Library road trip

Book: The Borrower


Author: Rebecca Makkai


Published: 2011 (Viking)


I like this book for very selfish reasons--namely, I completely understand the main character's mid-twenties aimlessness and love/hate relationship with her first-out-of-college job. I am living that right now. Also, I would totally go over to her apartment to listen to the plays and rehearsals in the theater below with her while reading or drinking or both. It sounds like a good plan to make us both less lonely.


But you know what's not such a good plan? Letting a bright, spastic kid from a strict, possibly abusive family trick her into quasi-kidnapping him for a road trip after she finds him hiding in the library where she runs the children's room. 

Her impulse is all good intentions. She wants to help him get away from a crushing home life so he can figure out who he is, and maybe in this stealthy heroic gesture she'll find out enough about herself so she can finally start actually living. She already has to find creative ways to smuggle him Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. She's got Russian revolutionary blood and mob ties from her dad. Full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, etc, etc. 


But half of her starts off really freaked out and only gets worse as the kid blackmails her into taking him across state lines on a quest to see his grandma. By the time they find the grandma in a Revolutionary War-era Vermont grave, the fuck-yeah-rescue and oh-fuck-kidnapping parts of her brain are so incredibly heightened that...


...she avoids all consequences of said kidnapping by letting one of her dad's guys take the kid home on a Greyhound bus and never going back to her hometown again. She never sees the poor kid again. He probably had to go through the punishment version of the anti-gay camp his parents had him in and from which he was running away. She doesn't know. She thinks about him a lot and wants such a better future for him so hard, but it's even harder to believe her when she ran away to bury herself in an academic library instead of going back and maybe, I don't know, fighting for the little guy. 


I'm not judging her on real-life heroics, because fuck knows what she could've been charged with before she would've had a chance to explain herself and what would've stuck anyway, but it would've been so much more affecting and still totally logical for her to go back and face up what she (they) did.  

Why does she care?

Book: Alys, Always

Author: Harriet Lane

Published: Scribner 2012

Pages: 209


OH MY GOD this book was the most frustrating thing I've read in a really long time. Want to know why? Of course you do.

But reason does not come into this. That's exactly my problem. THERE IS NO REASON FOR ANY OF THIS BOOK TO HAPPEN BEYOND THE FIRST CHAPTER-Y SECTION THING.

Basic story: mousey book section writer comes across a car accident in which the wife of a famous author dies. After she gives statements to the police and etc, the family wants to meet her for closure. Okay. So far so good.

But then she starts hanging out with the daughter and eventually seducing the father AND WHY? She never says. Never, ever. Not one speck of "seeing all this wealthy wealth dazzled the bejesus out of me. I must have it!" No "this kid is so spoiled I should totally knock her down a peg and maybe steal some money/power." No "hot dad is hot and powerful and will help my career." That does happen and apparently she wanted it all along, but she's such a blank that there is literally no motivation for any of these events.

NOTHING. She is nothing and says nothing about wanting any of these things that apparently she does want and by the end she's just a wealthier version of a blank slate.

Why does she care? I DON'T KNOW. Then WHY THE HELL SHOULD I CARE? Because I don't. At all. The end.

Extra, extra, ambition trumps revolution

Book: The New Republic

Author: Lionel Shriver

Published: 2012 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 369

Let's talk about motivation. Specifically, what motivates a lawyer to chuck it and become a journalist?

According to Lionel Shriver, it's a lifelong yearning to get out of perpetual second place. It's an urge to get in the middle of things, to be the person everyone else goes to and values for once. It's a way to be a front-runner instead of part of the pack. Edgar's been trying to pull into first place since high school, and when he gets a foreign correspondent spot on a national newspaper, he finally feels vindicated.

Of course, he only got that spot because of a good word from the golden boy high school friend Edgar's always trying to outrun. And he only gets the job because the revered, literally larger than life journalist who started the stringer has disappeared. Edgar's hired to find him and maybe write a little about what's going on around there while he's at it in the middle of a revolution.

When he gets there, he eventually, through many, many struggles with himself and the absent journalist's legacy, discovers the old guy's secret and starts using it for his own gain. Edgar has enough morals sketched out to plausibly battle his personal ambition (SO MUCH ambition, guys) to do the right thing. Which he does, eventually, but not before exploiting the old guy's ways until he accidentally kills someone.

This is one of Shriver's more balanced story lines; unusual with quasi-metaphysical touches and characters impossible to mistake for "normal," but still thoroughly imaginable. When the group of foreign correspondents get together at their watering hole and argue about the true nature of terrorism, their dialogue gets a little lecture-y (oh gee, I wonder what Shriver feels about the efficiency of terrorists blowing up their own homeland...), but that doesn't come close to taking up significant space.

The whole thing is deep and nuanced and saved from sinking in its own gravitas by its wicked sense of humor. I feel like that could describe all of Shriver's fiction.

And it's worth noting that she wrote this in about 1998, but her publisher is just now putting it out. All of the newspaper business is a throwback to the days of influential physical print.

On a broken holiday together

Book: The Red House


Author: Mark Haddon


Published: 2012 (Doubleday)


Pages: 264


A British extended family full of secrets and people who don't especially like each other go on holiday together and oh boy, do things get out.

Like one of the dads is having an affair, one of the teenage girls is gay, the other teenage girl bullied a friend into attempting suicide, one of the mothers is haunted by her stillborn child on that kid's eighteenth birthday, the other dad had a marginal influence in accidentally paralyzing one of his patients, the teenage boy fancies his teenage girl cousin and then her mom. Typical stuff in a family drama.


But it's the little details, like how the dad's affair isn't any better than his regular life and how he's slowly realizing that, and how the teenage girl grows to realize she's gay and how she's been pushing that part of her down because she joined a church and was scared her new friends wouldn't approve, and how the teenage boy's lust jumps so easily from his step-cousin to his step-aunt when the first sharply rejects him, that ties this story together. 


It's sort of the opposite of How It All Began; here, everyone hurtles together from the edges of each other's lives into a holiday labeled "restful" which they all figure is just code for "we have to be bored around each other" and set up defenses accordingly. 


The defenses, of course, don't last the whole week. They're knocked down by each other through impulsive acts and immediately regretted revelations, and while there's not a giant happy hug and singalong at the end (thank fuck for that), whether they want to or not they all understand each other better as people by the time they part. 


Multiple perspectives stay in third-person, which is a relief because especially at the beginning they're a little hard to juggle, and descriptions (of landscapes especially) are staccato. Keeps the emphasis on what's happening in everybody's heads, which is always the most interesting bit.

But how did it all end?

Book: How It All Began

Author: Penelope Lively

Published: 2011 (Viking)

Pages: 229

In the first couple sentences, an old lady is robbed. In the next three or four chapters, this robbery and her subsequent broken hip shift pre-established events and schedules so that her married daughter falls in love with one of the old lady's reading students, the old lady's employer's niece meets a guy who swindles her out of business, and the niece's lover is outed as an adulterer. 

Promising start! None of the coincidences are contrived, although an unnamed narrative pops up to harp on them three or for times. So then what happened?

Uh, well, you know. Life. Things. 

The employer's sections were the most fun because he was a gone-to-seed academic historian who had no idea of the giant gap between his grand ideas and their banal actualities. The rest of the affected people, most especially his niece, were refreshingly practical about their situations, which got me to like them but did not result in an ending that tied everyone together again. I was half-hoping and half-dreading that kind of ending but figured the rest of the book had enough sense to do it well. 

But I never got to find out, because everybody just drifted apart. In a coda that was completely unnecessary seeing as how we were told he never affected the story ever again, the author tells us that the mugger was shortly robbed himself.  

Well all right then. 

Books of a feather

Book: Guardians of Ga'Hoole Book One: The Capture


Author: Kathryn Lasky


Published: 2003 (scholastic)


Pages: 219


Owls! I love owls. I like nighttime better than daylight (although my sleep schedule is convinced otherwise), I've always wanted to fly, and their paradoxical combination of cute and fierce is what I strive for when I bare my fangs before brushing my hair in the mornings.


So this book's combination of adventure story and owl education kept me amused. Great choice to narrate through a young owl (although the name "Soren" will forever conjure up Cracked.com for me, so I was giggling about remembered dick jokes and history lessons all through a children's book). That way the owl life-cycle and different species could be explained through organic discovery processes. 


Which doesn't mean that was a seamless segue all the time, but even when clumsily dropped into exposition, the educational bits were interesting. The adventure story was a typical hero's quest, but--guys, these were baby owls who got kidnapped by a cult that used the moon to brainwash them into--what? I don't know. They elude the moon-washing and escape to go find this mythic tree. I also don't know what that's like because there are fourteen more books in this series and I guess they'll stretch it out. 


I will not be stretching with them, but only because I have other books to tend to first. In the meantime, I will continue to watch this YouTube video for an owl fix:

http://youtu.be/KczxuINjk54

Growing up with help from words

This pile of books is all about growing up in some form or another, and I burned through them because I'm clinging to that topic like a five-year-old to their teddy bear since life keeps reminding me that I have no idea what I'm doing. Perhaps these guys do.

Book: Lizz Free or Die

Author: Lizz Winstead

Publication: 2012 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 302

Lizz Winstead definitely does. She created the Daily Show and ran it for a couple pre-Jon Stewart years, but that's your typical 18-hour we-became-a-family-with-FCC-fines TV writing experience. The really interesting bits are how she got there, and really good part is that she actually answers that in a satisfactory fashion: she worked her ass off at a day job and comedy clubs and writing in a giant armchair until she made herself known. She also talks about her family, my favorite quote from the whole book being her dad saying, "I raised you to have an opinion. I just thought it'd be mine." HA! 

She's more straightforward and less joke-a-minute, which makes some parts less funny and a little bit more sincere than maybe they could've/should've been, but on the whole it's a great non-cheesy yet still inspirational collection of ways how a wiseass lady made all her hard work pay off.

Plus this happened as proof that Liberry Tom is awesome:

 

Book: I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Author: Sloane Crosley

Publication: 2008 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 228

Sloane Crosley's also a good, aspirational essay read. She's young enough to inspire envy by her publication history but frank enough about exploiting her own faults and later insight (like when she as a Jewish kid went to borderline-Bible camp and neither she nor her parents realized it until years later). Her subjects are typical (dating, life in NYC, career, religion) but with specific, neurotic twists (a plastic pony collection, baking her first and terrible boss a cookie in the shape of her head, her parents' extreme fear of indoor fires and insistence on having Christmas as well as Hanukkah) that shows she knows how funny details are. She knows that life is weird and unfair and sometimes we just have to embrace the absurdity to get through it. And she's there to record how it goes down.

Book: Such a Pretty Fat

Author: Jen Lancaster

Publication: 2008 (New American Library)

Jen Lancaster, on the other hand, does not go down without a fight once she figures out what she wants to change about herself. Her memoir is about her quest to get past her own ego enough to get in shape for health reasons. I love that she's the exact opposite of every other dieting memoir in the fact that she starts from a place of self-love instead of hate. She's quick-witted but in way that's predictable if you've been paying attention to pop culture for the past six or seven years. Her lack of motivation is understandable but starts to sound ridiculous and whiny when you realize that she's getting paid to do all this and record it in a sort of meta-diary. 

She also stages conversations for exposition. I can tell, what with the block of text and the eerily specific questions her friends pointedly ask her at weird times. It was like seeing an obvious body double for Chantum Tatum (did I spell that right? Probably not; I don't care because he's not nerdy or British) in Magic Mike when he did the serious break dancing: I see what you did there and it's a little stilted but okay fine, it gives the general idea. 

Book: 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers

Authors: various

Publication: 2005 (Random House)

All the writers in here wish they could have Lancaster's job. They're all struggling, mostly with careers and why any of us are here in the first place, and they're all eloquent about it. I liked the one about the soldier who starts a mustache-growing contest with his fellow recruit to distract them while they're in Kuwait. I liked them all, but that was my favorite. The one about a new dad working a late-night Wendy's shift was good too but not any better, and it bothered me that there was an editor's note claiming how in love they fell with that one and why that one won the prize. Maybe that just speaks to the excellent level of overall quality in here. 

I enjoyed these, but now I think I'm going to jump ship from reality literature for the next couple offerings. These were almost too real.

Self-aware dystopia lives up to hype

Book: The Hunger Games

Author: Suzanne Collins

Published: 2008 (Scholastic)

Pages: 374

This is how I reacted to reading pressure when my boyfriend said he’s going to see the movie on its opening weekend and would I like to go with him?:

Because it meant I chucked my semi-cherished plans of keeping indie cred by reading Battle Royale instead of this popular series first. And of course I had to read the book before we see the movie, which pushed back my increasingly panicked plans of not adding any new books to the pile I want to get through, dammit.

It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay, because The Hunger Games reads fast and well, and it’ll be at least another year before the second book gets turned into a movie my boyfriend’ll want to go see on opening weekend, and too much indie book cred will make this blog insufferable anyway.

So! Katniss! She’s cool. She’s less the bold new feminist icon that reviews have told me about than an almost gender-neutral kid just focused on survival. That’s a refreshing change. Her skills and interests are presented as completely normal for her age, place, and family social status; she’s equal to Gale’s skills and nobody’s surprised about that. They just tell her to bring more illegal squirrel next week. She’s protective in a non-maternal way that sometimes hurts her own interests. She knows her own strengths and relies on them far more than exploiting her weaknesses to rely on other people. She can hunt and track but good fuck, don’t let her heal or cook anything more complicated than a roasted leg.

She’s cool, but the world building is the real star around here.

Collins is great at letting just the right amount of detail unspool around major events that Katniss knows well but is experiencing in person for the first time. I wonder if all the male tributes have to get waxed down for the presentation, too. All the new terms feel naturally descriptive but still memorable, the history revealed is enough to know reasons for actions but little enough to want to know more, and the action scenes I could totally follow in my head. Brava. 

A few “but…”s, though:

• I wish the games would’ve been played in a more interesting arena. Of all the landscapes possible, this year’s was the one that sounds the most like the backyard I had before I moved into an apartment.
• The fuck were those mutts about near the last bit of the games?! Please let there be a science lab raiding/rescuing scene in later plot.
• I’m dreading reading more about Peeta and Gale and Katniss as a triangle. The love story angle was SO GOOD in this book, meaning it was an ingenious strategy to act like it was an act for the cameras and Peeta’s reveal that he wasn’t acting was, duh, not a surprise to any of us but played as a genuine one to Katniss. That was handled well but I fear it will turn into hormonal teenage angst just as I celebrate how free this series is of that crap.
• Katniss’s inter musings about strategy got a little circular and reminded me of said teenage angst in books where the girl is worrying about what to do with/about a boy. But the higher stakes here (actual, physical, nobody-will-help-my-family death, as opposed to oh-my-god-I-want-to-die-over-this-socially-embarrassing-situation death) make it tolerable for a far longer time.
• Now that Collins has built a world, will she be as good at tearing it down? Rebellion to come, I guess. I plan on reading Catching Fire and Mockingjay back to back because my boyfriend says Catching Fire ends on a much more “what the fuck just and is going to happen?” cliffhanger than this one did.   

 Also, a point to remember: this isn’t a hard book. It’s solid YA plotting with fleshed-out characters and that’s a very good, enjoyable thing, but reading the whole triology in two days won’t get you into Harvard or anything. It will merely prepare you for life in a Capitol-controlled wilderness when you have to fight to death. Argue amongst yourselves as to which is more important a skill.

Where are the badgers?

Book: King of the Badgers

Author: Philip Hensher

Published: 2011 (Faber and Faber)

Pages: 436

Where are the badgers? Show me the badgers. I am not reading about any badgers in here.

Also, decide whether the little girl kidnapping story is the backbone event here or just an excuse to show how gossip works in a small English town. Either way is acceptable, I swear, especially considering how well-written both pieces are. But Checkov's gun does not get waved threateningly without being shot, and the driving subject of secrets shouldn't fade away only to flare up again on television and leave again without comment when the six o' clock news ends.

And about those secrets: uh, I'm pretty sure they're not. If they are, only one does any damage, meaning only one causes any conflict both internal and external, meaning only one actually DOES anything, this one that has nothing to do with the little girl kidnapping.

Why the HELL is there nothing else about the schizophrenic couple who have "neighbourhood watch" meetings that are just them and like five imaginary people the husband pretends to chair? WHAT? That was a BIG REVEAL that could've tied in SO WELL.

Typing this review, I've become uncertain as to why I actually like this book a great deal. I guess reading about all the different well-drawn characters was like nibbling on a box of assorted chocolates, offering a different sort of tasty in each bite while keeping a consistent underlying theme. Except a box of Whitman's tends to congeal into one lump that takes an embarrassingly long time to get out of my system, while this book didn't come together at all in the end. I have no idea what the title means or refers to.

But they baited me by watching Doctor Who in the last scene and talking about it so that between their dialogue and the book's publication date, adjusting for writing time and BBC transatlantic jumps, I've figured it's the series four finale. "Parallel worlds" is a dead giveaway. 


(These are the kinds of calculations I do when I finish a book but there's no time to get into another one before a Hunger Games loaner comes through for me to read before the movie comes out.) 

Growing up

Book: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Author: Alison Bechdel

Published: 2006 (Houghton Mifflin)

Pages: 232

I’m calling this a memoir because the author uses her family story and all their real names, including her own. She doesn’t dress it up as fiction, so it’s not, and she focuses way more on a vaguely stream-of-consciousness fixation on her relationship to her dad and how they handled each other’s sexuality than on a chronological run-through of her childhood.

Bechdel and her father are presented as inverts, as in she always wants to be and acts like a stereotypical boy and her father has spent his entire marriage repressing his female urges. This makes him cold and resentful to his family, and her gradually more confused until she finds a section about lesbianism in her university library and starts reading about that instead of her class-assigned Ulysses.

They each deal with their own homosexuality in opposite ways: he buries his under a pile of shame that occasionally explodes and leads to a car accident that might have been suicide; she pulls hers out of its hiding place and makes it a big part of who she is. She comes out as the more adjusted, better-prepared, world-weary second generation worried about but also smug about not making the same mistakes she saw her father go through. Her experience isn’t any less traumatic, but it makes her stronger instead of destroying her. I think she won.

The fluid artwork’s bold lines kept me entirely in her worlds, in her parents’ knick-knack cluttered house that her dad was always improving, in libraries (more than one and they were all drawn differently, not just Building That Was Not My House No. 2!), in her dorm room and the funeral parlor.

OH YEAH. Her dad also inherited a funeral parlor from his parents. It wasn’t a full-time business in their small town, but the whole family worked when the need came along. I wish she would’ve integrated this into more of her general telling, but she left it in one smallish section. By then end of the book I wanted to know more about the funeral home and less about what her father’s death might mean.

That might make me a terrible human being. But your Constant Reader never lets life get in the way of good content.   

You're doing it wrong.

Book: The Book of Tomorrow

Author: Cecelia Ahern

Published: 2011 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 310

Dear diary,

You don't know me, but I'm that insufferable twat who doesn't actually use you as a conceit unless it's convenient to the plot. Sometimes you tell me the future, but I can totally change it, I'm not locked in or anything, I also do that really annoying grammar thing where I string together two full sentences with a comma. Not two clauses, or two sentences that can depend on each other as clauses, I wish they had taught me about that in third grade. 

ANYhoodle, I'm going to use all this fake gravitas that I haven't earned yet (and that in fact makes me sound about as solemn and wise as a wizard on a Disney ride) to put mystery into a story that will basically be me bitching about how lame my new life is, how everyone in my family is keeping secrets from me, and how weird nuns are, mentioned over and over again until the last three chapters, which I guess is some sort of "tension device," or some shit like that. You'll have my like total word about what a bitch or nice kid I am (it's so hard to decide!) without all those stupid "scenes" and "dialogue" to pull you in. Really, exposition is THE thing to have nowadays, along with a mobile library driven by a boy who could care less about reading! But don't worry, I only use him for a statutory rape subplot that is the only possible way my age could be called into question. 

I totally could've done this whole find-out-who's-my-real-dad thing without you, but you know, you're welcome. I'm just a giver. Except when I feel selfish and tell you that for no reason except maybe I'm supposed to be the same bundle of contradiction as every other teenage girl? I don't know. It doesn't work anyway, so I'll let you not work and then un-destroy yourself from a fire without any sort of rules or guidelines on how you actually work because I'm too busy writing third-person fairy-tale wrap-ups for my last chapter. Well, there's my aunt snooping again! Better go sneer at some of her apple pie before she suspects anything! I hope this book doesn't make any young book blogger and writer question what the hell she's doing with all her spare time! Byyyeeee!

--Tamara Goodwin, most irritating diary writer in the history of diary writing. 

NO MAGICAL RULES FOR THE MAGICAL DIARY = YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. 

Dancing about architecture

Book: A Visit From the Goon Squad

Author: Jennifer Egan

Published: 2010 (Knopf)

Pages: 273

I’ve been staring down this book and its good reviews since it came out, resisting the urge to read it because writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Which is to say, there’s always a gap of interpretation that I’m willing to throw myself across because I love both art forms so much, and I usually end up banging my head a good one against waves of description that, fawning as they may be, don’t actually tell me anything. In my experience as a high school newspaper A&E editor, college radio station CD reviewer, Rolling Stone subscriber for far longer than it deserved, and High Fidelity fan, the better the review the more abstract the descriptions and therefore the more removed from living, breathing, sweating music stand the words.

But that’s not the case here. Actually, this collection of stories and incidents and characters on the New York music scene focuses so much on the people and the human bits of music that it’s really easy to slip into the punk clubs and the record label board rooms and undergraduate couches and start listening without noticing until everybody else turns their attention, too. The music underlines the humanity, the good and bad choices, the way time keeps pulling at everyone and their dreams.

It takes a bit of decoding to figure out everybody’s full individual chronological story arcs, but that’s not super important unless you get bored after you finish reading and want a slideshow project like the one the record label head’s former assistant’s kid makes to chart how her family is unraveling. (That was my favorite bit.)  It’s quieter than I expected, literally and metaphorically. Its last little bit of future predicting edges toward gimmick territory without ever touching down.

I don’t regret waiting to read it, or checking it out of the library instead of buying it, but I’m glad it waited for me to discover its charms. 

Crazypants tour of Arkham part 1!

Book: Batman: Joker’s Asylum

Writers: Arvid Nelson, Jason Aaron, JT Krul, Joe Harris, and David Hine

Artists: Alex Sanchez, Jason Pearson, Guillem March, Juan Doe, and Andy Clarke

Published: 2008 (DC)

Pages: 124

From my limited first-hand (first-eyes?) experience with comics, I know that I like the Batman universe. I also know that the Joker is my favorite villain and Arkham Asylum is my favorite setting because they’re both so damn gleefully creepy. Therefore, I thought this slim volume of Joker-narrated, one-off villain-led tales would be a good start as my own venture into the gi-fucking-normous continuity, the first superhero comic I have not read by trading off on my boyfriend’s assurance that it’s awesome. (Although I still love those recommendations because 1. he’s always right about them and 2. they mean I get to make him read lit fic novels that he will end up enjoying too.)

I was right! Although such choosing logic doesn’t allow for the unexpected emotional left hook I’m always looking for, I did get several expected taps to the chin from this. Each story is drawn and written by different people, so the weak morality tale of the first story (everybody fears the Joker but he’s not the monster this time! It’s YOU PEOPLE and all he’s doing is exposing your own bloodlust through reality TV!) and the Lady or the Tiger? ending of the last (the reader flips a coin to see how deeply Two-Face has affected a guy with his same burn condition!) are isolated incidents. The Penguin’s story is my favorite, drawn rounded with parallels that visually connect his past and present in an obvious psychological path without getting him monologing. Oh, except for these couple of panels where he’s talking about this girl he’s fallen in love with while his henchmen get thrown around in front of him, and then Batman drops down and says he’ll be watching him and the Penguin goes, all day-dreamy distracted, “Yes, yes, see you next week.”

But then he discovers that he can’t, in fact, overcome his past after all, and he returns to form by taking out his anger on the one thing that was starting to rebuild his humanity. It was pretty sweet.

Poison Ivy’s is basically an origin story with naked leafy ass, and the Scarecrow gets some neat deco art but a disappointingly thin connection between his talk about harnessing fear and the actual action. All enjoyable, and I believe there is a Volume II on the shelves. 

Troubled life as told through good food

Book: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Author: Gabrielle Hamilton

Published: 2011 (Random House)

Pages: 291

All throughout reading this book, I daydreamed about what to cook for future meals of my own. None of them remotely resembled the meals Hamilton was describing, which, and hang with me for a second, I count as good food writing because she caught me up in the actual act of creating and making food rather than imitating her, room-temperature-egg for room-temperature-egg.

She started out in a family where her dad held annual lamb roasting parties and her mom always had something on the stove and Hamilton herself fell into waitressing, catering, and finally running her own kitchen as a way of scratching independence out of a hostile mess of early drug addiction and neglect.

And it works fairly well--by chaining her to 18-hour days in an industry she never really wanted to stay in, true, and giving her a green-card husband she married for the hell of it and spends a ridiculous amount of time and energy on considering how they don’t actually love each other. It’s this that casts a weird mist of doom onto the whole back half of her narrative; the part that is usually reserved for unconditional redemption made me worry about the life choices she seems to know were kind of shitty even as she lives with them. It’s refreshing to read a memoir that doesn’t advertise hard work as a guaranteed ticket to happiness, that cooking embraces her as she embraces it but it still takes work on both sides just like any loving relationship.

But… I keep going back to her husband, and why they tried to act like a real family even when they had no reason or incentive or pressure to do so. It’s disturbing in a quiet way that she never explains and presents as a fairly normal if troubled fact of her life. Possibly she stayed for a bigger sense of community in their annual trips to his family in Italy, something she had never been a part of before and might not have a chance to be a part of any other way? Maybe? I don’t know.

Her use of food as a way of expressing her fighting chance in life makes me care. Her writing is excellent.

One more chance (because I checked out so many)

Book: The Flamenco Academy

Author: Sarah Bird

Publication: 2006 (Knopf)

Pages: 381

The history and tradition of flamenco is fascinating. The flimsy tale of romantic obsession Bird uses as an excuse to write about flamenco is not.

Her characters are interesting: a shy young girl who discovers flamenco as a way to a tortured guitarist’s heart, her best friend who needs attention in the same way of oxygen, the guitarist himself as he wrestles with mysteries of his identity that could make or break him in the flamenco world. They’re human enough to recognize and empathize with, and they provide crucial insights into a rarified subculture as outsiders who gain access throughout the tale.

Or that’s what they do in my head, when I really want to like this opera-on-page. In reality, there are no actual examples of them doing this, as in you have to take the narrative voice’s word for practically every character development. It baffles me why Bird thought it was a good idea to pull back the camera and use so much exposition. SO MUCH EXPOSITION, y’all. I want her to go full-out Gypsy fairy tale for this thing or add some fucking DIALOUGE between the shy girl and the minimal amount of people she’d have to interact with to become as good at flamenco as she is.

But Bird’s writing fluctuates. At least three people tell dramatic tales of their origins and secrets that take up chapters at a time. I wish she would’ve just expanded those until they touched each other and made a narrative that mimics flamenco’s mysterious, overly emotional depth framed by traditional structure.

Everything was harped on so fucking much, too, like she thought the reader would forget every few pages. And so many metaphors to describe the dance and the music. SO MUCH.

Sigh. I checked out Bird’s The Boyfriend School and The Mommy Club in this same batch because I love The Yokota Officer’s Club so much, but I can’t do it. They’re due back this week and I’ll take the gamble that I won’t regret reading her take on getting boyfriends back or surrogate motherhood.    

Texas and stereotypes and women and GAH

Book: How Perfect Is That

Author: Sarah Bird

Published: 2008 (Knopf)

Pages: 302

Strap in, y’all. This is a shouty one.

SARAH BIRD HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. How fucking dare she what? I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

Her social-climbing protagonist bitches about climbing back to the top where she can by $5,000 and lord it over her old frienemies SO MUCH that by Chapter 2, I was actively routing for the IRS to haul her away. (THEY WERE NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN.)

She bitched so much about staying in the old “hippie” college dorm of hers that took her in FOR NO GOOD REASON AT ALL that I was actively routing for them to vote her out in their pretend-suspenseful House Vote of Doom while she sat there batting her fucking eyelashes and handing out fucking brownies so she could stay in the very place that she trashed.

She’s the one that gets everybody else in trouble through her own stupid fucking fault, yet they’re the ones that end up pitching in to her whacky scheme to save her own ass DOING THE EXACT SAME THINGS THAT GOT HER AND THEM SO DEEPLY IN TROUBLE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

AND IT WORKED.

*headdesk*

Unlikable (I mean I really, really hate her) protagonist. Relationships that make Jon and Garfield look like sophisticated colleagues. Leaps of logic that everyone should’ve poked SO MANY GODDAMN HOLES THROUGH, pretending There Is No Other Choice just because the author can’t think of any—all of these things make me angry, all of these things make me hate this book and groan about how many War and Peaces women are going to have to write to get beyond this prototypical “chick lit” that shits on every fun quirky instinct ladywriters have.

But—SARAH BIRD YOU ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS. Have you COMPLETELY LOST IT since The Yokota Officers’ Club? That remains one of the best, most complex yet typical families I’ve ever read about, with such a unique mouthpiece in Bertie and, more importantly, her younger sister who is a complete bitch yet ENTIRELY SYMPATHETIC AND HUMAN  that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY you wrote like this on accident.

This is a sick joke. I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, SARAH BIRD. DISHONOR ON YOU AND YOUR COW.  

A very Batman Christmas

Book: Batman Noël

Author and artist: Lee Bermejo

Published: 2011 (DC Comics)

Pages: I don’t know. This was really thin, a single edition one-off rather than a giant omnibus.

Batman as Scrooge? After spending twenty minutes to absorb this whole book, I’m still not convinced about that parallel. I understand Bruce Wayne is rich, and I totally understand that Batman gets crusty and cynical around Christmas (me too, big guy. Me, too.)—but at heart he’s a good guy. He wants to keep his employee working during Christmas because there are some badass clowns still on the fucking loose out here, no time for beer-can ornaments and moppets with giant wet eyes, they’ll understand when they’re still alive on December 26, come on let’s GO!

And how exactly was Bob working for Batman so Batman had enough authority over him to try to keep him working on ANY day? I thought Batman worked alone.

Anyway, get past the first few pages and you’ll shiver your way into a grim, snow-covered Gotham City that shows Batman how he has to change and start seeing all sides to people’s criminal behavior because sometimes it’s not actual criminal behavior and all that such. …But isn’t Batman also the original “morality is grey and that’s why I wear black” superhero? Doesn’t he know all this shit already? I think I’m writing myself out of any conviction I originally had in this storyline.

Well, it looks super cool, anyway. Grim realism was made for Batman and his scowl and trail of shadows and Catwoman’s absolutely liquid catsuit. And of all the eleventy billion and seven adaptations of A Christmas Carol, this is for sure my second favorite (first favorite obviously being A Muppet Christmas Carol).