« January 2010 | Main | April 2010 »
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
tweets, 3/23-24/10
I have a lot of thoughts rattling around up there but I don't have the energy to sort them all out, so I'll let my tweets for the last couple of days serve as writing prompts.
We are sad: We'll watch some *I Spy* tonight in his memory.
about 5 hours ago via web
Robert Culp died. We LOVE Robert Culp. One of the surrealish sad things about preferring to watch TV shows from previous generations is that many of the people you see on the screen and come to think of as acquaintances (don't look at me funny! You're all addicted to Lost! And this is different how?) are either dead already or will be soon. This evening we put in a DVD and watched a 35-year-old athletic ladies' man who actually just died today at the age of 79 get himself into and out of espionage-ish scrapes. (It was a really good episode.) It was comforting and sad at the same time: He'll always be 35 for us. (Well, except when we watch Greatest American Hero* and he's fiftyish.)
*I bet you totally have that theme song stuck in your head now. Evil, thy name is Rachel.
I now have a phone with a camera in it, just in time for the year 2000! Oh, wait.
about 5 hours ago via web
Only because my old phone was on its last legs. I really do like the new one though, even though the camera is (as I knew it would be) lame. I do like that I can transfer pictures to it via memory card (see below) and use my own shots as backgrounds. I got so everlastingly tired of the boring stock images in my old phone, and I'm way too cheap to download new ones. Yes, I know I could transfer the pictures through the air just like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but even if I wanted to spend $10 a month on a data package (and I don't; see above re: cheap), data transfer doesn't work 'round these here parts anyway.
Just bought a 2GB Micro-SD card for $10. That's $2000 worth of hard drives in 1995 money; could lose it in a coin purse. Where's my jetpack? about 8 hours ago via webWow! That is such an original thought and I am sure I am the only person on the planet clever enough to think of it while looking at the memory-card display at Wal-Mart! Did you know that the sky is blue? It seriously is!
OK, whom do I have to befriend to get one of these for a pet?
about 9 hours ago via web
SERIOUSLY. Cutest baby animals EVER. My husband is all, "They just look like puppies," and I am all, "Yeah, if puppies were so eye-searingly cute that you couldn't look at them for five minutes without exploding from the buildup of glee." Did you see them?
C and I are thinking about auditioning for a community theater play. You only live once, right? Worst they can do is laugh. For days. At me.
about 24 hours ago via web
I alternate between thinking this is a crazydumb idea and nevermind, and thinking this is a crazydumb idea but I already told Claire and the Internet about it so I'd better go through with it because I can't lie. Hi yeah I'm totally going to go sing on a stage in front of strangers. By myself. Ha ha! It'll be a lark. Or else, you know, it'll be a memory that makes me cringe on a daily basis for the next fifty years.
My new theory: "The Book Report" from *You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown* was carefully engineered to stick in human brains and never leave. 3:05 PM Mar 23rd via webIt's unfortunate, though, that there are four people singing that song at once, because otherwise it would be a fantabulous audition piece. DO YOU SEE HOW CRAZYDUMB THIS IDEA IS. I just typed the phrase "audition piece", for crying out loud.
I love teaching my son algebra, especially when he just GETS it. Systems of equations today = my momgeekery firing on all twelve cylinders.
2:47 PM Mar 23rd via web
I looked ahead in his book and I'll be teaching him to complete the square in a couple of weeks and that is so full of awesome that I seriously think each morning about how it's one day closer to completing the square. As if completing the square were Disneyland. (It's maybe better. It doesn't cost $60 per person, and there are no crowds.)
I try not to want to smack Kit Kittredge, but every time Claire watches this insufferable movie, the urge is stronger.
This is really not like me but my gosh I just cannot stand that character. She's so... smug. And saccharine. And self-important. And too-cute-for-words. And I'm a hateful bitter cynic who should spend the rest of her life sitting by her window waving her cane at the neighborhood and yelling GET OFF MY LAWN. I know.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
easy, cheap chili for a crowd
La la la, I am going to post a recipe because I am not going to write about politics.
We had a family gathering here today to celebrate the birthdays of my niece and nephew. I made a pot of chili to go with the hamburgers and hot dogs. People! Chili is SO EASY. Years ago I used to think you had to buy one of those $2.50 brown-bag spice packets to make good chili, but I was so wrong. And considering that this batch served about eighteen people (small servings) with leftovers, it was cheap. And it was an excuse to use my new anniversary-present slow-cooker*.
*I just had the best anniversary date EVER with my husband. He bought me the aforementioned slow-cooker, and he took me to bookstores and the Olive Garden and A PLAY. How many years have I wanted to go to a community theatre play with him? Sixteen years, that's how long! It was so, so awesome. Also, we went to Winco. Winco is one hot date just by itself. There may have been smooching in the bulk-bin area. Hey, we have a license to do that.
So. Recipe. SERIOUSLY SO EASY.
You'll need:
*About, I dunno, a quart of dry beans. Maybe more. (I love love love black beans. Black beans are my very favorite foodish thing right now and they are excellent in this chili AND they are available in Winco's bulk bins.) (You could, of course, use canned beans, but that seriously decreases the cheapskate value of this meal because it's going to take something like five or six cans to get the same amount of beans. But then, your house will smell less like boiled beans later, so that's a bonus.)
*Some bacon if you like to cook your beans with bacon, or salt pork, or ham, or, hey, whatever, just salt if you want.
*2 pounds of very lean ground beef
*a yellow onion, chopped
*a couple of cloves of garlic, minced
*some chopped bell pepper if you like bell pepper in your chili (I used the very last bit of last year's bell peppers for this today. My only comfort is that this year's bell peppers are beginning their lives under a grow-light on top of my kitchen cupboards as I type this.)
*About 3 or 4 tablespoons of chili powder
*A tablespoon or less of cumin
*Salt and pepper
*Some canned tomatoes if you want (I usually don't, for chili, but whatever floats your boat.)
*You could also fully customize this by adding a bunch of hot stuff if you wanted to. Also, I bet you could do these up in some animal-friendly vegetarianish kind of way, if you like plain beans without meat. And let's face it, if you're a vegetarian, you're used to boring stuff like that already, so it'd probably be just fine for you. Go for it! (Also: MUCH CHEAPER.)
Soak the beans. You can do this overnight, or you can, like I always do, cover them in a few quarts of water, bring them to a simmer, simmer for a couple of minutes, and then let them sit for an hour with the lid on.
Then cook the beans in a few quarts of water. (I generally do not change out the soaking water. You get more nutrients this way, I am convinced. Also: I am lazy and I like to conserve water for totally non-green reasons.) You can add some bacony goodness, or you can not. You can add some salt, or you can wait till they're cooked and do it then. Hey, whatever. You want to cook them thoroughly, for two or three hours at a slow boil. (This time I put them in the slow cooker overnight on High**, but I usually don't.)
(**I think I got up in the wee small hours and turned them down to Low. But anything I do in the middle of the night is liable to be completely forgotten or else remembered incorrectly by morning. So. All night on High might be too much cooking for beans. Or it might not.)
When the beans are cooked, brown the ground beef with the onion, garlic, spices, salt, and pepper. Add the bell pepper when the meat's almost done. Then, once the meat is done, add the beans (or, if you're like me, add the meat and stuff to the beans in the slow cooker). Stir well. Bring to a boil and then simmer, covered, for at least half an hour; the longer the better.
DO YOU SEE HOW EASY THAT WAS? People, it's just beans, meat, garlic, onion, bell pepper, chili powder, and cumin. That is SO MUCH EASIER THAN PIE.
This filled the 6-quart crock of my slow-cooker (it's not a Crock-Pot-Tee-Em so I can't call it that, now, can I?). My next canning project (late this week, I'm thinking) will involve canning some of this chili. With store-bought bell peppers. Snif.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Recommended for your Blog-Reading Pleasure
Note: BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST, you might want to come up with a list of your ten favorite children's chapter books, in order. It could be fun, and if you do it before you continue, you won't have my list polluting your clear thinking on this obviously very important issue.
OK. Do you have your list done?
Back in early January, somebody (I wish I could remember who; probably someone on Twitter; was it you?) directed me to A Fuse #8 Production, a blog at the School Library Journal website whose author was conducting a poll looking for the top children's chapter books of all time. Now, I am not a school librarian or any kind of librarian so I'm not one hundred percent sure I was supposed to participate in the poll, but hey, it was up there on the Internet, and teachers were telling their students to participate, and I'm an educator and an avid reader of kidlit even though I'm thirty-my-gosh-five years old, so I sent in my list. It looked like this:
10. Daddy Long-Legs (Jean Webster)
9. The Great Brain (John D. Fitzgerald)
8. A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
7. Ramona the Pest (Beverly Cleary)
6. Farmer Boy (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
5. Henry Huggins (Beverly Cleary)
4. Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
3. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
2. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Robert C. O'Brien)
1. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
(Note: It would have looked different if I hadn't excluded some books, like Robin McKinley's Hero and the Crown and Richard Adams' Watership Down, on the basis that I thought they were probably more YA [or, in the case of Watership Down, adult] than kidlit, and the rules of the poll were very specific about excluding YA books. PLEASE OH PLEASE I hope this means there'll be a YA poll in the future; a year or so before she did this one, the writer did one for picture books, so my hope is not entirely without foundation, right?)
AT ANY RATE.
Since early February, the poll results have been coming out a few books at a time -- first ten books per post, then five, and now that she's on the top 20, one book per post, which means about four books per week, because the writer is torturing me specifically, of course. And when I say results, I don't mean just a list, although that would have been fascinating and it was what I was keenly anticipating when I started haunting her blog February 1st just in case my RSS reader had missed an update or something tragic like that. She writes an essay for each result, with summaries and author information and quotes from people who participated in the poll and even snippets of video and pictures of different covers for each book. It's a treasure trove for kidlitaholics like me.
It's been interesting to see where books from my list have appeared on THE list -- those which have appeared so far -- and also, it's been interesting, if you call smacking myself in the forehead repeatedly interesting, to see the books I'd have voted for if they hadn't slipped my mind at the crucial moment*, or if (which would have been much kinder, but a lot more work for the already-heavily-employed nice lady who compiled all these results from who knows how many people) I had been allowed to choose fifteen or twenty or an infinite number of books. It's also been fun to discover kidlit that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my vast kidliterary knowledge (ha). The Saturdays, where have you been all my life? My library holds list overfloweth.
*HELLO! Blue Willow!? Duh! Would have replaced one of the Little House books, I think.
So. What's your list look like?
Monday, March 15, 2010
springing, further
It's that beautiful day that comes every March: the first lovely, sunny, springy day, the day when the kids and I head out in our shirtsleeves and start the garden going for the year. Add in a load of freshly washed clothes hanging in an even fresher breeze, and a dozen hens and one very nervous rooster clucking around freely in the warm grass, and this is maybe the best day of the year.
Today we cleaned out the few remaining stalks from last year, gathered up the odd bits of garbage (a defeated looking "boffer" weapon [google it], some planting trays, the old destroyed bathroom scale we used to weigh the weeds we pulled last year [don't ask].) Speaking of weeds, the chickens had done an excellent job keeping those down all winter. Seriously, it's worth having a few hens if for no other reason than that you can turn them out in the garden each day once you're done harvesting, and they'll eliminate the need to go in and weed in the spring. Try it; you'll like it.
Then we cultivated the raised beds and planted things in two of them. Joy joy joy! C repaired the pea trellis and carefully set in last year's peas along the base of it; I broadcast onion and carrot seeds into their bed; LT and I planted rows of spinach. Over the weekend, I'd already planted trays of tomatoes, peppers, and herbs in the house; they'll be going out after frost. Also still to come: crookneck squash, zucchini squash, zucchino rampicante, cucumbers, potatoes, corn, and I can't remember what-all else. I love this time of year so, so much. Have I mentioned that?
Monday, March 08, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: The End
I will try to mark spoilers and make them easy to skip if you want to. I was going to go all 2002 high-tech and make the text color match the background color so that you'd have to highlight to read them, but then I remember about how RSS readers sometimes strip formatting, so I won't. Silly technology. Fix yourself!
So. I'm done with the book. Along with my thoughts about this ending in particular, I want to talk a little bit about twist ending in general. I've often called Picoult's endings such things as "cheap shots" and "ripoffs" and "contrived", and I've reached the point where sometimes when I'm reading one of her books, I read the ending first so that it doesn't infuriate me when I get to it. Obviously that wasn't an option for this project, which turned out to be a good thing, and here's why:
So this leads me to believe that there are two or three different kinds of Picoult endings:
- Books where the endings might seem contrived but aren't if you pay attention; see above.
- Books where the endings truly are contrived and truly are a rip-off -- My Sister's Keeper, for example, and Handle With Care -- books where the ending is a total departure from the rest of the story, books that remind me of that one short story I wrote for tenth-grade English where this guy had AIDS* and I got twelve pages into what was supposed to be a seven-to-fourteen-page story about his friendship with a girl before I realized there was no way I could write it the way I'd originally intended to do in the allotted space remaining so I killed the guy off in a car accident and called it a twist ending. My English teacher was suitably unimpressed, and I know how he feels because that's exactly how I feel at the end of a book where the ending seems to be just thrown in to make a splash (or cut the story shorter) but makes no point otherwise. *If you'd been fifteen in 1990 with an overly inflated perception of your own writing ability, chances are you'd have written an AIDS story too. Trust me on this.
- Books whose endings may or may not Play Fair, but they at least make you think about the book, and maybe even a major life issue, in a different light. I'm thinking about Tenth Circle and Plain Truth, two of my favorite Picoults (after Nineteen Minutes). It might be a bit of a cheap shot -- or it might not, and I'll never know because I can't wipe that part of my memory and reread the book to find out -- but at least it's a cheap shot with a point. (You might argue that the end of Handle With Care qualifies here too, but I would argue back.)
In sum: this wasn't a perfect book. The writing was a bit wobbly in the Jacob sections, as Katie and I both noted, and there were a couple of grating factual difficulties. But overall, I enjoyed it and can recommend it.
Katie, thank you for doing this project with me. I know we're both busy people, but I had a lot of fun. (Yes, I have homework and kids, but you have a full-time job, so I think it all evens out. And I only had to stay up till 1:30 once this weekend to catch up on my trig homework. :) )
highly effective habits of very dramatic people
C is preparing for 4-H Presentation Day this weekend, at which she will present an interpretive reading of the passage from Anne of Green Gables wherein Marilla and Anne meet for the first time, and Anne finds out that they don't want her because she's not a boy. I am (among many other positions including nurse, nutritionist, teacher, spiritual guide, and taskmaster) my daughter's drama coach, so I was helping her along a bit with her reading:
I: All right, here's what I want you to imagine. We've built a beautiful barn, and fenced in our whole acreage, and bought hay and grain, and we go with the horse trailer to the breeder's farm, and you hug your new horse and love her and give her a name, and we bring her home and turn her loose in the barn and then a sheriff's deputy comes and tells us that we have to take her back because you can't have horses here. That is how Anne is feeling right now; she was getting everything she ever wanted her whole life but now she's just figured out that she doesn't get to have it after all.C: OK.
I: Ready?
C: Yes. "'You don't want me? You don't want me because--'" [racking, uncontrollable, whole-body sobs.]
It took five minutes for her to be ready to try again. When she's on Broadway, she'll have to come up with some kind of Method-Lite or she'll never be able to make it through a performance.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: Day... whatever
I, um, sort of stopped paying attention to pages and I'm almost done with the book now so I had to stop and update before I finished the whole thing. This reminds me of how I feel when I have a package of something delicious sitting next to me while I'm studying and I look up from my textbook to find that the package has somehow emptied itself while I was engrossed in a world full of trigonometric identities or Deaf cultural values, except without the Oreo chocolate in the corners of my mouth. (Note: I have not done one single problem of my trig homework for the weekend yet. Good thing it's a rainy Saturday, right?)
Can I just break up the flow here to say how much I love books? Ever since I was a little girl I've been fascinated by the realization that there are entire worlds and lives and emotions, transformed into ink and printed on paper squeezed between two covers, just sitting there waiting for us to open them. It used to make me a little dizzy, to look at all the rows and rows of worlds in the library. And now, here I am, thirty-five years old and very much a citizen of the Real Grown-Up World with taxes and children and jobs and responsibilities, and stuff, and I am itching to open the book that's sitting mere yards from me, to find out what happened. Even though nothing really did.
SPOILERS GALORE if you haven't read this book yet. Read it first; it won't take any longer than polishing off a few dozen bags of Oreos.
OK. So now the trial's in full swing. My love-loathe relationship for Picoult is never more present than it is during the court trials that inevitably take up the last 150 pages of her books. On the one hand, this is where the rubber meets the road, and you're finding out what happens and watching characters' reactions to things. On the other hand, that's a whole lot of talking and a considerable amount of either a) fresh infodump or b) reiterations of stuff we already knew from before, and that can get tedious. That aside, at this point I can't help but think that Picoult is setting us up to think that Jacob killed Jess. He keeps dodging around the issue, and there was that "I didn't hurt her"/"I didn't mean to hurt her" bit. Which, if I'm right about that, would mean according to the laws of Picoultdynamics that Jacob couldn't have done it (in his mind, remember, he "hurt" her when he dragged her body down the stairs), and maybe Kat was right all along and it was Theo... or Jess actually did just die of a fall, which is where I'm leaning now. So yes, you read that right: a last-minute change in my PPCSTE prediction. I hope I don't come to regret it.
And now if you'll excuse me there's this really important trial going on on my end table and I have to go pay attention to it.
Picoult-a-thon: Day 4, to p. 304
I confess that I didn't take notes during this section, so I don't have a lot of detailed things to post about it. A few random thoughts:
Picoult's lawyers are always quirky. In House Rules, the lawyer is 28, a former farrier, suffering from a bit of a crush on Jacob's fortyish mother, and woefully inexperienced at practicing law. This is sometimes funny and usually harrowing. Good job on that, Ms. Picoult.
Not so good: more jarring non-literalness from Jacob during his turns at narration. I think it was technically after page 304 (I'm at the point where I just want to keep reading -- damn the blog updates! full speed ahead!), but there's one time when Jacob narrates about "a lick of cold air" that "wraps around" his ankles. I'm not saying that there aren't people with Asperger's who could think in those terms; I'm just saying that when you have a character who, when asked "Can you tell me your name?" replies, "Yes," with no sense of belligerence or irony, you can't have him rhapsodizing about ankle-wrapping licks of cold air a few pages later. This is definitely turning out to be the one major weak point in this story for me: Picoult can't set aside her own style long enough to let Jacob's voice through.
I waver occasionally, but my PPCSTE prediction is still the same, with the added angle that yes, I think Jacob did set up a crime scene as a forensics experiment, whatever else he may have been doing with Jess and her body. UNLESS -- unless this is all what she wants us to think, to throw us off the trail. I most certainly can not drink from the cup that is in front of you!* As Katie says, she's doing this just to mess with us.
*Unless, of course, I've spent the last five years building up an immunity to Picoulticane powder.**
**I do realize that I may well be the only person on planet Earth who is dorky enough to find this humorous.
Friday, March 05, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: Day 3, to page 228
Now I feel terrible for having been snarky because this section was so, so painful to read, as a mother, which means of course that Picoult hit the mark and did an excellent job. I'm not even going to bring up the few imperfections I found along the way. I'm just going to go hug my son.
(explanatory post re: this series: here.)
My predictions remain unchanged, though.
Picoult-a-thon: Day 2, pages 76ish-152
In case you're looking at this post with furrowed brow, thinking, "the heck?!", I'll recap: Katie and I are blogging about a new book (House Rules) by an author we both like/loathe (Jodi Picoult). Here's the first explanatory post in the series.
* * * * * *
Ooh, so many possibilities are emerging now. To summarize, we know that Jess is dead; we know that Theo saw her right before she disappeared; we know that Jacob came home from an appointment with her in serious distress; we know that he moved her body and set it up so that the police would find it a few days later; we know that the cops suspect Jess's jerk of a boyfriend. Picoult is setting it up, though, like Jess fell and Jacob cleaned up and moved her body, perhaps (as Katie mentioned) thinking that he's "taking care of his brother" (House Rule number 5) by covering up for him. It also appears that Jacob's forensics obsession is at play here; has he set the scene up as a test for the local PD? It begins to look that way. This all still plays into my original PPCSTE prediction: we're supposed to think Jacob is innocent, but he did it. But could she be trying to make us think that? It's a very Vizzini vs. Westley kind of circle of doubt I've got going here.
Complaints:
- I hate to nitpick, but neurotransmitters don't transmit by "raging through [one's] bloodstream", Ms. Picoult. They're made in neurons, and then they hang out between neurons waiting to, you know, transmit impulses. Maybe he has agonists in his bloodstream. Cripes, I'm such a nerd.
- Also, after all my ranting about how writers shouldn't show us the chickens in my last Picoult post, I really think in a crime/mystery/whatevergenrethisis novel, it's extremely unfair to have the protagonist and the narrator hide pertinent information from us. That is Not Playing By The Rules. Jacob and his mysterious metal "object" from the crime scene alllllmost made me throw the book, but not quite. I did give in and roll my eyes a few times. I'm going to add a feature where I guess the nature of the "object" until it's revealed, though. I think we're supposed to think it's a knife, so that's too easy (again with the Vizzini vs. Westley scene), so I'm thinking it's Jess's iPod.
Otherwise, good reading. Better than the first 76ish pages, I think.
Just to clarify, my take on the Picoult-Patented Cheap-Shot Twist Ending at this point is:
It looks like Jess fell and Jacob moved her body. The fact that this is so cut-and-dried so early on in the game makes me distrust it, and I hold to my original prediction, which is that Jacob killed her, for some reason having to do with taking care of his brother.
springing
Winter is going out in lush, uplifting loveliness, like it always does here. When I was a schoolgirl and I read the Anne of Green Gables series for the first time (cue heavenly chord), I was bewildered by Montgomery's unfavorable description of late winter. Late winter is quite possibly the most beautiful thing in the world in central California, because what it really is is spring.
Fiddleneck, always the first wildflowers that can be seen from your car as you go down the highway.
Lambs! Squee! I wonder if the rancher would miss just one little lamb if I put it in my hatchback and brought it home with me?
This is a roadside weed with its best clothes on, lit from behind by grass-filtered sunshine reflected off a pondy puddle (or a puddly pond; cattle pastures in the valley are dotted with them after a rainy spell).
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: Day 1, pages 1-76ish
I had forgotten how quickly seventy-six pages of a novel goes. THAT IS SO SAD. Realizing that I can have forgotten anything about the 100% pure awesome that is losing myself in a good book almost makes me question my priorities and toss this whole 'further education' bit out the window.
OK, not really.
I digress. For those just joining us, my friend Katie and I are liveblogging (except not exactly, you know, live) Jodi Picoult's House Rules. Full explanation is here. And now, on to the snark:
There's really not much. This is a pretty decent book and the things I don't like about it aren't snarkable things, or maybe I'm not in a snarky mood, but here goes:
- The most glaring issue for me so far (full disclosure: I'm a few pages into the second 76-page section, and it gets better) is that Jacob's voice (remember he's the boy with Asperger's) just doesn't ring true in his first-person sections. For a person who's so literal -- and people with Aspergers definitely tend to be literal -- his thoughts contain an awful lot of metaphors and idioms. It felt much, much more like someone else explaining Jacob's thoughts -- which of course it is -- and it took me out of the story a bit.
- Also: Like any novel that has a complicated medical or psychological issue at its center, the narration tends to be a bit infodumpy and advocate-ish. Some of the text reads like a Good Housekeeping article rather than a page-turner of a novel by a bestselling author. It's kind of unavoidable, I know, when the author has to introduce her readers to An Issue while simultaneously showing how her characters' lives are affected by it, but there it is. I noticed the same thing about Picoult's previous novel, Handle With Care (which got thrown across the room at the end. Hey, guys, this could get exciting here).
Interesting note: the mother (Emma) is an advice columnist. This is a good job for someone in a novel, I think. I remember liking it when I read a kidlit book (was it called Dear Lola?) about a parentless family whose oldest brother keeps the family in food and lodging by writing an advice column, way back when I actually was a kid (the fact that I'm not one now certainly doesn't keep me from reading kidlit, although college unfortunately does). And then there was a recent Jacqueline Mitchard novel, The Breakdown Lane, about an advice columnist whose teenage son takes over her column when she develops MS. (I really enjoyed this book, but unfortunately I've just told you almost everything I can remember about it. Getting old is sad.)
If Jacob at some point takes over his mother's column, though, I will be quite surprised.
Also: I totally called the crime scene diagnosis before Jacob did. Unfortunately, this is because it made the news a year or two ago when a man died in a similar way not far from here.
Theo (younger, neurotypical brother) is developing into quite a creepy, disturbed character. Not your average sullen overlooked teen, he feels compelled to break into people's houses and handle their stuff when they're not home. Which -- oh -- brings me to one other thing I didn't like: thanks to contextual clues, it's pretty obvious to a reader with brains that he does this because he wants to feel like he's in a normal family and a normal home. Yet Picoult has to tell us that, during one of Theo's first-person sections, instead of letting us figure it out for ourselves. Now I don't go into a Jodi Picoult novel expecting, say, the finesse and subtlety of Kazuo Ishiguro, but give me a little credit for having a brain, please? It reminds me of the film version of The Music Man (which, by the way, I mostly utterly adore), during "Pickalittle Talkalittle": we see the matronly women in their feathered hats standing around gossiping, behaving like busybody hens, even singing in a chickenlike way, and then just to be sure and also to insult the audience's intelligence, the camera cuts to some convenient hens pecking at the ground nearby. HEY AUDIENCE! DID YOU NOTICE THEY ARE BEHAVING KIND OF LIKE HENS? Graah. Don't show us the chickens, writers.
And now I will close with my new prediction regarding the PPCSTE (that's Picoult-Patented Cheap-Shot Twist Ending, of course):
I'm still leaning toward Jacob as the guilty party, and it will have something to do with Emma's family's House Rule Number 5, which states, "Take care of your brother; he's the only one you've got." (hence the title, see?)
Satisfying things du jour
ooh goody! a list!
- I finally, finally opened and sorted the box of Miscellaneous Kitchen Things that had been occupying too much space in a high cupboard in my pantry since we moved into this house two years ago. Lo and behold: shelf paper! Drawer liner! Candlesticks! Cookbooks! The last of which reminded me that oh yeah, I'd been wanting to switch the cookbooks and the portable coffee mugs* places in my kitchen cupboards, so I did, and then I decided that I really should sort through my recipe binder and tidy it up, and two hours later here I am, still in my pajamas (they're workout clothes, excuse me, and I just haven't worked out yet today, see), but with a tidy cookbook cupboard and a serious craving for every kind of food I've ever made during the entire course of my sixteen-year marriage**.
*One (1) person in our house drinks coffee and yet we have enough travel mugs to outfit an LA freeway at rush hour, I think. Give or take a few, maybe. It has always been this way. I have given up trying to cut down on the quantity, as I am always met with Very Firm Resistance from certain quarters.
**holy dang, SIXTEEN YEARS (in two weeks). That's, like, the amount of time people's parents have been married. How does this happen?
- This organizational spree was brought on by the fact that last night I canned seven quarts of beef stock, made from the bones and scraps of chuck roasts ($1.27/lb on sale!) used to make and can fourteen quarts of beef stew on Monday, and I am quickly running out of space in my canned-goods cupboard. Which (running out of space in the canned-goods cupboard) is one of my minor goals in life. I would love to have to add on to my house to make room for things that I have put up in lovely secondhand Mason jars. You know which ones are my favorites? The ones that have old labels clinging to them. I bought some jars at a rummage sale once, and when I brought them home I found a label that said "Tomatoes 1966", in that immaculate careful handwriting that girls learned eighty years ago, still barely adhering to the outside of one jar. For some reason, that almost made me cry. I tried to keep it, but it crumbled into pieces when I touched it. (1966 was not so into acid-free adhesive, I'm guessing.)
- After I work with the kids on their school projects just a little more, and after I spend an hour thrashing around on the elliptical machine, and after I shower and change out of my workout clothes, I am going to sit down with a novel and read it. Because I have to, see.
Picoult-a-thon: Before I Begin
As mentioned in my first post, Katie and I are doing a co-project (because "joint project" just sounds wrong) where we will be reading through Jodi Picoult's new book, House Rules, and doing a Very Special Kind Of Review Which May Include Snarking (or may not. It could be an awesome book. Sometimes they are. Nineteen Minutes, I am looking at you.). Why this book? Well, it's almost kind of an inside joke between Katie and myself, but not quite: Picoult is an author with whom we each have a kind of love/loathe relationship (I could be wrong but I think on my part it's more love than loathe, and on Katie's it's more the reverse), and one day not long ago we were chatting about how we should read Picoult's next book together and blog about our predictions for the obligatory Twist Ending (if you've ever read Picoult, you know that every ending must twist; it's the first law of Picoultdynamics). So here I am, and there she is or will be, and I'm out of parentheses at present so I had better get down to business.
I haven't started the book yet. It's 532 pages and Katie and I are going to try to read it in a week even though I have school and children and all kinds of other fun things that fill my days (verifying trigonometric identities makes my brain smile but it does cut into one's reading time -- oops, now I have a parenthesis deficit). So unless my calculator is wrong, that comes out to exactly 76 pages per day. It's as if the publisher knew we would do this, right? I will make a possibly heroic effort to keep up.
The jacket blurb tells me that this is a book about a mother of two sons: Jacob, who has Aspergers and is SERIOUSLY into crime-scene analysis, and Theo, who, reading between the lines, been completely neglected and shunted to the side by his single mother in favor of his older brother's issues. Somebody kills somebody, and some people think that the older crime-obsessed son with Aspergers did it. (There are better summaries just about everywhere, possibly including the wall of a stall in your nearest gas station restroom, but that'll do for now because have you seen the timestamp on this post? -- GAH. More parenthesis debt.)
Without further ado, my first prediction re: the twist ending, based on my not-insubstantial experience with Picoult's previous works: We will be set up to believe that Jacob is innocent and that his brother Theo is the killer, but in fact Jacob will be GUILTY. (Don't worry, that's absolutely not a spoiler. It'll probably change at least once or twice before I totally spoil the end for you.) (GAH!)
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Why, here I am!
I must confess: I miss blogging. So here I am. I have no idea if I'll be able to maintain this at all, what with school and homeschooling and all the other gazillion things I usually have on my plate, but I want to. I'm not where I was (maybe someday I'll import [most of] those posts, if I stick around here, that is), because my domain name is about to expire and I don't think I'll renew it. Or maybe I will, and I'll import these posts. Or maybe I'll have a new domain name. I am an unpredictable, indecisive person: move over, Philippa Gordon, and if you haven't read Anne of the Island now is a good time to do that, by the way.
So. I have a few projects in mind for this blog, aside from the usual* book reviews and self-deprecating humor and garden posts and chicken posts and canning posts (I have seeds! and two new canning cookbooks! squee!) and photographs and school-related posts and maybe even some mind-numbingly dull exercise stuff, since (prepare yourself for a shock) I do that now -- exercise -- and everyone who does it likes to talk about it even though anything short of training for a marathon is pretty darn boring as a discussion topic, really. *if you can call anything "usual" when I haven't done it with any regularity in about fourteen months, right?
The first project is a live-blogging one with Katie: We share a love/hate relationship with Jodi Picoult's writing, and so we are going to read her new book, House Rules, which was just released today, and snark about it objectively review it, complete with predictions for the inevitable Picoult-patented Cheap-Shot Plot Twist (TM) and anything else we feel like snarking about rationally discussing along the way. Other projects to come may or may not involve scary 1970's food and Little House on the Prairie (not, it is to be hoped, simultaneously). Stay tuned.
