Girl Detective

Whoa, I am seriously out of the practice of blogging, and intend to get back to it, right now. A busy summer combined with many deadlines for other writing work meant a new routine. I still don’t have the hang of things even though school’s been in a month already, but I’m going to give it a go.

With limited time, items on my to-do list get removed in favor of others (as writing for my weblog has, of late), and this provides useful insight into what I value. Yes, of course, there’s always the fooling-around-on-Facebook factor, but in general, if I have a few things to get done a day, the list will go something like this:

1. Food
2. Sleep/Nap
3. Work
4. Reading

On some days, I would probably put sleep ahead of food.

I wasn’t always like this. Most of my life I considered myself incapable of napping. I would go and go and go until I collapsed. Even having a child didn’t make much of a dent in this. I tried to nap, but didn’t know how. Instead, I drank more coffee. But when I was pregnant with my second child, and my first was a toddler? THEN I finally needed to nap. So I practiced. I learned. And I got good at it. Both kids have stopped napping, but I try to have one every day. I am certain that even this small bit of extra rest is good for my body and mind. Here are a few of the things that help me to nap.

1. Lay down at a regular time. 12:30 to 1:30 is a good ballpark. Much later and you risk interfering with night time sleep.

2. Plan a light rest, not a marathon. You and your body benefit from reaching the second stage of sleep, not deep sleep. Twenty to thirty minutes is a good amount of time.

3. Quiet your mind. Turn off the TV, radio, computer. Read a little. Loosen restrictive clothing. Here’s a technique that works for me: Close your eyes. In your head, name five sounds that you hear. Next, name five things that you feel. Open your eyes, and name five things you see. Now repeat this cycle from four, to three, to two, to one. The person who taught me this technique swore that by the time I got to one I’d be asleep. I’ve proved her wrong more than once, but not very often. This is a good meditation to slow down my monkey mind.

4. Set an alarm if you’re worried about missing something. Give yourself about thirty minutes. Resting the body and trying to quiet the mind, even if you don’t fall asleep, are beneficial.

5. Hack a nap. Drink an ounce of lukewarm coffee or tea. Lie down, try to fall asleep, and twenty to thirty minutes later you’ll wake as the caffeine hits your system. I’ve seen this called a caf-nap or nappuccino. I’ve tried it. The benefit is I wake alert and ready to go. The downside is sometimes it’s harder to drop off to sleep, and I don’t get to enjoy the coffee.

6. Practice. Napping is a skill. Sleep is important. Don’t give up.

James Collins ponders why we read if we can’t remember what we read in “The Plot Escapes Me” at the New York Times:

Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

I’m sure I’m not the only one relieved that he musters decent evidence for continuing to read even as what we read falls away. Isn’t that what life is, really?

(I think this link came from The Morning News.)

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

My friend Amy kindly lent me Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I continue to mull it over, especially that last sentence of the Proust quote that opens the book: “It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

Egan’s book, like that sentence, does convoluted things with time, place, memory and even literature. Goon Squad isn’t exactly a novel, nor is it just a collection of stories, as she comments in an interview at Salon. It’s a sprawling, ambitious work that careens among characters, around the world and back and forth over time. Chapters are connected, sometimes just barely, but in a way that makes sense in our hyper-linked culture. Even in a chapter told in Power Point, the wildness makes sense; Egan has that much control over her material.

It opens with Sasha, one of the many engaging characters who come on and off stage throughout the book:

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather.

Like Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which I recently enjoyed, Egan is skilled at creating characters you want to meet again. While the structure is similar, with different character-based chapters, Egan’s book is vaster in both its reach and grasp, perhaps like the Proust novel that informed it.

At the Boston Globe, (HT The Morning News), “Lost Libraries,” the strange, sad fate of many authors’ libraries:

Most people might imagine that authors’ libraries matter–that scholars and readers should care what books authors read, what they thought about them, what they scribbled in the margins. But far more libraries get dispersed than saved.

For this month’s book group and next month’s Books and Bars meeting (where the author will be Skpying in; Skype is a verb, now, right?) I read on of the buzzy books from last year, Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You. And I laughed. A lot.

Judd Foxman is a 30-something guy who found out his wife was cheating on him shortly before his father dies. Devastated by the breakup of his marriage, he reunites with his very messed up family.

There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion. We banter, quip, and insult our way through birthdays, holidays, weddings, illnesses. Now Dad is dead and Wendy is cracking wise. It serves him right, since he was something of a pioneer at the forefront of emotional repression.

The book reminded me of movies, not of other books. Like Parenthood and Death at a Funeral (the UK version), a disparate family regroups, then sad and hilarious things happen. Unlike those movies, though, the former too sappy and the latter uneven, the book manages to balance its tragic material with a reliably funny comic tone, and I couldn’t stop reading it. Avoid if you are averse to profanity, or graphic sexuality, but check it out if you like dark humor and are in need of a fast, funny read.

Holy Cats! I knew I fell behind on blogging over the summer, what with the different schedule and the big reading project, but had no idea how long it had been since I wrote about movies. This will be the catch-up post.

As most of you long-time readers know, I review books and movies as I go along. Since I started keeping track, my movies far outpaced the books. It makes sense that I’d watch more movies; a film can be consumed in about 2 hours, while a book takes longer. But reading is more important to me than watching movies. This year I made a conscious decision to read more, and I like the new ratio. I weeded down the requests at the library and stopped browsing the DVD shelves in Target. I don’t have Netflix on purpose. On a night when I might have previously opted for a movie, I chose to read instead. Some of this was so I could finish three honkin’ books over the summer. But now that I have the new habit of reading as evening activity, I hope to keep it up.

Toy Story 3 (2010) I loved this more than my kids did. They were (justifiably) frightened a few times. I think they preferred How to Train Your Dragon. But this one was a gem. Funny, scary, sad and fulfilling.

Tron (1982) This was humoring my husband, G. Grod. I gave it to him for a gift a while back and he wanted to watch again in preparation for the upcoming sequel. I can see how the tech was groundbreaking at the time, but that doesn’t make the bad acting and thin plot any better since I didn’t have any nostalgia factor going for me. Jeff Bridges has come a long way.

In the Loop (2009) Lighting fast, super dark, and at times blisteringly funny in its spot-on satire. Uneven, but worth seeing.

Inception (2010) I enjoyed it, was entertained while I watched it, and thought about it after it was over. I was not impressed enough, though, to try very hard to puzzle out exactly what happened and didn’t feel the need to see it again.

The Awful Truth (1937) Cary Grant in an early film that shows why he became a star. Hilarious, and a perfect example of what a good rom-com is, even decades later. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out.

Bedtime Stories (2008) Watched this with the kids. They could not understand it and asked a constant barrage of questions, which didn’t help my experience. Eminently skippable.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) Geek fest. Loved it, even the slow bits. Did you like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz? That’s the director. Don’t be scared off by whatever might scare you off. It’s hilarious and very true to the wacky comic books it’s based on.

Stagecoach (1939) A recent Criterion Collection reissue. The first John Wayne/John Ford western. Classic and important.

The Incredibles (2004) Again. the parents liked it more than the kids.

In the Heat of the Night (1967) Recently mentioned in Entertainment Weekly as one of the classic cop-partner movies. I’d never seen it. Worth it, not only for Poitier’s delivery of the famous line. Don’t know what I mean? Then rent this.

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) The Swedish film, #2 in the trilogy. Has the same problem as #1, and the books: too much horrible violence against women, shown far too graphically. But it also has the trump shared by those others, too. Lisbeth Salander is COOL, and Noomi Rapace brings her to life. But this film (as well #3, and as did books 2 and 3) lacks the interaction between Blomkvist and Salander that made #1 so good.

In preparation for next week’s meeting of Books and Bars (which I just found out clashes with a Club Book reading by Colson Whitehead at the Roseville library; doh!), I pulled Craig Thompson’s Blankets off the shelf to re-read.

The first time I read it, I was moved by this comic-book memoir of a young boy’s boyhood, first love, and struggle with faith. I’d heard the rumblings over the years since it had been published that decried it as the romantic hand wringing of a sappy emo boy. This made me very aware of this aspect of the book, and made me like the book a little less, since it’s the bulk of this very bulky book.

I’m still moved by his depiction of boyhood with his younger brother, and with his creative ways of showing his struggles with the fundamentalist Christian upbringing he had in rural Wisconsin. But there’s very little humor here to leaven the material, and the book drags sometimes because of this. His visual storytelling is impressive, and the art work is beautiful.

It’s interesting to compare with another comic book I just read, Unwritten: Inside Man, which is more an illustrated story, IMO, than a graphic work, where the art and text combine to tell the story. I still recommend Blankets, though not if you’re feeling particularly jaded or cynical.

I was excited to see the second volume of the comic-book series Unwritten: Inside Man, at the comic shop recently. I enjoyed volume 1, but wondered if it was merely a promising beginning or indeed the foundation for a good story. I am leaning more to the latter interpretation after reading volume 2.

The line between the person, Tom Taylor, and the fictional character his father created, Tommy Taylor, is increasingly blurred. Following the disturbing events at the end of volume 1, Tom’s life becomes a lot more difficult, and the truly strange, literary things that happen don’t make things any easier. This is a dark, at times violent book that’s telling a story while also talking about telling stories. It’s intriguing enough that I’ll read on. If you liked Sandman or like Fables, this is likely in your wheelhouse.

Faithful Place by Tana French is her third mystery novel in a series loosely linked by characters. You don’t need to read them in order, but that’s how I’d recommend them. Begun with In the Woods, continued in The Likeness, we get to know Frank Mackey, a detective in undercover from the latter book.

The book starts with his memory of a pivotal life event:

I was nineteen, old enough to take on the world and young enough to be a dozen kinds of stupid, and that night as soon as both my brothers were snoring I slid out of our bedroom with my rucksack on my back and my Docs hanging from one hand. A floorboard creaked and in the girls’ room one of my sisters murmured in her sleep, but I was magic that night, riding high on that surge tide, unstoppable; my parents didn’t even turn over on the pullout bed as I moved through the front room, close enough to touch. The fire had burned down to nothing but a muttering red glow. In the rucksack was everything important I owned: jeans, T-shirts, a secondhand wireless, a hundred quid and my birth cert. That was all you needed to go over to England, back then. Rose had the ferry tickets.

He’s divorced with child, and bitter about custody and his wife’s new boyfriend. But an urgent phone call drags him back to the neighborhood he grew up in, the Faithful Place of the title. As the novel unfolds, Frank’s world gets shaken again and again, and he butts heads with family and police as he tries to figure out who did what, and when.

This book is receiving great reviews (it’s an Amazon Book of the Month and got a starred review at Publisher’s Weekly), and many are claiming it’s better than the second, which most people thought was better than the first, which most people agreed was a thumping good read. My preference may lean toward The Likeness, which I plan to re-read soonish.

French writes a great thriller. Her psychological characterizations are complex, and the characters engaging. I was loath to put down the book, and resented (quietly, most of the time) things that made me do so: kids, husband, work, sleep, food, etc. And French is great at getting me attached to the characters and putting them through emotional wringers. These books make me feel twisty on the inside with some of the things the characters experience and do.

Yet I didn’t find it perfect. The whole divorced-cop thing brought nothing new to that tired character trope. And the mystery wasn’t hard for me to figure out. I suspected the killer early on, and even though I saw attempts at red herrings, they were never red enough to convince me. So I highly recommend it as an entertaining read, but it’s not for me one of the best books, ever.

That said, now that I’m just after finishing this book, I’ve got a hankering to call someone a fecking gobshite, or say “fair play to you” if they do a good job. And I have a strong suspicion that we’ll see more of Stephen Moran in the future from French.