An Embarrassment of Riches

What We're Reading Now

Ross is reading The Road to Ruin by Donald Westlake. It's about hangdog, blue-collar, schlepper criminals, and he avoids reading it in public for fear of breaking out in maniacal laughter.

Ross works at the Central library. 

Short and Sweet - by Helen I'm not much of a short story reader, but every once in awhile a story will strike my fancy. This happened with Ed McClanahan's hilarious story, "How's that again" in his book O the Clear Moment. Ed's wife has been after him to get a hearing aid, but of course, he is not ready to hear this. One day at the car wash, he discovers why he needs to listen to her advice.
    
    "I roll the window down halfway (for the purpose of telling him to stop mumbling, fer crissakes) and hear instead "Take your foot off the brake and take the car out of gear!" (as any competent audiologist can tell you, "put" and "take" sound remarkable alike under certain atmospheric conditions), but before I can sort out and obey these apparently contradictory instructions the car lurches forward - "lurch" is going to be the operative word from here on - and I see to my horror that rushing toward me is this great hideous spongy pink alien thing with long flabby tentacles slapping at my fenders, my hood, my windshield, and now these vile slimy pink tendrils are actually inside the car, flippetty-flappetty-flopping through the still half-open window, invading my personal space and flinging nasty car wash juices all over me and my glasses and my nice upholstery and my new goatsuede jacket, and I frantically trying to poke them back out with one hand while fumbling for the electric window button with the other, but the more tentacles I push out the more come flopping in behind them,... "

And you can imagine the rest.

Jane McCafferty's Thank You for the Music is another book to try. This collection of short stories is about the silences and the connections that can develop between strangers. My favorite is the story "Dear Mr. Springsteen" which shows how a love of music creates a momentary bond between an aging lonely white woman and an African American boy.

Happy Reading.  

Another Short Walk - by Tama A couple weeks ago I was browsing at Powell’s on Hawthorne and a book on that awesome remainder section caught my eye. The Cactus Eaters: How I Almost Lost My Mind—and Almost Found Myself—on the Pacific Crest Trail by Dan White.  I loved Bill Bryson’s book on the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, and if this was anything like it, it’d be good, at the very least. I put it on hold the next morning.

Dan White and his girlfriend of several months decide to leave behind their dead end reporting jobs to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Their hope is that it will deepen their still new relationship, make them stronger people and all that. They spend hundreds of dollars on great equipment and their favorite snack foods, and even though they're getting off to a late start (meaning June) they figure that if they can knock off sixteen mile days for six months they’ll finish before the weather turns—sounds iffy. How many miles will they walk, theoretically? Two thousand six hundred and fifty from Mexico to Canada.

They’re given a one-night short-course by a couple of people who’ve already hiked the PCT. They recommend dividing it into twenty-five segments. At the beginning and end of each segment they’ll leave the trail and resupply at designated towns nearby. They will mail twenty five boxes of dried food to themselves addressed to General Delivery at post offices near the trail heads. They’re given a list of “trail angels” who live in the supply towns--folks who let hikers sleep at their house for free, give rides, even schlep water to the desperate. Sounds doable if you’re organized.

So far it’s the funniest book of my still new summer reading season. I’ve forced friends and loved ones to listen to entire paragraphs. The other day I was laughing so hard it actually made my son pause Lego Star Wars II to ask if I was ok. I couldn’t wait to finish it yet I was sad when I did, and in my world that is the sign of an excellent book.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the ending was not what I expected, but it was real and I give Dan White credit for that. The joy of the book for me was in the trek itself. The lesson for me was the reminder that it’s good to be honest and be yourself, even if it’s hard sometimes.

Haunted by Choice - by Jen As Americans we demand choices. Choice equals happiness.

Or does it?

I have an un-American confession: sometimes I'm sick to death of choosing. That secret forced-to-wear-a-uniform-to-school envy I harbored as an ordinary public school kid washes over me once again. I want the choice made for me. Or no choice at all. It's just easier that way.

My happiest summer vacations at a kid were spent stuck at cousins' houses in rural parts of Washington and New Mexico. There was no roster of camps, lessons, or play dates. The only scheduled activity was go play. We poked at anthills with sticks, picked blackberries until we were covered in blood and juice, read the same two ratty books over and over because they were the only books lying around. There was nothin' to do and it was pretty rockin' great.

I can make a great argument for single-payer health care, but I'm more likely to sound off about the drinks in the vending machine at work (twenty-eight varieties of sugar water but not a single root beer.) Recently I started whittling the choices I offer to Child the Elder. Hungry? Here's the one thing you can eat right now. Time to read a book before bed? Mommy's voice means Mommy's choice. He complains, sure, but secretly I think he's pleased with this totalitarian turn of events.

Summer is when I give myself a break and go back to the things I want to read repeatedly. Most people in high school are forced to read both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson. They either become English majors or they run the other way, screaming, into their sensible adult lives and never discover both authors have written hilarious tears-will-leak-out-your-eyes memoirs about raising children.

Shirley Jackson's Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her fabulously funny accounts of surviving life with four children as a professor's wife in the 1950's. She is a woman who treats hospital childbirth as a well-deserved vacation and flips a coin with her husband to decide who will talk to the detested teacher during Parent's Visiting Week. She is a one-woman taxi service minus modern car seats and has sarcastic conversations with clueless college students:

"Certainly," I said. "My only desire was to be a faculty wife. I used to sit at my casement window, half embroidering, half dreaming, and long for Professor Right."

"I suppose," she said, "that you are better off than you would have been. Not married at all or anything."

"I was a penniless governess in a big house," I said. "I was ready to take anything that moved."

"And of course you do make a nice home for your husband. Someplace to come back to, and everything so neat."

"My spinning lacks finesse," I said. "But I yield to no one on my stone-ground meal."

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny is a personal diary extract and will show you a side of Hawthorne you never dreamed existed. Think of the guy who wrote the Scarlet Letter. Now think of that same guy stuck at home taking care of a spirited five-year-old while his wife is away. He is alone and this is his debut as a single parent. In Hawthorne's experience this includes application of curling tongs to the tot's hair with predictably poor results and encouraging the boy to, um, evacuate his bodily waste on the property of the neighboring Shakers. Hawthorne didn't like the Shakers.  

Lucky for us, they wrote all of this down. Jackson and Hawthorne both knew the value of a good haunting but probably never intended to haunt me with their quirky parenting. Now they can haunt you, too.

Go play. And don't come back until I call you for dinner.

All In the Family - by Tama

I’ve been in a bit of a book funk lately. Just can’t seem to find a really good one--you know, the kind that makes you excited to get back to it when you’ve had to put it down. The kind where all you want to do it sit and read for a few gloriously uninterrupted hours. The kind that you’re bummed to finish because there’s no way the next one will live up to it and only disappointment lies ahead. I want a book like that.

I can’t recall how the Spellmans came into my life--probably a review in some library journal. It doesn’t matter because they’ve saved me. In The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz, we meet Izzy Spellman, age 28. Izzy has a much younger sister, Rae, and a chronically perfect, type-A older brother, David. The kids have been brought up in the family business of private investigation, to either their benefit or detriment, depending on the kid. David is an overachiever who ran far and fast from the family business as soon as he could to become a high-powered attorney. Rae, age 14, is chronically addicted to recreational surveillance and sugary food items. Izzy, the middle child, has attended multiple colleges and universities without completing a degree, can’t seem to hold down a “normal” job, has a past littered with romantic mistakes and slightly excessive drinking, and prefers to enter and exit the family home via windows rather than doors. Mom and Dad just try to maintain some sense of sanity and keep the business afloat as they squeeze in the occasional “disappearance” of their own, family code for a weekend away by themselves.
 
Curse of the Spellmans has been nominated both for an Edgar Award and a Macavity Award, and those of you who read mysteries know what a big deal that is. And honestly, I liked the other two in the series better, so that tells you how good they really are.

One reviewer called the series “Harriet the Spy for grownups” another says “part Columbo, part nightmarish Nancy Drew.” Whatever. It’s always a starred review no matter who's doing the reviewing, which in the book biz means you need to pay attention because people are gonna be asking for it. And for good reason.

There’s talk that a Spellman movie is in the works but we all know that the books are always better.

www.lisalutz.com
 

Let's See...Old Mother Hubbard... - by Nicola

…went to the cupboard to eat her curds and whey. Wait, that’s not right!  Well, it has been a very long time since I've even thought about nursery rhymes, but I did think about them a lot while reading two books in the Nursery Crimes series by Jasper Fforde (pronounced “ford” like the car).  Are these books even for adults?  Oh yes!  Many children would have trouble with all of the nuances Fforde inserts into his whimsical stories. The Big Over Easy is the first title in the series. The main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary, are head of the Nursery Crimes Division of the local police constabulary in Reading, England. Their assignment is to investigate the death of Humpty Dumpty. The second  book in the series is The Fourth Bear.  Was there a fourth bear?  Why didn’t Mama Bear and Papa Bear sleep in the same bed?  And how could Jack Spratt not look for the violent Gingerbreadman who had just escaped from the supposedly secure mental hospital?  Well, mystery readers won't be surprised that Jack will not forget the Gingerbreadman is on the loose, even though he has been suspended for screwing up another assignment involving Red Riding Hood.

Jasper Fforde’s highly imaginative books are not for everyone, but those with a sense of fun will enjoy going along for the ride with him wherever his mind takes them.  

Lives of Comic Desperation - by guest blogger Marc Acito

Our guest blogger is the novelist, humorist and screenwriter Marc Acito. He was the winner of Oregon Book Awards' 2005 Ken Kesey award for Best Novel for How I Paid for College. His latest book is the sequel Attack of the Theater People.

I'm a promiscuous library user. At any given time, I've got two dozen books out and as many on hold. I got into the habit when I was poor and couldn't afford books. I probably shouldn't say this, since it's in my best interest that readers buy books, but I never buy a book I haven't read. I figure why own it if I'm only going to read it once?

So I use the library to test drive--promiscuously. If I love something enough that I need to own it, then I buy it, underlining and scrawling marginalia as I re-read.

As a result, I'm a familiar fixture at the Hillsdale Library, my local branch. Yes, it's true. Despite being a gay guy with a trendy haircut, a ready wit and the same waist size I had in junior high, I live in Deepest Suburbia. I prefer to think of it as the Lower West Hills.

Living as I do in the burbs, I’m a huge fan of books about desperate housewives. Reading stories about smart, funny women who are miscast in their lives is like having a marathon phone call with your best girlfriend, assuming your best girlfriend is hilarious, brilliant and completely honest.

A perfect example is the compulsively readable We Are all Fine Here by Mary Guterson, in which a married woman finds herself pregnant after a liaison with her old boyfriend in the bathroom at a friend’s wedding. You know those friends who are constantly screwing up but you secretly enjoy it because it makes you feel better about your own life? That's what reading this book is like.

We Are All Fine Here delivers Hitchcockian suspense without anyone being chased by a crop duster or rappeling off Abe Lincoln’s nose. From page one, questions abound: Who is the baby’s father? Who will the heroine end up with? How much longer can she hide her morning sickness? (announcer voice) These questions and more will be answered As The Stomach Turns.

In contrast to the friend who screws up is the friend who’s got it all together. For that, you must turn to Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther. Forget the melodramatic MGM weepie with Greer Garson. This slyly comic story of a well-bred Englishwoman on the eve of World War Two fascinates me with such pressing concerns as how do you find a charwoman on short notice and what do you say at a shooting party?

But Mrs. Miniver’s contentment with her privileged life is tempered by her wry observations, like how she longs to invite the scintillating half of the couples she knows to dinner, then invite the boring ones another night that she could cancel. It’s like Mrs. Dalloway for Dummies.

The best literary friend of all, however, is the narrator of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, who is the perfect synthesis of the first two—a mild screw-up who still has her head screwed on straight. Long before Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, she wanted to wring the neck of her philandering husband. Because the novel is reportedly based on Ephron’s own calamitous marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, it’s difficult to imagine anyone other than the acerbic author herself in the role, even after Meryl Streep played her in the movie.

This book proves the adage that “Writing well is the best revenge.” The heroine of Heartburn writes cookbooks—which is appropriate given Ephron’s totally edible prose. It’s a delicious book, one you alternately want to gorge on yet savor, and the kind of hilariously wise and well-observed novel that makes readers wish the author were their best friend and makes writers like me contemplate suicide.

While I lead my own life of quiet desperation, however, I depend on these fictional friends they way I do my real ones: for comfort and laughs and inspiration. I take solace in knowing that there are others in the same boat. Especially if that boat is dry-docked in Deepest Suburbia.

My Family and Other Books - by Ruth (read) One of my favorite books of last year is an oldie but a definite goody:  My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.  I was finally motivated to read this book when PBS aired a movie version, and I almost never see a movie before reading the book it's based on.  Months later, I found out that it was a friend's favorite book, and he told me about other Durrell books he had enjoyed including two short story collections:  The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories and Marrying Off Mother and Other Stories.  Durrell is a keen observer (as any naturalist should be!) of not only nature, but of family, friends and other people he comes across in his peripatetic life, and his delightful descriptions make for lots of fun reading.  My Family and Other Animals is about the time he spent with his mother and three siblings on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s.  Larry (I had a "Duh!" moment when it finally hit me that Larry was the novelist Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet!) is querulous and self-absorbed, Leslie - the second eldest brother - will shoot anything that moves (and some things that don't), and Margo, the lone daughter, could be a teenage girl today, with her boyfriend troubles and diets.  Mother is vague and sweet, constantly mediating her family's quarrels while cooking a constant stream of tasty-sounding dishes.  Gerry delights in bugs and all other things in the natural world, and finds friends among the locals while enjoying his status as the youngest family member.  This early love of nature endured throughout Gerald's life - he became a well-known naturalist who established the Jersey Zoological Park, and a prolific author and TV personality. The other two books in the Corfu trilogy are Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fauna and Family.  If you've never read Gerry, you're in for a treat!

Once You Make a Balloon Dog, You Can Do Anything! - by Tama Twisted: A Balloonamentary

Huh. A documentary about balloon twisters. Really? I do love a good documentary but truth is I didn't expect to love this one quite as much as I did, and now I can't stop telling people about it.

Film makers Naomi Greenfield and Sara Taksler met at their freshman orientation a few years ago. It was the classic "Say Something About Yourself" icebreaker, when Sara said "I can make balloon animals." Naomi, next up, said "I was gonna say that!" Bam--instant friends, and now partners in film making.

The charm of their movie lies in the lives of the twisters themselves and their lovely, eccentric, sometimes obsessive personalities. There are Ph.D.s, troubled teens and cancer survivors. They came to twisting for a variety of reasons, and for some, money was a good reason.  And it turns out the money is good, my friends, surprisingly good. We're taken to one of the big twisting conventions, Twist and Shout, where we meet balloon twisters from all over the world who welcome in curious passers-by without reservation, put a piece of latex in their hand, and teach them how to make a doggy.

But there's way more to balloon twisting than doggies. For example, I'd never thought about how easily some balloon shapes lend themselves to representations of the male and female anatomy. There are adult-themed twisters who cater to bachelor and bachelorette parties, as well as gay bars. There are gospel twisters who cater to a different crowd and see twisting as part of their mission. But there's everything in between--a gigantic flying octopus, a Trojan horse, and 100 foot tall soccer players. Literally, the sky's the limit, or not the limit, depending on how you look at it. Is it sculpture? Engineering? Fun and silliness? Yes.

What made my movie-watching experience extra nice was that Naomi Greenfield was there in the theater. She stayed to teach us how to twist a balloon doggy, and then put a movie promo pin on my jacket. She was lovely and sweet to the only two people who were in the theater to see her movie that day and who were mostly thumbs when it came to twisting. I liked her immediately. And next time I meet a twister at the farmers' market, I'll probably strike up a conversation with them as I hand them a donation for that doggy they made for my son.

More at http://www.twistedballoondoc.com/

I Laughed Til I Cried - Nicola Were you around when bomb shelters and fallout shelters were being built in the 1950s and early 1960s?  Can you picture Christopher Walken as a compulsive and slightly crazy scientist?  Then the film Blast From the Past is for you.  One night Calvin and Eve are visiting their neighbors and news of the Cuban missile crisis comes on TV.  The nervous Calvin insists that he and his wife, Eve, go down to spend the night in the elaborate shelter he has built under their house.  That very night a jet plane crashes into their house and Calvin decides that is a nuclear bomb since he cannot see what it really is.  The very pregnant Eve gives birth to their son, Adam, soon after they have been in the shelter.  The three of them end up spending 35 years in the shelter because that is the half-life of radioactivity and they would then be safe from the side effects of nuclear fallout.  The fun begins when Adam emerges from the shelter on his 35th birthday to a world he has never experienced before.

Irish Bedtime Stories - by Nicola

A warm and fun read before you turn out the lights is the little series by Brendan O’Carroll, an Irish playwright and stand-up comedian.  The first book is alternately called Agnes Browne or The Mammy.  The premise does not seem humorous—Agnes is trying to raise her seven children alone in Dublin after her husband dies.  Agnes is spunky, however, and she handles the hurdles in her life with strength.  The second in the series is The Chisellers.  The title refers to her seven children, some of which have begun to be a bit troublesome.  The third title in the trilogy is The Granny and continues, not surprisingly, when Agnes becomes a grandmother for the first time and most of her children are in their twenties.  O’Carroll continues with a prequel, called The Young Wan,

which describes Agnes’ young adulthood before her marriage.  In each book, the characters are eccentric and get themselves into some interesting predicaments.  The only drawback is that some people may have trouble with the Irish slang, which O’Carroll  uses quite liberally.

Uncommonly Good - by Alison

I’ve just finished The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. It took only a couple of hours to read, but what a pleasure! The premise is that the Queen, in wrangling her incorrigible corgis, discovers that the local library’s book mobile makes a regular stop by the kitchens at Windsor Palace. Stepping in to apologize for the ruckus, she thinks it only polite to borrow a book. (Listen to a podcast of this excerpt here.)

“She had still not solved her problem, knowing that if she left without a book it would seem to Mr Hutchings that the library was somehow lacking. Then on a shelf of rather worn-looking volumes she saw a name she remembered. ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett! I can read that.’ She took the book out and gave it to Mr. Hutchings to stamp.

‘What a treat!’ she hugged it unconvincingly before opening it. ‘Oh. The last time it was taken out was in 1989.’

‘She’s not a popular author, ma’am.’

‘Why, I wonder? I made her a dame.’

Mr Hutchings refrained from saying that this wasn’t necessarily the road to the public’s heart."

And so begins a love affair with books that will change forever her sense of duty and her relations with the politicians, servants and celebrities that people her life.

Bennett is a charming writer and there were many laugh out loud moments. And through it all he confirms what all librarians know: if only people would read, they would be better, smarter, more sensitive and wiser, though not necessarily more content. The Queen begins by turning her focus inward, but more and more finds her perception of things going on around her is sharpened by her reading. This leads to a stunning denouement, about which I will say no more.

Bennett is also the author of The Clothes they Stood Up In and of the screenplay The History Boys, a movie I can heartily recommend. All in all, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Chocolate Underbelly - by Tama

Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America By Steve Almond
Here's a good read to relax with while glorying in our post-trick-or-treating rewards. This has to be one of the funniest nonfiction titles ever in the history of funny nonfiction. I read it a few years ago before Steve Almond was so hip and happenin', and reread it a few weeks ago as I was fighting off the April version of The Miserable Cold. I started laughing so hard on page 16 that it was over an hour, and a half box of tissues later that I finally stopped coughing, and got a grip on the hysteria. A few days later I texted a coworker at a library convention in Philly to ask if she'd bring me some Peanut Chews because they're raved about in the book and I thought they were only local to Philly (they're readily available other places now and fabulous). The book's not all fun and games. Almond gets more serious later on, but always with a humorous, self-deprecating undertone that's friendly and lovable. Powell's had the book remaindered a while back and I got it dirt cheap, but you should track it down and read page 16, if nothing else. Off you go.