reading report: too much time on the plane

Remember "the next post" mentioned in the previous post? This isn't it. Still mulling that one.

In other news, you may have missed it in the comments a few weeks ago, but Laurel recommended a novel called Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, particularly for those who are planning a trip to Italy. It is perfect for that purpose, but it's also the best book I've read in years, so go find a copy of it even if you aren't headed to Italy. I tried to read it not long after it came out and never made it past the first chapter. Maybe because Walter's description of Pasquale, a young Italian who has recently inherited the Hotel Adequate View, felt motivated by pity. I've had my fill of novels about poor, victimized, wounded people, how they got that way, and why they will never rise above it. But Laurel recommended it highly, so I persevered. For which I am grateful, because Pasquale turns out to be a wonderful character, the heart and soul of the novel--and he does rise above his circumstances, although in a much more interesting way than I would have predicted. It is a terrific book, warm-hearted and generous, beautifully written, often funny.

This is starting to sound like an overblown description of wine (woody and fruity with a sexy nose and overtones of toasty oak). Just go find it. It's about Hollywood, movies and movie stars, a tiny albergo on the coast of Italy, the sometimes surprising nature of true love, selling your soul (or refusing to), Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, and the Donner party. Can't miss, right? I think I'm going to read it over again, because if it has a flaw, it's that there are lots of things going on and I'm sure I missed some of them.

On the return trip, both of my flights were delayed, so I ended up with plenty of time to read. Tawna Fenske's third novel, Frisky Business, turned out to be the perfect antidote. I've followed Tawna's blog for a long time, so I feel like she's a friend, although I've never met her and she has no idea who I am. She just gets better and better. This one, the story of a woman who takes over as director of development at a non-profit in Bend, Oregon, is just about the perfect romantic comedy--amusing, fizzy-light, but intelligently written with some worthwhile insights into people and their motivations. (see? like a wine description again.) I just wish she'd slow down a little and trust her story more, because it felt a bit rushed at times. Fun read, though, and if you're stuck on a plane circling Minneapolis for 45 minutes waiting for a thunderstorm to move through, you'll be just as grateful for it as I was.

And that's all the news from here. It's hot as heck here and since we don't have A/C, that makes things a bit miserable. But we've got fans and we're headed out to the lake this weekend to swim. Hard to complain, because that's what summer's all about, right?

odds and ends: I got two hands, one beating heart

1. PellMel finished her first year of medical school a couple of weeks ago, was home for a week, and then took off again to do a month-long rotation at a rural clinic. She is so excited about the stuff she's learning, it's infectious--even I got excited when she called to tell us about her first experience with a cardioversion yesterday (which is the thing you see on TV all the time where they yell CLEAR and then jolt the patient with paddles, but apparently that's not the way it's done anymore. It is more civilized now. But they still say CLEAR.). MadMax is done on Monday. Their school has a long-time policy of allowing those with less than two absences during the semester to skip end-of-semester finals. Apparently, it cut absences by some outrageous amount when they first started it (60%?? something like that), but over the years it has been less and less effective. So they are changing it next year so that everybody has to take finals again. But for one last time, MadMax gets to skip exams. Summer is about to begin.

2. Reading Report: Me Before You by JoJo Moyes. This is one of those books that if you think about it too much, it starts to fall apart. But if you just read it and let it be, loved it. Louisa Clark loses her beloved job at a cafe when it closes and must find something else. When she reluctantly takes a job as caregiver to a quadriplegic, she never expects it to change her life. But it does.

3. Our chickens got sick. We have northern fowl mites, apparently. I feel terrible, because we let it get really bad before we realized what was happening. We've done the initial treatment and they are already much better, but we aren't getting many eggs. I might have to buy a dozen eggs, for the first time in two years.

4. I caved into the pressure. I'm trying gluten-free for one week. I'm embarrassed to even admit it, because it seems like such a food fad, one of those things everybody is doing this year and by next year we will have moved on to something else. But a) I do know some people (including one of my sisters) for whom it has solved a myriad of health problems, and b) this way when yet another person tells me I should try being gluten-free, I will be able to tell them that I DID try it. You can probably tell that I'm not expecting much, but I will let you know.

5. So I don't think I"ve told you we're going to Italy this summer. Dean's dad has rented a villa in Tuscany for July and August, and how in the world were we going to resist that? We'll be there for five days, with stops in Florence, Cinque Terre, Rome, and Dublin smooshed on to either end for two weeks total. (yes, I did say Dublin. It's a long story.) I promise pictures on our return, but not too many of them. Any ideas for a theme? I did doors last time. Maybe I'll just do doors again, because those were some really cool pictures.

6. Amazon vs. Hachette. Clearly I don't know the full story here. Probably none of us do. You can't paint Hachette as the little guy being crushed by the giant, because Hachette is huge publishing firm that has done its own share of crushing. And also, I'm not giving up Amazon. I live in a small town in Northwestern Montana. Without Amazon, I would be.... oh, there are so many things I love about Amazon, and some of them have nothing to do with buying things. I read reviews there all the time, even when I end up buying somewhere else. You have to take the reviews with a grain of salt, of course, because you never know when a review might be a plant, but still I can generally figure out what I want to know.

But in this instance Amazon is wrong. Just sayin. For the time being, I'm shopping elsewhere. And for the love of Mike, why can't we get Stephen Colbert and Sherman Alexie together more often? (see video below, if I embedded the code correctly.) If you can swing it in your book budget, go to Powell's website and buy California. (watch the video to understand why.) I adore Powell's anyway. If I lived in Portland, I would be there every day.

The Colbert Report
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7. We have been blessed with the most beautiful spring I can remember. It took a long time to get here, but it has been gorgeous. I'm saying that now, because June is often the rainiest month of the year and and we're just getting started on June. I'm getting off to enjoy it while I can. Hugs to everybody and have a great weekend.

more odds and ends, because it's an odds and ends kind of week

1. I've been a little discouraged about the number of headaches I'm still having even though I went through all the misery of getting off caffeine. But it's the end of the month tomorrow, and I still have six maxalt left. The drugs don't lie, I guess. My prescription is for twelve every month, and last fall I had to get extra a couple of times. So having six left at the end of the month means I'm not having as many as I used to, even if it doesn't seem like it. I always get migraines when I travel, and I've traveled quite a bit recently, so maybe that's why I've seemed headache-y recently. Whatever. I was happy and surprised when I went up to get one this morning and there were still six of them. (okay, now five.)

2. I haven't told you about one of my travels yet. A couple of weeks ago I met my mom, my sisters, and Cheery-o near Chicago so we could go to the memorial service of the beloved family friend (and Debbie's dad) I told you about in November. It was a great trip--I was able to catch up with my family, visit with Debbie, meet some new people, and celebrate a life well lived (although he is sadly missed). But it also brought back boatloads of memories, both from my childhood --we moved there when I was two and moved to Dallas the summer I turned seven--and also from my two years of college there. I had one of those classic throwback experiences: we drove the route that I used to walk every day from our house to the elementary school. It seemed like miles when I was a kindergartener, but it is only about three blocks. Ha.

3. Reading Report: I haven't done one of these in a long time. But besides the Jane Austens and the Jim Palmer book I already told you about, in the past two months I've read: Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson, Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen, A Letter of Mary and A Darker Place by Laurie R. King. All recommended but none of them exactly knock-your-socks off. Then, to my surprise, I loved Elizabeth Gilbert's book on marriage, Committed. I wasn't a fan of Eat Pray Love, and Committed didn't get very good reviews, so I didn't see any reason to bother. But a friend recommended it recently, and it was available on ebook from our library, so I decided to try it. I was fascinated. Good mix of personal anecdote and research into the history and sociology of marriage. It's not anything like EPL, and maybe that's why I liked it. Also I read Tenth of December by George Saunders, which is getting all kinds of kudos as the best short story collection ever. He is a jaw-droppingly, stunningly good writer, but the stories are not easy reads. One of them was so horrifying ("Semplica Girl Diaries") that I almost put the book down. But there are a couple that save it from being too sharp, too cutting, so I'm glad I persevered. Recommended with reservations. :-)

4. As will surprise no one, it is easy for me to overdose on church. Really, sadly easy. I hit that point--with a vengeance-- last week. Poor Dean got an earful (okay, maybe two or three) about my frustration with long meetings, always having to be there, and etc. etc. Church is useful to my spiritual life, but it isn't the center of it, and I don't want it to be. Plus I am not particularly mature about being bored. But I knew when I signed up to be a deacon that I was signing on for three years of being more involved than I generally care to be, so I have little excuse. Fortunately last night I attended a "leadership training" session that restored my patience. We have a great church. But even so, I am glad that summer is coming, which means that choir and session both end for a few months and we can skip church for weeks at a time.

5. Starting just this week, I can look out the window and see green. There's still snow on the mountains, but our grass is (mostly) green, the shrubs are budding out, and the people across from us who actually have a real lawn have real, emerald green I can look at (we just have a big field). There comes a point every year where I start to believe that spring will never come, so this is a relief.

And that's all I can think of. Tomorrow is May, happy May Day to one and all. You will note that I remembered to add labels before I posted this one. Go, me.

Monday, Monday. Can't trust that day.

Unlike the rest of the country, we have had pretty much absolutely normal weather. For us, for this time of year. Which isn't to say it's been pleasant, but just that we always have crazy winter weather. Generally we have highs in the upper-20s to low-30s, with overnight lows into the teens. But then there will be storms and cold snaps and also chinook winds which warm things up into the 40s or even 50s and make you think spring is coming even in mid-January. So yeah. Around here, business as usual. But I know the rest of you aren't used to it, and I hope you're thawing out by now.

This past weekend was the designated time for finally getting all the way off caffeine. Having done both the cold turkey method and the weaning off method now, I can tell you for sure that it's better to wean off. The time I went cold turkey--four? five? years ago--was absolutely miserable for about ten days. Then it was moderately miserable for another couple of weeks. It wasn't until I'd been off for several months that I realized that I felt better and that it had been worth it.

This time has been entirely easier. I haven't had any caffeine since Thursday. Friday, I felt a little bit off, but not that bad. Saturday was pretty miserable, but by Sunday I was already better, and today I'm to the point that took three weeks that last time. So, if you have to do it, wean down first. With a couple of minor exceptions, I haven't had more than 40 mg of caffeine in any one day for a couple of months. As a side benefit, in the process of weaning down, I quit drinking Diet Dr. Pepper. I've had maybe three in the last two months. I'm so healthy I stun myself. ha.

Now we just have to see if all this makes a long-term difference in the number of headaches I'm having. It did last time, so I am optimistic.

Karen, intrepid commenter and blogger who doesn't blog enough, recommended Laurie R. King to me several years ago, but I never quite got around to reading them. King has two series going, one series of contemporary mysteries set in the Bay area, and one historical that is about Sherlock Holmes many years after the end of his Arthur Conan Doyle adventures and his new sidekick, Mary Russell. Mary is forty years his junior but it is still the first time he has met his intellectual match (well, I suppose other than Moriarty or Irene Adler).

So I've read the first of the Bay area series, and the first two of the Mary Russell series (because really, they are more about Mary than about Holmes). Definite thumbs up. I could quibble about certain things, but King's writing style is.... mesmerizing. Her books are very difficult to put down once you get into them--although two of the three I've read started slowly and took awhile to hook me in.  I had good excuses for sitting and reading the last couple of weeks, but time's up. My next class starts in three weeks and I have to get to work on it, plus I have a couple of other projects I've been putting off. So, back to work for me.

odds and ends, because it's too cold to do anything else

Brrrr. Like most of the west and middle of the country, it is freezing around here. High of 7 today, with lows down to about -3 or -4--but that's way better than poor PellMel in Bozeman, who woke up to -20 this morning. Great day to sit in front of the fire with a book, and lucky me, because I had that surgery on Tuesday so I have an excuse to do it! I'm willing to put up with moderate pain for that, especially since I am high on vicodin. Wheeeee!

The chickens get the worst of it around our house, poor things. We shut the door into the henhouse so it keeps the heat from the heat lamp in, but it's still barely above freezing in there. I haven't been down to check on them yet today. The water inside the henhouse was frozen solid yesterday, so I tried a different arrangement today, we'll see how it works.

I think I told you at some point last month that I'd run across some interesting books that had restored my faith in reading. They are mainly non-fiction, which is surprising, because I'm not much of a non-fiction reader. I enjoy learning new things, but I almost always feel when I pick up a non-fiction book that I've learned most of what they have to say by the end of the first couple of chapters, and the rest is just droning on and on and on. But I've run into several that have captivated me recently. I'm hesitant to give recommendations because lord knows what interests me at any one moment may not interest anyone else, but here are two.

Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende. I picked this one up on a whim at Costco because the cover caught my eye. Lende lives in Haines, Alaska, where she writes the obituary column for the local paper. But it's such a small town that her obituaries are more like mini-portraits than the usual canned items. One day while riding her bike into town, she is run over by a truck (driven by a guy she knows). The skeleton of this book is the story of the accident and her recovery, but it is fleshed out by endless stories of the people in her life. I really enjoyed it, and it made me want to visit Alaska (but not live there! it's cold enough here!).

Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer. The subtitle is "Shedding Religion to find God (and the unlikely people who help you)." I was fascinated by this book. I've been reading it off and on for the past couple of months. Sometimes nodding my head in vigorous agreement, sometimes arguing with him, occasionally disappointed, but usually moved and inspired. He's a former pastor of one of those evangelical mega-churches whose career ended when he and his first wife divorced (well, that career ended, he moves on to several others). He still occasionally comes across with that slick smugness that so many evangelical pastors have, but mostly you can tell that he was broken wide open by the experience. If you enjoy thinking out-of-the-box about Christianity, I recommend this highly, even though I disagreed with him on a few points (for example, although he questions his former judgmental attitude toward gays, he never quite makes it to acceptance). I'll be thinking about it for awhile. But since some of his revelations (waitresses can have spiritual insights! gays can honestly seek after God!) are pretty obvious to those who aren't evangelical (or former evangelical, like me), it won't appeal to everyone.

I'm also reading The Kid Who Climbed Everest by Bear Grylls, recommended by MadMax. Since I read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, I wasn't sure why I would want to read another Everest book, but I'm really enjoying it. It's much more personal than Krakauer's version, so you get a better feel for what it is like to really be there doing such a crazy thing. Or at least, I think you get a better feel--since I've never been there or done any serious climbing, there's no way to really know.

That's enough for today. I will quit complaining about the cold and sign off. Darn it, I have to go sit and read a book. It's crucial for my recovery.

Riffday: Another one already?

1. Thanks for your patience with my whiney day on Friday, but I have to say there were more comments on that post than on anything in a long time, so maybe I should whine more often.

2. There was a brief discussion about migraine remedies in the comments of that post, so I will update you on what I've tried.  Hmmm. that could get fairly long. what I've tried in the past week, let's put it that way.  Just a couple of weeks ago I read about another blogger's near-miraculous success with peppermint oil.  I've heard of lavender (which gives me a headache), but not peppermint oil.  So I tried it, and I give it a guarded thumbs-up.  For low-level headaches, it works as well as advil.  It didn't do anything for the major one I had on Tuesday.  Eva mentioned ginger, which was also new to me. I have ginger tea here at the house but I haven't used it as a headache remedy.  It worked better than the peppermint oil, but still not as well as Maxalt--which is the prescription drug I've used for years now.  But Maxalt is expensive and has side effects and I start running out of it when I have a long run of headaches, so overall I'm happy to know about both of these. All remedies are individual in how well they work, but these are definitely worth a try if you are also a headache sufferer.

3. We've never had a dog that likes to ride in the car before.  Zeke, the border collie who was our first child, hated to ride in the car and would drool all over the place (which our vet said was a sign of carsickness).  Jazz is happy to go in the car but she gets so obnoxiously excited that I can't stand to take her anywhere.  She spends the whole trip with her head hanging over the seat, panting.  But Sadie just wants to go.  If I pick up my keys, she heads straight for the back seat, and she settles right down and goes to sleep.  It's kind of nice to have company on my interminable rounds of errands.  I've joined the legions of Montanans who drive around with their dog(s) in the car.

4.  April Reading Report:  Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen (fun book, perfect vacation read).  If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell (interesting insider look at the movie industry).  Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (fabulous, wonderful, loved it--but it's Gaiman so no surprise there).  Women Food and God by Geneen Roth (thought provoking. It seemed to me to be more about life in general and applicable to men as well, unlike the title sounds).  All of them good and well worth reading, but none of them seemed worth writing out a full review.  Or maybe I'm just not in the mood this month.  Some thoughts inspired by the Geneen Roth book may show up later.

5. I think we should all read Great Gatsby before the movie comes out.  It's not that long (less than 200 pages) and it's not a terribly difficult read.  It doesn't have a happy ending, but the writing is beautiful.  I might even vote for it for the Great American Novel, or at least one of them--I suppose we could create subcategories: "Greatest U.S. Novel about the Myth of the Self-Made Man."

6.  Brag On My Children Time:  MadMax broke the freshman record for discus throw at a meet on Saturday--for his high school and possibly for the state.  And PellMel got into medical school--it happened about a month ago but I don't think I ever told you. So she will be busy for the Next Eight Years.  My children totally rock.

7.  I sang tenor in choir this week!  There were four altos but only two tenors, so I moved up to the top row with the guys.  It was fun.

Reading Report: March 2013

I know reading reports bore some of you-- my pageviews always go way down.  So here is the non-book news for those of you who skip this one:  We're headed out for spring break tomorrow (which is why this is going up before the end of the month), so have a great week without me.  We're driving to Southern Utah and hiking around the rocks.  If you think I sound somewhat less than enthused, you're right. I'm trying to keep an open mind. I'll take pictures and let you know how it goes.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  Loved, loved, loved this book.  Seriously:  read it.  It's a heartbreaker-- two hyper-intelligent, snarky teens with cancer find each other and slowly, believably fall in love.  But they have cancer.  You know it's not going to end well.  Even though it has some sad moments, it's funny and clever and still manages to be joyously life-affirming.  Beautifully done, and I wish I could carry Hazel and Augustus around in my pocket.   

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.  If you're interested in computers and technology (and I am), this is an interesting book.  San Francisco is overrun with DHS (Dept of Homeland Security) agents after terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge.  The solution ends up being worse than the problem--in the name of "protecting" the U.S. from terrorism, they end up treating everyone like terrorists.  San Francisco turns into a police state.  Doctorow likes to teach (and preach), so it often reads more like a textbook on internet security, cryptography, first amendment rights, and the history of protest movements than a novel.  There is definitely a story--there are teenage protagonists who bring down the bad guys.  And it's clever enough that you don't mind the lectures.  Much.  But I did start to skim after awhile, I'll confess--partly because I've read a fair amount about this topic in non-fiction so I didn't feel like I needed the info-dump.

The rest of this post is about The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon.  You've been warned.  For some reason his writing stirs up my brain, even when it's a quasi-detective novel.

I love Chabon. I feel a great deal of affinity for his writing, even though I'm pretty sure from various things I've read about him and his wife that I wouldn't care for him if I were to meet him in person.  At least part of that affinity is because he has a religion (Judaism) that grounds him and helps define who he is, yet he is very willing to reinterpret it, topple it over, turn it inside out, and otherwise chew on it to find out how it works.  He has no patience with sacred cows, but you wouldn't write an entire novel about a fictional Jewish community, a novel that's so steeped in Jewishness that as a non-Jewish reader, it's occasionally difficult to figure out what's happening, unless you found profound inspiration in the religion of your youth.

Yiddish Policeman’s Union (YPU) is a murder mystery, there’s no doubt about that—a man calling himself Emanual Lasker has been murdered by a gunshot through the back of his head, and the mystery of who did it and why is unraveled by two police detectives, Meyer Landsman and Berko Shmetz. If you want to just find out who murdered Emanual Lasker, you can do that, but your task will be made more difficult because YPU is also an alternative history, a newish sub-genre of historical fiction.  All historical fiction takes a particular period of time and imagines a story within those confines, but alternative history takes a particular moment in history, changes it, and then imagines how history would have unfolded differently.  What if the South won the Civil War?  What if the Germans won World War II?
 
In YPU, Chabon imagines what would have happened if the Jews had been forcibly expelled from Jerusalem in 1948, and two or three million of them had ended up in Sitka, Alaska--an idea that was apparently actually proposed by FDR just before WWII.  If you’re like me, with a sort of vague understanding of major historical events compounded by a sieve-like brain incapable of retaining details, topped off with an obsessive need to understand what you’re reading about, it can nearly drive you to distraction to read alternative history. I keep getting tripped up by the need to know what parts of the story are "real" and what parts are made up.

But I know enough history to know that there is no Jewish colony in Alaska and in that, at least, we are firmly in the realm of Chabon’s imagination.  Then he starts naming streets and parks after famous Jews (real? made-up?) and he creates a history that has happened since 1948 that contains some real people and some not.  The whole thing must be full of insider jokes, sly humorous references to Jewish history and culture that I’m not getting, and it irritates me.

But that's pretty minor once you get past the first 60 pages or so.  Once the story really gets underway, it's a good one.  Landsman has been slowly fading away since his divorce, carried along by Shmetz, his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish cousin.  The Jewish colony has always been temporary, and it is only a matter of a few months until they will lose their homes again.  The powers that be bring in a new supervisor to make sure all their open cases get cleaned up before Sitka gets handed back over to the state of Alaska, and the new supervisor is Landsman's ex-wife.  And then the murdered man turns out to be the son of a prominent Orthodox Jew.  There's plenty of stuff to think about:  marriage, divorce, abortion, faith and belief, home and homelessness, miracles and crimes.

Chabon is a verbal genius.  It’s his gift and also his downfall.  He plays with words like they are bright shiny objects he can juggle, sending them spinning into the air until their movement blurs their outlines into what appears to be a web of substance, of meaning (that tricky word that we are no longer allowed to use).  YPU is often jaw-droppingly beautiful writing.  But on the downside, it often feels like he is trying too hard.  He probably knows he’s a virtuoso with language, so he seems to feel the need to stuff every paragraph with startling images, surprising metaphors.

As a reader, it’s exhausting.  Eventually, after all the endless, complicated setup that an alternative history requires, you just want to read.  You don’t want to get tripped up by verbal gymnastics that may be brilliant, but slow down the story.  You don’t want to stop in the middle of a chase scene (where Landsman is running through the woods practically naked being chased by bad men in an ATV) to marvel at the “scrotal” pair of propane tanks that have absolutely no bearing on anything.  They’re just there so that Chabon can remind us that he is a genius at riffing on words.  Or at least that’s how it feels.  I started to resent it after awhile.  Just knock off the verbal pyrotechnics and tell the damn story, I wanted to yell at him.

And the ending.  I’m sure if I’d gone back and re-read all the cryptic conversations that Landsman has in the last 50 pages, I would have been able to figure it out.  But by that point, I just didn’t care enough to go back and ferret out all the details.  I got the main parts of it.  They solved the crime in front of them.  But which deal was the one they couldn’t believe they made?  Was it the one with Litvak? Or Cashdollar? Or Mrs. Shpelman? Did they make one with Uncle Hertz?
 
So, yeah, the end was too complicated, and I was too ready to be done with the book to bother with figuring it out.   But, unlike That Book from last month that I ended up wishing I hadn’t read, even though this isn't Chabon’s best work and I thought the ending was dumb (because it made me feel dumb), I’m still glad I read this one.  There are several parts of it that moved me--the relationship between Landsman and his ex-wife, the dead man's history--and that made me think.  And when I wasn't annoyed with the verbal gymnastics, I was in awe at the writing.  Not to mention that there are several laugh-out-loud moments.  Can’t ask for more than that from a detective novel.  Recommended, with reservations-- if you like Chabon (but if you do, you’ve probably already read it), or if you enjoy alternate histories.



I just found out he has a new one that came out a few months ago.  And I still haven't read Kavalier and Clay.  When I find a good author, I spread the books out so I can look forward to them. :-)

Reading Report: February 2013

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is part novel, part short story collection, part memoir, part fiction writing manual, and altogether amazing.  You've probably already read it, it was published in 1990 and I've had it in my TBR pile for a long time.  But I just finally got around to it when I finished school.  The only problem is that once you've read it, you see it everywhere, so even though it's new to me, it already feels like a cliché.

It's about O'Brien's experience in Vietnam, and at times it is really hard to read.  (But, oddly, the only time I wanted to put the book down because it was too horrible to read was not a war part.)  Normally I don't like war books. I think because usually in a book about war, I feel like the author is trying to convince me how horrible war is, which I already know. That sale has already been made, so why would I want to keep listening to the sales pitch?

But O'Brien's purpose is broader than that.  Or maybe narrower.  He is just describing his experience, which includes the horror of war, but it also includes how it felt to be drafted, and how he fell in love in fourth grade, and even at one point an entire chapter about how he wrote the previous chapter. By including stories about grade school and PTSD and taking his daughter back to Vietnam twenty years after the war was over, he both dampens and intensifies the effect of the chapters that are about the war. 

You get it--like a ton of bricks, you get how awful it was to be there at certain moments--but you also get far more than that.  It would be an interesting book to discuss with a bunch of creative writers, because at times it doesn't quite hang together as a piece of writing.  Some of the chapters are so strong as short stories that they overwhelm the structure of the book, even though it is clear that he intended to shape them into something more than just a collection of stories.  But on the other hand, part of the effect he achieves is because he throws all these disparate elements together and lets them rub up against each other.  From any perspective, though-- the writing, the experience, the history-- it's fascinating.  Highly recommended.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  Sick, disturbing, twisted.  Amy Dunne disappears on the morning of her fifth anniversary, and her husband Nick is the most likely suspect.  You think you know what's going on for the first two hundred pages or so--even though I could imagine two different ways it might play out, I was pretty sure one of them was right.  Then one of them became obviously true, and from there you think it's going to be just a game of cat and mouse, to see if the police will find out the truth in time to resolve things at the end.  But there's one more twist right at the end, and the novel that I kept reading in spite of being totally creeped out, in spite of having nightmares, kept reading because I was sure that even if it wasn't a happy ending, at least things would be resolved at the end, finally just turned into a more twisted, more creepy, more sickening unresolved horror.  It's brilliant, there's no doubt about that.  And if you like creepy, horrifying books, then by all means run right out and get it.  But it's the first book I think I've ever read that I wish I hadn't. 

And that's all for this month.  If that summary of Gone Girl makes you just curious enough to think you might want to read it, let me know and I will give enough plot details so you can satisfy your curiosity without having to read the damn thing.  I was going to start having a "genre fiction of the month" and a "non-fiction of the month" section,  but I didn't finish reading either one by the time March rolled around, so maybe I'll do it next month. 

Reading Report: Jan 2013

Shakespeare's Lady by Alexa Schnee.  I'm not the first person to gripe that historical romances are often just an excuse to put modern people in fancy clothes and old-fashioned social situations.  But Shakespeare's Lady is not anything like a typical historical romance, and it wasn't intended to be.  Alexa has done her homework.  She's imagined--in rich detail-- the life of Emilia Bassano, one of the ladies in Queen Elizabeth I's court who is often mentioned as the most likely candidate for the unnamed Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets.  Emilia is truly a woman of her time-- almost completely powerless to make her own choices, subject to the whims of her queen, the lover to whom the queen first consigns her, and eventually, her husband.  But she takes William Shakespeare as her lover, and they are both changed by their affair.  The affair is imagined--there is no proof that it happened--but Alexa makes it believable.

This review is long overdue.  Alex is the daughter of a dear friend of mine, and you may have noticed that she occasionally comments here as alexinksit (the link is to her blog).  I was able to watch from the sidelines as Alex wrote the book, won an award for it, and got it published.  I bought a copy of it as soon as it came out, of course, but I didn't have time to finish reading it until this week.  Highly recommended.  There is no happily-ever-after, but you'll feel as if you've been transported right back to the sixteenth century.  It's all the more amazing since she wrote it when she was seventeen.

The Black Tower by P. D. James.  I love P. D. James.  Her mysteries aren't always the most intricately plotted, and by 2013 standards, the police procedural aspect is almost ludicrously behind the times (this one was published in 1975).  But her protagonist, Adam Dalgleish, a detective at Scotland Yard, is a complexly interesting man, and P. D. James writes like a dream.  Contemplating a map drawn by an elderly friend, James writes,

The map could be guaranteed to confuse anyone accustomed to depend on the orhodox publications of the National Survey rather than on early seventeen-century charts.  The wavy lines presumably represented the sea. Dalgleish felt the omission of a spouting whale.

Later, she describes another character:

Anstey's smile, when it came, was as sweet as ever but his eyes were preoccupied and his enquiries over his guest's comforts were perfunctory.  Dalgliesh sensed that he wouldn't be sorry to see him go.  Anstey might see himself in the role of a welcoming medieval abbot, always ready with the bread and ale, but what he really craved were the gratifications of hospitality without the inconvenience of a guest.

This one is not her best mystery, but it is still plenty rewarding as an installment in the story of Adam Dalgleish.  The Black Tower opens with Dalgleish in the hospital.  He has been diagnosed with a deadly illness and told he has very little time to live.  Then oops! they find out they were mistaken, and he is almost literally brought back from the dead.  Dalgleish, a poet as well as a police detective, has some lovely meditative thoughts on returning to life after death, while in the midst of dealing with murder.  I'm slowly making my way through James's work--this is the fourth one of hers I've read-- and so far, they have all been excellent.

In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming.  This is the first book in a series about a woman Anglican priest named Claire Fergusson and the chief of police in her small town, Russ Van Alstyne.  On a cold December night, Claire finds a baby someone has left on the steps of the church.  A week later, out on patrol with Russ to get a better handle on what's going on in their town, Claire finds the body of a young woman who has recently given birth.  Unraveling the mystery behind the birth and death leads to another murder and nearly to Claire's death as well.  It's a little clumsy, but I'm happy to be forgiving for a first novel.  It's definitely good enough that I looked for (and found!) the next one in the series at our library this week.

I seem to be on a mystery kick at the moment.  I don't read them all the time, but sometimes they're exactly what I want to read.

I also read the Gallaghers of Ardmore trilogy by Nora Roberts.  So shoot me.  I just wanted something mindless when I was done with school.  I only started reading Roberts a couple of years ago, and she's so prolific that whenever I'm in the mood for one of hers, there's always another one to read.  If you like Roberts, these three (Jewels of the Sun, Tears of the Moon, and Heart of the Sea) are a good example of her work, but if you don't, they definitely would not convert you.  They're set in Ireland, about three siblings who run the family pub.  In the first one (and best of the three), oldest brother Aidan Gallagher falls in love with Jude, an American who is visiting the land of her ancestors as she recovers from a humiliating divorce.  In the second (and least successful), Brenna O'Toole has to get the attention of the middle Gallagher sibling, Shawn, who has been a brother figure to her since they were in diapers.  In the final one, Darcy Gallagher's incredible voice is discovered by a wealthy American who is building a concert hall in Ardmore.  Roberts has an annoying way of writing dialogue that is all the more annoying because it appears in every single one of her books.  But some of her books are still entertaining, and these are better than average--but not as good as Northern Lights, which I read right before Christmas, and is probably the best one of hers I've read. 

YALit: the rest of the semester

So I reviewed the first half of the semester of Young Adult Literature in this post and this one.  Here are the rest of them.  I almost scheduled this to post next week after Christmas, then thought I might as well go ahead and post it now.  We survived the end of the world, after all.

Monster by Walter Dean Myers.  Steve Harmon gets involved in a convenience store robbery that ends up in a shooting (not by him).  When the story opens, Steve has been denied bail and is in jail waiting for his trial.  He's seventeen, but he's in an adult prison.  Our class was divided about whether or not he knew what was happening when the robbery began--it's not exactly clear.  So it's hard to know if he's just a completely innocent bystander getting the classic raw deal, or if he made a stupid mistake and will be a wiser man after the experience (I thought the latter).  It's very absorbing, but I have to tell you, I hated it.  I hate reading about kids in prison.  Must be the Mom thing. It makes me sick to my stomach. The thing that makes Monster so fascinating and gets it a partial reprieve is that it is written as a screenplay.  Steven is a budding film director, and he writes the events of his life as if they are a film.  It's fascinating what he is able to do with point-of-view and juxtaposing different events.  Recommended if you're not a mom.

Gifts by Ursula LeGuin.  LeGuin and I go way back.  I read the Earthsea Trilogy when I was in sixth or seventh grade, and then in high school I read the Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.  All of which were excellent, and highly recommended.  This one, not so much.  For one thing, it takes a very long time to get started.  If I hadn't been required to read it for class, I would have given up after about 15-20 pages--it didn't get really interesting until somewhere around p. 75.  

Orrec and Gry are childhood friends who live in the typical pre-industrial psuedo-medieval world of all fantasy novels.  Their families have hereditary gifts that are sometimes passed to their children, sometimes not.  Orrec is supposed to get the gift of destruction, but it is so long in coming that by the time he thinks he receives it, he is old enough to know he doesn't want it.  Gry has the gift of being able to influence animals, which her mother uses to great effect by helping the local clans to hunt-- in their subsistence culture, an important role.  But Gry is so sensitive that she refuses to help anyone hunt down an animal.  Both of them face interesting challenges as they try to figure out their gifts and how to use them, and the relationship between Orrec and his father is fascinating.  But LeGuin really disappointed me by not seeming to recognize an obvious use for the contrary-side of Orrec's gift, which I can't say anything more about without major spoilers.  If you like fantasy and you like YA lit, this is definitely worth reading, but otherwise, probably not.

ShipBreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi - Another fascinating one.  This one is set in a post-global-warming-meltdown world.  Nailer, the main character, lives with his alcoholic, abusive father on a beach where the local economy is run by gangs who make their living by stripping resources from the foundered oil tankers resting off-shore.  After a huge storm, Nailer and a friend come across a fully-loaded yacht that has nearly infinite possibilities for salvage-- one room has enough stuff in it to keep them fed for years.

The only problem is that there is a young woman, barely alive, in one of the staterooms.  Do they let her live?  (spoiler: yes, they do.) and then what do they do with her?  This is a fascinating study of what happens to human beings when the normal societal pressures to act ethically have fallen apart.  Nailer is a really interesting protagonist--Bacigalupi doesn't take the easy answers.  So in spite of my antipathy toward another post-apocalyptic novel, I have to say this one is worth reading.  There is a sequel, but from the reviews I've read of it, it doesn't sound nearly as good.

Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin.  This is one weird book.  I mean that in the nicest possible way.  It's about a young woman who spends four (five?) days out of every month as a boy.  I enjoyed the thought-experiment aspect of it, but I didn't think it was particularly thoughtfully done.  McLaughlin went for the easy ending (and the ending that could be stretched out into a series, which sure enough, has happened) rather than the thoughtful ending.  How much truly mind-bending stuff about gender could you do with a plot like this?

But she seems content to let the opportunity go by and just go for humor and a love triangle (quadrangle? do you count the four days per month as a separate person?).  I thought of a better ending, and one of my classmates thought up a much better ending.  If we can do it, why couldn't she?  Interesting and entertaining, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.  And by the way, you could never get away with teaching this book in the classroom in our conservative town.  Even if it weren't for all the gender stuff, there is an actual sex scene toward the end (not particularly detailed, but still).  Not happening.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang.  American Born Chinese is a graphic novel.  I've read a couple of others (Bone, Persepolis, Contract with God), and I enjoy them.  But I'm not a particularly visual person, so much of the drawing is lost on me.  I'm too busy reading the words to look at the pictures.  Some of my classmates were more attuned to the visual aspects of this book, and they were able to point out some great stuff that you don't get if you're not looking.

Anyway.  It's three inter-twining stories:  the Monkey King of Chinese legend, who is kicked out of heaven because he's not wearing shoes and wants some revenge; Jin Wang, a young Chinese boy who deals with what unfortunately is probably typical treatment at a school where he is the only Asian American; and Danny, a Caucasian kid who has a crazy Chinese cousin who comes to visit just often enough to drive him crazy.  The stories seem completely unrelated until about two-thirds of the way through, when suddenly the collide in a way that is surprising and satisfying.  Really enjoyed this one, although I suspect it would be treated with suspicion by someone who is native Chinese; it's a pretty thoroughly westernized story.

Into the Wild- by Jon Krakauer.  This one will get its own post in a week or two.  It's a non-fiction story about Chris McCandless, who decides to put his ideals in action by spending a summer living off the land in Alaska and dies in the process.  It's not quite the story I was expecting.  I read the original article Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine way back when (he died in 1992), and I was fascinated then.  This version, which is both more complete and fixes a misconception written into the earlier article, is even more interesting.  One of the things that interested me the most was the discussion in our classroom.  There were three or four students who had ideals similar to McCandless, several more complete cynics, and then the professor and me-- who considered ourselves to be older and wiser, but maybe we're just older and more cynical.  Highly recommended, and like I said, another post is coming, although it will be more about idealism and compromise than about the book.

There you have it.  It was a great class, one of my favorites out of my two and a half years of graduate school.

Reading Report: Looking for Alaska, plus other long-winded thoughts

If anything, this week is worse than last, because I went to Texas to visit my mom for the holiday weekend (no class on Monday).  The tickets were purchased months ago when I thought my thesis would be practically finished by now-- my original plan (made at the beginning of the semester) was to send it off to my readers on November 1st.  But I couldn't change the tickets, and it was a good trip, I'm glad I went. 

Now I have a paper due tomorrow, and I absolutely must send my thesis to my readers by Friday-- my advisor tells me I might be able to get away with sending it Monday, but it is generally the accepted practice to give your readers two weeks to read and comment, and I have to have my thesis turned into the graduate school a week before my defense. The defense is December 10, meaning I must have it turned in by December 3, two weeks before December 3rd is November 19th (next Monday), and if I'm going to have any time at all to edit it based on their comments, that means sending it to them this Friday.

SO WHY THE HELL AM I SITTING HERE TYPING A BLOG POST?  And that is an excellent question, but I'm still taking the YALit class, and I just finished Looking for Alaska, and I wanted to write something out while it's fresh in my mind.  Which takes a bit of backing up.

Last fall, when I was doing the independent study on Modernist poetry, I wrote my final paper on the first third of H.D.'s (Hilda Doolittle's) long poem cycle, Trilogy, which is called The Walls Do Not Fall.  She wrote it in England during World War II when it must have seemed that the world was ending.  It's about being a woman poet, a female visionary, in a world that has no use for visions, femininity, or poems.  The Walls Do Not Fall is about figuring out how to survive in that world--not how to change it (she moves on to that, at least partly, in the second and third sections), but how to manage living in that world as it is.

She has some specific strategies, such as choosing carefully to whom you will give your allegiance--in a hierarchical world, it is important to make sure that you are following the leader(s) you want to follow.  Like Joseph Campbell's image of the ladder on the wall-- you don't want to climb and climb and climb a ladder, only to find out that it was propped against the wrong wall and ends up someplace you didn't really want to go (I'm mixing stuff up here, H.D. doesn't know a dang thing about Joseph Campbell)(and I don't know much, either, other than watching a couple of his TV shows about the archetypal hero. I just heard the ladder example years ago from a therapist).

Anyway.  Back to Looking for Alaska (author-John Green).  It struck me that this is what I love about Young Adult literature.  Literary fiction for adults tends to be about analyzing the world, how awful it is, how there is no hope and and everything is futile.  Unless it is rebuilt from the ground up without sexism and racism and classism, there's nothing to be done but despair. But YALit, at least the good stuff, is often about how to manage living in that world--not how to change it, but how to find hope and joy and beauty in the world as it is.   

Looking for Alaska is that type of book.  Miles Halter decides he has had enough of his boring, nerdy life in public school and goes off to a prep school to find the Great Perhaps.  It has definite overtones of A Separate Peace and The Secret History, but it is its own book.  It's occasionally laugh out loud funny, often heart-rending.  It gets a little hokey at the end, even by my standards with my well-known love for hokey-ness, but still. Even though it discusses a very difficult issue, and the teens involved are thoroughly flawed human beings (aren't we all), it still offers a way of dealing with the world, of continuing on even in the face of some very bad stuff.  Rather than just ending in despair, it offers some tools for continuing to live. 

Good book.  Worth reading. 

Reading Report: Studies in Young Adult Lit, Part 1

Here are brief overviews of the six books we've read so far. 

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.  This one came out the same year I graduated from college (1983), but even though I'd heard about it for years, I'd never actually read it.  It's a series of vignettes told by Esperanza Cordero, a young Hispanic girl who lives in a low-income neighborhood and longs to live somewhere else.  The (chapters? stories? episodes?) are very brief, sometimes just a page, sometimes 3-4 pages, so it reads very quickly.  Cisneros is a genius at discussing big ideas about adolescence, domestic violence, poverty, race, emerging sexuality, dreams and aspirations in such beautifully crafted prose that you don't really notice what she's doing if you're not paying attention. In fact, you could just race through it, skimming through and getting the high points.  But you'd miss much that way-- the vignettes reward careful reading and even re-reading.  Beautifully done.

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff.  Set at some vague time in the not-too-distant future, How I Live Now is the story of 15-year-old Daisy, a New Yorker who is sent to England to live with her aunt and four cousins when she can't get along with her new stepmother.   A war with an unspecified enemy breaks out, and she and her cousins must eventually fend for themselves.  It sounds dreary and depressing, but what makes it work is Daisy's sly, cynical humor and her four endearingly nutty cousins.  I loved this book, even though the ending left a bit to be desired-- many unanswered questions and a back-to-the-land idyll that was described too quickly to be believable.  (Trigger alert:  there is underage consensual cousin-to-cousin incest. I didn't find it offensive given the way it is described, but some people in the class did, so I thought I'd let you know.)

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse.  This is another one that I'd heard about for years but never read (like Mango), and that should be depressing but somehow isn't (like How I Live Now).   It's told in blank verse, but after the first chapter, you don't even notice that-- which I think is a sign of very carefully crafted verse.  It's the story of Billie Jo, a 15-year-old living in Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.  There is dust everywhere-- they set the table with the dishes turned upside down so they won't get coated with dust before they sit down to eat.  Billie Jo's passion is playing the piano, which she must fit in around school and chores.  Then a horrible accident turns her world upside down and threatens her ability to play the piano ever again.  The story of how Billie Jo fights through the trauma to a new acceptance of herself and her life is just plain old beautifully told.  It's like looking at really good black and white photographs-- stark and plain and piercing.  This is another one that merits a second reading.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  Ditto what I said on the last one-- I'd heard about it but never read it, and it should be depressing but isn't.  It's the story of Arnold (Junior) Spirit, a Native American who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation but decides to attend school at a white high school 22 miles away.  He must deal with being the only non-white at his new school at the same time that the entire reservation sees him as a traitor.  Junior wants to be a cartoonist, and the book is filled with drawings of his friends and family. He is also a basketball player, and two key basketball games play a major role in helping him understand the tensions between his two worlds.  Like Daisy in Rosoff's book, Junior is a terrific, funny narrator. 

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.  This one won the Newbery Award in 2010.  It's the story of Miranda, a 12-year-old New Yorker who starts receiving mysterious notes on crumpled bits of paper and must solve the mystery of who sends them and why.  There is also her mother, who has been accepted to appear on the $20,000 Pyramid with Dick Clark, and her best friend Sal, who suddenly doesn't want to be her friend anymore.  Miranda's favorite book is A Wrinkle In Time, and although you don't have to have read that book to understand the story, many of the themes and ideas carry over.  This might be my favorite one so far--like Daisy and Junior, Miranda is an endearing, precocious narrator with an interesting story to tell.

So after five terrific books, there had to be one that wasn't so great, and that one is Hoot by Carl Hiaasen.  It's not a bad book, but the characters are two-dimensional, and the plot is entirely predictable.  By comparison to the others we've read so far, it fell flat-- not a single student in our class liked it.  It's the story of Roy Eberhardt, who has recently moved to Florida and must deal with all the typical new kid issues:  bullies, who to sit with at lunch, making new friends, learning his way around town.  He soon becomes involved in a plan to stop the construction of a national chain restaurant on a lot that is home to a group of endangered burrowing owls.  The morals espoused are so convoluted that it's difficult to make your way through them, and yet it is clearly moralistic in tone-- this a Book About An Issue.  It might be a fun read for fourth or fifth graders, but otherwise, not recommended.

There you go.  I'll post another one at the end of the semester.

book reviews (again)

I've received two e-mails asking me what the name of the author was from yesterday's post, so I came up with An Idea.  I'll explain and you can tell me if I'm dead wrong.

I didn't know book reviews were a touchy subject when I started blogging (I've talked about this before).  It never occurred to me that the actual authors might read my reviews.  Never even crossed my mind.  Authors are godlike creatures living in an alternate plane where they wrestle with their muse and produce books that arrive in bookstores and libraries ready to be devoured, right?  Why in the world would someone like that want to read some ya-hoo's half-baked opinions?  why would they care?  I have no credentials except that I sit here and type.

But then I discovered that many of my favorite authors do, in fact, have quite a strong presence on the web, and are often heavily involved with their fans.  Which is great, terrific, and says wonderful things about them as people, but it makes me want to run from the room.  If I were ever to meet one of my favorites in person, I would be completely and utterly tongue-tied.  Hero worship. And it gets even worse when I make some lame brain comment on one of their blogs and they actually respond. 

And then several of the (non-author) blogs I follow stated that they never review books, because they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, or (perhaps more importantly) injure their own chances of getting a book published by offending someone who has influence in the publishing industry.  That second part is not a problem for me, since my fiction is so bad that I'm in no danger of getting it published, regardless of friends or enemies in the business.  But the first part has caused me considerable thought.  These godlike authors can get their feelings hurt?  new thought for me, although obviously of course they can.

At that point, though, I said I was going to keep doing book reviews since that's one of the main reasons I started blogging: to be able to write about the books I read.   But I seem to be incapable of writing a 100% positive book review-- I've never read a perfect book, and why should I say a book is perfect when it's not?  (See, this is that asperger's-ish thing.  People's feelings are less important to me than other things, like being honest.  This is not something to be proud of.  Especially not when "being honest" means "stating my silly hyper-sensitive opinions about things that I'm really not qualified to comment on." But if you point out to me that I might have hurt someone's feelings, I am horrified.)  And then it became apparent that an author might really have found one of my reviews (not a negative one, thank goodness).  And then I read an interview with a pulitzer-prize winning author in which he said something to the effect of:  a review can be 99% good, but the 1% negative is what you remember, not just the next day but years later.

So I gave up.  You might have noticed that I haven't posted a book review in a long time.  I have no desire whatsoever to be negative to someone who deserves only kudos for going through the insanity that is writing a book, and coming out with something that is good enough to be accepted for publication, and has been through the hands of agents, editors, and beta readers, all of whom are more competent, experienced readers than me. (than I? I just googled to check on that and got conflicting answers.  It looks like technically it should be "than I.")

But here's the thing:  I still have things to say about the books I read.  And sometimes I really want to say them.  So yesterday I wrote the "not a book review" post, thinking I would just say what I wanted to say and leave the identifying information out of it.  And for the record, I don't worry about naming Nora Roberts.  If a woman who has sold millions of books is worried about my penny-ass little opinion (which she can't possibly be), she deserves what she gets. 

But this morning it occurred to me, what if I write the review, and then put the author and title in the comments?  Because I don't think that web crawlers search the comments (web crawlers are the "things" that go through all the sites out there on the web and catalog "things" to appear in google searches--or yahoo or bing or whatever)("things" being the technical term).  so what do you think?

Hmmm, this post was originally going to cover some other stuff, too, but it is long enough and I need to get back to reading James Joyce's biography.  I'm not usually a biography fan, but I have to admit that this one is pretty interesting, especially if you've read some of his stuff.  Turns out almost everything he wrote has its roots in real things from his life.  ("things" again).

And let me know if you know anything about web crawlers and comments.

not a book review

Nora Roberts is a publishing phenomenon like no other.  You can love her or disdain her, but the woman knows how to write a book.  When I first started reading romance novels a couple of years ago, I avoided her entirely because ...well.... Nora Roberts.  She's not exactly someone to tell your Modern Poetry professor about.  But I did finally read a few of her novels, and became fascinated.  Once you accept her formula (if you can), she's a genius.  I ended up reading at least a dozen of them, because I was trying to figure out what it is that she does and how she does it.

I still don't know, but damn, the woman almost never makes a mis-step.  Like I said, you can love her or hate her, but she has her finger on the pulse of something that works for millions of readers.  When a friend of mine was dealing with a husband with ALS whose health was rapidly deteriorating, I asked her what I could do to help.  She asked me to send her a box of Nora Roberts.  The escapism was exactly what she needed to get her through.

But I'm borrowing one of Roberts' rare mis-steps to prove a point.  In one of her novels, one of the early trilogies, the hero and heroine have been dancing around each other, the hero ready to be more serious about their relationship, the heroine wanting to keep it casual.  One night when they are with a group of friends and family, he announces peremptorily to the group that she is moving in with him as of that night--the first she's heard about it.  She is infuriated.

They get in the car, you're expecting her to just blast him, but she doesn't say a word.  She is completely silent until they are in his apartment.  It makes absolutely no sense.  Roberts explains it by saying she (the heroine) is too mad to speak, but there is absolutely no reason why this character, who has never had a problem speaking when she was angry before, would suddenly be struck dumb.

Then they get to his apartment, and she starts to rant as he undresses and gets in his enormous jacuzzi tub.  He ends up pulling her in, while she is still entirely clothed.  And then I got it-- Oh.  she had them be silent in the car to set it up so she could have the jacuzzi scene.  It was a complete cop-out, in my opinion.  She wanted the jacuzzi scene, so she had the heroine act in a way that was out of character.  If you're going to refuse to move in, why wait until you're already there in the apartment to state your opinion?  It makes no sense whatsoever.  I was so irritated at that heroine for being such a wimp, because of course then she gives in, without him ever having asked what she wanted, or otherwise having to work out what the next step of their relationship is.  Of course, really the person I was angry with was Roberts, for having her heroine act like such a wuss, all so she could set up the steamy (*smirk*) jacuzzi scene.

Apparently this kind of thing doesn't bother most readers.  I just finished a new book, by someone who used to be one of my favorite authors, that is filled with moments like this-- smaller and less blatant, but still, you have the feeling that you're just moving from plot point to plot point instead of there being any legitimiate character development.

And it's especially disappointing to me because this woman was one of my most favorite romance novelists.  Her first trilogy is still one of my all-time favorite series, and the four that followed it were even better.  But her most recent series has been all about the formula, all about setting up these steamy or heartwarming or suspenseful or whatever moments, without worrying about the fact that to get there, her characters act in ways that make no sense from scene to scene.  What happened?  Did she change agents, or editors, or publishing houses?  Did she start listening too much to focus groups to find out what readers want?  Is she writing to what sells instead of what makes sense?  Whatever it is, I wish she'd stop, because I used to love her books.

but on the other hand, another author--whose work I enjoy and admire--said in her blog this week that this exact same novel is probably the best romance novel of 2011.  So what do I know.  But even if I'm in the minority, I still don't have to like it.  I'm about to give up on her.  There's one more to come in this series, and I'm sure I'll read it, just to fninsh out the series.  But if it's not considerably better, I'm done.

Reading Report: summer 2011

English Creek- Ivan Doig.  This one is excellent.  It's kind of a guy book-- it's a coming of age story about Jick McCaskill, the son of a forest ranger on a fictional Montana national forest, during one tumultuous summer. Many things happen, some big, but also many small moments, about fishing and haying and the Fourth of July.  It's beautifully written, and it beautifully describes a moment in the history of the American West that has almost completely vanished.  The McCaskill family is well-established; their existence is not the homesteaders' precarious struggle for survival.  But still it is the summer of 1939, and money is scarce.  World War II hasn't started yet.  There are cars and trucks, but mostly Jick and his dad get around on horseback. 

It takes place in a fictional Montana county that, if it were real, would be located a couple of hours from where we live.  The occasional references to real places made it fun to read, and since Doig is a native Montanan, he gets it exactly, precisely, right:  the breathtaking, addictive scenery; the way the clear, cold air can clear your head.  It's not a book for everyone, but if you like horses, or fishing, or have any interest in the history of the West, it's well worth reading.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Dubliners- James Joyce.  This one was "sort of" for school.  It's one of Joyce's earliest works, and it's far easier to read than his later stuff.  There are characters in Ulysses who show up first in Dubliners, so I thought it would be an interesting read.  And it is.  In the same way that your opinion of some modern, out-there, abstract artist is improved when you see her early work and realize that wow, she really can draw, these short stories prove that Joyce is truly a great writer, and not just someone who was out to bamboozle people with the most complicated work he could possibly think up-- which is sometimes what you think when you're slogging through Ulysses and about to throw up your hands in exasperation. 

Back Spin- Harlan Coben. This is the 4th in the Myron Bolitar series, and it's my least favorite so far.  It's about a golf player who finally reaches the top of the leader board at the USOpen again after choking at a similar point many years before.  On the eve of his big moment, his son is kidnapped.  I hadn't read one of this series since last summer, and while it was good enough to make me look forward to moving on to the 5th, it didn't have nearly the impact of the last one I read.  It is just too complicated.  There were not one, not two, but three big reveals at the end.  And the goofy humor that is Myron's trademark seemed overdone and intrusive instead of quirky and endearing.  But it surely kept me absorbed through a couple of days of vacation-- I had to force myself to put it down at one point and rejoin the family because I'd become so immersed in it I was in danger of being disowned.

Making Waves- Tawna Fenske.  I've been a regular reader of Tawna's blog for several months now, mainly because she makes me laugh early in the morning, which is similar in difficulty level to making Atilla the Hun cuddle baby chicks.  So I was excited to read Making Waves, her debut novel, which she's been blogging about for a long time.  It's well worth reading.  The opening scene, where Juli, the heroine, is helping her mother make the most bizarre jello salad you've ever heard of (and I've seen some strange ones), is absolutely hilarious in an understated, brilliant kind of way.  And Juli's first interaction with the hero, Alex, is similarly clever.  I'm in awe that this is a first novel.  It's maybe a little uneven, and the pacing runs in fits and starts, but it is as much fun as I've had reading a book in a long time.  Perfect beach or plane read.  Good job, Tawna!  After reading her blog I feel like we're friends, even though she has no idea who I am.

This has also been my summer of Georgette Heyer.  I think I've read about a dozen of hers now.  Fortunately for me, she's written about 30 novels, so I haven't even come close to reading them all.  Some of them I've liked better than others, but none of them has been awful (although some of the really early ones, like These Old Shades, come close).  My favorites so far are Cotillion, The Nonesuch, Bath Tangle, A Civil Contract, and The Unknown Ajax.  Heyer takes some getting used to if you're used to contemporary romance novels.  She uses exclamation points with abandon.  There is no steamy sex.  And there are rarely big, detailed denouements.  The first few I read I found enormously unsatisfying because the resolution of the relationship between the hero and heroine took place in about two paragraphs on the very last page.  But once you get used to that, you start to see how subtly she sets things up, the little ways that the characters gradually learn to appreciate each other, instead of the sledgehammer effect of so many contemporary novels.  I've become so enamored of Heyer's restraint that it has ruined contemporary novels for me.  I tried reading a few other authors I've enjoyed in the past recently, and they pale by comparison.  Which is why none of them (except Making Waves) are getting reviewed here, not even the one I just finished, which I disliked so intensely that I'm tempted to wax eloquent.  But it's not worth it.

Reading Report-unplugged week

The Help - Kathryn Stockett.  This one and the next have been so widely read and reviewed that I don't know if I have much to add.  It's good.  There were some things about the writing that were interesting to me, making me wish I knew someone I could ask about creating characters.  It seemed at times that they were place holders rather than separate, distinct characters-- as if Stockett had said to herself, OK, now Hilly needs a positive character trait, so I'll show her interacting with her children.  OK, I need an employer-maid pair that really love each other, so I'll put these two in.  But it's not enough to detract from the story, or to take away from the importance of what is said.

For all of us who lived in the South and are more than 40 years old, it brings back memories of things we don't necessarily want to remember.  How wrong it was, but how entirely entrenched it was, and how scary-impossible it felt to change anything.  In case you haven't heard about it, it's the story of a number of white and African American women in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s-- the black women work for the white women, and their relationships are complex and disturbing.  The women in the book are my mother's generation, but I was old enough to see.  We didn't have a maid--we weren't in a high enough income bracket for that--but we did have a series of black women that came in and cleaned for us once a week.  They never did childcare, though, so it was a little different, but maybe not much-- maybe not as much as I wish it was. 

I started the book with a sense of dread, that I would come to love these African American women and horrible things would happen to them.  I wouldn't be able to deny the truth of it or the reality of it, but I didn't want to read about it.  But Stockett did a really nice job of showing the reality of how bad it was without dragging her characters through graphic horrors.  Even though it would have been fair for her to do it.  I'm just glad she didn't.  And I should probably be a little bit ashamed about that. Entirely worth reading, if only to bear witness.

Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen.   It's good.  It's worth reading, especially for the recreation of the world of the traveling circus a hundred years ago.  She did a lot of research, and it shows in many realistic details.  But now I will proceed to gripe about it.

**Spoiler Alert** I'm not giving away anything major but if you are one of the few people who haven't read this, and you like to approach a book with a completely clean slate, skip down to the paragraph that starts with "Savvy."**  Until I took a creative writing class last spring, I had never heard that prologues in novels were a bad thing.  I've read books that had them and I never really noticed them enough to think that they were good or bad, although sometimes I skimmed impatiently through them.  Since that class, I've read several discussions of this on writing blogs, and I sort of see their point.  It can be lazy writing, a way of doing "info-dump" without having to figure out how to fit it seamlessly into the main narrative of the story.

But still prologues didn't bother me as a reader.  Until this book.  This prologue bugged me, not because it was lazy writing, but because it was manipulative writing.  The prologue in this book is foreshadowing-- a description of a murder that will occur at the end of the book.  When you get to it the second time, it is retold in more detail.  In the prologue, Gruen leads you to believe character A committed the murder, when in fact it was character B.  The changed scene is not a huge surprise-- by halfway through the novel, I was thinking to myself, well, it shouldn't be A that kills him, it should be B.  So you sort of know.  But it just struck me as a really odd choice for an author.  Why would you want to purposely mislead your readers?  It felt manipulative and insincere to me, and left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  But I still think it's worth reading.  The recreation of a moment in American history is fascinating.

Savvy - Ingrid Law.  Even though my kids are too old to read kid books anymore, I still enjoy the good ones, and this is one of them.  First, what didn't work (borrowing from Lora).  The voice of the narrator, a 13-year-old girl named Mibs Beaumont, is really irritating.  I think it would have irritated me even when I was 12, but that was so long ago it's hard to say for sure.  She has a sing-songy way of speaking with internal rhymes and double words ("I felt a tad vulnerable being a jig shy of jaybird-naked in a suit that better suited someone older") that would feel more appropriate for a tall tale or a folktale than it does here.

Another part of the problem with the language is that Law makes up words for the plot that are a little cutesy.  In the Beaumont family, everyone develops some sort of special gift that displays itself for the first time on their 13th birthday.  Rocket can create sparks and electrical currents; Fish taps into the weather.  The gift is called a "savvy" and learning to control it is learning to "scumble."  So there are several conversations about scumbling your savvy that make you roll your eyes.  But I know that wouldn't have bothered me when I was 12, because think of all those science fiction books I read that had all kinds of made-up words for fancy science fiction stuff.  So I will just shut up about that.

But language aside, I loved this book. It opens on Mibs' 13th birthday, and the story of figuring out her "savvy" is the story of the book.  Her father has been in a very serious car accident and is in a coma in an ICU in another town.  She wants to get there to be with him and her mom (who is staying with him at the hospital), but also so she can help him with her new gift.  She hijacks a pink bus and gradually gathers a motley collection of friends old and new.  When her gift turns out to be something that she thinks isn't going to do him any good, she has to struggle with disappointment that she didn't get something spectacular like her brothers.

Law has many wise things to say about learning to value yourself when yourself isn't who you want to be.  She isn't subtle about it; the moral of the story practically hits you over the head at times.  But this is kid fiction, and subtlety is not necessary.  and it spoke to me as an almost-50-year-old who still has self-esteem issues at times--and if you're still working on it at this age, sometimes you need a 2x4.  This is a fun, lovely book, and better yet-- it comes with a sequel already in print.  and p.s. there is some not especially overt religious stuff in here-- the characters attend church, and the preacher's kids are two of the main characters--but it never becomes obnoxious.  I hope you know me well enough by now to know that that would be a deal breaker for me.

March/April 2011 reading report

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress- Rhoda Janzen.  First of all, let me say that I love the name Rhoda, even though (or maybe because) I have a vague recollection of a song about a Rhoda from grade school.  OK, that's out of the way.  I enjoyed her book.  It was laugh out loud funny at times.  It's a memoir sort of along the lines of Eat Pray Love, except way snarkier, less spiritual, and she doesn't travel to exotic locales.  (But other than that, it's just the same!)  Her husband leaves her for a man he met on gay.com, and not long after that she is in a very serious car accident.  So she goes back to live with her Mennonite parents to recuperate after many years of not being a Mennonite.  There are obvious parallels with my past, although we weren't Mennonites.  But my dad's family is German and Baptist, and there are plenty of similarities.  Enough that some of her descriptions of her youth made me smile and get a little misty-eyed.  But good lord, is she snarky.  Sometimes it's really funny.  But other times it borders on being cruel.  Oddly, her nearly-cruel moments are reserved not for the Mennonites, but for the sartorially challenged.  God forbid you should have the temerity to wear a fleece vest in her presence.  I'm not sure I would want to be her friend, I don't think I'd measure up.  I own four fleece vests. -smirk-  But I did enjoy her book.  Recommended.

The Fortune Quilt- Lani Diane Rich.  I'm slowly working my way through Lani/Lucy's books, savoring them.  She's a terrific writer.  The three I've read were alike in at least one respect:  once I got into them, it was impossible to put them down.  I read the first chapter of this one before bed one night, then sat down with it about 10:30 the next night intending to read for half an hour or so.  At 1:30 I finished it.  I could not stop.  It's very compelling.  It's about a young woman in her late twenties who loses her job and her (male) best friend all in the same week. And then her mother, who disappeared 17 years earlier, shows up.  The plotline where she is trying to find resolution with her mother is also a major theme of one of the others of Lani's I've read, Little Ray of Sunshine.  About the only complaint I have about this book is that Sunshine does it better. (Well, and that I liked the best friend better than the hero, but taste in heroes is always subjective--there have been other romances I've liked where I didn't particularly care for the hero--so she gets a pass on that.  And Will was growing on me by the end, anyway.)  If I'd read Fortune Quilt first I'd have no complaints.  But after reading Little Ray of Sunshine, this one just doesn't have the same complexity/depth of resolution.  Good book, though.  I'm definitely taking one of Lani/Lucy's books with me on my next plane flight.  The flight would fly by.  (ark, ark)

For school:  Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.  Yup, still working my way through Jane Austen.  Emma, I think, is my favorite of all of them.  The main character, surprisingly enough named Emma, is so perfectly drawn, and the resolution of all her little schemes is so beautifully done, it's hard not to just gape in awe at the writing.  There's one argument (discussion) between Emma and Mr. Knightley, where they are discussing Knightley's judgment of another person's character, and Emma's judgment of Knightley, that we ended up discussing for over an hour in class--just because there was so much packed into that two-page section.  Another reason I love it is because of the movie Clueless, which has to be one of the best-ever adaptations of a classical work to modern times.  And another reason I love it is because in at least one way-- her arrogant, youthful assumption that she knows everything she needs to know, and way more than anyone else around her-- Emma reminds me of me at that age.  And yet even though she's such a horrible snob, you can't help but love her.  It's such a great book.  And even though she learns the error of her ways by the end of the book, Knightley makes the most touching declaration of having loved her through the whole thing.  *sigh* *gush*

Mansfield Park is, I think, the least likable of all of JA's work.  Fanny, the heroine, is not a woman to interest a contemporary reader.  She's sickly, shy, retiring, and easily embarrassed; but even worse, she seems-- at least on first reading-- to be a priggish, moralistic prude.  But you know, this was my second time reading it, and I found her to be a much more sympathetic character this time.  She is so thoroughly herself.  She has a very clear and consistently-drawn character that makes her bearable, even when you're rolling your eyes at her timidity.  A closer reading reveals her to be not so much a prude as completely loyal to the people whose opinion she values.  If you could divest the word "pure" of its overtones of moral perfectionism, I think you could say she is 'pure in heart.'  Not because her heart is faultless, but because reading about her is like looking into a pool of clear, still water.  I think. But maybe I'm over-reading.  Anyway.  If you're not an Austen fan, this one is definitely not going to change your mind.

Persuasion.  This one is quite different than JA's others-- or at least, as different as one romance novel can be from another. Anne, the heroine, is older-- in her late twenties.  She has loved the same man all along.  She fell in love early but turned him down on the advice of her mentor because he was a young, penniless, unproven naval officer.  When he comes back eight years later, he must get over his hurt, and she must figure out how to reach through all the social barriers that separate them to let him know how she feels.  And another major difference--she doesn't end up with the big house, as the heroine of all her other novels do.  It's a great story, in some ways far more modern than any of her other work.

Ulysses.  I read it (click on the link for the long, tortured tale of my progress).  The whole dang thing, and since I'm taking an independent study on it, I'm reading it again.  It's difficult and brilliant, bawdy and sublime, but mostly it's long.  the first time reading it is a 650-page exercise in delayed gratification.  You just don't know what is happening much of the time.  But the second time through (and I'm less than halfway at the moment) is an entirely different matter.  Since you know what's going to happen later, you can see how everything fits together.  Is it a great novel?  yes. absolutely. Is it the best novel of the twentieth century, as so many have claimed?  Well, I'd have to say no, because I don't see how you can claim that a novel that only a very few have actually read is the greatest novel of the 20th century.  Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises or The Color Purple or To Kill a Mockingbird or or or.  Recommended?  yes, if you enjoy a challenge, and if you take it on, I'd add:  read it twice.  It's an entirely different (and better) experience the second time through.

Audiobooks-- I'll make this quick since I've already gone on and on here.

Cotillion- Georgette Heyer.  I love Heyer.  I've read or listened to three now (so I can tell you its pronounced "hay-er"), and I'm working my way through a fourth when I'm in the car.  She's terrific.  Here's the thing about Cotillion.  If you've read many romance novels, you know their main drawback:  you know the ending almost before you start.  You know that the heroine and the male protagonist are going to end up together.  The interest lies in how that is accomplished.  But in Cotillion, honest to Pete, about halfway through you're not sure how it's going to end.  She has several little twists up her sleeve that put the whole thing in question.  I'm not giving it away, and if you think you might want to read it, don't read the back cover or the reviews on Amazon, just plunge in.  Another thing to get used to with Heyer is all the exclamation points.  They're wearisome, and that's one of the best reasons to listen to her stuff as an audiobook.  But well worth it.  Highly recommended.  I loved this one.

and you're thinking, I thought she was going to make it short.  sorry.

Bet Me- Jennifer Crusie.  I've read it at least half a dozen times, but it was on sale on Audible a couple of weeks ago, so I thought it would be fun to hear it.  And it was.  I'm a skimmer, so I often miss details.  With an audiobook, you hear every word, and you realize how brilliant Crusie is at dialogue and amusing little details.  It is a tribute to her skill that I can say I love this book, even though it has my least favorite plotline-- the whole thing would be resolved if the hero and heroine just sat down and talked.  And it's especially irritating because they do sit down and talk, many times, but just never about the right thing.  But I still really enjoyed listening to this and was many times driving down the road laughing hysterically all by myself in the car.  Great book.  If you haven't read it, go straight out and get either the print or audio version right now.

Reading Report: Feb 2011

March 6th it is, and I'm just now posting the reading report.  It's been that kind of week.  I've been buried in academic reading, so you may not get any good recommendations, but here 'tis.

Jane Austen-- Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice.  It's like Nirvana, yes?  Oh, damn, I have to read Sense and Sensibility this weekend.  Poor me.  Lady Susan, which I'd never even heard of before this semester, is an early novel, written in epistolary style (i.e., the whole thing is letters that the characters write back and forth to each other).  It has an extremely rushed ending, but other than that, it is surprisingly good for an Austen novel you've never heard of, and in some ways funnier than her later stuff.  And it's short.  Worth picking up if they have it at your library and you need a quick snarky read.  Northanger Abbey is a parody of the popular romances of the time.  I found it the most tedious read of the ones we've done so far, but it still had some great moments.  I suspect it would be funnier if I had read Castle of Otranto or Mysteries of Udolpho (which were the popular romances of Austen's time), but I haven't, and I didn't have time.  I already wrote about S&S, and P&P... well.  It's brilliant.  There was a thread on Facebook recently between a friend of mine and a bunch of her other friends about how they'd never been able to get through it and they couldn't understand why everyone loves it so much.  I don't understand how you couldn't.  It's not exactly a quick read, especially not at first while you're getting used to her slower pace.  And unfortunately, she has a habit of leaving out the scenes that turn into the best scenes in the movies  (In the movie of S&S, when Emma Thompson totally loses it when Hugh Grant comes back?  (which has to be one of the most brilliantly acted scenes ever) Not in the book.  Not kidding.  the Emma Thompson character is so overcome with emotion that she runs out of the room before she can break down.)  So I suppose if you saw the movie first and then tried to read the book, you'd be disappointed. But I'm not.  I adore these books.

OK.  I think I've gushed enough over Austen.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.  I read this when it came out twenty-ish years ago and thought it was way too depressing and didn't particularly care for it.  But I had to read it for my FemLitCrit class this semester and loved it this time.  It's definitely not a feel-good, cheerful novel-- it's about a young woman who has been convicted of a grisly murder, and the psychiatrist who tries to cure her of her amnesia so she can remember what happened.  But it's far from the dark, despairing novel that I remembered.  I'm not sure why I read it that way twenty years ago.  In fact, probably my main objection to it this time is that it ends a little too neatly.  I can't say anything more than that without spoilers.  Highly recommended.

Ulysses update.  Yes, I'm still reading it.  It goes on and on and on.  It's basically the story of one day in the lives of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.  During the day, Stephen has various deep conversations with different people and ends up drinking with medical student friends at a maternity hospital.  Bloom, who has spent the day going to a funeral, eating lunch, and masturbating on the beach as he watches a beautiful young woman, has also been avoiding going home to his wife, whose lover has been to the house during the afternoon.  Bloom goes to the maternity hospital to check on a woman he knows who is delivering there and ends up sitting with Stephen and his friends as they get progressively more drunk--although Bloom himself imbibes very little.  Bloom, feeling protective of Stephen, follows him to the red light district of Dublin, where there is a long, astonishingly inventive dream sequence that takes place in a brothel.  Now Bloom and Stephen are sitting in a cheap coffee house.  Bloom is hoping Stephen will sober up a little, and he is still avoiding going home and avoiding even thinking about what happened during the afternoon.  It's brilliantly done, but it isn't easy to read, and I can't possibly recommend it.  You'd kill me.  But if you're determined to read it, let me know and I'll let you know my strategy (for what it's worth, which may not be much).  It involves two commentaries, a paraphrase, a dictionary, and the book itself.

And on a more fun note:  (sorry, this is getting long).

Dream a Little Dream, Susan Elizabeth Phillips.  I've read enough SEP novels to know that I almost never like the way they begin and the way they end, but the in-betweens are good enough that I keep reading them.  This time, I figured I could get the setup off the back cover, so I started reading on about page 75, which worked really well.  The story is about Rachel Stone, who is the widow of a corrupt televangelist. She returns with her young son to the small town where they lived, where almost everyone hates her for the way her husband (and by implication, her) fleeced them out of all kinds of money.  She is so broke that she and her son are living in her car.  She has to find the last bit of her husband's fortune, which she's convinced is hidden in the house where they lived.  Their house has been sold, and Gabe Bonner, a widower who has unwillingly hired her to help him renovate an old drive-in movie theater, just happens to be the caretaker of the house.

There is also a secondary romance between Gabe's brother, a local pastor, and his church secretary. As with most of Phillips' novels, the secondary romance is almost more interesting than the primary one, although in this case it may have meant more to me because of my background.  The brother-pastor is questioning his faith, and has an ongoing conversation in his head with God, in the persons of Clint Eastwood, Oprah, and somebody else whom I'm forgetting.  It's a little weird, but I thought it worked pretty well, and his moment of resolving his faith--although hardly an in-depth analysis of faith issues-- worked well enough that I could buy it.  It will remind you of The Shack, if you've read that, except that it is about a gazillion times more believable than The Shack was, partly because rather than stretching the metaphor till it breaks, Phillips lets it be a low-key, not-too-serious sideline to the main story.

But where the story really got me is the relationship between Gabe and Rachel's son.  I was sobbing by the time they got it resolved.  I thought it was beautifully done, and believable.  And that's where I should have stopped reading.  Because once again Phillips managed to write an ending that all but ruined the book for me.  I could go on and on about what bugged me about it-- tantalizing details that are thrown out and then dumped without resolution, a tacked-on crisis that serves no purpose, big moments that fizzle (after a long, tense night, Gabe's brother volunteers to keep the kid so Rachel and Gabe can go home and talk things out. So what do they do?  in the next scene, Rachel is TAKING A NAP and Gabe is out working in the yard).  When they finally do have their big talk, Rachel insists that Gabe talk about how much better she is than his dead first wife.  Not kidding.  Suffice it to say, yuck.  Now that it's been a couple of weeks since I read it, I will say that the middle 300 pages is good enough that I'd still say it's worth reading, especially if little niggling details don't bother you as much as they bother me.  But if you talked to me the day after I read it, I would have told you to burn it.  Next time I may not only skip the first 75 pages, but also stop reading 50 pages before the end.