Girl Detective

As part of the same Spielberg series in which I saw Jaws, I finally also saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unike Jaws, it prefigures a lot of the touchy-feely stuff that Spielberg did later, most notably E.T. (of which I’m not a fan.)

Richard Dreyfuss is one of many civilians who see a UFO one night. They’re brought together by the govenment, and questioned, but mostly dismissed and ridiculed. Teri Garr is Dreyfuss’ wife, and when he begins to behave strangely (painting and sculpting things over and over based on images in his mind) she grabs the kids and leaves. He befriends the mother of the little boy from the ads, who has disappeared after a subsequent UFO sighting. The government begins tracking down leads, as does a French scientist played by Francois Truffaut, who should not have quit his day job as a director for acting. Dreyfuss and the mother try to figure out what’s going on, and eventually stumble into the finale.

Unlike Jaws, this is more interesting as a relic of film history and pop culture than as an enduring film, I think. It’s well made, the music is good (the film was edited to go with the music, not the reverse, as is usual), and it’s engaging. I can see the large shadow it cast both in alien and government conspiracy tales, like the X-Files. In the end, I found Dreyfuss a little forced in his kookiness, and the ending made my teeth ache a little, even if it avoided the gag-inducing treacle of E.T.

I did finish Book 2 of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver a few days ago, and then plunged ahead to book 3, which I’m frantically trying to finish by tomorrow, thus the lack of blog postage lately. And so, this’ll be quick.

Book 2 finds us in the company of Jack Shaftoe, a London urchin who, along with his brother Bob, hangs on the legs of hanged men to help them die more swiftly. They had procured payment previously, of course. Bob grows up to be a military man; Jack becomes the vagabond of the title. During a mercenary stint taking Vienna from the Turks, Jack manages to rescue a pretty harem girl and a good horse. Eliza is the girl, and she was sold into slavery after being kidnapped with her mother from the shores of Qwghlm (familiar to those who’ve read Cryptonomicon) by a Bad Man who dines on rotten fish. Eliza has sworn revenge on him, and vows to end all slavery.

Jack and Eliza make a good team. He teaches her about thieving, and she teaches him about subtle trickery. She becomes expert at financial markets, and they travel to Amsterdam and Paris, encountering Natural Philosophers like Leibniz along the way. But as Eliza becomes more savvy by the day, Jack slowly goes mad from syphilis. They meet up in Amsterdam, only to part acrimoniously, and then befall two different and very bad fates.

Jack and Eliza’s story is much more of a romp than was Daniel Waterhouse’s in Book 1. This is swashbuckling adventure, with some science, finance, and math thrown in for good measure. Heady stuff, indeed.

Things I looked up:

Huguenot is pronounced in French: [yɡno]; in English: /ˈhjuːɡənɒt/, or /huːɡəˈnoʊ/.

One of Jack’s nicknames, L’Emmerdeur, is vulgur slang for “pain in the ass.” Or arse, since he’s English.

Thus far, I’m very much enjoying my summer reading choice, even if it does make my purse quite heavy to tote around.

My newest piece at Simple, Good and Tasty is part of a bi-weekly series on using up my CSA box.

I said I was going to finish book 2 of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver by today. Didn’t happen. I’m on page 403, with Jack Shaftoe and Eliza making their way through the European countryside. They make for good company. I’m still aiming to finish by the end of the month, and have no other books I need to read in the meantime. I’ll update again when I finish Book 2.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is the July selection for the Twin Cities’ Books and Bars group. I’d read only good reviews of it, but after I mentioned I was reading it, some of my literary pen pals–Tulip, Amy and Steph–said they weren’t fans, and were interested to see what I thought of the book. That made me hyper-aware as I finished the book. Would I like it?

In spite of peer pressure, I did, but I can guess why others haven’t.

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

Quentin is a prestidigitator and high school senior in NYC, and is part of the hyper-competitive race to get into a top university. When his Princeton interview doesn’t go as planned, he ends up sitting for an entrance exam to Brakebills, a private university for magic. Quentin has been obsessed with a Narnia-like fantasy series set in a land called Fillory since he was young, and is thrilled to discover magic is real and that he has an aptitude for it.

If this sounds familiar, it’s meant to. The Magicians is not coy about the debt it owes to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Unlike those, however, it’s not sweet, romantic, or centered on Christianity (Lewis) or love (Harry Potter). When Quentin finds out magic is real, the result is like Harry Potter filtered through Bret Easton Ellis. There’s drinking, drugs, sex, raging immaturity and bitterness. Grossman speculates on how magic might impact real, spoiled teens. Brakebills is less like a university than a vocational school with no career waiting at the end. The result isn’t pretty.

Along with the discomfort of reading about a debauched magic population, there’s Quentin, who is hardly a sympathetic main character. He’s a shallow, competitive guy who’s always grasping to be the best, whining about unhappiness, and pining for some life-changing circumstance that will bring him finally to the bliss he feels he deserves. He casts away old circumstances with hardly a thought, including friends and parents. This leads, unsurprisingly, to disastrous results.

For me, though, the disastrous results were of a piece with the whole book. The groundwork was laid carefully throughout, and things progressed to what I felt were fitting ends. Is Quentin reformed and nice by the end? No way. But is he wiser, less credible and (possibly) less selfish? I think so. I did find a self-awareness at the end that wasn’t there previously.

I had the opportunity to see Lev Grossman read earlier this week, and asked him about some of his influences. I had guessed, correctly, that Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was one of them. So rather than describing it as “Harry Potter for adults,” I might say “The Secret History, with magic.”

This is a frequently dark, bitter book with scenes of profound ugliness. Yet I liked how it made me re-examine my own feelings about reading Narnia, Harry Potter, and others. Prior to reading this book, I re-read a fantasy favorite of mine when I was a teen, Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey. I found it a less pleasant read than I remembered, and I think that’s exactly the thing Grossman was going for: how magic would affect real teens if there were no kindly advisor figure like Dumbledore, and no obvious “big bad” like Sauron. This book contains deep ambivalence about how cool magic would be if it were real, and examines why longing for a fantasy world is not endearing, but a significant a character flaw.

As part of Take-Up Productions‘ Spielberg series at the Trylon Microcinema, I got to see Jaws for the first time in a theater. It’s one of those weird gaps in my movie-watching history, but I feel very luck to have been able to see it on a big(ger) screen. I found it truly scary, and had I seen it as a child I would have had nightmares. At one scene, the entire audience gasped and jumped. Best of all, though, was how scary it was with implied action and with the momentum from John Williams’ famous music. This wasn’t a sappy movie that pandered to an all-ages audience–this felt very much like a horror movie for grown-ups. Dreyfuss and Scheider are a good buddy team, and Quint’s speech about the USS Indianapolis was mesmerizing.

Yes, I just re-read Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, one of my favorite books from girlhood. But I had a good reason. Really.

Books and Bars is reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians for July. (And he’s reading at Barnes & Noble Har Mar tomorrow night.) It’s about a guy who still re-reads and loves a Narnia-like fantasy series from his childhood, so a woman who’d read it already suggested going back to a book we’d loved and wished were real when we were young. I chose Dragonflight, because it was the one I wished most fervently was real, and the one whose heroine I envied.

I used to own most of the Pern books, but have gotten rid of all but this one, since the last time I re-read them was probably in my early 20’s, or two decades ago. I was worried about revisiting a book I had such a strong affection for, and that made such a huge impression on me at the time (pun not intended)–it was a gateway book into sci-fi and fantasy for me. When I started reading, my affection was right where I’d left it. For better or worse, though, I could not silence my consciousness, far more critical and discerning that that of my younger self.

The back-of-book description is utter rubbish, so I’ll do a broad-strokes summary, though I imagine more than one of you is geeky enough to have read the Pern books, too. Pern is a colonized but abandoned world, with a largely medieval/agrarian culture. Lessa is a former noble who went into hiding as a girl when her family was slaughtered by an invader. She bides her time waiting for revenge and to claim her birthright, and thinks the time has come when a group of dragonmen come on “Search.” The old queen dragon has laid a golden, queen egg, and the men, led by bronze rider F’lar, are looking for intelligent, powerful women candidates to “impress” the new queen. Impression is a psychic link made between person and dragon at the time of hatching that lasts till one of them dies. Lessa, rather than regaining her birthright, goes back with the dragonfolk and *gasp* impresses the new queen, who is the great hope of the dragonriders to revitalize the dragons, who protect the planet from a rain of deadly spores (”threads”) that takes place every two hundred years or so. Few believe the threads are real. F’lar and Lessa do, though. Will the threads reappear? Will Lessa and F’lar triumph over them?

This was heady stuff for me as a teen. Lessa had telepathic powers, plus a psychic dragon. She also got handsome F’lar. The book was sort of the next progression from horse books for me (dragons being just bigger, psychic creatures than horses), plus with “romance” (not really that romantic, as I discovered this time around) and sex. (When the dragons go into heat, so do their humans.) I very much wanted to be Lessa, with psychic powers, a dragon and a tall, dark, handsome man.

With all due respect for its age (same as mine–1968),there was a lot of disturbing, disappointing stuff in there. Lessa is supposed to be a strong female heroine, yet she is both a virgin and unknowing when her dragon goes into heat, and she ends up having sex for the first time with a dragonrider. Further, that dragonrider was having sex with others, won’t share his affection for her, only his frustration, often shakes her physically, and notes that without the dragons involved, their sharing a bed “might as well be rape.” Well, if the shoe fits, and all, then maybe it is.

During the book, Lessa has only one conversation with another woman (unless you count her dragon, and I don’t), and it’s about home economics, so hardly forward-thinking stuff. Women play a subordinate, domestic role in society, and the men are portrayed as polygamous. And while Lessa and F’lar are perhaps almost three dimensional, none of the other characters are. The women are either matrons or sluts, and the men are either loyal or stupid.

Re-reading this book was a curious mix of old joy and current discomfort. I loved this book when I was a geeky, hormonal teen, but find it problematic today. I probably would not recommend it to anyone, much less a young girl, who deserves a book with a strong female character who is friends with other strong female characters, and not subject to the physical and psychological manipulation of men.

I’m having a hard time thinking of a YA or YA fantasy book that has this, though. Even ones that are better about the psycho-sexual relations between the sexes (or within one) usually have the young girl as a loner, and not friends with anyone with whom she talks about things other than boys. What books am I forgetting here, readers?

Inspired by reading friends at In Our Study, I recently read Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. I thought it was a fascinating, compelling close reading of Anne Frank’s life and her diary, which in turn made me excited to read/re-read The Diary of a Young Girl.

I remember reading it at age 10, in grade 5, for a book report about a famous person*. I think I’d read it before that, at least once. I loved Anne’s diary. I related to her, and it helped me learn more about the Holocaust and WWII**. Her beginning resonated then and now:

June 12, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support…

June 14, 1942: I’ll begin from the moment I got you, the moment I saw you lying on the table among my other birthday presents.

What I read then was not the same book I just read, though. Anne did keep a diary, in fact many volumes of them, now referred to as the “a” diary. Near the end of their time in the secret annex, a politician on the radio encouraged those in hiding to document their experiences. Anne went back to the beginning of her diary and began an edited version, now known as the “b” diary. After the war, her father Otto Frank took both documents (which had, against all odds, survived) and combined them into what’s called the “c” version. This is what I read as a girl, and the version most people know. The Definitive Edition is more recent, and restores many deleted passages from the a diary, especially ones dealing with sexuality and Anne’s difficult relationship with her mother.

Reading Prose’s book, and then reading Anne’s diary as an adult, gave me a vaster appreciation of the diary as a book. Anne wanted to be a journalist and to publish her writing. At the ages of 13 to 15, when she was writing the diary, she already showed immense facility with storytelling, characterization, humor and emotion. The diary is the work of a skilled, maturing writer. If you haven’t read Anne’s diary, or haven’t read it in years, I highly recommend The Definitive Edition.

*For the book report, we had to dress as our character. I remember I picked out a plaid skirt and tried to style my hair like Anne’s on the cover of the book. Another student in my class, named Peter and on whom I had a crush (as Anne did on two boys named Peter in her diary) also presented that day. His subject, whom he dressed as? Hitler.

**I learned about the Holocaust and WWII when I was about 7 years old from, of all things, a comic book from a Christian bookstore. It was an adaptation of Corey Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, and I found it while my mother was shopping for other things. She bought it for me and I read it to tatters.

I’m off and running with my summer reading project, Baroque Summer, during which I hope to finish all three of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle volumes, Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World.

Quicksilver is conveniently split into three books, so I’ll read and recap them one at a time. Book One is, confusingly or conveniently, “Quicksilver.”

We open on mysterious stranger Enoch Root in 1713 Massachusetts, who seeks out Daniel Waterhouse, a ridiculed figure he finds at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technology, situated between Charlestown and Newtowne. Initial chapters alternate been Root meeting with Daniel and Root’s past, in which he met a young Isaac Newton. When Root gives Waterhouse a royal summons, though, Waterhouse is persuaded to return to England, and boards the Minerva, whose captain is named van Hoek.

From thence, chapters alternate between the Minerva and Daniel’s past in mid to late 1600’s England. This includes the plague, further religious strife, and burgeoning scientific investigation by those why styled themselves alchemists, and those, like Daniel, who call themselves Natural Philosophers. Daniel was the son of a vocal dissident Puritan. Many around him assume, incorrectly, that he espouses his father’s belief in predestination. From his youth, Daniel encounters many famous historical figures, such as Newton, Leibniz, and Hooke. With them, he participates in numerous experiments. He also struggles to figure out the tangled web of politics and their relation to religion. When his father figure and mentor, Wilkins, dies, Daniel is adrift and worried. He’s not much helped when his former schoolmate Roger Comstock (of the “Golden Comstocks”) offers himself as a patron. As “Quicksilver” comes to a close, Daniel realizes his path will not be simple:

His role, as he could see plainly enough, was to be a leading Dissident who also happened to be a noted savant, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Until lately he would not have thought this a difficult role to play, since it was so close to the truth. But whatever illusions Daniel might once have harbored about being a man of God had died with [his father], and been cremated by [his mistress]. He very much phant’sied being a Natural Philosopher, but that simply was not going to work if had to compete against Isaac, Leibniz, and Hooke. And so the role that Roger Comstock had written for him was beginning to appear very challenging indeed. (330-1)

As you can see, Stephenson employs the archaic “phant-sy” a contraction of phantasy, just as “fancy” is contracted from “fantasy”. The “ph” spelling emphasizes the connection to the Phanatiques, another term for religious dissidents such as the Puritans and the Barkers.

At another point, Daniel comes across a hairpin in the shape of a caduceus, the symbol of the Roman god Mercury, which is also another name for Quicksilver. The caduceus, a rod with two snakes, has been misappropriated by the US medical establishment and correctly should be a rod with one snake, or a Rod of Asclepius, who was a healer.

If this kind of obsessive nerdishness is appealing to you, then you’ll likely enjoy Stephenson’s speculative take on the 17th century.

Is anyone reading along with me? If not, I’m going to take these books in chunks at my own pace. Next up: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, a blast from my past followed by Lev Grossman’s The Magicians for July’s meeting of Books and Bars. Then I’ll be back for book 2 of Quicksilver, “King of the Vagabonds”.

I turned the English version of Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest down once, when a friend offered to lend it to me while I was in the midst of a bunch of other books. But the next time around, when it was released stateside in late May, I couldn’t resist. I found a $16 copy at Target and went with with it.

For those of you who missed it, or skipped it because of length, I recommend the New York Times Magazine’s “The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson” that ran just before the US release of the third Millennium book.

I’m not sure if it matters if I give a review here, is it? You’re either going to read it or skip it depending on your experience with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. What I found was a slower book than its two predecessors. That said, I enjoyed it. It’s less of the third in a trilogy than a completion and continuation of The Girl Who Played with Fire, the ending of which was less than completely satisfying.

Who lives, who dies, who gets away and who gets arrested in the wake of the events at the end of Fire are revealed at the beginning. I don’t think I’m giving much away if I say that Lisbeth Salander lives, am I? She’s confined to the hospital when charges are brought against her for many assaults, while in the background a gigantic conspiracy and cover up is under way. To the rescue is white knight Mikael Blomkvist, beloved by women, who has to figure out what’s going on so Salander can get her name cleared. Multiple plots are up in the air, some more compelling than others. Hatred and violence against women are again a theme, but not as gruesome and graphic as in the previous books. Unlike the last book, though, this one finishes with a satisfying denouement and few hanging threads, a relief since Larsson died shortly after handing in the manuscripts for the trilogies. Good, satisfying, didn’t leave me hungering for more. Not ohmigod-I-loved-it good, but few things are, right?

So, is it worth buying in hardcover? Only at a discount, I’d say. Since it’s a bestseller, the discounts are impressive right now. You might not want to wait, as the discounts will likely lessen as time goes on, and you’re at risk of spoilers from those who have read the book. The hardcover discounted 40% costs about as much as the full-price trade paperback will when it’s released. And the wait lists at the libraries were staggering a year ago; I shudder to think what they look like now.

Apologies for the slight delay to the previously published schedule for my Baroque Summer project. (That is, if anyone’s reading along with me. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) I have made it to page 217, about a fourth of the way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, the first of his Baroque Cycle trilogy.

As often happens, the correct way of doing this became clear once I was already doing it. Mr. Stephenson has helpfully divided up the first and third volumes, Quicksilver and The System of the World, into three books. The publisher even tried making mass market paperbacks of each of Quicksilver Books One, Two and Three, until they realized, too late, that few people would choose to pay more for three MMPBs than they would for one TPB or used HC. When reading a book divided into three books, it makes MUCH more sense to read one book every ten days. I’ll blog today about the first fourth, but then I’m switching the schedule (again, if anyone’s with me; if you’re not, I’m just probably going to proceed pell mell, blogging madly as I go.) to match the structure of books 1 and 3.

What about book #2, The Confusion, you’re wondering? Well, Volume 2, The Confusion is an alternation between 2 books, so I can’t divine a much better way of splitting it up than doing about a third of it every ten days. Confusion, indeed.

Baroque Summer, revised schedule:

Quicksilver Book 1: June 10th
QS Book 2: June 20
QS Book 3: June 30
Confusion to p. 254: July 10
Cf to p. 556: July 20
Cf to p. 815: July 30
System of the World Book 1: August 10
SotW Book 2: August 20
SotW Book 3: August 30

So I’ll blog here today on Quicksilver through p. 217, but will be back again (I hope) on 6/10 to write about the entirety of Volume 1: book 1. Got it?

After maps, an invocation and a quote, Quicksilver opens on a witch hanging in 1713 Boston, attended by a mysterious man named Enoch the Red, later named as Enoch Root.

Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner’s purpose it not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow–and, to a Puritan, tantalizing–glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.

At Enoch’s request, a young boy named Ben leads him away from the crowd and to a man named Daniel Waterhouse. It is Daniel, not Enoch, who becomes the main character of this first book. The son of a Puritan, Daniel was early on swayed to the company of alchemists and natural philosophers. He meets and mingles with many famous historical characters, most notably Isaac Newton.

In 1713, Enoch persuades Daniel to return to England. From there, the chapters alternate between the past and 1713, usually between Daniel’s sea voyage and his youth. Throughout both periods, and in ways familiar to those who read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, fictional characters mingle with historical ones into an almost seamless yarn.

I saw almost because I do occasionally get the sense of the writer in the background shuffling his index cards, saying, “OK, I’m going to put this Newton anecdote here, and this Leibniz factoid there…” Nonetheless, Quicksilver does what the best historical fiction should–makes a new story out of something old, while simultaneously commenting on and revealing things that really happened such as the Bubonic Plague, the Fire of London, along with mythic characters like Mother Goose and Captain van Hoek.

The times were a heady mix of politics, religion, finances and nascent sciences. Daniel, as an intelligent naif, is an excellent avatar for the reader to navigate the twists and turns of the story and its many characters. Stephenson, though, manages a sprawling canvas with remarkable clarity. I’ve been taking notes as I’ve gone along, but wonder if I’d be OK if I didn’t–if I’d lose track of characters or plot points. Taking notes does seem to suck some of the fun out of reading what’s clearly a historical romp, as I found it did last summer with Infinite Jest. Yet I think a slow, careful reading the first time might make for a fast, fun reading the next time. And I’m fairly certain this one will be worth re-reading, not just for its nutrition, but for its tastiness. I often gape or laugh aloud when something is revealed. Thus far, I’m having a very good time.

I recently returned from a class reunion in DC. Most of the people I spoke to live up and down the east coast. But when I said I was from Minneapolis, I usually got an enthusiastic response along the lines of, “I have a friend who lives there, and I love visiting!” Before I moved here, sight unseen, in 1998 from Philly, I found the same reaction. If I mentioned the Twin Cities, most people would gush, in spite of legends of bad winters. (Which I’ve found aren’t that much worse than PA and OH.) And Timeout Chicago sums up some of the charms pretty well:

When it comes to world-class Midwest cities, Chicago handily trounces the competition (not that we’re biased). But Minneapolis-St. Paul exudes its own kind of quiet cool, and we don’t just mean the weather. Dispatched by bus, train, car and plane, four writers discovered that the sleek new Twins stadium, chic restaurants and bars (and legal food trucks!), jaw-dropping art and architecture, vibrant music scene and more outdoor activities than you can shake a stick at (or food on a stick) make the Twin Cities well worth a weekend jaunt. And you know what? The weather was pretty pleasant (except for that brief snow shower).

One more thing that’s meant a lot to me is the plethora of local authors, like Kate DiCamillo and Neil Gaiman, who are part of the thriving reading and writing scene. Hat tip for link to Mustache Robots.

As most of you know, I can be a snob, a cynic and kind of a misanthrope–in other words, not really the reunion type. I skipped most of my high school or college reunions. If I wanted to catch up with people, I figured I’d do it with my small circle of friends, and not be bothered by the crush of other people I didn’t much need to see. But my high school friends swore to me they had a great time at the 15th, and my college friends did the same about their 10th, so I decided to attend the next round. And boy, was I glad I did.

I had a blast at my 20th high school reunion and my 15th college reunion. It was a chance for friends to converge in a single space and time, which is harder as time goes on with jobs and kids and everything else. And it wasn’t true that I didn’t want to see all those other people, because often, I had a great time talking to them, laughing about old times and engaging in conversations about new ones. What I noticed especially at my 20th HS reunion was the social walls had dropped. We’d become one small group of 100+ people who’d all had a shared experience in school together, and been through good and bad times after. No one much cared anymore who had been a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, or a recluse.

So this past weekend I flew out to DC for my 20th college reunion. I was part of a group of 10 women, four of whom were my roommates in college. We talked about our present lives, and things like work, kids, moving, cancer, husbands, autism, babies, and more. We laughed about old times, and cringed at old photos of us with big hair and baggy sweaters. We got dressed up and went out in the city to parties, saw other friends and caught up on the lives of others. I learned I’d had a pivotal role in getting one couple together in college! We ate good food, shared clothes, shoes, perfume and makeup. We laughed. There were no husbands or kids (who probably would have been bored anyway at all the “remember whens”) to look after or worry about. Then we laughed some more. One morning, I even slept till almost 10 a.m. I can’t remember the last time that happened. Eight years ago, maybe?

I had a great time away with my friends, and then was glad to be home. I gave my husband and boys huge hugs. I had a good time without them, but I’d missed them, too. Being at reunions chips away at my snobbery, my cynicism, my misanthropy, and any bad feelings about my life. _That’s_ why I go to reunions.

As I thought might happen, given that I was traveling the past two weekends, and trying to finish Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I wasn’t able to meet my first page goal for Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver.

I am aware that, as the instigator of this project, this is pretty lame of me. I apologize.

I’m only about 40 pages shy of 217, though. I’ll try to finish tonight so I can comment on it tomorrow. Will anyone be joining me?

I’m a snob, so I’m always wary of the label “Oprah’s Book Club.” But I actually find her magazine pleasant to flip through. A book-group friend liked Oprah’s favorite books of the decade list, and picked Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth for our next meeting. When I began to read, I felt wary, too. It felt very self-help-y and new-age-y.

Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection?

I put my suspicion aside, and read on. And I really appreciated what I found. Tolle writes that the basis of much pain and suffering comes from the ego. Once we can recognize that, we can break free and be on the way to who we truly are.

Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

This is by no means a fun, fast read. But it is rich and thought provoking, especially for those of us who have trouble settling the mind, or quashing unkind thoughts. At the fear of overstatement, I think this could be a life-changing book, even if just in small positive ways. And which of us couldn’t benefit from that?

Get your engines started, ladies and gents. My crazy summer reading project begins today, June 1. I’ll be reading all three of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World over the summer. The pace is 200+ pages a week. First post and discussion will be next Monday, June 7. Details are here.

Embarrassing disclosure #1: My geek husband G. Grod and I bought all three when they came out in hardcover (HC). Then we bought the trade paperback (TPB) of Quicksilver when it came out, as I thought I’d read it, and it would be way less wrist strain than the HC. I didn’t make it very far, though. So when I proposed the Baroque reading plan, my husband said he’d read along, and he’d take the TPB and I had to read the HCs since he’s already read them. Then I went book shopping today and found another TPB of Quicksilver, and 2 apiece of The Confusion and The System of the World. So I have a matching his-n-hers set of Baroque Cycle TPBs so my husband and I can read simultaneously, and neither has to drag around the doorstop, author-inscribed HCs. Yes, that means we have 3 sets of the trilogy. Yes, we are geeks.

Embarrassing disclosure #2: I bought Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest last week for $16. I was traveling over the weekend, and thought I could tear through it before I had to start Quicksilver. Alas, I didn’t get as much reading time as I thought, and I’m only about a third of the way through the Larsson. I think the best plan is for me to try and finish before I start Quicksilver, but I may be behind next Monday on my own project. Nice. Though I imagine some of you understand, no? Happy reading, all, and I look forward to seeing who’s here next Monday!

Some breaking news for those who like to bask in the sun. The Environmental Working Group has released its 2010 Sunscreen Guide. The not-so-good news? Nearly all commercial sunscreens contain ingredients the EWG says to avoid, including oxybenzone and vitamin A. There are only a few dozen the EWG recommends. You can search for their recommended sunscreens, or you can plug in the name of the sunscreen you’re using for you and your kids. Warning: the latter is likely to be worrying and discouraging. All of the ones I had in the house were there.

Is there cause for alarm? This piece, from the Huffington Post and with the advice of a dermatologist, says no. In spite of what alarmists may say or imply, if you’re going to be outside, properly applied sunscreen will help protect against skin cancer, so it’s better to use it than not. What’s safer than that? Staying out of the sun entirely, wearing protective clothes and headgear, or at least avoiding the peak hours.

Is there cause for concern? Yes. The FDA has not established guidelines for sunscreens, so there’s not regulation on dodgy ingredients. Further, there’s almost always conflicting information on what’s a good or bad ingredient.

What I did was throw away the old, badly rated sunscreens, then bought a tube each of two of the EWG’s recommended brands, Badger Unscented SPF 30 and Vanicream SPF 30. I got the Badger at my grocery co-op, and the Vanicream at Target, so neither involved a special trip.

And, for those still delusional that tanning beds are safer than the sun, a new study from the U of MN shows they increase the risk of cancer, even with the investigators looking at new types of tanning beds, which use a UV spectrum different from the sun and alleged to be safe. (The latter detail is from a scientist friend, though not included in the article.)

So, to sum up. No sun is safe sun in regard to skin cancer, though it is the best source of Vitamin D. Enjoy the sun in moderation. Be safe and smart about your choices. Use a safer sunscreen, and use it correctly. Reapply as needed. Stay out of the sun between 10 and 4. Wear a hat. Cover up.

I started using tanning beds when I was 17. I worked in a tanning salon for 9 months when I was 20. Then I had to see a dermatologist about a patch of skin; he cut it and several others out and found they were dysplastic–possibly pre-cancerous. He told me to never use a tanning bed or lay out again. Since then I’ve had more than a dozen patches of skin removed. Usually a patch has to be cut out twice. Once for the initial test, and again for complete removal. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is unpleasant and painful. I’ve been lucky–no melanoma. Yet.

Be careful out there.

I don’t know the exact date, but it was sometime in May 2000 that I started taking yoga classes. Since then, it has been the only type of exercise I have been able to continuously practice. I’d tried running, swimming, Jane Fonda, aerobics, in-line skates, etc.

Yoga worked, I think, because it was exercise, concentration, meditation and breathing to calm my monkey mind. Or rather, TRY to calm my monkey mind. I go to one or two classes a week, and hope to up it to two to three. Someday, I tell myself, I’ll have a home practice.

In spite of ten years, I still feel very much a beginner. There are some poses I still can’t do, like Crow and Handstand. But there are others I can, like Headstand, that I wasn’t able to for a long time. Also, I’ve learned the pose names both in English and many in Sanskrit, and know how to modify if I need to take a break in class.

Today I have an ambitious goal: bike to a harder class than I’m used to, and bike home. Not sure this is a good idea; not sure how it will go. But I think I’m going to try.

My 20 year college reunion is coming up, so I’ve been poking around in old boxes. I was surprised, then disturbed, then kind of gratified, to find a book list I kept in 1985. Here are the first five. Four of these things belong together, see if you can spot the one that doesn’t belong:

1. The Wanton by Rosemary Rogers
2. Desiree by Anne Marie Selinko (this one isn’t as trashy as it sounds. Really.)
3. Mindbend by Robin Cook
4. The Queen’s Confession by Victoria Holt
5. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Which one do you suppose was for AP English?

OK, here are a bunch more:

6. War and Peace by Tolstoy
7. Hunchback of Notre Dame by Hugo (in French, perhaps?)
8. Thinner by Stephen King
9. Heaven by V.C. Andrews
10. Lucky by Jackie Collins
11. The Fourth Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders
12. Rage by Stephen King
13. The Prince by Machiavelli
14. Sweet, Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers

I get literary whiplash just looking at this list. I am abashed by the trash.The good stuff is on there because it was assigned. BUT. Look how far I’ve come. (Abeit in 25 years. And wishing peace to my poor, hormonal 17yo self). I read Crime and Punishment last year BECAUSE I WANTED TO. My book list today is, I think, a richer place than my book list of 1985, just as I hope my inner life is richer than it was when I was 17. So, please, laugh at the preponderance of pulp and trashy romance. I am.

And then I’ll get back to A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. And on to Baroque Summer. But perhaps cramming in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest if I can. Just because something’s popular doesn’t mean it’s not good.

For my foodie friends, I just finished a piece on sugar and sugar alternatives at Simple Good and Tasty.

Sugar is enjoying a resurgence in popularity after years of being vilified for empty calories and its role in things like tooth decay, obesity and diabetes. As the negative effects of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) have become better known, sugar’s profile has risen. Cane sugar, as opposed to cheaper beet sugar, has especially benefited from HFCS’s bad press; it is actually being touted as a healthful ingredient. Yet cane and beet sugars are highly processed, refined and provide no nutritional value. Other, less refined, sweeteners have some benefits that sugar doesn’t. Yet nearly all of them raise blood sugar, and have little nutritive value. So why bother?

Here’s what I learned/confirmed:

Honey can’t be organic. Maple syrup and honey are the only sweeteners local to MN. All sugars are bad for you, though some are better than others IN MODERATION. Almost all sugars/sweeteners, even if natural, are processed (except raw honey). And finally, I still prefer to bake with not-completely refined cane sugar for the best results. Oh, and Stevia kind of scares me.