Girl Detective

#38 in my 2007 book challenge is Hope Larson’s slim and lovely graphic novel Gray Horses.

Noemie is a French exchange student, on her own for the first time. In Onion City she befriends free-spirited Anna, a baker’s daugher who scultps in bread, and finds herself the target of a mysterious photographer–but it’s not until she falls asleep that things really get weird.

Larson’s art is beautiful and accessible, and the choice of two-tone color emphasizes it well. The story is both realistic and dreamy. All passages in French are translated, so this is a good book for beginning students of French. This book charmingly bucks the YA conventions of geeky boys and group acceptance. It’s evocative in both art and story. There is much for a reader to savor here. Recommended.

Can we all just acknowledge that Tim Gunn and Bravo are throwing Project Runway fans a bone so they can delay the next season, and try to double dip on viewers?

TGGtS is not a bad show. But it’s just another makeover show, elevated by Gunn’s tart humor, exacting taste, and impressive cadre of “friends”. I really liked his recoil when co-star Veronica Webb mentioned leggings. She was clearly more than set decoration; her opinions were strong, and both Tim and the make-over-ee respected them. The first contestant was clearly going to be a slam dunk. She was gorgeous and in good shape, she just didn’t know it or dress for it. The show’s product placements and name dropping felt obstrusive, especially the diamond ring.

Two Project Runway contestants were introduced. Chris has flamboyant clothes and charisma, but seems like he’s aping Jay McCarroll too deliberately. Jillian is cocky, but has no on-screen personality.

This entry feels about as disjointed as the episode did, though I won’t try to push your buttons and make you cry. You’re welcome.

The chefs are criticized if they send out a bad dish, or they decide not to. Hubris seems a common path to elimination. More often, a chef who think’s s/he’ll blow it out out of the water blows up instead.

I’m glad I wasn’t at episode 10’s boat party; those appetizers looked boring and scant. Even the top ones–Casey’s beef carpaccio, CJ’s seafood sausage, and Sara’s tomato bread pudding–looked good but not great. And the others could have come from a mid-level hotel’s catering service.

The judges were right to call Brian and the chefs on why they went for two items apiece instead of one. From the armchair it seems obvious that doing one great item well, and making tons of it, would be the way to go. Why didn’t the people who had catering experience know this? Hasn’t any of them done a wedding where the servers get mobbed on the way out of the kitchen and can’t even make it to the middle of the room?

I liked Brian’s non-hesitation to take a leadership role, and I empathize with his management mistake of giving people their heads as a way to let their best selves come forward. This is great in theory, but has mixed results in practice. The theme this season seems to be teamwork and leadership. Those who have a strong voice, a discernment about their own stuff, and can work (or learn to work) with others do well, as Sara did in part two of Restaurant Wars. Brian learned nothing from CJ’s and Tre’s mistake of the last episode; he was lucky not to be eliminated.

Howie’s offer to resign was full of bravado and honor, but unnecessary. He thought Brian might get eliminated, like Tre the week before, because of poor leadership. He knew his food was a large part of the failure and recognized he was the one who should go home. I like the responsibility this demonstrated.

So many chefs are in repeat-mistake mode that I see no clear winners and losers. Brian won the quickfire by eschewing his usual seafood and using Spam, then did a conventional tuna tartare for his app. Sara was on the disastrous dessert team in one of the early eps, yet she agreed both to doing a dessert and using cut-rate ingredients. Where was the strong voice of last ep? Hung went spazzy during the quickfire, and conventional during the elimination. Somewhere between the two lies his area of talent. And Dale hamstringed himself by agreeing to do a boring app with Hung.

(Did you know that Spam is made in Austin, MN, where there is a Spam museum? My husband G. Grod was delighted at Brian’s quickfire win.)

I recently admitted to an accidental crush on Anthony Bourdain. I’m enjoying his blog on the Top Chef episodes.

Throwing Things has a recap that may only be hilarious if you’re a football/Eagles fan. Since I do have some of those in my household, I’ve linked to it. (”Ee-yas!” is among 19mo Guppy’s many words.)

#37 in my 2007 book challenge was The Professor’s Daughter, story by Joann Sfar, illustrated by Emmanuel Guibert. It is a translation of a European graphic novel, and is published in the US by First Second. This is a beautiful and funny book, which I found surprisingly delightful after recently reading several disappointing graphic novels.

A mummy and a professor’s daughter forge an unlikely romance. There is murder, mystery, and general mayhem. The watercolor art is lovely; the characters and story are engaging. The slim book itself is a lovely edition with heavy paper and a gatefold cover. Highly recommended.

#36 in my 2007 book challenge was Clubbing, written by Andi Watson with wart by Josh Howard. It’s from the DC Comics Minx line of graphic novels. I’ve really enjoyed some of Andi Watson’s work, like Geisha and Slow News Day. Clubbing was a huge disappointment.

London goth girl Charlotte “Lottie” Brooks is exiled to the country with her grandparents after being caught with a fake ID. There is the standard geeky cute boy that the heroine comes to appreciate over the course of the book. The story, though, takes a bizarre twist once Lottie arrives in the country, and ends up as a supernatural mystery. Had it been well done, I might have appreciated the subversion of expectations. Instead, it read like a Season 7 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Not a good thing.)

While the story might appeal to bubble-headed eleven-year olds, any charm was lost on me. Lottie was as self-absorbed, irritating, and foolish as a girl can get. Not recommended.

#35 in my 2007 book challenge was The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Even if I don’t end up seeing the December film, I like to read books around when the movie comes out because of the increased coverage of the book in the press.

The Golden Compass is a sweeping adventure book, mixing fantasy, science, and religion. All humans have daemons, animal-like creatures that shift shape until their partner hits adolescence. A friend of young orphan Lyra Belacqua’s is kidnapped, and she decides to rescue him. Danger and adventure ensue.

GC has a great pace, and some very big ideas, but the characters don’t achieve three dimensions. Most of the adults are evil, all of the kids are good, and Lyra becomes increasingly unrealistic as a kid over the course of her adventures. She’s far too competent in a crisis, of which there are many. Some of her lack of complexity is explained away as a lack of imagination. This is another example for my catalog of fictional lunkheaded saviors, but it doesn’t make her more believable as a kid. Nonetheless, the story swept me along, the ideas intrigued me, and the story had closure and a compelling cliffhanger for the next book.

I am interested to see what the holistic experience of Pullman’s trilogy will be.

#34 in my 2007 book challenge was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, which I’ve written about previously here. The premise is that a woman’s life branches after a major decision, and the chapters alternate between the two lives, rather like the movie Sliding Doors, though that was about chance, and not nearly so literate.

Shriver ruthlessly questions the all-too-common assumption we make when we take a fork in the road and things don’t go as planned. The other fork looks great in retrospect. She carefully crafts her narrative to show that there’s good and bad in all choices. In the end, I thought she favored one choice over the other, but I didn’t think this was a bad thing.

Embarrassingly, this book caused me to develop an accidental crush on Anthony Bourdain, an author and TV food personality I previously didn’t care for. Bourdain’s look so matches the physical description of Ramsey in TPBW, though, that my literary crush on the character of Ramsey (for all his faults) segued into a crush on Bourdain. Oops.

#33 in my 2007 book challenge was After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, the first book I’ve read by this author.

any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.

The book is the giant octopus, and the reader is sucked in.

We know. But we are not qualified to become involved., …We look down…from above….Gradually, as point of view, we begin to draw back. We break through the ceiling, moving steadily up and away….The higher we climb, the smaller grows our image….until it is just a single point, and then it is gone. We increase our speed, moving backward through the stratosphere. The earth shrinks until it, too, finally disappears. Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness. The movement is beyond our control.

Murakami toys with point of view and perspective in brave and exhilarating ways.

No one answers our questions. Our question marks are sucked, unresisting, into the final darkness and uncompromising silence of the night.

The author honors his readers by not explaining every little thing. The images, characters and ideas in this book linger; my brain continues to puzzle over them.

#32 in my 2007 book challenge was Faith Sullivan’s Cape Ann. I’ve taken a few seminars with Sullivan through the Loft. She is both a kind and constructive reader, so I wanted to check out her books. The Cape Ann is narrated by young Lark Ann Erhardt, and set in a depression-era small town in Minnesota. The details are carefully crafted, and the narrative unfolds precisely but not predictably. Lark and her mother are engaging characters, easy to love and empathize with, though there are some heartbreaking things that transpire. Lark’s voice is at times too knowing for a six-year old, but the overall effect is winning.

#31 in my 2007 book challenge was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I wrote about here, here, here, here, and here.

In short, I really enjoyed it. It digressed and dragged in the middle, but I found both the ending and the epilogue satisfying. I also enjoyed reading many of the interviews with J. K. Rowling, to learn the answers to questions I had, and ones that hadn’t occurred to me.

I didn’t win any ribbons at the fair this year. Apparently my four entries were small potatoes compared to the woman who hogged all the awards. Worse, she sounds too charming to dislike for it.

My sister Sydney complains when I do reviews and don’t write funny stories about her nephews. The point of the blog is to encompass it all. I hope to do a slew of reviews soon, though, so this entry is to placate Sydney.

18mo Guppy likes it when I sing the ABCs, and starts to babble random letters while I sing, in a letterish harmony. When excited, he does a happy dance, like Drake did at the same age, where he stomps his feet up and down very fast and grins, rather like Snoopy. He also likes to pivot in a circle, using one leg as a fulcrum.

Drake is reminding me that things change, then change again. When in the midst of some particular stage, it seems as if it will last forever. He’s entirely out of diapers, though, even at night, so he is changing. Several months ago, Drake would wait till we shut the light off at night, then scurry up, turn on the light, and look at books till he fell asleep. G. Grod and I would remove the pile of books from his bed, and turn off the light. At some point, though, it stopped. When we turned off the light, he turned over and went to sleep. Or he stayed up and turned off the light before he fell asleep. Within the last week, though, things have changed again. He’s turning the light on after we leave, then falling asleep with it on.

I will be interested to see how long this variation of the stage lasts, and also whether Guppy does it when he gets older.

One of my strange, largely non-marketable skills is that I write letters that get responses. Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl printed one of mine in her City Pages food column this week, and came to the interesting conclusion that compiling a list of Minnesota food gems will start a gourmet revolution. I think revival might be more accurate, but hey, I’m not called revolutionary that often, so I’ll take it.

Here are a few of my MN food essentials–a short, incomplete list of why the Twin Cities are great for foodies:

Grocery Cooperatives
Farmers Markets with countless, if not only, local farmed goods
New French and Rustica breads
Cedar Summit Milk
Hope and Pastureland butters
Sonny’s Ice Cream
Legacy Chocolate’s Potion No. 9
Cafe Brenda
La Belle Vie
MN State Fair
Midtown Global Market
Origami sushi
Restaurant Alma
The Modern
NE Mpls food corridor: Surdyk’s, Pizza Nea, Punch Pizza, Fugaise, Brasa, Bulldog, Gardens of Salonica, Wilde Roast, all within blocks of one another! Now if only someone (Sonny’s, Izzy’s, Sebastian Joe’s, I’m talkin’ to you) would open an ice cream outpost, that area would be foodie heaven.

My stomach and I are only human, so even on three trips to the fair this year I couldn’t try everything. I also didn’t make it to the Fine Arts building. Foodwise, I found both winners and losers, but here are some of Rick Nelson’s 2007 picks that I’ll check out next year in their sophomore outings:

**** (four stars)

- Alderman plums, Midtown Global Market, Cosgrove St. between Dan Patch Av. and Wright Av.

- Buttermilk scones with jam, Country Scones & Coffee, Food Building

- Lingonberry Turnovers, Lingonberry Ice Cream, Underwood St. and Carnes Av.

- Strawberry and chocolate ice cream sodas, Bridgeman’s, Judson Av. and Liggett St.

- Strawberry malts, Dairy Goodness Bar, Empire Commons

I’ll also try for a pork chop on a stick. I’ve only heard superlative things about them from my carnivorous friends.