Once I chewed through every Scott Pilgrim book currently available, I felt a little bereft. What was I going to do? I couldn’t just jump into another graphic novel. What if it wasn’t funny enough? What if there wasn’t any magical-realismesque video game action? What if, what if it wasn’t any good?

Lucky for me the answer came in the form of a big box of graphic novels from Largehearted boy. In that treasure trove, I unearthed Lost At Sea, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s first book.

It was the perfect balm for my Scott Pilgrim withdrawal.

How so? Because it was the not so bad, not so good way to get over my Scottaholism.

Lost at Sea is a road trip graphic novel about four Canadian teens driving home from California. The star of the book is Raleigh, an intellectually gifted 18-year-old who has no soul. At least she doesn’t think she has a soul, she’s pretty sure a cat stole it when she was younger.

She happened upon this trio of classmates coincidence in California, where Raleigh was supposed to be visiting her estranged father but instead had hooked up with her Internet boyfriend.

What I liked about this one is that you can see glimpses of Scott Pilgrim in it. The friendships where affection is shown through acerbic wit and sarcasm, the floundering hero looking trying to come of age, and the littlest bit of music.

What I didn’t like about this one is that it feels really floaty. A lot of questions are brought up or insinuated but never fully explained or answered. At one point Raleigh vaguely mentions that her mother sold her (and her sisters) to a man in the very same Oregon town the group is stuck in after their car breaks down. Is this true? I can’t tell.

I’m not entirely sure what really happened with the Internet boyfriend either. Like I said it’s kind of floaty.

However, there is a scene towards the end of the book where the group is trying to capture stray cats in the hopes of helping Raleigh get her soul back. It’s beautiful, funny, and poignant. Probably worth the price of reading the book alone. It so perfectly captures the lengths true friends will go to when you’re in need.

This is one of those books I’d probably have adored when I was about twenty-two. There’s just something about the hopeless romanticism, the melodrama, and the what’s it all mean-ness of it that will appeal to young people who are at that point in their lives. Which, I guess, kind of makes sense, since the book is aimed at the late-teen crowd.

Like I said, it’s okay. There are worse ways to spend an hour. However, if you’re looking for a good step down from Scott Pilgrim while you wait the arrival of the last one, it’s absolutely perfect.

It’s never a good sign when it takes you months and months to read a book. It’s an even worse sign when that book is a graphic novel. But it took me roughly three months to claw my way through Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole.

This book was lauded by most everyone who wrote about it. I learned this only because I had to do some googling to figure out the hell I just read.

The veneration was my first surprise. My second was that the main characters, teenagers Perry and Ruth, are step siblings. That second surprise made me like the book even less than I thought I did.

What we have here is a sort of coming of age of two southern teens, both afflicted with schizophrenia to some degree. I’m not sure if there are varying degrees of schizophrenia, but I’m willing to give Powell a buy on that. I’m not willing to give him a buy on the utter coincidence of the step siblings both having schizophrenia, unless their parents met at some sort of support group. If that’s the case we should know that.

Anyway the book is a sort of jumbled mishmash of coming of age and mental illness and sick family members. It opens with Ruth and Perry’s dying grandmother coming to live with them. She’s not as near her deathbed as we’re led to believe, because it takes her years and years to die. In the meantime, we find out that both Perry and Ruth suffer from hallucinations.

Ruth often sees insects everywhere, and she’s concerned with them, so she has a touch of the OCD with her schizophrenia. Perry’s illness manifests itself in the form of a tiny, pencil-topped wizard who forces Perry to do his bidding.

Even though I found the novel on the whole a confusing mess, the scenes with Perry trying to resist the mandates of the wizard are pretty great. But the rest is just kind of okay, at best and pretty boring its worst.

I can’t quite figure out why this book garnered so much acclaim, the art is kind of muddy and the story is muddled. This is one I should have just given up on, but refused to be beaten by a graphic novel. Lesson learned, it’s okay to give up on graphic novels you aren’t enjoying.

We’ve spent at least one day a week together for the past two and a half years. Friday really was the end of an era. We celebrated by making monster cookies.

As we mixed, shook, and shouted NO FAIR, I tried to get the Tibbles to express some kind of emotion regarding the end of our weekly visits.

“After today I won’t be babysitting you all the time anymore,” I said.
“Can I add this oil?” Nolan shook a bottle of vanilla at me.
“It’s not oil,” I said. “Aren’t you sad you won’t see me anymore?”
“We’ll still see you at Christmas and Easter and things like that, right?” Cade asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But you won’t see me every week like you do now.”
“So?” he said.
“So, it makes me sad.”
“Is it time to add the yummy yums?” Liam asked.
“You guy aren’t sad at all?” I asked.
The shook their head in unison.

Damn boys.

It’s impossible to review Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 2010. I’ve been trying to come up with the words for weeks now.

Women have gotten PhDs dissecting this book, what it meant to women in 1963, and the repercussions of its publication. I cannot measure its goodness or badness in a few pithy sentences. In fact, I even have a hard time being critical about the book’s many flaws — mainly that it’s written for and about white, upper-middle class, straight, college-educated women. Plus, it seems, Friedan seems to think education is only for those white, upper-middle class, straight women.

Despite its flaws, I want to press this book into the hands of every woman I know (and a lot of the men). Ladies, we’re still perpetuating and falling victim to the Feminine Mystique. You should read it. Everyone should read it, not just to see how far we’ve come but how far we have yet to go.

This book has changed the way I think about things, the way I see things. It’s like a sixth sense, I see sexism everywhere. I find myself making sexist, anti-woman judgements all the time, and I’m abhorred by it. But at least now, I recognize it. It’s a small step, but still a step.

This book was an education for me, and I think it will be for you too. We never study women’s history in school, or the role women played in history. We learn about Betsey Ross (she made the flag), and then spend a paragraph on Suffrage, and that’s it.

I didn’t take any women’s history classes in college, and the one feminist class I took was not a good experience. I took a Women’s Lit course and was labelled “so male” by my classmates because I’m not a petite, “feminine” woman and because I disagreed with their interpretation of the short story “Sur” by Usula K. LeGuin. Eighteen years, and I’m still bitter about it.

So, since I’m having a hard time finding the words I’m going to take the easy way out, and share just a few of the surprising things I learned from and while reading The Feminine Mystique

• Some of my friends are suffering from The Feminine Mystique right now in 2010. They’re smart women who quit their jobs to become stay at home moms, and until I read this book, I thought they’d kind of lost their minds. But that’s not it. They’re lonely, empty, and depressed. They’ve given up everything they are to be mothers and are finding that living your life for someone else, even someone else you gave birth to, blows. It’s not fulfilling so they turn to drinking and sexual fantasies in hopes to find fulfillment. So far, it’s not working.
• Women were forced back into the homes by men returning from WWII who longed for these idealized mother figures they missed so much while in battle.
• The fiction (which was quite popular then) in women’s magazines went from being about career-women looking for love (barf, I know), to women looking to be the perfect housewife. The male editors of the magazines only published stories (both fiction and non-fiction) about women as mothers and homemakers, which in turn forced the female writers to write about such things — even going so far as to write about Edna St. Vincent Millay’s cleaning (or it might have been cooking or party-hosting) tips rather than her poetry. If you don’t see Mommy Blogger written all over this portion of the book, there’s something wrong with you. Mommy-blogging might just be the second horseman of the second feminine mystique apocalypse. We have 1000s of women’s voices on the Internet and a majority are spending their time talking about the cute thing their kid did rather than, oh, anything else.
• Prohibition? Yeah, it wasn’t a movement by a bunch of no-fun-having teetotalers who wanted to kill everyone’s buzz. No. It was a movement by women for women, because drunken men weren’t earning living and were beating their wives. It was a movement to help stop domestic violence, not to ruin everyone’s fun.
• Mothers were (are?) blamed for everything — loving too much, loving not enough, and just generally fucking up everyone around them.

There was much more. Much, much, much more. The Feminine Mystique is the kind of book you read and then it takes about the rest of your life to process what it really means to you and the world around you.

I’m thinking about joining the ranks of those boring, jackassy literary pundits who warn about the impending death of something: publishing, the novel, the short story, the traditional book, and everything else you love hold dear.

What am I declaring the death of? Story. Or at least good, engaging stories. Off the top of my head I can think of four books I’ve read this year that were well-written but lacked interesting stories or the stories fell apart midway through the book (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Melting Season, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and The Ask). I can’t tell if it’s me or if it’s them. Is there a dearth of story in this year’s must-read books? Or am I just more demanding than usual?

You can add Jenny Hollowell’s Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe to that list of beautifully-written books that lack an actual story. On the surface the story of Birdie Baker, a thirty-year-old struggling actress seems like it would be fraught with tension, but it’s not. Instead we get a sort of dreamy, wishy-washy portrayal of a woman so far removed from her life it feels like she’s floating through it.

Hollowell starts out strong. Instead of presenting Birdie’s backstory as a series of films (with no cameras rolling). It’s a smart and interesting way to get Birdie from her strict, religious Virginia home to Hollywood, but after that the bold storytelling goes away. Instead we’re left with a repetitive (Birdie spends a lot of time driving and sitting on her porch drinking), flat story about a depressed actress who hasn’t fully coped with her past and is on the verge of becoming embittered by all those who have done better than she has.

It’s kind of a drag, and it’s a shame, because the writing here is really wonderful.

Then the past arrived, rubbing against the window screen, and that poison air descended upon her bed. There was nothing new to remember, nothing new to feel there was only that same accumulation of losses, but here with the smell of honeysuckle all around, with the days spend in a green, humid haze, and with the lines she spoke still humming in her mouth, the venom of their judgments, she felt them more clearly. Absence after absence, emptiness after emptiness, nothing after nothing — in the darkness of the motel room her losses crowded around her like ghosts.

And while this passage is beautiful, it hints at what’s wrong with the story — “there’s nothing new to remember, nothing new to feel.” Why is that? Because Birdie has spent the preceding 164 pages moping about her past and feeling sorry for herself.

Second of all, thank you for all the solicited advice. The confrontation with the unpleased went okay. I’ve hatched a plan whereby the next time he/she is unpleased the unpleasedness will be strictly his/her fault and not mine at all. You should read the advice. Some of it is really brilliant².

¹ I have a theory that if you really love some thing, a thing you use every day all the time (like sunglasses or glasses glasses or water bottles or pens), then you should have two of them. This way you don’t get all bummed out if you should lose or break that thing, because you have a back up. Sure the back up seems subpar at first but eventually you get used to it. I didn’t have a good backup water bottle. I had the cool looking, hard to suck out of water bottles as backups. Bad move. So I got a backup for the original, beloved water bottle (I also got a back up to the back up). If that makes me bougie so be it.

² I didn’t really have anything to add to the word brilliant, I just thought I needed another footnote. Also, I stole the footnote idea from Christa who also used footnotes today. But she quoted a Poison song and I’m wearing a t-shirt that says “talk nerdy to me” so I figured it’s alright³

³ Yes, I wore this shirt yesterday. Suck it.

And let’s just say for argument’s sake that you cannot cut this person (or people) out of your life because you share a gene pool or they pay you money or you have a long personal history. So you have these people in your life and they are never pleased. Something is always wrong or not quite right, but out of the kindness of his or her heart they will accept this subparness.

How do you cope with that? How do you deflect their little bits of snark and not let it weave itself into your brain tying your guts into knots and making you think “why do I suck so much?”

Right before her ninth birthday, Rose has a bite of a lemon cake her mom baked. It was a practice cake to make sure the recipe was right for the big occasion, Rose’s birthday. In that bite, Rose is overcome with her mom’s feelings of loneliness and emptiness.

Rose’s magical power — tasting the emotions and background of the people who prepare the food she eats — takes center stage for about half of Aimee Bender’s second novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. It’s a fabulous, interesting premise that seems to get lost halfway through the book.

Rose is kind of a lonely, odd-duck herself in a family filled with lonely, odd-ducks. On the surface the Edelstein’s look like American apple pie goodness and all that. Dad’s a lawyer, Mom’s an artist who works at a carpentry co-op, and brother Joe’s a budding scientific genius. But then there’s the cake filled with sadness and regret. It’s our first hint that things aren’t as they seem.

This novel is at its best when it’s focussed on Rose, her gift, and the relationship she has with those around her. Bender’s a phenomenal writer. I can’t imagine any other writer who can write a scene involving a turkey sandwich that can bring tears to your eyes. Each chapter ending is a little kick to the chest as if to remind you how engaged you are in this story.

So why did this book leave me feeling so empty, kind of like how I imagined the lemon cake tasting?

Because Bender seems to lose her way. Instead of sticking with Rose, her strange abilities, and how that effects her relationships with the people around her, she veers off into a story about Joseph.

He’s Rose’s older brother who may or may not be autistic. He’s obsessed with science, physics specifically, and how a penchant for disappearing — like into thin air, it seems. Joe’s also obsessed with being alone, and when he gets his very own apartment (paid for by his doting mother) things get really bad. Joe goes missing for days at a time, throwing his family into distress.

After awhile we jump back from Joe’s story to Rose’s story which has leaped forward many years. The sibling’s stories don’t seem to blend well, because while Rose tells us about Joe and what’s going on with him, we hear less and less about the food and what she’s tasting.

Bender never seems to get her footing back. The book feels sort of loosey-goosey with a few flashbacks thrown in to explain what really happened to Joe. It doesn’t sit well. As a reader I had a hard time reconciling Joe’s story with Rose’s and how together they told a bigger story, and what role Rose’s ability to taste emotions had to do with everything.

This is one of those books I enjoyed reading, the journey is fun and engaging because Bender’s such a great writer, but once it was done I kind of wondered what the point was.

Do you have that friend in your life who, depending on the day and your mood, you are either madly in love with or so annoyed by you want to shove him in front of a bus? After reading Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, I’m pretty convinced that if Steve Almond were my friend, he’d be that friend. Why? because he’d write things like, “he called me because, well, misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.” And he’d also wank on endlessly about some musical genius he loved that I’d never heard of. See how it could be love or murder?

First a confession: I have a weird fetish for/obsession with rock & roll memoir/essays books. I read every one that comes down the pike in hopes of finding an author that can put into words the relationship I’ve had with rock & roll better than I can. I’m pretty sure that if they let a woman write this type of a book, she could do it. So far, I have not found a woman who has written this kind of book. No, it seems these kinds of essay-memoir-rock-and-roll books are reserved for the Steve Almonds, Rob Sheffields, and Chuck Klostermans of the world.

Yes, yes I know woman have written books about rock & roll. I’ve tried them all. But not one of them, at least that I’ve found, has written the memoir/essays book about being a music fan and what the music has meant to her. No, usually the rock and roll books by women are about being in the band or the women’s revolution in rock & roll (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s– pick your revolution).

You’d be hard-pressed to find a book by a woman about her experience with music fandom (and groupie memoirs don’t count). If you know of one, a good one, let me know and I’ll be your best friend forever.

I cannot hold the fact that he’s not a woman against Steve Almond. I can, however, hold the fact that even though he calls himself a Drooling Fanatic he’s kind of more than a fan. Anyone with the ways and means to get access to their musical heroes, to interview Dave Grohl and get Spin to foot the bill is more than a fan. Right?

Not surprising, it’s those parts of Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life where Almond goes all rock journalist I found the most unappealing. I’m not the kind of fan who wants to know where my musical idols live and what they drink for lunch and what their studio looks like. I just don’t care. Unless the rockstar is telling me exactly who or what a song is about, I just don’t care. Almond does. (A cavet: I did eat up the chapter about Ike Reilly, because I love Ike Reilly. In fact it was Almond’s inclusion of “Commie Drives a Nova” on his Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay that prompted me to give the book a shot)

However, most of these profiles come towards the end of the book and by that time Almond has been so charming you’re willing to indulge him his little fanboy escapades.

Almond’s funny and he’s a good writer, this combination is divine. I can’t even count how many times I laughed out loud. He does lyrical takedowns of Toto’s “Africa” and Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” that are so funny I live with the hope that in the future there will be an Almond book that is nothing but the explanation of lyrics. Like this about “Africa”:

Our hero is waiting for a female whose plane arrives just after midnight. Got it. This seems to place him in or around an airport, the sort of airport within earshot of drums. He can see the wings of the plane, which are lit by the moon and also, curiously, able to reflect the stars.

Finally, because I’m already at 660 words, I’m going to provide you with a 6-bullet list of things I really adored in this book. You can consider it 6 reasons you should go read it.

1. When he talks about the delicacy needed in placing a needle on a record and the insults that could be hurled if you did it incorrectly, “You yipped it, gooch.” It’s much funnier in context.
2. That he lists The Beastie Boys as some of the biggest assholes in rock because they ditched their female drummer and now are all high and mighty about misogyny after “years of of inspiring dudes to get trashed and paw women.”
3. “It’s not about the music. It’s about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.”
4. On the index card I use a bookmark and to keep notes I wrote: Chapter 9 = Fuck Yeah!! (two exclamation points). It’s about how Joe Henry became his writing coach.
5. His three-hour argument with Brock Clarke (who inadvertently inspired me to start MN Reads.
6. Obligatory mention that he mentions The Replacements.

(Also, the stuff he writes about his wife and Kip Winger is totally awesome. I promise to shut up now. Really. Go get the book. It’s fun.)

No, I did not pop him in the mouth. Instead I calmly (at least in my head it was calm) explained to him how fucking narrow-minded he was. I even got him to shake his head in agreement. Which I considered a small triumph.

Then I broke his heart by sharing with him the fact that women are more likely suffer domestic abuse from the time they’re pregnant until their babies are like six months (or a year or so) old (Sister #2′s PhD dissertation is on domestic violence of some sort, I can’t remember exactly), even if their partner had not shown any violent tendencies before. I explained to him that we need to stop seeing raising children as “women’s work” and we have to stop making it emasculating for men to take an active role in their kids’ lives. We need to teach men how to be fathers, like we do women from the time they can hold a babydoll in their arms.

I wish that young, privileged white male Law student could have been here today while I explained to my 12-year-old niece that women never ask to be raped. It is never a woman’s fault, and it’s because of our laws created by men and upheld by men that we blame the victims. We say “she was asking for it.” And our discussions around rape still seem to focus on the things the woman shouldn’t have done. She shouldn’t have worn that skirt. She shouldn’t have danced that way. She shouldn’t have been alone on the street. And we don’t talk about how men should not be attacking a woman. Ever.

So Happy Suffrage Day fellow women of America. We’ve had the right to vote for 90 years and we’ve come a long way. But we’ve got a long way to go, and it’s only through our solidarity are we going to be able to make the change we need to be truly equal.