Girl Detective

Revival, Vol. 1: You’re Among Friends by Tim Seeley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Found myself wanting to like this more than I did. I found some clumsy visual storytelling like an text dump on a spread, and multiple characters who look too like others.

Everything reminded me of something else, so nothing felt fresh or original. Newscaster reminded me of Cersei from Game of Thrones. Main character reminded me of something by Rucka (forget which title: Stumptown?) Art and main character design reminded me of Whiteout. CDC guy reminded me of Sayeed from Lost.

Yet it says noir right on the cover, and part of noir is its embracing of tropes. In my experience, a critique of a noir work that says it’s cliche misses the point, and yet that’s what I felt after reading this. Am I missing the point? Not in the mood for noir?

It has an intro by Jeff Lemire who writes Sweet Tooth, which I love, so I feel I should love it by the transitive property. Not sure whether I’ll continue with this series.

BUT, props for the Dessa and Rhymesayers poster in one character’s dorm room!

View all my reviews

From “Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens,” (hat tip friend V)

Any list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

Numbers aren’t everything, but I find it interesting to ponder that Austen and Scott–reductively romance and adventure, hers and his–come out, literary DNA-wise, as the progenitors.

Also, how awkward is the punctuation of the article’s title, given the NYT choice not to use the Oxford comma? Perhaps only we copyeditors (copy editors?) would care or notice.

File under the heading “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”:

For one of my three book groups, I picked an author, rather than one book to read, so we’re having a sort of literary Colson Whitehead potluck where people could read Intuitionist, John Henry Days, or Zone One. But, as the moderator, that meant I had to read all 3 in the month before the Morning News Tournament of Books, which I’m much rather be reading nerdishly for.

John Henry Days centers on a freelance journalist, J Sutter, who goes to cover an event celebrating the legend. We’re told early on there’s a murder, and then the book hops here and there (rather in the manner that a legend accretes) telling J’s and John Henry’s and the ballad’s stories.

John Henry Days is a bigger and much more ambitious book than The Intuitionist. Interestingly, I preferred the latter. this one was a bit too big, sprawled a bit too much, and I felt like Whitehead and his editor were too reluctant to kill his darlings (edit out precious but unnecessary sentences). From Jonathan Franzen’s review at the New York Times “Freeloading Man“:

Unfortunately, in his pursuit of the exhaustive, Whitehead also serves up …half a dozen other interludes that read, at times, like the work of somebody getting $2 a word.

If Franzen says you’re too wordy, that’s something to pay attention to.

But, Franzen also says that just when you are frustrated you stumble across a sentence or passage or chapter that draws you back in, despite the rambling and un-urgent narrative. I found this absolutely true.

Impressive, often entertaining (one bit about air quotes will stay with me for life), but a little too wordy, and a little too cerebral and lacking in emotion, for me to urge it on all and sundry.

I’m not sure I can recall the last time (ever?) I got my inbox to zero. My feed reader, yes. Trying to practice new habits, I saw Inbox Zero for Life.

Doable? I don’t know. Has my smart phone made my bad email management worse? Don’t know.

I’ve been whittling away at the inbox today, and am down about 75. Only 850 to go…

Wonder if I can get to zero.

An Open Letter to Kitchenaid Customer Service:

Interestingly and frustratingly, but sadly not surprisingly, I have visited your website and am unable to complete the customer feedback because I cannot access the columns–you have a faulty website with a limited Flash program that doesn’t accept input from our browser.

Also, you don’t list an address so I can send a physical letter.

And when I called to get an address, I was told by the electronic voice that I’d have to wait over ten minutes to talk to a real person. Also, I wasn’t given an option of customer feedback, just service or parts.

APPARENTLY, YOU DON’T WANT TO RECEIVE CUSTOMER FEEDBACK. I HAVE NO DOUBT WHY. KITCHENAID, YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE, LIKE YOUR PRODUCTS, STINKS.

I have recently received two solicitations for an extended service plan for our Kitchenaid dishwasher, purchased at Warner Stellian in February 2006. The dishwasher is the worst appliance we have ever had the misfortune to own, and your brazen solicitations for us to pour good money after bad on the dishwasher in general, and Kitchenaid in particular, only add insult to the considerable injury we have endured over the years as we’ve muddled through with this substandard, poorly made machine waiting for it to die.

The machine broke down for the first time in February 2007. We thought we’d be covered by the warranty and were surprised and upset to find the warranty had been for a mere six months, which hardly shows company confidence in your products. The door mechanism had failed, and the chopper was clogged. The technician fixed both problems, and told me the door was an ongoing issue. I did my own research and found significant online evidence (just 2 examples: here and here) that the door attachment was weak and faulty. A more conscientious company would have notified all customers and replaced its shoddy work for free. Instead, we like many others, had to pay about $300 soon after we bought the machine to fix something that wasn’t made right in the first place.

A few months later, our control panel froze again. We called a technician, who came, told us the clogged chopper was an ongoing problem with the Kitchenaids, and showed me how to reset the panel and take the machine apart so I wouldn’t have to call for service everytime. He did not have to do this, and I am still grateful that he had the decency and good customer sense to do this. It is only this that has allowed us to trudge on over the years with the dishwasher, as the machine clogs at least once a month and I have to take it entirely apart to clear it out. This is yet another ongoing problem with the machine that could have been avoided by better engineering early on, but then at least mitigated later on by including how to reset the panel and take apart the machine in the user manual, rather than trying to hide that information with technicians who charge about $200 a visit.

This second visit meant we’d paid over $500 on top of the original price, all within 18 months of purchase. I determined that if another service call was ever warranted, that we’d buy a new, non-Kitchenaid dishwasher, one from a company with a good performance and excellent customer service record.

And while the door has not detached from the machine again, it has not performed well, either. It frequently pops open during a cycle, an unpleasant surprise to discover in the morning, and a waste of water as the cycle runs again. We’ve learned to hack this by wedging it shut with a chair and our cast-iron pan to weight it down. It seems to me this is an extreme solution to something so basic as KEEPING THE DOOR CLOSED.

The front basket accessory unravelled at the bottom, but we chose not to spend more money on the dishwasher. Ditto one of the brackets on the top shelf.

In order to keep the chopper clear, we had to scrupulously rinse dishes of food particles, plus carefully arrange dishes in the machine. This machine was extremely fussy and require a great deal of practice and attention in order to function. Even so, it often didn’t clean dishes thoroughly.

I contacted Kitchenaid customer service to detail the bad experiences we’d had with our machine. I was told it was out of warranty, and that they’d be happy to arrange another service call for me that I could pay for.

There is plentiful documentation online that many others had similar troubles. For me and for others, your company had NOT responded to repeated requests to stand by their malfunctioning product by fixing or replacing shoddy items.

The guts of the Kitchenaid DW. You need to remove them ALL to get to the clog.

For better or worse, I’ve been able to keep the machine going for almost 7 years since I learned to reset and clean it out myself. But the clogs have been getting more and more frequent, so I think the machine is near the time when I’ll kick it to the curb and tell it not to let the door hit it in the rear on its way out. I don’t appreciate spending hundreds more dollars on replacing an appliance I’d hoped would last for many years, not limping through seven. But I very much look forward to a non-Kitchenaid dishwasher.

Interestingly, and not coincidentally, over these years I’ve accumulated what I call the Kitchenaid Graveyard of other Kitchenaid kitchen implements that have failed. I will attach a photo, and will attach the photo to this letter that I’ll post online to my website, to Facebook. I will additionally follow up to review these items accordingly on major retailing sites so that other consumers might avoid the expense of these readily breaking down items:

The Kitchenaid graveyard of broken items. Cheese slicer and grater not shown.

Blender 1: glass container cracked, lid had faulty liner
Blender 2: plastic container cracked
ice cream scoop: squeeze mechanism broke, and scoop wouldn’t release without it
basting brush: filaments bent and would no longer evenly distribute sauce
cheese slicer (not pictured): wire broke immediately
Cheese grater: rubber ring base ripped; plastic casing and base both cracked

It took some years, but I finally learned my lesson and stopped buying Kitchenaid. I had a false sense of a reliable brand given my ONE good experience, which was with the mixer I bought at Bloomingdale’s at King of Prussia mall in the early 90’s. It still works well over twenty years later, even though it’s the lower end 4.5 quart size. But if it ever does break, I doubt I’d replace it with a modern Kitchenaid, given the subsequent product debacles I’ve endured over the years.

My advice to you:

Reduce advertising and spend that money and attention on engineering and customer service, which are severely lacking in products both large and small.

Extend your warranty yourself–make it two years, and when an issue like the dishwasher door becomes evident, replace the items at no cost to the consumer. Stand by your products, and not by sending out extended warranty solicitations way after the fact like you’re doing us some favor.

And, if you’d really like to stand up for your products, replace our Kitchenaid Dishwasher model KUDS01FLWH7 which has been a constant disappointment with a new one, and if it holds up, I’ll write positive reviews.

But until and unless you make a definitive statement like replacing our limping dishwasher, I will keep this letter posted on the web, and post detailed, negative reviews of your faulty products based on my experiences.

I am your sincerely disappointed, irritated and now aggravated by your recent solicitations,

Unhappy Kitchenaid Dupe

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, a selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books, is exactly the kind of book I’ve come to hope for from the tournament. I’d heard that it was good, but not until I read it myself, and it reached out and dragged me into it for 440 odd pages, did I appreciate HOW good, or how glad I am to have this book in my life now.

A boy in North Korea, who is NOT an orphan as he defensively tells people throughout his life, grows up and has improbable adventures with unbelievable coincidences. Horrible and wondrous things happen. It’s like a Dickens story set in a communist state, the details of which are so insane it reads like satire, but probably isn’t. Especially in the second half of the book, point of view and time switch suddenly and often, yet I didn’t have trouble following the narrative. This reminded me of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, except without the bat$hit crazy magic stuff. Kim Jong Il = bat$hit crazy all by himself, no magic needed. I loved this book, and highly recommend it.

I have of late been on a B-movie bender. And oh, how it has helped keep up my mirth in the short, dark days of winter. (Or, winter as it is now, which is hardly anything, even here in MN, which is still short and dark, if not that cold or snowy.)

In years past, I’ve gone on Oscar-nominee benders, seeing movies like Capote, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men. This year, for now, I have no taste for the deep and meaningful award-winning movie. Flight, about a plane crash? The Master, about a delusional cult-starter? Lincoln, a Spielberg Important Film? The Impossible, about a tsunami? No, thank you.

(I do still plan to see Zero Dark Thirty because: Jessica Chastain, Kathryn Bigelow, and Chris Pratt.)

Of this year’s Oscar contenders, I have seen The Silver Linings Playbook, which I enjoyed (as I had the book it was based on) Argo and Les Mis, all of which were crowd-pleasing but Silver Linings is the only one I’d recommend highly. The other two were overtly emotionally manipulative; I could feel the buttons being pushed and the puppet-strings being pulled.

When I look back over the movies and DVDs I watched in 2012, I can see the same pattern of enjoying B movies, but being disappointed in so-called Important ones. Will it last? I don’t know. Is it that the Important Movies don’t look good enough to justify the pain they portray? Or am I just looking for a balance between Complex and Involving/Engaging (e.g., Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker), and if I have to choose between Important and Entertaining, I’ll take the latter.

In December/January, Friday Night Lights sent me on something of a Taylor Kitsch (Riggins!) bender, which I then followed with a Channing Tatum bender, and accidentally (but happily) wound up with a Fass-bender. (Sorry).

Have I become a stereotypical cougar in my 40’s, ogling pretty boys young enough to be my son? Um, perhaps. (Wait, no! I looked up Kitsch, Tatum and Fassbender, and while they’re younger than me, they’re not young enough to be my sons! Woot!)

Friday Night Lights Seasons 3 to 5. My sister and I watched this in tandem so we could phone and email. I loved, loved, loved this series, and its portrayal of a loving, complicated, supportive marriage. I don’t like Texas or football particularly, but I adored this series. Also, Wire alums: Wallace! D’Angelo! So glad to see you guys again!

Savages. I loved the gonzo, over-the-top violent book, and figured the adaptation directed by Oliver Stone would either be a perfect match, or a clustercuss. I choose perfect match, though critics didn’t like it. I thought it was visually arresting, and kind of a blast. Caveat: choose the rated, not the unrated version. It’s Oliver Stone, and the unrated version had me looking at the ceiling a lot till my husband told me it was OK to look back at the screen. Benicio went over the top with scene chewing, but I thought Salma, Travolta, and Taylor Kitsch did some great work.

John Carter. Not as bad as I’d feared, with really impressive effects. Fun to watch. Reminded me strongly of the original Star Wars, and I think my two boys, 7 and 9 years old, would really enjoy it as a sci-fi epic. It might seem derivative but only because it was what everything since has been based on.

Battleship. Swear to you, I was doubtful, but this is a fun movie that will occasionally surprise you (its inclusion of real military vets). If you were a fan of FNL, then it’s directed by Peter Berg and has both Riggins and Landry, and a terrific funny long opening scene. Rihanna shouldn’t quit her day job.

Haywire. I will watch anything that Steven Soderbergh directs. It may not be great, but it WILL be interesting. This one about a female assassin was involving to watch, then the extras elevated it. The star is a real-life mixed-martial-arts champion, and is impressive to watch fight, though her acting skills weren’t enough to really carry the movie. Channing Tatum (whose Magic Mike can be seen as a companion to this, for messing up the gaze and who we cheer for and what we want for them) was solid, plus, Michael Fassbender! Love him. For the fight scenes alone, this worked for me.

Step Up. OK, bear with me here. I saw this mentioned in Entertainment Weekly as part of a reminder that Wire alums were in it. This one had Deirdre Lovejoy as a mom. It’s Romeo-and-Juliet-ish, though it took that analogy a little too far in its final 30 minutes. My husband G. Grod and I watched the first hour and he agreed that it was decent, and it’s fun to watch Channing Tatum dance, and in some scenes, pretend like he can’t dance. But when we watched the last 30 minutes the next night, we were groaning. So, the first hour and the dancing, thumbs up. Plot developments toward the end? I can only shake my head.

X-Men First Class. My husband swore it wasn’t that bad and since I’d made him watch Step Up, this only seemed fair. And again, this was a perfectly good, entertaining B movie! Kevin Bacon seems to sink his teeth into evil, McAvoy can’t quite cover up his Scottish accent the whole time, January Jones can’t act but looks pretty, while Jennifer Lawrence does both, and, again, FASSBENDER! A few nice, geeky cameos, too.

I’m not sure if our B-bender is going to continue, but it’s been nice to lower my standards, and embiggen my enjoyment.

I’m having one of those days where I can’t find things. Couldn’t find the charger for one of our gadgets, and then couldn’t find my copy of The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead so I could pull a segment out to show you how much trippy fun his prose is.

Tellingly, my first thought was, “huh, must be one of those days, stars out of alignment and what not.”

When really, the correct response is “this house is an effing pit, and I really need to stop being so sluttish about the housewifery. (NB “sluttish” used in the English, not American sense.)

The Intuitionist was Whitehead’s first novel, and it’s a mind-bending work. Lila Mae Watson is the first black female elevator inspector, in an alternate reality where elevators are really important, and racism is overt.

“Lila Mae Watson,” she says. “I’ve come to inspect your elevator.”

The man’s lips arch up toward his nose and Lila Mae understands that he’s never seen an elevator inspector like her before….He doesn’t like her. “Let me see your badge,” the man says, but Lila Mae’s hand is already fishing in her jacket pocket. She flips open her identification and holds it up to the man’s face. He doesn’t bother to look at it. He just asked for effect.

The hallway sells of burning animal fat and obscure gravies boiling to slag. (4, 5)

(As you can see, I found my copy. It was hiding under some of the boy’s school papers right next to my desk.)

Elevator inspectors come in two flavors: Intuitionists, who sense what’s wrong with the elevator by trying it separate it from its “elevator-ness”; and Empiricists, who crunch numbers. When Lila Mae is implicated in an accident, these two groups scramble to place the blame in the other groups’ camp, all while some noir-ish mystery plays out with kidnapping, torture, hired goons, and alluring strangers.

As a story, it’s compulsively readable, but its also about race, change, and potentially all sorts of other things. I continue to ruminate on it after I finished. Engaging and thought provoking, my favorite combination.

I read comic books, but not generally superhero ones. It has probably been about fifteen years since anyone at the comic shop said to me, “Hey, you should check out Wonder Woman.” But a friend recently said I might like the new story line, which centered on the Greek gods. I recently enjoyed spending time in ancient Greece when I read The Song of Achilles. Then I saw the striking art by Cliff Chiang on the cover of the collection of the series’ reboot, Wonder Woman: Blood, and I thought it might be time to try again. I’m glad I did.

As part of DC Comics’ reboot, many of the series regulars have aspects old and new, so it’s a good time to start reading. I’m familiar with the Wonder Woman story, having seen all 3 movies (the Cathy Lee Crosby one and both Lynda Carter ones) when I was a girl and watched the ongoing series with Lynda Carter.

In this new take on the character, Zeus is missing, other gods are jostling for the throne, and Diana learns some shocking news about her origin while taking on the protection of a young woman who Hera is trying to kill. This collection is of the first 6 issues. I really like Chiang’s art, and his strong, distinct portrayals of characters, and will snap up the next graphic novel as soon as it comes out.

A selection for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia was a surprise to me. Going in, I thought it was a dystopian-future YA novel. Imagine my surprise, then, to find it set in a 70’s commune in upstate New York. Because I didn’t expect it, the book felt utterly surprising to me. Written in short, lyrical bursts, it engaged me from start to finish.

I devoured it in a few days, and am hesitant to say more about it, so that you might enter without baggage as well. What I will say is that I loved reading it, and it was full of characters who I loved and cared about. An early section is narrated by a small child, but was not irritating to me as was Emma Donoghue’s Room. The time frame reminded me of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad.

Fair warning: the end of the book centers around a character’s parent dying. I have many friends who lost a parent recently, and this last section might be excruciating to someone still grieving such a loss.

Les Miserables was a long book full of thrills, snores, tears and laughter. This was one passage that made me smirk:

Wedding customs in 1833 were not what they are today. France had not yet borrowed from England the supreme refinement of abducting the bride, carrying her off from the church as though ashamed of her happiness like an escaping bankrupt or like rape in the manner of the Song of Songs. The chastity and propriety of whisking one’s paradise into a post-chaise to consummate it in a tavern-bed at so much a night, mingling the most sacred of life’s memories with a hired driver and tavern serving maids, was not yet understood in France.

Zing!

HEY, Y’ALL! I FINISHED ALL 1231 PAGES OF LES MISERABLES!

Before I read this book, I didn’t believe in abridgements of books. Now I do. Seriously, this book begs to be abridged. The edition I read was lightly abridged, and it was still overly long, with stultifying digressions and redundancies, even aside from the two (on cloisters and argot) that Denny, the translator of this edition, chose to put as endnotes. Long chapters that digressed away from the story, on related things like the Paris sewers, were almost always slogs that sometimes defied this reader’s will to keep going. If you are going to read this book, I recommend that you skip digressions. You can tell which they are because they don’t have the main characters. I believe you will lose little or nothing. Perhaps this is me being a cretin or a lowly literate reader, but I stand by this advice.

If the book were only the story of Jean Valjean, Marius , Cosette, Fantine, Javert, Eponnine, the Thenardiers and Gavroche, then this would be a whopping good tale. See the success of the musical as proof. Interestingly, I found the book to have a much more involving and satisfying end than did the 2012 film adaptation, and I was amazed that near the end, after so many pages, I sped up to a gobbling pace.

A word about the particular edition, the lovely Penguin Hardback Classic with the red cardinals. Many of those cardinals disappeared over the course of the reading in little flakes of red paint. These Hardback Classic editions are lovely objects (I have several), but alas, do not stand up well to actual reading. The Penguin trade paperback version is one of the only film tie-in covers I don’t find offensive, plus it would have been easier to schlep around for the many weeks I was reading. For portability and true unabridged-ness, I tried the Signet mass-market edition edited by Fahnestock and Macafee, but switched to the Denny HC because it was pretty, because the MMPB print was too small for my aging eyes, even with bifocals, and because the translation to me felt stiff.

Finder is one of the longest running independent comics out there. Hard to describe, creator Carla Speed McNeil once copped to “aboriginal sci-fi,” and that works as well as anything.

The “through” character, even if he’s often just in the background, is Jaeger, half-aborigine, and thus shunned by all. He can play civilized, but prefers the wild, and this combination seems to drive women wild, though he’s honest and doesn’t pretend he’ll ever settle down. This is a sexually explicit series, so if that makes you uncomfortable, it probably isn’t for you.

Four stories are contained in Finder Library v. 2: Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, The Rescuers, and Five Crazy Women. There’s a mix of high-low, funny-tragic throughout the book. Dream Sequence and The Rescuers are mostly tragic, while Mystery Date and Five Crazy Women are mostly comedy. McNeil’s black and white art is accessible, but nuanced. These stories bear fruit on re-reading, and the end notes in this collection are worth checking out.

In brief, to avoid spoilers:

Dream Sequence: a popular virtual world is invaded by a predator.
Mystery Date: a student of anthropology and prostitution tries to figure out her mysterious new professor
The Rescuers: the baby of a privileged family is kidnapped, and the story interwoven with the tribe of aborigines camping in the area.
Five Crazy Women: Jaeger gets (and deserves) no sympathy from a long-time friend as he pours out some of his checkered past with women.

If you haven’t checked out or heard of Finder before, look for the collection Talisman, and if you like that, seek out the two library collections for the entire series. For ongoing new stuff, check out McNeil’s website.

For those of you familiar with this series and with Friday Night Lights, I have a theory: Jaeger = grown-up, alterna Tim Riggins.

A selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (no question mark, which I find strange) by Maria Semple had been on my radar for a while, recommended in reviews and by friends. Semple’s background includes a stint as writer on Arrested Development, and the book is similar in its same snarky, frantic style. It does, though, have a beating heart that’s perhaps more akin to something from Modern Family.

The novel is made up of a hodgepodge of letters, reports, receipts and articles, tied together with the memories of Bee Branch, an 8th grader at a private school in Seattle. Bee’s mother is the Bernadette of the title, who disappears two days before Christmas, and the novel starts in the month leading up to it. Bee’s father in an executive at Microsoft, and the family is planning a trip to Antarctica, a present for Bee for her all-A grades.

Though the story is often about Bee’s search for Bernadette, it’s the woman herself who is the bright, shining star of the novel. Bernadette is a bundle of crazy, having had a series of disappointments and difficulties both personally and professionally. But watching her navigate her fear of the impending trip abroad and the people around her is a blast. She’s smart, complicated and interesting, just like the book, which I devoured in two days. Fair disclosure: I was also avoiding a deadline and cleaning the house, but still, this book was wildly engaging and entertaining. The ending was abrupt, so I wished for a bit more closure, but like Bee in the book, I’ll take what I can get when a book is this flat-out fun to read.

A selection in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, I’m not even sure if Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles was on my radar. I’ve read none of this year’s selections, though many have been highly recommended by friends. But this one I knew almost nothing about, and it’s this kind of reading experience that makes following the Tournament of Books (ToB) such a delight to this geeky reader.

The novel is narrated by Patroclus, who you might remember from Greek myths and the Iliad as Achilles’ best friend. Miller richly imagines the details of their boyhood, and how they came to be immortalized in Homer’s epic. I read the Iliad in my first year of college, in a literature course. It was one of just three books we read. We started with the Iliad, then War and Peace, then Hemingway’s In Our Time. In high school, I skipped reading the books I was assigned, and managed to pull off good grades anyway. In college, though, in that class, I felt the challenge of a semester devoted to just three books, and I read them all. And details of them all remain, these twenty six years later. So I knew how the story would end, but it didn’t diminish by one jot the urgency with which I read this story, consuming it quickly while still appreciating the backstory Miller was detailing, and the lovely prose she used to do it.

Divine blood flows differently in each god-born child. Orpheus’ voice made the trees weep, Heracles could kill a man by clapping him on the back. Achilles’ miracle was his speed. His spear, as he began his first pass, moved faster than my eye could follow. It whirled, flashing forward, reversed, then flashed behind. The shaft seemed to flow in his hands, the dark gray point flickered like a snake’s tongue. His feet beat the ground like a dancer, never still.

I could not move, watching. I almost did not breathe. His face was calm and blank, not tensed with effort. His movements were so precise I could almost see the men he fought, ten, twenty of them, advancing on all sides. He leapt, scything his spear, even as his other hand snatched the sword from its sheath. He swung out with them both, moving like liquid, like a fish through the waves.(45)

Like the film Brokeback Mountain, this is a love story between men that is more about the love than about them being men. And yet, I had two questions in the end. Throughout there is a great stigma attached to their love between men, especially from Achilles’ mother. I had thought this was a stigma now, but not as much in ancient Greece. Achille’s mother, the divine sea nymph Thetis, was an example of my other question. Miller depicts her as cold and frightening, which is fascinating, yet as one of only three main female characters, it gives what felt to me a painfully short and narrow window into women in ancient Greece. Another character, Deidameia, is selfish and cruel, while the third, a slave girl Briseis, is uncomplicatedly good. All other women are mentioned merely as prizes, objects, or occasionally as beloved of men.

I can’t speak to historical accuracy, but I was left with the nagging feeling that a more modern stigma against men loving men was applied to these boys retrospectively as conflict, while a nuanced portrayal of women was not. And while the latter point might have been historically accurate, I wanted something more from the females in this tale.

You know those books that are on your radar forever, and yet you never buy a copy and occasionally hear it recommended to remind you of it, but then years go by, and you still haven’t read it? That book, for me, was Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. Published in 1995, it was on many best-of lists, yet didn’t even make the short list for the Booker Prize that year. When I read the article “Tears, Tiffs and Triumphs,” I was intrigued by how it was mentioned a few times by authors even though it had not won the award itself.

So finally, finally, I have got around to reading it myself, and it is a lovely little book. The German poet Novalis, before he became famous under that name, was “Fritz” von Hardenburg, a young Romantic from a good, but poor family. When he falls in love with a very young middle-class girl, his family is upset. And I too, as the reader, found it baffling. Falling in love on sight with a twelve-year old? And yet, as the story plays out, and we meet Fritz and his Sophie again and again, surrounded by their families and friends, it is completely understandable and sympathetic by the end.

It’s set in the late 1700’s, as the Germans struggle to interpret what the ruckus over in France means for all of them, and filled with memorable characters, great humor, grand grief, and lovely passages of writing.

“I have been in the kitchen,” she went on. “Stewed pigs’ trotters, plum conserve, bread soup.”

“I cannot eat,” said Erasmus.

“Come, we’re Saxons. We can make a good dinner, even if our hearts are breaking.”

I found it a delight.

I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente for one of my book groups. It was suggested by a woman whose middle-school aged daughter had already read it. In my head I though of it as The Book with the Purposely Unwieldy Title.

It flies its geek flag proudly, starting off with a bunch of fantasy tropes:

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.

This is a modern take on the Victorian fairy tale, and reminded me strongly of Neil Gaiman’s work. The author does not hide the shoulders she’s standing on to write the tale: Persephone, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, and Gulliver’s Travels are all given nods. If you enjoy those stories, then you’ll likely enjoy this one, which is a cheeky, knowing take on a lost child’s adventure.

September makes interesting friends and enemies, and takes on a quest, of course. She is by turns afraid, brave, stupid and clever and thus a decent guide to Valente’s version of Fairyland. Originally written as a web series, it tends to wander rather than proceed with purpose.

There are some surprising twists at the end that I appreciated and I found the book engaging and diverting to read. I will check out the sequel, but don’t feel the need to do so now, now, now.

Looking back on what I watched in 2012, there were a lot of crowd pleasers, and not a lot of recent Big Serious Movies. There are a lot on the year-end best-of lists that I haven’t seen, and don’t care to see, like Lincoln and The Master. This was obviously a year in which I wanted to be entertained and I must say, the Marvel superhero franchise delivered in spades with Avengers and Amazing Spider Man, plus the opportunities to rewatch Iron Man and Thor. The Dark Knight Rises was a disappointment, but then, it almost had to be after The Dark Knight, which may be the apex of superhero movies to date.

Watched, and enjoyed, a lot of good TV on DVD: Party Down, Slings and Arrows, Cowboy Bebop, The Wire, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights.

And went on my usual holiday movie bender, and enjoyed re-watching Planes Trains and Automobiles, Shop Around the Corner, and The Sure Thing. Finished out the year on a high note (no pun intended) with The Big Lebowski. It was a good reminder that re-watching classics is a worthy, and rewarding, pursuit.

Something about December makes me ravenous for stories.

Argo: enjoyed it while watching, but dislike it the more I think about it. Manipulative and vain storytelling.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Utterly charming.
Hot Tub Time Machine. Made me laugh.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Magic Mike. Because I like Soderbergh movies. And don’t mind looking at Channing Tatum.
The Shop Around the Corner. MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MOVIE.
The Ref. Made me laugh.
Bridget Jones’ Diary. Ditto.
Les Miserables (2012) Made me cry. One critic described the Fantine solo as “emotional porn,” and can’t disagree. Amused by this argument between Anne Hathaway and Sam Jackson over whose movie is the saddest.
Scrooged. Funny enough.
Home Alone. Oh, how the boys laughed. A joy to hear.
A Christmas Story. On second viewing, I see why this is classic.
The Sure Thing. Oh, such a good and funny road movie.
Silver Linings Playbook. Departs from the book in several ways, but really good, and enjoyable, as was the book.
Shaun the Sheep: We Wish Ewe a Merry Christmas. The boys laughed and laughed.
The Big Lebowski. My husband and I laughed and laughed.
Santa Claus is Coming to Town. With the boys.

Not sure what we’ll watch to ring out the year. Candidates include Clueless, Emma (Paltrow version), It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas.

This year, thanks to my summer reading project of Shelf Discovery related books, I read nearly 100 books, and finish the year in the middle of three chunksters.

Since we’re on winter break, and the kids are here, and they are, no joke, running around chanting “nyah, nyah, you can’t hit me,” I’ll keep this short.

Here’s what I liked (and didn’t)

Classic: Middlemarch by George Eliot
New Fiction: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Re-read: Beloved by Toni Morrison
YA re-read: Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume
New-to-me-YA: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks by E. Lockhart
Made me laugh: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
Didn’t like as much as the critics did: Swamplandia!, Tiger’s Wife, State of Wonder (UGH!), Telegraph Avenue (didn’t finish), Ready Player One
Thumping Good Reads: Lonesome Dove, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, After the Apocalypse, Art of Fielding, Wild, Tragedy of Arthur, Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Silver Linings Playbook, Devil in Silver, and Turn of Mind.