Girl Detective

I am not an efficient or effective purger. My husband is actively opposed to purging. And since the birth of now 5yo Guppy, our house has gone into a slow, steady decline in neatness and cleanliness. I’ve vowed to clean and organize before; my organization tab on this blog is from 2007 (*wince*).

This time, I think I really mean it. I have two cleared horizontal surfaces to show for it. Fingers crossed that I can keep this up.

The magazine table, before (covered with things to donate):

Magazine table, after:

Entry table, with five years of accumulated non-urgent mail (keep in mind, none of this is quite junk, either; I’m on the DMA’s do-not mail list plus recycle anything that’s obvious. This is all the non-obvious stuff, mostly financial statements):

Entry table, after:

Two of my favorite books to read to my sons are about eggs. One is a classic, Bread and Jam for Frances:

It was breakfast time,
and everyone was at the table.
Father was eating his egg.
Mother was eating her egg.
Gloria was sitting in a high chair and eating her egg, too.
Frances was eating bread and jam.
“What a lovely egg!” said Father.

Frances the badger does not like eggs, or most other foods. She asks for bread and jam instead. But when she begins to receive bread and jam at every meal, Frances learns the perils of getting what you want. This book has so many things: charming pictures by Lillian Hoban, an amusing, yet gently instructive tale by her then-husband Russell Hoban, several songs about jam, and (as Kate Moses pointed out in her touching memoir Cakewalk) a story about food and its role in a happy family. My mom read this to us when my sisters and I were girls, and she made up tunes to go to the songs, just as I’ve done for my sons.

The second book was given to us by my sister Ruthie some years ago. It’s the deceptively simple Two Eggs, Please written by Sarah Weeks and illustrated by Doreen Cronin, the illustrator of the Click, Clack Moo books. It’s 2 a.m. in a downtown diner. A brown bear is in the kitchen, a red fox is out front. One by one, customers trickle in; they include a taxi-driving rhino, an upright-bass playing mouse whose band has probably just finished a set when the bar closed, a construction worker ram, and a homeless alligator and his pet snake. What do they all want? Two eggs, please. (And the “please” is pleasingly repeated.) They each get a nice, big cup of coffee but the egg orders are all different. The chef is shown breaking two eggs, one brown, one white, and both the same on the inside. The simple, timeless message told with charming pictures and few words moves me every time, and I only hope its deeper message is planted and growing inside my boys, even as they enjoy the simplistic portrayal of a late night diner counter.

I eat the same breakfast every morning: a cherry pomegranate toaster pastry and a cappuccino. About two hours later, I’m finally hungry for something more substantial, and that’s when I usually cook an egg. As often as we can, we get our eggs from one of Guppy’s preschool teachers, whose grandmother keeps chickens out in the country. Check out this yolk: half as high as a golf ball, and yellow-orange like a hot sun. These are eggs from happy chickens.

And from another recent morning, one of Guppy’s and my favorite second breakfasts: a bacon/cheese scramble alongside toast with a great deal of butter (hat tip, Mercy Watson books):

Note that I’m eating the heels of the bread, as the three other people in this family refuse to. Am I eating their leavings, or fortifying myself with the part of the bread that has the most nutrients?

Night Train to Munich, a lesser-known film by Carol Reed, director of The Third Man, owes a lot to its predecessor, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, with which it shares screenwriters, lead actress and supporting actors. It does, however, hold its own in a lovely new Criterion edition. It was both filmed and set in the very beginning of World War II, which is one of the reasons many of the Nazis are portrayed as fools rather than evil, as the extent of their actions wasn’t yet known.

Margaret Lockwood is the daughter of a scientist whose new method of armour-plating vehicles might be critical in the war. Both the Nazis and the English are trying to secure the scientist to their side with secret agents and complicated plans. Paul von Hernried (who would soon leave, before he was arrested, for Hollywood to become better known as Paul Henried in Casablanca) meets the daughter in a concentration camp. Twenty minutes in she meets co-star Rex Harrison, a seaside song and dance man, and their roles entwine engagingly for the rest of the film. Entertaining and worth watching, this is a beautiful print, and the Criterion dvd comes with a good history and essay on the film.

This was my second read of Cormac McCarthy’s multiple award winner The Road, this month’s pick for the reading group I’ve started, of books with themes of myth and religion. Again, I found The Road a profound, moving, provocative story of the environment and human nature, told with Christian allegory. I flinched at times. At others I couldn’t stop reading until I found out what happened to the unnamed man and his son. And in the end I cried, then dried my tears and read through till the end, which some see as hopeful and others (like my husband, G. Grod) do not.

Yes, it was made into a movie, with Viggo Mortenson. It didn’t get great reviews; I don’t plan to see it. As for the book, though, there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t yet read the book, I recommend it. Read it and come back to discuss.

A man and his young son are on the road, heading south several years after an unspecified environmental disaster:

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire. (6)

That last phrase, “each the other’s world entire” continues to awe me with how much power five words can carry. McCarthy subtly creates the near future and its slight off-ness. He doesn’t use apostrophes for the word not: didnt, wouldnt, cant. Yet he does use it for other contractions: we’re, they’re, there’s. He’ll occasionally tweak a word, as when the man uses the binoculars to “glass” the road below, to create a feeling of difference.

The first time I read the novel, I was convinced there had been a nuclear holocaust. This time, noting the references to the distant sun, I suspect a natural disaster, something like the meteor some scientists theorize brought in the Ice Age and the end of the dinosaurs.

The man and his son stumble through a ruined landscape, scavenging for canned food and fuel from the past. This raises the question of hope versus futility. If hope, then is it a good thing, or was there a reason it was what remained in the box Pandora opened? Is hope an evil, like the rest of what escaped, or is it the antidote?

I choose to believe in hope. That’s what I read into the book, though I see how McCarthy skillfully left readers to draw their own conclusions in many instances, especially the end.

Unintentionally, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, my husband and I seem to be on an 80’s-comedy bender. The past month included 3 birthdays, three work-intensive birthday cakes, one family visit, and four cases of strep (one for each of us.) So at the end of each day, just about all I want to do it collapse on the couch and be entertained. And Groundhog Day was ideal for that.

Bill Murray is Phil, a bitter weatherman on the embarrassing-to-him trip to Punxatawney, PA to cover the emergence of the groundhog, also Phil. His nastiness projects him into a type of purgatory, in which he wakes every morning to the same February 2nd.

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters.
*That* was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get *that* day over, and over, and over…

He goes through the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of grief, along with detours into crime and hedonism, but has a lot to learn on his way to the end of the movie, which is apparently a favorite of both Buddhists and Catholics.

The success of this film, as it nears its 20th anniversary, is likely due both to the charm of Murray being funny combined with a sweet tale that doesn’t become saccharine or even preachy, and in the end is far more thoughtful and full of ideas to ponder than I would have expected from the team who did Stripes and Ghostbusters. Both of which are good, but Groundhog Day, in my estimation, is a classic.

Earlier this year, Moviefone had a new evaluation of how long Bill Murray was stuck in the Groundhog Day loop.

All of us have strep throat this week, so there’s been more comfort TV than usual. My husband and I followed the recent viewing of 16 Candles with Weird Science, John Hughes’ teen-boy wish-fulfillment movie, in which two geeks build a dream woman. This movie could easily have been hateful. Instead, it’s merely (surprisingly) not that offensive, thanks to the geeks’ believability, Kelly LeBrock’s knowledge and power, and a lack of actual sex. Intermittently entertaining for some funny lines, and interesting to see Robert Downey Jr with a sky-high gelled coif, but eminently skippable. This is from IMDB’s trivia:

Although he wrote the screenplay, John Hughes was not overly invested in it and was adamant about not directing the film. He changed his mind when Universal offered him a deal: if said yes to directing Weird Science, they would greenlight a project Hughes cared much more deeply about AND wanted to direct: The Breakfast Club (1985). Hughes would later state that he was irritated by the time he had to take away from the latter film to work on this one.

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question is also one of the selections for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. What I remember most about the announcement of it’s winning the MB prize was that both the author and many others seemed surprised that it won. After reading this expose, “Tears, Tiffs and Triumphs“, about the judging process of the Booker over the years, I figure the judging is just slightly more than random, but usually a MB prize winner doesn’t suck. And The Finkler Question doesn’t.

The back of the book describes it as “a funny, furious, unflinching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. The first adjective is “funny” and many of the blurbs praised its humor, wit and satire, yet the book is much more concerned with the endless complications of anti-Semitism and Israeli/Palestinian violence. There really is nothing funny about the latter, but Jacobson often does find humor in the former, as in the main character Julian Treslove’s weird fixation on the Judaism of his friends:

Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew–small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes. He had extravagant features, a prominent jaw, long arms and big feet for which he had trouble finding wide enough shoes, even at fifteen. (Treslove noticed feet; his were dainty like a dancer’s.) What is more–and everything was more on Finkler–he had a towering manner that made him look taller than he actually was, and delivered verdicts on people and events with such assurance that he almost spat them out of his mouth. “Say it, don’t spray it,” other boys sometimes said to him, though they took their lives in their hands when they did. If this was what all Jews looked like, Treslove thought, then Finkler, which sounded like Sprinkler, was a better name for them than Jew. So that was what he called them privately–Finklers.(17)

A subtitle for the book might well have been: “Jewish Identity: It’s Complicated.” Jacobson does an exemplary job of showing, not just telling, how absurdly complicated it is, as well as reminding the reader that racism should never be tolerated, even as it’s so prevalent and ingrained that many wish to dismiss it as benign. This book might have been helpful for me 17 years ago, as I considered converting to Judaism, based largely on the simplistic portrait painted by the rabbi I was studying with. Once I learned that Judaism could be just as silly, awful, complicated and misguided as the religion I was raised in, converting didn’t have nearly the allure it once did. It’s a good book, in that it provoked me to think about the continuing insidious influence of racism. But enjoyable it wasn’t. I have a hard time thinking of anyone I’d recommend this book to.

Next: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

One of my husband G. Grod’s favorite movies, the 1948 Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan, only recently joined our video library. We watched the beginning with 5yo Guppy and 7yo Drake; they loved the swordplay sequences. But we stopped at the end of the diamond studs sequence, as what follows with Milady DeWinter would be very, very hard to explain. And it was in that contrast of tone that I think the film foundered. Is it a jolly adventure, or a dark tale of murder and adultery? The beginning and end suggest the former, but much of the movie is about the latter.

A new adaptation is due out this year. The cast looks promising, the director, not so.

Last year, Minnesota Monthly did a profile on local fashion and self-image blogger Sally McGraw. I liked her look, and loved what she had to say, so I started following her blog, Already Pretty. As this winter has dragged on, and on, I’ve found myself again and again reaching for cotton turtlenecks with the sneaking suspicion that neither Tim Gunn nor Sally McGraw would approve. I bit the bullet, and wrote to Sal:

I’m a stay-at-home mom and writer with 2 boys in NE Mpls. Right about now in winter is usually when I throw in the fashion towel. Boots, long underwear, turtlenecks under sweaters.

I struggle with winter mom fashion in MN in general, but am wondering, is there a way to wear cotton turtlenecks and look put together and not frumpy, or am I better off with non-turtles and scarves all winter long?

The response was what I had expected:

Now, turtlenecks. Honestly, they are tough to pull off. Very few people - myself included - actually look good in a close-fitting turtleneck. We wear them anyway when it’s freezing out and there are definitely times when warmth trumps fashion. If you love them lots, you can try doing a t-neck AND a scarf. Having something drapey and/or patterned to soften the harsh lines of the turtleneck helps a lot. You can also mitigate the high neck with a deep-v blazer. But going without turtlenecks and doing just scarves and cowls will look more chic and flattering. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

Her response, while disheartening, has not purged my turtlenecks from rotation, especially on days below 20F when I’ll be out and about. But it was a good reminder not to reach for the same old thing, and to give more attention to the scarves in my closet, of which there are more than a few.

I probably saw 16 Candles in the theater, as I was 16 when it came out. I do know I watched John Hughes’ genre-changing teen film again and again on VHS and on television. I identified with Molly Ringwald: I was a funny looking redhead with too-short hair and nowhere near the cute clothes she sports in this. I was a little afraid to watch it again after so many years. What if the suck fairy had got into it. My worry wasn’t unwarranted; there were a few things that nagged me. Overall, though, it was what I remembered, a sweet, funny film about a girl whose family is so wrapped up in the upcoming wedding of her older sister they completely forget her sixteenth birthday. I’d never noticed the Jane Austen-ish echoes before, but found them pretty clear this time, with a sensible girl surrounded by crazy relatives. Molly Ringwald is charming and likable as Samantha, Michael Shoeffling smolders sweetly as Jake Ryan, but it’s really Anthony Michael Hall who steals the show. He’s hilarious, both physically and verbally and his presence is what stops this from being too whiny or navel-gazing.

I have to admit to disappointment both with the racial stereotype of Long Duk Dong, and about a morally ambiguous morning after scene, but overall I thought the movie held up well. I still think the scene in front of the church at the end is one of the sweetest, most romantic ones in film. I’ve never understood the women who think Lloyd Dobbler was the perfect guy. Jake Ryan was it, for me, long before I knew the debt he owed to Mr. Darcy.

Oh, I loved re-reading Carter Beats the Devil, the next selection for Twin Cities’ book club Books and Bars. And I’m glad I liked it, since I was one of the people who recommended the book. What if I’d misremembered, or been in a weird mood, or hadn’t noticed that it wasn’t that good? I’m glad to say, none of these are true. Gold’s tale of vaudeville magic was as thumping a read the second time as it was the first.

The Overture with which it opens introduce Charles Carter, a stage magician in 1923, and a famous show which President Warren G. Harding attended. Amazing things happen, then the book recedes to Carter’s childhood:

“I’ll need an assistant sometimes.”

Their eyes met, and James’s watered. He looked away.

“It’s all right,” Charles added. “I can do it alone.”

James slipped into the tub, under the water, and then resurfaced. Later, Charles, too, would get into the tub, but for now he stood alone and held the rock in his hand, because it had already started for him: his hands felt naked without something in them–a card, a coin, a rope–and whenever they held something secretly, they felt educated. (66)

This book is enthralling historical fiction, with great characters from the golden age of magic including Houdini, suspense, mystery, tragedy and romance. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay it is to say that Gold blends history and fiction so entertainingly that I am utterly uninterested in researching what was “real” in the story. The show is so good that I don’t care to know how the tricks were done.

I made three birthday cakes this month. One for 5yo Guppy:

It is Obi Wan and Anakin battling on the planet Mustafar. I have not seen the movie this scene is from, but I know the relevant details, as it’s the kind of thing one learns as the wife of a geek and the mother of sons. The cake is one yellow round and one chocolate round, as 7yo Drake likes yellow cake and 5yo Guppy likes chocolate. I used recipes from Cook’s Country, and found them dry.

For my husband G. Grod, I made Cook’s Illustrated’s Chocolate Mousse Cake. (I’d link to their website, but it always freezes my browser, and thus annoys me. I will not reward them for that.) Very good, but the recipe is fussy, with whipped egg whites, a bain marie and hours to cool then hours to chill. I never managed to restrain myself from eating long enough to take a pic of the finished cake, but here were some steps:

For my birthday, I thought about buying a cake, but decided finally to make the Brown Eyed Susan Cake, which I’d coveted since I’d seen it in a 2005 copy of Cook’s Country.

Here was the magazine photo:

Here is my version:

For me, making it took all day, the chocolate marble and frostings were much lighter than the magazine pictures, and the cake itself was dry. With vanilla ice cream, it was quite good, but in retrospect not worth spending my entire birth day making. Memo to future self: buy a cake. As for the dryness of the cakes, I was using unbleached cake flour. That might have been a factor, so before I toss those recipes, I’ll try using regular cake flour.

At The Morning News, Victor LaValle’s “Scribble,” on books as objects, with a good story about getting turned down by a woman:

I shut the book. “Can I borrow this?”

She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder–so nice!–and said, “No.”

I almost dropped the book. It bobbled between my hands so she grabbed it from me and slipped it back onto the shelf, right where it had been before.

At The Common Review, Rebekah Frumkin’s “Our Psychic Living Room” preaches to this already-converted David Foster Wallace fan:

What Wallace is often trying to say in his fiction and essays–the message, as it were, at the heart of so much outpouring of feeling–is simple: think about someone else besides yourself. Which is a message a lot of us need desperately to hear. Wallace attacked the bored stasis of the unengaged American life–the stoned sitting and staring, the herdlike consumption of pleasure-inducing drugs (which could be anything from alcohol and cocaine to shopping and television)–and sounded an unselfish call to action. As someone who fought valiantly to escape the constraints of his own troubled mind, Wallace knew the value of a good change in perspective. “You are not the only person on this earth,” he seems to be telling his readers. “You really need to understand that and try to act accordingly.” If every bored person could just wake up and stand witness to what’s happening in the world, then maybe we’d all be a little more generous with our time and resources.

Emphasis mine, as it’s something that’s come up a few times this week. Article via Arts and Letters Daily.

As I mentioned in my last post, having multiple books groups as the Tournament of Books approaches does not help me curb my predilection for book buying.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, as I’ve not read it, and this edition has a new essay by the author.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, winner of last year’s Man Booker prize, a contestant in the ToB, and literature about religion.

I have been going to the same dentist office for 12 years. The previous dentist retired, and a new one bought his practice. They know our family, and can even say which son’s teeth seem like which parent’s. Best of all, right downstairs is one of the best Half Price Books in the area. (I worked there 12 years ago, which is why I started seeing that dentist.)

No trip is complete without a stop before or after to the bookstore. This stack of four was me restraining myself.The combination of The Morning News Tournament of Books, plus the new book group I’ve started, in which we’re reading fiction with themes of religion and mythology, hits me right in my vulnerable, compulsive book-buying spot. These I’m considering for the book group:

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller, Jr.
Lamb by Christopher Moore
Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

After the bookstore, I go to Rustica bakery for an excellent coffee drink (macchiato nowadays) and their bittersweet chocolate cookies. Post-bookstore Rustica is one of my very happiest places.

It’s only the second month of the year, and my notes on movies are already hopeless out of whack. I have some on my list that aren’t on the blog, and vice versa. Even though I’m taking a break from the compulsion to see everything that usually is Oscar season for me, I still have seen nearly as many movies as I’ve read books. I’d like the movies to be a definite second, not a close one. After I post this, I’m going to my library request list and cull it of any other than “I want to see it NOW” films.

Greenberg (2010) d. Noah Baumbach. I don’t like Ben Stiller. But this was a smart, extremely weird, often uncomfortable but sometimes charming and hopeful movie. I’m not sure I’m glad I saw it, but I’m not sorry, either. (This was my pick from the library.) It hadn’t occurred to me till I read the trivia at IMDB, but the character of Florence does bear interesting similarities to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

High Noon (1952) d. Fred Zinneman, with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. (My husband’s pick from the library.) An aging but still mesmerizing Cooper is the lawman who’s trying to retire when the rumored appearance of his old nemesis makes him question whether to stay and defend his town, while his virginal, Quaker bride urges him to leave with her, and rejects him when he doesn’t. Is he a macho idiot, or a heroic man? The film is satisfyingly vague enough about this to make it much more than a simple morality tale, and has more than a few echoes of its soon-to-be-blacklisted writer, Carl Foreman. Highly recommended.

Ponyo (2008) (My pick for the kids from the library.) Neither boy enjoyed this when we saw it in the theater, to my profound disappointment. Yet 7yo Drake especially liked the movie at home, and 5yo Guppy didn’t dislike it this time around. I’m beginning to suspect that familiarity may breed affection with these boys and movies, and they’re rarely going to like something the first time they see it. This is Hayao Miyazaki’s lovely take on Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, that is not creepy and anti-feminist and sexist like the Disney movie is. A little fish girl falls in love with a 5yo boy. Her father disapproves, and the ocean falls out of balance unless things can be resolved. Sweet and lovely, Ponyo is rated G and one of the better films out there for kids–accessible, with an ecological subtext.

Spaced was a Channel 4 UK television series in the early 00’s, with Simon Pegg and Mike Frost, directed by Edgar Wright, who also collaborated on Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. There are only two short seasons of seven episodes apiece; the second series was commissioned before the first season even aired. Pegg is Tim, a wannabe comic artist who works in a comic shop. He becomes friends with Daisy, played by Jessica Stevenson, and they rent a flat together pretending to be a couple. Supporting cast includes Frost in his first acting gig, as Tim’s gun-crazy friend Mike, Daisy’s snotty friend Twist, Brian the crazy artist, Marsha the red-wine-guzzling lockjawed landlady, and Tyres, their insane bike-messenger friend. Weird, sweet, and hilarious. I can’t believe the UK had this, and we had Friends. Unfair.

I didn’t feel the love for One Day that critics did. It’s covered with amatory blurbs. I read it for one of my book groups, Books and Bars, and probably would have put it down.

The conceit is descriptions of only one day per year of the two main characters, Emma and Dexter, whom we meet in bed the morning after they finish university. Emma is a brainy feminist idealist. Dexter is a handsome lazy guy from a wealthy family who develops a drinking problem. Since the book starts with them in bed, it ostensibly avoids some of the “will they or won’t they,” yet it doesn’t. That tension underlies most of the book, and I didn’t find it that compelling, mostly because I didn’t care for the main characters. I am fine with unlikeable characters, but only if they are complex. Emma and Dexter were unlikeable because they were uninteresting to me, each a pastiche of unsurprising stock traits.

There is a major twist toward the end, and I feel the book picked up a bit after that, if only because there was finally some character development, but it was too little, too late for me. I leaked a few grudging tears at the end, so wasn’t unmoved, but became annoyed with it again as I tried to find illustrative quotes, and have given up. Not for me, but it did inspire a good book discussion, even if many of us left without figuring out why others loved the book.

Next up: Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold (aka Mr. Alice Sebold.)

I saw the spine of I Think I Love You, and had to pick it up; that was a favorite song from my girlhood and had a renaissance in college when my roommates and I would get up on a coffee table and sing it with improvised microphones at the top of our lungs. I think we all also had it played at our weddings; I have a photo in my wedding album of us dancing and singing to it.

After I picked it up I saw it was by Allison Pearson, whose I Don’t Know How She Does It I enjoyed and it helped me make the decision to resign my corporate job and stay home with my then 9mo son Drake. The description of I Think I Love You talked about teen idols, girls’ friendships, women’s friendship, the difficulties of middle age, all of which sounded right in my wheelhouse. The back blurbs were starred reviews from PW and Kirkus. I charmed a double discount from the guy behind the desk, and walked out with it, which was going to happen in any case.

The book centers on Petra, a 13 year old Welsh girl in 1974 hopelessly in love with David Cassidy. She holds a precarious place in a clique of girls, and a burgeoning best-friendship with Sharon. Petra’s chapters alternate, though, with Bill, a college-grad know-it-all who ghost writes an English David Cassidy fan magazine. As much as it shames him, he finds he is very good at his job, while he tells his girlfriend he’s a rock journalist, bending the truth more than a bit.

Bill stood and watched beside the other journalists, most of them men, none of them Cassidy fans; not in public, at any rate. How surprising it was, then, to see their lips move in sync to half the songs, as if they had been versed in his collected works by the power of hypnotic suggestion. Maybe they couldn’t help it; maybe they just had the radio on all day, in the kitchen at home, beside the draining board, and then on a shelf at the office, next to an open window. Cassidy songs would come and go, through an average radio day, and over the weeks they would seep into your nervous system, whether you wanted them there or not, and you would find yourself breaking out into a song, no more able to prevent it than you would a violent rash. (145)

The book moved from the 70’s to the 90’s, and does a very good psychological portrait of teenage fandom. Both the dust jacket and the binding are a blinding hot pink, so you have to embrace that you’re reading chicklit; I can’t really imagine a guy reading this book. It is by a woman, about girls and women, and really for girls and women and the different stages of life and love that many of us go through.

I was born a little late for the David Cassidy craze. My first pop crush was Donny Osmond, and my second was David’s younger half-brother, Shaun. But the details of pop-star worship are dead on, even with different pop stars, and girls from a different country than mine. If you ever had a crush on a pop star or ever suffered the cruelty of other girls, then I think you’ll find much to identify with and appreciate here.

This year I finally acknowledged how silly it was to say I wasn’t going to buy any books. So I noted something like I’d try to keep it to two a month. Which did not take into account graphic novels, so it’s not a much less silly goal. I’m not sure what a reasonable one would be, but perhaps I can keep track of this year’s acquisitions, and base next year’s on it? (Did you notice how I weaseled out of accountability for the WHOLE YEAR?)

Jan books

For my own purposes (and perhaps as an excuse to my husband, who is a little better than me about not buying books) I’ll include the rationalizations/perfectly good reasons.

One Day by David Nicholls. For Books and Bars on 2/22/11. Also because I could have won something by buying a book. Didn’t win.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. Because I saw the movie and read a recommendation at The Morning News.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. Bought for The Morning News Tournament of Books because library queue too long, and I really enjoyed Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.

News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist by Laurie Hertzel. I won a signed copy at my friend Amy’s blog. Woo!

Savages by Don Winslow. Same reason as Lemon Cake: ToB plus library queue too long.

Number of these I have even started: 0.

February books

Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett. Because I’m starting a book group on literature with religious and mythic themes. I thought this might have a related essay.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Because this was recommended online as an example of the Demeter/Persephone myth, so I might want to read it for the above-mentioned book group, and it’s an Oxford World Classics edition, my favorite.

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. I recently read an old Guardian article dishing on past Booker decisions; it made me want to seek this out. Since it’s about women and philosophy, I thought it might also work for the book group.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Because it’s about women and religion and I might want to read it for the book group, and when I went to look for my copy, I couldn’t find it.

I Think I Love You by Alison Pearson. Four of these things belong together; one of these things just doesn’t belong…It’s awfully pink, no? Saw the title, which was one of my favorite party songs in college, saw it was by Alison Pearson, whose I Don’t Know How She Does It I loved, saw it was about girlhood crushes, friendship, aging, motherhood, and had starred reviews from Kirkus and PW. I couldn’t leave Barnes and Noble without it, and it jumped the TBR queue ahead of all the other books in this entry. And I love it. So there.