Book lists and being a little SAD

The charmingly-named Bunnyslippers asked if I would link to past year-end book review posts. Who are you, Bunnyslippers? I feel like I should know you. In any case, yes, yes I WILL link to past year-end book review posts.

Huh. There aren't as many as I thought.

Books read in 2010 post here.

Books read in 2011 first post here, second post here, third post here. (Last year was the first year I started dividing them into two-star, three-star and four-or-five-star posts).

So, it's February. Honestly, I think January wasn't the worst one ever. Which is mostly good, and a tiny bit bad, because since I wasn't absolutely mired in despair I was frustrated with myself for not doing more, but I didn't really fell well enough to do more, but I felt well enough to be pissed at myself for not doing more... yeah, it was a whole idiotic cycle. I joined Weight Watchers Online because my doctor said Weight Watchers is a worthwhile program but the thought of going to meetings made me want to kill myself with hot dogs sharpened into stakes. It does seem like a really sensible program, and I think the fact that it makes you aware of what you eat is great, because it's really easy to lose track, but I hate that it's made it all about numbers again. At the end of January I was briefly depressed that I hadn't lost very much weight, and then I stopped and slapped myself around and said, dude - you lost weight. In January. Quit being a putz. So then the day before my weigh-day I find myself either trying to shave points to maximize the likelihood that I'll get a lower weight the next morning, or downing half a wheel of brie out of spite. Yeah, no food issues here.

My husband is doing it with me, which opens up a whole other can of worms. It's nice to think it would be a mutually supportive thing, but honestly, all I want to do it stir heavy cream into all his food. Men lose weight faster anyway, and he's generally pretty thin, and that's NOT THE POINT, his father had a heart attack at sixty and he does need to be making healthy choices, but all I see when he eats a doughnut is him thinking "well, we'll do this together, but you're the only one who really needs to", and then I have to forcibly restrain myself from dripping turkey gravy into his mouth while he's asleep. I promise, I'm working on it.

I've hit a bit of a roadblock in CPAP usage. I usually wake up in the night and look at the clock and take off the mask if it's five a.m. or later, because then I know I've worn it for five or six hours. But for the past week or so I've woken up at three a.m. or so and realized I've already taken off the mask without realizing it. And getting up still feels like pulling myself out of quicksand, with weights on my ankles and carrying a basket of wet towels.

Then there's the fact that now it's February, and I think, yay! January's over! I will feel instantly better! Yes, NOW! No? Okay, NOW. Wait for it, wait for it...um, now? And then I remember that this always happens in February, because somehow my serotonin and dopamine levels don't respond to flipping a calendar page. Stupid neurochemicals.

Anyway. My husband reminds me periodically, and kindly, that January is to be survived, not conquered, and gives me permission to go to bed early and read or watch movies on my ipad. I started rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and after Eve watched part of one episode with me when she couldn't sleep one night she started watching it on her own. Except she was just flipping through Netflix and watching random episodes, which may or may not have resulted in me becoming unreasonably irate and hollering "you're watching Buffy ALL WRONG", but in any case she's watching it in order now.

Yeah. Whiny Wednesdays for the win.

My Biblio Year

I just did a quick count of my 2010 reading on the Goodreads website. Not counting whatever books I forgot to record or, more likely, was too embarrassed to confess to reading, it came in at 103. I didn't really care about the total, other than because the other day I was reading a blog I'd never read before which was demonstrably written by a distinctly twit-like person and she said she'd read thirty-one books this year and I though "I hope I've read more than this twit". (And that's why I haven't made a New Year's Resolution to be kinder and more non-judgemental, and if I had it would already be broken).

So, in no particular order and in my own wingy categories:

A Big Huge 'Meh':

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

Properties of Light: a Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (oh goody, another book about a tormented genius physicist and the student who comes to study/worship at his feet and falls in love with his beautiful tormented daughter.)

So Long at the Fair by Christina Schwartz

Blackout by Connie Willis

Tithe by Holly Black

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue (it was supposed to be fictionalizations of actual historical events and people, which it was, but none of them really caught fire for me. Also, no one actually gave birth to rabbits, which in my book was a mistake. A monstrous birth or two always adds some kick to a tale.)

The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay (sucked me in with a bookstore setting. Surprise surprise -- nineteen-year-olds are whiney and self-absorbed and when a guy keeps telling you he has nothing to offer you and will never return your love you should probably believe him the first time. Or, you know, by the seventeenth or eighteenth, if you must persist.)

Post-Human by David Simpson

Mania by Craig Larsen

Caused Actual Nausea:

The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse (my snotty review here)

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Young Adult Fiction that made me consider giving up Old Adult Fiction:

The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins: just read them.


100 Cupboards, Dandelion Fire, The Chestnut King by N.D. Wilson: not flawless, but fresh and original, no easy answers, some great characters. Wilson needs a better publicist -- I only found these at the library by accident.

Tigerheart by Peter David (I'm a sucker for a re-imagined Peter Pan story every time)

Never After by Dan Elconin (yup, every time. This one wasn't quite as good, but still...)

The Child Thief by Brom (and again. Okay, maybe I need to look for some sort of support group...)

If I Stay by Gayle Forman


Greener Grass by Caroline Pignat

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

The Game by Diana Wynne Jones

A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb (a ghost story like no other ghost story -- beautiful, wonderful, extraordinary, transporting, captivating....)

Unwind by Neal Shusterman (if parents don't think their children are proving to be worth the trouble of parenting by a certain age, they can have them 'unwound', unmade and their parts put to other uses -- if that doesn't make you feel like crying and throwing up a little bit, never mind -- you're clearly dead inside and this book will be lost on you).

Re-read:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (I might be too old for this now. It was diverting, but really pretty silly.)

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (good, but not for the reasons I remembered).

Books that Did their Best to Improve my Mind and if they Failed it's really My Fault and not Theirs:

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed. (ugh)

I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire (it's a little scary to look back over centuries of evidence that show how frightening men as a whole have found women as a whole from pretty much the beginning of recorded history.)


Ten Degrees of Reckoning by Hester Rumberg (extremely sad and upsetting) - my review here

Paradise Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock (my review here)

The Boy in the Moon: a Father's Search for His Handicapped Son's Life by Ian Brown (my review here)

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (pretty much convinced me that the entire Foreign Aid apparatus (apparati?) should be put in the hands of sensible fourteen-year-olds, and the douchebags handling it now should be slapped silly).


Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (so good that I ended up reading her novel, which convinced me in turn that she should really stick to non-fiction.)

Passing for Thin: Losing Half my Weight and Finding Myself by Frances Kuffel

Angry Fat Girls: 5 Women, 500 Pounds and a Year of Losing it...Again by Frances Kuffel

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (silly review here)

What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen

Can't Remember a Thing About Them no Matter How Long I Stare at the Title:

Those Who Walk in Darkness by John Ridley

The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr

Sweetwater by Paul Charles

The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

A Quiet Belief in Angels by R.J. Ellory

Really Very Bad to Begin With, Made Infinitely Worse by the Author's Boastful Self-Lauding Cringe-Inducing Introductory Notes:

Nightshadows by William F. Nolan

Quite Good:

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (my review here)

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg

The White Garden: a novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron

I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass


Think of a Number by John Verdon

What Never Happens by Anne Holt

Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress

One For Sorrow by Christopher Barzak (when he's shorter he's better)

Benighted by Kit Whitfield

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Moby Dick by Herman Melville


Really Very Good:

Horns by Joe Hill

Sleepless by Charlie Huston (closest literary description I've ever read about what insomnia feels like)

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

Superstition by David Ambrose(sort of a backwards ghost story -- very clever and unsettling)

The Interpreter of Silences by Jean McNeil (my review here)

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger

Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

Monstrous Affections by David Nickle

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes (my review here)

The Chosen by Chaim Potok (my review here)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Annabel by Kathleen Winter



The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Rocked me to my Very Core, and Either in Brief Flashes or in their Entirety Ripped Through to a Seam of the Infinite -- Approach with Caution:

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

Far To Go by Alison Pick

Kockroach by Tyler Knox
Home by Marilynne Robinson

The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Strange Times

Look at me, posting because I want to not because I have to.

Angus got his Scholastic book order today. I recently read Nan's rant about Scholastic books and had yet another 'wow, sometimes I am wholly uncritical and sheep-like in my ability to just do stuff without examining its underlying potential for evil' moment. Gee whiz, man, it seems so innocent! They bring home flyers with wonderful beautiful precious BOOKS in them and I wrote a check which, come on, that's not like real money, that's like play money, and then I forget about it and wonderful beautiful precious BOOKS appear. Clearly I will have to spend some time examining the Scholastic ideology because I'm coming off a rough month and I've been migrainey that past couple of days and I'm still unclear on the exact nature of the evilness, but I'm willing to learn. But this is not about that. This is about the books I ordered before the evil was revealed in all its leering drooling evilness, and I'm not giving them back. Ignorance of the law may be no excuse but ignorance of evil is...wait...oh leave me alone, the voices told me to, you can't make me, I have hemmorhoids.

So I bought Eve the Usborne Book of Famous Paintings. She likes to
draw, she seems interested in art, it called out to me. I gave it to her after school. After supper and her bath and Hannah Montana, I was wrapping a few presents and I saw her on the couch reading something. I walked over and she was reading it! The book I got for her to read about art! The same day we got it!

WTF?

Doesn't she know how we do things around here? I buy something because it's educational and topical and will surely give us some lovely moments of learning and sharing and discovery and revelation. Then the kid ignores it and plays video games and watches tv and loses it under a pile of crap and only reads it when I demand that they sit down and read it and have a lovely educational revelatory moment goddammit. They don't try to read it the same day and say "oh, Mrs. Goodsell showed me this Claude Monet (perfectly pronounced) painting", and "is this pronounced Van Eek?" and "WHAT? She's not really pregnant?! That's a terrible skirt then!"

Oh, now Angus has wandered over and they're reading it together. I am sore afraid, friends, sore afraid.

How NaBloPoMo Can You Go?

Yah, I know that makes no sense. After all my moaning about how long November is, I totally didn't realize that today was the last day. Seems like I should have something more auspicious than...what I have.

My friend Pam's husband is away for an unspeakable amount of time so I picked up her kids and took them to school this morning so she could stay in her pajamas, because my Dad picked up the kids a couple of times while Matt was away and I stayed in my pajamas and it was five flavours of awesome. I worked in the library for a few hours and got my cuteness fix from Eve's adorable little twin friends who always come up and hand me their books beaming these fantastic little smiles. And their hair is a different length so I can tell them apart. Then I went to Winners to stock up on advent calendar stuff. Then I went to Chapters to buy battling rodents for my nephew and an obsessive compulsive squirrel book and toy for my other nephew and in a fit of giddiness I bought Come Thou Tortoise and The Elegance of the Hedgehog for myself because it was Just Too Perfect, they were clearly meant to be togther, with me -- I just barely managed not to buy Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (had to draw the line somewhere).

Then I came home and started looking through the Christmas boxes for these little boxes of 24 elf-hats that I got a couple of years ago at IKEA and decided that I would use this year instead of getting the Spiderman or Princess ones with the cheap sub-standard chocolate in them. Why? Beats the hell out of me. If my kids are happy to eat the sub-standard chocolate, why the hell am I not just keeping the good stuff for myself? Okay anyway, the advent hat thingies were in the last box. Not the last box I looked in, because duh. The very. last. Christmas. box. And if you'd seen my storage area, that would have a much bigger impact. Okay, I've just looked at some other DIY advent calendars and am having severe advent calendar envy. Then I took Eve to dance, and two other Moms and I ended up at....Chapters. Again! I managed not to buy anything this time (not even my tall vanilla rooibos tea latte because Patti owed me girl guide cookie money.) Then we went back to pick up the girls and the teacher reminded us next week was parents' night and half of us said "yay we get to go in and watch" and half of us said "you mean we don't get to go to Chapters?" I won't mention which half was which.

Then we came home. And I would be overjoyed that it was the last day of November except that we all know what comes next....

....gulp.

Guns, Germs and Exploding Peas

Last night at book club we were discussing Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. It's a great book, an important book, one that takes a very complex subject and renders it comprehensible to the layperson. Tomorrow I will talk about the huge and far-reaching issues addressed by Diamond. Today I'm feeling shlumpy and under-the-weather and I'm just going to be a smartass. Because one of the great joys of this book was wading through paragraphs including weighty analyses of "politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies" and "autocatalytic processes" and then coming across phrases such as "Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops" or "archaeological evidence of chickpeas".

This splendid paragraph comes from a section on how domesticated plants often varied significantly from their wild progenitors:

" A clear example involves peas, whose seeds (the peas we eat) come enclosed in a pod. Wild peas have to get out of the pod if they are to germinate. To achieve that result, pea plants evolved a gene that makes the pod explode, shooting out the peas onto the ground. Pods of occasional mutant peas don't explode. In the wild the mutant peas would die entombed in their pod on their parent plants, and only the popping pods would pass on their genes. But, conversely, the only pods available to humans to harvest would be the nonpopping ones left on the plant. Thus, once humans began bringing wild peas home to eat, there was immediate selection for that single-gene mutant. Similar nonpopping mutants were selected in lentils, flax, and poppies." 

Exploding peas! Nonpopping mutants! One of my book club friends watched the DVD version, in which she said Jared Diamond was actually the star. She said the DVD was even further simplified than the book, which I guess was necessary for time constraints but also because geez, could you say any of that stuff with a straight face?

Oh! Oh! The animals! Apparently if you didn't have the good fortune to be born on a continent which housed a good number of domesticable large mammals you were basically screwed. An important distinction must be observed between tamed animals and domesticated ones -- Hannibal crossed the Alps on tamed elephants, not domesticated ones. Domesticating animals entails breeding them selectively, producing animals which are different from the wild breed. Unfortunately, a good many large mammals prove to be stubbornly resistant to domesticating. For this reason, the aforementioned Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops did NOT overthrow the Roman Empire. But then Diamond throws in some anecdotal stuff about the New Guinea villages where he has spent years, and how the people there keep pets such as kangaroos, possums and ospreys; "New Guineans even regularly capture chicks of wild cassowaries (an ostrich-like large, flightless bird) and raise them to eat as a delicacy -- even though captive adult cassowaries are extremely dangerous and now and then disembowel village people". Zebras are also apparently singularly ornery critters, who have the "unpleasant habit of biting people and not letting go", and are actually responsible for injuring more American zookeepers every year than tigers (why do tigers get the bad rap? As far as I've heard tigers usually only maul stupid drunk people who vault into their cages in the middle of the night).

In a section on various organizations of early civilization: "A fact further diffusing potential problems of conflict resolution in tribes is that almost everyone is related to everyone else, by blood or marriage or both. Those ties of relationships binding all tribal members make police, laws, and other conflict-resolving institutions or larger societies unnecessary, since any two villages getting into an argument will share many kind, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent. In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other". Imagine the conversation: 'So your Great-Uncle Henry canoed the rapids with my fourth cousin twice removed George? Awesome -- this spear no longer has your name on it -- high five!'  Not only is Jared Diamond a kickass writer, I think I'd really like to have a beer with him some time.

The Ideal Burger of Memory

"Take hamburgers. Here, hamburguesas are really bad. It's known that Americans like hamburgers, so again, we're idiots. But they have no idea how delicious hamburgers can be. It's this ideal burger of memory we crave...not the disgusting burgers you get abroad."

This is a quote from the movie Barcelona which I saw years ago. I only vaguely remember the rest of the movie, but this quote about hamburgers stuck in my mind, and struck me as appropriate for this post idea. Except when I typed it out and really thought about it, it wasn't really appropriate at all. But I liked it as a title so much that I decided I didn't give a rip.

What this post was actually supposed to be about was not an ideal hamburger of memory, but a mythic hamburger of imagination. But for me the hamburger is a book. (Bear in mind I'm still slightly feverish). I was wondering if I'd started ordering books in my sleep. Every few weeks, a book shows up in the mail, often from an obscure town in the U.S. or U.K. Sometimes I recognize the title, sometimes I don't. But I know it's some book that I've read a review of and wanted to read, and the library didn't have it, but one of the booksellers on abebooks.com did.

For the most part, the books cost under two dollars. The shipping costs are higher than the cost of the actual book. The entire transaction rarely exceeds ten dollars. But still. I go to the library every week because I'm trying NOT to spend any more money on books, and, almost more importantly, we have no more ROOM for books. The only reason I'm spending that ten dollars, and bringing another centimetre-and-a-half-width shelf-taker-upper into the house is because, once I realize the library doesn't have it, it becomes infinitely more desirable than the thousands of books the library has. Because what if it's The One? The mythical book of possibility that will change my life, unlock the doors of perception, shatter the sacred truths, and put an end to cellulite forever?

Of course, it's all usually a huge disappointment. The package arrives, and... it's just another book. Sometimes it's enjoyable enough, sometimes it's quite dreadful and you have to wonder what the hell the reviewer was thinking. Sometimes it's quite magical, most often when it involves science fiction/fantasy short stories by women, now that I think of it. I put these ones in my triple pile of books on my bedside table and read them one at a time, trying very hard to stop myself, when I reach the end of one, from rushing on to the beginning of the next (if I have to turn the page over for the next one it's easier to stop, otherwise it's a pathetic display of me trying to wrest the book out of my own hands). They are wise and splendid and occasionally they blow my doors of perception right off the hinges.

It's not that strange a phenomenon. It's always easier to imagine that the book you can't read is better than the one you have, or the one episode of Lost that you missed was the Best One Ever, or the thing you didn't order off the menu would have been ten times better than what you chose. And sometimes it's just incredibly fun and giddy-making to realize that I am a grownup with my own money (well, my husband's own money -- I'm workin' on it) and I can go ahead and order a book if I want to -- I actually do remember being incredibly frustrated as a child when I wanted a book and couldn't get my hands on it fast enough. On the other hand, I'm a grown-up and I should realize that I don't need to have every book I read about. At least not before I get to the bottom of my tripartite bedside table pile.

If you want to read the story that made me NEED the Ellen Klages book, (it's about a library!), the absolutely freaking amazing author allows that here. Of course, it makes me despair of ever writing anything one-fiftieth as good. But the Ideal Burger of Memory can't help it if it wrecks you for McDonald's.

Good thing they weren't testing my emotional stability

I wrote my first exam in seventeen years last night, for my first library tech course. I wasn't stressed about the exam itself -- the instructor had assured us that the purpose of the exam wasn't to trick us, it was just to assure that we had met the learning goals of the course, and I knew that I had. Compared to the multiple-page essay questions on magical realism and narrative lyricism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was pretty sure this would be a breeze, and it was pretty close. But the actual mechanics of finding the right building and the right room and my exam actually being there and not tripping and losing all of my pens down a storm drain on the way... that I was nervous about. I drove to Algonquin the day before and scoped out the building lay-out -- people I knew were divided into two more or less equal groups on thinking this was a logical and prudent step and thinking it was thoroughly anal and laughable. Don't feel obliged to tell me which camp you fall into.

The night before I didn't sleep well. I read a little too late, thinking it would make me sleepy, then couldn't fall asleep. I got up early and walked with Pam anyway, thinking I could rest before the exam which wasn't until 6:30. I got home from the walk and grocery shopping at about eleven. The kids were slated to go to my Mom's from school and have dinner there, which seemed like a good plan when we made it, but the day just kind of stretched into this uncomfortable amorphous blob of hours to kill, and I couldn't really settle to anything. I read the paper. I cleaned up a little. I made some spicy black beans. I studied a little. I walked around flapping my hands a little, because Angus does it and I wanted to see if it actually worked as a tension reducer. It does a little. I left a little too early, which turned out okay, because when you get to the room you have to line up and wait for some woman to fish your exam out of a big box of exams.

The guy sitting at the table in front of me got in trouble for opening his exam early. Then he had a long question for the invigilator about something in his exam. I worried that he was going to be a troublemaker and wondered if I should move. Actually he was completely silent for the rest of the exam, but after a few minutes I realized that between questions I was flicking my pen between two fingers making an annoying tapping noise. I mentally apologized to the guy in front of me and made myself put the pen down between questions.

Turns out I can't write more than two lines without messing up words and writing crazy crooked sentences at this point. I raced through the easy stuff, then flipped back through and finished the stuff that required a bit more thought, then flipped through about ten times more than necessary to make sure I hadn't accidentally missed five pages of questions or anything (it could happen). For the life of me I couldn't formulate a coherent definiton of index, which was stupid but I only had to pick ten so it didn't matter, except that I totally knew it and it made me crazy.

I finished in about an hour and a half out of a possible three hours, handed in the exam and then spent the next ten to fifteen minutes wandering around the parking lot trying to find my car. It was like I popped some weird emotional cork the minute the exam was done. I used to be a cry-at-the-drop-of-a-hat person. Weddings, funerals, auto shows, commercials with kittens in them, I was your girl for copious waterworks. My Mom used to get mad at me for crying all the time, which, hello, like it's a voluntary function. When Angus was a baby I cried a lot too. But in the last few years I could count on one hand the times I've cried -- not sure if I used up my lifetime allottment or became suddenly insensitive or what. As soon as I was back in the car, I felt weirdly weepy. I was happy. I was fully one-twenty-fourth closer to a credential that could allow me to spend all day in a library AND GET PAID for it. I was happy. And tired. Really, really tired. I felt like I might fall asleep while driving. I stopped at an intersection, and four teenagers were crossing the road with the tiniest dachsund I've ever seen, and it's stumpy little legs were moving so fast they were basically a hummingbird-wing-like blur. I laughed so hard I could hardly start driving again. I decided to go to Chapters because the kids were still at my Mom's and my husband was hashing out baseball teams somewhere and I didn't feel like going home to an empty house. When I walked in they were playing Constant Craving by k.d. lang, and I was convinced it was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard and it almost made me cry again.

I bought this book and this book, because I'm trying to fill in some gap in my coverage of the classics, and it has to be better than this book, which I'm finally almost through, thanks be to all that is good and holy and not about whales. I went home and the kids were just going to bed. They were telling me stuff and I suddenly saw that Angus had a big fat lip, and he said he fell off his bike riding from school to my Mom's, but he was fine, it didn't hurt at all. So naturally I burst into tears. He kept saying he was fine, and I kept thinking how brave he was being, and realizing he was riding with his friend Jon, so even though it must have really hurt he wouldn't have felt like he could show it, which made me cry harder, whereupon my entire family declared me mad as a box of frogs and told me to go have a drink or something.

I ate some salmon, because I hadn't eaten before leaving for my exam, even though I'd meant to, but I'd gone up to fold laundry and happened on an old episode of this show, which I didn't even really watch when it was actually on, and Felix borrowed a gun to go deer-hunting and the family dog got shot, and I couldn't tear myself away until I found out if he was going to pull through, so I ran out of time to eat. I do realized this has blown my neat little theory that I only went loony AFTER the exam, but I strive for honesty here.

I went to bed and started reading this book, which is possibly the most beautiful and original ghost story with a wonderful sense of wholeness and rightness, or just an okay book that I read in a heightened state of appreciation. Then I finished reading it, because it was impossible not to. Then I laid down and cried some more. I felt fine, just like I'd sprung a slow leak from the eyes. It was annoying because my pillow kept getting wet.

I'm back to normal today. Mostly. Here's hoping this is a one-time thing, since I'm looking at roughly twenty more of these over the next four years, and it would be nice if I don't have to go home from my library job to a padded room.

The Breakwater House

I'm sick of working on my electronic periodical indexes assignment so I'm reviewing The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger.

This book is beautifully written, and the translation is flawless. I mention this because whenever I see that I'm reading something in translation, I tend to wince; nothing interferes with a reading experience like a bad translation.

I was a little wary after the first few pages, which describe a woman finding and buying a house and then mysteriously being unable to photograph it properly, or track down the previous owner, or give directions that allow other people to visit her. In my experience, this type of non-linear plotting is sometimes an excuse for an author to indulge her poetic urges without regard for logic or story. And I like a story. Happily, there is one, or several, and they are all quite captivating, despite a certain non-linearity. The characters, mostly women, are wonderful: Lucie and Claire, two little girls who meet in infancy and grow into a fiercely close friendship: Aurore, Lucie's mother, colourful, bohemian, passionate: Suzanne, Claire's mother, stoically proper and affluent: and various ancestors that lead to Lucie's present story, wherein the confusion and fragmentation is actually a completely understandable response to a crippling, logic-destroying grief.

The writing is densely textured with striking images: a woman's stomach after childbirth "retreats slowly, like a tide, without making a sound. It looks like an unmade bed, a deserted backstage, a painting under restoration...A shawl for the long winter nights." A mother holds her child, the "imponderable mass of her sated sleep." There are sad, cock-eyed moments of humour -- Aurore gives Claire a black doll, which she adores, dresses in pink and sleeps with every night, whereupon her discomfited mother suggests that "Mélanie ought to become the other dolls' cleaning lady." When her husband's grandmother thrice survives the night when doctor's have declared her death imminent, Suzanne keeps calling priest and Claire "questions her about the risk of overdosing on last rites."

A slight magical mist surrounds much of the narrative, yet the depiction of female friendships is letter-perfect. The hyperbolic and mythic nature of some of the events does not mute or negate the emotions of the characters. The narrative is threaded through with grief, but the overall tone is of healing. This is an intriguing book by a wonderful writer.

I'm going to be web content!

I whine a lot. I recognize this. It's not because I expect sympathy -- I don't. I don't even give it to myself. I am rationally capable of recognizing that I have a very nice life. Great children, great husband, great parents, great sister, great friends (gah, the monotony -- note to self: accumulate some associates with toxic personalities to bitch about). Nice lifestyle, good pair of running shoes, great kitchen table, nice yellow vase of red-orange tulips. Some real time to myself during the day, starting last September. Sadly, I'm also middle-class Western neurotic enough to have a sneaking suspicion that there are a bunch of women out there who have all this AND hair that doesn't suddenly decide to take some time for itself, toes that don't overlap so toenails become an urgent and painful issue, and brain chemicals that don't suddenly find English muffins a source of unutterable chartreuse-flavoured despair every third day and alternate Tuesdays.

Like I said -- I whine. Often I mean it humorously. Often I hope that by framing it humorously I will persuade myself to see it that way. Often it works. Sometimes, not so much.

I don't feel great today. I still have this ongoing sinus problem. I couldn't fall asleep last night and when I finally did, I woke up coughing and stuffed up a couple hours later and couldn't fall asleep again. I feel headachy and slow. I spent the day reading Lectures and making notes, which was a perfectly legitimate and even necessary use of time, at my kitchen table with my vase of tulips, in the sun. And felt guilty and unproductive because, I don't know, I wasn't writing a book or running a marathon or...something, I don't even KNOW what. It's annoying.

Well, screw that. Let's talk about Mary Lynn. My good friend who I've never technically met, but I LOVE. Why do I love her? Because she's funny and smart and from the first email she sent me her voice made me feel like she was someone I wanted to know. But wait! There's more. When I kept complaining (whining) about not being able to make links in blog posts, she sent me an email with detailed instructions about how to make links in blog posts. It's because of her that I can spout off about what I'm reading or my new favourite cracker or my sister's new favourite gift basket accessory. This is something that makes me veritably chortle with glee every time I do it -- it's true! I chortle! And wait! There's EVEN more. Soon after we started our mutual stalkerdom (following each other), Mary Lynn sent me a link to Anansi Press, which was asking for bloggers to fill out a questionnaire in order to be sent books for reviewing. I filled out the questionnaire, but I was pretty sure they would just laugh and hit delete since I had to answer questions like 'average number of commenters' (uh, 1.5?), and 'site metrics' (um, eleven centimetres?). But today? THIS was in my inbox:

Hi Allison,

Thanks for filling out our blogger review questionnaire! I had a peek at your blog and it's great — very funny. Just wanted to let you know that we popped a copy of Pascale Quiviger's The Breakwater House in the mail for you to read and review, if you like. Hope you enjoy!

Best,
Trish

--
Trish Osuch
Web Content Manager
House of Anansi Press
110 Spadina Ave., Suite 801
Toronto, ON M5V 2K4
416-363-4343 x42
trish@anansi.ca

Free book! In the mail! From someone who professes to sort of maybe care about my opinion! Doesn't that just strike the perfect balance between 'doesn't really matter' and 'really doesn't suck'? And doesn't Mary Lynn (linking again JUST BECAUSE I CAN) sort of rock all the way to the moon and back? And don't you think my pretentious faux-erudite book review will be more fun than all the whining? I do. I really do. Plus, she said my blog was funny, out of all the other available adjectives (self-pitying, maudlin, horrifyingly shallow and self-obsessed, nasty, brutish, short). I'm calling it a good day, on balance (ha. balance).

Books, Babies, Butchery

I've been binge-reading memoirs over the past week of stuck-ness. Reading becomes sort of a fraught endeavour when I'm not feeling in top emotional shape, since the joy tends to get sucked out of almost everything, and it feels wrong to be reading grimly and compulsively, but it's a step up from staring at the walls, so I still do it.

The last two I read were Paradise Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock and Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession by Julie Powell. Peacock is a poet, and this book is touted as an exploration of her decision not to have children. Julie Powell is the author of Julie and Julia, which was made into the movie starring the deliriously delicious Meryl Streep who embodied Julia Child-ishness, and Amy Adams, who was totally the wrong actress to play Julie Powell, in my opinion (WAYYYYY too sweet).

I tend to read memoirs, at the outset at least, in a very cynical manner -- I could meet you on a street corner and have you tell me a sad life's story and I would weep and embrace you and take you home to feed you borscht, but when it's a print I can be a real bitch. About halfway through Molly Peacock's book I suddenly thought, what the hell is my problem? She had a hellish childhood, her father should have been chemically castrated at puberty and damned straight she wouldn't want to have kids. What still irks me (and funnily enough it showed up in Julie Powell's book too) is the assumption that woman who decide to be childless have that we who procreate are blissfully, blithely unconflicted about it -- as if they're the only ones who have to constantly question whether they're fulfilled and leading the best possible life. It seems that the mothers these women know are all self-satisfied, slightly dim people who sit around beaming at their snot-nosed screaming brats and soliloquizing about how womanly and fertile and at-one-with-nature they feel. I may be exaggerating slightly, but not a whole lot. I know that some people think it's selfish to choose your career over having a family. I used to say it's more selfish to have children, before I had them. The truth is, either choice is selfish in different ways, and self-sacrificing too; it's a plain fact that nobody can have it all, and no matter which way you go, some days you will think "I was insane to think this was the right choice" and some days you will feel the deepest pity for anyone who chose differently.

Molly Peacock had a turbulent childhood and the resultant trauma led to other crap in her life that would not have accomodated a child well at all. She's an artist and a teacher, and when she says she needs to be able to leave those children and go somewhere at the end of the day where there aren't more children, I think that's perfectly legitimate. How many authors or musicians or artists have been revealed (in yet more memoirs) to be horrible, abusive parents that probably never should have had children? Maybe if your art means that much to you, you ARE better off deciding not to try to be a mother too. Some people are okay putting the art aside until the children are grown, or trying a mish-mash of being both, with variable results. I do agree with Molly Peacock that the decision is one that likely needs to be made more than once, and I sympathize with the tendency to second-guess oneself, but lord knows that isn't solely the province of the childless. I second-guess myself six times before breakfast.

Molly Peacock is quite likeable; Julie Powell? Well....

I don't mean it to be quite as acid as it sounds, when I say that I think both of these women have made the right decision not to have children (with Julie Powell I guess I'd have to add 'so far'), in Molly Peacock's case because it would have been a hardship for her, and in Julie Powell's case because it would be a disaster for the child.

One thing I kind of have to admire (?) about Julie Powell is that she really owns her shit. She doesn't try to sugarcoat her flaws. I know some people enjoy writing and reading vicious reviews, and this book fairly begs for them. I can't do them; I'm always too aware that there's a real person behind the writing. Julie Powell has definitely taken a heapin' helping of abuse or fifty for this book, and it's easy to see why. It's harder to see why someone would want to write this book and have it published. Or why I read it, I guess, since nobody forced me. I quite liked Julie and Julia, although even then I wondered at Julie's singular lack of shame and gratitude (but then, I'm a big sloppy mess of shame and gratitude, and not everyone has to be like me). In this book, (in which the subtitle should probably be reversed in order of priority), she explores the profession of butchery and delves in painful detail into an adulterous affair, much of which is carried on with her husband's knowledge, if not sanction. I did find the meat-cutting parts interesting, and her description of the butcher shop where she apprentices, and its remarkable owners and employees, is lovely. The parts about inviting her lover into her apartment as a 'friend', and having him sleep on the couch so they could fool around while her husband was sleeping? Not so much.

More than anything, Julie Powell seems to be really emotionally immature. She wants to have the sweet, soulful husband with whom she's 'like two souls in one body'(or something, I don't feel like looking it up), and the edgy, self-assured, self-absorbed lover who makes her feel badass. My take is more that you don't get to have everything, you pick your partner and work hard on your marriage and figure out a way to live with it -- or don't. She persists in trying to have it both ways, and romanticizing it even while professing to be tortured about it. When the affair sort of 'ends', it's because the lover dumps her, and then she cyber-stalks him and deluges him with calls and texts for months afterwards. These are not the actions of a well woman. She talks about both her mother and grandmother having the same dark unhappiness in them, and while she might be onto something, I do constantly have the impulse to tell her to try a nice SSRI and keep her panties on for a while. And that the fact that her lover likes to tie her up and hit her and was always absolutely sure that he was going to be able to seduce her doesn't make him deep and complicated -- it just makes him a crafty jackass who gets a lot of sex.

It bugs me (is this bourgeois and puritanical?) that the 'resolution' she comes to is that she has to keep seeing the lover (not sleeping with him) because he's a 'part of her experience', and she expects her husband to be okay with that. Her self-knowledge doesn't really seem to increase through the writing of the book (although she can break down a side of beef in much less time). If I took anything away from this book, it was to see the same tendencies in myself in embryonic form, and to be grateful that they haven't ravaged my life or my husband's life to the extent that they have hers. Maybe sometimes the best thing you can hope to think at the end of a memoir is "Crap, I'm glad I'm not her".

Head in the Clouds

I stayed up way too late reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell -- holy crap. I spent the first few pages thinking I will never be able to finish reading this; the first section is one of those English-man-on-savage-Pacific-Island-in-late-eighteen-hundreds or anyway a long long time ago (I suck at history) and the dialect was nearly impenetrable. I pushed through and that section ends abruptly (mid-sentence, in fact) and a new section begins, years later before World War II. The book is made up of sections that are separate but linked by strange resonances, and it's utterly, utterly brilliant in a bleak, mournful, 'this is the way the world ends' kind of way. And I stayed up way too late reading it. Then I woke up at five a.m. with a screaming migraine. My husband gave me some Tylenol 1s before he left for Angus's obscenely early hockey game and told me to sleep in. A couple hours later I half woke up and heard the kids playing their new favourite game at the bottom of the stairs. There were a few meatball balloons left over from Eve's birthday party two Saturdays ago, and Angus recently had the head-swelling honour of being one of the only two grade four students chosen for the grade five volleyball team, which won first place at the tournament last Wednesday.

So the game? You guessed it. Balloon volleyball. He's rarely in the house these days without batting a balloon around trying desperately not to let it touch the floor, and importuning his poor sister to play with him at neverending length. Variations include lying on their backs and batting it to each other with their feet. Yep -- our very own Balloon Boy.

Anyway, my headache was still in full force, and the hollow balloon-thudding and accompanying smack-talk was slightly irritating, but I liked the fact that they were playing something with each other that didn't involve the television or related electronics, so I stuck my head under the pillow and went back to sleep.

When I was eventually up and showered and sat down to check my email, I found this one from Angus in my inbox:



"sorry that we made so much noise if you heared all the noise when you were in bed.

Angus/eve,"



Say it with me... awwwwww.

Head still hurts. But feeling pretty happy regardless. And put Cloud Atlas on your to-read list.

Under Where?

My sister called me this morning. In the course of conversation she mentioned that she was on the Indigo website ordering a book for her daughter when this book suddenly popped up in her sidebar. She couldn't remember precisely why she had intended to read it, but she ordered it anyway, and then she remembered that I had recommended it. This prompted me to look back in my posts for my review.

And I couldn't find it.

Agh!

Full disclosure: I know the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross. Not intimately or since childhood or to pop over for tea (I wish), but she's good friends with my sister-in-law, and intimately tangled up in the genesis of this very blog (gasp!). It's true -- look at my very first post ever to verify.

If you're thinking that the fact that I know her and like her makes me more likely to give the book a good review, you are so flat-out back-assward blind-drunk cousin-wed WRONG, that...well, refer back to my very first post ever again. Ilana's the first person I've ever really known that got a book published. The phrase "gnawed to the bone by a million rabid rats of envy" springs to mind (doesn't precisely roll off the tongue, though). If there had been the tiniest of flaws, the most nearly imperceptible of errors, I would have percepted the hell out of it. In my tiny, shriveled, petty, unlovely heart of hearts, I wanted to hate this book.
Imagine my crankiness. For any book, it's great. For a first novel it's fucking brilliant, damn it. I didn't even have to skim it again to remember the whole story, which almost never happens. It's not the kind of book where you pore over sentences and pull out quotes. It's the kind of writing that creates a world so real that it sucks you right in and impresses itself on you so that you can see the mark of the bra strap on your shoulder when you stop reading. The characters are so real you can hear their voices as you read their remarks. I'm not Jewish, except reading this book? I was Jewish. And old, and seething with resentment and regret and self-admonishment and rage and yearning (yeah, all that wasn't as much of a stretch for me).

Sima is a wonderful character. She's strong but flawed, intelligent but deeply unhappy. Timna, the beautiful and exotic stranger who enters her life and changes it forever, is a real character in her own right as well as being a catalyst. There's something so quotidian and so beautiful about the bra shop, women congregating around something that hinges on the body, on vulnerability and nakedness and sexuality, on something that can be a basic garment of support or an accessory meant to reveal, to engender desire, which is a shimmering thread running through the novel.

I suspect I didn't write the review as soon as I read the book because I felt like I couldn't do it justice and Ilana might read it and unfriend me on Facebook or something. Either that or I just forgot. I hope it wasn't the whole bitter and corroded with envy thing. Nah. I forget stuff all the time. Last week I went to pick Eve up off the school bus and she wasn't there because she'd gone home with her friend Laura which I knew, but forgot. Happily, the police were pretty understanding.

Clearly publishing a stunningly fabulous work of literature wasn't good enough for Ilana, since now she's a midwife. Don't you hate her? Come on, you kind of hate her. Don't worry -- I have it on good authority that she underwent some wacky government experiment which means that now she never sleeps. That's not really true of course, but thinking it is like balm on my acidly envious soul.

Way to go, Ilana. You bitch.

Sentimental about Education

I've been working on my first assignment for my course. It's not terribly arduous -- I just have to compare the mission statements of five libraries. And it's pretty much done. And it's not due until February first. In fact, the lecture on which it's based only officially came out today. When the course started on February 15th, there was a message mentioning that the first lecture would be posted in the lectures folder, but I couldn't find anything in there other than the welcoming message. So I emailed the professor (great. First whiny annoying student with a hand waving in the air going excuse me, excuse me, I can't find the lecture, where's the lecture). So she posted Lecture #1, which was actually dated today -- the second week of the course. The welcome message was the first lecture. We were supposed to spend the first week familiarizing ourselves with the software (which is stupidly easy to use, and I use the term advisedly, since I can use it).

Photo by Audra B

But hell, if it was up, I was reading it, and taking notes, and doing the class participation exercise.
I was supposed to interview two people about their library usage for the exercise, but since I know everyone's busy I sent out about a dozen emails asking people for their comments. And of course everyone I know is really freaking nice and efficient as well as being busy, so I got a dozen replies (thanks everyone!). So I emailed the professor asking if I could amend the assignment to include everyone's thoughts. And she emailed back: "Look, you incredibly annoying keener, can't you just do the goddamned assignment the way I wrote it and quit being a pain in my ass?". Well actually she wrote back that it would be interesting if I did it the new way and to go ahead, but I could tell she was thinking the other thing.

Then there's the first assignment. Which, as I said, is not that hard. So why has it been doing my head in? Granted, it was a little difficult getting the old gears moving in that way again, but I know I can put a paragraph together in a way that doesn't totally suck. I know I can think critically, or at least fake it. Why did I absolutely NEED to finish it once I started it, just so I could get it out of the way and stop brooding?
I would chalk it up to my good old obsessive, annoying-perfectionist, perspective-lacking me-ness, but I know for a fact I'm not the only one. My friend Janis took a course and at one point thought she'd gotten a five out of ten on an assignment (it was actually only marked out of five) and freaked out and didn't sleep all night. Okay, admittedly this is a small sample, and one could argue that Janis is every bit the older-child keener-freak that I am. But I think it might say something larger about the whole concept of 'school'. I remember a friend who studied science once saying that she decided to read The Brothers Karamazov. About halfway through, she stopped and considered what it would be like if she was reading it for a course, and she could feel all the pleasure drain out of the experience. How is it that 'learning' has somehow become twinned with this concept of regimented, rote, joyless fact-ingesting?

This isn't a well-thought-out treatise or anything. I know it all comes down to money. I know there are alternative schools that claim to break the mold of traditional education. I know that there are teachers in my kids' school that do make learning fun. In J.K., they keep caterpillars until they spin their chrysalises, and then set the butterflies free in the summer. In grade one, Eve gets a bean every time she speaks French in class, and gets to trade the beans for treats at the end of the week. Angus's class had a medieval festival with jousting and poetry and pancakes (they couldn't get a license for mead and pottage, I guess).

Still, every now and then I wish things were a little different. I don't really think homeschooling was for us -- my kids need other kids too much, and I'm not sure I have the fortitude to be responsible for their education. They both get a little bit of everything -- music, sport, art, literature, and good old-fashioned play. They're not being stifled. Eve especially still really enjoys most of her time at school. Maybe it's more my hang-ups than theirs.

Clunky segue to the relevant book quote. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart -- it's an end-of-the-world book, but not with aliens or bombs or John Cusack. It's quieter and more meditative, more a what-would-happen-if? story, with real characters and thoughtful questions. This is what it has to say about work and play:

"When once they stalked the deer, or crouched shivering in the mud for the flight of ducks to alight, or risked their lives on the crags after goats, or closed in with shouts upon a wild boar at bay –that was not work, though often the breath came hard, and the limbs were heavy. When the women bore and nursed children, or wandered in the woods for berries and mushrooms, or tended the fire at the entrance to the rock shelter – that was not work either. So also, when they sang and danced and made love, that was not play. By the singing and dancing the spirits of forest and water might be placated – a serious matter, though still one might enjoy the song and the dance. And as for the making of love, by that – and by the favour of the gods – the tribe was maintained.

So in the first years work and play mingled always, and there were not even the words for one against the other... But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and ‘sleeping on the job’ a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.”

Also, I Gained Six Pounds.

I had my yearly physical today. In the course of the appointment I mentioned that I seemed to have a sinus headache all the time lately; when she asked how I was sleeping, I said not great, and she asked if I felt rested when I woke up and I said huh? Does anyone? She also knew I was having breakthrough depression symptoms, which I wasn't that concerned about because I generally do in January. But just as she was about to leave the room and I was about to hop off the table and get dressed, she came back and said she wanted to give me a prescription for something that she thought would a) help me sleep more deeply b) be an adjuvant for my antidepressant and c) help my headaches, because it's often used as a migraine preventer.

I felt a little like Homer Simpson after Lisa tells him that bacon, pork and ham all come from the same animal: "Oh right, some wonderful, magical animal!". If this works, I'll be out in the street with a sandwich board shilling for the drug company that makes it.

Truthfully, my mood situation has been better this year than it has some Januaries. I crashed a little early this year, so Christmas was a little hard to get through, but the last two weeks I haven't been terribly depressed. Physically, though, I feel just kind of crappy. Not really quite getting anything but always sort-of maybe fighting something off, that kind of thing? It makes me think of this passage in one of my Top Ten Best Books Ever (The History of Love):

"My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I'm at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit? -- small daily humiliations -- these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that's been lost. It's true that there's so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick, sharp pain and then it's over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. I don't mean to make it sound like I've made a science of it. It's not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It's just that I notice certain patterns. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I'm ready, this, for reasons I can't explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible... Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don't know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big production just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I've woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all."

Now, Leo Gursky has had a genuinely, monstrously, unfairly tragic life. Me, not so much. But still, I wonder if my depression and anxiety have gone undercover, and only come out in weird symptoms and discomforts. My sore shoulder -- maybe that's my fear that we spend too much money and have too much stuff. Headache -- the suspicion that I read too much and live too little. Rash on elbow -- the worry that I'm really not the best mother I could be. Aching breasts -- the regret that I didn't have more sex with more people. Cough -- existential fear of life, death, the universe, and everything.

Nah. It's probably just lung cancer or a degenerative brain disease.

What I'm Reading

I just finished The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It was disappointing. It's supposed to be about a writer who's commissioned by a mysterious publisher to write a book 'with the power to change hearts and minds'. A dangerous book.

I love the idea of the dangerous power of words, and the Faustian aspect sounded intriguing. But the reality was much more telenovela/melodrama than sophisticated magical realism. You know what I'm really sick of? I'm really sick of men who languish and pine over beautiful tragic women who have absolutely nothing to their character other than being beautiful and tragic. What's fun about that? I mean, if she was beautiful and tragic and could fix a carburetor, or made a mean grilled cheese, or could pop your dislocated shoulder back in effortlessly, then by all means languish away. But nice boobs and long hair and an air of doomed misery? Bleah.

My first lecture for Introduction to Libraries was interesting and informative, with several links for further exploration of various libraries and on-line research sites. I was intrigued by the description of the holdings of one Health Sciences Library, which kept referring to 'knowledge-based health care' practice and information. Knowledge-based health care as opposed to what, exactly? Tossing back a cup of vinegar and nettles and hoping for the best? Denial-based health care, where you ignore the problems and hope they'll go away? Is this not a rather perplexing term?

There was also a link to the Freedom to Read website, which was very interesting. I particularly enjoyed reading the section on challenged books. There's a long list of books, along with the offended party's objection. One of the books is called Trouble on Tarragon Island, and deals with a clear-cut logging dispute:

"Cause of objection—In the novel, a girl’s grandmother joins an anti-logging group and poses semi-nude for a calendar. In the first chapter, several boys taunt the girl about her grandmother’s breasts, calling them 'bazoongas.' The librarian objected to the bullying scene—the Elizabeth School has a zero-tolerance policy for bullying—and to the word 'bazoongas.'"

This did, in fact, result in the book being removed from the shelves, although it was later replaced. It was quite fascinating -- in a voyeuristic, periodically livid, sometimes amused way -- to see the various objections people raise to reading material, and also I really enjoyed the repetition of the word 'bazoongas'.

I'm going to bed with yet another book or four. High hopes for no beautiful tragic suck-wads and maybe a few bazoongas.

Not THAT Kind of Rye

I re-read The Catcher in the Rye on the week-end. It's been vexing me how little I remember about some of the books I've read. I really like re-reading, but it always feels a little like falling behind (maybe if I didn't surround myself with gargantuan, teetering towers of books to be read it would be easier). I realized that all I remembered about Catcher was the character's name and that he said 'goddam' a lot, and something about being at a teacher's house in the middle of the night. And angst, of course. So I read it again. A lot of people have said that they read the book as a teenager and really identified with the character. I don't remember this being the case for me at all. I thought he was kind of a jerk. Then again, I was kind of a goody-two-shoes rule-following teenager -- I smushed up all my angst and alienation in a tiny little unappetizing ball and rammed it so far down my gullet it wouldn't resurface until several years later in the middle of a lecture on Latin America -- my professor thought I was weeping for the plight of the downtrodden poor, which would have been understandable, but actually I was just suddenly realizing how sad and artificial my comfortable, middle-class upbringing had been.

No, really. The book seems much better and much sadder to me, reading it as an adult. It's bandied about as a universal paean to youthful rebellion and disaffectedness, which in some ways it is, but Holden Caulfield also has real shit to deal with. I feel like his rather showy despair is somewhat more earned than that of some adolescents. He's lost a brother, and his parents persist in putting him in boarding school which, come on, who wouldn't be angst-ridden and angry? Has anyone ever had a positive experience at boarding school, other than some of the sappy little gits in Enid Blyton (just kidding, I adore Enid Blyton)? He fails in academic pursuits because he's mourning, and he feels like most of the world is artificial and worthless because no one seems to have properly acknowledged the pain and senselessness of his loss. The entire book is a diagram of his desperate and graceless attempts to connect with someone, and while there are flashes of humour and the ridiculous, on the whole I just felt really sorry for him. I was glad that he was wherever he is now, resting and, it is to be hoped, getting the help he needs.

So is it just that I re-read it in *&^ January? If I read it again next month will he just be an obnoxious slacker, on par with the high school kids who hang around smoking and swearing outside the library doors while I'm trying to shepherd my kids past and doing my best not to look like a starchy, disapproving middle-aged mother, even though that's precisely what I am? I might never know.

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I'm also re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for book club, which is a little more fun. Here's to not having your house destroyed to make way for a hyper-space bypass, and to someday figuring out the definitive recipe for the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Also, Eve is starting rehearsal for another Irish Dance Show in March. It's called Just a Bit of Craic. Craic is pronounced 'crack'.
(Pronounced eyebrow raise).

Do You REALLY Want to Know?

Description of which areas of the brain are involved in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D.:

"We detect mistakes with our orbital frontal cortex, part of the frontal lobe, on the underside of the brain, just behind our eyes. Scans show that the more obsessive a person is, the more activated the orbital frontal cortex is.
Once the orbital frontal cortex has fired the 'mistake feeling,' it sends a signal to the cingulate gyrus, located in the deepest part of the cortex. The cingulate triggers the dreadful anxiety that something bad is going to happen unless we correct the mistake and sends signals to both the gut and the heart, causing the physical sensations we associate with dread.
The 'automatic gearshift,' the caudate nucleus, sits deep in the center of the brain and allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next unless, as happens in OCD, the caudate becomes extremely 'sticky'.
Brain scans of OCD patients show that all three brain areas are hyperactive. The orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate turn on and stay on as though locked in the 'on position' together -- one reason Schwartz calls OCD 'brain lock'."
So how am I feeling? Well, we have this new green bin for organic waste and kleenex, and I have this sinus thing, so I'm using a fair number of kleenex and technically I should open the theoretically clean little green bin every time I need to put in strawberry ends or banana peels or kleenex, but every time I have to touch it I feel a desperate need to wash my hands, so I either have to wash my hands until my skin looks like something that should be made into a purse, or I have to make little piles of peels and tissues until a future time when I have to wash my hands anyway, then I open the green bin and put in the stuff and THEN wash my hands.
In other words, my caudate nucleus is a little sticky, and I'm in brain lock. You?