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Friday, August 31, 2007
books for August
- An Invisible Sign of My Own -- Aimee Bender -- 2.5
- I was bewildered by this book, honestly. I liked the premise (math-obsessed young woman teaches school, encounters other numbers-obsessed people, has a father with a mysterious and symbolic-seeming non-disease, buys an ax), and the writing was good, but it took the whole "adult fairytale" genre (think Jonathan Safran Foer, but less graphic) to some extremes that I just didn't get. I didn't know if the book was one random unrelated oddity after another, or if every oddity had some deep meaning that I was supposed to ferret out. The problem is, there were so many oddities that it made me tired trying to figure out which was the case. There are some good moments here. It's kind of a shame that the weird ones overshadowed them.
- Dream When You're Feeling Blue -- Elizabeth Berg -- 4
- Elizabeth Berg is one of my favorite authors, and yet if you had given me this book without her name on it I would have had no idea that she had written it. She's cast herself completely against type, to mix my media and my metaphors appallingly, in writing this little gem of a historical novel about a family of sisters and their experiences during WWII. This doesn't have Berg's trademark zingers -- those "of course I've always thought that, and just never known it" moments that can make me cry if I read her books too late at night; it's more plot-driven than her books generally are, and the style isn't as comfortable and easy with itself as her work usually is. But it is a story with a lot of heart, lovingly constructed, and sweetly told. It's an homage to a generation of men and women who deserve our praise and respect, and I recommend it.
- Nineteen Minutes -- Jodi Picoult -- 5
- I have been dreading writing this review. Not because I don't love the book, which centers around a bullied boy and the school shooting he perpetrated, but because I love it too much and I know I can never do it justice. I wish I had enough money to buy a copy for every student in every public high school in America; I would send marked copies to a dozen or so people from my past as well. Truly, Jodi Picoult has found her way into the head of an emotionally abused student in a way that no other author I have ever read has managed to do, and has documented her character's journey to violence with heartrending acuity. The supporting cast is well-drawn as well. Please, if you haven't read this already, read it now.
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- Mohsin Hamid -- 2.5
- This novel is told entirely in the narrative voice from the point of view of a Pakistani man who attended university and then worked for a year in America. The writing style didn't endear me to it, and the "don't you see, Americans, that everything you do is just wrong wrong wrong and that's why everyone hates you so much" theme didn't please me much either. Not that it didn't give me anything to think about, but every time I had a "hmm, you know, I'd not thought of that in precisely that way before" kind of moment, it was followed up by a load of such stereotypical Ugly American tripe that it lost its intended effect.
- How to Talk to a Widower -- Jonathan Tropper -- 4
- I really liked this. People compare Jonathan Tropper to Nick Hornby with good reason. You might also say he's like a man's Marian Keyes -- riotously funny, but full of wisdom on deep topics at the same time. This book centers around a young widower and the complications he faces as he attempts first to hold on to his grief and then to let go of it. Everyone who's ever grieved deeply will find something with which to identify here. Recommended.
- Lost and Found -- Carolyn Parkhurst -- 2.5
- Not a badly-written book; it moved along at a good pace, and it held my interest even though I was completely unfamiliar with its premise (a reality show). I even liked some of the characterizations quite a bit. The 2.5 is because I am so so so tired of books where the Christians are caricatures of evil badness and hypocrisy, while the unwed lesbian mothers are angels sent from heaven. Yawn. Except, oh yeah, heaven is full of evil bad hypocrites, nevermind. Obviously it's the author's right to write her characters however she sees fit. It's also my right to trash her narrow-minded decisions in a review.
- Plain Truth -- Jodi Picoult -- 4.5
- Just when I was thinking, "you know, I would LOVE to see a book from a mainstream point of view where there are Christians like the majority of Christians I know, portrayed in a realistic and non-negatively-stereotyped manner", along came this beautiful book, again by Jodi Picoult. (This one wins the Least Annoying Picoult-Patented Last-Minute Twist award from me, by the way, at least of the books of hers I've read to date). The story centers around an Amish woman and her community, as they are rocked by an accusation of infanticide against one of their own. I don't agree with everyone's actions or decisions, but I love the way Picoult treated her characters. The Amish are real people; the attorney who finds herself living far closer to them than she had ever thought she would is a real person, too, and their interactions ring with truth and compassion and true open-mindedness. Recommended.
- Nickel and Dimed -- Barbara Ehrenreich -- 2
- This much-talked-about bit of journalistic nonfiction left me cold, honestly. Everything from Ehrenreich's tone (condescending) to her methods (attempting to live as "the working poor" for a month at a time, three separate times, three different places) and her politics (I probably don't have to elaborate) bothered me. Her whole premise is undermined by the fact that her experiments were managed in a completely inaccurate manner. Diving into minimum-wage work as she did, she had no way of actually knowing what she professed to be telling the world in her book: what life is like for the poor. On the one hand, she had money going into the experiment for start-up expenses, a luxury that most of the working poor can't manage (she admits this); on the other hand, in her brief episodes of "slumming", she had no way of learning this crucial fact: Life is hard when you're poor, there's no doubt about it. But life is also full of joys and friendships and families and love and trials just like anyone else has. This book wasn't a complete waste of time -- the writing is engaging, and it may at least educate a class of people who've never worked for minimum wage and may not ever have thought about the fact that a waitress is actually a person.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
while I'm in video mode...
...here's one that LT came up with today. I helped him with the editing and sound recording, and showed him how to set up the camera, and he did pretty much everything else. (I helped him hold his props still every now and then too.)
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
eclipse
Guess who stayed up really really late last night?
It was amazing, really. I went outside at 12:30. The world was as bright as dawn, and seemed brighter because of the contrast with the deep shadows. I sat in the backyard with my camera on the tripod, watching the eclipse, taking a picture every few minutes, and reading that massively annoying book for school (there's a mood-shatterer). T and the kids came out just before 3 AM to see the beginning of totality; by the time I went in the house at 3:40, the night was dark as any moonless night; the stars were gorgeous, and I had a hard time finding my way around in my own backyard, dark-adjusted eyes and all.
Here's a time-lapse video of it (didn't embed it because I could NOT make autostart shut off, and I didn't want all three of the people who read this to be blasting O Fortuna every time they went to my page for the next ten entries, which means, what, three months). It's not fabulous but it's better than the one I may or may not have posted and nearly immediately deleted this afternoon. RSS feed? what RSS feed?
Thursday, August 23, 2007
no news is not actually necessarily good news
This is Thursday, the 23rd of August. This wouldn't mean much to most people (except the approximately 16.5 million people whose birthday is today; happy birthday!), but to me it means that it has been MORE THAN THREE DAYS since we were absolutely really supposed to have heard something sort of definite about you-know-what. Except apparently the mortgage company who stands to lose even more of its bankruptcy-tattered shirt on this deal had the realtor-access locks changed, which means that the appraiser couldn't get in until today, and now that he's presumably had a chance to do his appraising thing, we should REALLY hear something. By Christmas. Of 2009.
I'm feeling a wee bit more at peace about the whole thing, but only by the grace of God, and that's not to say that sometimes I don't briefly fantasize about moving into a refrigerator box on the street corner just so that I can stop with the wondering and the waiting and the freaking out. And there also might be fleeting fantasies about lobbing grenades through the windows of a certain blue-and-white real estate office -- after hours, of course -- but they're really and truly very fleeting.
Instead of the refrigerator box, it appears that we'll be moving in with my parents. I'm sorry, parents. You offered. My thought was that if we weren't able to get the house we want (which also happens to be, I am not joking, the sole and only house in our area that we can afford, including two-bedroom places which are really not an option), we would suck it up, admit defeat, and rent; moving in with Mom and Dad was only supposed to happen if we did get the house but couldn't move into it before our deadline to be out of this one. But T wants to hold off on getting into a rental for a few months, to see if the market does anything miraculous or interesting (like, say, completely recover and leave us entirely in the single-income-family dust) by the end of the year. So we are sucking it up even further and moving into my old bedroom and my parents' spare bedroom (which actually, come to think of it, was originally intended for Jenn, but she moved back to LA before she had a chance to occupy it). This is far from being all bad. Honestly, I've wanted to live out there again almost since I moved away; I just hadn't planned on invading their privacy and peace so thoroughly and for so long. We're already filling their garage with our belongings, including T's Charger, and we've also rented a storage unit to house our household furniture and also some engines and rear ends (the automotive kind) that need to be out of the weather and out of the way at the same time. I have made a spreadsheet (I may be a nerd, but hey, I am now a sane nerd -- every little bit helps) detailing what I need to do with the inside-house stuff, and when, and I was surprised by the length of the list of tasks that had "ASAP" in the "When?" column. So today I decided to tackle the filing cabinet. Five hours, two oversized and overfilled Hefty bags, and an overheated shredder later, here I am. But I guess at least that's done, I can check it off the list, and the cabinet can go in our moving sale.
Have I mentioned how much I hate moving? I truly really hate moving, and not just because it wears me out physically. The emotional strain is just as bad. Do I try to find room to store the ancient and now-nearly-untuneable piano that my father bought for me with $300 of hard-earned overtime pay when I was in tenth grade? Exactly how many pictures drawn by my son at the age of five can I throw away without sending him screaming to a therapist at the age of 25 instead of 30? Or, for that matter, without sending ME screaming to a therapist, say, tomorrow? How many times can our truck make the trek back and forth to my parents' house before it falls apart in an exhausted, trembling heap in the middle of the dirt road? How many truckloads of stuff can four people own, anyway? (answer: humankind hasn't figured out how to count that high yet.)
I swear I think about stuff besides moving. I really do. For at least seven and a half minutes per day.
(School is going OK. The online English class seems to be working out fine (even though the book we're reading might be annoying me just a wee tiny little bit), and so is the in-person music appreciation one, except I need to be more careful to duct-tape my mouth closed before class starts. Debi. will you please PRETTY please take the class and sit behind me so that you can stab me between the shoulder blades with a freshly sharpened pencil every time I open my mouth? The difficulty is that I LOVE music and I'm SO interested in it. The other students in the class never say anything when the instructor is standing there waiting for someone to contribute, and it is really, really hard to stuff my fist far enough into my mouth to keep myself from calling out answers. Next week I'm resorting to the milkshake bribe again.)
Thursday, August 16, 2007
day 47 - imperial barbecue
The Star Wars fans in our household are not terribly fond of Ewoks or the Gungans (I can see their point, especially regarding the latter). Neither, obviously, are the storm troopers, the Emperor, or Darth Vader, as is evidenced in the Lego art installation created by my eleven-year-old son and preserved for posterity in this photo.
(You do get that those are flames under there, right?)
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
day 46 - leaves
Just a shot of some backlit leaves. I had walked to school, thinking it would be too dark on the way home to take pictures, but not able to stop and grab any on the way. But class got out (very) early, and on the way back home I saw these hanging over the path by the library.
stuff
I've been under a lot of stress since the whole we-have-to-move thing got dropped in our laps. I realized the other day that this is a new experience for me, this waiting for someone else to make decisions that will impact my life in a very big way. The last time this happened was when I was applying for colleges. In 1993. In my adult life, I've never had to move house; I've not applied for jobs and waited for calls for interviews; I've not even applied for credit when there was any doubt that it would be approved. So this whole issue of waiting (and waiting and waiting) for other people, who don't know me from Adam and couldn't care less if I lived or died, to get themselves together and make a decision that will alter my life in a very serious way, is taking its toll on me. I have had some up-and-down days lately, and I've been lying low about it around here because if I'm tired of my own whining that I know nobody else wants to hear it, but actually some of the days, the 'down' bits of up-and-down have been almost kind of scary.
So it was nice to go to school tonight for the first time since May and have a really good time. Small blessings, and all. Even though I got to my car after class and saw that I'd left my headlights on (car started fine). Even though I got pulled over on the way home because the officer said I was weaving and thought I might be under the influence. (Yep, that's me, under the influence of a diet Coke and a Beatles song combined with the fact that a 35-year-old car has a steering box that is a wee bit more relaxed than the ones they come out with today.) Even though the instructor for the class I'm taking has a reputation as a really hard grader. Even though I get to spend the semester reading books about the working poor with a decidedly liberal slant, and even though I'm a tiny bit afraid of getting graded down for my opinions rather than my writing skills. Honestly, with the kind of day I had, I could have been going to a dental appointment followed by a trip to the gynecologist, a swimsuit-shopping expedition, and a tour of a dairy farm, and it would have been a pleasant change from the breakdown-inducing difficulties I had with my kids today, just over whether or not their chores would get done. Well, with one of them.
Oops, there's that whining I wasn't going to do.
So. It's good to be back at school. Tomorrow I have another class -- something else to look forward to, that will help pass the time while we wait for house news. I wonder if it's too late to sign up for about thirty more units?
Saturday, August 11, 2007
day 42 - baby possum
(other days are at flickr. I didn't blog them. I had a few other things on my mind. Plus I wondered how long I had to go without posting before nobody ever came here again.)
Another busy day. (I know. What a shock.) More packing, more schlepping of boxes to my parents' garage -- this time it was the entire contents of our overhead crawl-space, two truckloads full of stored baby memories and restoration parts for my husband's car and religious books and music books and who knows what all. In the midst of this, my daughter had a birthday party to attend; on my way home from dropping her off, I saw what I thought was a rat, behaving in a most un-rat-like manner as it crossed the road about fifty yards from my house. It was moving slowly, no skittering at all. When I parked the car I took my camera (of course) back to see what was going on, I found a BABY POSSUM crossing the road. I very nearly died of the cuteness, which is funny, because when they're full-sized, American possums are not cute [i]at all[/i]. Here he is, telling me he will CUT ME if I even THINK about getting any closer with that big black thing because he is a BIG BAD TOUGH GUYRODENT MARSUPIAL . As anyone can see.
Also, here he is looking more sedate.
And here he is in all his full-length hairy cuteness (he was pretty much exactly the size of someone's pet rat, just for scale.)
When I went back out later he was gone. I hope he's old enough not to need a mother, or that he found her, or she found him, or whatever.
