As the Crowe Flies (and Reads!)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part the First, In Which I Go Crazy With Wand Innuendos

2013-05-17T07:20:00.000-04:00

Ho, boy. It's harder than I thought it would be to coalesce my thoughts this week. I think Deathly Hallows is a pretty good book but a pretty poor wrap-up to the series, but I'm not sure that anything could have wrapped up the series brilliantly for me--my expectations were always going to be too high. The whole time I was reading this week, I kept thinking, oh, not much longer. Or, wow, we won't see ______ again. I'm feeling pretty melancholy and the worst hasn't even happened yet. But onwards and upwards. Thanks once again to Alice for hosting the readalong, without which I'm sure I'd have got lots more reading done but had much less fun.

I think this is the first book where JKR used any epitaphs. I am not a fan of that. I do love the dedication, though. And it's curious to me that it looks so serpentine. Is it a subtle nod to Slytherin? Or an even subtler nod to the Mouse's Tale/Tail from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? I'd really like to know.

Chapter One: Snape is literally and figuratively Voldemort's right-hand man. Love that. But then we hear about Pius Thicknesse and methinks that JKR has grown a tad heavy-handed with her Name Symbolism once more.

She makes up for it when Voldemort and Malfoy compare the length of their wands, though. Makes Lucius's "involuntary movement" all the more intriguing, no? And then "some of the throng sniggered." They certainly did, Jo.

Not my original idea here, but I remember reading a pretty in-depth review of DH after it came out, saying that in the first chapter, Rowling really ratchets up the fear and tension by killing off a character so beloved that...we never knew her name before now. When I first read the scene of Charity Burbage, I was pretty subdued, but every subsequent time I've read it, I can only think of what that critic said and it makes me giggle.

Chapter Two: In Memoriam. Maybe this chapter would have been better named In FoDump.

Chapter Three: I got nothin'. I really had wanted a better reconciliation of Harry and Dudley, and there were glimmers of it, but I think there's an enormous story there just waiting for JKR to tell it.

Chapter Four: I like the action-y bits in this chapter, but it all kind of leaves me wondering why they couldn't just, oh, I dunno, drive Harry out of harm's way instead of creating this ridiculously complicated diversion. They could have put lots of Shield Charms on the car. Dumbledore wanted Snape to still be useful to Voldemort? Dude, Snape just killed you to be useful to Voldemort. No need to get Moody killed in the process. Besides that, why not Disillusion themselves when leaving Privet Drive? They did that when arriving there and it seemed to work just fine.

Wait, you want to use polyjuice and risk everybody's life instead of just driving away in a muggle car? Riiight.

Also, the same critic who wrote that about Charity Burbage brought it to my attention that at one point there are six naked Harry Potters in the room, waiting for clothing. Just sayin'.

I was upset when Hedwig died. She dies a better death in the movie than in the book, though.

Chapter Five: I love the twins here. Getting an ear cursed off and still making bad jokes about it. The twins are really at their best in this book, I think.

Hole-ier than thou.

I'm sorry, but an editor should have caught this one: "The suddenness and completeness of death was with them like a presence." In other words, it was with them like something that was with them. Yup.

Chapter Six: Anybody else surprised by the way Secret Keeping changes with the death of the Secret Keeper? I would have assumed that charm/spell/whatever would end with the death of the Keeper.

Also, Ron is at his best in this section of the book. His humor is quick and the tone is just right and he seems to have gotten a grasp on the different ways he can be a friend to Harry vs Hermione. I chuckle every time I re-read his "always the tone of surprise" line. And his response to Hermione's saying that if she were to drive a sword through him it wouldn't damage his soul: "Which would be a real comfort to me, I'm sure." Oftentimes in previous books Ron's humor has a bitter edge or is at someone else's expense--usually Luna's or Neville's. But I really like Ron in these first ten chapters, and he's not a character I generally am partial to.

Chapter Seven: Twelve Fail-Safe Way to Charm Witches...about which Ron adds,"It's not all about wandwork." No, indeed, Ron. No, indeed. Tee hee.

Chapter Eight: Krum hadn't realized that he'd ever discussed his wand with fans before. You cheeky Seeker, Krum!

Chapter Nine: In which Hermione is essentially the most awesome character ever but then claims never to have done any memory charms. One chapter after telling us that she's performed complex ones on her parents. Editors should have caught that, too, but like Helen of Troy's face, it's a line that has launched a thousand "ships." (Most adult Hermione/Snape stories incorporate that line and have Snape perform the memory charm on the Grangers.)

And then Ron struggles with his wand and tells Hermione that it's no wonder he can't get it out. With Harry standing right there and everything!

Chapter Ten: Oh, thank GOD they finally figure out who the heck RAB was. Now we know was Narcissa didn't get a star name like the other Blacks--it's because her cousin Regulus got two. Oh, and yeah, they finally remember that locket from OotP that they mysteriously couldn't open.

Oy, my goodness, Kreacher's tale. So heartbreaking. One of the most poignant part of the entire series, I think. My eyes are actually welling up right now, just thinking about what I read yesterday. So emotional, so right on the money in terms of Hermione's analysis of house elf motivation and loyalties and what bastards wizards are for treating house elves the way they do.

Heckuva chapter to end on, I say.

Tales of Beedle the Bard

2013-05-10T06:56:00.000-04:00

All hail, Alice, host of the bestest readalong, and her ability to make us all stick to deadlines like good little Hufflepuffs. It really has been a ton of fun, and I appreciate the emotional breathing room she's given us between tomes 6 and 7. But it must be said that reading Tales of Beedle the Bard has left me feeling siriusly underwhelmed. See what I did there?

In fact, this is how I felt about reading them:

Very shruggy. I mean, part of the point of fairy tales is that there's no real character development--they're supposed to be blank enough for Every Reader (or in some cases, Every Listener) to be able to read a little of himself or herself into them. And to be fair, I've gone back and read some of the Grimm tales in recent years and didn't love them either.

But do you want to know what really bothers me about this book? Well, quite a lot, actually. But one of them is the bogus 4th wall play that JKR does with her annotations for Muggle readers. And another of them is Dumbledore's annotations to begin with.

For starters: If these tales, which must have been old when Beedle managed to write them down, were so progressive in terms of gender equality, why, 600 years later, does Slytherin not have any female quidditch players? Why do witches still stay home and do the child-rearing while their husbands go off to work in the ministry?

While I don't think I would be able to sit through a reading of Mrs. Bloxam's expurgated version of "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot," the few excerpts Dumbledore included in his annotations filled me with glee--there are so many good words in there: "poorly tum-tums," "teethy-pegs," "kissed and huggled," etc. And you can't tell me that Hoppity Pot isn't a better name than Hopping Pot. Considering Dumbledore's own few words of nitwit, oddment, and tweak, I'm surprised he's not more drawn to this version himself.

One of the more benign images from googling "teethy peg"

Did anybody else think that Babbity Rabbity's Cackling Stump was going to be a story about an amputee? Back when I read Deathly Hallows, where Ron is naming various tales to Harry and Hermione, utterly astonished they've never heard of any, this was one of them, I thought that and was kind of hoping for it. Like an olden-days version of Mad-Eye Moody, whose pegleg talks back to its owner.

I also wanted to pull my hair out re: the deathly hallows re: Dumbledore's purely Byzantine machinations with those in our upcoming book to be discussed. Deathly Hallows, thy name is Red Herring. Just like communism.

And what's up with the Malfoys being badmouthed all the time? JKR, you could make your names a little less heavy-handed and it would be more effective. Brutus Malfoy? Really?

Anyway, I'm glad that net profits from this book go to benefit some children's fund or other, but honestly, this book seems to be the equivalent of Meryl Streep filming "She-Devil" because she needed some beer money. In other words, it's not quite up to the standards I usually associate with JKR's stories.

See what I'm saying?

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince Readalong

2013-05-03T11:54:00.002-04:00

His dumblin' days are sadly numbered. I can hardly think about it.

There is so much happening in the last quarter of this book that I hardly know where to start. Except, of course, by thanking Alice for hosting this readalong. If anything has been made clear during my participation, it is this: despite our collective nitpicking about contradictions and inconsistencies and our tendency to bicker about our beloved characters, this is a magical, magical world that JKR has created. It is not, perhaps, world-building on a Tolkien scale, but it is still the world I most want to dwell in when I want to escape from this one.

And now, on to Chapter Nineteen: Elf Tails: it's interesting to me that Hermione is the first one to analyze the two different attacks on Katie and Ron and peg them for ultimately being the same. She may not excel in creative magic like the twins do, but her mind is sharp and logical and she doesn't get distracted by dissimilar superficial details. It's Our Girl at her best.

Same chapter: Mr Weasley says it was a lucky day that Ron sat with Harry on the Hogwarts Express, but really, isn't it just the opposite? Would half of the Weasley's troubles exist if it weren't for Ron's close association with Harry? Would Harry have even been sorted into Gryffindor if he hadn't made friends with Ron on the train? Still, good on Arthur Weasley for being a glass-half-full kind of guy.

Same chapter: I'm sorry, but couldn't a 5th grader have found a loophole around the instructions Harry gave Kreacher? Harry didn't tell Kreacher that he couldn't tell, say, Bellatrix or Narcissa, that he (Kreacher) was following Draco.

Chapter 21: The Unknowable Room. I'm curious about Harry's and Snape's disagreement on the best way to tackle dementors. Harry = producing a patronus and Snape = occluding? That's my hunch.

Brief detour to the Drarry sexual subtext: Draco calls Harry the Boy Who Scored, Harry later says under his breath multiple times, "I need to see where Draco Malfoy keeps coming secretly" and "I need to see what Draco Malfoy is doing inside you." Yeah, baby.

Chapter 23: Horcruxes. I wonder, not for the first time, why it's only murder that can split a witch or wizard's soul. It's terrible, but it doesn't seem like the worst thing to do to somebody. Seems like what Bellatrix & Co did to the Longbottoms was worse. And is it just the act of murder that splits the soul, or is that additional creation of a horcrux that does it? And where does killing leave off and murder begin?

Chapter 24: Sectumsempra. Does anybody else find it disturbing that in the same chapter in which Harry slices open Draco Malfoy and nearly kills him, that he finally gets Ginny Weasley? Way to reward your characters for brutality, Jo. On the other hand, the monster in Harry's chest at the end of this chapter inspired THE best pieces of fanfiction I've ever read: The Way We Get By and Drop Dead Gorgeous, by Maya/Mistful, aka Sara Rees Brennan. If you can find them anywhere on line, I recommend that you do so.

Chapter 26: The Cave. Very cool, very creepy, but unnecessarily complicated, perhaps? Could they have flown on brooms to the middle of the lake? Couldn't Harry have shot the aguamenti'd water straight into Dumbledore's mouth? Couldn't Dumbledore have taught Harry a quick spell to produce fire when he was conversationally telling him how they would keep the inferi at bay?

But oh, my hear melted the first time I read Dumbledore say, "I am not worried, Harry...I am with you." And then every subsequent time I read that, my heart just broke, because of course I knew what was coming next.

Tarot card: The Lightning Struck Tower

Chapter 27: The Lightning Struck Tower. There's a lot going on here. Besides the obvious, I mean. It breaks my heart a little bit that Draco has had such a tough year that the sympathy and praise he gets from Dumbledore mean so much to Draco. What a terrible position to be in: forced to plot your way to kill one of the greatest wizards of your time, with pain of death hanging over you--not just yours, but your entire family's. I imagine Draco would have been in much better shape if it was only his own life on the line. Poor Snape, because the moment he's been dreading all year finally arrives. If Dumbledore is correct, then Snape believes he is splitting his soul to keep Draco's intact. Poor Harry, to be invisible and petrified the entire time.

Poor Draco

Chapter 28: The Flight of the Prince. I don't understand how anybody who has ever read any kind of story with a red herring before could still think that Snape was evil after reading this chapter. Snape is fleeing for his life with Draco and he still is trying to teach Potter, still trying to protect him. I remember reading this chapter the first time, in the wee hours of the morning, feverishly turning pages, re-reading the scene on the tower and then this one, going back & forth between the two chapters. Comparing the "revulsion and hatred" from one scene with the "demented, inhuman" look on his face, the pain visible there compared to the pain of a dog being burned alive.

Chapter 29: The Phoenix Lament. I'm mostly fine until I get to the scene when Fleur and Molly arrive in the hospital wing and have their moment. Then I cry and cry. I have neither really liked nor disliked Fleur, but at this moment I love her. "What do I care how 'e looks? I am good looking enough for both of us, I theenk." Indeed you are, Fleur. Indeed, you are. But can I just say here how much I hate the inconsistency of Fleur's speech? Sometimes she is capable of pronouncing a"th" or "h" and sometimes she is not?

Ach, I am out of time. But this book leaves me with an ache that the others don't, and not for the obvious reasons. No, instead I'm left wondering how and when the Snape/Harry story arc will be resolved, because in HBP, it's clear to me that theirs should have been the most important relationship in this series. And I don't mean that just because Snape is the most interesting character, but because of all of the layers of the story that would wrap up if they came to a true reconciliation. A reconciliation between Snape and Harry is a reconciliation between generations, it's a righting of past wrongs, it would come from a place of understanding instead of blind prejudice, and oh, shoot, I really am out of time and can go no further.

I'll just say this: that if you think Snape is as interesting a character as I do and would like to read some excellent fanfiction that beautifully addresses the Harry/Snape issue, please read Theowyn's Harry Potter and the Enemy Within. It's not slash, everybody stays in character, but it's a thoughtful exploration of the student/professor relationship and, to my mind, a better story for Harry's sixth year than HBP was.

Book Review: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2013-05-02T08:36:00.000-04:00

One of the best books I've read in the last decade was Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, published in 2006 and recreating a period of history about which I knew nothing, much to my shame: the Biafran war for independence in Nigeria. When I heard that Adichie had a new novel coming out this spring, I was very excited by the news.

It's difficult to compare Adichie's seminal novel with Americanah, her latest effort. This is a contemporary novel, splitting its time between Nigeria and America, with a brief and depressing detour into England for good measure. The writing is always good and frequently transcendent, and that's not an adjective I use lightly. It is a third person narration that mostly follows Ifemelu, a bright young Nigerian woman who jumps at the chance to study in America; after finding much struggle she finds both personal and professional success, but something still eludes her, so she returns to Nigeria. We also get a portrait of Obinze, the boy from university who loves Ifemelu but loses her through no fault of his own, and his subsequent sojourn to London as an illegal immigrant.

The third person narrative feels so intimate on occasion, though, that I had to double check and assure myself that it was not first person--that, as much as anything, is the true measure of how fine a writer Adichie truly is. She does everything right, as far as I'm concerned, and writers who are (lazily, in my opinion) compelled to write in first person, or use multiple narrators to tell their story, or worse, do either of those things while writing in present tense, could learn much from studying her prose and structure.

The first half of this novel is truly substantive, whether it's dealing with power and corruption in Nigeria, or the vagaries of racism in modern America. Adichie made me think of race in new ways while I was reading this, and of course her discourses on American Blacks vs Non-American Blacks (told via Ifemelu's blogposts) were fascinating and illuminating in equal measure. Whether it's Ifemelu's complicated relationships with her auntie, cousin, and boyfriends in the US, or with her family or Obinze back home in Nigeria, or whether she's casually expositing about race in America compared to a lack of race awareness in Nigeria, I found the first half of this book satisfyingly meaty--something I could really sink my teeth into. Whether I was reading the book over breakfast, on the airplane, or in a cafe in the French Quarter, I was immersed and loving it.

The second half of the book, however, is a bit of a disappointment, I'm sorry to confess, but that may have more to do with my expectations than it does with any real failure of the book. Once Ifemelu repatriates to Nigeria, and once her path crosses with Obinze's again, the book becomes much more about relationships than anything else. While I was expecting Great Things, hoping that Ifemelu would use her Life Experience to strike out on her own, raging against the machine for the rights of the downtrodden, she was mostly concerned with reuniting with Obinze, who in her absence, had married and had children.

The book ends with (Spoiler alert: please highlight the following text to read it) Obinze leaving his wife to be with Ifemelu, which gives the novel a tawdrier ending than I would have liked. I had no objections to their being together--in fact, I tend to root for happy relationships in fiction--but what I really wanted was for the novel to continue beyond that point, to tell me what extraordinary things they had done with their lives. I wanted to know that they used the strength of their combined love as a fulcrum to move the world and be a force for good, as they had been on their own in their separate lives.

Still, I want to make it clear that I was drawn into this novel emotionally in a way that I haven't been with the past few pieces of literary fiction I've reviewed. Adichie's writing is terrific, and a book like hers, even one whose ending disappoints, is still about a thousand times better than most of the drivel that gets published.

NB: This book has already been published in the UK and will be published by Knopf in the US on May 17, 2013. I read an advance reading copy provided to me at my request from my sales rep.

Last Month in Review: April 2013

2013-05-01T07:55:00.000-04:00

I saw this gif a few weeks ago while searching for the perfect Harry Potter gif for Alice's readalong. It's no more appropriate now than it was for Harry Potter, but it's so cute I had to use it. Found it here, but I don't think it's her image, either.

April was an entirely average reading month for me: a little fiction, two works of non-fiction, some audio books, some fan fiction, and even one e-book. I am thankful because I think my temporary reading slump is behind me. In chronological order:

1. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Excellent work of literary fiction. Slightly disappointing ending.

2 & 3. The Way We Get By and Drop Dead Gorgeous by Maya/Mistful. These are, without a doubt, some of the finest pieces of Harry Potter fanfiction that I've ever read. Humorous and angsty and romantic in equal measure. If you can find them, read them. This is a pair of novel-length twin stories.

4. The Son by Philipp Meyer. Review here. Excellent but troubling epic set in Texas.

5. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris. His trademark humor. Very good. Review here.

6. The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells byAndrew Sean Greer. The writing was good, but I never did cotton to the author's time travel justifications.

7. A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy. I listened to this audio book in my car. Review here.

8. Anne of Avonlea by L M Montgomery. Re-read this book for the nth time, this time as an e-book. Still love this story.

9. Mom and Me and Mom by Maya Angelou. Another audio book, which I hope to review one of these days.

10. The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn. Debut novel, rich with atmosphere and full of promise. And it has a great story behind its publication. Incidentally, Matthew used to be a customer of mine when I worked at Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, MS.

What about you? What did you read last month that you loved?

Book Review: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

2013-04-29T07:34:00.000-04:00

It's difficult to summarize a book like Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, or more precisely, to summarize it and make it sound as interesting as it really is.

Nora is a woman on the cusp of turning forty who fancied herself an artist during her high school and college years, and is thus dismayed with herself two decades later when she is still teaching elementary school. That is, until a certain family moves into town and she falls a little bit in love with all of them and with the potential that each one--mother, father, and son--represents to Nora.

Nora narrates the book in first person, looking back on her life from her formative years through college and onward, but spending most of her time relating in precise detail what her mundane life was like Before and After. That is, before and after Reza Shahid becomes one of her students and she gets to know his parents, Skandar and Sirena, a couple whose Lebanese-Italian background, by way of France, seems exciting and exotic even in worldly Cambridge, MA.

I had never read Claire Messud before, so I came to this book with no particular expectations, and I ended up being blown away with her insight and sense of language. The writing is frequently gorgeous and my advance reading copy is full of dog-eared pages. I think what stands out most, however, is Nora's voice. Nora is a woman whose slow-burning anger has reached a tipping point, and the narrative sears with a rage that is so incandescent that it illuminates her specific character but also Every Woman. It feels thoroughly modern, but as my coworker Caitlin rightly pointed out to me in a discussion one day, there's also a very classic, almost timeless, feel to it. As if The Woman Upstairs, given a change of setting, could just as easily have been penned by Mary Wollstonecraft or Virginia Woolf or any woman whose life is circumscribed by her time.

Nora's voice is searing, to be sure, but she casts her same critical gaze inward, too, so this is not just a world-done-me-wrong narrative, but also a hard look at the choices she has made for herself, learning to live with those choices, and deciding which ones are worth the time, effort, or courage to change.

Some sample passages for the flavor of the writing, including some where she invokes the Reader, like Jane Eyre does in her narrative:

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I was in love with her--which I was--but in a romantic way--which I was not. You're thinking, how would I know whether I was romantically in love, I whose apparently nonexistent love life would suggest a prudish vacancy, uterus shriveled like a corn husk and withered dugs for breasts. You're thinking that whatever else she does, the Woman Upstairs with her cats and her pots of tea and her Sex and the City reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog, the woman with her class of third graders, and her carefully pearly smile--whatever else she manages, she doesn't have a love life to speak of. Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is (69)?"

Regarding herself and the members of the Shahid family: "Each of them wanted something, and their wanting made me believe that I was capable. Not that I was an extraordinary woman, exactly, but only not exactly that. Something quite like that. Which always since childhood I had secretely wanted to believe--no: had always in my most deeply secret self believed, knowing that the believing itself was a necessary precondition...My lifelong secret certainty of specialness, my precious hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would (119)."

And this little bit, which somehow reminds me of part of Eliot's Four Quartets: "With the distance I have now, I can see that it was one small thought among all the other thoughts that drift like dust motes through a cluttered mind. But it was a thought I made an object, and held on to and turned over and over in my hand, as if it were an amulet, as if it gave meaning to what had come before; and holding on to it changed everything again (135)."

"I was happy. I was Happy, indeed. I was in love with love and every lucky parking spot or particularly tasty melon or unexpectedly abbreviated staff meeting seemed to me not chance but an inevitable manifestation of the beauty of my life, a beauty that I had, on account of my lack of self-knowledge, been up till now unable to see (141)."

This book was a fine, fine read and if there is any justice in this literary world, it will make both the year-end Best Of 2013 lists as well as the awards circuit when the times come.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book provided to me at my request by my sales rep. Knopf published it last week.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: Readalong Part Deux

2013-04-26T11:39:00.001-04:00

My various Harry Potter editions:some UK, some US, some Spanish, some audios

Since I didn't do the reading this week, I planned on not posting anything. But then I started reading Rayna's and Ally's posts and felt like it was too much fun to miss out on. This will be very brief and slanted and mostly based on my memories of my last read-through a couple of years ago. Thanks, as always, to Alice for hosting this read along, for it is THE BEST.

Chapter Nine: Rayna has already pointed this out, but it's one of my favorite Neville moments in the book, when Minerva recognizes Neville's worth: "It's high time your grandmother of the grandson she's got..." We've been on the Neville Appreciation Bandwagon all along; it's nice to see some textual support for that finally happening.

Parvati has a crush on Firenze, which must have inspired some truly raunchy fan fiction. Hmmm...best not to think on that too long.

Snape's introduction to DADA: The man was poetically passionate about potions, but now that he's teaching DADA, he's poetically passionate AND insinuating danger with every syllable. Makes me wonder all sorts of things, but mostly makes me wonder how the world would collectively feel about Severus Snape if this story had been told from a non-Gryffindor's POV.

Oy, clearly I'm spending too much time with this. That's three points for the first chapter we read, and I'm not even through...must move faster.

Chapter Ten: Poor, poor Merope.

Chapter Eleven: Hermione, that confundus charm is beneath you. It seems odd to me that she doesn't consider that explicit cheating when later in the book she's very upset when she thinks Harry used the Felix Felicis in quidditch.

Chapter Twelve: I'm glad to see that Minerva isn't ready to jump on the anti-Draco bandwagon because of the flimsy testimony Harry gives her; however the irony kills me because this time Draco actually is up to something terrible. I'm so conflicted. Well done, JKR.

Chapter Thirteen: Speaking of conflicted, I'm generally pretty conflicted about young Tom Riddle. I think it's rather unfair for JKR to harp on that whole "it's not what we are, but our choices, that define us" angle when Tom is clearly born a sociopath. I'm not an expert on the subject, but it's my impression that the true sociopath is incapable of working within the strictures of a normal, moral society, so in this case, young Tom never had a choice, per se. How much more powerful a villain would he be, then, if Tom had not been born that way, but had chosen to become that? I don't mean to make light of the terrible things that Tom has already done in his young life, or what he will grow up to do, but I think JRK's authorial intent is a little bit misguided here.

Tom Riddle, Jr: Born This Way

Also, Dumbledore doesn't like Tom, and he has a bad feeling about him, but how on earth can it have been the smart choice to send a muggle-raised child to Diagon Alley on his own? For the first time? It can't have been.

"The mouth organ was only ever a mouth organ." SO much homo-erotic subtext to that statement, no?

Chapter Fifteen: Unbreakable vows. Luna's general awesomeness. Taking down the ministry via unexpected channels like gum disease. That's like defeating the Mayor of Sunnydale with hummus.

I'm out of time now. Can't look up more gifs, cannot respond to Ron's being poisoned. Or talk about cauldrons full of hot, strong love that need to be stirred. But it's funny that Harry remembers the bezoar from his first potions class, isn't it? Oh, and Wilkie Twycross, whose name I inevitably end up saying as either Twycwoss or Trycross. But enough for now...

Walkin' Round New Orleans, or Where NOT To Stand for the Gay Easter Parade

2013-04-25T07:45:00.000-04:00

Image found here

Our last full day in New Orleans was beautiful--sunny, high 70s--albeit with ultra high humidity. I've been living outside the South for so long that it was actually a treat to experience it, but I had no great love of near-100% humidity when I lived in Mississippi. We had started the day with a three-course Easter breakfast at Brennan's. Unfortunately, whilst descending the stairs after eating, I looked a lot like the above gif, except, you know, with less prancing at the start. Bruised dignity and some later soreness aside, I was fine. But I do seem to have a habit of falling in New Orleans after breakfast.

I promise: I hadn't had the soup of the day when I fell

AW, Carla, and I went back to the hotel to change into some more comfortable clothing & shoes and hit the town again, popping into any little store, gallery, or boutique that looked interesting and pausing to listen to many of the street musicians. I made a few photos along the way, keeping my fingers crossed that we might run into Kora Guy before the afternoon was over.

Your guess is as good as mine

This boutique was giving out tiny cups of some kind of daiquiri

We paused once, mid afternoon, to grab a cold beverage and sample the wares of La Divina Gelateria, which lived up to its name. An Orangina and some cucumber & mint sorbet were even more refreshing than a turn about the room, and we were happy to sit down for a few minutes in the shade of the buildings that surround the cathedral. Shortly after abandoning our table, we finally saw Kora Guy, where I made a short video and bought one of his CDs for DH, who loves the kora as much as I do.

La Divina Gelateria

Kora Guy

We were also pleased to learn that there were two Easter parades in the Quarter that day, so we planned our afternoon around the latter one, the Gay Easter Parade, which dovetailed with the Easter Bonnet Contest. We saw the tail end of the first parade when leaving Brennan's that morning, and were looking forward to seeing the Gay Easter Parade as it snaked its way down Bourbon. Unfortunately, I didn't pay quite enough attention to is starting point, so I led Carla & AW astray. We stood for close to an hour on an elevated stoop on Bourbon street that we figured would be the perfect vantage point for the parade. And it would have been, had we been on the parade route. As it was, we saw a few people who were on their way to compete for the Easter Bonnet Contest.

We stood on the stoop here for the parade that never was.

But at least this nice woman let me take her picture

Dinner that night was at NOLA, one of Emeril's restaurants in New Orleans and one which came highly recommended from Carla & AW's friend, Kathleen, who said it was her favorite meal of the week. Our reservation was at 6:15, which is a tad earlier than we would have preferred, but it was either that or a seating at 8:30, which was too late, so we simply made do.

The restaurant is a converted warehouse and has the industrial decor that seems to be so trendy these days. Our primary server was a little smarmy and reminded me quite viscerally of the laundry detergent ad director guy at the end of the Calendar Girls movie, especially the way he'd say, "Hello, ladies." Our bread guy, who told us to call him "Bread Guy," was terrific, though, and we eventually got it out of him that his friends called him Bud.

Carla & me at NOLA

Once more, there weren't a ton of vegetarian options on the menu, so AW made do with ordering a salad and a couple of sides; there was a vegetarian special that night not on the regular menu, but for some reason that I no longer recall, it didn't appeal to her. Carla ordered a BBQ shrimp & smoky cheese grits dish that I really loved, but it's worth noting here that BBQ shrimp in Nawlins-speak usually means pretty spicy and not at all what most people think of as BBQ. I still remember the fire in my mouth from the first time I ordered a BBQ shrimp po-boy in New Orleans. I opted for a simple salad, followed by the small plate of duck confit & fried egg pizza. They were both good but nothing out of the ordinary. We were pretty full so we opted to take dessert back to the hotel to eat--we chose the pina colada cheesecake dessert special because we thought it would travel well, and it was fine but nothing special. I'm afraid that I mislaid the receipt from NOLA, so I cannot recall what our dinner came to, but I left thinking that our meal was pretty good but nothing approaching extraordinary.

The BBQ shrimp & smoky cheese grits

The duck confit & fried egg pizza

We got back to the hotel room and Carla presented me with a gift that I LOVED: a t-shirt promoting literacy in the city of Memphis proclaiming, "I like big books and I cannot lie." So true. Thanks, Carla!

We wanted to make our last night, well, last, so we stayed up talking as late as we could. It's tremendously difficult being separated from my best friends from high school, especially when they both live in the same city (Memphis) and even work together, so it's vitally important to me to have these get-togethers, come what may.

Coming up next: my last morning in New Orleans, plus some concluding thoughts from our trip.

Book Giveaways: I Haz Them.

2013-04-23T08:01:00.000-04:00

Found here

The first one I shall call the All Zelda, All the Time giveaway:

A couple of months ago I read Z and was surprisingly drawn into it. As I say in my review, I wasn't aware of loving it while I was reading it, but there was something about the book that made me want to take action. It prompted me to locate a copy of Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald so that I can give her her due, and not a lot of books provoke action like that. I haven't read Call Me Zelda, so I cannot comment on that one, but considering the Zelda-Hemingway antagonism, it seems ironic that the author of Hemingway's Girl wrote it. Anyway, I shall give advance reading copies of these two books away in a package deal. This giveaway is open only to US and Canada.

My other giveaway is for a book with a little bit of everything sensational in it. If you happen to be looking for a book that has a religious cult, arson, polygamy, incest, the Dust Bowl, illiteracy, motor accidents, and love, look no further. You can read more about it in my review, but let's just say that these characters will not be the poster children for mental stability any time soon. This is also a paperback advance reading copy of the book, but I am willing to ship this one anywhere in the world if it costs me no more than US $20.

To enter, just be a follower of my blog and leave a comment below on which giveaway you're interested in. For purpose of closure, let's say that the giveaway is open through the end of April.

New Orleans, Where You Can Get Lit AND Lit at Breakfast

2013-04-22T07:17:00.000-04:00

Breakfast at Brennan's has been a time-honored New Orleans tradition for many decades, and one in which we were happy to participate for Easter Sunday brunch. It's hard not to love a place (by which I mean both the city and the restaurant) where it would be unusual not to drink and set your food on fire. At breakfast.

A sculpture of their signature rooster in the courtyard

So we were a tiny bit dismayed when we arrived at Brennan's for our 10:30 am reservation (no second breakfast nonsense this time around) to have our cheerful "Good morning!" greeting be returned rather curtly by a harried-looking host. We were directed with an impatiently pointed finger to wait at the bar or in the courtyard for our table until they were ready for us. Far cry from our reception at Commander's Palace the day before, where everything was the epitome of graciousness!

About 10 minutes later we were led to an upstairs table in a nondescript room. Again, minor disappointment compared to the charming ambience of Commander's garden room. Lest you're afraid this will be nothing but a woe-betide-me review, fear not. Our primary server, Dan, was highly personable, and the food itself was amazing.

AW and Carla

AW avec moi

Making our selections for the 3-course breakfast was daunting--even AW had the luxury of two different delicious-sounding vegetarian entrees. AW and I started off with a cocktail called the Fleur de Lis, an exotic combination of champagne, Lillet Blonde, and Grand Marnier, and though they were very elegant, I was a little disappointed in the taste.

Baked apple--the photo is quite deceiving!

I eventually settled on the baked apple, the Eggs Hussarde, which is one of their signature dishes, and Bananas Foster, another signature dish. My mama didn't raise no fool! While I was fully expecting to enjoy all of it, I was really blown away by the baked apple, served in double cream, and topped with the caramelized sugar from the baking process. It doesn't look like much in the above photo, but it was one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth--which just goes to show that sometimes what's simple is what's best.

Eggs Hussarde

Eggs Ellen

AW chose the Eggs Portuguese, which is a flaky pastry with poached eggs, tomatoes and gravy and other good things, while Carla opted for Eggs Ellen, a salmon, poached eggs, and Hollandaise concoction. My Hussarde was similar to a traditional Benedict, but with a richer marchand de vin sauce. I liked it very much, but I don't think it was as good as the Eggs Sardou that I'd had there on a previous visit.

Bananas Foster. Again, not pretty, but absolutely fabulous!

Dessert is the course where Brennan's shines, quite literally. There are at least two flambé options and ordered both of them: Bananas Foster (x2) and the Crepes Fitzgerald. I wonder how many flambé carts the restaurant owns, because we saw several "performances" during our visit. Dan gave the most animated and engaging performance--some of the other servers in the room did it rather perfunctorily.

Here's Dan performing with our Bananas Foster

Another server with a different table's flambé

Our bill was about $50 less overall than our experience the day before at Commander's Palace, but that's simply because our alcohol bill was significantly reduced. The food prices were comparable. On the way out, we overheard one employee say that they were serving 1,100 people for brunch that day, which may go a little way to excuse the harried greeting we had upon arrival. That would be an impressive enough number if Brennan's put on a buffet brunch, but for a 3-course, full service meal? Hard to imagine.

Book Review: A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy

2013-04-20T12:12:00.001-04:00

I had never read Maeve Binchy before and had no real intentions of starting, but I somehow ended up on a mailing list for Random House Audio, and now those good folks send me a few audiobooks each month. Or at least, for the last two months. I sure hope it continues!

Knowing very little about the book or the writer, other than she died last year and wrote the book Circle of Friends, the movie adaptation of which I have seen, I didn't really know what to expect, beyond the vague notion of Something Irish. A Week in Winter is the story of several disparate characters who come together for a holiday week at a place called Stone House in the west of Ireland (A-ha! I was right!). Each chapter tells the story of a different character, sometimes beginning in childhood, sometimes picking up in adulthood, and the reader learns of their hopes/dreams/aspirations. Something happens to each character, ranging in scale from mild to pretty intense, that, conveniently enough, only their time at Stone House can heal.

Some of the characters were quite interesting, especially Chicky Starr, the Irish woman who returns to her homeland after a few decades in the US, nursing a secret and looking for a way back to her roots. It is she who purchases Stone House and turns it into a charming inn, despite having no background in the hospitality industry. She entered into the enterprise so naively that I had to quite forcefully suspend my disbelief, but I enjoyed her character nonetheless. I would have greatly preferred that the book followed her instead of devoting each chapter to a new character, incorporating the stories each new guest who stayed at Stone House in a more organic way.

The audio reader, Rosalyn Landor, was perfectly serviceable. I would have preferred a greater differentiation in accents, as the people from Ireland, America, England, and Sweden all sounded roughly the same, but she rendered her male voices pretty well (I find that voicing a gender opposite of one's own is the hardest to do convincingly, among the scores of audio readers I've listened to).

I don't think ever would have purchased this book to read, but I am often willing to listen to audio versions of books I would never pick up, so in that case I'm happy to have listened to it. A Week in Winter is not the book for me, but I can think of a lot of people for whom it would be. If you don't mind reading books with a constantly shifting point of view, and if you tend to enjoy stories where nothing truly terrible happens and it all works out in the end, this just may be the book for you. In light of the events in Boston this week, that might hold a greater appeal than usual right now.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Part the First

2013-04-19T07:43:00.000-04:00

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is one of my favorite books in the series -- it's got the most Snape action, you see. It's been several long weeks since I fully participated in Alice's Harry Potter Readalong, so I'm very happy to have the time to do it this week. She is officially the bestest for hosting it.

Chapter One: Info dump. Bor-ing. Though I always enjoy getting chapters written without the dubious benefit of the Harry Filter.

Chapter Two: I think we can all agree that this chapter is made of undiluted awesomeness. If I didn't already love Snape, this chapter would still make me swoon. Bellatrix's passionate hatred met with Snape's snarky parries each time. "Of course, you weren't a lot of use to him in prison, but the gesture was undoubtedly fine." And the interplay between Bella and Narcissa--so terrible, so revealing about each sister. There's very little I don't love about this chapter. But it makes me wish quite desperately that Narcissa had reached out to her other sister before it was too late. I think it's clear that Narcissa has no allegiance to the Dark Lord at this point--her not reconciling with Andromeda is one of the missed opportunities in this series that makes me most sad.

Chapter Three: So much good stuff in here, and I'm not saying the Dursleys don't deserve it for their legacy of abuse toward Harry, but it seems to me that Dumbledore is engaging in a bit of muggle-baiting here.They're terrified of Dumbledore and don't trust to eat or drink anything from a wizard, thanks to the twins, but the glasses of mead keep rapping against their heads in an increasingly violent manner. Poor form, Dumbledore. Poor form. But the phrase "but sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often" is pure gold. But this one is one of my favorites in the entire series:

Chapter Four: How did Dumbledore know that Slughorn was still there, transfigured? Does he know Slughorn's style so well, or is it that he was picking up on some sort of magical signature from his black, deadened hand? Probably both.

Chapter Five: Mollywobbles. I don't even want to know what bits of Molly that were so appealingly wobbly that Arthur made it his pet name for her.

Chapter Six: U-NO-POO. Those twins, bless 'em.

Every time I think of Hermione as brilliant, she does something so insanely un-thought out that I want to shake her. Trying to learn more about that opal necklace is one of those times. But of course her foibles make her much more real than most of the other characters.

Chapter Seven: As if we didn't know Neville's sexual status of virgin, he proudly declares that his wand is made of cherry and unicorn hair. If Book Neville looked like Film Neville, this joke would be meaningless.

But on to more serious matters: Luna. Oh, Luna. Harry, you're blind not to value her as much as you value Ron and Hermione. Neville, too, for that matter. But at least in this book you're learning, vis a vis his response to Romilda Vane.

Also Chapter Seven: Who the hell throws a luncheon party on a train like that? Slughorn fawns over Harry the way Lockheart used to fawn over himself. But at least Ginny keeps on being the coolest kid on the block, so there's that.

Okay, seriously. There's something I have to say.

Too good not to use past OotP

If I could turn back time: the Weasley twins are this generation's Marauders. I missed out on most of the OotP discussion, so please pardon my digression. If y'all did discuss this, please let me know so that I can check out your posts and respond in the appropriate places.

Anyway, I think we have a pretty good idea what James & Sirius might be like if we had the chance to read their stories: Fred & George. I've always liked the twins' comic relief in the series, and though I think the application of their intelligence is often misguided, I think they may be the smartest characters in the series. Perhaps even moreso than Hermione, but I'm not 100 % certain. Anyway, they blithely stuff Montague in a broken vanishing cabinet for the sake of 10 house points. Maybe a total of twenty (10 per twin). A broken vanishing cabinet where he could have died of dehydration or starvation, I might add (In the twins's own words: "That could take weeks. I dunno where we sent him."). And while Umbridge no doubt would have expelled both of them for far less, I'm not at all convinced that Dumbledore would have. So there you have the parallel: two bright Gryffindor boys who value their own cleverness almost condemn to death a Slytherin boy. Montague had to try to apparate out of it. Since you cannot apparate on Hogwarts grounds, one can only imagine how he managed to do that... ("he nearly died doing it," Malfoy will tell us later in this book). Fred and George might not have known precisely what would happen to Montague, but it's clear that they knew something would. Weeks? A student missing for weeks?! But if it's just a Slytherin, then it doesn't really matter, does it?

JK Rowling claims to be anti-bully and that's why she doesn't like Snape, but it seems she can overlook terrible bullying in her Golden Gryffindors. (True: a teacher bullying a student is a different magnitude from a student bullying another student, but why are all of the exceptions made for Gryffindors?

Book Review: The Son by Philipp Meyer

2013-04-17T08:04:00.000-04:00

It took me quite a while to work my way through The Son. Partly this was because I picking up and putting down lots of other books between my readings of it, and partly because the book gets off to such a violent and wrenching start that I had to take it in very small doses.

But let me back up. If I had only one sentence to describe this book, I don't think I could improve upon this one-sentence summary from the publisher: a "multigenerational saga of power, blood, and land that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the border raids of the early 1900s to the oil boom of the 20th century."

This book is powerful and fierce and extremely well written. Cormac McCarthy seems to be the writer to whom most other reviewers are comparing Philipp Meyer, and I get that. I really do. If you're a writer of literary fiction that features the American west, and if you don't shy away from depicting the violence of that time and place, then comparisons with Cormac McCarthy are inevitable. I, however, find more of Philip Caputo's mark in Meyer's book than I do McCarthy's. That is, there is a stronger, driving narrative at work here, and Meyer seems far more concerned in moving his story along than he is in dazzling the reader with stunning but circuitous prose.

The Son jumps back and forth in narrative and time frame, and I was thankful more than once to have the McCullough family tree listed in the front of the book. The three primary narrators are, in birth order: Eli McCullough; Eli's son, Peter; and Eli's great-granddaughter, Jeanne Anne (J.A.). We get points of view ranging from Peter's journal entries to Eli's more straightforward first person narrative to the third person omniscient sections about Jeanne Anne.

Eli is by far the most compelling character, and most complicated to boot--both in terms of his life and my feelings towards him. Terrible things happen to him and to his family, but in turn he exacts some pretty dastardly violence on other characters. Kidnaped by Comanches as a boy and forced to endure the torture and slaughter of his mother, sister, and brother, he eventually becomes part of their band. When a few years later terrible straits necessitate his return to the white man's life, he is utterly self-aware of how ill-suited he is to this world. Adrift and caught between two very different codes of honor, he makes his own rules, and woe betide those who stand in his way, be they friend or foe. The world, however, soon takes him to be man of action and a man of honor. I'd say they're only half-right.

Peter seems to be the least reliable narrator, but that might be because he is the character I have the least use for and thus I am inclined to dismiss him. His father's life of action completely overshadows and unmakes him. In his diary he pretends disgust regarding the wholesale slaughter of their neighbor and his entire extended family, but not so much that he actually does anything to keep it from happening. Still, the very act of journaling seems to expiate him of his guilt. If he records that he feels such unease, then it must make him a better man than his fellows.

Jeanne Anne, while not likable, still managed to elicit my sympathy as a woman competing in a man's world in Texas in the 1950s and later decades. Dismissed by her father and buoyed through adolescence only with the misty memories of her great-grandfather Eli's fondness for her, she is an interesting mix of traditional and modern. Sharp-minded and sharp-tongued in a time and place where neither was valued in a woman.

These people are largely unlikeable, but their collective story is certainly a compelling one. I was always aware while reading The Son that it was a good book, but it was really only when I came to the end that I realized just how good it was. I didn't love it, but somehow that feels completely irrelevant in the face of what Philipp Meyer has accomplished. He has de-romanticized the West as many people think of it, laying bare the basest of our collective instincts without lionizing any of them. And it's about here that I get into discussions of authorial intent with my coworkers--I feel that Meyer makes it clear for the reader just what a complicated piece of work that Eli and his family are, while at the same time Eli's peers have romanticized and lionized his life and actions. I don't think Eli labors under any illusions of himself, though.

Some passages I noted:

Jeanne Anne: "People made no sense to her. Men, with whom she had everything in common, did not want her around. Women, with whom she had nothing in common, smiled too much, laughed too loud, and mostly reminded her of small dogs, their lives lost in interior decorating, other people's outfits, and proper seating at parties. There had never been a place for a person like her (7)."

Jeanne Anne again: "She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins attached to her name...The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they'd press a button on a wall to get warm. They hated big oil, they hated Texas. But life as they knew it did not exist without Texas (85)."

Peter: "It occurred to me, as I watched the oil flow down the hill, that soon there will be nothing left to subdue the pride of men. There is nothing we will not have mastered, except, of course, ourselves (400)."

Eli: "You could butcher and pillage but as long as you did it to protect people you loved, it never mattered. You did not see the Comanches with the long stare--there was nothing they did that was not to protect their friends or their families, or their band. The war sickness was a disease of the white man, who fought in armies far from his home, for men he didn't know, and there is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling and was seen as such, and treated with suspicion (435)."

I would not say that this book, as a rule, is humorous, but every once in a while it slyly sneaks in there, such as in these passages:

Eli: "Over many of the wagon trains heading west, away from the war, the Confederate flag could be seen flying proudly. They were in favor of the war as long as they did not have to fight it themselves, and I have always thought that is why California turned out the way it did (445)."

Jeanne Anne, on older men with younger lovers: "She wondered what it would be like to look into the mirror and see yourself, white haired, slough skinned, your wilting everything and uncountable skin tags; right next to some perfect young specimen of the human race. On the other hand, they were men. They likely thought their fiber drinks and sagging bellies were just as fine as cream gravy (545)."

This is one of those commitment books--if you decide to read it, it's going to take a goodly amount commitment on your part. But I think that if you're the kind of reader who likes to sink your teeth into an old-fashioned, epic-length book chock full of complications and contradictions and darn good writing, this is exactly the kind of book that you'll admire.

NB: I read an advance reader's edition of this book provided by my sales rep at my request. Ecco will publish the book in June 2013.

Pulitzer 2013, or Thank Goodness They Picked a Winner This Time

2013-04-16T08:05:00.000-04:00

Pulitzer winner, fiction

The moments during the Pulitzer announcements were fun today--and they were the last peaceful moments before I heard about the bombs in Boston. My coworkers, Caitlin & Nieves, and I had some fun wagers going over which fiction titles we thought might make the cut. Not only that, but we were preparing unpleasant voodoo doll torture to the Pulitzer committee if they decided to pull a stunt like last year and not award any prize for fiction.

I walked around the store prior to the announcements, considering some of my favorite fiction from last year and reviewing my store's First Edition Club picks. My list's frontrunner, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk didn't even make the shortlist, much to my surprise. It was both a personal and odds-on favorite for the award considering its award history. And of course I gave a nod to Louise Erdrich's The Round House for its previous showing in award season. Again, not a finalist.

Pulitzer finalist

I was quite surprised at the announcement of The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson -- not, I rush to qualify, because I didn't think the content deserved it, but because it doesn't adhere to that last little bit of Pulitzer-speak, "preferably dealing with American life." I actually had read it back in the fall of 2011 (mini review here) and I had considered putting it and the other finalist, Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (my mini review of it is here), which I eliminated from my laminated list for being a story collection. Shows what I know. I happen to admire both of these books when I read them, and they were both selections for our First Editions Club, so I imagine that our members are pretty happy about the news today. And just for the record, I happen to think that the hardcover design of The Orphan Master's Son is infinitely superior to the paperback's design.

Pulitzer finalist

Kudos go to my coworker Caitlin, who was the only staff member in our store who put The Snow Child on her list. Plus, isn't that a fun cover? I really am drawn to it. Still haven't read that one yet, but I've got a signed ARC around somewhere that I should track down...

What about y'all? Were you surprised with the results or were you expecting those titles to win all along? What books were you hoping would win that didn't?

Book Review: Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

2013-04-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

Oh, my goodness. I've been in a bit of a book-reading slump lately. I say "book-reading" not to be redundant but rather to differentiate from my fanfic reading, which has most decidedly not been in a recent slump. Up until today, it was taking me on average about three weeks to finish a single book, not least because I was actively reading about a dozen different ones and making no good headway in any of them.

Today, though, I began and finished David Sedaris' wonderful new essay collection, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. Maybe it's because it was purely fun to read and not something I had to read for work is what did the trick, but my goodness, I was positively chortling through most of it. Much to my husband's and my cats's dismay; the former because he actually has to do work today and the latter because it's much more difficult for them to sleep on my lap when I'm doubled over and shaking with laughter.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sedaris once when he was on tour for Me Talk Pretty One Day, a terrible day in July in Jackson, MS, when the store's air conditioning wasn't working and there were no windows to open. He was a serious trouper and very good natured about it, and for which I admired him. Since then, I've listened to most of his books on audio, and a couple of years ago at the same bookstore, I attended another reading: this one in the comfort of air conditioning, accompanied by $2 beers. Sedaris told a bizarre poo-in-hand story that prompted me to write one of my favorite blogposts [because apparently I never moved beyond the scatological phase, developmentally speaking], which you can find here.)

That same night, I remember that my husband and I were the first to laugh at one of jokes in his "book titles that take on a whole new meaning when you remove one letter" sketch: The Count of Monte Cristo. Since it was in Mississippi, perhaps the crowd initially went to Crisco (which admittedly isn't all that funny) and it wasn't until Sedaris, waiting for the other shoe to drop, kept saying, with emphasis, The *Count* of Monte Cristo. At which point the crowd just hooted.

Speaking of owls, I loved this book. I almost wasted a perfectly good cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee over breakfast this morning by snorting most of it through my nose. My husband, driven to distraction, actually had to crank up his music in the studio today while working in order to drown out my laughter. (Though this gesture somehow loses some of its potency since it was Sibelius he was cranking up.)

As with any collection, some pieces are stronger than others, and I particularly loved "Author, Author" and "Laugh, Kookaburra." There are some darker, "imagined pieces" (for lack of a better term, since "fiction" doesn't quite fit) in between the first person essays/anecdotes that sometimes veered beyond Sedaris' traditional balance of humor and sardonicism into uncomfortable territory.

Anyway, here are some passages that spoke to me. Maybe they'll speak to you, too.

On things he wants to say to parents when their children are being obnoxiously whiny: "Listen, I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap the child across the face. It won't stop its crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason."

On those creepy old men at church who constantly ask young people if they're dating yet: "[They'd] even refer to newborn babies as "lady-killers" and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn't enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone."

"Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it's there but for the life of him doesn't understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but I still don't get it. Why take chances with money?"

On mocking people: "It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, 'Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.' If [the person's] criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she was just being petty and judgmental, then we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks." (Oh, God, that's so true of me, too, that I read the passage twice and was embarrassed for both Sedaris and myself.)

Sedaris doesn't pull any punches when it comes to his observations of human behavior. He must be uncomfortable to live with sometimes, but then he turns around and skewers himself with the same sense of vicious patheticism and I think, "well, okay, then."

NB: Little Brown will publish Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls later this month. I read an advance reading copy that was provided at my request from my sales rep. I will probably seek the audio version, too, for my car so I can enjoy it all over again!

New Orleans (cont'd)

2013-04-14T10:29:00.000-04:00

So, if you're just tuning in: in my previous New Orleans post, we were rolling ourselves in from second breakfast at Commander's Palace...we get back to the hotel and change into our Walking Around Clothes (as opposed to our Gussied Up For Special Meal clothes). Most importantly this involves a change of footwear: the sidewalks and streets are notoriously uneven, so you need comfortable and sturdy shoes. And despite the heat, I tend to wear closed-toe shoes because I have a pretty good idea of what comprises the puddles in parts of the Quarter--let's just say it's not primarily rainwater.

Alley view of St. Louis cathedral

Anyway, we walk around, listen to music, browse in shops, and in general bemoan the fact that we ate so much. We poke into the small but charming Faulkner House Books in Pirate's Alley behind the cathedral. I once bought a first printing of Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust there--near fine, in a very good dust jacket. Spent more money than I had, but the book has gone up in value since then, so I feel quietly justified. In a completely out of character move, I left without buying anything, first edition or otherwise, but did take some photos.

I believe this entire case is filled with Faulkner first editions.

The beautiful fiction section in Faulkner House Books

My friend Carla buys shoes the same way I buy books: with impeccable taste and great abandon. So when we found a store called Shoe-Be-Do, she was in heaven. I was mostly agog at the designs (and prices). I would swear that some of those shoes were more architectural wonders than something to adorn the feet. I was pleasantly surprised that in the back they had actually had some Walking Around Shoes. I tried on a pair, and while the sole felt divine, the straps caught under my outside ankle
in a decidedly abrading way.

I mean, really: who could wear these?

It was hard to drag Carla away from ShoeBeDo, but there were other stores calling our names. Along the way, I was pleasantly surprised to see the fellow I hereby dub Kora Guy playing on one of the street corners. We paused to listen for a while, at which point he mentioned that he had CDs for sale for $15. Feeling oddly shy, I walked away, but before I gained the following block I was feeling full of regret. I vowed that if our paths crossed again that I would buy one.

Kora Guy

Eventually we wandered back to the hotel room to rest a bit and freshen up--not for dinner, as we were feeling decidedly antagonistic towards food. But our friend Patrick came over again, so we visited for a couple of hours in the air conditioned confines of our room before heading out again. Carla was feeling a little ill, and also had a ton of work to do, so she stayed behind while Patrick, AW, and I ventured out. Here is where things became a little comical. AW is a vegetarian, all I wanted was a light salad or maybe some fresh veggies, and Patrick, who is at the best of times a somewhat picky eater, had given up breads and pastas for Lent. You'd think that in one of the culinary capitals of the US that we might be spoiled for choice, but that's where you'd be wrong. We walked around for nearly two hours looking for a place where we might all sit down together to eat, but we found nothing. As I noted before, New Orleans is surprisingly vegetarian un-friendly.

Cafe du Monde

Naturally we wound up at the one place where we said at the beginning of the night we wouldn't go: Cafe du Monde. I think our exact words were, "Ugh--fried dough. WAY too heavy after our other meals today. Let's go anywhere but Cafe du Monde." Poor Patrick had to content himself with a large chocolate milk. I tried to make my meal a bit more healthful by getting milk and fresh-squoze orange juice. (You may say squeezed if you like. I prefer squoze, with a nod to Jill Conner Browne.)

Anne Walton and I were actually debating sharing one order of beignets (they come 3/order), then wondered aloud who we were trying to fool? Of course we couldn't share an order. That would just be silly. I mean, why hold back now?

Covered in a light but comprehensive dusting of powdered sugar, we walked back to the hotel, laughing and carrying on, while I was keeping a stealth eye (and ear) out for Kora Guy. No joy. I'd have to keep my fingers crossed for the next day. And by that, I mean Easter Sunday, where we had 10:30 reservations for another three-course brunch at Brennan's. Tune in next time for flaming breakfasts, outrageous Easter bonnets, and where not to stand for watching the French Quarter Gay Easter Parade.

New Orleans: Second Breakfast is the Most Important Meal of the Day

2013-04-12T08:10:00.000-04:00

Sunrise over the rooftops: the view from our room

New Orleans is a not a city for dieters. Nor is it a destination for picky eaters. There is great food--seriously great food--in abundance, but it's usually the type of food that requires the hoisting of oneself from the table afterwards.

Because my friends's friend stayed in town an extra night just to meet up with us, the least we could do was meet up with her for first breakfast on Saturday morning. She didn't want to go to Cafe Du Monde (quel horreur!), so we walked to her hotel in the Central Business District instead. We had no idea until we walked in that it was one of John Besh's restaurants: Luke. Naturally we made much of the "I am your father" and other Star Wars jokes. We even saw the man himself walk through a couple of times--I wouldn't have figured that he would be on premises.

Knowing that I had to pace myself for our second breakfast at Commander's Palace, I ordered a short stack of pancakes with pecan honey butter, which were quite good. The coffee was French press and also quite good, and we all enjoyed ourselves very much.

Before long, it was time to say goodbye to Kathleen and hie ourselves back to Canal Street to catch the streetcar (please do not call it a trolley) to the Garden District. Because we were not born yesterday, we knew right where to catch it--at Carondelet, before it turns and heads back on St. Charles. We all three easily grabbed seats, but by the time we made our first stop on St. Charles, the car filled up and the people remaining in the queue had to keep on waiting. Suckers! The ride took about 20 minutes and Commander's is about two blocks from the street car stop on St. Charles.

AW on the streetcar

Commander's Palace is quite the institution in New Orleans. I had been there once before for a jazz brunch when DH and I took one of our granddaughters on a special trip for her 13th birthday. They serve up a three-course brunch in high style, and there's a wandering jazz trio that moves from dining room to dining room, taking requests. It's great fun.

From the moment we arrived, it was a fabulous experience. Warm welcomes all around as soon as our feet crossed the threshold. We were lucky enough to get seated in the Garden Room, which is fun because you get to walk through the kitchens to get there, because there's a live tree growing in the room up through the ceiling, and because it's glassed in and overlooking the courtyard, which was lovely that time of year.

The second breakfast of champions: double fisting with milk punch and a Crescent City Cooler

Clearly the best first course for second breakfast is a cocktail. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I LOVE being in a city where it's not at all ridiculous to spend more money on booze than on food at breakfast. Or even second breakfast.

Carla with her cocktail

AW with her Strawberry Flip

It was very difficult deciding what to order (take a look at their sample online menu and see for yourself), but I ended up starting with the Oyster & Absinthe Dome, which is a creamy concoction with bacon, artichokes, and tarragon-infused cream, topped by a flaky pastry shell.

Oyster & Absinthe Dome

It is not, however, the most accommodating place to eat if you are vegetarian, as my friend AW is. They offered only one vegetarian option for the entree on the brunch menu: Red Velvet pancakes. But since those would also be followed by a dessert course, AW wasn't so interested in essentially eating dessert twice. The only minor mar in the whole process was when she asked our server if the crab & vegetable frittata could be made without the crab. Instead of saying "yes, of course we can do that," he said he had to phone the chef and ask permission. It surprised me quite a bit that a restaurant of that calibre and that kind of national standing would not empower its serving staff to make such accommodations. And frankly it surprised me that there wasn't a non-dessert-like vegetarian option for the entree on their menu. In a city that relies heavily on tourism and where the number of vegetarians is on the rise pretty much all over, it is almost inconceivable.

My [mumble] Benedict

The kitchen finally responded with an All Clear to the veggie frittata request, so we recommenced with our enjoyment of the day. I cannot remember the name of what I ordered, but it was a Creole take on Eggs Benedict, with crayfish, "debris," and a spicy sauce. As I recall, and with the photographic evidence above, I think it was served on a bread that more closely resembled a biscuit than an English muffin. It was excellent, but I only managed to eat about half of it. And no, I did not bite the tail and suck the head. Thanks for asking.

You can see a little bit of the tree through the glass behind them.

In fact, by that time, were all questioning our collective delusion in thinking that a first breakfast was a good idea, but we had to power through the dessert course. Which, frankly, is worth waiting for, not to mention worth a little gastrointestinal distress. But dessert is my raison d'être, or at least one of them, and these were a couple of pieces des resistances.

It was strawberry season in Louisiana during our visit, and I had forgotten just how plump, sweet, and lush those berries are. Plus, we wanted to be mindful of our heavy meal, so we ordered two servings of strawberry shortcake for dessert to accompany the bread pudding soufflé. Honestly, have you ever heard a phrase more enticing than bread pudding soufflé?

Bread Pudding Soufflé with milk punch

When it's delivered to the table, the server breaks the top and pours into it many heaping spoonfuls of hard sauce. It was pretty divine, I have to say. The only thing that could possibly improve it would be the introduction of a second round of cocktails. AW and Carla ordered milk punches while I ordered a shot of rum: XO Ron Zacapa, neat, with a side of ice and some lime.

I'm not sure which surprised us more: the size of the bill or our difficulty standing up after the meal. We were, of course, expecting a large bill, and despite the fact that one of our drinks cost $25, we didn't come close to spending more money on alcohol than on food. Well, that gives me something to aim for next time. I won't say what the total was, but we decided that it was the perfect amount, because the tip came to $42, which is the perfect and most important number, as any Douglas Adams fan knows. Clearly the hand of fate had intervened over second breakfast, or maybe that was just my third cocktail talking.

Inside the small gallery that houses Garden District Book Shop

On our way back to the streetcar stop, we paused at Garden District Book Shop, as I cannot pass up a bookstore. And despite the fact that I get a substantial employee discount at my own store, I cannot not buy a book when I walk into another bookstore. Thus I walked out with a nice little hardcover edition of a Eudora Welty book.

Once we walked back up to St. Charles, we were a little dismayed to realize that all of the streetcars heading towards the Quarter were full--practically overflowing--and thus not stopping to pick up any more passengers. Guess we're the suckers now. We waited about 30 minutes before calling a cab to get back to our hotel, where we changed clothes to head back out the Quarter for more exploration. About which, more anon, as this post is long enough and we've only covered first and second breakfast...

Just a random street scene

New Orleans: As the Crowe Flies (and Eats! and Drinks!)

2013-04-11T08:26:00.000-04:00

St Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, New Orleans

Oh, New Orleans. The Big Easy. The Crescent City. The City That Care Forgot. The Land of Dreamy Scenes. Or just plain Nawlins. However you like to call it, it's one of my favorite places on earth to visit. It's one of the last American cities to retain an intrinsic feel that transcends the unfortunate homogeny that is the hallmark of most of our country.

It's also a helluva great place to go for celebrating a special occasion, which is just what my two best friends from high school and college did a couple of weekends ago. We have all recently celebrated a milestone birthday, so we decided to meet in New Orleans to celebrate in style. What we didn't realize during the planning stages of the trip was that our travels were over Easter weekend, a particularly festive time in the Quarter, which explains the dearth of hotel rooms and high airfares. I flew in from the east coast and arrived a few hours before they did, as they had the more leisurely train journey from Memphis. Our room at Prince Conti hotel wasn't quite ready (I arrived more than three hours ahead of check-in), but I was happy to walk around and amuse myself until they were ready to receive me. And since they upgraded us to a suite, I was in an even better mood.

What could be finer? A book, a beverage, and a table that is a window on the world.

I walked around for about an hour to orient myself and discovered that our location on Conti Street, between Bourbon and Daupine, was excellent. After enjoying various street musician performances, I wandered into a quiet cafe (almost impossible to find!) to enjoy a light sandwich and iced coffee.

Exterior of the Prince Conti

After a couple of hours, I wandered back to the hotel and the room was ready, so I went up to unpack and wait for my friends. The suite wasn't at all luxurious (in fact, in many ways it was on the shabby side), but it offered us a good deal more space than the room we'd originally booked, so I was quite happy with it. As it turns out, it came in handy multiple times to have a separate sitting room.

Our sitting room. I believe the ceiling beams are original to the building.

Our bedroom: two queen beds. Yes, that is a fireplace on the far end.

Once Carla and AW arrived, we had a jolly time catching up before heading off to meet one of their friends for dinner. Their friend Kathleen was already in town for something else, so it was a treat to meet up with her for the evening. Kathleen has a terrible shellfish allergy and AW is a vegetarian, so we settled on the Italian fare of Irene's, a 20 minute walk away.

Eclectic decor of Irene's

Unfortunately, Irene's does not take reservations, so we showed up at the unfashionable hour of 5:30 pm for a table since three of us had been awake and traveling since about 4:00 that morning. There was already a line forming at the door when we showed up--I'd estimate that about 30 people were in front of us in the queue.

Behold: the grail-like splendor of my bourbon sidecar

Our server was a live one but quite patient at that, answering our detailed questions about the menu and the specials. Clearly my first order of business was to order a cocktail--one that sounded so good that AW followed suit: bourbon sidecar, served up, with a twist. It was certainly good, but slightly too sweet. Rimming the glass with salt AND sugar would be a fantastic remedy for that.

I highly recommend matching your cocktail to your jewelry.

I ordered one of the fish dishes, and it was quite good. Perhaps not quite as good as the restaurant's Zagat rating had led me to expect, but all perfectly good. With an additional glass of wine, plus a share of dessert, my total came to about $45, before the gratuity.

Our pre-cocktail photo

My fish amandine meuniere.

After dinner, the four of us walked the Quarter and met up with Patrick, our friend from college who hails from New Orleans. He was in town for the holiday weekend, so after his Good Friday service, he drove down and met us near St. Louis cathedral, where we were busy making snapshots of Touchdown Jesus:

By day: much less interesting

By night

Touchdown Jesus in all of his ghostly splendor

We then proceeded to spend the next half hour taking approximately a bazillion photos to make sure we got every possible permutation of our group of five people. With and without flash, of course.

Look: you can see our auras. Or perhaps our souls. I'm not sure.

After that we wandered around the Quarter, listening to the street musicians (I don't recall hearing so many in the last 4-5 trips I've made to the city--maybe it was for the holiday weekend?), window browsing the gorgeous galleries on Rue Royale, and poking into the few shops that were still open.

A kora player. His sign says African Bass Harp but he seemed gratified when I asked with great confusion, "That's not a kora? It sure looks like a kora."

A chandelier in a lighting store on Royale

An art gallery

Love this bulldog, mascot of one of the boutiques we walked into.

All in all it was a great start to a terrific weekend. We all went back to our sitting room to chat about this & that and to make that very important decision: where to go for first breakfast on Saturday before our second breakfast (we're very Hobbit-like) at Commander's Palace. About which, more anon...

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of ~~the world~~ the Quarter.

Three Mini Book Reviews

2013-04-09T08:41:00.000-04:00

My blog has been on the dormant side recently, but my reading has not. Here are three mini reviews of books that I've read that are recently (or soon to be) published, and by "mini reviews," I essentially mean that these are the small shelf tags that accompany these books in my bookstore.

Frances & Bernard by Carlene Bauer. Has a letter ever changed your life? When Frances and Bernard meet at an artists’ colony, they are not quite certain what to make of each other, but one letter changes everything. Bernard’s first letter to Frances leads to a deep and intense friendship. Not-so-loosely based on Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, Frances and Bernard navigate the tricky waters of publishing, romance, religion, and mental illness in this hauntingly beautiful story. If you enjoy the works of Marilynne Robinson or 84 Charing Cross Road, or if you appreciate the bittersweet aspects of life, give this one a spin.

The Mothers by Jennifer Gilmore. I had to remind myself several times while reading this book that it’s a novel and not a memoir—that’s how realistic and heartbreaking it feels. After years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, Jesse and Ramon desperately want to adopt a child, but they never could have imagined the difficulties lying in wait for them in the process, not least of which is determining how willing they’d be to adopt a child born with Down’s syndrome, fetal alcohol, blindness, deafness, spina bifida, or any combination thereof. This is an emotional and compelling read.

The Dinner by Herman Koch. What starts off as a rather Bourgeois novel quickly takes a darker turn and descends into the realm of menace, both underhanded and overt. Clearly there is more to our unnamed, mild-mannered narrator than first meets the eye, and as he learns more about his son’s new and disturbing hobby, the reader learns more about him. The further this insidious father-son story unfolded, the faster I was compelled to turn the pages. This book is a bestseller in Europe and recently translated for English-speaking audiences.

Last Month in Review: March 2013

2013-04-04T20:17:00.001-04:00

Lawd, I can't believe that it's been over two weeks since my last blogpost. That just goes to show how crazy it's been at work recently and how much fun I recently had in New Orleans (about which, more anon, if by "anon" I mean tomorrow. which I do.). I also have a new computer now, so I have no more excuses for not blogging.

On the other hand, I've been spending a lot of time brooding about the new Amazon purchase of Goodreads and deciding whether to close my account or to keep it but with heavily abbreviated usage. In other words, I'm engaged in the time-honored battle of weighing my principles against my inherent laziness. Those of you who know me best can probably guess which way I'll choose, but for the record, I say Boooo, Amazon!

March was a pretty good reading month for me, thanks largely to some excellent fan fiction. In chronological order, I give you:

1. Maddie On Things: A Super Serious Project About Dogs and Physics by Theron Humphrey. This book doesn't really count, as it has very little text, but it's a book that I love. It's one of those books I'm glad I didn't actually spend money on (no, I didn't steal it--it was free) but am so happy that I own it 'cause I can turn to any random page and count on a smile. Also, I met both the author and Maddie the Dog at Winter Institute in Kansas City. That dog is pretty amazing--just take a look at some of the photographs and you'll see what I mean. Yay, rescue dogs!

2. If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan. This is Algonquin's first YA book, coming out in the fall. Deals with the oh-so-light topic of homosexuality and transgenderism in Iran. Review here.

3. You Are One of Them by Eliott Holt. Terrific debut that is a dual coming of age novel set during the Cold War. Review to come.

4. Three Junes by Julia Glass. Audio book. Review here. I really loved this book.

5. The Promise of Stardust by Priscille Sibley. Review here.

6. Dupont Circle by Paul Kafka-Gibbons. This was a re-read of a book I read a good ten years ago. Most of it held up well, and it's gratifying to see how far our country has come on the gay marriage issue since its publication.

7, 8, 9, 10. Underwater Light, Coda to an Epilogue: Twenty Years Later Or, the Kids are All Right, If You've a Ready Mind, and Quality of Mercy by Mistful/Maya. These are all Harry Potter fanfics and they're all novella or novel length. Seriously, one of them was over 800 manuscript pages long. So I'm totally counting them. I love these. If you can get access to them (they're no longer supposed to be available on the internet), I heartily recommend them.

11. The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy. Oh, Booy! This is really good. I hope to write a review one of these days.

12. Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin. This was another audio book. Solid story, solid audio narrator. This is a sports-triumph boarding school novel somewhat akin to A Separate Peace and Dead Poets Society. (Do not believe the comps that say it is like The Art of Fielding. It is not, for that is as simplistic as saying that Moby-Dick and the Master and Commander series are similar because they both involve sailing.) Interestingly, this was the second book I read this year that featured a female coxswain. I also had my eyes & ears glaze over with some of the row-speak, which is why I probably would have preferred reading this book instead of listening, as it's much easier to skim a book than a CD.

So what about y'all? What was your favorite book in March? Did you read any of the same books I read, and if so, what is your verdict?

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Readalong: Better Late Than Pregnant

2013-03-15T09:12:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I've been lurking for these last four weeks 'cause work has been busy and I've had to travel to Kansas City and interview candidates for a job opening at my store. Oh, and also my computer died, which means it's hard to budge my husband off of his computer, which he uses for work, just because I want to look up Snape gifs.

All of which basically adds up to my sadness at being unable to participate in Alice's HP Readalong. But because I don't want to be the only kid not playing in the sandbox this week, I'm joining in for a belated post covering both GoF and some of the greatest HP fanfiction you've never read.

If we're going to get technical about it, I haven't read GoF for this post. I last read it a few years ago and last listened to it about two years ago, so the finer points aren't exactly fresh in my mind. Thus I will just say two things:

(1) I cried buckets the first time I read about Harry & Voldemort's duel and then I was emotionally wrung out to the point where I couldn't enjoy my visit with my then-partner. Too bad, as he was living in Louisville for the semester and I only got to see him once every 4-5 weeks.

(2) I read a first printing of the book, where there is a tremendous editing gaffe in the end, where James emerges from the end of Harry's wand before Lily does. I was torn between indignation for such a terrible gaffe and wanting to believe that it held important textual significance.

What about y'all? Any of you read a first printing, either US or UK or Canadian or Australian? And did it totally mess you up to see Lily and James emerge in the wrong order?

Oh, wait, I have to say a third thing.

(3) Snape. Can you imagine the kind of bravery it must have taken him to go back to Voldemort two hours later, and what kind of torture he must have endured to prove to Voldemort that he wasn't the Death Eaters who had left him forever? It makes me shiver just thinking about it, and not just because I read fan fiction. He had to have known he was facing death and that only tremendous luck and occlumency could save him. And poor Dumbledore, to know that he was asking that of Snape. I like to think that when Snape returned from his meeting with the newly-recreated Voldemort that Dumbledore did some extra dumblin'. I know I sure would have.

Anyway...on to the fanfiction discussion. Harry Potter fanfiction has existed almost as long as Harry Potter, but it really exploded between the releases of books four and five, a period of time known as the "three year summer." That's when I discovered fanfiction for the first time, and may I just say that in my world there has never been a better procrastination tool than reading HP fanfiction.

My very favorite pairing is Hermione/Snape. Now, don't get all ewwwww on me. Fanfiction is about being open to the unexpected. The very best Hermione/Snape stories, IMO, are the ones penned by Anna on Witchfics: She has written a trilogy that surpasses all other fanfic I've read, with really good writing (much better writing than JKR's, actually), great plotting, and some pretty fabulous lemony bits. ("Lemony bits" is fanfiction speak for smut. Don't ask me why. Google it for yourself.)

There's also the great site dedicated solely to Snape/Hermione fic called Ashwinder. The site ranges in quality from the terrible to the sublime, but one really fun one is called His Draught of Delicate Poison, written by Subversa, playing off the Marriage Law meme and loosely based on the wonderful Georgette Heyer novel, The Grand Sophy. It's funny and plot-filled and with some fun original characters, but not especially lemony. More like lemon-scented.

My second favorite pairing is Harry/Draco. Yeah, I've got a Slytherin thing, for sure. The very best Draco/Harry fics are no longer available on the internet. They were penned by a woman named Maya, who is actually Sarah Rees Brennan, and once Rees Brennan published her first real book, she pulled all of her fanfic from the interwebs. She made it available for a one time download, which I availed myself of, but my computer has since died and those stories are now irretrievable. I would pay good money to get my hands on them again. Seriously. Contact me if you have these stories and I will make it worth your while.

Then there are those stories that, overall, are too wordy or meandering to be good in their entirety, but which have wholly interesting bits that I go back and read occasionally. One of them features Harry/Snape and it's called The Mirror of Maybe by Midnight Blue--this writer created the concept of wizarding tattoos and Life Ink, and the scenes where Harry is getting inked, and later when he shares his tattoos with Snape, are great. Harry is also a tremendously good DADA teacher in this story.

Guess that's about it for now. So, yeah, back to GoF:

Just kidding. I meant back to Snape. And by that, I mean I'm finished here. My husband needs his computer back.

Book Review: If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan

2013-03-13T08:19:00.000-04:00

Consider this:

1. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran.
2. Gender reassignment surgery is paid for by the government in Iran.
3. Sahar and Nasrin are two girls who live in Iran.
4. They are also in love with each other.

Leave it to Algonquin, one of my favorite literary presses, to launch their new line of books for younger readers with a novel like If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan. Nothing like a nice, safe, book that is sure to be a crowd pleaser, right? No, in fact I salute Algonquin for picking a book like this; it's not often that we see so many layers of non-traditional protagonists in one book: Sahar is not white, nor is she is heterosexual, nor of a Judeo-Christian heritage.

Sahar narrates the story from a first person, present tense point of view. She and Nasrin are in love and have been since they were little girls. They sneak kisses and caresses behind closed doors until the terrible day that Sahar learns that Nasrin's parents have arranged her marriage to a suitable man. Lucky for Sahar, she can confide the burden of her secrets to her cousin Ali, himself a mover & shaker in the underground gay community, and he introduces her to Parveen, who has undergone gender reassignment surgery.

From the moment Sahar meets Parveen, her driving thought is to follow in her footsteps so that she can marry Nasrin, and like many teens, she is completely heedless of the consequences that might follow such an action. All she can think about is Nasrin and not being separated from her; it never crosses her mind that Nasrin might not continue to love her in a man's body, much less than being in love with somebody at the age of 17 isn't a good enough reason to undergo such a medically and psychologically intense process.

Alas, Nasrin never seemed worth it to me. In the same breath that Sahar tells the reader how much she loves Nasrin, she inevitably shares a story that demonstrates how shallow, self-involved, and unconcerned with academic achievements Nasrin is. I never was able to understand what it was about Nasrin that made Sahar want to forsake her life as she knew it for this other girl, other than her beauty and popularity. Maybe that's the author slyly playing with the idea of teen love, hinting that it can only ever be in the eyes of the beholder? Perhaps, but that would imply a level of sophistication that is otherwise not present in the novel.

There are some interesting minor characters here, including her cousin Ali, but also Nasrin's betrothed (who pops up later in a twist I admit I didn't see coming) and a pair of prostitutes who pose as a mother/daughter team. I would have very much enjoyed seeing more of all of these characters, as I cetainly found them more compelling than Nasrin, and even, occasionally, Sahar. The book is fairly slight--it's a small trim size with generous margins and fewer than 250 pages--so it's a shame that it wasn't fleshed out a little better.

Though I greatly admire the author for tackling difficult issues, I wish she would have developed them more. While these issues are certainly worthy of a teen or adult novel, the handling of said issues feels more like a middle grade novel--lacking the depth and nuance that I have come to expect from finer young adult writers. The first person, present tense (or the present pernicious, as my friend Rob calls it) does not do the book any favors, either. It is the least sophisticated POV, in my opinion, and a 3rd person narrative could have done wonders for allowing the author to show more from Nasrin's perspective rather than simply to tell the reader certain things, which is how the novel plays out.

Still, I applaud Sara Farizan and Algonquin for producing a novel that is sure to make some young readers think about their world in a new way, including many things they take for granted, and I look forward to more of Farizan's work. If she reacher her potential and creates novels as substantive as her topics are, she will certainly be a force to be reckoned with.

NB: I read an ARC of the book that I picked up at Winter Institute. Algonquin Young Readers will launch its new line with this YA novel at the end of August of this year.

Audio Book Review: Three Junes by Julia Glass

2013-03-12T09:04:00.000-04:00

It's amazing to me the difference between reading a book and listening to that book. A good reader can elevate a not-so-great book, while a poor reader can make a great book seem tedious. In this specific case, I'm not sure I can explain the difference between my two experiences with Julia Glass's National Book Award-winning Three Junes, as both the book and the reader are good, but I suspect it's all down to two things: I am a more discerning reader now than I was ten years ago when the book was published, and books resonate more strongly at certain times than others.

My memory may be a bit faulty, but when I first read this book, I apparently never read the jacket copy, as I recall expecting this book to be about multiple women named June. It's not. Here's the lowdown, courtesy of the publisher:

In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.

Six years later, again in June, Paul's death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.

Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her.

My first impression after listening to the first few tracks of the audio was, "Why the hell is the book being narrated in a Scottish accent?" I'd forgotten that family in question was Scottish, but it still surprised me that the non-dialogue parts were read in the accent. It took a little getting used to, and on at least one occasion it required listening to certain words or phrases more than once to understand them. To wit: when Paul is visiting Greece, somebody starts talking to him about the "dunkies," or so I thought. I had no idea what dunkies were, and it was only later in context that I realized that the character was actually talking about donkeys.

I'm ashamed to say that I could not identify how real the narrator's accent is, but he switched back & forth with relative ease between American and Scottish accents (to be honest, they all sounded a little bit faked to me. Faked well, but faked). There were only a few muddied passages where the dialogue switched quickly between characters and the narrative and it was difficult to distinguish who was speaking because the accents became conflated. John Keating really did a great job of reading this audio, and there were times when it was his storytelling, rather than the story itself, that moved me to tears, although of course sometimes it was both.

My favorite section of the book was Fenno's, though I also really liked the first section that focused on his father, while the last section left me feeling mostly lukewarm. I think it's an interesting choice on any writer's part to impart more knowledge to the reader than to the characters, and I think that's what frustrated me most about the last section. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, in terms of what unfolded between Fenno and Fern, but it never happened.

While I remember liking this book when I first read it (I'd given it a 3* rating on Goodreads, for example), I kind of fell in love with the book while listening to it. There are some seriously gorgeous passages that for whatever reason didn't jump out at me the first time I read it--of course, I can't quote them here because I was driving while listening to the book this time around. This is a mighty fine novel and I'm so glad that I decided to buy it on audio when I saw it at my local record store for $5. I've since upped my Goodreads rating to 4*, and if I had liked the last section as much as I liked the first two, it might even have earned 5*.

What about you? Have you had different reactions to the same book when reading it in different formats or when encountering it at different times in your life?

Book Review: The Promise of Stardust by Priscille Sibley

2013-03-11T08:25:00.000-04:00

When I first heard about this novel several months ago when I was deciding which new winter '13 fiction titles my store should carry, I thought the promise sounded interesting: Elle falls off a ladder and hits her head, causing severe brain trauma, so her devastated husband, Matt, has to make the call to take her off life support. But wait! Blood work shows that Elle is, in fact, pregnant, so Matt decides to keep Elle on life support until the baby can be born. But wait, part deux! Elle's mother-in-law produces a piece of paper saying dating from two decades ago that says she is Elle's health care proxy, and that she is going to take Elle off life support (acto her advanced health directive), because Elle's wishes should outweigh everything else. Mother is thus pitted against son in this modern medical feud.

Sounds intriguing, no?

Well, if you're a savvier reader than I am, then you will have already anticipated the immediate direction the book takes once the conflict between Matt and his mother arises. I, however, was entirely too naive to anticipate the political melee that broke out, with the militant pro-lifers backing Matt's position and vilifying his mother. Matt's attorney agrees to take the case because he is eager to set precedent in this arena, heavily hinting that he would love to be one of those people credited with overturning Roe v. Wade.

I almost stopped reading at that point, as I wasn't at all interested in spending the next several hours of my free time immersed in the vitriol that marks this issue, and I certainly didn't want to immerse myself among characters who want to defeat one of the single biggest victories in the women's movement. No, indeed! Then I had second thoughts; I didn't really know how the book would end, so I decided to stick with it. I had a good idea that the book wouldn't be for me, but I also thought that it was a book I could probably sell and therefore finishing the book would not equate to time wasted.

My biggest issue with the story, and one that I thought was a pretty gaping hole in the plot, was Matt's general disinterest in the unborn child. He never really gives any indication that he wants to keep Elle alive so that he can be a father to that child, or that so he can still have a tie to Elle after she dies. He mostly wants to keep Elle on life support because she was desperate to have a child--desperate to the point of being willing to risk her health in order to carry one to term after several miscarriages. Matt is a neurology surgeon and he never indicates that he is the type of person who would be willing to put his life on hold in order to raise a child by himself. What's more, the hospital didn't realize Elle was pregnant when she arrived via ambulance, so she was pumped full of meds, then put on general anesthesia in a surgical last-ditch attempt to save her. Goodness only knows how the trauma and the drugs would impact the fetus.

So yeah, I never quite bought into the fact that Matt wanted to be a parent to this baby that, in all likelihood, would be born with all kinds of health issues, if it even lived to term at all. And since he was perfectly prepared to take Elle off life support before discovering her pregnancy, it was a pretty big sticking point in my being able to read the book at face value.

Looking beyond Matt, though, there were some real complications on both sides of the story, and everybody who knew Elle wants to have their say. Each family member draws lines: Elle's dad takes Matt's side, Elle's brother sides with Matt's mom. Even Elle's old lover from college shows up with an advance directive that is several years old, from when he and Elle were working for NASA in Texas: this is key, because Texas state law overrides a woman's right to be removed from life support if she is pregnant. It's a big brouhaha all over.

This definitely wasn't the book for me, but I have a pretty good idea the kinds of readers who would: those who love Jodi Picoult, Kristin Hannah, Nicholas Sparks and other issue-driven romances. I will say that I appreciated the author's choice to tell the book from a single point of view (Matt's, via a first person narrative) rather than resort to Picoult's style of using different narrators (and, ugh, different typefaces for each one). I've not read a ton of books by Picoult, Hannah, or Sparks, so this may be grossly generalizing, but I also felt that Sibley's book was slightly more nuanced than those works. I know several family members, friends, and/or customers who will like this book, I feel.

NB: William Morrow published this book as a paperback original in February of this year. I read an ARE provided to me at my request from my sales rep.

Book Revew: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

2013-03-07T08:03:00.000-05:00

For my job, I receive books every day with an editor's letter tucked inside, exhorting the 101 reasons why I should read that particular book. (Why, yes, I do love my job. Thanks for asking.) But what I do not receive every day is a book with letters from ten different editors around the world, exhorting the 1,001 reasons why I should love this book, and that's the first thing that made me sit up and take notice about Ruth Ozeki's new novel, A Tale for the Time Being. The ARC that Viking sent out included notes from editors in the US, UK, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Australia, Greece, and the Netherlands. I had not read Ozeki before, but I thought, "A-ha, clearly this is a book to be reckoned with."

And I was right. Mostly I just want to heap superlatives on this book, but I'll try to tell you a bit about what the book is about, though that will be tricky. Like the quantum physics that infuse (infuses? Is the word "physics" singular or plural?) the story, it's a book that alters as one reads and observes. Because a summary would be too complicated, I'm going to borrow the publisher's own marketing blurb here:

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Nao has become one of my favorite narrators in literature. She is very much in the vein of Midori from Haruki Murakami's novel, Norwegian Wood, which is to say she's bubbly, bright, and annoying-but-endearing. Her father is suicidal, and the cruelties she endures at the hands of her classmates (shockingly, with the tacit permission of her teacher) make every American YA novel about bullying look like a bonny good time. It's no wonder that she wants to follow in her father's footsteps and try to end it all. Yet she has this wonderfully indomitable spirit and sense of humor that juxtaposes in a fascinating way with her avowed fate.

Jiko, Nao's great-grandmother, is also a terrific character. Though there are some secrets she has guarded all of her life, she serves mostly as Nao's sole source of stability and as such, she guides her in the way of Zen Buddhism. Nothing Nao says or does can offend or surprise her, despite Nao's best efforts.

With the character of Ruth, Ozeki starts to break down fiction's fourth wall. Character Ruth splits her time between New York and an isolated island in the Pacific northwest, just like Author Ruth. Character Ruth is a practicing Buddhist novelist, just like Author Ruth. And the similarities go on.... Ruth (the character) is something of a Japanese scholar trying to defeat a bad case of writer's block, so her obsession with Nao's found diary becomes a way for her to sublimate her anxiety. Her husband is a quantum physics-quoting botanist, so there's that, too.

Top all of that off with the fact that Nao's diary excerpts as they appear in the book are amply footnoted for the benefit of a non-Japanese audience, and that the footnotes are attributed to Ruth--but is it Character Ruth or Author Ruth? It's hard to tell sometimes, and that's the whole point, I think.

I love the opening lines to Nao's first section. They put me a little bit in mind of the Emily Dickinson poem, "I'm Nobody!Who Are You":

My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you're reading this, then maybe by now you're wondering about me, too (p. 4).

I also love this: "I don't mind thinking of the world without me because I'm unexceptional, but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She's totally unique and special, like the last Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind. But please don't get me going on the topic of species extinction because it's totally depressing and I'll have to commit suicide right this second" (25).

And this bit about Nao's time living with Jiko at the temple:

They bowed and thanked the toilet and offered a prayer to save all beings. That one is kind of hilarious and goes like this: As I go for a dump/I pray with all beings/that we can remove all filth and destroy/ the poisons of greed, anger, and foolishness.

At first I was like, No way am I saying that, but when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, "Thanks, toilet," and it felt pretty natural. I mean, it's the kind of things that's okay to do if you're in a temple on the side of a mountain, but you'd better not try it in your junior high school washroom, because if your classmates catch you bowing and thanking the toilet they'll try to drown you in it. I explained this to Jiko, and she agreed it wasn't such a good idea, but that it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don't say anything (167).

That gives you a pretty good flavor for Nao's narrative sections, equal parts earnestness and impishness. There is so much that is extraordinary about this book, but I fear I'm not doing it justice. I think I will close with the blurb that I wrote up for Publisher's Weekly Galley Talk, as sometimes it's easier to say more with fewer words:

Zen philosophy and quantum physics blend seamlessly in Ozeki’s brilliant new work of metafiction, where sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the author’s attempts to build up and break down the fourth wall. Or as Jiko, the wise and wizened Buddhist nun from the book might say, “to raise or to raze, they are the same.” Jiko’s calm, hard-earned acceptance of contradictions contrasts brilliantly with the life of her great-granddaughter, Nao, a bullied schoolgirl with a suicidal father, adrift in a sea of emotions she is incapable of navigating. When Ruth, on the opposite side of the Pacific, discovers Nao’s diary among the post-tsunami flotsam and jetsam, she becomes obsessed with Jiko’s and Nao’s stories—to the point where she’s convinced that solving the diary’s puzzles will ease her restlessness and dissolve her writer’s block. I’ve rarely encountered a novel that has made me think about our world quite as much as this one has, where distance and time are mutable depending on the observer, and what is a reader if not the ultimate observer? Ozeki’s novel feels, impossibly, both timeless and utterly of our time, but I suspect that might be the hand of Jiko guiding me.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book, provided to me by my sales rep, which Viking publishes on March 13, 2013.