Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Books for June. NO I AM TOTALLY NOT KIDDING. With bonus extra-long Atlas Shrugged blathery section.

Atlas Shrugged was a major project during May and June. I finished it before these other few books I'm going to review, but I'll put its review last because it's so long.

Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that I am pretty much reusing reviews for these first few books; I wrote them originally for Visual Bookshelf at Facebook so if you follow me there, they'll be pretty familiar to you (although I edited some of them a bit). (Ask me about the time I wrote a paper about a French author in French for French class and then just translated the paper into English and turned it in for English class. Not plagiarism, just... labor-saving. Right?)

1. Johnny Tremain -- Esther Forbes -- 5
   
   • I read this in late elementary school, and then I think once as an adult years ago. I knew I loved it, but it's even better than I remembered. Our family is on an American Revolution kick right now so my kids and I just listened to an unabridged audio version of this; T will be listening to it once he's done with Atlas Shrugged. The title character is fictional but the setting and many of the events depicted are real; the story is engaging for people of any age from say third grade on up, with enough grit to avoid glossing over the fact that war is unpleasant, but nothing graphic enough to turn off or frighten younger readers. Forbes is a skilled writer, and her vivid (but not in the least highfalutin') descriptions transport you to 1770's Boston, and to the turning point of one nation's history.
     
     The reader of the audiobook (it says Grace Conlin on the cover and at blackstoneaudio.com, but she's identified as somebody Cassidy by the reader herself at the end -- hmm) is awesome. If you like audiobooks and/or historical fiction, I heartily recommend this one.

     
     

2. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day -- Winifred Watson -- 3.25
   
   • This story of a dowdy spinster whose life is changed for a day when she shows up to interview for a job at the house of a society woman is arch, humorous, and overall much naughtier than you'd expect for something written in the 1930's. (Still quite chaste by today's standards, though.) Overall, a lightweight but pleasant enough read.
3. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas -- John Boyne -- 5
   
   • This book is beyond excellent. Its fable-like quality doesn't detract one whit from its gut-wrenching realism, and the Holocaust is brought home to young adult readers in a way I don't think it ever has been in any other novel. The ending is shocking and highly effective. This will be required reading for my eighth grader this upcoming school year.
     
   
   
4. White Crosses -- Larry Watson -- .5
   
   • Must confess that I didn't like this at all. The entire story is told from inside the head of the sheriff of a small town in Montana; he is an utterly unlikable character and simply spending that much time with his irrational and frequently despicable thought processes was annoying. Then there's the fact that the story is told in a meandering, stream-of-consciousness way that was absolutely maddening to endure; the narrator can't light a cigarette without going off on a two-page aside about why he smokes or some memory that is only tangentially connected to the matter at hand. Yes, people's minds DO work this way, but thought is quick - and pages of tiresome reminiscences and speculation definitely are *not*. The story could have been told in a fifty-page novella, and instead it's dragged out into a 400-page novel by means of one annoying mental rabbit trail after another.
     
     Initially I kept going because I wanted to see what happened; I began to think of skipping to the end but reviews mentioned some shocking surprise ending so I tried to hold off and see if I could guess what it was. On page 200 I gave up and skipped to the last fifteen pages. All of my guesses were *much* more interesting than what actually happened.
     
     There are probably people for whom this is just the right kind of novel, but for myself, I prefer my crime stories to crackle a bit more, and my thoughtful literary rambles to be in the company of someone I can enjoy more than this wretched arse of a sheriff.

And now on to Atlas.

I am coming to terms with the possibility that I may never sit and write out the long, articulate, scholarly assessment of Atlas Shrugged that I've been planning to write and even halfheartedly started last night. And rather than let that failure keep me from doing my Books for June post, I'll go ahead and do a quick paragraph or two about the book and give myself permission to move on.

Atlas Shrugged is a lot of things. It's a novel, yes, but I think Ayn Rand's primary goal was not so much to write a story as it was to create a novelization of a philosophy. It's a rite of passage of sorts, for conservative/libertarian types like myself. It's on a lot of people's "Books that Changed My Life" lists. It's 1200 pages of tiny print, or sixty-three hours of audio if you prefer. It's an icon, a product of its time, a warning for all times, especially (it sometimes seems) for ours. It's sometimes so engaging that you can't put it down, and occasionally so boring that you feel you absolutely must stab your eyes out with forks if you can't skim just a weee little bit.

Rand hung her philosophy on a frame consisting of a ripping good story; the basic plot is as follows. It's sometime in the near future -- that is, the near future to people in 1958, which is when the novel was published, although I think it took over a decade to write -- and for several years, industrialists and other major movers and shakers have been mysteriously vanishing. Meanwhile, Dagny Taggart, the only major female industrialist in the US, has been building her family's railroad empire to ever-greater heights, while her brother Jim, the titular head of the organization, is a whiny jerk who is in tight with a bunch of Washington bureaucrats whose aim is to place serious regulations on industry for various reasons of their own. The regulations are crippling major industries and continue to do so in increasing degree throughout the novel. We learn about Dagny's early love affair with a young man, a childhood friend who was also destined to be a great industrialist but who has, for reasons no one understands, become a notorious playboy and run his family's company into the ground, and we watch her have an affair with a married steel tycoon who is also a major industrial player. Dagny is perplexed and angered by what she sees as the defection of her fellow industrialists, as more and more of them (and more and more important ones) continue to vanish; she is determined to get to the bottom of that situation, while she is also determined to keep her own company going against all odds. There's so much going on in the novel on so many levels that it's difficult to write a brief summary of it, especially without giving away key plot points that are best discovered in context, so I'll leave it at that, but just trust me that it's a better and more interesting story than I'm making it sound.

Rand's writing has that mid-20th-century utilitarian feel to it -- not trash-novelish, but not high literary style either. She uses words to tell a story and get across ideas, and she does a good job of that. This book being what it is, there's an extremely high level of infodump -- that is, stuff the author knows or believes, and that she wants you the reader to know or believe, so she puts it in the mouths of her characters. The most extreme example of this is the entire 55-page chapter (and remember, this is tiny, close print, probably over 400 words to a page) consisting of one man's speech over the radio. It's about three hours long in the audio version, and it's a barefaced, unashamed, obvious plot device used by Rand to include an explicit handbook of her philosophy within the pages of her novel. I honestly wish she hadn't; I think a discerning reader will have already gleaned nearly everything included in that speech from the story itself, and that for the purposes of plot (the radio incident in and of itself is an important plot point), the address could have been much, much shorter and still had the same effect. Still, that's my only major gripe with the story; otherwise I think it's highly worth reading.

Now for the philosophy itself. You can find a great deal of information about Rand's ideas - she called her philosophy Objectivism - on the Internet, so I won't give a detailed exposition of it here; I'll just say that its primary tenets are that man exists for his own sake, and that the individual is paramount. Much of what she says I agree with, vehemently, to the point of cheering aloud while reading from time to time. Others of her points, not so much. Just a few examples:

I agree with Rand about the evil of punishing achievement, drive, and ability. Perhaps the strongest theme in Atlas Shrugged, being set, as it is, against a backdrop of industry, is the idea that achievers should not be penalized by being enslaved by the government (or their own guilt) for the benefit of those who do not achieve. Her novel lays out in relentless detail what can happen when great minds -- people who can and do make things happen -- become the property of a mass of parasitic humanity who want to 'mooch' (Rand's word) off them. Some of these passages look like they come from this morning's paper.

I also agree with Rand about the value of the individual and of individual rights. Individual rights, individual liberties, individual responsibilities, individual freedoms: any government interfering with these is a dangerous government.

I don't so much agree with her when it comes to the one-on-one, human-relational aspects of her philosophy, though. Rand promoted the idea that altruism is not just something that can't and shouldn't be legislated (in this I agree), but that altruism -- self-sacrifice for the sake of others -- is actually wrong whether you do it by your own choice or not, and that true morality can only mean living for your own best interests. It's not as bad as that sounds, or as simple; in the various relationships within the novel, this idea plays out in many ways: A man is no longer obligated to be faithful to his wife if she is not holding up her end of their marriage contract. A man is not obligated to do anything for anyone if he does not get an equal value in return. Personal pleasure is the highest law of human relationships. Adherents of Objectivism put a fine point on these ideas, I've found, by pointing out that if giving love makes you happy, then that is your return on your investment, so giving love is OK. But that's not enough for me, because there are always going to be situations where (in my opinion) good morality, whether based on religion or personal ethics, holds that self-sacrifice is important even if the sacrificer gains nothing, not even pleasure. I found it interesting that in all 1200 pages of this novel, there is not one mention of how a mother should behave toward her children. There are virtually no children in the story at all, except for one family (presented positively but very briefly) who dropped out of society so as to avoid having their children indoctrinated in state-controlled collectivist-socialist schools. (You can just imagine what I thought of that. ;-) ) My idea of love is different from Rand's, it appears. I would be interested to see if she addressed the subject of parental love in particular in any of her other writings. To my knowledge, she did not have any children herself.

Also, I obviously don't agree with Rand's idea that religion is a crutch for the weak and it's bad bad bad to believe in anything supernatural ever at all ever. Fortunately, while this was mentioned a few times and in a few ways in the novel, it's not pervasive enough to have ruined my pleasure in reading it.

Soooo. Not so much with the "a quick paragraph or two", I guess, but there's a WHOLE lot more that I'm not covering here and that I simply don't have time or energy to go into at this point. I would love to discuss this novel with other friends who have read it. T's reading it right now, or rather listening to it, and we'll be able to have good talks about it soon without my having to worry about spoiling something for him inadevertently. (We were supposed to be keeping more or less together in the story, but I was a BAD GIRL who couldn't put the book down while I was camping this month, and finished. TOTALLY on accident, of COURSE.) If you've read it and want to discuss/debate/enthuse/whatever with me about it, please contact me and we'll have a go at it.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

silence: broken. More's the pity.

Summer at our house means being careful about running the sprinkler for too long, because the water level in our well drops off enough that the pump ends up gasping for water and only coming up with air. This hadn't been tested yet this year... until now. (I am always handy when laws of physics or things like this need to be tested. Everybody has a special skill. This is mine.) I turned the sprinkler on the lawn well after sunset but before dark, sternly reminding myself that I needed to shut it off in half an hour, and then I completely forgot we even had a sprinkler until I flushed the toilet at 3 AM and it did that funny "hey, there's no water to fill me back up in here" kind of panicked sort of choking sound, at which point I instantly remembered the sprinkler and the well and dashed out in my bare feet to turn off the faucet.

And T's not here -- he is coming home in about six hours from a two-week work trip to Hawaii -- so I had to handle this all on my own like a big girl, by calling him in the middle of the night on his cell phone, which he had graciously left on as he slept in a hotel room in San Francisco. I'm sure he is glad that his wife can hold down the fort while he's gone like Ma did when Pa took off for town 40 miles away. I'm sure he's contemplating this *exact* parallel as he lies in a hotel bed trying desperately to fall back asleep for 45 minutes before he has to get up anyway.

And the pump recovered so quickly that I have a sneaking suspicion that it hadn't actually gone into full-bore RED ALERT mode and was still thinking more along the lines of, "Hey. People? People? Did you forget about me? ...hey... hello?" Three in the morning is not a time for subtlety in problem assessment, though. Not for me, anyway.

Oh my goodness. I just opened the door to let in the cat and Venus was rising so beautifully next to a tree that stands in our yard that I went straight past an Anne-ish thrill to an Emily-like "flash". I did have time to notice, while I scurried around outside checking to make sure that I hadn't also left water on in the garden or elsewhere, that the stars looked amazing. Everyone should live at least for a while in a place where going outside in the middle of a clear night and looking up means having your breath taken clean away.

Anyway. Back to the STORY. The crisis was past by 3:30 and I came in the house all hyped up on adrenaline and decided that I would get a head start on dinner by setting up the crock-pot now, instead of trying to do it between getting up at 6 and leaving at 7. And then I couldn't go to bed, because I had to cook the giblets for the cats. It is against my household rules to a) give raw meat to pets b) throw away usable food or c) have chicken innards just sitting there in a bowl in my refrigerator, so what else could I do? And while my hands were performing the rather unpleasant tasks involved in getting a chicken ready to be cooked, my brain was thinking, "Hey. I should write a blog post. Maybe while the giblets cook."

So there it is. A month of blog silence broken by a water emergency-or-not and chicken liver.

I know I say this every time but I really have been thinking how I need to post more. For one thing, if you don't see me on Facebook you have NO IDEA how my garden is doing right now, none at ALL, and that's all my fault and I'm sorry. I know it's hard on you, the wondering. And you don't know that I've been sick or what I thought of Atlas Shrugged (well, nobody knows that; I'm not even sure I know yet) or how the summer reading program is going for the kids or what our chickens look like now or how C did at State Presentation Day or how tall LT is or anything important.

But also, I'm discovering a major flaw in my "I'll put off blogging and just use twitter or Facebook or both to express myself about this thought that's in my head" plan, and that is that the archiving at twitter and Facebook simply stinks. You can't call something up by date or topic and search is pretty much useless or nonexistent; you have to sit there and click "more" 300 times to get to something you wrote six months ago and for some reason now want to remember. So one of the pleasant byproducts I've enjoyed since I began communicating with people via the Internet, first via email and then through archivable chats and then through this blog and then finally through social networking sites, is eliminated: I can't easily use my own writings as a diary. I can't go back and find that link to a knitting pattern, or laugh at my own jokes or at people's comments, or even remember what I'd done on a certain day.

(Also, T can't access Facebook -- not that he'd want to; he wants a T-shirt he saw that proclaims REAL MEN DON'T FACEBOOK -- or Twitter, or even read the little Twitter snippets in my blog sidebar, from his work computer, due to network regulations meant to keep government employees from spending all day socializing instead of working. [This would be the web 2.0 version of "the entire workforce of the state of Virginia had to have Solitaire removed from their computers because they hadn't done any work in six weeks.… You know what this is, you know what we're seeing here? We're seeing the end of Western civilization as we know it.." Name that quote!] But he can read my blog, and we both used to like it, that he could peek in on our day at home while he was away.)

So I'm going to try to make a conscious effort to document stuff here again. Don't bother thanking me. I know you're all grateful.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Garden update with a gratuitous chick picture

OK, we have had our first garden casualties this year:

Spinach, being devoured by striped cucumber beetles. EVIL EVIL BEETLES. I offered the kids a bounty of a dime a beetle and they found and squished over a hundred of the demonic little beasts. Anyone know if we can wash this and eat it, or if we should just count it a loss?

Something also ate a bell pepper plant down to its stem. The others have a little damage here and there (grasshoppers? More beetles? Tomato worms?), but this was pretty extreme. Wonder if it will miraculously come back.

But all is not lost; here's a pea blossom.

And most of the pepper plants look more like this. (Fortunately.)

itty bitty baby zucchino rampicante plant. Grow grow grow!

I still need to plant the rest of our squash and the melons. This is SUPER LATE to be planting. I felt all motivated to go out and do that a few minutes ago. Lemme check -- OK, nope. All gone. Darn. (I'll do it later anyway.)

Tomato plants.

Tomatoes and basil. Early on something was eating the basil but the new leaves seem to be OK. Probably because the beetles all headed for greener pastures in the spinach bed next door.

Claire's 4-H bed. :) She's got potatoes (which we need to bury; another project for today or tomorrow), onions, a tomato plant, a pumpkin vine, a Jerusalem artichoke, and probably something else that I'm forgetting.

And as promised, cute young chicks:

HA HA I'M SO FUNNY. (They look like teenagers.)

Friday, May 08, 2009

Garden and CHICKIES.

I have been INCREDIBLY LAX with garden posts.

Well, OK, I've been incredibly lax with ALL posts, really, but let's put that aside for the moment.

Anyway. I still don't have pictures of the tomatoes and peppers I'm planting tomorrow, because I am A SLACKER. But I do have SPINACH PICTURES. Yes, that's right, for the second year in a row, something I planted in the ground has actually grown.

Itty bitty carrot tops! Oh yeah, I said spinach.

This year's spinach! Popeye would be proud.

And even more exciting:

Volunteer spinach, sown naturally from seeds that fell from last year's spinach after it bolted, and not discovered by us until we were cleaning out the bed to plant in it in April. This whole nature thing, it really works!

And MOST exciting of ALL... baby chicks!

We're allowed to like them because these particular hens will have long lives of egg-laying; they're not for meat.

One of the chicks (we bought twelve) on the day we bought them, when I THINK they were about two days old but I don't know for sure:

You'll notice that they're reddish and not yellow. That's because they're Rhode Island Reds, see. Not Rhode Island Yellows. (Actually, I think yellow chicks grow up and become white chickens, if it's anything like it is with ducks.)

After a mere week of gorging herself on chick mash:

(full disclosure: I have NO IDEA if that's the same chick. There is virtually NO WAY to tell these girls apart, except that one is kind of small and retiring like a runt.)

A few in one spot: (They had their first outing today; we took them out and put them in the chicken-wire enclosure around the base of our recently-planted apricot tree. SO CUTE to see them scratching and pecking at bugs just like real chickens. Oh. Yeah.

This chick was in the process of being really loud and drawing both Smokey and Scout from the far reaches of our property to gaze ravenously in at her:

She's also, by the way, sitting in one of the FIVE beds we mulched today, in preparation for the aforementioned planting of peppers and tomatoes tomorrow. Is it possible that I might do two blog posts in a row? Don't count on it.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

SHOPPING HELL AUGGHH.

I had to report for jury duty today (well, technically, yesterday. Tuesday.), and on Monday I suddenly realized that I had NOTHING TO WEAR. I panicked, looked over my stuff, and decided that actually I'd do OK if I got some new boots. See, I used to have these black boots (from Payless, of course) that I would wear on occasions where jeans were OK but oldish no-longer-quite-white athletic shoes were not. (In other words, these were my church shoes and no I'm not joking. The flats only come out when I wear a skirt and tights which is probably less than three times a year.)

Anyway. Those boots died a sad death thanks to a crack across the sole. (For $15 at Payless and several years of hard use I'm not complaining.) So I simply needed to replace them except that SHOCK AND TRAGEDY Payless doesn't carry them anymore. Apparently even Payless must occasionally bend to the pressure of changing fashions, which is exerted by an industry with shall we say a really heavily vested interest in women's felt need to reinvent their wardrobes every year in unison. (I am not a fan. Can you tell?)

I didn't find any other shoes that would be just right, because I'm not a loafer person and can you wear loafers with jeans, anyway, and if you do what do you do for socks? None of my skirts would be quite appropriate except for one that needs light-colored sandals to go with it, and my sandals are black because my otherwise-identical light pair wore out, and of course THOSE aren't available anymore either. So then I was stuck, and I decided to buy a skirt that would go with my flats, except I couldn't find just the right skirt either, and it was all simultaneously utterly miserable and utterly typical of my usual shopping experience. I hate shopping*, and I especially hate shopping when I have to find something by tomorrow OR ELSE, and I really especially hate shopping when I have only about an hour to go looking for clothes I don't want to buy anyway in three different stores before I have to dash to a class.

*for clothes. I like shopping for groceries just fine.

In fact, here's a list, in order of ascending horrificness, of things I would rather do than go clothes shopping.

1. Take an algebra test, even a really difficult one with a million tiny error-prone steps to each problem and for which my studying had been slightly inadequate.
2. Drink a giant cup of grape soda.
3. Take a big load of trash to the dump.
4. Have the measles.
   • For three weeks.
     • Over Christmas.
5. Visit the gynecologist.
6. Read a bad 1970's Harlequin novel.
   • Out loud.
     • During a visit to the gynecologist.
7. Ride the Tilt-A-Whirl four times in a row.
   • and proceed to throw up on a stranger.
     • Who turns out to be my gynecologist.
8. Write a history paper.
   • About Bodie.
9. Pluck a chicken.
10. Weigh myself in front of a gymnasium full of my worst enemies from all thirteen years of public education.
11. Have a root canal.
12. Have unnecessary major surgery.
13. Have unnecessary major surgery during which the doctor accidentally leaves a pair of scissors inside me.
14. Pass a kidney stone.
15. Pass the pair of accidentally-abandoned scissors.
16. Participate in a 24-hour adults-only Candyland marathon.
17. Stab my own eyes out with dull, dirty forks.

OK, I confess that somewhere along in there I started exaggerating. But not very early on, and NOT BY MUCH.

End result: I did not find either shoes or a new outfit and decided to just show up in jeans and the old tennis shoes, which appears to be some kind of jury uniform actually, so that was good but it also meant that my misery ended up being ALL FOR NOTHING. Sob.

*************************

Edited to add: Oh PS After a fascinating morning of watching the justice process at work -- specifically, sitting through voir dire, which is pretty much just like it is in John Grisham novels -- I did not get selected for jury duty, but not because I was excused for any reason. It was just because they had a whole bunch of extra people and didn't get to me before they'd filled the panel. But I'm "on call" for four more weeks, which means every Friday through the month of May I have to check in and see if they want me to come in and go through the whole process again. Fun times!

Thursday, April 30, 2009

I'm a bad, bad blogger.

But then we knew that.

But this is REALLY bad, because I totally neglected to do my son's birthday post and now he'll think I don't love him. MY BOY TURNED THIRTEEN.

I can say that now without my voice shaking but it took practice. THIRTEEN is awfully close to EIGHTEEN which is awfully close to NOT NEEDING HIS MOM ANYMORE AND MOVING AWAY. And obviously we want him to reach this stage, all in good time of course, because that's what's natural and good and the way God ordained things to be and will make him happy and us too but FIVE YEARS ARE VERY SHORT. So I'm hugging him a lot lately, to store up against that looming day when I'll have to call him and have him drive to my house from his house in order for me to be able to give him a hug. I even kiss his cheek when I can catch him off-guard.

A little premature, you're thinking? Come on, Rachel, the kid's only thirteen, it's not like he's heading off for college across the country next week, you say? I will remind you that FIVE YEARS. They are VERY SHORT. For example:

I have been blogging (such as it is, lately) for six years and that has felt like nothing.

Five years ago LT was eight and I thought he was SO big and grown-up and that was not very long ago at all.

Every year goes by faster than the year before. When LT was born, 5 years was roughly 1/4th of my life. Now it's roughly 1/7th. By the time he's 18 it'll be 1/8th or so.

Remember the year 2000? Does that feel like a long time ago to you? Nearly TWICE five years, people.
What about Claire, you say? You'll still have Claire at home? Yes, but NINE YEARS AREN'T VERY LONG EITHER.

So I think I'm justified in having a wee little bit of a freakout. Now if you'll excuse me, I think he's soundly enough asleep that I'll be able to smooch his face without having him wake up and wipe it off, so I have to go now.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Thank you, Veronica.

I know you've all heard of (and heard) Susan Boyle by now, right? I HEART SUSAN BOYLE... as much as I loathe those smug sniggering spectators whose collective eye-roll could be heard across the Atlantic when someone DARED to step onto a stage in front of them who was not conventionally attractive, and no their later cheering did not make me like them. Only the ones who actually cried are off the hook and no longer need fear my scorn. Bonus points for wearing sackcloth and throwing ashes on oneself.

Anyway. I've kind of had a blog post in my head about the Susan Boyle phenomenon, and I even sat and typed one out late at night a couple of nights ago but, like most serious and heartfelt things I type at 2 AM, it was too maudlin for words and also very rambly and not quite coherent, so I have not posted it here even though I am in desperate need of content. Then today, Veronica at Toddled Dredge (if she's not featured in your RSS reader she really, really should be) posted something so wonderful and spot-on about Miss Boyle and our attitudes about beauty that I no longer have to come up with a post and can just link you to hers, because she put what I was thinking into much better words than I could have done, 2 AM or no. Here you go.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Reading survey, and books for March/April. Sort of.

I know I owe a books post. Or two. OK, here goes:

• Listen to Helen's Babies, by John Habberton, available at librivox.org. Charming, funny, pleasant for the whole family.
• Don't bother reading Handle With Care even though the bones (no, um, pun intended) of the story are good and the issues are interesting, because a) the writing it not up to Picoult's usual level and b) the ending is the most jerkish mean horrible unforgivable ending she's ever written and that's saying something. I read it first like I always do now and it STILL spoiled the book for me.
• Fifteen continues to be wonderful, of course.
• I know I'm forgetting something here but you'll have to excuse me, because I'm taking a gorgeous and wonderful algebra class and a mind-numbingly dull California History class and the combination has simultaneously mashed my brains all up AND sucked away all my spare reading time, as is usual during term-time. (<- one of my favorite Lewisisms.)
  

Oops, forgot I was still listing. OK. On with the survey. You might already have read this if I'm your Facebook friend.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
L.M. Montgomery

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have several copies of Anne of Green Gables

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Maybe a little. But it's not like this is a scholarly paper, so I'll let it slide THIS TIME.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
As a child: Justin from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Yes, I had the preteen sweats for an anthropomorphized super-intelligent rodent.

Later: Stan Crandall in Fifteen, which I can understand, having just reread the book, and that sounds a little bad considering that Stan is and always will be seventeen.

Adulthood: Mr. Rochester and Captain Wentworth. (Shhh!) (OK, not really. But if I WERE going to have a literary crush, they'd be at the top of the list.)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
The Anne series, I'm thinking.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
When I was ten I spent hours and hours at the library and I had a different favorite book every few days. But probably really Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and not just because Justin was the cutest, sweetest, smartest rat on sometimes two legs and sometimes four.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I try to block these from my mind. Maybe the new Wally Lamb? Sorry, Mr. Lamb. I'd say it's nothing personal but I know that would do no good. Nine hundred pages or whatever that was, and ten years of work, it can't help but be personal. But at least you tried.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Probably We Are All Welcome Here, Elizabeth Berg. Or maybe Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos. That's not counting re-reads.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Aside from the Bible? :) A Thread of Grace, Mary Doria Russell.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Is there some kind of lifetime achievement award? Give it to Beverly Cleary. You know she's been publishing beloved bestsellers for SIXTY YEARS? Please don't die for a long time yet, Mrs. Cleary.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. And I'd love to see a new BBC Anne, as long as they hired Canadians or people whose accents could pass for Canadian.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Well, I'm touchy about this. Most of my very favorite books, as much as I might like to see them as movies, I just KNOW they'd change a ton of stuff and it would make me mad. So for most of my favorites, unless it's a classic or period novel being handled by the BBC, hands off please. (The abovementioned Water for Elephants is a possible exception because it's written in such a way that it would make a very marketable movie without changing a word, and also it would maybe be worth the pain of seeing a few changes to see a really excellent director and DP and art director team up on it, because it has enormous visual potential.)

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
It involved Mr. Rochester. It was over a decade ago. That is all I'm going to say. (Mostly because, truth be told, that's all I can remember. I'm not as young as I used to be.)

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
I know there have been several but I can't think of them offhand. Maybe that YA series whose title involves something about Angus and thongs and snogging.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Les Miserables, but it was worth it. I do wish he'd abridged that long chapter about the Paris sewer system, though.

16) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I've not read a lot of Russians but what I have read tends to be pretty bleak and I didn't like it much. (Anton Chekhov, I am looking at you.) I've not exactly majored in French literature, but I have read a few more French authors than Russian ones, and I do think I like those (Verne, Hugo, Leroux) better.

17) Umberto Eco?
Does Umberto echo? I dunno.

18) Roth or Updike?
I've read two Updikes and thought they were OK but overrated. Never read Roth.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Never finished anything from either.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare. But I like Chaucer too. OK, I'm man enough to admit it, I like the one thing I've read by Chaucer which is the one thing everybody has read by Chaucer (except Chaucer scholars, who have read two things) and that's the Canterbury Tales. Some funny parts, some interesting parts, some totally incomprehensible parts, the end. So to repeat: Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen, but I love Eliot too. That was mean to make me choose.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I own everything by Dickens (thanks to an awesome birthday B&N gift card many years ago from my husband) and I keep swearing I'm going to read through everything he wrote in chronological order, but instead I've read the same four or five of his novels that everyone's read (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and of course A Christmas Carol) and that's all. I've read the first 100 pages or so of Pickwick about three times, but so far apart in between that I always forget and have to start over. There, I've confessed. You can take away my literary snob card now.

23) What is your favorite novel?
I can't answer this question because my head just exploded. Thanks so much.

24) Play?
The Philadelphia Story

25) Short story?
Something by O. Henry, I think.

26) Work of non-fiction?
Mover of Men and Mountains by R.G. LeTourneau. Or MiG Pilot by John Barron, about Viktor Belenko. Or What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, by Daniel somebody. Pool. I just Googled it. Oh wait! I absolutely cannot leave out A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary. BEST MEMOIRS EVER. Is it super callous and selfish of me to say that I hope that she lives long enough to publish a third installment?

27) Who is your favorite writer?
I don't want to choose. You can't make me. Elizabeth Berg and Kazuo Ishiguro and Charles Dickens for the way they put words together. Cynthia Voigt, Anne Tyler, and L.M. Montgomery for the characters they create. Sara Donati, Charlotte Brontë, Audrey Niffenegger, Mary Doria Russell, and many others for the stories they craft. Jane Austen, Beverly Cleary, and Jan Karon for the way it makes me feel to read their books. Even this small exercise has caused me much pain. My poor exploded head was just beginning to heal from question 23 and there it goes again.

28) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
JK Rowling. I don't dislike her writing as much as Nicholas Sparks', but she's more overrated (just my opinion, of course) because she has so much larger a following than Sparks does. (This has nothing to do with any of the "sorcery books are evil" reasons for not liking Harry Potter. I just think the books are mediocre at best. Excuse me while I flee before this screaming angry horde.)

29) What is your desert island book?
the Bible

30) And ... what are you reading right now?
I just finished Fifteen and I haven't yet picked my next school-semester-in-session light comfort read-before-bed book. (I don't think that sentence had enough hyphens.)

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

hazards of multi-tasking. beware: this could happen to you.

Here's what can happen if you try to simultaneously clean out a junk drawer and have a discussion with your children about the varying degrees of disagreeableness in pseudo-swear words:

"OK, yes, 'crap' is not nice. 'Crud' is less bad. But 'crap' is not like going around saying -- Oh my goodness, look at this big Sharpie I just found!"

Guess what is the new expletive of choice for the giggling juveniles in my household.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Other things have been growing too.

Well, we've joked about having a betting pool for when this would happen, but it's too late now. (I always guessed he'd be 13. But you know, if I was still 5 8 3/8" like I SWEAR I used to be, I'd have been right, most likely. Barely.) Anybody want to put in for which week of his 13th year he'll pass up his Daddy at 5' 10 1/2"?

(Today's photos helpfully taken by Claire. Baby photo taken by my brother Toney.)

April 6, 2009. He is fifteen days shy of his thirteenth birthday, and a quarter-inch taller than his mom at 5' 8 1/8". A historic day! :)

April 6th, 2009. Left-hand side is on my head; right-hand side is on LT's.

LT and his mama, April 1996. I LOVE THIS PICTURE.