Girl Detective

Post-apoca-fic (PAF) is most recognized as a sub-genre of science fiction, but end-time narratives are at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah’s ark. Modern PAF is marked as beginning with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, written by a woman by featuring a male protagonist.

I recently re-read the PAF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. Published in book form in 1959, it collected 3 sections that had previously appeared in a sci-fi magazine. It centers on a monastery in post-nuclear Utah. There the monks seek canonization of the sacred Leibowitz of the title. A man of science instrumental in the nuclear holocaust of the mid 20th century, Leibowitz converted to Catholicism and advocated peace and learning. The book’s first section is set in the mid 21st century:

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

The subsequent sections jump ahead hundreds of years, though there are through lines for characters and artifacts that are fun and satisfying to recognize. I found the first section with Brother Francis, the most engaging. It’s the most funny, and Francis was my favorite of the many characters in the book. As the novel progresses, though, it shifts from being speculative to more preachy and explicative. The only females are in the third section, and this book fails The Bechdel Test, which identifies gender bias in fiction, in that no female has a conversation with another female.

Since the book is set in a monastery, it could be argued that it wasn’t within the scope. Yet after I read this book, I longed for a female perspective, something like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Since I hadn’t read her most recent post-apocalypse novels, I decided to check out Oryx and Crake, the first of the MaddAddam trilogy, which was followed by The Year of the Flood and completed with MaddAddam, to be published this September.

The events in Oryx and Crake are typical of PAF: a genetically engineered plague has wiped out probably all humans except one man, our narrator:

Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wve sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep. ..

Out of habit he looks at his watch–stainless steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

Snowman is not alone; he is surrounded by a variety of genetically spliced creatures. The series proceeds ahead then flashes back. Typical Atwood, she breaks every rule of how to write fiction, yet the story unspools seamlessly into a compulsively readable narrative. Although devourable, the book left a bitter aftertaste. The central characters are a love triangle: two men and one woman, who embodies several cliches, and meets a clicheed end. She never converses with another woman, so this book too fails the Bechdel test. And, for anyone expecting closure, remember: you’re reading Atwood.

I continue to puzzle over this book. What does it add to the PAF genre other than a ripping yarn typically devoid of females? Is there a deeper layer of irony that I’m missing? Is Atwood saying a fully realized female is impossible in PAF? Is this an extension of the female-suppressing world of Handmaid? Does the apocalypse somehow preclude women? Certainly, it’s provoking, though what it has provoked is perplexity and anger and disappointment at Atwood, not my usual admiration.

I found a possibly parallel question in Vanessa Veselka’s essay in The American Reader, “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters“:

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom–we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road.

Left to my own devices, I’d go down a rabbit hole and explore PAF with female protagonists. Maureen McHugh has done some excellent stories and her novel Mission Child is one of the few I can think of. Octavia Butler? Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country? Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time? YA PAF often has female protagonists, e.g., Katniss Everdeen, only to shackle and domesticate them in the end.

Alas, being part of 3 book groups, one of which I lead (hence Canticle, which sent me down this “road”) means my dance card is limited, so I’m unlikely to read up on these questions soon. If any of you kind readers have any insight, please, please, start a thread in the comments section.

I love most of Hope Larson’s graphic novels, Gray Horses, Chiggers, Salamander Dream, Mercury, with the exception of her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. I was interested to see how I’d like the oddly titled Who is AC? which is written by Larson, whose art I really like, but illustrated by manga artist Tintin Pantoja.

Lin is moving to a new town with her family. She’s a writer who puts out her own ‘zine. On the plane she gets a mysterious phone call that somehow results in superpowers, and further shenanigans ensue in creating a villain. There are a handful of strong female characters.

There’s lots going on with a big cast of characters. Good and bad lurk in the cyber-background and while this is clearly the beginning of a series, it is a standalone story. While it worked better for me than Foiled and Curses Foiled Again, this feels more disposable than Larson’s earlier works.

Oops. I’ve accidentally now watched more movies this year than I’ve read books, and have been reading a bunch of graphic novels, so it isn’t even like there are chunksters slowing me down. For a while I stopped requesting DVDs from the library because the queues were so long. Now I’m back in the habit. And a habit it is, in the negative sense of the word, when my husband has to warn me to stop using his account to reserve things or he’s going to change his password.

I can’t even blame recent binges or Blu rays from Half Price Books, since none of the recent viewings are from recent used purchases. Sigh. I suppose there are worse habits to have.

Django Unchained (2012) Hyper violent, of course, it didn’t impress me as Inglourious Basterds did. Good, but overlong and unfocused. I do like the revisionist history/wishful thinking aspect that it shares with IB.

Pitch Perfect.(2012) Flawed, but charming, like a real person. Don’t have high expectations, and it’ll be fun. Geek note: I bought the soundtrack, plus Kelly Clarkson’s Greatest Hits after watching it.

Dredd (2012). This I borrowed from the library because I thought my husband would like it and I watched it too. Hyper violent, again, but with dark humor, and an intriguing villain.Like V for Vendetta, this comic-book adaptation made more sense when it was grounded in Thatcher’s England.

Clueless (1995). I was reminded of it when I saw this article on game theory. Charming and fun, but a little low on the acting quotient. Paul Rudd has come a long way.

Iron Man 3.(2013) Date night. Glad I saw it before anything got spoiled, ’cause there’s loads of stuff to spoil. But overloud, overlong, and over ’splodey. Towards the end stuff was going down and I just kept thinking, “I’m bored. This is silly. Please move the plot along.” It does set things up interestingly for the future. But I’d say see it at a matinee, though sooner is better because of spoil-i-tude.

P.S. We saw a trailer for The Lone Ranger, that has Johnny Depp playing Tonto, and in Iron Man 3, Ben Kingsley plays a character called the Mandarin. Why are white people playing non-white roles, still? Shouldn’t we have moved past this? Can’t we PLEASE move past this, and have more non-white roles in movies played by non-white actors?

I listen to the Current radio station, and my favorite of their DJs is Mary Lucia. Yesterday, she played Squeeze’s first hit single, Take Me I’m Yours, which I knew from their collection Squeeze Singles 45’s and Under. It jolted me back:

18 years old, I’m new to a stickshift, grinding the gears and riding the clutch of a cheap, noisy car. 7:45 in the morning, running late on the way to school, my best friend is in the passenger seat. Between my knees a cold Diet Coke. (This was in the days before cupholders.) In my left hand, a Marlboro Light. Squeeze Singles blaring from the tape player. We laughed. We stalled out. We cursed. And somehow we got to school.

Foiled by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro is a middle-grade graphic novel about Aliera, an introverted girl who fences who is ostensibly in high school, though she feels much younger to me. There’s a cute new guy at school who seems a little odd and when she tried to meet him at the train station, things become really odd. Aliera’s only friend is her wheelchair-bound cousin with rheumatoid arthritis. She just got a new practice weapon (NB: not a sword) that her mother picked up cheap from a Chinese woman at a tag sale. (I don’t like the Mystical Asian cliche).

My description of the book won’t flow, because my experience didn’t either. It also ends just as it’s getting good. While I know this is part of what a series does, I do feel that each volume should have a complete story, and I didn’t think this one did. So I had hopes for the sequel, Curses Foiled Again. Alas, this worked even less for me, as a big villain was revealed, whose identity, past actions, and motivations I didn’t buy at all.

The illustrations are strong. Aliera is smart and funny, but as a whole, this didn’t work for me. There’s little subtext, so it’s all on the page, and the story isn’t complex enough to fully engage me. Perhaps because I’m not the target market? My children, 7 and 9, both boys, loved them.

Was it possible to die of loneliness, Nicole wondered. She lay alone in the giant king bed, listening to the neighbors having raucous sex, and didn’t doubt it for a moment.

[this is another fragment of a bigger piece I recently unearthed, one that I thought worked as flash fiction on its own.]

Right after Julian left town, people missed him. Time passed, and they began to miss other things. One of his roommates, Adam, couldn’t find his portable CD player. Their other roommate, Jason, couldn’t find his concert T-shirts. The bookstore discovered it no longer had a copy of the Hardcover Oxford Abridged English Dictionary. A co-worker couldn’t find his favorite bong. One of his exes couldn’t find her favorite sweatshirt or U2 CD. As people talked, they began to put it together. The conclusion was unmistakable. And in the NW corner of the country, Julian was safe from reprisals.

About a month after Julian left, everyone still missed their things. But they’d pretty much stopped missing Julian.

[Found this when I was putting together a writing sample. It was part of a larger manuscript, but I wondered if it worked as flash fiction.]

Apparently there were some people out there who thought Hilary Mantel shouldn’t be on the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for fiction, fka The Orange Prize. She’s won enough, seemed to be the feeling. Let someone else have a chance.

This is funny for a few reasons. It is EXACTLY what I was thinking when Mantel was included in this year’s Tournament of Books. She won it last year, give some other books a chance. Then I was thrilled when Orphan Master’s Son won, but it proceeded to win the Pulitzer, so it’s not like it was some tiny little book that needed recognition. But I agree entirely that she should be on this shortlist, which recognizes literary excellence. And her writing is excellent, even if I don’t care for it.

This was the point made by chair of judges Miranda Richardson.

“I was very keen to keep a balanced approach about Hilary Mantel,” she said, “because we have in the UK this tall-poppy syndrome: ‘You’ve already had too much; you can’t have any more. Go away and die now.’ It’s disgusting, frankly, because this competition is about excellence for writing.”

And I read this and was like, what? Is that THE Miranda Richardson, of Blackadder and oh so much more? Or was there some other, literary Miranda Richardson.

It IS the actor.

Every year there’s a kerfuffle over the prize, since many people (including AS Byatt) think it’s sexist to have an award just for women, except that last year’s VIDA stats show us that we’re still living in a world that slights women authors. But even AS Byatt agrees that Mantel should be on the list.

via Bookslut

Through some sort of synergy, we received three small indie movies in a row from the library. Two were good, and one was great.

Bernie (2011) Jack Black manages to control and channel his usual over-the-top-ness playing an assistant funeral director/choir director in a small Texas town who befriends a cranky old woman, played hoot-inducingly by Shirley MacLaine. Matthew McConaghey is great as the smarmy but well meaning local politician, and the performances are all elevated by the surrounding chorus of small town gossips, some of whom are from the town where the movie’s story is based.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012) Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg are charming as a couple who married young but can’t quite make it in the long run. Lots of nice supporting roles for good character actors, and a story that mostly lightly treads a tough balancing act that could easily have veered into the saccharine. Quiet, a little slow, but worthwhile.

Safety Not Guaranteed Up front, I loved the movie. This definitely belongs on that Entertainment Weekly list of movies you should see that you may not have heard of. (The previous two probably do, also, but this one, most definitely.)

Aubrey Plaza plays a withdrawn character not unlike that of April Ludgate on Parks and Rec, just minus the goofiness. She’s a magazine intern who gets assigned to check out a weird classified ad that seeks a partner for time travel. She and two others from the paper meet up with the guy who may or may not be nuts, and things play out in weird, surprising, sad, and sweet ways. Again, the tone on this could have gone so wrong, and that it didn’t veer into offensively weird or saccharine sweet delighted me. SEE THIS FILM.

Yay! I thought when I got the weekly pile at the comic shop and it included the 7th graphic novel collection of Peter Gross and Mike Carey’s comic-book series The Unwritten: The Wound, about a Harry Potter-like guy who finds that truth and fiction have a very complicated relationship. The problem with these six-issue collections, though, is that this bunch of 6 issues didn’t tell a complete story. It doesn’t stand alone, and merely leaves me hoping that closure comes in volume 8. So, you should absolutely be reading The Unwritten, as it’s one of the best current series out there. But v7 didn’t satisfy on its own.

Also recommended? Brian K Vaughan’s Saga. I buy that one monthly; can’t wait for the collections.

A few months ago, my husband was reading something on his nook and kept laughing aloud. It was Caitlin (pronounced CAT lin) Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which he’d seen recommended by gonzo author Warren Ellis. Since his copy was an e-book, he got a hard copy for me (I’m a traditionalist, and yes, I’ve tried e-readers. Not my cuppa.)

Starting off, it reminded me a lot of Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened because it’s about growing up poor and weird far from a major city. While Lawson’s is a pretty straightforward memoir, Moran’s is personal stories pinned up around a theme of what she refers to as strident feminism, a term she knows will put some people off. And yet, she has two diagnostics that I thought were useful and to the point.

One, to tell if you’re a feminist:

a. do you have a vagina? and
b. do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said yes to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist. (p. 75)

Another,

how can you tell when some sexism is happening to you?

Well, in this matter, what ultimately aids us is to simply apply this question to the issue: Is this polite?

The anecdotes come fast and funny, and it’s entertaining and a good reminder of other things that I, at least, sometimes forget. On underwear:

I’m pro big undies. Strident feminisms NEEDS big undies…there is scarcely a woman in Britain wearing a pair of underpants that actually fit her. Instead of having something that sensibly and reassuringly contains both the buttocks–what I would call a good pair of undies–they’re wearing little more than gluteal accessories, or arse-trinkets. (91-2)

On high heels:

“But, bafflingly, we totally accept the uselessness of heels. We accept it limply, shrugging. We are indifferent to the thousands of pounds we spend over a lifetime on shoes we only wear once, and in great pain. (196)

On bras:

“a good bra can be one of the greatest aids a woman will ever know.” (95)

(The only kind of bras she burns are the ones that don’t fit properly.)

There is also a very thoughtful and thought-provoking chapter near the end on a topic so touchy that most wouldn’t touch it, but Moran does, politely, I thought.

BUT. Here come the but’s. Somewhere around the middle of the book, when the childhood anecdotes stopped and the book became more straightforwardly a treatise on feminism, I became less engaged. Moran made huge sweepting statements and didn’t qualify them, e.g., How to Be a Woman, right up front there in the title. Nowhere does she qualify her position as a non-poor white woman. See also:

“Even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female–citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra–can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years. Come on–let’s admit it.” (131)

Um, no. No. I will not admit that.

Also, she draws a polar distinction between burlesque, saying that it lets “the power balance rest with the person taking her clothes off”, as opposed to strip clubs, which she finds indefensible. I don’t quite buy either extreme of her argument.

She offers two chapters: Why You Should Have Children and Why You Shouldn’t Have Children. But while it seems balanced that she included the latter, her romantic waxing on motherhood tip the scales toward the former. Additionally, this was one of many instances in which she used “you” rather than “me” and I found the slippage into second person grating, as when she keeps using “you” in the chapter about naming her vagina and breasts, which is not something I ever did or worried much about. And I was bothered by her use of “you” in the chapter on abortion. She probably did it as a way to draw in the reader and encourage empathy, but it came off to me as distancing herself from her own story.

In the end, the amusing anecdotes and helpful reminders were not enough to win me over. I spent some time reading reviews at Goodreads, and there are almost no three star reviews–they tend to 1/2 hate or 4/5 love. I would give this book 3 stars. Some good stuff, some not good stuff. Context and qualificaiton would have made a huge difference to me. Enough good stuff for a qualified recommendation, but that’s it.

It took me a little while to finally meet Nick Drake’s song “Pink Moon” properly. Our relationship started with a case of mistaken identity.

Many years ago, there was a Volkswagen commercial that had a song I really liked. The next time I was CD shopping (something my husband and I used to do, in those Double Income No Kid days) I saw a CD with a starry blue cover and a sticker that said it contained music featured in a Volkswagen commercial.

I listened to the CD on the ride home, but was disappointed. Nothing on this new Hooverphonic CD sounded as good as the song I remembered. Maybe I just need to listen to it more, I thought. Listening more made things worse. The discrepancy between the haunting melody in my memory and that album only grew. What a whiny, boring album, I thought. Alas, my husband really liked it, and played it often. To this day the opening moans of that album send me lunging for the off button.

Some months later, knocked up with my first child and browsing my comic shop, I heard the strains of THAT song. The original song. The song I wanted. The song I thought I’d found in Hooverphonic, but had not. I rushed to the counter.

“Who sings this song?” I demanded.

My friend the Big Brain looked at me as if he were sorry that I did not know the answer. He looked at me a lot like that back then because I didn’t know much about music or film. He had good recommendations for me in both areas that were the building blocks of some of my favorites today. Interestingly, though, he was less helpful with comics advice. Except for Hicksville. And Goodbye Chunky Rice.

“It’s Nick Drake. He’s dead.”

“Can I borrow it?”

Not only did he let me borrow it, he let me borrow the other CDs that came in the really cool limited set he had. I took them home and listened to them over and over. Unlike with Hooverphonic, repeat listening only endeared them to me more. Months later, as I was packing my pregnancy bag for the hospital, those CDs were one of the first things in the bag. I imagined giving birth listening to the calming strains of poor-dead Nick Drake’s voice. And then I put a whole bunch more stupid sh1t in the bag, like the video of Pride and Prejudice, about twenty other CDs, makeup, makeup remover that I’d made a special trip to the store to buy a travel size of, and a pretty nightgown.

Out of all that, the only useful item was the Pink Moon cd. Nothing went according to how I imagined it. The classes said that water breaking first was a dramatic fib perpetuated by Hollywood. My water broke first. At midnight. After I’d just fallen asleep after an exhausting day. I spent the next twelve hours having irregular contractions that made me throw up anything I put in my mouth. Even melted ice cubes came back up. Finally the hospital grudgingly agreed it was time for me to come in. I was still leaking a little, so we put a black trashbag over the back seat of the car. I got in, but had a hard time sitting upright. My husband knew that Pink Moon made me feel better, so he put that in. After the song finished he asked if I wanted to listen to something else.

“Pink Moon!” I called out, desperate, like it was a life raft I was hanging onto. “Pink Moon!”

The bat$hit crazy edge to my voice was in direct contrast to the soothing sound of the song. My husband wisely snatched his hand away from the controls, letting the CD play on.

Long story short: long labor with healthy baby boy. Gave up playing music after the first couple Nick Drake ones. Figured out it was ridiculous to think that I’d be in labor and up for a video, as if I were home, sick in bed. Never wore the nightgown. If I was going to gush messily all over the place, I was happy to do it in hospital supply. Touched neither the makeup or the remover and was suitably embarrassed for having thought I might.

Those Nick Drake cds, especially Pink Moon, were about the only useful thing I took to the hospital. Every time I hear Pink Moon on the radio, I hear my own voice in my head, screech-moaning, “Pink Moon! Pink Moon!” in a violent tone that does not match the song at all. It’s not a bad memory, though, in fact it makes me laugh.

With the annoying announcement that Google Reader is going away, I’m trying to break up with it before it breaks up with me. I’ve whittled my list of “must-read” feeds to a baker’s dozen. We’ll see if this helps with my time management and distraction issues as I move closer to the timesucks of a big writing deadline and a school fundraiser that I’m helping with.

My husband and I have been buying far too many Blu rays. Shameful, really. There’s no way we can watch them as fast as we buy them. Like books, our appetite exceeds our capacity.

I lamented that we’d had some duds after doing an enjoyable run of B movies. Then Admission disappointed. Things do seem to be on the upswing, though.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Directed by a woman, with a strong woman main character. Too long, but worthwhile.

Blood Simple. The Coen Brothers first movie, and still just so, so good. Part of the Coen Bros Blu ray set I got my husband for his birthday.

Raising Arizona. No sophomore slump for the Coen Brothers here. Interestingly, I’d never had the white hot love for this movie that others did, but I thoroughly enjoyed it this time. “Son, you’ve got a panty on your head.” Hilarious, yet touching.

Harry Potter 5 The Order of the Phoenix. With the boys. Great work by Imelda Taunton and fun to see the kids grow up with each movie. A good enough adaptation of a too-long book.

Looper. Hard to follow because of its timey-wimey wibbly wobbly-ness. A decent action movie with some great bits and ideas, and a surprise big plot twist toward the end. Joseph Gordon Levitt is great per usual, Bruce Willis is good as a bad guy, Emily Blunt’s American accept is faultless. Some nice nods to Terminator, but that’s still the gold standard of time travel action flicks. My expectations were too high, and I found the movie’s take on time travel hard to follow–it chooses alternate timelines rather than a linear one.

Nobody Else but You. French noir murder mystery. An enjoyable and visually impressive riff on the Marilyn myth.

The men of Bravo are not cold. It’s a chilly and windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar. Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby, where overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampolined right down the middle of his hangover. (1)

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books. Though it went down early, the fans of it were ardent enough to make me still want to read it. And oh, I loved this book.

Billy Lynn is one of a handful of soldiers who survived a brutal and famous skirmish in Iraq. They’re brought back to America for a “victory” tour, which ends with the Thanksgiving football game just before they’re supposed to ship back out.

Billy is such a sympathetic narrator, and one who skewers the ironies of war and yet is somehow compassionate. One of the last war books I read I can barely remember. This, though, is going to stay with me.

I am one of the few people who didn’t love Wolf Hall. I found the story boring and the use of ambiguous ‘he’ pronouns annoying. Does this reaction make me a philistine? Perhaps. So I was understandably reluctant to approach the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Trusted friends like Amy and Kate assured me it was better than the original. Nonetheless, I put it off over all the other Tournament of Books contenders that I wanted to read. Left it for dead last.

I liked the opening. There’s some gorgeous writing. Henry the VIII’s court should be fascinating. Yet I found this book far too easy to put down. I told myself I’d give it 50 pages, yet when I got to 45, I couldn’t even see the point of forcing down those last five pages. It was non-compelling for me, and still with deliberately awkward use of ‘he.’ I read so many ToB books this year that I just loved and raced through; this one left me cold. I returned it unread, and am on to the next book. Life’s too short.

I finished Bleak House, y’all! Thanks mostly to my friend Amy at New Century Reading, who did a readalong where we did one of the serialized chunks a week, so it took us 20 weeks. I really enjoyed having a longer reading project alongside the books I read one at a time, and looked forward to reading my 40 or so pages of Bleak House every week on Sunday. I think I’m going to try to keep up the habit of one big reading project for books that I continually don’t feel I have the gumption to finish in one sitting. I’ll be doing Brothers Karamazov this summer with one of my book groups, but some other candidates are the short story collections of Alice Munro and Angela Carter, or other Dickens books.

Bleak House is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Sprawling with both funny and sad parts, a huge cast of characters (rather too many of whom die, in my opinion, yet it IS called Bleak House, so not like I wasn’t warned). Esther Summerson is our main character, a young woman told since she was young that she’s tainted with the sin of her illegitimate birth. At first, Esther seems too kind, too nice, but she becomes more complex and interesting over the course of the book, especially as we’re slowly shown that she’s not exactly a reliable narrator.

This book has something for everyone. Romance, mystery, tragedy, lost love, murder, humor, social commentary and I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I had only a few minor concerns by the end–the over-romantic portrait of the domestic angel accompanied strangely by the condescension of others for Esther in this role, and the lonely end for one of my favorite characters, Mr. George.

Fair warning: do NOT read a character list as you go, or follow links. Spoilers abound, and there are some good ones in here.

I thought Building Stories by Chris Ware was going to be one of the books I skipped in this year’s Tournament of Books. I don’t care for Ware’s precise and ultra-iconic art style, and no matter how many times I tried to read Jimmy Corrigan, I couldn’t get into it. Ware seemed like one of those chilly, distant writers who disdain their subjects. Also, it costs $50 retail. It comes shrink wrapped, and so couldn’t be tried before the buy. When I did finally ask about it at my comic shop, they were out of stock and it was between printings. But then trusted friends like Amy and Kate said it was worthwhile, and I was in a socialist bookstore where they had it back in stock, so I took the leap.

There are 14 elements in the box, in book, strip, newspaper, and other forms. The main character is perhaps a young woman, since most of the stories center on her and her life from childhood to old age. But the conceit is that the brownstone building she lives in as a young woman tells some of the stories, so we also see into the lives of others in the building, and even into some of the local bees. It’s clever and engaging, and its also spookily insightful at times, with the main character sometimes saying things that are true but so ugly that most don’t even write them into journals. There were complex interesting women in this story and their lives were treated with compassion and respect. So while Ware’s style is chilly and distant, his storytelling was not.

Many of the commenters at the ToB advised against ending with the Bee book (NB not the Bee newspaper, but the book; they’re different.) That was good advice. I read it early, and found it amusing. Some readers speculated that there is an advised order of reading printed on the back of the box. I don’t think this is so–there’s a diagram showing where such items appear in the brownstone, but no order, which I think is the point. You can peek into and slip out of these lives, the stories go back and forward in time, there’s no exact beginning and end.

I would have preferred if the contents of the stories would have match the form of the object–like one of the old woman’s letters, the journal of the young woman, a children’s book that told the bee story. As it was, with its seemingly random pairing of story and object, this felt more to me like a “look at me, look at me, look at me now!” trick. And it IS worth looking at, and spending time with. But I was fatigued as I approached the end, and was glad to be done with it. My eyes were burning and tired from the tiny type, even though I have bifocals AND used a magnifying glass. (which would have been a useful addition to the box.) The $50 price tag is steep for a book, though perhaps just a fraction of what such an art object is worth. It does smack of white elitism to me. One of the judges enraged the commenters by belittling the work, but I did like this:

its elaborate packaging allows the thing to double as an oversized merit badge of taste and sensitivity to be displayed on the coffee tables of the McSweeney’s set.

Worthwhile, and I own it, so anyone who wants to borrow it can.

A selection for this year’s Tournament of Books, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was so hard to find for free/cheap that I chose to rent it from the library for $.25 a day. Even then it was hard to find a rental copy. But once started, it sucked me in and pulled me along like a riptide till I closed the book, very satisfied.

It’s told in alternating viewpoints and alternating times, yet was easy to follow. There’s a film exec, his young assistant, an aspiring screenwriter, an old Italian man who met a movie star in his youth, and that’s just in the beginning. This is a romance, Hollywood history, and mystery. The relationship between the young woman and the movie exec reminded me a great deal of Sasha and Benny in A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s well written escapism. Loved it. Not as much as Orphan Master’s Son, but still, a lot.

I’m 45. I wondered recently if because my Granny is almost 99, if this didn’t make me less than middle aged. Alas, it was a joke, and I’m recently butting up against trying to dress my aging self. I’m thinking wistfully of the time my yoga instructor said to me, “Your abs look aMAzing!”

To which I responded, “Not for long, I’m 6 weeks pregnant.” And that was the last we saw of my flat belly, though I suppose I should take some consolation that it went out at the top of its game.

Now, though, it’s a definite bulge, and my current challenge is that I can’t find a clothing layer that covers both my belly and my boobs. If it’s long enough at the bottom, it’s plunging, often below the edge of my bra at the top. If it covers my (admittedly scanty) cleavage (aka Cleave-land) then it hits about my belly button.

So I’m desperately seeking something–a tank, a camisole–that can meet both needs. I have one Bordeaux top that a friend gave me that does pretty well, though new ones are price-y (or spendy as we say here in MN) at $55. I picked up some Alfani camis (no longer available on their site) from the Macy’s sale rack shopping with my sister last week.

I also ordered a couple things online, and was reminded of the problem with online purchases–easy to buy, hard to return. So I think I’m back to shopping in person. And yet, shopping isn’t exactly the best use of my time. Sigh.

But my prey is elusive, and I suspect this is EXACTLY the kind of silly quest that distracts me from things I really should be doing, like writing, some volunteer work at the boys’ school, exercising, and cleaning house. I do so love silly quests.