Girl Detective

Something about December makes me ravenous for stories.

Argo: enjoyed it while watching, but dislike it the more I think about it. Manipulative and vain storytelling.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Utterly charming.
Hot Tub Time Machine. Made me laugh.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Magic Mike. Because I like Soderbergh movies. And don’t mind looking at Channing Tatum.
The Shop Around the Corner. MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MOVIE.
The Ref. Made me laugh.
Bridget Jones’ Diary. Ditto.
Les Miserables (2012) Made me cry. One critic described the Fantine solo as “emotional porn,” and can’t disagree. Amused by this argument between Anne Hathaway and Sam Jackson over whose movie is the saddest.
Scrooged. Funny enough.
Home Alone. Oh, how the boys laughed. A joy to hear.
A Christmas Story. On second viewing, I see why this is classic.
The Sure Thing. Oh, such a good and funny road movie.
Silver Linings Playbook. Departs from the book in several ways, but really good, and enjoyable, as was the book.
Shaun the Sheep: We Wish Ewe a Merry Christmas. The boys laughed and laughed.
The Big Lebowski. My husband and I laughed and laughed.
Santa Claus is Coming to Town. With the boys.

Not sure what we’ll watch to ring out the year. Candidates include Clueless, Emma (Paltrow version), It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas.

This year, thanks to my summer reading project of Shelf Discovery related books, I read nearly 100 books, and finish the year in the middle of three chunksters.

Since we’re on winter break, and the kids are here, and they are, no joke, running around chanting “nyah, nyah, you can’t hit me,” I’ll keep this short.

Here’s what I liked (and didn’t)

Classic: Middlemarch by George Eliot
New Fiction: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Re-read: Beloved by Toni Morrison
YA re-read: Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume
New-to-me-YA: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks by E. Lockhart
Made me laugh: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
Didn’t like as much as the critics did: Swamplandia!, Tiger’s Wife, State of Wonder (UGH!), Telegraph Avenue (didn’t finish), Ready Player One
Thumping Good Reads: Lonesome Dove, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, After the Apocalypse, Art of Fielding, Wild, Tragedy of Arthur, Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Silver Linings Playbook, Devil in Silver, and Turn of Mind.

I was in my sons’ room, looking for a missing book. Here’s what I saw, “hidden” under 9yo Drake’s pillow:

Ransom and Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan, two scary books I loved as a kid.

Yep.

I’m not quite sure how I got here, but first, my friend Amy at New Century Reading said she was doing a Bleak House readalong, with each serial segment a week, just about 40 pages. Easy, I said, and was glad to pick it up again after I tried and failed at an earlier readalong this year.

Then, my husband says he wants to see Les Miserables on Christmas Day. I’ve never read it, I said. (except for an excerpt in high school French called Les Chandeliers de L’Evecque.) Why don’t we read it together? So we nerdishly compared translations and decided to go with the unabridged Fahnestock/Macafee in the mass market paperback.

The small type, the several typos, and the general sludginess of the prose all brought me down. I’ve switched to a much prettier edition translated by Denny, and we’ll see how it goes from here.

Also, somewhere in there, I decided to pick up volume 2 of Carla Speed McNeil’s excellent Finder Library, perhaps when I was waiting for the MMPB of Les Mis to arrive and after I’d read my weekly allotment of Bleak House.

Thus, in the middle of December, and holiday frenzy, I find myself in the middle of 2700+ pages. What was I thinking?

For one of my book groups, Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante wasn’t at all what I was expecting. When I heard it was a book about a woman with dementia, I imagined a Lifetime movie. Instead, it’s something else entirely. The main character, Jennifer White, is a retired hand surgeon whose dementia is getting worse. Her best friend was recently murdered, and she’s the prime suspect. Unfortunately, she’s not a reliable narrator, and this book plays skillfully with that, telling us parts of her past and present as she goes, filling in the big picture a little at a time. I was very worried that the end wouldn’t pan out. This is the kind of thriller that depends very much on the strength of its Ta Da moment at the end. I think the author mostly pulled it off. There were some implausibilities that nagged, but it was largely satisfying. It engaged me from beginning to end, and I found the main character fascinating.

I started Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed, before I read Strayed’s more famous Wild. It’s a collection of the previously anonymously penned advice column at literary site The Rumpus. It is a very different book, but with many similarities and connections. As in Wild, Strayed puts a lot of herself and her troubled past on the page. But she doesn’t tell the exact same stories, in the same ways. Here, she uses them in service of telling people who ask her for help what she thinks. This is not a story, with a beginning middle and end. It worked well for me as a pick it up then put it down book, read in bits in between other things. It might make an excellent book for the bathroom, which seems a weird descriptor, yet an apt one, I bet for those who know what I mean.

I really enjoyed reading the columns, and reading Strayed’s responses. A few weeks ago, I read Savage Love, and didn’t like a response that Dan Savage gave a reader. “Sugar would never have told her to do that!” I thought, outraged. Throughout, Sugar is like someone who listens well, really tries to understand what’s being said (and as often, what’s not) and who exhorts the writers, and all the readers, too, to work to reach their highest, best selves, with acknowledgement of how hard that really is.

One of my favorite passages was about writing:

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet. (351)

I got to see Strayed in person recently, where she also offered her writing advice like this: “Write like a mother [cuss]er.” Which is funny, but it’s also true. That’s sorta how I felt about the book. It’s a good companion to Wild if you liked that, but probably not if you didn’t.

Raina Telgemeier’s Drama is a graphic novel about Callie, a middle-school theater geek. She has a crush on one boy, while another one likes her, and makes friends with some others as they prepare for the school play. There’s kissing, but not much more, so the story feels sweet and young. It has an openness about gay teens that reminded me of the wishful fantasy of Boy Meets Boy. The art is charming, Callie is engaging if sometimes annoying. It’s a likeable book that I found myself wishing I liked more. I just didn’t connect–maybe because I was not a drama person?

Overwhelmption: noun. The state of being overwhelmed, inundated or otherwise paralyzed by a situation (e.g. approaching holidays) or mess that’s “so big. And so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up. There is no way at all!” (The Cat in the Hat)

See also: Tharn:

Describes the act of a person or animal being frozen in terror, e.g. a deer caught in the headlights.

Perhaps originally found in Richard Adams’s novel ‘Watership Down,’ the term was also adopted by Stephen King for use in his novel ‘The Stand.’
Michael stood tharn while the grizzly bear bore down on him.

I was eagerly looking forward to The Devil in Silver, the follow up (not sequel, as I’d assumed it would be) to Big Machine, which I discovered during the 2010 Morning News Tournament of Books, and really enjoyed.

I noticed over the last year that the date for Devil in Silver’s release was pushed back at least once. LaValle reveals why in his author’s note at the end–his wife gave birth to a son in May 2011 and that resulted in some changes to his writing routine that put it past deadline, but also gave him experiences that he incorporated into this wild novel.

Most of the book is told through the view of Pepper, a big white guy who gets put in a mental institution for a 72 hour observation after tussling with some cops, but ends up staying a little bit longer. He struggles (literally) to get out, but they drag him (literally and figuratively) back in. From the start, he’s aware of something beastly, weird and scary in the psych ward of New Hyde Hospital in New York City.

The snort came for a third time. It was even closer now. Immediately to his right. As if the animal had crept right up to his ear. Even worse, there was a smell. Musky and warm, like old blood. It made his throat close, and he wanted to wretch [sic]. The hospital’s staff members sat around the converence table taking notes, or watching him. Not one of them seemed to notice anything. How could they not smell that stink? (14)

Pepper grudgingly begins to accept his situation, and interact with the staff and patients around him. As in Big Machine, the administration may or may not be evil, and what looks like a monster may not be. A ragtag group of misfits stumbles toward some kind of truth, fragmenting along the way. In addition to Pepper’s point of view, we get many others, including a very strange one toward the end that I won’t spoil but that I enjoyed a lot.

There’s a lot going on in this crazy quilt of a novel: literary horror, social commentary on the treatment of the mentally ill, character sketches from different walks of life, and a character toward the end that I suspect is LaValle’s Gary Stu (a male Mary Sue):

A big man. Not tall but wide. The polite term is heavyset. (The clinical term is hyperobese.) A black guy…Late twenties or early thirties, his hair was kind of a wild puff and his head was down. …interested in his own toes. He had his arms crossed. (402)

The book was scary, but had some laugh-out-loud moments, and some downright sweet ones, along with some terribly sad ones. It engaged me, made me loath to put it down, and pulled me through from start to finish. It’s possible that it’s kind of a mess, and has uneven stuff in it, but if so, I didn’t even notice.

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, I recently read The Silver Linings Playbook, whose main character also spent time in a mental ward, also lost large chunks of time there, also had violent tendencies, and in one scene, shared a tiny box of cereal across the table from another female character. It was a strange mirroring, probably coincidence, but fascinating.

I recall exchanging emails with LaValle after he did an author Skype chat with one of my book groups, Books and Bars, but I can’t find any record of it. (Did I imagine it?) In it, I tried politely to express my worry that he’d pull a Matrix, and follow up a promising first work with a crappy second one. In my opinion, he didn’t. I was sad not to meet up with the two main characters from Big Machine, but glad to meet these new ones, and interested to see what the next book might hold. Well played, Mr. LaValle, well played.