hello John Krasinski! - and read the book. So: movie first. That way I wouldn't be disappointed by it.

It worked pretty well. Except I am sorry, but I still think Rachel is too good for Tom Cruise, or Dex or whatever. Maybe I just want to think that the right guy won't be so wishy washy about me. And the book and movie were surprisingly different. Even on major plot points. The book did things that just couldn't have worked on screen. I think we would have hated Rachel more. And maybe that's too bad, that we have to bow to convention, but so be it.

Rachel's "best friend" is bratty Darcy, whose fiancé is changing his allegiance. But her real best friend is co-worker Hillary. Although other childhood bud Ethan is pretty cool too. In the movie, rather than complicate things with another actress, we just wrap them both into Ethan (John Krasinski!) who has secret feelings of his own.

Anyway, totally enjoyable. I like that Rachel does something pretty horrendous - sleep with her best friend's man mere weeks before the wedding - and yet is portrayed as sympathetic and human. And while you root for her, you also do feel squeamish about what's going on. Except that you also don't. And you also - if you're me - can't decide if you think Dex is a cad or just a guy who misplayed his hand and is now figuring that out.

The sequel follows Darcy. And I bet we are going to learn to like this spoiled princess. But I sort of don't wanna. That said, I'll read the book. And watch the movie. After all: John Krasinski!

The Dark Side

I Am The Cheese - Robert Cormier (Dell-Laurel Leaf, 1977)

First of all, my boy Corey Perry just won the Hart Trophy for League MVP. I'm a whole mess of happy about that. But I won't let that distract me from my book review.

It starts with Twitter, and the #YASaves trending topic that got big a few weeks back after a WSJ article posited YA lit today was darker than in past years, and even dangerous. (I am oversimplifying.) Anyway, the response was immediate and severe. The consensus: YA literature helps teens navigate the perils of adolescence, and adults who write for the WSJ need to calm the eff down. (Again, oversimplifying.)

I had a few discussions arising from some RTs of mine. A friend told me that while reading the article, he was reminded how I Am The Cheese was a really powerful book, that stuck with him. I decided to read (or maybe re-read?) it. Which I did on Monday night.

It's powerful stuff, this book. Adam's story is revealed in alternating chapters. His solo bicycle journey from his hometown to a Vermont town 70 miles away, where his father is in the hospital, and then the transcripts of taped sessions between him and a shadowy doctor of some sort, who is asking questions about his past. It quickly becomes clear that something in his life went dramatically awry, both recently and in his very early childhood. You fear for Adam, and reading this now, an adult, all my maternal instincts kicked in. I was troubled that I was obviously too late to protect this child.

1977, and this is dark. Apparently not as graphically dark as what's out there today. But powerful. Harmful? I doubt it.

Speaking of the impact of YA, another discussion led to Lois Duncan.... My friend brought up Don't Look Behind You, a 1990 novel about a girl whose family is in the Witness Protection Program. Of course I remember this book! I must have read it a bunch of times. But the one that stuck with me more is Stranger with My Face, the novel that introduced me to the concept of astral projection, and also terrified me away from ever being willing to give it a try. (Wimp.) Are these books still being read?

Before I wrap up, I want to mention that the books that stuck with me the most are the scary ones. I bet this isn't uncommon. And I wonder how much it relates to the central thesis of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, namely that dark tales enable children to safely grapple with their fears. I am sure there is plenty of scholarly literature out there on the topic. Maybe one of these days I'll do a little more searching. For now, just speculation....

In the Mood for Love

The Bachelor - Carly Phillips (Warner Books, 2002)

First Lady - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Avon Books, 2000)

No one has to pretend to be married! No fake marriages! Well, except in the latter, the widowed FLOTUS does pretend to be pregnant, and is at least once introduced as the wife of the guy to whom she's hitched her runaway self. And in the former, a fake illness forces our hero to find a lady to wed. In a hurry. Luckily his old high school crush is back in town too.

I should stop. Talking about romances makes me ironic. Because there's no way to admit you read and enjoy them without telling everyone that you are a hopeless romantic. Rolling your eyes dramatically at least shows you know they are foolish.

But who am I kidding, really? Would I keep reading them if I found them so moronic? (Well, maybe...) I am a sucker for them. I love the dramatic arc. Damsel is in distress, finds herself latched to vaguely abhorrent but totally sexy man, and as she falls for him, discovers all this strength within herself. I know there is plenty that is escapist and dangerous about this fantasies, but they really could be a lot worse. There are many worse things than believing that you can grow into your own best self and find true love. Right???

A Memory Palace

Great House - Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

Nicole Krauss blows my mind. (I have mentioned this before.) A few years back, I gushed about The History of Love, and her latest novel employs a similar plot devise, being a sort of biography of a thing. In this case it's a desk, this monstrosity of a desk that is confiscated during Nazi occupation, and touches the lives of a surprising number of people. Strangely, I kept seeing the desk as almost like an organ - all the different drawers like pipes and .... I don't know.

Her stories are lyrical and haunting, and it's no surprise that many of the narrators are either authors or loved ones of writers. They speak in a high-flown language that doesn't really bear any relationship to how most of us talk, but carries the weight of intense sadness, loneliness, emptiness, and a struggle to know those we love.

I noted less than I would have liked, and this makes me sad. I'd probably direct you to the entire (long) chapter "Lies Told by Children." The first narrator, the author who owned the desk most recently, comments on how the things she loves she is reluctant to share with others, unlike those who want to share the music and literature that makes them who they are. She also has a lovely line about her youth: "I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself."

This is, perhaps, a book better meant to be reflected upon in conversation - or silence - than in a blog. It consists of interwoven parts, and leads to interwoven thoughts. I want to talk about it, and digress, and bring up other points, and wander down tangents. (That last might have been redundant.) So go read, and then come talk to me about it, okay?

Literary debates

Michael Silverblatt generally makes me giggle. Because I'm like that. But I found his discussion with professor and author Marjorie Garber fascinating.

Have a listen:

Vacation Reading

There's Cake in My Future - Kim Gruenenfelder (St. Martin's Griffin, 2010)

For my vacation, I brought a bunch of unread New Yorkers (of which I read one, on the plane ride home) and a serious novel (post to come), which I worked on at airport gates and on the plane. But for the meat of the trip, the hotel reading, I wanted light and fun. For that, I went with the Gruenenfelder.

The premise is cute. Three friends. One tries to direct the future through this cake pull charm thing. Except it gets messed up and fate has its own plans for the ladies. I like these "friends" books, b/c you get different stories. One woman tries to adjust to married life, one negotiates the problem of being best friends with the guy you love, and the third rebounds - or attempts to - after a breakup. All light, all fun, all funny. Also, set in Los Angeles. Hurrah!

One thing that got a lot of attention from me was the mention of the crushworthiness of John Krasinski; the other was this line, from the fiancé: "I love that you think that anything I do could be fraught with subtext. I'm a guy: we are rarely, if ever, fraught with subtext." I still don't really believe this is true, regardless of what guys tell me, but I thought it was adorable all the same.

Going back to find Gruenenfelder's first two novels. But first I really need to make a dent in that pile of magazines. My nightstand thinks it's still January, folks. :(

She's back!

Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2011)

I've sorta missed my girl Sookie. This series has long since been completely out there. I mean, there's suspension of disbelief, and then there's what Sookie's Louisiana requires. But, after 9 months or whatever, I realize I've missed it. It was oddly comforting to return to vampires and werecreatures and fairies and witches and demons ... and now elves? Well, elf.

Too much going on. And everyone is out to kill Sookie or someone she loves. Or is creating plots that impact Sookie or someone she loves. Also, everyone still wants to have sex with her. It's exhausting, but it's fun.

But this installment was also sad. I'm not sure what comes next for Ms. Stackhouse. Each book has a melancholy ending, but this one hit harder for me. I guess I have to wait until next spring to find out what's next.

Or, How I Found Love Thanks to a Bluebird

Goodnight Tweetheart - Teresa Medeiros (Gallery Books, 2011)

It is getting to be the case that I can't read a serious book without having its lighthearted companion on the nightstand with it. And this was on an endcap at the library. I'm sure David Foster Wallace would appreciate the fact that while I was reading a novel that is in so many ways a meditation on presence and paying attention, I was also starting a short romance about Twitter, which is essentially a paean to short attention spans.

Abby is a writer who had an amazing breakout novel, and who is suffering less from sophomore slump and more from a crippling case of writer's block. Her agent puts her on Twitter so she can connect with fans and keep her name out there. And she immediately meets a guy, a literature professor. And most of the novel is the DM (direct message) banter between them. Lots of pop culture references, lots of flirtation, lots of ... well, mainly just flirtatious pop culture references.

There is a deeper undercurrent, of family and love and loss and connections and how they are difficult and frustrating and all that. And of course escapism, which is one of Twitter's strong suits. How does Twitter enable us to get away from who and where we are? And can that be a good thing? How strong of a connection can you really form with someone who you met in spurts of 140 characters? I spend a lot - a lot - of time on Twitter, so these are questions I've spent some time pondering. Answers? I might still need to get back to you on that.

Mindfulness

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)

Talking about DFW is something I do quite a bit, but that I find intensely difficult. (And I'm far from the end of the bell curve of his most devoted fans.) So I'm gonna skip all a whole bunch and go straight to an attempt to make some sort of sense for myself of this unfinished work.

I found myself wondering how long this novel would have been if finished. There's so much... it stands up well as it is, but then I think about Infinite Jest, and I start to think that maybe these 538 are really only about half. And that's.... well, it is. We can leave it there.

What DFW had in mind only really became clear at the end, in the notes, where I was like: ohhhhhh, so that's why everyone was so ... what's the word? They were all gifted. But these quirks all seemed to make sense in middle of the mind-numbing bureaucracy of an IRS building in the middle of a Midwestern field in the middle of the 1980s. It's as much about being present, and paying attention, and breaking through that wall. Thus.... a big long list.

• "It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not." (Esp, in the case of the character thinking this, when you are inundated with extraneous information.)
• This unbelievable passage, too long to quote in full here, about the power of interrupting a conversation and asking "what's wrong?" which will shock the other person into wondering how you know. "He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. ... He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it."
• §13 is a really quality depiction of the thought process in panic attacks, and the way anxiety about having anxiety becomes the central source of the anxiety.
• This is (naturally) a footnote: "There are secrets within secrets, though--always."
• The 100-page mega-chapter has several thought-provoking moments, although it becomes funny when you realize later one what its function is.
• A callback here to that first quote I mention: "It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice." Different speaker, same idea.
• Oh, and that guy's mom becomes a lesbian in the mid1970s and opens a feminist bookstore called Speculum Books. I loved this.
• Advice often merely points out "the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of [the advisee's] own situation and path."
• Wallace, as a character: "What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point - otherwise we might as well just be computers downloading raw data to one another."
• Back on the point of paying attention, there's another lovely long passage (by the DFW character) about concentration and studying and how most paying attention is done in "jagged little fits and starts" and is mostly all the things we do to distract ourselves.
• Oh, and then we get to the uncomfortably true observations about the banality of certain immaturities... that no one truly understands and loves you for who you are and "you're also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you're feeling it, the loneliness, so you don't even have any sympathy for yourself."

And this doesn't even get at how interested and funny and annoying and actually quite tragic most of the characters are. At how fascinating and extraordinarily rich and DFWian. This book is a treasure, partially formed. And that, unfortunately, has to be enough.

It's a choice, mindfulness. It's a choice what we pay attention to. And everything about David Foster Wallace makes me want to remember that. And to make choices that I find satisfying. It's so difficult; it's unbelievably and maddeningly difficult. But still worth the trying.

Festival of Books + DFW

Before I tackle The Pale King in full, I thought I would start with a quick and dirty overview of the panel I attended yesterday. Times book critic David Ulin moderated a panel with Wallace's biographer D.T. Max, agent Bonnie Nadell, and editor Michael Pietsch.

The discussion began with Nadell's and Pietsch's experience in the weeks and months following Wallace's death, compiling the thousands of pages of work and going through it to see how much of a book was there. It moved on to an exploration of some of the ideas he explores in the work and, for lack of space to consider it more fully, why the work remained unfinished.

Of our threesome, we had just finished the novel, were halfway through, and were about to start. But the discussion I think worked for all of us, although we were distracted by what appeared to be some tension between Nadell & Pietsch, who knew DFW much longer and more intimately, and Max.

A couple interesting lines I picked up from each:

Max mentioned the struggle of "pushing away extraneous noise and thoughts." Nadell noted that Wallace found non-fiction easier and more fun, and "he didn't trust how much fun it was." Pietsch formulated maybe my favorite question: "Is the plot what's happening while you think you're looking for the plot?"

Festival of Books - Trojan Edition

It's that time of year again where I brave the ridiculous sun and crowds to celebrate books with tens of thousands of other people. This year, the LA Times Festival of Books moved to the University of Southern California, which totally worked for me, although I really missed my excuse to get Diddy Riese. On the other hand, this year there was free Ben & Jerry's! (Yay volunteerism!)

My friend, her bro, & I wandered around, checking out booths, ducking into shady spots, and filling out the group crossword puzzles. We also added our reads to the giant "What are you reading?" wall. There is nothing quite so awesome as putting both The Pale King and Goodnight Tweetheart. (Do I contradict myself? ....) I was totally gratified to see several references to Beverly Cleary on there. Hurrah.

We also went to the DFW panel on The Pale King, but that's for another post...

LOL Online Dating

Love @ First Site - Jane Moore (Broadway Books, 2005)

This is an advance ready copy, just fyi. I assume it's close enough to the final product.

So, I really needed me some British chick lit. I miss Bridget Jones. This seemed promising. It's got the right ingredients: 30something, goofy gay male friends and sassy female friends, hilariously awful work environment, frustrating dating set up, etc. But I spent a lot of the book thinking that it was fine, but.... It was missing something. And the love story depends on a lot of scenes that are not only not in the novel, but don't seem to have time to be in the novel. When would they have happened? Hmm?

But then I got to the final few pages, and it got seriously adorable. Problems galore, but awwww. So. Cute. Anything more I say gives it all away. And I mean, you'll know what's going to happen, obviously. But still. Awww.

So it didn't really fill my chick lit need. But it was okay. Next up?

This is water.

I have started DFW's The Pale King. As a result, he is much in my mind lately. (He is also much on the Twitter. Everywhere. Goodness.)

So I am listening to the Kenyon commencement speech from 2005. So powerful. Watch.

Part 2

National Library Week

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

A likely match

Sex, Lies, and Online Dating - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Lenny and Eunice were really bringing me down. This totally beautiful and heartfelt story, no matter how satirically presented, was a little more than I could handle. Especially because it was, as promised, "super sad."

So I needed another love story to read in tandem. Enter Rachel Gibson. She writes contemporary romance novels, and first caught my eye (in a Booklist capsule review maybe?) because at least a few of her titles center around the fictitious NHL Seattle Chinooks. Yay hockey players! This one does not, but our protagonist is a fan of the minor-league team in Boise.

In addition to liking hockey, Lucy is a mystery writer who has decided to tackle the subject of a serial killer who meets men on dating sites and then sends them to their death via erotic asphyxiation. So she has to date some for research. The trouble is that someone in the city is acting out her book, even while it's still being written. Which leads her to Quinn, a cop who is dating around in hopes of drawing out the killer, who is, obviously, Lucy. Right? Blah blah immediate physical connection, growing emotional attachment, annoyance at lies and concerns about how the other one feels, etc. In short, the perfect antidote to Lenny and Eunice. So just what I needed.

What can love do?

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart (Random House, 2010)

Once upon a time, I really enjoyed The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Gary Shteyngart in general. But you know how you get lazy about following the stuff you like?

So over the summer I read excerpts from SSTLS in the New Yorker. And that's how it ended up on my book list. Although it then took, what? 6 months to actually get my hands on it. But here it is.

In short: dystopian future. Shteyngart as always does a great job of creating a world that is recognizable and yet totally different. The US is collapsing, and is pure consumerism and cell phones and rankings and .... man, I hate doing these overviews in any sort of way that makes sense. So screw it. Let me skip to the interesting parts.

Lenny's diaries are interspersed with the e-mails and chat transcripts (although they have different names) of Eunice, the girl he falls madly in love with and who, for her own reasons, finds her way to him. What makes them so fascinating and heart-breaking is how much they cannot communicate at all, how little we can actually express to the people we love, the ones we want to understand us most. And how little sense life makes, even at the best of times, and certainly not in a country falling apart.

Some moments:

• "keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities ..."
• a passage I cannot find about Lenny's attempt to spend an entire week without books .... this in a world where no one reads, and no one has read for decades. And yet, despite this, the Naughty Librarian look continues to be desirable.
• "the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association." [I remember feeling this - although far more dread - on 9/11, the wish that I could have lived when history wasn't happening.]
• on bipartisanship's dangers: "When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future."
• "I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world." And I felt so much weight on much shoulders when I read that. And then, this lovely lovely line:
• "The fading light is us, and we are , for a moment so brief it can't even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful."

Lenny and Eunice. They're each terribly flawed, but their flaws make them truly real and human. It's especially noticeable in Eunice, who starts out such a cipher, such a creature of this brave, unhappy new world. Lenny sees depths in her, and we don't. Turns out he was right, just not in the way he expected.

Starting Over

The Season of Second Chances - Diane Meier (Henry Holt & Co., 2010)

(advance reader's edition)

Something I always seem to forget when I am sick or depressed is that I find narrative healing. So while I was spending a week fevered and coughing, I couldn't manage to read any of my New Yorkers. Why didn't I try a novel at the very start?

Finally I picked up Meier's, a reader's edition that I came into possession of somewhere along the line. It's about a middle-aged woman who leaves her teaching job in NYC when she is recruited for a new project at Amherst. She seems to have no spontaneity, no rich inner life, and yet there is already a promise of it, when she begins by buying this ramshackle Victorian house near campus. She gets drawn into a world of color and possibility, dragged slowly by her handyman - if such a term really gets at his talent for not only fixing a house, but unearthing its true potential - and her officemate. And a supporting cast of characters. Joy is, what? I think 48, when the novel opens, but she blossoms almost like a teenager, finding that there is strength in vulnerability, and freedom in tying yourself to a community.

Joy grows into herself in ways both expected and not, and loose ends maybe don't knot as nicely as one might like. But this book was a lovely break from my life, and even from the West Coast. And it made for a good reminder that life doesn't necessarily work on a schedule, and that maybe I don't need to worry so much about missing my chances or running out of time. We grow when we are ready to grow.

Awww

The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie (Bantam Books, 2010/1996)

Remember how a couple months ago I was like "omg, Jennifer Crusie is like the most adorable thing ever"? I picked up another of her titles recently - this one a reissue of one of her earliest works - and I maintain that her work is just purely adorable. How can you hate on romance novels when they are this sweet?

That said. Will someone please explain to me why people in books and movies are always getting themselves into fake engagements or fake marriages? Does this ever actually happen in real life? (Psst Corey Perry, if you need a fiancée, call me. I won't ask too many questions.) This time, stuffy yet hot professor guy needs a family life in order to nail down his dream job (oh, and by the way, he is writing this crazy feminist book, just so you know) in some little town in... Ohio?... so he ropes in his aggravating kooky artistic neighbor. Who loves strays. And the rest is essentially what you'd expect, all done with a really light hand.

I am recovering (I hope!) from an awful flu, so I keep thinking back to the scene where the whole "family" gets some terrible bug and is laid up for ages. If they made it through, so will I, right?

Librarians to the Rescue

This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All - Marilyn Johnson (HarperCollins, 2010)

For the past two months, I have been working on my e-Portfolio, the culminating project for my MLIS. As I have pondered core competencies and looked for evidence that I have met them, I have been guided by Johnson's humorous and impassioned look at the library profession. She's popped up in 3 or 4 of my essays, and thus I don't have much desire to pull a lot of quotes for you here.

But I will recommend this book to library-lovers, as well as those who are interested in how we are navigating the Information Age. Also those who like charming looks at the hidden sides of "boring" professions.

Johnson covers a lot of territory - I remember hearing first that she gets into librarianship in Second Life and other adventures in cyberspace. And yes, she does. But that's only one part of it. She talks about Radical Reference and librarians out of the streets, hawking their trade for social justice. She talks about cataloging, and the cultural importance of good subject headings, the economic value of libraries, the tension between scholars and the general public at renowned institutions like NYPL, and the value of reading as a reliable cure for racing thoughts. (It was a relief to be reminded I'm not the only one who does this.)

Did she get everything perfect? Doubtful. Will she save librarianship? That's too loaded a question to even tackle. But it's a fun and often witty reminder that my chosen profession is home to as much variety and opportunity as I could ever hope for. (Provided I ever actually find a job.)

The People's History of the Fastest Game on Ice

Hockey: A People's History - Michael McKinley (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)

So, the blog title is kinda lazy, but I'm going with it.

This monster tome is the coffee table companion to what I believe was a CBC miniseries about 5 years back. It's about 9x12 and weighs in at.... a bunch of pounds (kilos?), and is chock full of pictures and sidebars. Including some amazing ones from early in Canadian hockey history and of a shockingly sweet 13 y.o. Wayne Gretzky.

The book is a little like if a Ken Burns documentary got shoved into a book. It makes strange segues, and fades to sepia a bit. Which is probably all the case b/c it was a documentary shoved into a book. But such fantastic stories. Girls using their skirts to help hide the puck as they deked around a defender, dudes whose names are on trophies being actual people. Getting drunk and trading a player for $1million for example. Or forcing everyone on your team to enlist during WWII.

It took me weeks to get through this thing - lots of lapses in concentration and intervening life and whatnot. But experiencing it over time, in bits and pieces, was sort of the way to go. How better to go through >100 years of one's favorite sport, especially as interwoven into the history of a country?

I'd like to mention the severe lack of Paul Kariya, but I guess that's to be expected. *I* know that he was a crucial part of the 2002 Olympic team, and that'll have to be good enough. :)

Isn't it romantic?

Call Me Irresistible - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (HarperCollins, 2011)

It was my grandmother that introduced me to Phillips. I was visiting and helping box up books to donate to the library (yay Grandma!) when I came across Match Me If You Can. Which I snapped up and read over the next 20 or so hours. I was smitten.

Anyway, one thing I like quite about about Phillips (although I guess this is common among romance novelists?) is the way the books inhabit the same world and include the same characters. For example, in this latest, the two leads are children of couples from her early books, and another former youngster makes a major appearance, and is set to star in an upcoming novel.

Meg shows up in small-town Texas just in time to break up her best friend's wedding to Mr. Perfect. Because she knows he's just not perfect for her friend. Then is stranded there. And she just keeps running into him, and from there romance ensues. The description of Ted's charmed life is hilarious. And while we eventually get his POV, it doesn't come until very late in the novel, so he remains as much a cipher to us as to Meg.

It's a formula, sure, but it works, and I really do find Phillips' books more charming than probably any other romance novelist out there.

Spun sugar

Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie (St. Martin's Press, 2004)

Over the summer, I did some research on genre fiction and along the way came across a reader's advisory guide to romance fiction that pointed me toward Crusie. I couldn't tell you what it said, but I noted the name with a "maybe I'll check this out sometime" sort of attitude.

So Bet Me takes on your typical mis-matched, romantic comedy couple. She's serious and a bit overweight, he's hot shit with a bad reputation. And thanks to a pile of misunderstandings all set off by a ridiculous bet by her ex, they end up on a date. Which is where fate takes over.

This book was insanely charming. I found everybody adorable. Friends, sidekicks, evil exes and family... it was like living in a little fairy world. With great banter. Seriously, the banter - and not just between Min & Cal - was really well-done. When I read romance, I tend to read it with a cynical eye. (Because I am - or ought to be - too cool for it, too intellectual for it.) But maybe because I'm trying to be more sincere in my enthusiasms in general, or maybe just because Crusie got past my defenses, I was sorta smitten. It was a really sweet reading experience.

The freshman years of life

Commencement - J. Courtney Sullivan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

I am a sucker for books about recent graduates of elite colleges and universities, and how they adjust - in their different ways - to life outside of that bubble. Often enough this means constructing different bubbles, but that is of plenty of interest to me as well.

In this version, four women become best friends at Smith College, Sullivan's alma mater. And the narrative is interspersed with recollections of their time as students. And then they go in separate directions, and their friendships are stretched and challenged. For better and for worse.

Early on, the novel won me over with one of my favorite ever descriptions of Irish dance: "which Celia now credited with her perfect posture and complete inability to dance like a normal person." Love it :)

There was also a lovely description of the ways in which powerful relationships develop in college: "Back then, they had expanses of time in which to memorize one another's routines and favorite songs and worst heartaches and greatest days. It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it."

And maybe it's for that that I keep reading these novels...

The Little Things Add Up

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun - Gretchen Rubin (Harper, 2009)

Sometimes it almost feels like certain books were written just so that I could read them. (No, I swear I don't really think the universe revolves around me.) This was one of those books. My friend Siel first recommended the book around this time last year. I couldn't tell you for sure why I didn't get it then, but when a patron had me add her name to the request list, I took it as a sign that the time had come. I mean, I had already looked at Rubin's blog, and read her contributions to Slate.

There were so many little things that Rubin mentioned that made me (literally, sometimes) exclaim, "Hey, that's just like me!" For one, the Pavlovian response that taking off contacts and putting on glasses means sleepytime. Another, the need to collect what she refers to as "gold stars." I could go on in this vein for a while, and certainly I ought to talk more about the philosophical underpinning of the book, but I sorta want to skip to the good parts... by which I mean how it relates to me. (Egoism, party of one.)

Rubin's premise is that while she's not unhappy, there is room to be happier, and she owes it to herself to see if she can be. Without making crazily life-altering changes. So for a year, she pursues her Happiness Project, complete with themes for each month, specific resolutions, and a chart to mark her progress. She acknowledges that each person's project will be unique, and indeed while I read it felt very clear which parts were important to me, and what other things are important to me that she didn't need to address in these pages. And so... my takeaways:

• January: walk outside more; get more sunshine; get enough sleep - it really matters; there are so many types of clutter, and chances are you'll be happier without them; the wisdom of "engineer[ing] an easy success"
• February: embrace physical contact (it's been an interesting road for me discovering when I am and am not a touchy-feely person); seek fewer gold stars; be considerate of the ones you love
• March: have an expansive self-definition; enjoy the moment instead of always anticipating the future
• April: remember the validity of others' feelings; keepsake happy memories; honor traditions; make time for projects
• May: fun is energizing; relationships thrive on common interests
• June: connect! - keep in touch; seek out new friends (hmm, writing this reminds me of that song about friends from Girl Scouts...)
• July: don't be afraid to spend - know yourself; make and stick to decisions
• August: appreciate the moment; be grateful; what we admire in others is a quality that is nascent in ourselves waiting to be fully realized (this from a commenter on Rubin's blog). [This is also the chapter where she discusses the fear of "tempting fate" with our happiness, an idea that I have struggled with since at least my freshman year of high school.]
• September: accept what you love; push to grow within an area of passion
• October: examine your "True Rules" - do they make you more or less happy? Hold onto my own mantra: Be Here Now.
• November: be willing to laugh, even at oneself (but I personally should probably beware too much self-deprecation); value others in conversation; "Enthusiasm is a form of social courage"
• December: accountability; acknowledge what makes you happy, not what you wish made you happy

So you see, there's plenty there. I feel like I will be meditating on different aspects of this book for weeks and months (if not longer) to come. How it will inform the ongoing project that is my life is not quite certain, but I already know I am grateful for it.

Every Unhappy Family

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

The opening lines of Anna Karenina came into my mind unbidden after I read the final page of Freedom. It occurred to me that there is something tragically beautiful in the tale of an unhappy marriage. Tragic, obviously. But there's real beauty there too. In the misunderstandings and the fears left unspoken, or spoken backwards. Why is there so much poetry in it?

Anyway. I liked this novel quite a bit more than I expected. I liked The Corrections, and this promised to be pretty similar (and was!), so I'm not sure why I was surprised. But I was all the same. Maybe I just didn't think I was in the mood to like something that received so much hype.

But Franzen writes the type of novel that tends to lower all my defenses. It is big and sprawling and delves deeply into the inner stories of most - if not all - of its characters. (Why do we not really get to know Jessica Berglund though?) Benefitting from something approaching omniscience, we get to see the bigger picture that the characters can't. And to wonder if it will become clear to them. And if such a thing really matters.

I suppose it is to be expected that I would think of Tolstoy, as Patty's experience of Natasha Rostova guides her thinking about fidelity to her husband. (Franzen - or Patty at least - provides a very different reading from my own about the triangle(s) of Natasha-Pierre-Andrei-that other jackass.)

I made a couple other notes, mainly about amusing cultural references like Conor Oberst, but nothing of great note. I am sorry to have forgotten a few of the other themes I had wanted to touch upon. The trouble with big books, I guess.