Girl Detective

Influenced again by the lit blogs, I am reading Kate Atkinson’s book Case Histories. A few years ago I read her first, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the Whitbread. I liked but didn’t love it. I thought the ending felt contrived, though I had enjoyed the book as I read it. That book, as well as Smilla’s Sense of Snow, taught me not to recommend a book until I’ve finished it. Endings are hard to do, and even harder to do well. Bad endings have the unfortunate ability to cast their shadow over that which went before them. But I am drawn to the idea of a variety of passionate and intelligent readers writing their reaction to a book, so I decided to give Case Histories a go when the Lit Blog Coop picked it as their Summer 2005 “Read This” recommendation.

As of page 128, I’m happy I gave Atkinson another try. There are three mysteries involving three families, and one investigator who has looked into two of them as of my reading to page 128. The characters are engaging and complex, the writing is strong, and the mysteries are intriguing. I put the book down when I must, but I do not wish to draw out this reading experience. Several passages have stood out to me, making me wish for my own copy to underline. This is an uncharacteristic urge, since I have lately enjoyed the freedom from book ownership and cost afforded by my local libraries. I will post more on the book as my reading progresses. I’m hoping that the ending does not disappoint.

[Michelle] was driven by something, only she didn’t know what it was but she was sure that if one day she could get everything finished then she’d be free of whatever it was that was driving her. “You’ll never get everything perfect, Michelle,” Shirley said. “That’s impossible.” But it wasn’t. Given enough time you could make anything perfect. P. 41.

Closer. 2004. Directed by Mike Nichols, who is Mr. Diane Sawyer, FYI. #27 in my 50 movie challenge for the year. I’d heard mixed things about this film. Some said it was great with terrific performances. Others said it was too dark and overly cruel. Both are true, though. It is well directed and acted, and doesn’t paint a reassuring portrait of couples in love. It does show, though, with cutting accuracy some of the truly funny and pathetic things people do while in pursuit of what they call love. I thought Clive Owen’s performance as Larry was the strongest, and not just because I have a crush on him. Many reviews said there were no sympathetic characters, bu at the end of the film, I liked and understood Larry, which I think had a lot to do with Owen’s portrayal. The scene when he and Julia Roberts reveal secrets to one another had tremendous emotional power. Much less effective was Natalie Portman. I am mystified that she earned an Oscar nomination. I could tell by Portman’s delivery that the script originally was a play. She sounded like she was reciting lines. Owen starred in the stage version, though in the character of Dan, played by Jude Law in the film. Charlie Rose interviewed Owen and tried to get him to admit which of the two parts he liked best. Owen, however, would not be goaded into an undiplomatic statement. He was unequivocal in his respect for having worked with Nichols, whom he called brilliant, but rather less effusive about Robert Rodriguez, with whom he worked on Sin City.

To illustrate the book and movie reviews here, I’ve used images from a few websites along with their links. This is not, though, the most considerate and ethical practice, as I was reminded after following this link from Conversational Reading. Until I figure out a way to put the images up efficiently and more ethically, I will do text-only reviews.

On the eve of starting the next draft of my novel, I re-read this book for inspiration, book #34 in my 50 book challenge for the year. I’m thrilled to re-read. It’s something I did when I was younger, before I got overwhelmed by all the good books out there. But re-reading is a practice, even a skill, that I want to cultivate. The first time I go through a book, I read to see what happens. I race ahead to find out. Subsequent readings allow me to savor the the choices the author made in terms of language, craft, and story.

Speak is teen fiction, and one of my favorite books, not only of recent years but perhaps ever. The main character and narrator is Melinda, who starts ninth grade with no friends, because she called the police during an end-of-summer party. Both times I read this, Melinda’s voice reached out and grabbed me, and hauled me along her very sad and yet extremely funny story.

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache…

Older students are allowed to roam until the bell, but ninth-graders are herded into the auditorium. We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of summer watching bad cartoons. I didn’t go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don’t have anyone to sit with.

I am outcast.

The ending is so fitting that it flirts with overdetermination, yet it is so balanced that I don’t want to change one jot of it. I am frankly envious of the author who wrote such a compelling character, powerful voice, and wrenching story. I love this book.

This was also the eleventh book I finished this month. If I keep up this pace I’m going to beat my goal handily. Maybe I should give Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle a try. It feels as if the more I read, the more I’m able to read. Some of the books I’ve read this month were short, but some weren’t–one was the nearly 1,000-page Don Quixote! I feel I’m a better, faster reader than I was before I gave myself this challenge.

Lone Star. 1996. Directed by John Sayles. #26 in my 50 movie challenge for the year. I love watching a film and feeling swept up in the hands of an expert storyteller and skillful director. Lone Star intertwines stories of people in a small town around the theme of prejudice. It’s a mystery, told in the present and the past, with stellar performances. The characterization of a huge number of characters is pulled off gracefully, even as it shows people in all their messy complexity.

a teen fiction anthology edited by Michael Cart. Book #33 in my 50 book challenge for the year. As usual with Cart, this is a strong collection by talented writers including Katherine Paterson, Lois Lowry and Jon Scieszka. The stories range in tone and time though all center on the theme of the future. It was published in 1999, prior to what many people asserted was the turn of the millennium. Because its publication pre-dated 9/11, the stories and themes take on an almost old-fashioned innocence, which feels strange because the collection is only a few years old.

Book #32 of my 50 Book Challenge for 2005. The author said she wrote this as a break between Persepolis and Persepolis 2. It has the same charm and humor of Persepolis, but feels more slight, both in weight and in content, like the graphic novel equivalent of a novella. It centers on an after-lunch gathering of women for tea and discussion of others and each other, and their mostly difficult relations with men. The title refers to a method of falsely re-creating virginity, a practice that one story told with disastrous results. As with Persepolis, the art is deliberately simple. It is easy to find points of recognition in the stories, even with women of different age and culture.

Book #31 in my 50 Book Challenge, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Another strong entry in the Bendis/Maleev collaboration. Daredevil, confronted by his naked ex-girlfriend in his bed, a.k.a. The Black Widow,

DD: My life’s kind of in dissaray.
BW: As opposed to when?
DD: You got me there.

It’s a solid story that moves fast and has some funny bits. The collection includes an issue drawn by several artists, who do a much better job than is usual for a gimmicky flashback issue. Maleev’s art seemed more photo-referential than it has before, reminding me of Tony Harris’s art in the very entertaining Ex Machina.

#25 in my 50 Movie Challenge for 2005. You knew this was coming, didn’t you? To finish my Don Quixote related media, I watched Lost in La Mancha, the documentary of Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to bring DQ to film. Much was made of the fear of this turning into The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a costly Gilliam flop. The documentary details the painful deterioration of the film due to an accumulation of almost unbelievable bad fortune. The production is plagued by bad weather, absent actors, military maneuvers, an ill lead actor and more. What I found most interesting was that Gilliam did not intend to film a straight adaptation. His film was to be called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Johnny Depp, sporting a thick mane of dark, wavy hair with a blond streak, was cast as a modern ad agency guy who is transported back in time, and mistaken by DQ for his squire. I was surprised to hear Gilliam has an American accent. I thought he was English because of all the work he’s done with Monty Python, and was chagrined to learn at the IMDB that he’s from my neck of the woods, Minneapolis.

by Elisabeth Robinson. Book #30 in my 50 Book Challenge for 2005. A novel in letters about Olivia Hunt, who is trying to produce a film of Don Quixote when she finds out her younger sister is dying of leukemia. The letters are from Olivia to various people in her life–friends, family, co-workers, her ex-boyfriend.

The epistolary format didn’t work for me. I didn’t find Olivia’s narratives well differentiated in types of letter (emails were similar to faxes and to letters) or in recipient (she told parts of the story to whomever she was writing to, so if you removed the “Dear X” from the letter, it didn’t matter for long stretches whether she was writing to her sister, her friend or her ex.) I think this book might have worked better if Robinson would have interspersed narrative and letters, rather than trying to cram the former into the latter.

There were some sentences that were unwieldy and incongruous in general, made more so for being in a letter, e.g.,

It’s a clear, fine spring day and I had to feel it for a minute, to just breathe in the sweet magnolia scent of a June day in the Ohio Valley.

Also, Robinson didn’t use quotation marks, which made dialogue sometimes difficult to follow.

Perhaps as a result of the letter format, none of the characters felt three dimensional. I didn’t see much growth or increased insight even in the main character of Olivia. Things changed around her, but I didn’t find her very changed at the end.

On the positive side, there was a good balance of funny and sad, and some interesting insight into the Hollywood experience. Since I read it recently, I understood all the references to Don Quixote, and thought it was a good thematic match for her sister’s illness. I thought it especially ironic that she notes in a few letters that people should not worry about Gilliam’s Don Quixote, since it won’t get made. Her fictional version does get made, though in real-life Robinson worked on a version that didn’t. Terry Gilliam did eventually try to film Don Quixote. He turned his failure into the documentary Lost in La Mancha.

I’m well into my thirties, but I have no experience with weeds. As a teen, my share of the yard work was mowing the lawn. I kept my resentment of this job mostly to myself, until I ran our riding mower over a seedling buckeye tree, then deep into a 6-foot-square yew shrub. The bush died, I was fired, and a succession of very cute lawn boys picked up where I left off. As far as I was concerned, it was win, win.

I lived in apartments until last fall, when my husband G. Grod and I purchased our house. The yard is tiny, but not problem free. Which are the weeds? Dandelions are obvious, but some of the stuff I’ve pulled up smells like mint. Also, the previous owner mentioned tomato plants. I have no idea what a tomato plant looks like, yet there are weed-looking things in the area.

When we bought the house, we were excited that half the back yard was covered with wood chips. Less lawn to care for, we thought. Two things have become apparent. One, weeds grow in wood chips as well as they do in the grass. Two, after more than three weeks of rain, wood chips get moldy.

Today’s most concerning find was by our back steps. I noticed some uprooted plants in a secluded corner, then saw a small hole filled with grass and moss. Something built its nest/burrow right under our back door.

I can’t differentiate between weeds/not weeds, and I’ve got moldy chips and burrowing creatures. I don’t think I’m up to this.

This is a good article with a disgusting title on the rise of novels told in stories. I’ve read two novels in stories (NIS) recently, Elizabeth McKenzie’s Stop That Girl, and Elizabeth Crane’s All This Heavenly Glory. Both were good, but the stories got less good as their protagonists got older, a problem I didn’t find in one of my favorite books from a few years ago, Melissa Bank’s NIS The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. (FYI, Bank’s follow up, The Wonder Spot is due at the end of this month, and looks promising.)

In general, I prefer novels to other forms because of continuity of voice and characterization. NIS books have more of this than do books of unrelated short stories, but it’s an uncomfortable hybrid. Though the author of the article is dismissive that market issues are driving the rise of the NIS, I think it’s valid. Short stories don’t sell as well as do novels. It’s interesting to see the rise of a new form, one of which, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, waits on my bedside table. But I’m not yet convinced that these so-called novels aren’t literature with an attention-span problem.

In spite of my previously professed preference for novels, I have read and enjoyed several short story collections lately.

28. All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. Similar in many ways to #25 Stop That Girl by another Elizabeth (McKenzie, who in fact is named in one of the fawning blurbs by little-known authors on the back, one of whom is Thisbe Nissen, whose name I’ve always admired even if I have not read his [her?] books), this is a novel in stories about Charlotte Anne Byers, who eventually goes through a convoluted dropping of the Anne on her way to adulthood; the stories alternate between childhood and adulthood, though I found the former rather than the latter more engaging, making me wonder, as I did with the aforementioned Stop That Girl, whether all stories with intriguing young heroines have them grow up into boring, crazy women, in this case who are boringly redeemed by the love of a younger man, though the book itself isn’t boring, in fact it’s quite funny, such as in the opening story when she says she is seeking Owen Wilson (not an Owen Wilson type, she clarifies, but the man himself), and I often recognized myself in bits (though not the parts that involved, as did Crane’s previous collection, #24 When the Messenger is Hot, an opera-singing dying/dead mother, Iowan step-family, authorial move from NYC to Chicago, and an annoying tendency to use the second person narrative when things got a bit too autobiographical), as in her childhood obsession with her friend’s Crissy dolls, one of which I owned as a child, and whose growing hair never broke, though I wrote previously about how Crissy’s “sister” Velvet’s hair mechanism did break, and if you find this ongoing sentence with commas and parentheticals to be very annoying, then you might want to give the book a miss, because Crane is very fond of them and can go on for over a page, though, admittedly, she does it more skillfully than do I.

29. Beware of God by Shalom Auslander. I wasn’t in the mood for dark humor, but this collection won me over. It’s extremely dark (lots of death, including people, a dog, a monkey) but so clever, subversive and funny (God is a happy, giant chicken!; the Peanuts characters take sides in warring religious factions!) that the end result is almost charming. I laughed out loud several times, and would have read more parts aloud except that my husband had to leave for work and I didn’t think Drake would get the jokes.

1. Hidden Cd tracks (Kings of Leon Youth and Young Manhood)

2. Not printing the song list on the Cd case (Bright Eyes Fever and Mirrors, Lua, Lifted)

3. Not printing the title and artist on the Cd itself

Things that make me lunge for the Forward or Off button:

1. Tracks that feature, in whole or in part, conversations or clips from radio, television or answering machines. (Bright Eyes Fever and Mirrors and Letting Off the Happiness, some Guster EP that I have). Get over yourself and sing, already.

2. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star

3. Garrison Keillor’s voice

A few years ago when I worked at a used book store, I was excited to come across omnibus editions of some of my favorite books from childhood, such as Curious George by Margret and H.A. Rey, Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne, and George and Martha by the late, great James Marshall. All the good books in one nice volume; what a great idea!

Except, of course, that it’s not. Omnibus editions, for both kids and adults, have the same problem. They are too much of a good thing. Bigger books are harder to handle than smaller ones. Smaller books are more likely to be taken hither and yon and actually read. Yes, there is the problem of smaller print, but most of us bookworms have corrective lenses already.

My husband G. Grod recently read an omnibus edition of Le Carré. That was an ideal omnibus situation–he was going to read a bunch of short, related books very quickly. Our 21-month-old son Drake struggles mightily to haul the Curious George and George and Martha omnibuses (omnibi?) off the shelf and to the reading chair. A commendable effort, but, oh, the poor parent who is now faced with reading the entire omnibus aloud!

Eschew the siren call of the omnibus edition, that Costco version of literature. Instead, spend a little more on individual, human-sized books that can be read one at a time.

(NB Comic books vs. graphic novels are a related, but different, discussion.)

I recognize this feeling. It’s that life is pretty good. The last time I felt this was about three years ago. At that point I felt my life, my job, my relationships, my marriage, my living situation were all pretty good. I could either maintain the status quo, or try to move to a new stage in life and start a family. Things didn’t proceed quite as planned.

I was troubled by hip pain and insomnia during pregnancy. Labor and birth did not go well, though they did result in a healthy baby. I had a series of medical problems after the birth, work deteriorated, Drake was continuously ill in daycare, I resigned, we sold our apartment, bought a new house, moved, and my husband promptly lost his job.

Finally, though, spring arrived in its half-assed fashion to Minnesota. The snow mostly stopped. We began to meet people and make friends. My husband found a job. The weather is sometimes warmer. Occasionally the sun even comes out. Drake and I are able to get out of the house with fewer layers of clothing. I am able to see what life is like when we are not in crisis mode.

Drake is often a joy to be around. I’d be lying or delusional if I said he was that way in general. After all, he’s a person, and none of us is good company, always. I finally realized that it is unreasonable to expect him to be cuddly and laid-back, since these adjectives have never been used to describe me, so I better start appreciating him for what he is, which is active and curious. He is learning his letters and numbers, but has trouble with multi-syllabic ones, like W and 7. He also has trouble with multi-syllabic words and usually only pronounces the first. This can make for problems in understanding, since Toe and Toast sound alike, as do Pea and Pete. Drake is excited to recognize letters and numbers in the world, and often shouts them out with delight in public. At home, he likes to “hide” under the cushions on the couch. He’s pretty easy to find, since a large part of him is usually sticking out. He no longer puts every single thing in his mouth. He still loves to be read to, and has memorized passages from his favorite books, so that we can leave out words and he’ll fill them in, as with the “tiddely pom”s in one of Winnie the Pooh’s songs. This can sometimes be unfortunate, as when he runs about chanting “I die,” a line from Edward Gorey’s The Epiplectic Bicycle. (So much for encouraging non-cutesy children’s books.) Yesterday I noticed that he could hang on the bar over the slide; it used to be out of his reach. Today I noticed that the pants I bought too big at Christmas are definitely too small. Life keeps changing.

Outside, the weather is chill, grey and rainy. I have a lingering cold. It is easy to feel laid low by these things. Instead, I’m reminded that I have a very different life from the one three years ago, one in which I read, write and get to spend time with a developing person. I am glad the crises have died down, so I can appreciate this new life.

Years behind everyone else, I recently finished reading Fast Food Nation. Overall, I found the book discouraging, but not surprising. It details many disgusting, inhumane practices of the fast food and meat industries. One of the most disturbing facts is that there is little or no regulation or testing on meat that is sold to public schools. Kids are most likely to get the worst meat.

My most lasting impression from the book is that I am very fortunate. I do not risk life or limb at my job. I can afford food that is grown and created conscientiously. I am, indeed, lucky.

27. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman. I did it! It was long, but well worth it. Sancho Panza and Don Quixote are interesting, complex characters. The book is by turns amusing and sad. What I enjoyed most were the tricks that Cervantes played with multiple authors and various reference points. There are gaps in the story, e.g., Sancho’s wife has four different names. Cervantes didn’t correct the mistakes on subsequent printings, but instead wove them into the entire story. Grossman’s translation and notes make this book easy to read and enjoy.

23. The Night of the Hunter. 1955. Directed by Charles Laughton. Mitchum is mesmerizing and terrifically creepy. While some of the sets were laughably fake (one house looked as if it were a cardboard cutout silhouetted against the sky), this movie still packs a wallop of tension. It can’t be coincidence, can it, that in the end, a character notes that “Children abide” while Jeff Bridges noted at the end of The Big Lebowski that “The Dude abides”?

24. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. 2003. Directed by Peter Weir. An entertaining, well-crafted and not over-the-top epic. Russell Crowe has good hair, and carries off puffy shirts well.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. A woman I know refused to read it because her friends who read it no longer shop at chain grocery stores or eat at fast food restaurants. Scary, enlightening, compelling and well-written. It made me glad I already adjusted my life to (mostly) eschew fast food and grocery chains. One of the reasons I enjoy living in the twin cities is the abundance of whole-food cooperatives, one of which I can (and do) walk to.