Girl Detective

HEY, Y’ALL! I FINISHED ALL 1231 PAGES OF LES MISERABLES!

Before I read this book, I didn’t believe in abridgements of books. Now I do. Seriously, this book begs to be abridged. The edition I read was lightly abridged, and it was still overly long, with stultifying digressions and redundancies, even aside from the two (on cloisters and argot) that Denny, the translator of this edition, chose to put as endnotes. Long chapters that digressed away from the story, on related things like the Paris sewers, were almost always slogs that sometimes defied this reader’s will to keep going. If you are going to read this book, I recommend that you skip digressions. You can tell which they are because they don’t have the main characters. I believe you will lose little or nothing. Perhaps this is me being a cretin or a lowly literate reader, but I stand by this advice.

If the book were only the story of Jean Valjean, Marius , Cosette, Fantine, Javert, Eponnine, the Thenardiers and Gavroche, then this would be a whopping good tale. See the success of the musical as proof. Interestingly, I found the book to have a much more involving and satisfying end than did the 2012 film adaptation, and I was amazed that near the end, after so many pages, I sped up to a gobbling pace.

A word about the particular edition, the lovely Penguin Hardback Classic with the red cardinals. Many of those cardinals disappeared over the course of the reading in little flakes of red paint. These Hardback Classic editions are lovely objects (I have several), but alas, do not stand up well to actual reading. The Penguin trade paperback version is one of the only film tie-in covers I don’t find offensive, plus it would have been easier to schlep around for the many weeks I was reading. For portability and true unabridged-ness, I tried the Signet mass-market edition edited by Fahnestock and Macafee, but switched to the Denny HC because it was pretty, because the MMPB print was too small for my aging eyes, even with bifocals, and because the translation to me felt stiff.

Finder is one of the longest running independent comics out there. Hard to describe, creator Carla Speed McNeil once copped to “aboriginal sci-fi,” and that works as well as anything.

The “through” character, even if he’s often just in the background, is Jaeger, half-aborigine, and thus shunned by all. He can play civilized, but prefers the wild, and this combination seems to drive women wild, though he’s honest and doesn’t pretend he’ll ever settle down. This is a sexually explicit series, so if that makes you uncomfortable, it probably isn’t for you.

Four stories are contained in Finder Library v. 2: Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, The Rescuers, and Five Crazy Women. There’s a mix of high-low, funny-tragic throughout the book. Dream Sequence and The Rescuers are mostly tragic, while Mystery Date and Five Crazy Women are mostly comedy. McNeil’s black and white art is accessible, but nuanced. These stories bear fruit on re-reading, and the end notes in this collection are worth checking out.

In brief, to avoid spoilers:

Dream Sequence: a popular virtual world is invaded by a predator.
Mystery Date: a student of anthropology and prostitution tries to figure out her mysterious new professor
The Rescuers: the baby of a privileged family is kidnapped, and the story interwoven with the tribe of aborigines camping in the area.
Five Crazy Women: Jaeger gets (and deserves) no sympathy from a long-time friend as he pours out some of his checkered past with women.

If you haven’t checked out or heard of Finder before, look for the collection Talisman, and if you like that, seek out the two library collections for the entire series. For ongoing new stuff, check out McNeil’s website.

For those of you familiar with this series and with Friday Night Lights, I have a theory: Jaeger = grown-up, alterna Tim Riggins.

A selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (no question mark, which I find strange) by Maria Semple had been on my radar for a while, recommended in reviews and by friends. Semple’s background includes a stint as writer on Arrested Development, and the book is similar in its same snarky, frantic style. It does, though, have a beating heart that’s perhaps more akin to something from Modern Family.

The novel is made up of a hodgepodge of letters, reports, receipts and articles, tied together with the memories of Bee Branch, an 8th grader at a private school in Seattle. Bee’s mother is the Bernadette of the title, who disappears two days before Christmas, and the novel starts in the month leading up to it. Bee’s father in an executive at Microsoft, and the family is planning a trip to Antarctica, a present for Bee for her all-A grades.

Though the story is often about Bee’s search for Bernadette, it’s the woman herself who is the bright, shining star of the novel. Bernadette is a bundle of crazy, having had a series of disappointments and difficulties both personally and professionally. But watching her navigate her fear of the impending trip abroad and the people around her is a blast. She’s smart, complicated and interesting, just like the book, which I devoured in two days. Fair disclosure: I was also avoiding a deadline and cleaning the house, but still, this book was wildly engaging and entertaining. The ending was abrupt, so I wished for a bit more closure, but like Bee in the book, I’ll take what I can get when a book is this flat-out fun to read.

A selection in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, I’m not even sure if Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles was on my radar. I’ve read none of this year’s selections, though many have been highly recommended by friends. But this one I knew almost nothing about, and it’s this kind of reading experience that makes following the Tournament of Books (ToB) such a delight to this geeky reader.

The novel is narrated by Patroclus, who you might remember from Greek myths and the Iliad as Achilles’ best friend. Miller richly imagines the details of their boyhood, and how they came to be immortalized in Homer’s epic. I read the Iliad in my first year of college, in a literature course. It was one of just three books we read. We started with the Iliad, then War and Peace, then Hemingway’s In Our Time. In high school, I skipped reading the books I was assigned, and managed to pull off good grades anyway. In college, though, in that class, I felt the challenge of a semester devoted to just three books, and I read them all. And details of them all remain, these twenty six years later. So I knew how the story would end, but it didn’t diminish by one jot the urgency with which I read this story, consuming it quickly while still appreciating the backstory Miller was detailing, and the lovely prose she used to do it.

Divine blood flows differently in each god-born child. Orpheus’ voice made the trees weep, Heracles could kill a man by clapping him on the back. Achilles’ miracle was his speed. His spear, as he began his first pass, moved faster than my eye could follow. It whirled, flashing forward, reversed, then flashed behind. The shaft seemed to flow in his hands, the dark gray point flickered like a snake’s tongue. His feet beat the ground like a dancer, never still.

I could not move, watching. I almost did not breathe. His face was calm and blank, not tensed with effort. His movements were so precise I could almost see the men he fought, ten, twenty of them, advancing on all sides. He leapt, scything his spear, even as his other hand snatched the sword from its sheath. He swung out with them both, moving like liquid, like a fish through the waves.(45)

Like the film Brokeback Mountain, this is a love story between men that is more about the love than about them being men. And yet, I had two questions in the end. Throughout there is a great stigma attached to their love between men, especially from Achilles’ mother. I had thought this was a stigma now, but not as much in ancient Greece. Achille’s mother, the divine sea nymph Thetis, was an example of my other question. Miller depicts her as cold and frightening, which is fascinating, yet as one of only three main female characters, it gives what felt to me a painfully short and narrow window into women in ancient Greece. Another character, Deidameia, is selfish and cruel, while the third, a slave girl Briseis, is uncomplicatedly good. All other women are mentioned merely as prizes, objects, or occasionally as beloved of men.

I can’t speak to historical accuracy, but I was left with the nagging feeling that a more modern stigma against men loving men was applied to these boys retrospectively as conflict, while a nuanced portrayal of women was not. And while the latter point might have been historically accurate, I wanted something more from the females in this tale.

You know those books that are on your radar forever, and yet you never buy a copy and occasionally hear it recommended to remind you of it, but then years go by, and you still haven’t read it? That book, for me, was Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. Published in 1995, it was on many best-of lists, yet didn’t even make the short list for the Booker Prize that year. When I read the article “Tears, Tiffs and Triumphs,” I was intrigued by how it was mentioned a few times by authors even though it had not won the award itself.

So finally, finally, I have got around to reading it myself, and it is a lovely little book. The German poet Novalis, before he became famous under that name, was “Fritz” von Hardenburg, a young Romantic from a good, but poor family. When he falls in love with a very young middle-class girl, his family is upset. And I too, as the reader, found it baffling. Falling in love on sight with a twelve-year old? And yet, as the story plays out, and we meet Fritz and his Sophie again and again, surrounded by their families and friends, it is completely understandable and sympathetic by the end.

It’s set in the late 1700’s, as the Germans struggle to interpret what the ruckus over in France means for all of them, and filled with memorable characters, great humor, grand grief, and lovely passages of writing.

“I have been in the kitchen,” she went on. “Stewed pigs’ trotters, plum conserve, bread soup.”

“I cannot eat,” said Erasmus.

“Come, we’re Saxons. We can make a good dinner, even if our hearts are breaking.”

I found it a delight.

I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente for one of my book groups. It was suggested by a woman whose middle-school aged daughter had already read it. In my head I though of it as The Book with the Purposely Unwieldy Title.

It flies its geek flag proudly, starting off with a bunch of fantasy tropes:

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.

This is a modern take on the Victorian fairy tale, and reminded me strongly of Neil Gaiman’s work. The author does not hide the shoulders she’s standing on to write the tale: Persephone, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, and Gulliver’s Travels are all given nods. If you enjoy those stories, then you’ll likely enjoy this one, which is a cheeky, knowing take on a lost child’s adventure.

September makes interesting friends and enemies, and takes on a quest, of course. She is by turns afraid, brave, stupid and clever and thus a decent guide to Valente’s version of Fairyland. Originally written as a web series, it tends to wander rather than proceed with purpose.

There are some surprising twists at the end that I appreciated and I found the book engaging and diverting to read. I will check out the sequel, but don’t feel the need to do so now, now, now.

Looking back on what I watched in 2012, there were a lot of crowd pleasers, and not a lot of recent Big Serious Movies. There are a lot on the year-end best-of lists that I haven’t seen, and don’t care to see, like Lincoln and The Master. This was obviously a year in which I wanted to be entertained and I must say, the Marvel superhero franchise delivered in spades with Avengers and Amazing Spider Man, plus the opportunities to rewatch Iron Man and Thor. The Dark Knight Rises was a disappointment, but then, it almost had to be after The Dark Knight, which may be the apex of superhero movies to date.

Watched, and enjoyed, a lot of good TV on DVD: Party Down, Slings and Arrows, Cowboy Bebop, The Wire, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights.

And went on my usual holiday movie bender, and enjoyed re-watching Planes Trains and Automobiles, Shop Around the Corner, and The Sure Thing. Finished out the year on a high note (no pun intended) with The Big Lebowski. It was a good reminder that re-watching classics is a worthy, and rewarding, pursuit.

Something about December makes me ravenous for stories.

Argo: enjoyed it while watching, but dislike it the more I think about it. Manipulative and vain storytelling.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Utterly charming.
Hot Tub Time Machine. Made me laugh.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Magic Mike. Because I like Soderbergh movies. And don’t mind looking at Channing Tatum.
The Shop Around the Corner. MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MOVIE.
The Ref. Made me laugh.
Bridget Jones’ Diary. Ditto.
Les Miserables (2012) Made me cry. One critic described the Fantine solo as “emotional porn,” and can’t disagree. Amused by this argument between Anne Hathaway and Sam Jackson over whose movie is the saddest.
Scrooged. Funny enough.
Home Alone. Oh, how the boys laughed. A joy to hear.
A Christmas Story. On second viewing, I see why this is classic.
The Sure Thing. Oh, such a good and funny road movie.
Silver Linings Playbook. Departs from the book in several ways, but really good, and enjoyable, as was the book.
Shaun the Sheep: We Wish Ewe a Merry Christmas. The boys laughed and laughed.
The Big Lebowski. My husband and I laughed and laughed.
Santa Claus is Coming to Town. With the boys.

Not sure what we’ll watch to ring out the year. Candidates include Clueless, Emma (Paltrow version), It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas.

This year, thanks to my summer reading project of Shelf Discovery related books, I read nearly 100 books, and finish the year in the middle of three chunksters.

Since we’re on winter break, and the kids are here, and they are, no joke, running around chanting “nyah, nyah, you can’t hit me,” I’ll keep this short.

Here’s what I liked (and didn’t)

Classic: Middlemarch by George Eliot
New Fiction: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Re-read: Beloved by Toni Morrison
YA re-read: Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume
New-to-me-YA: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks by E. Lockhart
Made me laugh: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
Didn’t like as much as the critics did: Swamplandia!, Tiger’s Wife, State of Wonder (UGH!), Telegraph Avenue (didn’t finish), Ready Player One
Thumping Good Reads: Lonesome Dove, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, After the Apocalypse, Art of Fielding, Wild, Tragedy of Arthur, Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Silver Linings Playbook, Devil in Silver, and Turn of Mind.

I was in my sons’ room, looking for a missing book. Here’s what I saw, “hidden” under 9yo Drake’s pillow:

Ransom and Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan, two scary books I loved as a kid.

Yep.

I’m not quite sure how I got here, but first, my friend Amy at New Century Reading said she was doing a Bleak House readalong, with each serial segment a week, just about 40 pages. Easy, I said, and was glad to pick it up again after I tried and failed at an earlier readalong this year.

Then, my husband says he wants to see Les Miserables on Christmas Day. I’ve never read it, I said. (except for an excerpt in high school French called Les Chandeliers de L’Evecque.) Why don’t we read it together? So we nerdishly compared translations and decided to go with the unabridged Fahnestock/Macafee in the mass market paperback.

The small type, the several typos, and the general sludginess of the prose all brought me down. I’ve switched to a much prettier edition translated by Denny, and we’ll see how it goes from here.

Also, somewhere in there, I decided to pick up volume 2 of Carla Speed McNeil’s excellent Finder Library, perhaps when I was waiting for the MMPB of Les Mis to arrive and after I’d read my weekly allotment of Bleak House.

Thus, in the middle of December, and holiday frenzy, I find myself in the middle of 2700+ pages. What was I thinking?

For one of my book groups, Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante wasn’t at all what I was expecting. When I heard it was a book about a woman with dementia, I imagined a Lifetime movie. Instead, it’s something else entirely. The main character, Jennifer White, is a retired hand surgeon whose dementia is getting worse. Her best friend was recently murdered, and she’s the prime suspect. Unfortunately, she’s not a reliable narrator, and this book plays skillfully with that, telling us parts of her past and present as she goes, filling in the big picture a little at a time. I was very worried that the end wouldn’t pan out. This is the kind of thriller that depends very much on the strength of its Ta Da moment at the end. I think the author mostly pulled it off. There were some implausibilities that nagged, but it was largely satisfying. It engaged me from beginning to end, and I found the main character fascinating.

I started Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed, before I read Strayed’s more famous Wild. It’s a collection of the previously anonymously penned advice column at literary site The Rumpus. It is a very different book, but with many similarities and connections. As in Wild, Strayed puts a lot of herself and her troubled past on the page. But she doesn’t tell the exact same stories, in the same ways. Here, she uses them in service of telling people who ask her for help what she thinks. This is not a story, with a beginning middle and end. It worked well for me as a pick it up then put it down book, read in bits in between other things. It might make an excellent book for the bathroom, which seems a weird descriptor, yet an apt one, I bet for those who know what I mean.

I really enjoyed reading the columns, and reading Strayed’s responses. A few weeks ago, I read Savage Love, and didn’t like a response that Dan Savage gave a reader. “Sugar would never have told her to do that!” I thought, outraged. Throughout, Sugar is like someone who listens well, really tries to understand what’s being said (and as often, what’s not) and who exhorts the writers, and all the readers, too, to work to reach their highest, best selves, with acknowledgement of how hard that really is.

One of my favorite passages was about writing:

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet. (351)

I got to see Strayed in person recently, where she also offered her writing advice like this: “Write like a mother [cuss]er.” Which is funny, but it’s also true. That’s sorta how I felt about the book. It’s a good companion to Wild if you liked that, but probably not if you didn’t.

Raina Telgemeier’s Drama is a graphic novel about Callie, a middle-school theater geek. She has a crush on one boy, while another one likes her, and makes friends with some others as they prepare for the school play. There’s kissing, but not much more, so the story feels sweet and young. It has an openness about gay teens that reminded me of the wishful fantasy of Boy Meets Boy. The art is charming, Callie is engaging if sometimes annoying. It’s a likeable book that I found myself wishing I liked more. I just didn’t connect–maybe because I was not a drama person?

Overwhelmption: noun. The state of being overwhelmed, inundated or otherwise paralyzed by a situation (e.g. approaching holidays) or mess that’s “so big. And so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up. There is no way at all!” (The Cat in the Hat)

See also: Tharn:

Describes the act of a person or animal being frozen in terror, e.g. a deer caught in the headlights.

Perhaps originally found in Richard Adams’s novel ‘Watership Down,’ the term was also adopted by Stephen King for use in his novel ‘The Stand.’
Michael stood tharn while the grizzly bear bore down on him.

I was eagerly looking forward to The Devil in Silver, the follow up (not sequel, as I’d assumed it would be) to Big Machine, which I discovered during the 2010 Morning News Tournament of Books, and really enjoyed.

I noticed over the last year that the date for Devil in Silver’s release was pushed back at least once. LaValle reveals why in his author’s note at the end–his wife gave birth to a son in May 2011 and that resulted in some changes to his writing routine that put it past deadline, but also gave him experiences that he incorporated into this wild novel.

Most of the book is told through the view of Pepper, a big white guy who gets put in a mental institution for a 72 hour observation after tussling with some cops, but ends up staying a little bit longer. He struggles (literally) to get out, but they drag him (literally and figuratively) back in. From the start, he’s aware of something beastly, weird and scary in the psych ward of New Hyde Hospital in New York City.

The snort came for a third time. It was even closer now. Immediately to his right. As if the animal had crept right up to his ear. Even worse, there was a smell. Musky and warm, like old blood. It made his throat close, and he wanted to wretch [sic]. The hospital’s staff members sat around the converence table taking notes, or watching him. Not one of them seemed to notice anything. How could they not smell that stink? (14)

Pepper grudgingly begins to accept his situation, and interact with the staff and patients around him. As in Big Machine, the administration may or may not be evil, and what looks like a monster may not be. A ragtag group of misfits stumbles toward some kind of truth, fragmenting along the way. In addition to Pepper’s point of view, we get many others, including a very strange one toward the end that I won’t spoil but that I enjoyed a lot.

There’s a lot going on in this crazy quilt of a novel: literary horror, social commentary on the treatment of the mentally ill, character sketches from different walks of life, and a character toward the end that I suspect is LaValle’s Gary Stu (a male Mary Sue):

A big man. Not tall but wide. The polite term is heavyset. (The clinical term is hyperobese.) A black guy…Late twenties or early thirties, his hair was kind of a wild puff and his head was down. …interested in his own toes. He had his arms crossed. (402)

The book was scary, but had some laugh-out-loud moments, and some downright sweet ones, along with some terribly sad ones. It engaged me, made me loath to put it down, and pulled me through from start to finish. It’s possible that it’s kind of a mess, and has uneven stuff in it, but if so, I didn’t even notice.

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, I recently read The Silver Linings Playbook, whose main character also spent time in a mental ward, also lost large chunks of time there, also had violent tendencies, and in one scene, shared a tiny box of cereal across the table from another female character. It was a strange mirroring, probably coincidence, but fascinating.

I recall exchanging emails with LaValle after he did an author Skype chat with one of my book groups, Books and Bars, but I can’t find any record of it. (Did I imagine it?) In it, I tried politely to express my worry that he’d pull a Matrix, and follow up a promising first work with a crappy second one. In my opinion, he didn’t. I was sad not to meet up with the two main characters from Big Machine, but glad to meet these new ones, and interested to see what the next book might hold. Well played, Mr. LaValle, well played.

Fairest is the newest spin off from the popular comic-book series Fables, and Wide Awake collects the first seven issues. It tells backstories of some of the female characters, in this case Sleeping Beauty. (Not to be confused with Beauty of Beauty and the Beast–different character in this world. Unlike Prince Charming, who was actually the same guy to all the ladies–Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella. He got around, that one.)

This story picks up in series continuity just after the Fables defeated the armies of the Emperor. We’ve got Ali Baba, a bottle imp (not a djinn, sorry!), the Snow Queen and Sleeping Beauty. There are fights, there’s romance and things don’t quite have a fairy-tale ending, which I appreciated. In addition, Fairest: Wide Awake is capped by a one-shot story about Beauty and the Beast, with a surprising reveal about their history.

As with the best of the Fables series, Fairest is a fun, fast read, that plays around with storytelling and mythologies in interesting ways.

In November of 2010, I tried a DIY spa treatment at home. I made a brown sugar/heavy cream scrub for my scalp, which exfoliated and moisturized well, but smelled terrible. I wrote:

This should put me off any more home spa attempts for a while. Until I forget, and then I’ll be all, “I don’t know if this is a good idea, but I’m going to do it anyway.” Story of my life, I swear.

Two years and 17 days, people, is how long it took me to forget. Yesterday I consulted Curly Girl for a natural, shampoo-free solution for itchy scalp. I’d tried the brown sugar and conditioner before, and it worked OK. The newer edition of the book recommended quinoa plus conditioner. Directions: 1 tablespoon raw quinoa in 3 tablespoons conditioner. Scrub scalp and rinse. Hey, I thought, if I use it in my hair then we don’t have to eat it! (Not a fan of quinoa, or of how much 9yo Drake bitches and moans when we make it.) Plus it’s bigger, so it should scrub better than brown sugar.

It actually felt very nice and scrubbly, but as with past home-spa disasters, things started well but ended badly. Quinoa, unlike brown sugar, does not dissolve in water. And it’s a fast cooking grain. So by the time I finished scrubbing, rinsing, conditioning and showering, the walls, floor, shower curtain and my feet were covered with partially cooked grain. How had 1 Tablespoon produced so much? The hair trap was full, the water was backing up. The grains were no longer hard, but soft and more difficult to clean up.

So, here I was again, cleaning up another home spa mess. On the bright side, the scrub worked great and my scalp is in great shape.

Prompted by my friend at Mental Multivitamin, I am always happy to obsess nerdishly over books. I’ll try to keep this short.

1. What book (a classic?) do you hate?

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Though it does remind me to be a better, less selfish person.

2. To what extent do you judge people by what they read?

I shouldn’t but I do. But when I see someone reading a book I’ve consciously decided not to pick up, or that I’ve tried to read and disliked, it’s hard to feel a kinship.

3. What television series would you recommend as the literariest?

The A & E Pride and Prejudice miniseries.

4. Describe your ideal home library.

Shelves enough for all. Nothing stacked on its side.

5. Books or sex?

Both (but probably in that order, to be honest)

6. How do you decide what to read next?

It’s a balancing act. I’m in 3 book groups, and I have many bookish friends (including my husband) with whom I share recommendations. It’s definitely a holistic process, taking into account calendar, whether a movie’s coming out, whether it might be spoiled, what others are reading, if I feel guilty about having bought it, length…

7. How much do you talk about books in real life (outside of the blogging community)?

ALL THE TIME! Which is still never enough. I’m in 3 book groups, 2 of which meet monthly, and the other ever 6 weeks. One of them I started and moderate myself. I talk about books whenever I can, and if I’m at a loss with a person in conversation, I ask what they’re reading.

Bookish, blogging friends, how about you?