Only three books this month, but that's only because I'm strolling through Dan Simmons' Drood, and have been for a few weeks now. And, I suppose, I spent several days attempting to get hooked on Tiffany Baker's The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. I *wanted* to like it, but I just couldn't get there, and after more than 75 pages, when I still wasn't that interested, I just packed it in. There's too much already sitting around waiting on me to spend time on something that I'm ambivalent about!
First off, there was Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death. A friend enjoys the series, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was okay - good enough for me to pick up the second book at some point, I imagine. The series is set in England under Henry II, and the "sleuth" is a woman sent upon the king's request from the medical school in Salerno. Children are disappearing, the Jews of Cambridge are being blamed, because they get blamed for everything, and the situation is so tenuous that they've had to move into the castle for protection from the general citizenry. Of course, the Jewish population also pays a lot of taxes, and as a result, Henry would like this resolved ASAP. I usually enjoy historical fiction, but sometimes I struggle with not having a sense of how much is fiction-fiction and how much is historically-based fiction. This was one of those cases, but no real complaints when I remember that it's just a light read.
After that, I read Stephanie Kallos' much-lauded Sing Them Home. She's very talented, especially at character renderings, and something about the matter-of-fact way she does it put me in the mind of Larry McMurtry. Odd as it sounds, for a comparison, I'd say she's Larry McMurtry's Evening Star meets Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. Just a light touch of magic in this story about three modern-day siblings reunited after their father's sudden death and still struggling with the disappearance and presumed death of their mother in a tornado nearly 30 years ago. The Welsh community of Emlyn Springs becomes a character, too, with deep-seated Welsh traditions for honoring the dead. The tornado actually serves as a beautiful metaphor for any sudden, violent death in some ways - you leave home when things are normal and come back that evening to find your life completely wrecked and a loved one missing, in a sense never to be seen again. Odd sometimes, how you have revelations (not really revelations, perhaps, but an emotional understanding of something that you've cognitively understood for quite awhile) when reading that don't seem directly connected to the book, but I just realized during this that my mother would never have wanted to leave me. Beautiful and sad - but that realization and the book.
After that, another book about mothers and children - Kathleen Kent's The Heretic's Daughter about real-life mother and daughter Martha and Sarah Carrier who were imprisoned during the Salem witchcraft trials. I don't think I learned anything new about the trials, but the only other fictional work on the subject I'd read was Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The Crucible is a classic with good reason, but Miller's really more concerned with the politics and parallels, while Kent, as a Carrier descendent, is focused on relaying her family history and applying a very human face to the tragedy. It's one thing to read about the injustices and the discriminations in the abstract, but Kathleen Kent does a wonderful job of drawing you into the lives of these two women and making you see the frustrations in the first person. That women were so often accused, especially if they were smart enough or persistent enough to actually heal a person or a farm animal, just seemed horribly injust - if you were lazy, indifferent or unlucky, you might be many things, but you weren't likely to be a suspected witch!
And this month I picked up the new Deanna Raybourn, Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Asta in the Wings, and Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy. And I have holds at the library on Terminal Freeze, The Reader, The Seance and much more. Add that to what I already have lying around....
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Nest Building
On my walk this morning, I kept hearing rustling on the island, and finally realized that a fox squirrel was hard at work, building a nest in the cleft of a tree. I only meant to watch for a second, but got so entranced that I lost track of time. What a production! Unlike birds, who mostly pick up loose stuff and just fly off with it, the squirrel was wobbling out the the end of branches, gnawing off twiggy tips and hauling them back. And, of course, on the way back, there are twigs poking out in all directions that cause you to get hung up on things, so then you have to turn around and tug and tug. And if that doesn't work, you have to go back and gnaw some more. Sometimes the limb is so unwieldy that it's just easier to climb down to the ground, turn around and ascend again rather than trying to turn around mid-trunk.
Then, after all this work, you get the branch back to the aforementioned cleft, where you have been hard at work laying out a few base sticks as a platform. Shoving the new stick into place frequently dislodges other sticks that you've worked so hard to wedge in, and all your bouncing up and down on the sketchy platform doesn't help. This assumes that you even manage to get your newest stick in place - about two-thirds of the time you drop it and start all over again.
As if all this weren't bad enough, the birds were tremendously loud today, and in his behalf, I wanted to tell them to just shut up! There was a squabble amongst goose neighbors, and the seagulls were so bad that listening to Rush Limbaugh would have been preferable. (Actually, that's a very apt analogy - lots of angry squawking, very little substance, and poohing all over everyone else's existence without making any real contribution.) It's warmer, and the ice is thinning, and I think some of it was just self-encouraging chatter to keep up one's nerve while tiptoeing on the ice, but still - what racket! Personally, I also wanted to suggest that he reconsider the advisability of having geese as neighbors. It has to be like living next to an Appalachian trailer park when it's perpetually Friday and perpetually payday.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the squirrel phrase for "Damn" is, but I think it looks like this:
This is what my new friend did after several attempts at stick placement. On the one hand, he looked tired, but on the other, he looked for all the world like he was thinking very hard about the advisability of the whole process. In fact, I think he seemed to be questioning being a squirrel at all - seems like it might be easier to just go live in an abandoned hole or something. After a few minutes, he climbed down from his tree and went to rest in a leaf pile. I empathize - it's a terrible thing to be driven by instinct and training to do something that is so frustrating. Perhaps he needs a squirrel therapist to discuss his tragic upbringing with parents who taught him to base his self-worth on the quality of the nest he constructs. Will have to go check on his progress this weekend and hope he does not have a breakdown in the intervening days.
Then, after all this work, you get the branch back to the aforementioned cleft, where you have been hard at work laying out a few base sticks as a platform. Shoving the new stick into place frequently dislodges other sticks that you've worked so hard to wedge in, and all your bouncing up and down on the sketchy platform doesn't help. This assumes that you even manage to get your newest stick in place - about two-thirds of the time you drop it and start all over again.
As if all this weren't bad enough, the birds were tremendously loud today, and in his behalf, I wanted to tell them to just shut up! There was a squabble amongst goose neighbors, and the seagulls were so bad that listening to Rush Limbaugh would have been preferable. (Actually, that's a very apt analogy - lots of angry squawking, very little substance, and poohing all over everyone else's existence without making any real contribution.) It's warmer, and the ice is thinning, and I think some of it was just self-encouraging chatter to keep up one's nerve while tiptoeing on the ice, but still - what racket! Personally, I also wanted to suggest that he reconsider the advisability of having geese as neighbors. It has to be like living next to an Appalachian trailer park when it's perpetually Friday and perpetually payday.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the squirrel phrase for "Damn" is, but I think it looks like this:
This is what my new friend did after several attempts at stick placement. On the one hand, he looked tired, but on the other, he looked for all the world like he was thinking very hard about the advisability of the whole process. In fact, I think he seemed to be questioning being a squirrel at all - seems like it might be easier to just go live in an abandoned hole or something. After a few minutes, he climbed down from his tree and went to rest in a leaf pile. I empathize - it's a terrible thing to be driven by instinct and training to do something that is so frustrating. Perhaps he needs a squirrel therapist to discuss his tragic upbringing with parents who taught him to base his self-worth on the quality of the nest he constructs. Will have to go check on his progress this weekend and hope he does not have a breakdown in the intervening days.
Monday, February 16, 2009
January in Review
Boy, am I running behind. Blame it on February being a short month....
First of all, I "re-listened" to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If you don't already know what a genius Jim Dale is, then I'm not sure I have anything else to say to you!
New Year's Day, my husband allowed me to be a complete slug, and I sat in a chair by the stove with a mug of cider and a cat and ripped through Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought it was great. Nothing groundbreaking, I don't suppose, but it's what thrillers used to be back when James Patterson was still writing his own books. It's a good, solid story, carefully built with interesting characters, and I was hooked from the beginning, which is saying something, since Larsson launches the story with some corporate espionage/fraud. (Sorry, that's just me, but I need bodies - missing jewels, industrial spies, and military plots don't cut it.) It was a pleasure to read; not a literary novel, perhaps, but a strong story told well. I'm saddened to learn Larsson only left us with three before his untimely death.
Seems it was a month of good stories, or started that way. I moved on to Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief after that. I'm a little concerned that it's being billed as historical, because the historical details were hazy and sketchy enough that even someone with a decent grasp of early American history and material culture would have had a hard time placing the story definitively. But that's because it's a story! An orphan who lost his hand, a stranger with questionable motives, giants, dwarves, brawls - this has it all. Reading Tinti's debut tale was like sitting around the fire, listening to a storyteller spin a yarn with odd characters, larger-than-life adventure, and spellbinding twists and turns. It might say everything about this novel to say that I kept picturing it in my mind as a terrific project for Tim Burton....
After that I picked up Bottomless Belly Button, the graphic novel by Dash Shaw. This was my first graphic novel, or at least my first graphic novel that was more about "novel" and less about "graphic." It was a good choice, because although I've not exactly been converted to a graphic novel fanatic, it was an introduction to the subtleties that the medium can convey. In the right hands, I can see that it's a beautiful blending of books and film - delicate emotions and nebulous events that don't always translate well in either format (your book would be too wordy and your movie would have no plot) are dealt with so well here. It's actually the opposite of a story in some ways, more like little glimpses of how a family deals with the end of a story, and at the end, I realized it could only have been done justice as a graphic novel. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.
At this point, I took a brief break from my "best of 2008" lists to catch up with Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series in Killer Heat. What can I say? Linda Fairstein. If you've read one, you've read them all, and if you've read them all, odds are they've stewed into a composite novel in your head. Body, investigation, turbulent relationship with Mike Chapman, danger in isolated historic New York spot, and a last-minute rescue and resolution. Acceptable way to kill a little time, and her newest release, Lethal Legacy, takes place in the New York Public Library, so I had to get caught up for that!
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's latest, was another "best of" title that I picked up, and I'm glad I did. "Gentle" might be a good word for the story, but not for the character. Olive is brusque, loving, cold, passionate - she's just a human, a normal person, who if treated as a survey topic would probably have an even smattering of responses in the love, like, dislike, and hate columns. She's us - average people who have good days and bad, who occasionally does something right, occasionally does something mean, and as often as not does one or the other completely unwittingly. All of that averages out to the human experience, and Strout's work is almost like a series of short stories, many NOT from Olive's point of view, that are strung together to give us a picture of who she is at some of her best and worst moments. It's almost as if a camera crew followed her around for her whole life, collecting bits and pieces that were edited together by someone with a well-balanced sense of things. You like Olive Kitteridge, not because she's likeable, but because she's very human, and we can all identify with her fits of generosity and viciousness.
After that literary pause, I took a complete turn off the beaten path and picked up Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. I liked it, I think, although in some ways there are two works here - an anthropological one and a linguistic one, and they might have been better served by actually being two books. I fell into the anthropological track, and I felt jolted about quite a bit when late in the work the writing shifted to a more technical linguistic discussion, but regardless, the Piedans are people worth getting to know. They are truly unlike any other group of people I've ever read or heard of - they don't import knowledge, they have a remarkably simple language, and they seem to be so unconcerned with the distant past that their language doesn't even allow for a discussion of it. Everett raises a philosophical question - are we who we are because of our language or is our language what it is because of who we are? A "chicken or egg" question, one that leads you to wonder if a culture doesn't have war because their language wouldn't allow for the expression of it or if their language doesn't allow for the expression of war because they've never had one. Fascinating, but ultimately, not quite fulfilling. Perhaps I just need to go find a linguist to quiz at length to satisfy my curiosity....
First of all, I "re-listened" to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If you don't already know what a genius Jim Dale is, then I'm not sure I have anything else to say to you!
New Year's Day, my husband allowed me to be a complete slug, and I sat in a chair by the stove with a mug of cider and a cat and ripped through Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought it was great. Nothing groundbreaking, I don't suppose, but it's what thrillers used to be back when James Patterson was still writing his own books. It's a good, solid story, carefully built with interesting characters, and I was hooked from the beginning, which is saying something, since Larsson launches the story with some corporate espionage/fraud. (Sorry, that's just me, but I need bodies - missing jewels, industrial spies, and military plots don't cut it.) It was a pleasure to read; not a literary novel, perhaps, but a strong story told well. I'm saddened to learn Larsson only left us with three before his untimely death.
Seems it was a month of good stories, or started that way. I moved on to Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief after that. I'm a little concerned that it's being billed as historical, because the historical details were hazy and sketchy enough that even someone with a decent grasp of early American history and material culture would have had a hard time placing the story definitively. But that's because it's a story! An orphan who lost his hand, a stranger with questionable motives, giants, dwarves, brawls - this has it all. Reading Tinti's debut tale was like sitting around the fire, listening to a storyteller spin a yarn with odd characters, larger-than-life adventure, and spellbinding twists and turns. It might say everything about this novel to say that I kept picturing it in my mind as a terrific project for Tim Burton....
After that I picked up Bottomless Belly Button, the graphic novel by Dash Shaw. This was my first graphic novel, or at least my first graphic novel that was more about "novel" and less about "graphic." It was a good choice, because although I've not exactly been converted to a graphic novel fanatic, it was an introduction to the subtleties that the medium can convey. In the right hands, I can see that it's a beautiful blending of books and film - delicate emotions and nebulous events that don't always translate well in either format (your book would be too wordy and your movie would have no plot) are dealt with so well here. It's actually the opposite of a story in some ways, more like little glimpses of how a family deals with the end of a story, and at the end, I realized it could only have been done justice as a graphic novel. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.
At this point, I took a brief break from my "best of 2008" lists to catch up with Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series in Killer Heat. What can I say? Linda Fairstein. If you've read one, you've read them all, and if you've read them all, odds are they've stewed into a composite novel in your head. Body, investigation, turbulent relationship with Mike Chapman, danger in isolated historic New York spot, and a last-minute rescue and resolution. Acceptable way to kill a little time, and her newest release, Lethal Legacy, takes place in the New York Public Library, so I had to get caught up for that!
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's latest, was another "best of" title that I picked up, and I'm glad I did. "Gentle" might be a good word for the story, but not for the character. Olive is brusque, loving, cold, passionate - she's just a human, a normal person, who if treated as a survey topic would probably have an even smattering of responses in the love, like, dislike, and hate columns. She's us - average people who have good days and bad, who occasionally does something right, occasionally does something mean, and as often as not does one or the other completely unwittingly. All of that averages out to the human experience, and Strout's work is almost like a series of short stories, many NOT from Olive's point of view, that are strung together to give us a picture of who she is at some of her best and worst moments. It's almost as if a camera crew followed her around for her whole life, collecting bits and pieces that were edited together by someone with a well-balanced sense of things. You like Olive Kitteridge, not because she's likeable, but because she's very human, and we can all identify with her fits of generosity and viciousness.
After that literary pause, I took a complete turn off the beaten path and picked up Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. I liked it, I think, although in some ways there are two works here - an anthropological one and a linguistic one, and they might have been better served by actually being two books. I fell into the anthropological track, and I felt jolted about quite a bit when late in the work the writing shifted to a more technical linguistic discussion, but regardless, the Piedans are people worth getting to know. They are truly unlike any other group of people I've ever read or heard of - they don't import knowledge, they have a remarkably simple language, and they seem to be so unconcerned with the distant past that their language doesn't even allow for a discussion of it. Everett raises a philosophical question - are we who we are because of our language or is our language what it is because of who we are? A "chicken or egg" question, one that leads you to wonder if a culture doesn't have war because their language wouldn't allow for the expression of it or if their language doesn't allow for the expression of war because they've never had one. Fascinating, but ultimately, not quite fulfilling. Perhaps I just need to go find a linguist to quiz at length to satisfy my curiosity....
Friday, February 13, 2009
It's Electric!
Karmically, we were due for a power outage. The remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped through here last year, and our power barely blipped. Especially "barely" in light of the fact that lots of Ohioans didn't have power for a week or more. Several ice storms and heavy snows this winter put the lights out in some places, but again, not even a dimming of the lights over here. So, when the heavy winds came through this week, it was kind of our turn.
Unfortunately, it is, of course, not the kind of turn you want - not like being next in line for an amusement ride. The power went out sometime after we went to bed Wednesday night, and naturally, this meant that I had a web conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Hooray for the community room at Panera! I ruthlessly (okay, not really) kicked a bunch of people studying some cardiology stuff out, recharged my cellphone and gabbed away with no problems, aside from the occasional advertisement for Panera because I was getting timed out and having to go back to their main page to get logged in again.
Then I spent the afternoon expending enough energy and money that I felt certain the power would come on again. (You know that old rule: if you want something to happen, make it as inconvenient as possible, and it will. Need 5 seconds at a stoplight to find your lip balm in your purse? Guaranteed green lights all the way to work.) Anyway, I remembered that our uninitiated gas grill had a burner on the side, so I lugged home a propane tank ($50). After work, we unearthed the grill in the barn, drug it around to the back deck, and fired it up. Fortunately, I'd made a pot of chili this week. Then, I found a paint bucket and an old five-gallon bucket, so we managed to pull enough water up out of the cistern to rinse dishes and flush the toilet. We also unpacked all of the freezer and refrigerator into a big Rubbermaid tub and iced it down. A positive there - we got the fridge cleaned out!
After a candlelight dinner (chili and a Mistletoe-scented Yankee Candle Co. candle aren't, perhaps, the most palatable of scent combinations) and a run out for ice and some hot cocoa, we headed up to bed. The cats filled in the little nooks and crannies around us like chinking between logs. I wore the work light on my head, so Andrew could read to me, and then I rolled up in a little ball and slept like a log. An occasionally chilly log, but a log nonetheless.
As I was paddling around in my thoughts while waiting for sleep, I was thinking about Fannie Flagg's character, Aunt Elner. You just have to love Aunt Elner, and one of my favorite things about her is her intense appreciation, an appreciation that only an old farm wife could have, for electricity. Thomas Edison is one of her favorite people, and every year, on his birthday, she turns on all the appliances in her house at the same time to celebrate. I thought to myself that I might just have to do that next year.
So, we woke up to power this morning. The electricity not only was cooperative enough to come back on, but considerate enough to do it enough before we woke up, allowing the water heater to generate hot water for showers. While Andrew showered and fed cats, I cleaned out the pellet stove and fired it up, and then he made breakfast while I showered. It's already almost 55 degrees in here, and after I settled on the couch with the heated mattress pad and a quilt, I remembered Thomas Edison, and thought I'd just see when his birthday was so I could be prepared. According to Wikipedia, it's February 11 - the day before our electricity went off. Perhaps he was peeved by our lack of appreciation. I've made a mental note to do better next year....
Unfortunately, it is, of course, not the kind of turn you want - not like being next in line for an amusement ride. The power went out sometime after we went to bed Wednesday night, and naturally, this meant that I had a web conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Hooray for the community room at Panera! I ruthlessly (okay, not really) kicked a bunch of people studying some cardiology stuff out, recharged my cellphone and gabbed away with no problems, aside from the occasional advertisement for Panera because I was getting timed out and having to go back to their main page to get logged in again.
Then I spent the afternoon expending enough energy and money that I felt certain the power would come on again. (You know that old rule: if you want something to happen, make it as inconvenient as possible, and it will. Need 5 seconds at a stoplight to find your lip balm in your purse? Guaranteed green lights all the way to work.) Anyway, I remembered that our uninitiated gas grill had a burner on the side, so I lugged home a propane tank ($50). After work, we unearthed the grill in the barn, drug it around to the back deck, and fired it up. Fortunately, I'd made a pot of chili this week. Then, I found a paint bucket and an old five-gallon bucket, so we managed to pull enough water up out of the cistern to rinse dishes and flush the toilet. We also unpacked all of the freezer and refrigerator into a big Rubbermaid tub and iced it down. A positive there - we got the fridge cleaned out!
After a candlelight dinner (chili and a Mistletoe-scented Yankee Candle Co. candle aren't, perhaps, the most palatable of scent combinations) and a run out for ice and some hot cocoa, we headed up to bed. The cats filled in the little nooks and crannies around us like chinking between logs. I wore the work light on my head, so Andrew could read to me, and then I rolled up in a little ball and slept like a log. An occasionally chilly log, but a log nonetheless.
As I was paddling around in my thoughts while waiting for sleep, I was thinking about Fannie Flagg's character, Aunt Elner. You just have to love Aunt Elner, and one of my favorite things about her is her intense appreciation, an appreciation that only an old farm wife could have, for electricity. Thomas Edison is one of her favorite people, and every year, on his birthday, she turns on all the appliances in her house at the same time to celebrate. I thought to myself that I might just have to do that next year.
So, we woke up to power this morning. The electricity not only was cooperative enough to come back on, but considerate enough to do it enough before we woke up, allowing the water heater to generate hot water for showers. While Andrew showered and fed cats, I cleaned out the pellet stove and fired it up, and then he made breakfast while I showered. It's already almost 55 degrees in here, and after I settled on the couch with the heated mattress pad and a quilt, I remembered Thomas Edison, and thought I'd just see when his birthday was so I could be prepared. According to Wikipedia, it's February 11 - the day before our electricity went off. Perhaps he was peeved by our lack of appreciation. I've made a mental note to do better next year....
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Minutiae
I think it's the smallness of winter that is draining. Everything about winter is so incremental and miserly; the thermometer (and thermostat) degrees that we were so generous with in August - 87, 91, what's the difference? - are now guarded so carefully, watched over and discussed. Rain falls and soaks, a deluge, but snow accumulates. And accumulates. And accumulates.
Then, it all goes away so slowly. A summer thunderstorm wets the earth and by the next day, it's hard to know one passed, but snow lingers. It's like the negative of a photograph. Instead of dark shadows, the hollows and ditch lines have white streaks and traces that hang on for weeks. And the dripping is interminably. Snow leaves as slowly as it came, one drop from the eaves after another.
At the same time, this smallness is what is fascinating, so delicate and precious. Tiny sand-like grains fall and fall and fall until they pile up inches thick! The cumulative effects of individual flakes is amazing and beautiful, and individually, they seem to be swept away so quickly.
I remember my first big snow. The winter of 1977, I had just turned three, and I had an impressive collection of miniature jelly jars, likely from a gift basket, that had been handed off to me as toys. In memory, it seems as if I spent hours going outside, scooping snow into a jar, and bringing it back into the house. No matter how tightly I screwed the lid on or how close I stayed to the door, within moments, I had a little jar full of water. I was entranced, over and over, by the science that reversed another science. It's hard not to be in awe of a world that produces miracles in a jelly jar.
Then, it all goes away so slowly. A summer thunderstorm wets the earth and by the next day, it's hard to know one passed, but snow lingers. It's like the negative of a photograph. Instead of dark shadows, the hollows and ditch lines have white streaks and traces that hang on for weeks. And the dripping is interminably. Snow leaves as slowly as it came, one drop from the eaves after another.
At the same time, this smallness is what is fascinating, so delicate and precious. Tiny sand-like grains fall and fall and fall until they pile up inches thick! The cumulative effects of individual flakes is amazing and beautiful, and individually, they seem to be swept away so quickly.
I remember my first big snow. The winter of 1977, I had just turned three, and I had an impressive collection of miniature jelly jars, likely from a gift basket, that had been handed off to me as toys. In memory, it seems as if I spent hours going outside, scooping snow into a jar, and bringing it back into the house. No matter how tightly I screwed the lid on or how close I stayed to the door, within moments, I had a little jar full of water. I was entranced, over and over, by the science that reversed another science. It's hard not to be in awe of a world that produces miracles in a jelly jar.
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