Girl Detective

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.

I wrote last week about how I read a Shakespeare play, since I was about to see a production of As You Like It, and wanted to read the play in advance, to have a cushion of understanding to underpin my viewing experience, though a good production will make the Shakespearean prose accessible by the acting.

We saw a show by the group Ten Thousand Things, which we love for several reasons. They offer ticketed performances, but also offer free community shows for low-income, rehab, and prison populations. They feel Shakespeare and live drama shouldn’t be a privilege. Back in Shakespeare’s day there were cheap seats, but those are hard to come by today, and easy to see why in the audience, where my husband and I, 40 and 45 respectively, were in the tiny minority of “young” people.

Ten Thousand Things also performs in the round in a big room, so there’s a square of seats around the central play area, which was in a big room, not a “proper” theater. The lights are up, the actors regularly break the fourth wall, and the audience is not just up close, but often IN the performance. They also use a minimum of creative props, which really differentiates the experience from seeing a movie, urging me to use my imagination to bring closure to the settings.

So, the text of As You Like It, then. The play has a lot of similarities to other comedies, especially Twelfth Night: cross dressing, banished Duke, pastoral setting. And of course, a bunch of marriages at the end.

Here are the lines you already know that you might not remember came from THIS play:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players. (2.7.140-1)

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4.1.97-9)

An interesting exploration of women, and gender roles, plus it’s fun and funny to boot.

I organize a local book group, and while researching our January book, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, I came across this blog entry by author Marlon James. I’d heard of him the year before when his Book of Night Women was a contender in the Tournament of Books and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Macalester, near where I live, and one of my writing friends is working with him in a writing program through the Loft. So picking one of his books to follow O’Connor’s Wise Blood seemed an obvious choice, and John Crow’s Devil, with its dueling preachers in 50’s Jamaica, made an excellent contrast.

No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, shed and tree, machine and vehicle with a blanket of gray. Dust hid blood, but not remembrance.

Gibbeah, named after a town in the book of Joshua from the Bible, is a tiny town on a small island, ridden with poverty and secrets. Two men occupy the foreground of the book, while two women support them in the background.

Pastor Bligh is also known as the Rum Preacher, though his drink of choice is whiskey. Yet they were “relieved by Pastor Bligh’s behavior…So tormented was he by his own sin that he could never convict them of theirs.” The pastor is a drunk, but not a bad man. “In a town that preferred things black or white, grayness such as his was not welcome.”

It’s no surprise, then, when the villagers are swayed by the appearance of Apostle York, “the other, who led them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness” and who “came like a thief on a night colored silver.” He preaches fire and brimstone, and literally kicks Bligh out of his own church.

York is abetted by Lucinda, whose history of abuse and ill treatment makes her worship of the Apostle easier to understand. Bligh is taken in by a widow who feeds him and nurses him as he detoxes from alcohol.

Mr Garvey is the town’s owner, “new kind of Massa”, a “black bastard” who “still had a birthright to money.” Prior to the conflict, Garvey appeared at the church, five mornings a year plus at “funerals of those of stature or those who died under tragic circumstances. Funeral was spectacle in Gibbeah.” Once York appears, Garvey is nowhere to be seen. Is he awaiting the outcome of the clash between York and a soon-rejuvenated Bligh?

Throughout, there is a chorus of town voices, written in a challenging-to-parse Jamaican patois. This shows the town’s point of view, while also injecting the grim narrative with some much-needed humor. Also throughout are birds that are not what they seem. John Crows are vultures, not crows, and its hard to know whose leadership they support. Doves, too, defy expectations in this violent and surprising story.

This is an extraordinary violent story set in Jamaica, which has one of the highest murder rates and is known as one of the most homophobic places on earth. Any redemption in the story comes at great and terrible cost, likely a result of the prejudice and poverty that pervade the fictional Gibbeah of the 50’s and, it could be argued, the Jamaica of the present.

Reaction to the book in our reading group was split, with most disliking it and criticizing it for its unrelenting violence. Yet I appreciated reading such an in-my-face novel of racism and religion after O’Connor’s different take on similar themes of leadership, religion, sin, and redemption.

Also: A Bit of a Pickle; Painted Myself Into a Corner; Bit Off More Than I Could Chew; or It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.

I am forever admonishing female friends who call themselves selfish, stupid, lazy, mean, bad mothers, etc. that this kind of self-denigration is hurtful because it’s not true. (Ironically, it’s the exceptional few who are selfish, mean, etc. who never make jokes at their own expense, and instead trumpet any good deed while never admitting a foible. Blergh, and get more therapy, are what I have to say to that.) How many men to you hear saying stuff like this?

So, I am not going to say any of the many self-criticizing things I might about my current biblio-conundrum., I actually think I go on book benders most often when my life feels least in my control. A book bender says I hope the future has more time for reading, and backs this up by piling up evidence of the priorities in my life.

Life’s been pretty life-y around here for some time. We’ve had multiple bouts of stomach flu, lice, an emergency family trip, and I was cajoled into a volunteer gig a whole lot more involved than the one I’d hoped for. As I said, life. In the face of the recent avalanche of mostly little things, my response has been to crave more reading time and to commit to more books. So my situation is not even as it often is when I buy more books than I can read. This time, it’s that I’ve committed to reading more books than I think is possible even when life isn’t bustling.

(An aside: WHY is life bustling in February? We’re supposed to be hibernating. This is a yin, not a yang season. February around here was like December. I blame global warming and the ridiculous non-wintry winter we’re having.)

Here, then, is my To-Read pile, which doesn’t even include everything I’ve said I’d read. I’d write more, but I have 4 chapters to go in Bleak House for tomorrow.

Please understand; not really complaining. Too much to read in too little time hardly qualifies as a problem.

Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. for The Morning News Tournament of Books
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson because it was recommended by a writing teach to me in the 90’s, and has been on my shelf since then, and a friend’s reading it now
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. I pressured a friend to read John Crow’s Devil. She pressured me back to read this.
The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah. For TMN ToB
Bleak House by Dickens for this readalong (darn you, Patricia)
Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories reading a story at a time to follow up on Wise Blood and Flannery from January.
The Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel. For one of my book groups. I love comics, yet I rarely even like many of the indie types usually represented in these compilations. I’m trepidatious about reading this one.

Not pictured: complete manuscript of colleague in writing group, partial manuscript of good friend, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, the ten other books from The Tournament of Books that I haven’t read.