Girl Detective

Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was an indirect recommendation. A friend of mine is in a mentor program with a local author, who recommended it to her. She in turn recommended it to me.

It’s a collection of short stories, linked by the common theme of the title–the pushes and pulls of life, and the compromises we make as we go along. They exemplify the meaning of ambivalence–not the commonly mistaken conception of not caring, but being pulled to multiple opposing options. The stories are tight as drums. They pulled me through, with economic yet devastating characterizations, each taking me to an ending that was surprising, yet satisfying.

I often don’t enjoy short stories because they tend to go for an icky-wow factor that lingers unpleasantly. Meloy’s stories contain some people behaving badly, yet they made me think and feel, not recoil. I both enjoyed and was impressed by this collection. Highly recommended.

Greetings and Salutations, Friends and Readers! It’s been a while, no? Life’s been life-y lately, volunteering for an event at my kids’ school, applying to a writing contest/program, reading and struggling to understand Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a case of double pink eye, plus the usual merry-go-round of family stuff like sports and piano and reading and writing and such.

I’m out of practice with blogging, but eager to get back in the saddle. I’ve got book reviews, a few anecdotes, maybe even some food posts, all banging like Athena in my head, trying to get out. I hope you’ll see some of that in the next few days, now that things have settled down a little bit. (Fingers crossed.)

One of the first contenders in last month’s Morning News Tournament of Books, Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother was also one of the shortest waits at the library. It went down in the first match to Murakami’s IQ84. My reading schedule got so crowded I didn’t get to it before the match, but since both Amy of New Century Reading and Pat of O Canada, Y’all, liked it, I figured I’d give it a try.

I wasn’t surprised it lost to Murakami, as it’s a short work by a younger author versus a sprawling-idea-filled work by one of the greats. It tells the story in flashback of Raj, a boy during WWII on the island of Mauritius, which housed a secret prison camp for an exiled ship. The history is fascinating, Raj’s bond with his mother, his friendship with a prisoner, and his story of poverty and abuse are all touching, yet something about the book distanced me, in spite of its first-person narration. Perhaps my heart is two sizes too small, but this didn’t impress me as it did many others.

I grew up in a family that made deviled eggs for special occasions. There was never a recipe. What I remember is a series of steps: boil eggs, peel eggs, halve eggs, put whites on fancy deviled-egg dish, put yolks in bowl, add mayonnaise, mustard, salt, pepper and horseradish as a matter of course, then possibly experiment with things like vinegar, hot sauce, and, one unfortunate time, wasabi. Make sure everyone in the house tastes it to offer input, then put into plastic bag, pipe into egg-white halves, and put leftover yolk mix on crackers, usually Triscuits.

As an adult on my own, I don’t make deviled eggs as often as my family does. My kids don’t (yet) like them. But yesterday on Easter, I felt the pull of tradition. I unearthed the Harvest Gold Tupperware egg transporter (I have three other egg serving dishes) and got down to the serious business of making eggs.

I was motivated by three recent articles–one from the Genius Recipes series at Food 52, and two from my husband G. Grod, one on baking eggs rather than boiling them, and another on using Sriracha sauce in the filling.

Baking versus boiling? A success. I put a cookie sheet below the baking eggs in case they ’sploded, but no eggs were harmed in the process. Were they easy to peel, you ask? More than half of them were, but easy-to-peel is more a function of egg age than of cooking method. I’ve tried poking a hole with a push pin, storing eggs on their sides, and pretty much all the methods, but the best thing is old eggs, where the inside membrane is drying out. Peeling under a thin stream of running water at the sink helps a bit by making a little space between the shell’s membrane and the egg.

Next up was making the filling. I only had a few eggs to work with, as I’d made the Hell’s Kitchen 9-egg lemon-ricotta hotcakes for breakfast, so I had to do some fiddly math to get proportions right, but they tasted good, with a nice slow burn at the finish. And they looked pretty and orange-y. Until they fell off G Grod’s cargo bike on the way to a friend’s house. We were able to rescue most of them, and I cleaned them up a bit for the below photo. In spite of their looks, they went fast. I’m going to make a lot more, next time. And not drop them.

Sriracha deviled eggs

Sriracha Deviled Eggs

1 dozen eggs, preferably about a week old

To cook the eggs: Put oven racks in middle of oven. In cold oven, place eggs directly on rack. (You can put a cookie sheet on the oven floor if you’re worried they’ll explode; mine didn’t.) Set oven to 325F. Set timer for 30 minutes. Prepare ice bath. When 30 minutes have passed, remove eggs with oven mitts or tongs and put them in ice bath for 5 minutes. When pouring out cold water, jostle eggs to crack the shells. Peel. Halve. Place egg whites on plate or tray.

For the filling:

12 egg yolks
6 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
4 teaspoons Sriracha hot sauce
2 teaspoons fresh-squeezed lime juice
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Put yolks in mesh sieve over large bowl. With rubber spatula, press through mesh. Add mayonnaise, butter, mustard, Sriracha, lime juice and salt. Taste, and adjust as needed.

2. Transfer mixture to plastic bag. Snip off corner. Squeeze filling into egg whites on tray.

3. Eat the ugliest egg to make sure they’re good. Repeat as needed to reassure yourself. Share with friends. If you want to.

At the Telegraph, an article that has many commenters’ undies in a twist, “Bettany Hughes: who knows whether God is a girl?”

Bettany Hughes, an expert in ancient history, claimed that Christianity “was originally a faith where the female of the species held sway”.

To oppose the ordination of women bishops in the Church of England is to deny the central role women played in the foundations of the faith, said Hughes.

“By suppressing the true story of the connection between women and religion, we etiolate both history and the possibilities of our own world,” she wrote in Radio Times.

The Telegraph piece shoots itself in the foot by including an inflammatory bit at the end about another scholar’s thesis that Jesus was a hermaphrodite.

And while “God as girl” makes a good sound bite, I’d prefer female or woman or feminine or something less childish.

Seriously, though, the tradition of world religions had male war deities paired with female fertility and wisdom deities. Then that changed. Haven’t you ever wondered why?

(Link from The Morning News)

The teacher has been reading Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie aloud to 8yo Drake’s class. When she was close to the end one night, the next morning before school Drake “needed” to know the ending, so he asked to see our copy. I told him it was on the shelf with the other books by Kate.

“We have a whole section for her?” he asked wonderingly.

I told him to look in the D’s. Given that the first author he saw was Dickens, it took him rather longer than I expected to find Kate’s books.

When he pulled it off the shelf, he asked about the stuff inside: an article on Kate in the local paper after it came out, and some other Kate-related things. I showed him the inscription, which had an illustration of a dog.

Downstairs, Drake would not leave the house for the bus until he’d finished the chapter. I asked, I sternly asked, I raised my voice, then I realized I should just be quiet and let him finish his chapter.

As we walk/jogged to the bus, he said, “Our family is really lucky. Other families don’t have books signed by Kate.”

I responded, “Yes, we are a lucky family.”

Hype plus a slot in this year’s Tournament of Books put Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder on my TBR list. Years ago, a writer friend recommended Patchett’s Magician’s Assistant, which I loved. After I read Bel Canto, which everyone I knew loved (but I found a bit remote and chilly) I talked with my friend about it. She and I agreed that we admired Bel Canto, but didn’t love it in the way we did Magician’s Assistant.

In the meantime, Patchett lost some credibility with me with her piece on travel writing “Did I Kill Gourmet Magazine?”, which came off to me as snobby rather than tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, when the good reviews poured out on State of Wonder, I hoped for another Magician’s Assistant. Alas, no.

Marina Singh is a 42yo scientist employed by a big pharmaceutical company. In the first sentence, we learn her co-worker, Anders Eckman, has died, and soon learn that he was in the remote jungle trying to persuade a crotchety researcher to come in from the field. Marina is asked by both Eckman’s wife and the head of the company to go down and find out what happened. Things are complicated because Marina is having an affair with the much older head of the company, and she was a student of the missing researcher.

One of my pet peeves is characters who don’t grow and learn. While people like that exist in real life, I don’t care to spend time with them fictionally, either. To me, Marina was a dud of a main character, flat and uninteresting. Ditto for the plot, which seemed like it would be full of thrilling plot development. Instead, to me, it plodded, and by the time I got to this or that reveal, I was so exhausted from getting there that I didn’t care much. Or, in a few cases, the reveal had been expected by me so long that I no longer felt any satisfaction from having called it. Marina does some strange things at the end, and some other plot points are left unresolved. But again, I didn’t care that much. I neither liked nor admired this book. I experienced schadenfreude when Wil Wheaton slammed it during the Tournament of Books as:

a story that demands so much suspension of disbelief it may as well have asked us to accept sailing down a river flowing with unicorn tears.

For a character-driven medical thriller, I’d recommend Intuition by Allegra Goodman instead.

One of my three books groups, the one I run, focuses loosely on novels with themes of myth or religion. It is not a religious book group, but I find these books I read that I really want to discuss and chew over. A few friends had requested we read something by Annie Proulx. In researching her many books I found little that was overtly mythic/spiritual (though there is a short story written about hell). I finally decided on The Shipping News. I remembered liking it a good deal when I read it for my Book Group of Sacred Memory in Philadelphia, and it would be easy for people to obtain an inexpensive copy, borrow one from the library, or just take it off their shelf.

The story of Quoyle, a “large damp loaf of a man” takes us to Newfoundland, where he tries to begin a new life with his aunt and two daughters. The adults are haunted by ghosts of their pasts, as are many of those they meet. Most chapters begin with a picture of a knot and definition, which foreshadows the events of the chapters and reflects the boat-centric life of the Newfoundlanders.

Outwardly gauche and slow, Quoyle nonetheless was easy for me to love, as was his aunt and other characters in the book. Many parts made me laugh aloud (”poor Nutbeem”) and others made me recoil in horror. Some would say the setting is a character, I’d say it’s more the rich background that imbues the story to such an extent it couldn’t happen anywhere else. Crazy, huge, horrible things happen, and somehow, one of the words to describe how I feel about this book is “sweet”. Also, what I found about the book–that crazy huge horrible things happen and the characters and life go on–felt similarly to the aspect of myth and belief in this book–they’re in there but not obvious, and not made a big deal of. I was glad to revisit this book.

I have not seen the movie, and don’t intend to. Kevin Spacey is a fine actor, but he is so far from the picture of giant-chinned Quoyle in my head that I don’t want them to jockey for space.

As Parks and Recreation, possibly my favorite current show on TV, is on hiatus, I felt the need to fill the imminent Adam Scott void in my life. I’ve developed rather a crush on him as Leslie’s love interest, Ben.

So we borrowed Party Down seasons 1 and 2 from the library. Party Down is a sub-par Hollywood area catering company. Ken Marino is the Michael-Scott-ish team leader who pines to open a franchise of his own, while Adam Scott is the actor returning to a day job, his tail between his legs having been one of the “hey it’s that guy” guys. The episodes are 30 minutes and funny, raunchier than network TV, and in general, really solid. The cast features alums from Veronica Mars and Freaks and Geeks, and Jane Lynch steals every scene until she departed the show for Glee. Did the showrunners (one of whom is another of my crushes, Paul Rudd) take that as a setback? No, they hired Megan Mullaly for season 2 and she was hilarious. The humor is Apatovian, and he is name checked a couple times, so if that’s not your thing, this won’t be either, but if any of the other things I mentioned have been and you haven’t watched it, check it out. We enjoyed it a lot.

What we enjoyed much less? Real Steel with Hugh Jackman. I requested this from the library because Entertainment Weekly said positive things about it. It’s not without merit, but it follows a Disney plot trajectory: guy is a jerk, guy meets son, guy wants to become better man for son, guy succeeds! The robot fighting effects were good, but in the end, this felt more like a story my 8yo would have enjoyed, though I would have had him skip most of the beginning. Forgettable. Eminently skippable.

But what did we enjoy EVEN LESS? Julie Taymore’s The Tempest. Oh, I was so excited when I heard about that project. I really enjoyed her Titus Andronicus and Across the Universe. Helen Mirren as Prospero/a! Alas, the reviews didn’t lie. It was painful to watch, so after a bit we stopped watching. It feels like Taymore has pulled a Gilliam–she’s talented and creative but she needs someone, somewhere, to rein in the crazy. Example: naked Ariel flitting about the skies to weird music.

So two duds in a row, then I went with some mom friends to see Friends with Kids, starring Adam Scott and a bunch of people who were in Bridesmaids. One of my friends noted that we were laughing loudest of all the theater goers–perhaps we were just closest in experience to those punishing-on-a-marriage years of little kids. It was good, and Adam Scott was impressive throughout, especially toward the end though the rest of the movie ended more with a whimper.

So, my takeaway: when in doubt, watch the thing that Adam Scott is in. Don’t trust EW’s reviews, unless they’re of the Tempest, in which case, they’re right, stay away.

PS this entry had tons of links, then wordpress ate my draft and I don’t have it in me to do them over. Go to IMDB for more info.

Over at Tipsy Baker, Jennifer Reese has been writing about making banana bread here and here. She describes her ideal bread as having a custard-y texture. I like a heavy, moist banana bread, but a custard-y texture is going too far for me. Why not just make bread pudding out of banana bread rather than pudding-y bread? But to each her own banana bread, and it got me thinking about my own.

Melted butter. I put a stick of butter in the microwave for 30 seconds, which leaves bergs of butter then stir with a fork till the warm butter melts the bergs.

My carb addiction began pretty young, and I’ve been baking since middle school. So I’ve probably been baking banana bread for over thirty years. When it comes out right, which I’ll discuss further, it’s dark, heavy, moist, rich with banana flavor and studded with bright, sweet maraschino cherries. This is the recipe imprinted on me whose pull is so strong that I have to make an extra stop for maraschino cherries; my grocery co-op doesn’t carry such a thing. (And after reading Reese’s Make the Bread Buy the Butter, I know better than to attempt to make them myself.)

I used the chemically colored/flavored/sweetened cherries but not the organic vanilla in deference to the original recipe.

That said, I haven’t been wholly faithful to the recipe over the years. A note that says to add the “juice” of the cherries to the recipe, which already has a cup of sugar, made a wet mess that took two hours to bake with a crust that had to be swathed in plastic wrap to soften it. (I put juice in quotes because the liquid the cherries are in is an unholy combination of chemicals that I only wish I could pretend was merely sugar water.) And the most curious instruction, to me, was to dissolve a teaspoon of baking soda in a tablespoon of warm water. I’ve never seen this instruction in any other recipe, and it makes me wonder if somewhere back in the old days there was a problem with clumpy soda.

Black-enough bananas. If your bananas aren’t this gross, you can roast them in the pre-heating oven.

But as I considered banana bread and looked at the tweaks I’d made to the recipe over time (a hybrid of my family’s recipe with one from Cook’s Illustrated) I realized what I had was really no longer my great-grandmother’s recipe. So I called my grandmother and aunt to answer a few questions, and learned that while it is the recipe our family has been making for generations, it is not my great-grandmother’s, but instead someone named Henrietta.

Eggs from happy chickens. Really–they have names and their owner pets them.

My 97yo grandmother wasn’t clear on the exact relation to Henrietta, but I think she was a cousin, so I feel perfectly justified in continuing to refer to this as our family’s banana bread.

Buttered, floured sides give the bread something to cling to as it rises.

After this consult, where we checked the recipe against the one written on a flyleaf of my grandmother’s Joy of Cooking, I decided to make the original recipe again, without the Cook’s Illustrated tweaks to the ingredients. But I couldn’t help but add some whole wheat flour, skip the dissolving of the soda, plus melt rather than cream the butter, which makes for a very easy, two-bowl, mix-by-hand batter. I was quite torn about vanilla, which the original recipe doesn’t have but I usually add. But I steeled myself to omit it in the interest of science. Or historical accuracy. Or whatever.

Why yes, I _do_ use a Play-doh knife to take the loaves out so I don’t scratch the non-stick pans.

Alas, I was a little too clever. I divided the batter into four mini pans so they’d bake faster and the crust wouldn’t grow too thick. But I let them overbake a bit. The results were good, but a bit dry. I’m going to have to try again before I declare the original recipe a winner.

How about you; what’s your ideal banana bread, or your family recipe?

Mostly The Family Banana Bread
makes 1 standard loaf or 4 mini loaves

1/2 cup butter (1 stick) melted then cooled
2 eggs
3 mashed black bananas (about 1 1/2 cup)

4/3 cup all purpose flour
2/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

1 small jar maraschino cherries, stems removed, rinsed and torn in halves.

Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour loaf pan(s).

In medium small bowl, stir butter, eggs and bananas together. In medium large bowl, whisk dry ingredients together. Lightly fold banana mixture and cherries into dry ingredients with rubber spatula until just combined. Batter will be thick and chunky but there should be no flour streaks. Scrape batter into pan(s) and bake till golden brown, about 55 minutes for a large loaf, or 40 minutes for small ones. Tester should come out clean. Cool in pan 5 minutes, then on wire rack.

I’m reading Bleak House by Dickens in chunks along with the group at Unputdownables. I continue to wish that the schedule would have been divided in the same chunks as it was originally released–Dickens knew what he was doing, and wrote beginnings and endings with a purpose, and I’ve been sad as I’ve passed them, coming and going, seeing their merits but not going along with them.

I found this week’s segment, Chapters 10 to 14, (serial break was at 13) something of a slog, perhaps because life is overflowing with should’s given the early spring, but likely because of the 20 page chapter 14, which took me several attempts to get through. I might have done better had I had a week of rest after 13. In any case, I found this section to be full of Dickensian maunderings, where I could just imagine him sitting at his desk, counting the words. I empathize with this, yet it didn’t make it any less difficult to read the beginning of Chapter 10 about Snagsby, the end of Chapter 11 about the inquest, the middle of Chapter 12 on Boodle and Duffy et al. Chapter 13 was quite good, filled with character and plot development. Alas, ponderous 14, with its overlong excoriation of the elder Turveydrop, had me, literally, dozing more than once.

These said, I think I can say with some confidence who the unfortunate Nemo was, and surmise that Mrs. Flite is waiting for the Jardyce judgment, not an imaginary one. Richard is weak willed and uninteresting to me, but I did love how chapters 13 and 14 ended with Esther’s unreliable narration of “oh, by the way, there was this nice guy hanging about.” How I do hope Esther grows a spine by the end of this. I continue to be enamored of the name Peepy and wish I had something to name after him.

“It’s a tough read” is what I heard, over and over, about Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, about a poor black family outside of New Orleans in the days before during and after Katrina. Yet the impression I got was also one of admiration. Plus I loved the cover, with its mismatched type, and rough sketched dog on the swampy green background. When it become a contender in The Morning News Tournament of Books I had yet another reason to read it.

It’s narrated by 15 year old Esch, the only female in her family. She has two older brothers, a hard-drinking father, and a younger brother born just before their mother died. Esch has an extended family in her brothers’ friends, one of whom, Manny, she’s in love with. Her brother Skeet has a pit bull named China, who births puppies as the novel opens.

China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won’t let nobody touch her but Skeet.

The story goes forward day by day, ratcheting up the tension both with the events on the page, and what readers know is coming, though we don’t know exactly how it will affect them.

There is tragedy and violence in this book. Skeet has trained China to fight, and a long scene of a dog fight was difficult to read. But throughout, over and under all the “tough” stuff, there is a brightness to Esch’s voice, and a fierce love among all these characters (including the bond between Skeet and China) that made me feel lifted up, not beaten down, by this book. I feel it gets a bad rap, and that people will avoid it if all they hear is what a tough book it is. It’s rewarding and insightful with a tenderness and sweetness throughout that are resilient in the face of so much. I was sad to see it lose to Lightning Rods, but am so very glad to have finally read it.

Every Wednesday I take 6 and 8yo Guppy and Drake to the comic store for new comic day. I give them their allowance, and they decide how to spend it. I was settling up at the register and asked Guppy where his brother was.

“He’s in the corner.”

I said what had to be said: “No one puts Baby in the corner.”

The comic-book store guy laughed. My boys looked at me, baffled. Another guy in the store said, like a fairy at the birth of Sleeping Beauty,

“May he never understand why that is funny.”

I find the Dickens entertaining to read in this second week of the Bleak House readalong at Unputdownables, but had a lot of back-and-forthing this second week as I struggled to remember who was who, and at one time was even confounded by the incomplete list of characters when I went to find the name of Esther’s godmother. (It’s Miss Barbary.) But when I finally got my Jarndyces clear from my Dedlocks and such, things moved along at quick pace.

In Chapter 6, Esther, Richard and Ada are introduced to Mr. Skimpole, an importuning friend of Mr. Jarndyce’s, who descibes him as childlike. Does he mean childlike, as in selfish and without remorse or appropriate empathy for others? Because that’s what it seemed to me. We are again shown how sweet and good Esther is when she comes to his rescue over a bad debt. Again, this is Esther doing the telling, so what do we make of her own tendency to toot her own horn?

Chapter 7, ‘The Ghost Walk’ transports us to the Dedlock’s house, while they are in Paris. We meet the proud housekeeper, Mrs. Rouncewell, her grandson Watt and the pretty housemaid Rosa, who gives a tour to Mr. Guppy and another man when they show up to see the house. Mr. Guppy mostly droops about, but perks up when he sees a portrait of Lady Dedlock, who he thinks looks familiar. Hmm, now who could he be reminded of?

Chapter 8, ‘Covering a Multitude of Sins’ we meet yet another dreadful do-gooder, Mrs. Pardiggle and her angry gaggle of allowance-deprived boys. There is a very sad story about a brickmaker’s wife and a baby, but of course, it’s Esther and her goodness that are in the spotlight of her own tale. As far as I’m concerned, Esther more than deserved all the pinches those boys gave her.

Chapter 9, ‘Signs and Tokens’ we meet Mr. Jarndyce’s friend Boythorn, a good man and loud, who had been in love as a youth but lost her. Hmm. Who could he have been in love with? Also, Mr. Guppy pitches woo at Esther who does not handle his advances with equanimity.

Bleak House is good fun to read, and has moments of humor and sadness, though some do feel contrived. It’s full of delicious sentences, and I look forward to the next section.

A friend lent me her copy of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which was in the first round of this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. I found it a surprisingly non-fast read for such a short book; it’s only 163 pages. This isn’t, however, a criticism, merely a description. The few pages are not packed with words, but what words there are, are packed with meaning and provocation. An ongoing meditation on truth, memory, history, identity, and age, I was still ruminating on what I thought was its ending when I read this spoiler-ful excellent analysis by SFP at Pages Turned.

at the moment, I think the sense I had of the ending was a false one. The new ambiguity makes the book all the more interesting. And it was pretty fascinating to begin with. I may need to read it again.

Generally, I am not a fan of the Best American Series. While I did enjoy the 2002 Non Required Reading, the 1995 Best American Short Stories collection lives on in my memory like a bad smell. When I worked at a used book store, I can’t remember how many times that particular volume came in and then sat on the shelves till it was clearanced. NOT a keeper.

So I had some trepidation when one of by book group colleagues picked The Best American Comics 2011. Because while I love the medium of comics, I often don’t care for the type of comics I see as often gathered in these anthologies, which I think of–derogatorily, reductively, and unfairly I’ll admit–as the weird ones.

So I prepared myself for some weird stuff. And it was in there–one entry truly repulsed me with its art, a couple others with their subject matter. But I noticed that even in some stories I disliked, there was some element of visual storytelling that impressed me or made me think, as in Kevin Mutch’s “Blue Note”, Gabby Schulz’s “New Year’s Eve 2004″, and Chris Ware’s “Jordan W. Lint to the Age of 65.”

The majority left me cold. Some of the selections were excerpts of larger works, and hard to process because of this. Unlike a short story, they were not meant to stand alone.

More positively, in one case, a comic that I’d previously not loved–Ganges–utterly charmed me. A handful made me interested enough to look into their artists’ other works, like Gabrielle Bell’s “Manifestation”, Peter and Maria Hoey’s “Anatomy of a Pratfall”, Jillian Tamaki’s “Domestic Men of Mystery” (and her lovely wraparound cover), Kate Beaton’s “Great Gatsby”, and Joey Allison Sayers’ “Pet Cat”. Paul Pope and Joe Sacco’s work I’ve admired before, even if I’m not a regular reader.

There was a long list in the back of other notable books that the editor urged readers to seek out, as the book selections were her admittedly subjective choices. One thing my book group noticed was that 9 of 27 included sex of some sort. For what it’s worth, 7 of those were on my dislike list.

In the end:

Liked: 8
Didn’t move me:11
Disliked: 8

So, on balance it was only OK. Borrow this one, don’t buy it.

From the list at the back, some recommendations I echo: The Unwritten, Criminal, Mercury by Hope Larson, Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley, any of the multiple permutations of Gaiman’s The Dream Hunters, and David Small’s Stitches.

But sometimes, it’s all I’ve got. Here’s what I would be blogging if I could be blogging.

(My book group is due tonight, so I have to clean bathrooms.)

A review of Party Down Season 1 (mini: awesome)

A review of The Best American Comics 2011 that we’ll be discussing at tonight’s book group (middling, of course, which is what all these silly collections are. some good, some ok, some hateful.)

a review of Julian Barnes Sense of an Ending (mini: impressive. mesmerizing.)

a review of Pawnee by Leslie Knope, but if you’re not watching Parks and Rec, you don’t know the glory that is the best character on tv right now, Ron Swanson. (mini: hilarious)

a picture of the giant pile of books I bought today.

Yes, I do have a problem. I LOVE BOOKS TOO MUCH. (and coffee. and pastries.) As you can see, I found many of the Tournament of Book titles I wasn’t able to get at the library or through other methods.

Level of anxiety: medium high and rising. Rising.

Also, does the photo look weird and compressed to you? Sigh.

All right; that’s all the non-blogging I can manage.

I’ve been thinking about weight, lately. Sometime within the last weeks, something prompted me to write about it. Now I can’t remember what that was. Perhaps it will come to me as I write. But in any case, weight.

(Maybe it was watching the Oscars and thinking Angelina and Rose Byrne needed to eat more?)

In Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which I recommend, in the section “Remembrances of Being Very Very Skinny” she writes,

For a brief time at the turn of the century, I was very skinny.

Funny anecdotes ensue, then she finishes:

We should leave people alone about their weight. Being skinny for a while (provided you actually eat food and don’t take pills or smoke to get there) is a perfectly fine pastime. Everyone should try it once, like a super-short haircut or dating a white guy.

The next section, “Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat” starts

For a brief time at the end of that last century I was over-weight.

Funny anecdotes ensue, then she finishes:

We should leave people alone about their weight. Being chubby for a while (provided you don’t give yourself diabetes) is a natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of. Like puberty or slowly turning into a Republican.

The Tina Fey comments reminded me of something I’m pretty sure I read in O. Which is a better magazine than you might think if you just recoiled, and for better or worse, I’m the demographic. Anyhoo, an article about weight suggested charting your weight’s peaks and valleys over your life and noting how your life was at that time, and how your life probably isn’t at the same point it was when you were your skinniest, and may never get there again. If you read the sections in Bossypants, Tina Fey says pretty much the same thing with anecdotal evidence.

(Wait, maybe is was how I went to a party a couple weeks ago and got many compliments on how good I looked, and wondered if it was because I’d lost sudden weight after just coming off the stomach flu.)

So, in my life, in the middle of the 00’s, I was skinny. For pretty much the first time in my life. I went to a doctor because I had some bumps under my skin and she said, “Those are lymph nodes. Most people can’t feel them but you can because you’re so skinny.” I didn’t feel skinny. People would tell me that I was and I wouldn’t believe them. It was only years later, as I gave away the clothes I wore during that period (goodbye, size 6 Long N Lean jeans), or saw pictures of myself from that time, that I could acknowledge, yep, I was skinny.

At the time, my husband and were DINKs: double income, no kids. I went to a power yoga class about 3 times a week. We lived half a mile from our jobs, so we walked to work. I didn’t eat gluten, because a holistic chiropracter told me I shouldn’t, so I was extremely mindful of what I did eat.

(Maybe I was thinking about weight after I walked into the boys’ room in the morning to tell them to get dressed. I had on a shirt and underwear, but no pants. 6yo Guppy pointed at me and said, with delight in his voice, “Fat legs!”)

A funny thing was, around this time, I went to visit a friend of mine who had also lost a lot of weight. She looked lovely. Yet I thought she’d looked better before, and was reminded of one of my favorite scenes in Bridget Jones’ diary, when she finally loses the weight she obsesses over, puts on the LBD, goes and out and all her friends ask if she is ill. Maybe losing weight isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

In the wake of Guppy’s birth, I became generally depressed and anxious. As my crack team of medical professionals tinkered with this and that solution, I first lost a bunch of weight then gained it back after a med switch. When we reversed the switch, I thought I’d lose the weight again, and said so to my doctor.

She laughed, not unkindly. “Welcome to 40, honey,” she said, with sympathy. And I’ve been pretty steady since then, back at the same point I was for a long time in my 30s. Rounder than I’d like, but within the bounds of health.

(The most likely answer is that I was reacting to something I read on Sally McGraw’s excellent blog, Already Pretty, because last week was body image warrior week.)

I don’t own a scale. For a long time, I didn’t have a full-length mirror. I don’t obsess about my weight, yet there are still times when it bothers me, like when I have to hop up and down to get in a pair of newly washed jeans.

My point, and I do have one, is that it’s complicated, isn’t it? I wish I were without judgment, for myself and others, and while that judgment has softened over time, it’s not gone. Perhaps I can just aspire to Fey’s words: “We should just leave people alone about their weight” and include myself with that, then recognize when I fail, pick myself up and start over again, possibly a bit wiser. That’s life in general, though, isn’t it?

Last week my husband G. Grod sends me a notice that our favorite revival theater is showing The Seventh Seal, which we’ve never seen.

“No thanks,” I said. “I feel like I should see it, but I’d much rather collapse on the couch with you and watch the rest of Season 1 of Party Down.”

So we did. And I loved it.

I’ve found reading with a friend, be it book group, husband or online community, a great way to tackle chunky books that previously intimidated me, such as Don Quixote, Infinite Jest, The Baroque Cycle. So when I found out at O Canada Y’all that there was a Bleak House readalong, I threw my hat in the ring, in spite of having an overfull dance card.

I managed to finish the first six chapters of Bleak House by the goal date of today. Technically, I have till next Thursday to post my thoughts at The Unputdownables as well as here, but I think it’s best to jump in, and not wait till I “have time.” Ha.

Bleak House was a slow start to me. There’s some heart-thrilling prose, but the first chapter is about the legal system and a long-drawn-out case, so it would be easy to give up. Soon enough, though, fascinating characters appear on stage: Esther, an orphan, her dead godmother Mrs. Dedlock, the wards of the court, Ada and Richard, and my favorite thus far, Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her own family and home to lavish attention on the poor savages in Africa.

Reading about Mrs. Jellyby made me feel very good about my parenting and housekeeping.

One downside. The edition chosen for the readalong is the Barnes and Noble, which has both notes on the page and end notes, plus illustrations. Alas, the substantive, more interesting notes are at the end, while the ones at the bottom of the page, to which my eye is easily drawn, are not things that I need explanation for. They just trip me up as I read. I don’t need to have gout, reticule, coppice and barouche defined, and if I did, I could probably figure them out from context, thanks. It’s a quibble, though.

Illegitimate orphans, mysterious benefactors, crazy old ladies–and this is just in the first few chapters. I look forward to meeting the rest of the cast in the next 700+ pages.