Girl Detective

A fun find from our library, Looking for a Moose by Phyllis Root is one of our new favorite picture books. The text is repetitive and almost rhyming, similar to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, so it’s fun to read aloud. It’s different from Bear Hunt because it’s a one way journey, and because it has a happier ending that teaches the plural of moose. Cecil’s oil paintings are clear and engaging, and several pages have hidden moose.

#8 in my 2007 book challenge was The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating by David Buss. I found it often repetitive, and occasionally interesting. Published in 1994 and relying on research up to twenty years before that, it’s old for non-fiction, and thus dated about things like sexual behavior in the face of AIDS. The author has an interesting premise, and one I didn’t find very shocking or surprising: men and women’s mating strategies are often unpleasant adaptive mechanisms that have ensured survival and propagation. These strategies are general and animal-like, rather than individual and emotional. Buss interestingly deploys many examples from the animal world to illustrate parallel points. His anecdotes of humans, though, never felt like they illustrated his scientific data well. They seemed more like stories (and often unpleasantly sexist ones) in the vein of “love’s a bitch.” Additionally, the scientific evidence Buss relies on was sometimes sketchy. He noted that lesbians mating behavior didn’t conform to certain of his theories, but didn’t explore this at any length. In one particularly egregious instance, Buss noted how the sexual revolution proved one of his theories, since it occurred during a time of more women than men, yet he didn’t mention another key contributing cause, the birth-control pill. The chapters had some slipshod endnotes that hinted at less than rigorous scholarship. One of the members of my book group recommended Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? instead.

#7 in my 2007 book challenge was Evelyn Waugh’s Loved One. It’s a recommendation of my husband G. Grod. It was also my attempt to sneak in a short novel before I had to read two non-fiction books for my two book groups. The Loved One is, to borrow from Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short. It’s a bleak comedy about two Hollywood funeral homes (one for pets, another for departed “Loved Ones”), a dead Hollywood failure, and a love triangle among an aspiring poet, a head embalmer, and an idealistic cosmetician. I found it perhaps more clever than enjoyable. It has the kind of biting, mean-spirited humor that I’m not always in the mood for.

#6 in my 2007 book challenge was The Easy Way Out by Stephen McCauley, recommended by a member of my writing group. Though the plot meanders, it has outstanding characters, sharp writing, and some very funny, believable and poignant insights on relationships. Patrick, the main character, can’t seem to dump his boyfriend. One of Patrick’s brothers is engaged, but seeing another woman. The other brother is separated from his wife and living in their parents basement. Published in 1994, some of the material is dated, such as the perception of the threat of AIDS, and the details of the travel industry. Yet the travel details are so hilarious that they inspire nostalgia rather than disdain. (Remember using travel agents to book flights? Remember meeting people as they got off planes?) Sharon, the main character’s best friend and co-worker at a travel agency, takes great pleasure in subverting the travel system, among other things. She is one of the best and funniest characters I have read in a long time.

Bad news courtesy of Neil Gaiman: Dreamhaven Books, the independently owned book/comic/ephemera shop in Minneapolis, was burgled and trashed last weekend. Visit their site, buy a book and help them out.

My husband G. Grod has enjoyed these books lately:

The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi

Dzur by Steven Brust

One recent night the kids were in bed, and there were any number of things I should have done: resting, reading, writing, etc. Yet what I really wanted was to go to a bookstore. And when I tried to talk myself out of it (don’t need to, don’t want to buy books, what about the new book vow, etc.) I realized that I didn’t want to go book shopping; I wanted to browse.

Aimless browsing (aimless anything, really) is one of the casualties of this parent’s life. Trips to Target, the grocery store, the library, or anywhere else, are constrained by my kids’ short attention spans and my often depleted reserves of patience. But to browse? To wander hither and yon, with nothing to lead me on but my own whims? I went out directly.

With just over an hour till closing time, I browsed fiercely. I looked at all the Hemingway titles, trying (vainly) to figure out which collection of stories I read in college (turns out it was In Our Time.) I checked out the editions of To Kill a Mockingbird, since I’ll want a new one before I re-read it, and I don’t like the photo-cover TPB they sell at Target. I scanned the new-release tables, with their alluring covers and blurbs, but I was immune to their siren calls. Then I spent a good long time in the kids section going through the maddeningly subdivided board-book section. (Alphabetically by author! What’s so hard about that? I don’t need to look through Disney/Basics/Things That Go/Colors/etc.) I found so many gems in the paperback picture-book section that I had to take home a few. I Stink and Farmer Duck came home with me, but Mr. Gumpy’s Outing, It’s My Birthday, and Fables all went back to the shelf, amid much regretful sighing. I went to the register at the fifteen-minutes-to-closing announcent, and got a dollar off the price of one of the books because it was banged up, and because I asked. So yes, I did buy some books. But I didn’t go book shopping. I went book looking. And that was much more rewarding.

I’m a frequent user of the library reserve system. My favorite of the three nearby library systems has a great site with a good search function. I’ve been true to my 2007 vow to use the library less for books, but I am still using it to reserve and borrow new DVDs and CDs. There’s a high demand for these, so the lists are long. I am often flirting with the upper limit allowed of reservable items, since some take months to come in. But last time I went to reserve items, I saw a notice that the library was limiting reserves to twenty items, down from fifty.

My first response? How can they do this? (Disbelief; I think it’s the Kubler Ross first stage of loss.) Then I was angry, then I was defiant. I went online and put several more items on reserve, pushing myself very close to the previous limit of fifty. Ha, I thought. Whatever this new limit is, it isn’t working yet.

I wondered if I should get a card for 3yo Drake so I could double my reserves. Then I realized, who am I fooling? Mightn’t I have a problem if twenty reserve items isn’t nearly enough? Are there support groups for library ab/users?

The next time I tried to reserve something, I got this message: There is a problem with your account. Please see a librarian.

I don’t need to see a librarian. The gig is up.

John Knightley only was in mute astonishment. That a man who might have spent his evening quietly at home after a day of business in London should set off again, and walk half a mile to another man’s house for the sake of being in mixed company till bed-time, of finishing his day in the efforts of civility and the noise of numbers, was a circumstance to strike him deeply. A man who had been in motion since eight o’clock in the morning, and might now have been still–who had been long talking, and might have been silent–who had been in more than one crowd, and might have been alone!–Such a man to quit the tranquillity and independence of his own fireside, and on the evening of a cold sleety April day rush out again into the world!–Could he, by a touch of his finger, have instantly taken back his wife, there would have been a motive; but his coming would probably prolong rather than break up the party. John Knightley looked at him with amazement, then shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘I could not have believed it, even of him.’ Emma

I just finished re-reading Jane Austen’s Emma, #5 in my book challenge for the year. It was a joy; the nearly 500 pages flew by. I laughed out loud at passages like the one above, because I found the book consistently funny. This was not the case the first time I read it, just over two years ago. I enjoyed it, but didn’t love it, and found it slow to read.

I’m not sure what made the difference. I’m reading at the same time of year, and with about the same level of parental fatigue. It could be that I read the book previously, and several other Austen books recently. I was reading for enjoyment, not to find out what happened. Since there are several plot points that are kept hidden till near the end, this allowed me to savor the careful hints that appear throughout the text. Reading the other Austen novels Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, has made me more fluent in Austen’s prose style. As I find with Shakespeare, reading more is the best way to be able to read more because I learn the customs and rhythms of the language. In any case, I found Emma a delight, even though Austen acknowledges some of the inherent difficulties of her tale, like Frank Churchill’s behavior, Emma’s failed attempts to improve poor Harriet, and a grown man falling in love with a thirteen-year-old girl. I found a few other things bothered me in the book. The racism in a scene with gypsies, and the classism and snobbery that may not be tongue-in-cheek. Yet in the end I was happy because everyone was, whether they deserved to be or not. I’ll take my cue from Emma’s thoughts about Frank Churchill, and not be severe:

Though it was impossible not to feel that he had been wrong, yet he had been less wrong than she had supposed; and he had suffered and was very sorry; and he was so grateful….and so much in love…., and she was so happy herself, that there was no being severe Emma, Chapter LI

#4 in my 2007 book challenge was Mockingbird, a biography of Nelle Harper Lee. I read both To Kill a Mockingbird and In Cold Blood last year, and this was an interesting and informative companion book. This is the first and only bio of Lee, so Shields has the good fortune of no competition, as well as the good timing to publish in the wake of the films Capote and Infamous. Exhaustively researched in spite of Lee’s refusal to participate, the book did not feel tight and polished. I saw a number of typos (e.g., “the” left out of “on other hand”), usage errors (e.g., another thing coming, rather than the lesser known but correct “think”), and unwieldy sentences. The strength of the book is the exhaustive research of the author, particularly around the time that Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and helped Capote research In Cold Blood. There was good evidence of her writing habits, her strengths and weaknesses, and her family ties. It also gave different views into certain aspects of In Cold Blood. Shields attempts to answer the obvious question of why Lee never wrote another book as early as the introduction. I wasn’t sure why he would want to give away his conclusions so quickly after he did all the research that follows. The detailed intro also made a lot of what followed feel repetitive. The subject was fascinating, but the book itself would have benefited from more thorough editing, both of copy and in structure.

#3 in my 2007 book challenge was Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises. Long a favorite of my husband, it was more what I was expecting from a Hemingway book than A Moveable Feast: dark, bitter and depressing. The female character had no redeeming aspects, and left a trail of wrecked men in her wake. I felt sorry for all the characters in the book. The writing illustrated a technique Hemingway wrote about in AMF: deliberately leaving out critical detail. We never find out what Jake Barnes’s accident was, how it happened, or any details of its aftermath. This novel is in stark contrast to the remembered sweetness and joy in AMF of his early years in Paris. The ending sentence is powerful and enigmatic, and illustrates the writing advice Hemingway noted in AMF: All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

#2 in my 2007 book challenge was A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Like Demian, AMF was named by a friend (are you out there, JS?) as one of his favorite books. I bought it and it sat on my shelf. This book is one I regret having waited so long to meet. It is a memoir of Hemingway’s early writing career in Paris, and of his first marriage. It’s literary history, but I also read it as an apology to his first wife, Hadley, and an extended, elegiac suicide note. Having read only a little Hemingway long ago (a book of short stories, in college), I was expecting A Moveable Feast to be well written. I was not expecting a gentle book of humility, love, and sadness. This is one I will gladly read again.

#1 in my 2007 book challenge was Demian by Hermann Hesse. Years ago, a friend said it was his favorite book, so I picked up a copy and it sat on my shelf till now. Emil Sinclair feels different from his family and at his school. After meeting Max Demian, he becomes more aware of difference. After a brief struggle to fit in, Sinclair begins a program of self-education. While Sinclair does evolve, it’s not into the social structure, the typical end of a coming-of-age novel, but rather to someplace beyond it. Nietzsche is a clear influence. The homo-eroticism is barely veiled. This was intriguing to read so soon after I’d read Catcher in the Rye and King Dork. Sinclair and Caulfield have a lot in common. In contrast, King Dork ends with fairly predictable social and familial acceptance.

I’m going to continue with book and movie goals of fifty apiece, with three clarifications.

One, I want to read and watch more of what I already have than I did in 2006. I’ll need to continue the reined-in book buying, and be more selective about what I put in my library reserve queue.

Two, I want to read better books. There weren’t many “wow” books for me last year, even including the four I liked enough to purchase after borrowing them from the library. I read a lot of books that made me go “meh” last year. To do this, I’m going to try and worry less about how many books I’m reading, since fifty seems to be an attainable goal.

Three, I’m going to try not to make lists in advance. They spoil some of the fun of seeking out a new book, whether it’s from the library, store, or my own bookshelves.