Girl Detective

Uneven, silly, but 21 Jump Street made me laugh. A perfectly fine free viewing experience, courtesy of the public library.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Made me laugh. Made me cry. Had me utterly involved over the course of reading it. Didn’t want to leave the world and these characters. A smashing historical novel. Perhaps one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a little more than that? All right, all right.

The book opens, not on the main character, but with a midwife attending a complicated birth. Then, in 1799 by the Western calendar, a young Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet goes to Dejima, the trade outpost of the Dutch on the coast of Japan. He’s there along with his patron to uncover just how corrupt the former Dutch representatives were. After a chance meeting with a woman over a monkey that’s absconded with a severed human foot, things get really complicated. And that’s just in section one, before things go really crazy in section two. This book has history, trade, Japan, interpreters, romance, evil kidnappers, and dozens of characters, many of whom get to narrate. Deeply satisfying, and highly recommended.

I believe I saw Hayao Miyazaki’s animated Howl’s Moving Castle right after I re-read the excellent book by Diana Wynne Jones it was based on. I was disappointed that one of my favorite directors and one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors had not yielded a trifecta, but rather a mess.

I decided to give Howl’s Moving Castle the movie another chance and we watched it for family movie night this week. In it, a plain girl named Sophie meets a handsome wizard (voiced fetchingly by Christian Bale in the US adaptation). A jealous witch’s curse plunges her into old age, and she goes to work for the notorious wizard, Howl, who is rumored to feast on young women’s souls. In a turn of events everyone can predict, the nameless handsome wizard from the beginning is Howl. Instead of finding him terrifying, Sophie slowly learns that he’s vain, cowardly and selfish. But her influence on him, as well as the backdrop of a war, pushes him to transform, literally and figuratively, over the course of the movie.

The film makes little sense. Who is waging war for what reason, and why Howl is afraid of his old magic tutor are never made clear. But to my delighted boys, (and my husband and me) it didn’t much matter. Sophie is an engaging resourceful heroine, the moving castle is an animated wonder to behold, Billy Crystal is delightful as the cheeky fire demon Calcifer and if these weren’t enough, there’s a besotted turnip-headed scarecrow, a wheezy dog, and Lauren Bacall voicing a sometimes evil witch. Plot, schmot, this was lovely to look at and fun to watch. Just don’t watch it too close in time after you’ve read the book, so that it can stand on its own as entertainment, and not suffer by comparison to its source material.

Last weekend we squeezed (squoze?) in two family movies. At home we watched Harry Potter 2 The Chamber of Secrets (the one with the basilisk, the diary and Dobby), with Kenneth Branagh’s brilliant turn as the vain, cowardly Gilderoy Lockhart. 6yo Guppy pumped his fist at the first quidditch scene. So far he and 9yo Drake are handling the images well, so I’m going to continue on to #3, which was my favorite of the films.

Then we went to to see Brave so I could write about the inexpensive but awesome theater where it was showing. Both boys gave Brave a good review, though we had an unfortunate ending when G. had to rush Guppy to the rest room at the end when he complained of feeling ill. Warm theater + too many Skittles was too much for him, so he missed the very end, but didn’t seem that bothered by it. And didn’t actually barf, so all was well that ended well.

With two good movies under my belt, I was feeling cocky. A recent reunion issue of Entertainment Weekly had reminded me of John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful, which I owned but hadn’t re-watched. Rather than obsessing over election results on Tuesday, I decided to watch what I thought would be a cheering, diverting movie. Alas, it was terrible–a lame retread of Pretty in Pink with a pretty Eric Stoltz pining for prettier Lea Thompson while cute-as-a-button Mary Stuart Masterson squirms. I did learn from the EW article that Thompson married the director, (Hughes just wrote and produced) and that they’re still married. That piece of trivia, though, does not merit a recommendation. This, like Weird Science, does not hold up.

A reminder that my friend Amy is heading up a readalong of Dickens’ Bleak House at New Century Reading, and has a very reasonable schedule that follows the original serial release of the book. This next Monday is only the 3rd week, where we’ll be discussing up to chapter 10 (p. 144 in my edition), so you can still catch up if you want.

I highly recommend this. So far I’m loving the prose, the umpteen characters and their descriptions, and the mysteries and romances that are brewing. This is rich, heady stuff, and I’m glad to be reading with others, and doing it a little at a time.

This past September I passed a couple of personal milestones. My husband, I, and 9yo Drake have lived in our current house for 8 years. I believe this is the longest time I’ve ever lived in one residence. My previous record was a house in a far-flung suburb of Columbus, Ohio. We moved there when I was 10 and I left for college at 18. I came back the following summer, but my parents and I clashed over my very bad behavior, so I began my sojourn on the East Coast, almost 11 years in DC and Philly. I lived in, at my best guess, a dozen different places during those 11 years. My husband and I got married and moved to MN when he got a job here. We rented in a close suburb for 3 years, bought a condo downtown (which was great until we had a baby, then it sucked) and then (finally I hope) bought a house in a family-friendly neighborhood in Minneapolis where we’ve been ever since.

As best I can figure, I lived non-consecutively in OH for about 13 years, and consecutively on the east coast for 11 years, and consecutively in one Ohio house for slightly less than 8. Other than that long stretch from when I was 10 to 18, I never lived in any one apartment/space longer than 3 years. I’ve now been in Minnesota for 14 years, and in the same house for over 8.

About five years ago (when we’d lived in the house just over 3 years), I became very anxious about the accumulation of stuff and where to put it, and bewailed my lack of organizational skill. I even made a category on the blog for Organization. (It has very few entries.) Then I realized–prior to that point, I moved so often that my life had purging built into it, and I was feeling anxious at about the time–3 years–that I usually moved. Now that I was and would be in one place, I no longer had the urgent excuse to purge that moving provided.

I wish I could say that realization made me shape up and get organized. It hasn’t. My house is filled with blowing and drifting piles of crap. Now that 6yo Guppy is in 1st grade we have the avalanche of school papers from 2 kids, and I am fast losing my ability to know what pile something’s in. I spent half a day last week looking for a particular piece of paper. I am and probably always will be a sporadic perfectionist (occasional compulsive?) which means I make dents now and again, but then entropy takes over, piles grow and the cycle starts all over again. I probably should figure this organization thing out, though, since our house is small and I’m eventually going to run out of room.

It’s odd seeing how other people live, those who stay put and put down roots. I have no intention of moving, but life sometimes decides otherwise. I’ll have to wait and see if my plans and the future align.

Are you sitting down? Because The Tragedy of Arthur by author Arthur Phillips, is a little complicated. It’s a novel, but one that deliberately blurs the line of reality, being narrated by the character of Arthur Phillips, an author of such books as Prague and The Song is You, just like the real life Arthur Phillips.

The novel begins with a preface:

Random House is proud to present this first modern edition of The Tragedy of Arthur by William Shakespeare.

And further suggests

that general readers plunge directly into the play, allowing Shakespeare to speak for himself, at least at first. then, if some background is helpful, look to this very personal Introduction.

Before I began the book, I knew it had to do with a play within a novel and that it was convoluted and intertwined. OK, I thought, after I read the “Preface,” what to do now? Treat it as a novel, and read the “Introduction” of 256 pages, or do what I normally do when approaching a play or classic, read the work first, then backtrack to the introduction to avoid spoilers?

I tried the play first, then a friend told me to have some sense already and just read the novel. Having attempted both, I can attest that reading the “Introduction” first is the way to go.

Arthur Phillips, the narrator and main character (and possibly also the author?) launches into a long family history interspersed with token summaries of the play that follows, purported to be a previously undiscovered work by Shakespeare. As we learn over the course of the tormented, self-aware, memoir-ish “Introduction”, the play–The Tragedy of Arthur, about King Arthur’s short reign–may have been forged by his father, also named Arthur. Got it?

Phillips’ clever novel features many recurring features from Shakespeare: boy/girl twins, a “dark” lady, crossed love, a meddling father, and a remarried mother. Some scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, while others are cringe inducing. The character Arthur tries to negotiate a relationship with his father, Arthur, and their relationship ends up bound with a play about Arthur, as well. The whole can be described by a sentence it contains referring to a project of Arthur’s twin, Dana:

Her complete project was a strange and beautiful hybrid of historical research, literary interpretation, parody, and outright fiction.

And there are numerous points in the fictional play where readers are told they’re being duped:

Gloucester: Deception ‘pon deception preys and fats
Itself, the stronger to deceive anew. (II, vii, 14-15)

The novel The Tragedy of Arthur, about a play called The Tragedy of Arthur, is a good story as well as a well-researched and intricate literary tale. As it’s set in Minneapolis and Minnesota, I recognized many places. But imagine my surprise when I recognized the husband of a former co-worker! It would be hard work, and kind of fun-defeating (and thus perfectly in sync with the novel) to puzzle out how much of Phillips’ novel is all true, how much is pretty-all true, and and how much he made up out of full cloth, as he did (I assume…) with the entire Shakespeare-esque Tragedy of Arthur that follows the “Introduction.”

A few thoughts, out of joint: the character of Arthur’s twin, Dana, reminded me strongly of Cassie from the Tana French novels In the Woods and The Likeness and the twins’ relationship is very like that of Cassie and Rob from In the Woods. I was also reminded strongly of The Family Fang, with its wacky family of four, and brother and sister who try to puzzle out the truth from the lies of their performative parents. It also reminded me of the Thursday Next novels of Jasper Fforde, in the playful/respectful manner in which it worked with the origin material. Yet this novel, with derivation at its heart, and that reminded me of several others, continued to amaze me with its originality and wit.

There will be a video chat with the author at the 11/13 meeting of Books and Bars, which I very much look forward to.

Hey, everyone, my friend Amy at New Century Reading is doing a readalong of Bleak House by Dickens, using the same chapters he did when he wrote it, so one serial section a week, which is about 50 pages or so.

I started a readalong earlier this year and didn’t love it though I did love Bleak House, and am excited to give it another go.

Serial 1 is chapters 1 through 4. We meet London:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flecks of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

There’s an endless court case, a mysterious orphan, a crazy old lady, a beautiful woman with a past… Oh, I look forward to finding out more!

A selection for my book group that discussed books about myth or religion, Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes was the first non fiction pick of our almost two-year-old group. Several members had requested non-fiction, which those of you who read this blog know isn’t always my cuppa. Push comes to shove, I don’t think any non-fiction books are going into my apocalypse backpack for the end of the world.

Perhaps Apocalypse Backpack will be my band name. Anyhoo.

Since the group focuses of books of myth and religion, I’d been considering some of the new atheists like Dawkins or Hitchens. But they seemed so strident, and so “you’re dumb if you believe” that I wanted something a little more, well, moderate. And while I got that in the Barnes, which is his non-fiction meditation on death and dying from an agnostic or atheist point of view, I ended up wishing for a bit more stridency. But more on that in a bit.

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

This paragraph is a perfect introduction to the book. It’s dryly funny, self-deprecating, and it introduces Barnes’ older brother Jonathan, a frequent sounding board in the book. Barnes relates details from historical philosophers and writers about death, and quotes friends of his. (Anyone who can identify who his friends Professor S and C are? A Guardian review made it sound as if it were obvious, but even my two most Barnesian friends didn’t know.) He relates stories from his past and from his family’s past to demonstrate the shifting nature of memory and narrative. He cops to being afraid of death and nothing (hence the pun in the title, which I appreciated) and being forgotten.

It’s well written. It’s clever. But it doesn’t tell a narrative–Barnes doesn’t finish the book in a different mind than he started it, at least in my reading. And he spirals in and out of stories and reminiscences, adding bits as he goes, which is skillfully done, yet felt repetitive. Finally, several in our group wished he’d shared more of himself, and been a little less chilly and distant, a little more strident if you will, to use the adjective from above.

And yet, thinking on this later, given the childhood and family Barnes describes in the book, I’d say that this intelligent book is about as honest and disclosing and warm (i.e. not very) as can be expected, perhaps even more.

This book was also interesting to read close in time to his novel Sense of an Ending. There is at least one character in there created from reality, and the themes of memory and death are continuations of what is here.

I found it strange that the hardcover US edition features a grim Barnes staring out at us. It’s not an inviting image. The cartoon-y grave on the trade paperback edition is cheekier, and more engaging I think. But what I wished for was the cover of the English hardover edition, which reproduces a photo discussed in the book, of a woman with her face scratched out. This, I think, is a spooky, unsettling image straight from the book that matches its tone best. (Though the English TPB edition is a close second, I think. Weird, how they obviously could not agree on one image for this book. Were four really needed?)

One final question. His book is dedicated to P, most likely his late wife, Patricia Kavanaugh who died of a brain tumor in October of 2008, while this book was published in March of that year. She is mentioned just once, in passing, in the entire book. Was Barnes aware of her tumor, and her impending death while writing this, a further example of his reluctance to actually inhabit his own exploration?

I remembered! I remembered to post The Five Holiday Gifts early this year!

I met a friend today who said her 4yo daughter woke up this morning, the day after Halloween, and asked if it was Christmas yet. So here, in plenty of time, which is completely uncharacteristic of me (what’s next, an on-time, good-quality holiday card?) is this article that helps me every year.

Your advice: my boys are 6.5 and 9yo. They have a bazillion stuffed animals. Advice on the gift to hug and love? And no, sister Sydney, nothing alive counts for my allergic boys and their anxious, impatient mom.

From the archives, on gift giving for kids:
Star Tribune 12/24/89 - Pat Gardner “Tender Years”

The weeks of hectic preparation are coming to a close. Within days, the magic will begin to unfold for our children and, vicariously through them, for us. Just as we remember those wonderful Christmas Eves and mornings long ago, our children will one day look back on these days. How will they remember them? What are you giving your children this year?

I know one family of modest means that makes a great effort to celebrate Christmas in the best way possible. Their children always find five gifts under the tree. And more than that, the gifts are always accompanied by a parent. Here’s how they do it.

The children always receive a gift to hug and love. Sometimes it’s a doll or maybe a stuffed animal. Every Christmas each child has something to care for, to carry along and finally at night to share a bed, secrets and dreams.

The wise parents know that the children will themselves learn to care for others by practicing on dolls and stuffed animals. Mom and Dad demonstrate rocking the stuffed bear and wiping the doll’s face. They talk about being gentle and giving care.

More important, they treat their children tenderly. They make a special effort at this busy time of year for a little more lap time, more frequent hugs and all the physical care and attention their young children need.

The children in this family always receive something to read. The parents know that to give them books is to give them wings. The little ones get books, and the big ones get books. Books aren’t foreign to any member of this family. Books are treasures. And more than that, they become a daily connection between parent and child.

The wise parents know that the best way to raise a reader is to read to a child….They share curiosity. They take the time to listen patiently to their beginning reader. They share discoveries. Through books, these parents explore worlds within their home and beyond their front door with all of their children.

The children receive toys and games. These parents are concerned about each child’s skills and find fun ways to enhance their present capabilities and encourage further development. For a grasping baby, a crib gym; for a beginning walker, a push toy; for a pre-schooler, a shape and color sorter; for a beginning reader, a game of sequence and strategy.

The parents know that play is the work of childhood. They understand that to meet a child at her level of accomplishment is to encourage success in play. Success stimulates motivation and interest in a challenge. So the parents judge their toy and game choices carefully. Not too easy, but not too hard.

They they do the most important thing. They play with their children. The children see that learning is a toy, that it’s fun to challenge oneself, that play can be a very social activity, that it’s OK to win and also to lose and that Mom and Dad wholeheartedly approve of play.

The children in this family always receive a gift of activity. From a simple ball or jump rope to a basketball hoop or a pair of ice skates, they always have one gift that encourages action.

The parents know that those children who, by nature, are very active may need to be channeled into acceptable and appropriate activities. And they know that those children who, by nature, are very passive may need to be encouraged to move with purpose. But their message to their children is that physical activity is important and good.

These parents make their message clear by joining their children in physical play. They skate and play catch. They’re on the floor with their crawlers and walk hand in hand with their toddlers. They get bumped and bruised and laugh and shout. They sled and they bowl. And many times in the next few weeks when resting on the couch sounds much more inviting, these parents will give their kids one more gift. They’ll get up and play with them.

The children always receive a gift of artistic expression. They might find crayons, paints or markers in their stockings. It might be a gift of clay this year or rubber stamps or scissors and glue. The materials change, but the object remains the same: create with joy.

These wise parents aren’t terribly concerned about the mess of finger paints. They’re more concerned about the exposure to unique sensations. They want their children to use their imaginations. They want their children to approach life in a hands-on fashion. And they want them to express themselves through their artistic activities in ways that exceed their vocabularies.

Do you ever have that feeling like your life is a purse that’s too small for all your stuff, and no matter how much you try to prune away, you just can’t fit it all in? Kinda feel like that, today.

So, didn’t want to go another day without telling you that my husband G Grod and I watched the remake of Fright Night from last year. And it was hella fun. It’s a funny/scary vampire tale written by Marti Noxon, who used to write for TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and whose name I always confuse with Marni Nixon, who did the actual singing for many classics like West Side Story). It has David Tennant, formerly Dr. Who, in a significant role. Colin Farrell is perfectly cast, so kudos to whoever picked him. AND I liked the 1985 original (seem to remember watching it with my sisters) and one of the stars from that has a cameo.

SO, hardly haute cinema, but if you’re a Buffy, Dr. Who or Fright Night ‘85 fan, check this one out.

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words is the sixth collection of the excellent ongoing Vertigo comic-book series about a man named Tom Taylor who learns he may be the incarnation of his father’s famous fictional creation, a very Harry Potter-esque boy magician named Tommy Taylor.

In this collection, stuff happens. A LOT of stuff happens. We get some answers finally, actually, rather a lot of them. There are laugh-out loud funny lines, and the pleasing sense of many storylines converging, and finishing while a new start is made. Overall, this was a very entertaining segment of this engaging ongoing series about stories, literature, and a grown-up boy magician.

The Manhattan Projects (yes, it’s plural) by Jonathan Hickman is a graphic-novel collection of the first issues of the Image comic book series. It’s an alternate history of famous scientists like Einstein, Oppenheimer and Feynman, with sci-fi and horror. The story reminds me of Warren Ellis and Planetary, but it’s a little less gratuitously violent, while Nick Pitarra’s art recalls Frank Quitely’s. If you’re a science nerd who can stomach horror, then you’ll like this.

From my article “Tremendous Treats: Finding the Fun in Halloween” at Simple Good and Tasty, in which I defend candy:

Yet most of us also harbor happy childhood memories of coming home from a night of trick-or-treating with a pillowcase or plastic pumpkin full of goodies. The enjoyment was extended by sorting candy, trading it, and slowly (or not-so-slowly) consuming it over the next several days. It’s good to remember that there is joy in this candy-centric holiday that can easily get stifled by well-meaning adults.

In my last post, I linked to the other piece I wrote on candy. I thought I was done buying Halloween candy. Then I biked past Lund’s the other day and went in to check things out. Here’s what I found (and, if it’s not obvious, brought home with me):

Yes, those are Halloween-sized Pearson’s Salted Nutrolls and Mint Patties!

And, if that weren’t enough, which is OBVIOUSLY wasn’t, I bought these because the packages are so FREAKING ADORABLE:

Bat-black dots that are BLOOD-orange flavored–how clever is that?

In case you’re wondering, both Drake and Guppy declared that the bat dots were better than the ghost dots. Also, 2 our of 3 of us declared Pearson’s mint patties better than York. And, Drake is wrong, so it is really unanimous.

This is the end of Halloween candy buying. Really. I mean it.

I’ve been writing about Halloween Candy, and detailed my tops picks at Minnesota Monthly’s TC Taste Blog.

But in “researching” that article and another I just turned in, I may have gotten a little carried away procuring this year’s treats to hand out next week:

Every year we run out. This year might be different.

What’s your favorite Halloween candy? I did a poll of the bus stop moms and was surprised to find two of my most-hated candies were picked as most loved by others: candy corn and Three Musketeers (nougat=blerg). To each her own; vive la difference!

In which we go two for three on DVDs.

Last Friday night was family movie night. We watched the new Blu ray 25th anniversary edition of The Princess Bride with our boys, 6yo Guppy and 9yo Drake. We’d watched this movie together before, but it had been a while. Oh, what a joy this movie is. So many great moments; so many good lines. We loved it. The boys loved it. We loved that the boys loved it. And the best part? The next day, when Guppy recited Mandy Patinkin’s famous line: My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!

We put the boys to bed, and returned to the television to continue re-watching Veronica Mars season 1. We were on episode 17 of 22. We finished the first one. “Let’s watch one more,” I asked. We finished the second one. “It’s Friday,” I said, “we can sleep in. Let’s keep watching.” After the third one, my husband turned to me and said, “You may go to bed if you like. But if you think I’m going to bed before I watch to the end, you’re crazy.” So we settled in and watched the last three episodes. Till 1:30am, when I usually go to bed at 10:30pm. It was utterly satisfying. There were so many scenes in those last 6 episodes of season 1 where G and I cheered and pumped our fists. Those six episodes were on top of having watched Princess Bride. So I estimate 6 hours of screen time, which according to yet another study, has lessened our life span by 2 hours. Totally worth it.

Then, a few days later, I’d gotten a well-reviewed film from last year, The Deep Blue Sea, from the library. I figured watching a grown-up film might be a good counterpoint to our recent entertaining if not life-changing DVD choices.

But oh, did we regret it. The movie opens with Rachel Weisz’s character narrating a letter, shutting the curtains, and turning on the gas to kill herself. We are then hurtled back and forth through time as we glimpse her former marriage to a sweet, if inept, older man with mummy issues and the subsequent hot romance with former fighter pilot Freddie, played by Tom Hiddleston.

The troubles we had with the film were many. By opening on an attempted suicide, then finding later what prompted it, I found it impossible to empathize with Weisz’s character. I felt sorry for the both the men in her life, not for her. G thinks a better title might be: Mentally Ill Woman in Post War England Doesn’t Get the Help She Needs.The classical score, by Barber, rose to excruciating volume at times, bludgeoning me with “feel something NOW!” Equally unsubtle was the contrast between opening scene (closing curtains on grey day) and closing scene (you guessed it: opening curtains on bright day.) And towards the end, there were more than a few times when I sensed Weisz reading lines rather than inhabiting a character, and it became clear to me that the suffocating story was adapted from a play. I depart from critical opinion that almost universally praised Weisz’ performance in another way, too, in that I didn’t care for the long tracking shot of a flashback scene set in the London underground during wartime. It felt long, tedious and mawkish, in its singalong of Molly Malone. Much more successful was a bar room singalong to You Belong to Me.

So, my husband and I did not care for this very well reviewed film, though we loved Veronica Mars and Princess Bride. Are we philistines? Perhaps. Or perhaps we just were not in the right frame of mind for a slow film about people’s differing definitions of love. Or perhaps it just wasn’t as good as all that. In any case, not recommended.

I am one of those people who has piles of stuff and papers on most horizontal surfaces in the house. I inherited this tendency from my mother; I do not know which DNA strand it resides on. I used to be one of those people who, when asked for such-and-such random item, could picture it in my mind’s eye, go to the correct pile, and within moments, produce the desired item. Alas, no longer. More and more, I go to find something and simply can’t. I search through multiple piles with no success. This happened today when I went to look for the library copy of Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, recommended to me as a good teen romance by my friend C. Thus, there is not a quote from this entertaining books to put right here:

It is a good teen romance, one between Paul and new-guy Noah. They meet in a bookstore that’s having a concert and dance, so right away we know we’re in some kind of gay-friendly alternate universe, in a New Jersey suburb of NYC. And the romance follows the usual trajectory: Boy meets boy in a cute manner, then loses boy, then gets boy back. Other people’s romances orbit around them and comic relief frequently intervenes in the person of Infinite Darlene, fka Daryl, who is both the star quarterback and the homecoming queen. But it’s not all sunshine and flowers. Paul’s friend Joni is dating a new guy the old friends don’t like, and Tony’s gay-unfriendly parents are slowly crushing his spirit.

This is a short, lovely book, though I enjoyed it more at the beginning, when it focused on the open nature of the fictional school, than towards the end, when things played out mostly predictably. This book reminded me fondly of Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books, in how magical and wonderful and weird yet true it was. Highly recommended.

I got in a grocery checkout-line convo with a guy who said he wanted to move to Portland. I recommended he read Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, by Cheryl Strayed, that I’d liked it and Oregon played a big part in it. He said he would. The cashier asked him, “Are you really going to read it?” He said, yeah, his girlfriend was reading it and he was going to read it when she was done. The cashier thought this was weird, that I’d recommend a book his girlfriend happened to be reading. We tried to explain why it wasn’t. It’s really popular, said the guy. Harry Potter popular. No, I said, because the cashier looked skeptical again, it’s Eat-Pray-Love popular. She seemed satisfied by this, asked me if I wanted my receipt, and we all moved out into our day.

Wild was beginning to get Eat-Pray-Love popular even before Oprah picked it to jump-start her book club. After getting the big O on the cover, well, bestseller-dom was kind of a done deal.

In the mid-90’s, Cheryl was in the midst of a divorce from a nice guy, dating another guy who’d introduced her to heroin, and still grieving her mother, who’d died a few years before. Standing in line at REI, she saw a travel guide about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, and then decided that was a good way to start over. She systematically started planning the trip, sold her then-belongings for hiking gear, packed herself boxes of gear and money to meet her along the way, and went to California to hike up to Washington state.

Wild is her memoir of hiking the trail, but also of the messed up things that happened beforehand that drove her to thinking it would be a good idea. She found out quickly it wasn’t. Twenty-something Cheryl is an often exasperating narrator, especially in her flashbacks to life prior to the hike. It’s easy to see why she wanted to run away. But it’s hard not to be engaged by her travelogue, one that includes snakes, bears and torturous boots.

Modern-day Cheryl writes like a very balanced, serene person, intriguing to me since she says she didn’t have traditional experiences with therapy. She even has a gig as an advice columnist at The Rumpus; a collection of those columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was recently published. For those of you who were exasperated by Eat Pray Love (which I have a theory about*), this is probably not your thing–immature narrator trying to find herself. Unlike that book, though, this doesn’t have a girl meets boy happy ending. It ends with girl confronting self and coming out the wiser for it having endured agony, both in life and on the trail. If that sounds fun, or if, like me, you like to read about adventures without actually going outdoors, then this is a page-turning read.

*My theory about Eat Pray Love is that those who dislike it never went through a gruesome breakup. Non-statistically accurate testing has so far proved this true.

Back before I had kids, I was a once-a-week cleaner. Having kids, and especially moving through a bout of post-partum depression, taught me to tolerate a greater level of filth in the interest of self preservation.

However, now that both my kids are in school all day and my work is occasional freelance writing from home, I must admit that there’s little excuse for the copious dirt and blowing and drifting piles of crap in the house. Other than that housekeeping sucks. To use one of my favorite British-isms, which I think I got from Bridget Jones’ Diary, I am a poster child for sluttish housewifery.

Yesterday the kids had off from school, and I decided to tackle the shower grout, which had reached alarming levels of yuck. It was especially icky in the corners. When I began to research home-made, less-toxic cleaners, though, I found so many options my head spun. Always very curious, though, I decided to make an experiment out of it. I pitched it to the boys, and amazingly, they bought it.

The raw materials:

First, I made solutions using various mixes of water, vinegar, peroxide, baking soda, Barkeepers Friend, Bon Ami, Borax, Dawn blue soap, Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds:

I made a chart so I wouldn’t forget which was which. This was an official science experiment, after all:

Then I applied each solution to a section in the shower, including two control sections at the bottom of Comet with bleach and Clorox Bleach Pen.

I waited about 15 minutes, wiped off, then scrubbed off with an old toothbrush. My experiment returned meaningful results. I was chagrined to find the bleach worked best (though online sources say there’s a risk of it yellowing the grout over time.) BUT pleased to find the natural cleaners worked nearly as well. Anything with Dawn blue turned the grout a little blue, so that was out. Baking soda whitened as well as Bon Ami, Barkeepers Friend or Borax, so might as well use soda–cheaper and less toxic. Water worked as well as vinegar, but perhaps a smidge less well than peroxide.

Here, however, is what convinces me that I should avoid bleach and other toxic cleaners, no matter how effective:

After the test, the kids and I used the remains of the 12 non-toxic solutions to clean the rest of the shower. I am including this incredibly unflattering photo of myself so you can see the cleaner spattered in my hair and on my face and glasses. Cleaning the shower properly is a time-consuming and messy business. Doing it with something toxic like bleach seems ill-advised given the spatter zone, and especially because I had the kids working with me.

Full disclosure. After the boys stopped helping and went off to listen to Harry Potter #4 on CD read by Stephen Fry (which kept making me start and think that there was a strange man in the house, which was kind of true.) I used the bleach pen on some of the most-stained corners. I’m sure it is probably the most expensive of all the options, but it did provide precise application in all the grout lines.

In the end, I have vastly improved grout.

For now. Alas, based on what I read on the interwebs, which is of course always to be believed, what I should do from now on is spray the shower walls down with a solution (I recommend peroxide/water), wipe it down, clean regularly with paste (I recommend a paste of peroxide or water + soda). Alas, alack, I probably also need to remove some of the grout, regrout, then seal and maintain once a year.

Sigh. I miss being a renter and having this be someone else’s problem.

I really, really wanted to love the graphic-novel version of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson. So I was surprised and disappointed to find I didn’t even much like it. And I feel terribly, terribly guilty about this. I love the novel–it was one of my first favorites as a kid. I love Larson’s work. In Gray Horses, Chiggers, Mercury, she’s a great artist and storyteller. But for me, this adaptation didn’t work.

The aspect that gave me the most trouble were the character depictions. I’ve held this book so close, for so long, that I have my own pictures in my head of what the characters look like, even the minor ones, and many of Larson’s clashed with the ones in my head. Obviously, someone coming to the book for the first time via this adaptation wouldn’t have the same issue.

Related to that, though, was the trouble I had with the character of Meg. When I’ve read the book, which I did last summer, I’ve related to gawky, socially inept Meg. When I read this book, I was irritated by her. Seeing her on the page made me less able to identify with her.

I am torn as I write about the book. I wanted to like it. I don’t want others to skip it. But it didn’t work for me. Here’s hoping it works better for you.