Category Archives: Books

Fiction: “Tolstoy Lied” by Rachel Kadish

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A love story about an academic, sort of a shoo-in to my book pile, don’t you think. The narrator has a very similar tone and feel to the narrator of Love Walked In, but a few years older, wiser, and more jaded. It’s literate and witty, and the compare-and-contrast overlap between problems with the boy and problems with work colleagues is done really well.

Nice friendship moments, nice relationship moments, good realizations.

I didn’t like some of the choices at the end, however. Doesn’t stop me from thinking it was very well-written and worth reading. But I’m a little irked with at least one character. Shows you how involving it was, eh? 😉

Fiction: “The Used World” by Haven Kimmel

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Just as insightful and heartbreaking and tender and comic and genius as you should expect from a Haven Kimmel book. A story of three woman, connected and disconnected in ways only known to one of them. Spirituality, and friendship, and family, and love. And pain, and guilt, and when can one forgive, and when is forgiveness off the table. Small-town America, with all its aches and pains. And particularly the pangs of those more worldly who live in it.

Quite, quite lovely. Kimmel is an automatic “buy in hardback” for me at this point.

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Making: Fucking nothing. That’s right, NOTHING.

Reading: So my dad and I had this conversation about how we both just lovelovelove Slightly Foxed but we were both falling behind in reading it because every time you read it, you spend half the time you’re reading it running around looking for books in your “library” you’ve forgotten about and figuring out if you have that book by that author or some other book and going and buying more books because now it’s reminded you of a book…. Yeah and our ultimate conclusion to this long conversation was that sometimes you just have to read them to enjoy reading what they’re saying about things and NOT let yourself get into a frenzy of adding more and more things to your to-be-read pile. So last week I read the last four issues. And then I was at loose ends. OH NO. What to do. Then the Miracle Man came to visit from Hong Kong yesterday and we wandered by a bookstore and Holy Shit, Haven Kimmel has a new book out! Why didn’t anyone tell me??? So yeah. Now I’m reading “The Used World” by Haven Kimmel.

Watching: Fucking boatloads of fresh fall TV. Boatfuckingloads, I tell you.

Listening: New albums from bands I have loved awhile now: Athlete, The Thrills, Rogue Wave. The awesomely atmospheric Eddie Vedder soundtrack. New albums from James Blunt and Kanye (I like this one more and more the more I listen to, although I still agree with my initial thoughts that it’s not as joyful)… Of course, Ben Harper hasn’t left the rotation. New boys like Jeremy Fisher. New (to me) girls like Meiko, and Maria Taylor, and Sara Bareille…

Best of September.

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It’s a two-fer month, a study in contrast. One high energy, intense and dramatic; versus one calm, deliberate, determined and yet still as dramatic in its own way.
The best two movies I saw in September were “In the Valley of Elah” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” (I’m a little late on that one, I know). Both were excellent in very different ways.
The best two books I read in September were “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “A Three Dog Life”. As with flicks, high contrast between the two, yet equally satisfying.
The best two gigs I went to in August were Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals and The National.
I’ll [add to this] post later my favorite tunes in September…[I’ll talk about September tunes. Later. In another post. Hopefully. We’ll see.]
Random personal highlights: Buying lots of new Fall clothes, although hardly getting to wear them this month; Jen in town for drinks!!!; and FINALLY it’s time for FALL TV!!! [Kinda a slow month, eh?]
Lowlights? Can the summer heat go away now please? I’ve had enough.

Fiction: Love Walked In, by Marisa de los Santos

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At first it appears to be telling two different stories: Cornelia, 30-something, single, waiting for romance; and Clare, 11 and in danger of abandonment… Eventually of course, they coincide and it becomes not just a story of Cornelia looking for love and Clare trying to survive her mother, but a story of Cornelia and Clare coming together and how we connect and what makes a family and how does love come and when do you stay and fight and when do you have to walk away…

I really enjoyed this, more than I expected. But it was hard to think of Clare as 11 — she felt more like a 15 year old at least 90% of the time. I’m not often bothered by the “is this person older than they’re supposed to be feel in novels” (or not as much as my friend GirlDetective who I kept thinking of whenever I thought that here [note to GD, I really did!!]), but in this case it kept nagging at me.

And you know, Cornelia can be a bit twee at times. Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker will play her in the movie. Unlike many books, this one is concise enough, I don’t see there being the need to cut much of the plot.

Death and Faith.

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I got an email from a friend telling me her Dad died, and it reminded me that Madeleine L’Engle died recently and I’ve been meaning to recommend a specific book of hers.

While I dearly dearly love the Wrinkle in Time books, and there are a few of her adult fiction books I enjoyed also (A Small Rain, A Severed Wasp), my all-time favorite L’Engle book is from her “Crosswick Journals” ‘set, Vol 4. Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage.

A large part of the book is about her husband dying of cancer, and her struggling with her faith to “make sense of” or deal with that without falling back on either the nonsensical “why god why” or the equally (to believers in the concept of Free Will) nonsensical “God must have had a reason.” (In a world operating under Free Will, God is not a puppet master.)

It was a really lovely book and helped me when I was dealing with a death that hit me particularly hard, given the specific circumstances.

I reread the Wrinkle in Time books a few years ago during Harry Potter mania, to reconfirm that I did still love them even though I didn’t love (what I tried of) Harry Potter. They are more like both C.S. Lewis (faith-based fantasy) and Phillip Pullman (lovelovelove), and Meg and Charles are very beloved characters (by me and, of course, many others).

RIP Madeleine L’Engle.

RIP Papa Auta. I am sad I’ll never meet you when I finally make it to New Zealand. Your daughter has been such an important part of my life.

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Making: Same as last week, although I do have something on the blocking board I may get to sometime this week. Maybe…Quilting friendship star blocks. Knitting socks.

Reading: “Love Walked In” by Marisa de los Santos. I’m just about done though. I would be done if I hadn’t had to stand on the train this morning, and then things got all herky jerky and I fell into someone’s lap (no joke!) and was too embarrassed to pull out a book after that because what if it happened again and my book went flying and hit someone in the head or something….

Watching: Premieres! Yay! So far this week watched Heroes, Bones, Reaper (LOVED!), Chuck, 1/2 of Journeyman (hopefully I’ll finish that tonight), and the second episode of K-Ville. Still have House premiere and current episode of Damages on the DVR menu. More premieres to come tonight. Yay!

Listening: Nothing I haven’t mentioned here already…. my 1, 2, 3 albums so far this year The National, Okkervil River, Earlimart, new stuff from Kanye and Josh Ritter and James Blunt, and lots of French rap…. and Hard Fi “Once Upon a Time in the World” which I bought on a total whim the other night and really like! Rock/punk/FUN!

Caught ya!

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She thought about that word “capture,” how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer’s job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn’t kill what she caught, didn’t stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stories alive. She felt skeptical about this way of thinking of writing, she decided, but was glad to have considered it.
–Maria de los Santos, “Love Walked In”

Nonfiction: “Under the Banner of Heaven” by Jon Krakauer

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subtitle: “A Story of Violent Faith”. KC gave me this for Christmas and it’s probably something I would not have bought on my own. But daaaammmmmn is it good. Following several crimes committed by Mormon “Fundamentalists” (those who have broken away from the “mainstream” LDS Mormon church), it goes through the history of Mormonism itself, the philosophy of many of the breakaway sects, interviews with current members of regular Mormonism, fundamental Mormonism, as well as “apostates” (excommunicated members), and members who ran away from it all (Run! RUN FAR!!!!!).

It is incredibly researched and extremely well written and I could barely put it down long enough to go to sleep at night. Completely compelling reading about crazy, scary people. Extra kudos to Krakauer for including the rebuttal from the LDS Mormons (who aren’t really the FOCUS of the book anyway) and going through it point by point to either acknowledge errors or alternately say “Nope, I am right on that.”

Extremism in any area of life (religion, adventure, etc.) is not necessarily something I’m interested in, but it’s so well written, it was well worth reading.

Fiction: “Don’t Make a Scene” by Valerie Block

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Diane Kurasik, 40 years old, single, manager of the Beford Street cinema, finds herself in a summer of unexpected change. Evicted as her building is bought, romantically uninvolved but searching, searching, searching, expanding her theater… She continually compares her life to the movies and finds it lacking (who doesn’t, right?). And then the last third of the book unexpectedly (to me) turns into a May-September story (is that what you call it? a younger/ older romance?).

I really enjoyed this but I wasn’t very interested in the character of Vladimir and found it hard to believe Diane was either. Javier, on the other hand, I could understand.

Loved the movie references and the bits of history (wow, I will never look at Cary Grant the same way ever again). It’s referential the way the “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” was…except this is both better written and better edited. (Completely different type of plot, however.)