Girl Detective

We’ve had family movie night the last two Fridays. We broke one of my cardinal rules by eating home-made pizza and then ice cream in front of the TV to watch a movie we all agreed on.

Two Fridays ago, we watched The Avengers on Blu ray.

The boys loved it even more than they did when we saw it in the theater. They found the Hulk segments even more funny, especially “Target angry! Target angry!” G. Grod and I watched that entire 2.5 hour movie with them, then hustled them into bed so we could watch the extras and before the weekend was over had watched them all AND the movie with director Joss Whedon’s commentary. That’s how much we liked this movie.

Last Friday, we watched Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which I consider his masterpiece.

Then again, saying that unfairly denigrates his other masterpieces, so best of the best? We tried to watch it a few years ago with the kids, but they were scared by some of the imagery. We watched it this time, and things seemed to go well. Both 9yo Drake and 6yo Guppy enjoyed it, as did G. Grod and I. But that was before bedtime.

After we tried to put the boys in bed, they got up again three times. Drake was disturbed by memories of the image of a monster from the movie that went on a rampage, ate several characters, and then vomited for a very long, long time. Interestingly, nothing from The Avengers the week before fazed him as this did. We finally got him into bed, and by the next day seemed happy to take our suggestion to remember the funny and cute and beautiful parts, like the return of soot sprites from My Neighbor Totoro, and adorable duck creatures, but still, Spirited Away was only a qualified success.

After pizza, dessert was my favorite combination of Ben & Jerry’s flavors, Chocolate Therapy and What a Cluster (formerly Clusterfluff).

Chocolate Therapy is chocolate ice cream with chocolate cookies & swirls of chocolate pudding ice cream, formerly only available in scoop shops.

What a Cluster is peanut butter ice cream with caramel cluster pieces, marshmallow swirls & peanut buttery swirls.

Chocolate Therapy on its own is quite something, but when combined with What a Cluster, well, something rather magical happens.

I found this page when I was scanning Drake’s handwriting book from last year (he was 8):

Jaded, already, at such a tender age. And yet, I wonder at all the things that I could add to the list that have been moved beyond, His passions burn bright and fade fast:

Ninjago
Bakugan
Hot Wheels
Wipe Out
Fetch w/Ruff Ruffman and any number of PBS tv shows

The Dispreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart had been on my to-read list for years and a recent resurgence in my reading of young-adult books bumped it to the top and oh, I’m glad it did.

To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors, Alabaster Preparatory Academy

I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. I take full responsibility for the disruptions caused by the Order–including the Library Lady, the Doggies in the Window, the Night of a Thousand Dogs, the Canned Beet Rebellion, and the abduction of the Guppy.

Frankie, who over the summer gained four inches and twenty pounds, all in the right places, is a sophomore at an expensive northeast prep school. She is suddenly surrounded by boys who want her attention, and enjoys it, all the while questioning whether it’s the kind of attention she wants. She makes a gradual but believable shift from nice girl in the dorm to criminal mastermind, and it’s a blast to make it with her. This is a novel that turns the romance on its head, while still taking time to appreciate some of it along the way. But it’s also a story of a girl coming into her own power, making the shift from sweet to bitter to bittersweet, and in that it reminded me of Veronica Mars. This is a fun fast read that yet has some nice heft to it.

What better way to follow up a Toni Morrison bender than with a young-adult romance? An Abundance of Katherines was a good sorbet after a lot of tough reading.

The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he too a bath.

Colin worries that he’ll never cross that liminal space between prodigy and genius. Devastated by the latest dumping, he and his friend Hassan (who is an unfortunate trope: the fat, funny one) leave the Chicago area for a road trip to the boonies of Tennessee. There they meet a girl named Lindsay, her odd mother Hollis, and end up with oddly high-paying jobs as documentarians.

Colin is an engaging, if sometimes whiny narrator. I liked his asides and DFW-esque footnotes. The book zips along to an enjoyable, if not all that surprising, conclusion. Fun, but not life changing.

A slim, non-fiction volume based on a series of lectures, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison is a dense, thought-provoking read.

From the back cover:

Toni Morrison’s brilliant discussion of the “Africanist” presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree–and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

This was part of the swath of books I read around re-reading Morrison’s Beloved. It’s written in what one of my grad-school professors would have called “high academ-ese” and thus interestingly brings into question the poet Audre Lord’s assertion that one can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Morrison is able to wield ivory tower rhetoric like a weapon, and her argument about the necessity of an other to the American myth is a compelling one. Not a fun read, but a rewarding one.

“Magnificent Five-Story Book Mountain Library”:

via The Morning News.

In preparation for leading a recent discussion on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I raided my public libary, which had a number of books on Morrison and Beloved. Since I didn’t read them all in their entirety, I’ll put them all on one entry, though my annoyance with Harold Bloom’s guide was such that I thought it deserved its own entry.

Columbia Critical Guides: Toni Morrison “Beloved”, edited by Carl Plasa. Much more intellectually rigorous than Bloom’s guide. Five chapters cover the major aspects of the novel and gather and summarize some of the best scholarly works. Warning: tiny type. I showed a page to my husband who is something of a typesetting geek. He recoiled and cried out in disgust. I kid you not. If you were to read one book on Beloved, this would be the one I’d recommend.

Contemporary World Writers: Toni Morrison by Jill Matus. The chapter on Beloved is smart, well-written and well informed by earlier scholarship.

Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison by Gurleen Grewal. The chapter on Beloved is very good, tying together many aspects of it without being overwritten. I especially liked Grewal’s take on the ending as a communal working-through.

Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison, ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, who decries evaluating Morrison’s fiction on political, rather than simply aesthetic, criteria. He also writes that while Morrison has said she wishes to be contextualized in African-American literature, Bloom feels more that she is a potent mixture of Faulkner and Woolf, both of whom were subjects of Morrison’s graduate thesis. I was troubled by the pains he took to identify her with white writers while dismissing some specific other writers of color. But I appreciated that this collection was capped by an essay from Morrison herself, about a conspicuous lack of the Afro-American presence in American literature. In it, she argues so eloquently that the essay itself disproves Bloom’s attempt to diminish her work. As with the other Bloom guide, this one does have good essays in it by other authors than Bloom, including one by Margaret Atwood, and another by Margaret Mobley that is often cited in subsequent scholarship on Beloved.

Bloom’s BioCritiques: Toni Morrison. From his introduction:

Beloved is certainly Morrison’s most problematical work. Some readers whom I esteem set it very high, while other [sic] share my skepticism as to its aesthetic persuasiveness. It is a narrative intended to shock us into an ideological awareness, but its contrivances of plot are tendentious, and the personalities of its protagonists do not always cohere. I regard Beloved as a Period Piece, albeit one written by a woman of genius.

Note that he didn’t just say “genius” but qualifies it as “woman of genius.” Note the typo, one of many I found in the three Bloom books I consulted. I did appreciate the essay by Malmgren on Beloved that highlighted what odd companions the historical novel and the gothic ghost story make.

I am not saying that Bloom isn’t entitled to his opinion on Beloved, though I disagree with it. I _am_ saying he deploys terms that are belittling and condescending. I find this a kind of intellectual bullying, and all the more troubling for how many books on Morrison in general and Beloved in particular that Bloom has put his name on, and therefore made money. Yes, they may not be best sellers, but many are expensive ($35 to $45), and likely to be staples at most public and university libraries. He’s made money off Morrison’s Beloved by less than fair critiques, in my opinion.

Toni Morrison Explained by Ron David. Davis says he sought to write a guide that would be appeal to all levels of readers, from newbies to experts. I think he’s playing more to the groundlings with smart-ass comments that disrupt what might otherwise be a decent, readable guide. He has an interesting take on Morrison’s Paradise.

I went to the Half-Price books Clearance Event in the grandstand at the State Fairgrounds and got a whopping two hours to cruise up and down the boxes of children’s books. Interestingly, 2 hours was not enough time. For just children’s chapter books. There were THAT many books. Also, my knees and thighs were sore the next day from the constant knee bends of looking through the box atop the table, then below it. Up, down, up, down for two hours. Ouch. Yes, used book shopping made my muscles sore; I’m THAT out of shape.

In my defense, about a third of these are for Drake and Guppy. But oh, last summer’s Shelf Discovery Readalong has made me a junkie for old YA MMPBs (i.e., Young Adult Mass Market Paperbacks)

“That doesn’t look like banana bread,” my husband G. Grod remarked. My normal banana bread recipe has maraschino cherries in it, which makes it fairly easy to identify.

“New recipe. Smitten Kitchen,” was all I had to say.

G. and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary last week, which I unintentionally made a big deal of by putting a couple things on facebook and now here, so forgive me if I seem to be going on about it, but I have to say it’s one of those nice things about being married to someone for so long that I can just say “Smitten Kitchen” and he knows what I’m talking about.

Then again, there are probably at least half a dozen friends who would get that, too. So maybe I am just flagrantly boasting about our anniversary. Sorry. Anyhoo.

I’ve been making Marvelous Metropolitan Millet Muffins for a while, so I am a fan of millet and was eager to try the new combination. I took it to a sukkot party this weekend, and people really liked it. I’m not going to give up my normal banana bread recipe. And after mentioning to G. Grod, I may also try SK’s Jacked-Up banana bread. It’s good to switch things up once in a while.

Crackly Banana Bread, adapted slightly from Smitten Kitchen
makes 1 9-in loaf, or 3 mini loaves

My grocery co-op sells uncooked millet in the bulk aisle. Whole Foods and their ilk would likely have it, too.

1/4 cup uncooked millet
3 large ripe bananas
1 large egg
1/3 cup virgin coconut oil, warmed until it liquefies, or olive oil
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup cane sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Pinch of ground cloves
Salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour

Preheat oven to 350°F. Place millet on rimmed baking sheet and toast for ten minutes, shaking once or twice, while oven warms.

Butter and flour 9×5-inch loaf pan or 3 mini loaf pans.

In the bottom of a large bowl, mash bananas with a potato masher (smoother) or a fork (more toothsome/lumpier). Whisk in egg, then oil, sugars and vanilla extract.

In medium bowl, whisk together soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and flour, then millet. Sprinkle over wet ingredients and stir till just combined with no streaks of flour.

Pour mixture into prepared pan(s) and bake until a tester comes out clean, about 40 to 50 minutes for a large loaf, about 30 for mini loaves. Cool loaf in pan on rack for five minutes, then remove from pan and let cool on rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

This book has cemented my low opinion of Harold Bloom, with this sentence from his intro:

Beloved divides many of my acquaintances who possess critical discernment; for some of them it is a masterwork, for others it is supermarket literature. I myself am divided: not character in the novel persuades me, and yet much of the writing has authentic literary force. (emphasis mine)

He goes on, but I will spare you. Bloom’s name is on the book, as it is on two other books I read as I researched Beloved, so he is making money with this book that contains what I see as a low blow. Bloom may not regard Beloved as a masterpiece. But, as he notes, many people of critical discernment do, including those at the New York Times who, in 2006, named it the best book of American fiction of the past 25 years.

To use the term “supermarket literature” (deliberate deployment of damning oxymoron), in the preface to a scholarly collection of essays on that work, even while passively saying that it’s not him but others of his acquaintance, is insulting, not just to Morrison and the authors of the essays, but to me as a reader. Why should I read a book about a book that someone of critical discernment thinks is supermarket literature?

Then, to add further insult, the book is full of typos (could they not hire a competent copyeditor?) and the final essay has several outright factual errors, e.g. the rooster is misidentified as Brother, not Mister and thus Morrison’s careful strategies of naming characters are undermined.

Poorly done, Bloom, poorly done. It’s not enough to condescendingly admit that you think Song of Solomon is a masterpiece. You’ve outed yourself as an intellectual bully. After reading Beloved and the two other books with your name on it about Morrison, I would much rather live in a world that had Morrison’s literature than Bloom’s if I had to choose. But then, perhaps he’d think I don’t have critical discernment, and thus my opinion would not matter.

It’s too bad that Bloom’s churlish, petty comments in the introduction soured me at the start, because there are several very good essays in this book on Beloved that highlight interesting interpretations. If they had been treated to a good copyeditor, and not capped by a less-good essay, they might have been done justice.

9yo son Drake returned from a birthday party: They had cupcakes and ice cream, but I didn’t have any.

Me, knowing the mom who made the cupcakes and that they would have been good: Why?

Drake: I’m trying to cut back on sweets.

Me, carb-monster, utterly bewildered: Why?

Drake, rolling eyes: I’m going to tell my other parent. Maybe HE’LL appreciate it.

Then, we went to a Sukkot party over the weekend where he skipped chili and egg strata and ate only banana bread, pumpkin-nut squares and chocolate-chip cookies. Cutting back on sweets, my a$$. I bet he just ate too much pizza at the birthday party.

Both my boys are slow to lose baby teeth which is fine by me. Let them keep building their brushing skills on the baby teeth to give their grown-up teeth a better chance at fewer cavities.

6yo Guppy’s tooth had been loose for a while. Earlier in the week, he said he pushed it forward with his tongue in his school picture, so it will be immortalized.

Yesterday at the bus stop, I’m chatting with the other parents (we have 11 kids at our bus stop from 7 families) when I heard the cry go up from the kids:

“Guppy lost a tooth!”

Guppy appeared in front of me, lip quivering.

“Because Drake punched me in the face.”

I hugged him close (perhaps not only in sympathy, if you know what I mean), then checked for blood, which was minimal. I was relieved, since I didn’t have tissues and the bus was pulling up.

Alas, the tooth was missing, and the sidewalk was effective camouflage. I didn’t find the tooth, but another dad did, so I ran on the bus before it pulled away to assure Guppy that we’d found it.

9yo Drake maintains he didn’t PUNCH Guppy in the face, but merely scraped his hand down the front of it which ended up popping the already loose tooth out.

This morning, Guppy found $2 under his pillow. (We’re long past the Tooth Fairy here.)

“I guess you get an extra dollar when your tooth is punched out of you,” I told him.

“I didn’t punch him!” yelled Drake.

I don’t think he recognizes that describing it the other way tells the story more effectively, if not more precisely.

This is not the story that the title makes it sound like it’s going to be, so don’t dismiss it if you think this is going to be an inspirational story about losing weight.

My insurance company discounts rates for things like not smoking, having good cholesterol levels and low blood pressure, getting health screenings, etc. One of the boxes to check is a BMI in the not-overweight range.

Last week at the doctor, I took off my shoes and weighed in. When the nurse plugged the number into the calculator, I came in at 25.1% BMI, when 24.9 is the top limit of what they term “normal.”

“Can I take off my clothes and try again?” I asked the nurse.

“Sure,” she said, then advised me not only to take off my jeans but also my watch, bracelet and eyeglasses. Down to my underwear, we got a new number, plugged it in, and the new BMI was 24.7%. Success! We both cheered and laughed and clapped. The doctor also found it pretty funny when she came in.

Alas, I thought getting the target BMI would get me out of blood tests for cholesterol and glucose. Turns out I have to do those anyway. I’m not a fan of the blood draw; I’ve had some horrific experiences over the years. Also, I’m pretty sure there’s no way to jigger those tests to hit the target retroactively.

Because fall television has begun, and I no longer can be so carefree with my screen time. Here we go:

The Bourne Legacy (2012) with Jeremy Renner. Good, but not as good as the previous films.

Hanna (2011) About a girl programmed to be an assassin. I didn’t like it as much as my husband did. But did appreciate a very creepy turn from Tom Hollander, who played Mr. Collins in the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice. Wondering: was Cate Blanchett’s X-Files Scully-look deliberate?

The 39 Steps (1935), Criterion Collection. The movie is great, as are the extras, and the booklet/essay that comes with the DVD. I think my favorite part is where the guy takes a woman home, and then offers her haddock, and cooks it for her.

The Wire, Season 5. Such a good show. So sad to be done. Fingers crossed for some of those characters, but by the end, I did not give a sh1t about McNulty. He got off too easy. Oh, Bunk, Bunny, Carver, Dukie, Omar, and so many, many characters. I loved spending time with you.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Trifling, but probably worth it to see the original song by Monroe, since I grew up with Madonna’s “Material Girl” homage, and liked Nicole Kidman’s in Moulin Rouge.

Back to the Future (1985). The kids loved this, and I love watching my kids love a movie. The film holds up, though the Huey Lewis soundtrack doesn’t.

Fish Tank (2009). Michael Fassbender. Woo. Great indie, and loved the lead actress.

Being Elmo: a Puppeteer’s Journey (2011). Could it be MORE different than the previous DVD? Interesting and charming docu about the man behind the puppet, but I wanted more about his experience as a black man in a white man’s milieu, and felt it glossed over how he was loving to millions of kids as Elmo, but not so much to his one actual kid. (Reminded me of Miyazaki)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness. So classy, so good. Better than the recent film, and appropriately lacking the film’s unnecessary violence. Like the film, I had to let go of trying to follow the plot and characters and by the end they were all sorted. My husband about had a geekjoy apoplexy when he recognized the actor playing Karla.

Chronicle (2012) A surprisingly solid indie about kids who develop superpowers.

Woot! Caught up!

Currently enmeshed in season 1 of Veronica Mars (watching w/husband) and Friday Night Lights (sans husband.)

I first read Toni Morrison’s Beloved in 1996. I was in my second year of graduate school, and in a woman’s book group. I was new to the wish to become a better reader of better books. As part of claiming my books, I wrote in them. Alas, in Beloved, I wrote in red pen. While it’s interesting to see what moved me and felt important on my first read, it’s not what I want on my second read, sixteen years later. I am still mulling over getting a new copy. But for an upcoming discussion, because I couldn’t find an unmarked used copy (apparently, unsurprisingly, Beloved is the kind of book that gets marked up), I read my old copy.

I am certain that sixteen years, which included grad school in religion and umpteen books, helped make this a less bewildering read than it must have been back then. Also, knowing two key things about the book, since they will never be forgotten, made it “easier” to read than before. I put easier in quotes, because this is anything but an easy read. The blurbs are full of apt adjectives, like harrowing, stunning, dazzling, glorious, brilliant, shocking, brutal, magical, shattering. Both the history the novel relates–of the Middle Passage crossing and US slavery–as well as the emotions the richly drawn characters evoke, drew me in and forced me to read, think on, and feel things I’d really probably rather not. And yet, the reading of the book also makes it clear why it’s so important to know about these things, to not ignore them. The book bears witness to pain and ugliness, but also to beauty, strength, and hope.

Morrison’s writing is spare at the start, gets mystical in the middle with Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness chapters, and then more elaborate at the end.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.

Here’s what we know at the beginning. The house is haunted. Sethe is a former slave who lived with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, until the old woman died. One day a man named Paul D finds her. They once were slaves on a Kentucky plantation ironically named Sweet Home. Things proceed, moving back and forth, from there.

What struck me on this reading was that Beloved, with its ghost and grisly past, has all the hallmarks of a gothic horror story, which are blended with historical facts of the slave trade. I think it’s a toss up whether the gothic treatment highlights the horror inherent, or manages to make it able to be read, giving the reader just that small space of breathing room that fiction’s make believe can provide.

I re-read Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure prior to seeing a performance by Ten Thousand Things. Revisiting this play reminded me just how strange it is. I’d remembered it as a romance, but it’s classified as a comedy, though also a “Problem Play” because of its dark, weird mood.

In it, a duke dresses as a friar, gives all his power to a trusted friend Angelo, who then enforces a long-dormant law and sentences poor, nice Claudio to death because he got his girlfriend pregnant without marrying her legally and completely. Claudio’s sister Isabel, a soon-to-be nun, pleads for his case, Angelo falls in lust with her, the duke/friar runs around meddling, and wacky hijinx ensure.

The play ends with two, or is it three?, marriages. The two that are certain are punishments, and the men in them would prefer death. The third, uncertain marriage, can only be answered by the production. The one we attended last night skirted the possibility of the third marriage altogether.

It’s an unsettling text, and an unsettling play, though it does put forth provocative questions of power, equality, and judgment. I wonder if it might have been a satire in its time, whose sting has been lost with the context. I’m glad to have seen it performed.

Some of my favorite lines:

Mistress Overdone: But what’s his offence?
Pompey: Groping for trouts, in a peculiar river. (I, ii, 82-3)

Lucio: Our doubts are traitors,
And makes us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt. (I, iv, 77-9)

Duke: Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense. (V, i, 64)

which reminds me of

Polonius: Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t” (Hamlet II.ii.205-206).

When I did a good long think about the young-adult novel I am attempting to write, I realized something strange. It’s a romance. Which is not what I set out to write. But when I read Fifteen by Beverly Cleary this summer, I realized THAT was the kind of book I was trying to write: a coming-of-age romance with not too much conflict. Who knows if I’ll even finish mine. I’ve been working on it so long because, basically, I wasn’t a good enough writer to tell the story the way I wanted to. I’ve kept writing, and in the hope that someday I’ll be able to pull it off.

But YA romance, by and large, isn’t something I’ve read much of, so I did some spelunking at amazon.com and at sites like Forever Young Adult. I revisited this YA-fiction flow chart, and it was clear I needed to check out something by Sarah Dessen. Thus, Keeping the Moon.

My name is Nicole Sparks. Welcome to the first day of the worst summer of my life.

Nicole, nicknamed Colie, is shunted by her famous mother to live with her eccentric aunt in a tiny vacation town for the summer. Colie has dyed black hair, a lip ring, and an event in her past that’s made her angry and isolated. Over the summer, she gets a job as a waitress, makes some friends, tries to figure out her aunt, meets cute boys, and, guess what? She does not, in fact, have the worst summer of her life.

This, along with some other plot points, were not surprising. But Colie and the friends, even Colie’s relationship with her mother, all had some nice touches that felt real and true. I enjoyed it, and will seek out some of Dessen’s other books to see how they compare.

Or: Nerdishly Obsessing over Bicycling Backpacks

My husband and I both love bags. We have scads of them. The thing about bags, as with bikes and so many other things, is that you don’t know what works and what doesn’t till you’ve been living with something for a while.

For some time now, I’ve been muddling along with my husband’s old broke-ass gigantic backpack. It was too big, missing a lining, black on the inside, and with a rolltop that I nearly always have to undo and redo because I’ve forgotten to put in or take out something. In other words, completely unacceptable.

Now that fall is here, I’m making longer jaunts on my bike as the boys are back in school. I felt a growing resolve for a new bag. And so my quest began, which ended with my purchase of a Banjo Brothers Metro Bag. Here’s how I came to that decision.

I wanted a flap closure, not a rolltop. The latter is better for absolute water proofing, which isn’t such an issue for me, since I’m mostly a fair-weather biker. Since I often forget to put things in and take things out of my bag, easy access is more important to me. Rolltops also tend to ride higher above the shoulders, so they can lessen visibility. Choosing flap rather than rolltop ruled out Trash bags, most Beard bags, Seal Lines, and the handsome Chrome Orlov.

I knew from the black pack I’d been using that a dark interior doesn’t work for me. I needed a light-colored interior to better see what’s inside. Bags with dark interiors I ruled out were Bailey Works (such great color choices!) and Mission Workshop.

I also needed two side pockets. I like to carry my U-lock in my bag, for less rattly bang when I’m riding, and I don’t have a water bottle holder on my bike, so I like a 2nd pocket for the bottle and to stash my keys in. This ruled out the Beard Loiterer, as well as Chrome and Mission Workshop bags. The Timbuk2 Swig had only one pocket.

I also need a bunch of interior pockets for littler stuff like pens, wallet, book, etc:

I’d tried using conventional backpacks without a chest strap, but they made my shoulders ache. The Banjo Brothers Metro has both a chest strap and one at the bottom for even more support.

At the end of my search, I found one bag that had everything I wanted, and then some. The Banjo Brothers Metro in White had a light interior, double side pockets (though I wish they were a bit more deep), and a flap top. It was neither too big nor too small. The phone carrier on the strap, where I like it to be, is included, not an extra purchase. The interior has good organizational pockets. Bonuses: Banjo Brothers is a Twin Cities company, so local to me, and the bag was $74.99, significantly less than many of the other bags I looked at.

I’ll have to live with it for a while to see how it works out. Already I’ve noticed it rides higher on my shoulders than I’d like even though it’s not a rolltop. But everything else so far is good. I’m glad I waited a while to see what I wanted in a bag, rather than rushing into a relationship before I was ready.

A pick for one of my book groups, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street was mostly unknown to me, perhaps because I grew up elsewhere than in Minnesota, the setting for the novel and the origin point for Lewis himself. But now that I do live in Minnesota (and plan to stay) this felt like an enjoyable piece of required reading, one that would probably have been mostly lost on me if I’d read it when younger.

The main character is Carol, a young college graduate who works in Saint Paul, Minnesota before marrying a country doctor and moving to Gopher Prairie, modelled after Sauk Centre, Lewis’ birthplace. Idealistic Carol struggles against the staid pace and less than lovely facade of her new town, but her attempts to modernize thought and behavior mostly fall flat. The novel revolves around Carol’s struggle to accept small-town, middle-American life, while it wonders whether she should.

On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

In addition to Carol, though, it’s also the story of her husband, Will Kennicott, and their marriage. While the book is mostly viewed as a satire of small-town America, I found it also had some affection for what it mocked, and I appreciated the complicated portrait of marriage that it detailed through Carol and Will over the years.

What struck me again and again, too, was how modern the novel felt. The political and social issues, even the names and details of the Twin Cities, all felt like they were still echoing down the years. I would never have picked this up on my own, and it’s now earned a spot in the permanent library. Not a swift read, but a rewarding one.

Continuing to catch up on the DVD goodness we availed ourselves of this summer. Unlike the rest of the world, we do not have Netflix streaming. We get most of our DVDs from the library. Long wait, but FREE!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) with the kids after we listened to it on CD during our road trip. Those kids look so impossibly young! The quidditch brought to life is a delight, and our boys really enjoyed this.

Batman Begins (2005) rewatched the first movie in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. While the Evil Plan doesn’t actually make sense, it’s a very good action flick, and superbly cast and acted. (Even Katie Holmes, IMO.)

Batman: The Dark Knight (2008) Poor dead Heath Ledger. One of the (the?) best superhero movies ever.

Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) Good, but not as good as its predecessor. Joseph Gordon Levitt is one of the best young actors, and utterly engaging. Also, covering up Tom Hardy’s face with a mask the whole time? Ill advised.

Crazy Stupid Love (2011) Steve Carell and Julianne Moore are divorcing, and sad sack Steve gets adopted by Ryan Gosling, playing to type times infinity. Emma Stone is flailing in her own bad relationship, and somehow all these characters and more cross over. I didn’t care for some aspects, but overall, this was very entertaining. If Joseph Gordon Levitt and Emma Stone did a film together, would the world implode with charming cuteness?