Girl Detective

I am in 3 book groups, and moderate one of them, which means I get to pick the books. We read books with themes of myth and religion, mostly fiction, since I love stories, and find they give interesting pathways to understanding truth. The group celebrates its third anniversary this month with our discussion this weekend of Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory.

I’d not read this yet, though I enjoyed both the novel and the movie of Greene’s The End of the Affair, and The Third Man, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, is perhaps my favorite movie. It’s the tale of a whisky priest (spelled whisky in the book but whiskey on the back cover), an alcoholic on the run from the communist police who will kill him. It’s a beautifully written, emotionally rich portrait of a time and place, along with a deeply conflicted, oh-so-human and yet always striving toward the divine. He is running away, but also running towards, and story proceeds in chunks of time that reflect his bumpy journey. It begins with one person he encounters, and is told in stories of the others as he goes. It’s about him, but also about them, so really, about all of us.

Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn’t find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr Tench went on across the plaza.

I loved this, and look forward to discussing it with our group this weekend.

Yet another contender in this year’s Tournament of Books. I’m off to a roaring start because there are a couple doorstops, and because I wisely chose a short book for one of my book groups this month,and the other book groups are reading ToB contenders. Woo! Geekjoy!

So, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara is the memoir of a scientist who went to the tropics and discovered a tribe who’d learned how to cheat death. The scientist is a fascinating, flawed character, and the tale of the search for immortality, and the spectacular immoralities that go along with it, kept me tied up until the end.

Not for you if you don’t like books with characters you can’t be friends with. But if bat$hit crazy fictional monsters are up your alley, this book might be for you.

Another contender in The Tournament of Books, I knew I was going to read The Dinner by Herman Koch because friends had said good things about it. But I was intruiged by …

OMG, I have GOT to come up with a new word for intriugued because I canNOT seem to spell it and I am not going to try and keep going back and correct intriuged.. It’s like my spelling kryptonite.

Anyhoo. I found it interesting that The Dinner had a relatively low rating. Lots of hate for the book. Who was right, my friends, or the people of Goodreads?

Well, duh. You people, of course.

Please, forgive the pun, but I devoured The Dinner. It starts off and a guy’s going out to dinner with some other guy and he doesn’t want to go, and the other guy sounds like a jerk, and slowly, oh so slowly the story unspools and you find out how they’re connected, what the dinner’s about, what all the bajillion undercurrents are, and what truly horrible people these people are, and I had to wonder if I’m horrible for having been fascinated by horrible people. Certainly I can see why there’s a lot of hate for the book, because the characters and what they do are hateful. This is a great example of a book that a lot of people hate because the characters aren’t likable. But oh, are they mesmerizing. I was fascinated by this one.

Y’all know it’s that most wonderful time of the year, right? No, it’s not national dairy month. Or Christmas. It _is_ almost my birthday. But what I mean is, The Tournament of Books. Yayyyyy!

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid is a fascinating little book. Written in the second person, in a self-help-y style but really telling a boy and girl love story, but one set in the slums of India, so the course of true love doesn’t exactly run true.

Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre.

The book’s brevity means that its strange conceit doesn’t wear thin, and the passage of time in the nameless hero’s life move along at a fast clip. This was a weird fictional take on some of the realities from Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Smart, intriguing, different.

It is not an exaggeration to say Possession by A.S. Byatt changed my life, and for the better, after I read it in the winter of December 94/January 95. I was working unhappily in marketing for a company I no longer believed in, and realized (again, in the way of so many epiphanies, I have to have them multiple times for them to stick) that I needed to find a way to get religion and literature in my life.

Over the years, I’ve been trepidatious to read it again. What if I didn’t care for it, or The Suck Fairy had visited? I’m happy to say that a second reading only affirmed this book as one of favorites, if not perhaps The Favorite. I’ve often described this book as having everything: history, mystery, poetry, religion, science, romance and adventure. It’s like the Indiana Jones of novels, or The DaVinci Code if written well by an academic.

I dragged my feet on researching the book before a discussion I’ll be leading today. Again, that was silly. Here are a few of the best articles I found. And having dipped into them, I am now interested to go haring off in other literary directions, which is what my favorite books do to me.

If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it lately, it stands up, and is more timely than ever in this age of atheism Hitch/Dawkins et al.

The Wikipedia entry on Possession

Wikipedia on Christina Rossetti, the model for Christabel LaMotte

NYT article on Byatt after Possession won the Booker, “What Possessed A.S. Byatt?”

“On Possession” at The Poet’s Forum

A re-evaluation of Byatt by a former skeptic, at the Guardian’s Book Blog.

Another take on it at the Guardian’s Book Club

The Reading Group Guide for Possession

Helloooo. Is anyone still out there? I was flooded with spam, so decided to take a break. And Google reader went down and that kind of threw my online habits into a tailspin. I set it up so comments would have to be verified, but don’t know if anyone has tried to comment? I haven’t seen any comments, so if you’ve tried and haven’t seen yours, email me at girldetective (at) girldetective (dot) net.

And so, here I am months later, not sure still about whether and how to keep up the blog. I started it in 2002 (!) to develop a writing practice. It worked! So well, now, that the other writing has usurped the time and energy of the blog–not necessarily a bad thing. But I found myself, after having read the Murakami, wanting to write a bit more than I could on Facebook, Good Reads, and Twitter (on all of which I can be found if you know where to look.)

So, the Murakami was a choice for one of my 3 book groups. I’d never yet read Murakami, and felt I was missing out on a lit-geek equivalent of a Girl Scout reading badge. I had another long book to read for one of my other books (Possession by AS Byatt, which I hope to write about here, soon), and I wasn’t sure the Murakami would be my thing. I gave it the 50 page Nancy Pearl audition. At that point, I didn’t care for the wishy-washy, emasculated main character but I was drawn in by the WTF-ness of the bizarre world of the book. So I kept reading. And I kept reading.

The main character, Toru Okada, never gets very likable, and he has that unfortunate quality in a noir-ish protagonist to be irresistible to women around him. But he has a character arc, and while I didn’t like him, I was intrigued and frequently amused by sentences like any of the following:

Newly unemployed, I found this kind of life refreshing…And best of all, I could read any book I wanted. (25)

I developed no appetite at all, as I watched the hands of the clock in this quiet house, waiting for something to happen. And soon the thought crossed my mind that my failure to develop an appetite might be owing to the lack within me of this kind of literary reality. I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true. (181)

I washed myself off in the shower and laundered my semen-stained underwear by hand. Terrific, I thought. Why did I have to be having wet dreams at such a difficult time in my life? (191)

it’s kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, an if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ (261)

I found it hard to guess her age, but I supposed she was in her mid-forties. She looked younger than that at first glance, but the lines beside her nose had a special kind of weariness about them. (330)

My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought. (382)

He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his birth. (524) (This is very like a theme in Possession.)

Meandering and jazz-like, with a noir-like mood but a coming-of-age and adventure story arc, it has some troubling stereotypes of women, especially those who are drawn to Okada. I had especial trouble with a prostitute character. I don’t care for authors who use prostitutes as stock characters, or portray them as sexy, or knowing, or with a heart of gold. But it also has intertwined stories that go forward and back, tied up with Japan’s history in WWII.

The book is fascinating, frustrating, perhaps overlong, but as soon as I was done, I went online to look up things about the book, always a good sign that I’ve been mentally engaged by it. In spite of the things I didn’t like about it, I’m glad I read it, and would read Murakami again. But his short stories or one of the shorter works. I think this is about as much of him and his themes that I can take in one book.

Thanks (or apologies?) for the pun to long-time reader and friend VT.

I picked Jane Eyre as the November selection for the book group I lead (as opposed to the two others I just attend.) As the moderator of a discussion of my favorite book, I felt compelled to prepare thoroughly, and spent most of November reading Jane Eyre, related books, and watching all the adaptations. The 20 hours of seven (yes, seven) adaptations deserve their own post, so this one will just be about the ten (yes, ten) books.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. One of the first books written in first person from a child’s point of view, with attention to abuse, neglect and poverty. A coming of age, mystery and romance novel that contains one of the most famous metaphors in literature. Jane is a cool customer who speaks truth to power, and carves out her own belief system on the way, one that intriguingly merges Christianity, self-knowledge, and feministic nature.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Gilber and Gubar’s chapter on Jane Eyre helped bring that famous metaphor out of the Victorian closet and into wider view.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. An early intertextual and post-colonial novel that re-imagines the backstory for a character from Jane Eyre. I recommend the Norton annotated edition for its footnotes and essays. The text on its own bewildered me the first time I encountered it.

The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller. Excellent detailed history of how the facts and fictions about the Brontes themselves have come to overshadow the genius of their actual works.

The Brontes at Haworth by Ann Dinsdale. Lovely to look at. A good companion to The Bronte Myth.

Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan. One of my favorite childhood books, from which I learned that Emily Bronte wrote under the name Ellis and died young.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Hilariously nerdy book about a detective who investigates literary crimes, such as the kidnapping of Jane Eyre.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. James’ take on the governess-who-sees-a-ghost tale. The story and premise are great, but I found reading many of the actual sentences tedious.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey. A post-WWII update of Jane Eyre set in Scotland. The analog-to-Rochester guy’s secret makes no sense. Not only is it not compelling, but aspects of it contradict one another. Gemma makes an uncharacteristic decision toward the end, there’s an unpleasant hint of homophobia, and the resolution has nowhere near the power of the original. Widely praised by critics, it didn’t work for me.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Mentioned in The Bronte Myth and recommended long ago by my friend Becca, I finally got my own copy. Flora Poste is a delight, and I often laughed out loud. Here, she asks about a writer she’s met. The innkeeper tells her:

‘He’s doin’ one now about another young fellow who wrote books, and then his sisters pretended they wrote them and then they all died of consumption, poor young mommets.’

‘Ha! A life of Branwell Bronte,’ thought Flora. “I might have known it.’ There has been increasing discontent among the male intellectuals for some time at the thought that a woman wrote Wuthering Heights.

Cold Comfort Farm was a fun and funny book to end the Eyre Bender with. It has phrases and characters I will never forget.

For the record, reading all these was not only entertaining, but prepared me well for the book discussion.

Last year I posted this on 11/1. Ha!! This year, I think I remembered posting it last year, and didn’t realize I’d actually posted it, since I’ve all but stopped blogging, and now it’s December 13. Well, you have almost two weeks of shopping. Sorry, folks, for the lateness.

From the archives, on gift giving for kids:
Star Tribune 12/24/89 - Pat Gardner “Tender Years”

The weeks of hectic preparation are coming to a close. Within days, the magic will begin to unfold for our children and, vicariously through them, for us. Just as we remember those wonderful Christmas Eves and mornings long ago, our children will one day look back on these days. How will they remember them? What are you giving your children this year?

I know one family of modest means that makes a great effort to celebrate Christmas in the best way possible. Their children always find five gifts under the tree. And more than that, the gifts are always accompanied by a parent. Here’s how they do it.

The children always receive a gift to hug and love. Sometimes it’s a doll or maybe a stuffed animal. Every Christmas each child has something to care for, to carry along and finally at night to share a bed, secrets and dreams.

The wise parents know that the children will themselves learn to care for others by practicing on dolls and stuffed animals. Mom and Dad demonstrate rocking the stuffed bear and wiping the doll’s face. They talk about being gentle and giving care.

More important, they treat their children tenderly. They make a special effort at this busy time of year for a little more lap time, more frequent hugs and all the physical care and attention their young children need.

The children in this family always receive something to read. The parents know that to give them books is to give them wings. The little ones get books, and the big ones get books. Books aren’t foreign to any member of this family. Books are treasures. And more than that, they become a daily connection between parent and child.

The wise parents know that the best way to raise a reader is to read to a child….They share curiosity. They take the time to listen patiently to their beginning reader. They share discoveries. Through books, these parents explore worlds within their home and beyond their front door with all of their children.

The children receive toys and games. These parents are concerned about each child’s skills and find fun ways to enhance their present capabilities and encourage further development. For a grasping baby, a crib gym; for a beginning walker, a push toy; for a pre-schooler, a shape and color sorter; for a beginning reader, a game of sequence and strategy.

The parents know that play is the work of childhood. They understand that to meet a child at her level of accomplishment is to encourage success in play. Success stimulates motivation and interest in a challenge. So the parents judge their toy and game choices carefully. Not too easy, but not too hard.

They they do the most important thing. They play with their children. The children see that learning is a toy, that it’s fun to challenge oneself, that play can be a very social activity, that it’s OK to win and also to lose and that Mom and Dad wholeheartedly approve of play.

The children in this family always receive a gift of activity. From a simple ball or jump rope to a basketball hoop or a pair of ice skates, they always have one gift that encourages action.

The parents know that those children who, by nature, are very active may need to be channeled into acceptable and appropriate activities. And they know that those children who, by nature, are very passive may need to be encouraged to move with purpose. But their message to their children is that physical activity is important and good.

These parents make their message clear by joining their children in physical play. They skate and play catch. They’re on the floor with their crawlers and walk hand in hand with their toddlers. They get bumped and bruised and laugh and shout. They sled and they bowl. And many times in the next few weeks when resting on the couch sounds much more inviting, these parents will give their kids one more gift. They’ll get up and play with them.

The children always receive a gift of artistic expression. They might find crayons, paints or markers in their stockings. It might be a gift of clay this year or rubber stamps or scissors and glue. The materials change, but the object remains the same: create with joy.

These wise parents aren’t terribly concerned about the mess of finger paints. They’re more concerned about the exposure to unique sensations. They want their children to use their imaginations. They want their children to approach life in a hands-on fashion. And they want them to express themselves through their artistic activities in ways that exceed their vocabularies.

Actually, it’s supposed to warm up to the 40s! today. But still, I could see people doing the Minnesota hunch this week with the below 20 temps. So I reprint my advice.

***

Preparing to Go Outside: The Order of Operations

First, determine the outside temperature. This system of layering will be too warm for above 20F, but below that should stand you in good stead.

Next, remember what your mother said: use the toilet.

If you wear eyeglasses, consider contacts, as they don’t steam up. I’m heading steadily into bifocal territory, though, so I rarely wear my contacts anymore. Steamed lenses are better than loss of close vision.

Apply moisturizer to face, neck and lips. Heck, everywhere. During the winter, I forego sunscreen to maximize what little vitamin D I can get from the sun.

In order, don:

1. Underwear (underpants, and bra if you wear one)
2. Undershirt (thermal or silk, longer length is best)
3. Long johns (thermal or silk). Pull waistband over bottom of undershirt. This will keep your lower back (or overbutt, as my 7yo calls it) from unwanted exposure.
4. Socks, long and thick. Pull tops over bottoms of long johns.
5. Shirt(s)
6. Pants, over bottom of shirt. Do NOT tuck overshirt into long johns.
7. Sweater
8. Snowpants
9. Boots, hat and scarf
10. Gloves/mittens. Gloves inside mittens is the warmest, but diminishes dexterity.
11. Coat. The lower the temp, the puffier and longer it should be, covering at least your butt and the top of your thighs.

This order of operations has you always pulling something over a previous layer, rather than tucking in a subsequent layer, which makes for a smoother line and means you don’t have to double back, for example if you accidentally put boots on before snow pants. Also check out Sal’s post at Already Pretty on Layering Without Lumps.

Stay warm. And remember, it’s only six months till spring.

Super short, super cranky but impressive, daring, and with beautiful, evocative prose, I wanted to like it more than I did, though, and had some lingering troubles. In The Testament of Mary, Toibin takes an intriguing idea and gives voice to Mary the mother of Jesus, so often portrayed as demure and all loving. Toibin dares to make Mary bitter and mean. She says the death of her son was not worth whatever it is that the men who pester her say it is.

They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world. There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood, which I have seen before and can smell as an animal that is being hunted can smell. But I am not being hunted now. Not anymore. I am being cared for, and questioned softly, and watched. They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep.

Toibin dares a lot: he portrays Jesus as kind of a show-off-y jerk who wouldn’t listen to others, and shows Mary running from the cross for fear of her life.

A review I read at The American took especial issue with that last:

What troubles me about his Mary is that she is a coward. After her son is nailed to the cross–a scene described in agonizing detail–Mary runs away. She runs away because she cannot help him, because she is afraid and (here is the hardest part to swallow) because she wants to save her own skin.

Toíbín sins here against Scripture and tradition, yes, but also against the more universal code of Motherlove–that irresistible compulsion that drives a mother to protect her child at any cost. Motherlove is the deep knowledge that you would stand between a killer and your child and take a bullet in the face, that you would dive in front of a runaway train to shove your child off the track, that you would part with your own heart if your child needed it and that you would do this gladly. The inventions of tradition and bad art have provided us with too many impossible Marys who bear no relation to us. Do we need another? Toíbín denies Mary what makes her most human, sinning at last against the law of verisimilitude, and giving us one more Mary we cannot believe in.

I take issue with the review author’s “we.” I admire Toibin’s choice, I can absolutely buy a mother running away, since she knows her son is dead or dying. She does regret it later.

The ways in which Toibin didn’t carry me all the way were few, but significant. I kept wondering things like where is James, brother of Jesus, or why, if the gospels weren’t written until many years after his death, they’re being shown here as current with his death. Additionally, while I appreciated the complex humanity he granted Mary, a few times I felt her more as a puppet for Toibin’s anger at the church, rather than as a person of her own.

Mary Gordon at The New York Times noted this, about anachronisms, but I felt the same way about the doubts I had as reading, though I think mine nagged a little more:

This is a place where our associations – sandals and piles of coins versus shoes and bills – create doubts that hang in the air, like an annoying buzz. Or like a tiny pimple on an otherwise beautiful face.

In closing, these are a few images of Mary that have spoken to me over the years, ones that show her as decidedly human.

I love The Annunciation by Simone Martini, because she looks unhappy at the news of the Annunciation:

I love Paolo Veronese’s Holy Family because it shows Mary buttoning up, a motion familiar to those of us who’ve nurses babies, Jesus in a milk coma and clutching his penis. So normal!

I love Madonna and Child by Defendente Ferrari because it shows Jesus nursing, and Mary holding a cloth diaper. This one shows real, messy bodily truths:

And finally, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, which pissed people off because it showed her bloated, old, and with BARE FEET. Also, he used a prostitute, i.e., a real, sexually active woman, as a model.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo had long been on my radar. When a friend told me she was going to be in town for a free talk, it seemed like the perfect time to get around to it. That, and the library queue for it was no longer batsh1t-crazy long.

It’s a non-fiction account by a journalist about a slum in Mumbai, India. It is loosely centered around a death and series of trials, but includes a huge cast of people and tells a much broader story of poverty, corruption, and what people do to get by.

Boo made an interesting choice to narrate in the omniscient third person, but the summary at the end of the exhaustiveness of her research back this up. She didn’t put herself in the story because it wasn’t her story. And I didn’t miss her a bit, because hyper-focused Abdul, runty Samil, power-hungry Asha, and every single one of the others were so complex and interesting. Please forgive my reductive descriptors of these people–read Boo’s book to get the fuller picture.

At her talk, an audience member asked if her book made people’s lives more difficult because she named names and detailed acts of corruption. She responded that one of her goals had been transparency–all her participants had not only given permission, but sometimes insisted on using their full names and details of their lives, to better show the complicated, ethically slippery environment so different from ours in the pampered west.

I very much appreciated Boo’s afterward, in which she specifically calls out her situation of white privilege, and how and why she wrote the book. This was a eye-opening, world-expanding, thought-provoking book. One that, like the best books, leaves me with the question: NOW, what do I do now that I know what I know?

So, I have been slammed with spam and do not feel like wading through 423 comments right now, and have changed one setting, which means you have to sign in to comment. Sorry for the inconvenience, but 423 50-line spams has outdone me. If this works, great, if not, I may have to shut down comments.

Just waded through 223 entries of spam, all of which were huge and this took forever, and I didn’t find one actual comment from an actual person.

So this has me thinking. Heads up, dear readers. I think change is on its way…

For years, I snobbishly dismissed Wicked by Gregory Maguire and the musical it spawned as populist tripe. Fun for the masses, but not for me.

I can be such a snobby cuss, sometimes, no? Put me in mind of that lovely quote by William Paley:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination.

so when one of my smartest friends posted a glowing review of Wicked the book on Goodreads, noting that it was her THIRD read (important not just for 3rd read denoting a better knowledge of the book, but how many books do we readers honor by reading 3 times?), my interest was piqued, I questioned my prejudice and resolved to read it myself.

The time was right recently, when the touring company of Wicked came to town. I got tickets with a girlfriend,and sat down to read the book. It is not an easy read, but I found it a challenging and rewarding one.

You probably “know” the broad outlines, as I thought I did, given the popularity of the musical. It is a re-telling of the Oz story focusing on the witches showing a less sympathetic side of Glinda the Good, and a more sympathetic side to the Wicked Witch, named Elphaba, pronounced EL fuh buh, in homage to Oz’s creator L. Frank Baum.

This is a fair summation of the musical but it does faint justice to the book, which is complicated, going way beyond in depth and breadth Good vs. Evil, and which witch embodies which. Maguire’s book provides the history, childhoods, and influences of Glinda, Elphaba, and many more characters who orbit around the original Oz fable and movie. There are competing religions and traditions in Oz including a variation on Christianity, as well as echoes of an older, darker tradition reminiscent of ancient, matriarchal ones that predate Christianity. There are talking Animals who are persecuted, sentient mechanical beings, a recurring mother/crone figure, and so many more elements. Throughout, though, is the question of Good and Evil, which Maguire presents as tantalizingly ambiguous.

People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us… It’s people who claim that they’re good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

The heady mix of themes includes also wind as a signifier of power, and the nature of forgiveness.But it’s complex stew of themes that is, perhaps the book’s greatest weakness and, I suspect, why so many readers dislike it, shown by 3 stars on good reads with many negative reviews. The plot is loose, and wanders. Maguire raises many questions, but answers few definitively. This can be read as challenging the reader and trusting in their ability to think, but it can also be an author not quite in control of his creation. And near the end, when the traditional Oz tail dovetails most with Maguire’s re-telling, it felt like Maguire was hampered by fitting his tale to the other.

I can see why those who liked the musical (which is great fun, and offers some complication of the Oz story just not as much as the book. FYI, it’s adapted by Winnie Holtzman, who also wrote My So-Called Life.) would read the book and dislike it. It’s far less tidy and satisfying than the musical, which demands not nearly so much of its audience. But for its weaknesses of plot and sometimes over-mysterious backstory, this book has made me think, actively, on power, religion, good, morality and so many BIG things, that I highly recommend it, as long as you know you’re in for a challenging ride.

Little behind on this. What have y’all been watching; anything worthwhile?

Miller’s Crossing. My husband’s favorite movie. I think my favorite of the serious Coen Bros. movies. They alternate “funny” and “serious”; did you know?

Breakfast Club, Magic Mike, and Bridesmaids: with girlfriends, eating chocolate, drinking wine. Cliche? Maybe. Super fun? You betcha.

The Decoy Bride. Adorable Scottish rom-com, free on Netflix, starring David Tennant.

The Sting. Part of a Redford/Newman binge. Music and movie so good.

Smashed. Husband sat this earnest indie out. Didn’t love.

Cold Light of Day. Alas, really bad.

Much Ado About Nothing. Super charming, and Sean Maher made a GREAT Shakespeare villain.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1 and 2: with the kids. They loved the movies; I found all but #3 forgettable.

Killing Them Softly: decent, but with a sledgehammer message throughout that detracted.

Captain America, Avengers: girlfriends, wine, chocolates again.

Holy Motors: so weird. More of an experiment than a film. Critics loved it.

Princess Mononoke: with the kids. Glad we waited for this one; super violent.

Burn After Reading. Didn’t get great reviews, but I like it and LOVE Brad Pitt being funny. He should do that more often.

Pitch Perfect. Again. New classic. B movie, but love anyways. Aca-scuse me?

Vanishing Point. With the husband, in preparation for

Deathproof. Tarantino. As usual, overly violent, but worthwhile. Fascinatingly, passes the Bechdel test with flying colors.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: with kids, again. Love this cussin’ movie. Hot Box!

Sixteen Candles. With the GFs. Jake Ryan 4ever! Also love the scene with her dad.

Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt Russell again. Silly fun.

Rio Bravo, with the kids, who liked it lots.It’s one of my husband’s favorites, I don’t think I’d seen it all the way through. Apparently, Tarantino screens this for girlfriends to see if they’ll be compatible. One of the boys: “Dude (Dean Martin) is a really good singer!”

Men in Black, with the kids. They liked it a lot.

Prometheus. Some good stuff like my boyfriend Michael Fassbender as a non human, Idris Elba singing a line from a CSN song, and a tense surgery scene that will live in memory forever, but overall kind of a mess.

Sneakers. With the kids, who had fun.

Bring it On. Meaning to watch it since reminded of by Pitch Perfect. Fun, but not an essential.

To Be or Not to Be by Lubitsch. Lovely Criterion Collection. I see echoes of it in QT’s Inglourious Basterds.

I’m continuing to read Shakespeare’s history plays along with the adaptations on PBS of The Hollow Crown. Last Friday was King Henry IV part 2, which I did manage to read before I finished watching. I find it does help to review the play beforehand.

As I read and watch, I’m struck again and again by the enduring poetry of Shakespeare. This line:

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. (III, i, 31)

He’s talking about not being able to sleep, so it makes perfect sense in context, and is such lovely phrasing, and oh, I’m such a geek.

And oh, my crush on Tom Hiddleston just grows and grows.

Before God, I am exceeding weary (II,ii, 1)

:

I’m watching “The Hollow Crown” series of Shakespeare’s history plays on PBS, so am reading the four plays: Richard II, King Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, Henry V.

I’d never read the Henry IV plays, so part 1 was new to me. I watched the movie first, then read the play second. I wish I’d done it in the reverse. One particular scene, in which Hotspur continually insults Glendower, was hilarious to read, but I don’t remember finding it as funny during the play.

GLENDOWER

I cannot blame him: at my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.

HOTSPUR

Why, so it would have done at the same season, if
your mother’s cat had but kittened, though yourself
had never been born.

GLENDOWER

I say the earth did shake when I was born.

HOTSPUR

And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.

GLENDOWER

The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.

HOTSPUR

O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,
In passion shook.

So, basically, Hotspur told Glendower that the earth was farting on the day he was born. Lots of bodily functions and meaty insults, of which this was my favorite, though it had good competition:

Gadshill:

none of these mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms (II.i.73-4)

This is a manly play, full of action, which perhaps explains why I found it more enjoyable than Richard II, which is full of effete, weak Richard and lots of people who stand still and speechify.

Based on this, I will try to squeeze in a read of part 2 before tomorrow.

Lots of people cite Sarah Dessen’s This Lullaby as a classic of young-adult romance. Alas, it didn’t draw me in.

Eighteen-year-old Remy has just graduated from high school, and is about to dump her current boyfriend when she meets a weird guy named Dexter. Remy is a control freak with a many-times-married writer mother, and Dexter does not fit into her plans.

But I never felt really involved with the book. The characters never felt real to me. Remy felt like a checklist of characteristics rather than a person. I saw a couple plot twists coming from a ways away. I know Dessen is popular and her books are well reviewed, so perhaps her style is just not for me. I liked Keeping the Moon more than this, though, so I may check out another title.

Now, HERE is a good entry into the excellent and involving comic-book series The Unwritten. In The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice, we get origin stories for both Tom Taylors, the real one and the fictional one. In alternating segments, illustrated in alternating styles, we learn how writer Wilson Taylor simultaneously created both his real son Tom and his fictional character Tommy.

In what has been told piecemeal throughout the series so far, we get the backstory of Tom’s mother, her pregnancy, and Wilson’s machinations to create a living embodiment/mirror of a fictional creation.

This alternates with the text of the first Tommy Taylor book that Wilson was writing, the Ship That Sank Twice about a boy named Tommy, his friends Sue and Peter, and their magical adventure.

Like all of Unwritten, this is a twisty-turny tale that has literary references upon references, yet is good no matter how many you get or don’t, e.g., the Dumbledore-ish character is called Tulkinghorn, a name from Dicken’s Bleak House. I really enjoyed how it joined together and filled in so much of what readers knew and didn’t know.

While I liked the idea of the alternating styles, crisp pencils for the “real” world and softer watercolors for the fictional one, many of the segments had a different style. The credits page indicate that Peter Gross did all the layouts but several different artists did the finishing, This range of art styles made it feel uneven, rather than balanced, to me. This was a lovely, involving book. I would have preferred to have waited for one that Gross would have illustrated all himself, or at least half and half with another artist like Jon Muth, whose style I was reminded of in the fictional sections. But, I quibble. It’s a lovely book, well illustrated, and well told. It’s both a good entry in the series and a good possible entry point for new readers.

I lead a local community book group. This month’s selection was Kindred by Octavia Butler, which I wrote about here.

As I researched the book and author in preparation for the discussion, one thing began to stand out. Again and again, the book is referred to in terms I think might put people off from reading it. The author herself called it “grim fantasy” and that’s what Charles Stross referred to it as in his recent post “Time Tourism” on why women don’t time travel in fiction much. Adjectives from the back of the book include shattering and terrifying, And while these may be true, this book is so much, much more. It’s a gripping page turner, with a strong memorable main character, and a supporting cast that deconstructs racial stereotypes like these detailed at the blog Nicole Be Thinking:

Common stereotypes of black women include the Mammy, who is “everyone’s favorite aunt or grandmother;” Jezebel, the “sexually promiscuous, libidinous black woman;” and Sapphire, who is “usually shown with her hands on her hips […] as she lets everyone know she is in charge” (Yarbrough; Hudson 243). In my reading, I have come across another stereotype, the tragic figure of Cassandra (Yarbrough).

Do not be afraid of this book. Read it. Everyone should. It’s changed, and continues to change, my way of thinking and seeing the world.

The links I found were many, and fascinating, and I can’t do them justice, but in case you’re also wanting to know more about the book and its author:

Kindred is representative of a body of counter-narratives seeking to challenge dominant, utopian portraits of American democracy and the veneration of post-racialism as the state of U.S. race relations since the end of the civil rights movement.

Butler on time travel:

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn’t.

A short bio.

Reinventing the slave narrative.

Why it should be a movie, here and here.

It will be a graphic novel.

Themes of power, community and motherhood

About publishing Kindred:

“Kindred” was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South. Butler stuck to her social justice vision - “I think people really need to think what it’s like to have all of society arrayed against you” - and finally found a publisher who paid her a $5,000 advance for “Kindred.”

“I was living on my writing,” Butler said, “and you could live on $5,000 back then. You could live, but not well. I got along by buying food I didn’t really like but was nourishing: beans, potatoes. A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.”