2007 book 32

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
Of course the Mitfords are one of the most infamous and fascinating families, well, pretty much ever; Jessica is perhaps the one who's most infamous (ok, maybe the sister who loved Hitler and shot herself when England entered WWII was more infamous . . . or the sister who was a prominent British Nazi . . . I like this book about the sisters, for the curious). Anyway, Decca was well-known for running away as a teenager to get involved in the Spanish Civil War; she later came to America and was a prominent communist and author. Her letters are well worth reading--there's plenty of family drama, plus she was friends with many intellectual luminaries (among them Maya Angelou) and there are even a couple of letters to Hillary Clinton, who had clerked in Decca's husband's law office. Decca was really into writing letters--this book was an exhausting 700+ pages and is definitely aimed at the Mitford completist. There are plenty of letters that are funny or compelling, but 700+ pages was a little much for me.

2007 book 31

Judy Budnitz's If I Told You Once
I'm not sure how this book remained off my radar for so long--it's the sort of thing that is typically right up my alley. It starts off strong, with a young girl in a tiny town in Eastern Europe around the time of WWI; lots of folk tales work their way into her narrative and it's all very compelling and exciting. Eventually the voices of her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter are added into the mix, which is where things unravel a bit. For one thing, the middle two women are wholly unsympathetic, and Budnitz doesn't do a great job of distinguishing any of the women's voices from the others'. Things do pick up a bit at the end, so I'll give it a B+.

dude!!

OK, before I start this post, I should probably explain that I was reeeeally into Star Wars when I was a kid. Like, read the sequel-novels, had the poster hanging over my bed, built a model of the Millennium Falcon (and I'd never built a model before!). You didn't know I was a geek, did you.

Anyway, HBO's been playing the original Star Wars movies for the past few weeks and I keep catching bits and pieces of them here and there. So I just settled in to watch the end of Return of the Jedi, which has been my favorite since I was a little girl, b/c ewoks rule, and DUDE!!!! They edited the ending! In the scene where Luke sees ghost-Obi Wan, ghost-Yoda, and ghost-Vader, they edited out old Vader and put in Hayden Christensen! Can I get a big ol' "What the fuck?!" I just don't get it--I mean, they left in Sir Alec Guiness, so why can't whatshisname who played old Vader get to have a few extra seconds of screen time? He gets like two lines in the whole trilogy. Also, I don't want to be reminded of Hayden Christensen and the prequels, b/c the prequels sucked (except for Ewan MacGregor).

I'm the sort of girl who's a purist--and that shit just don't fly with me.

awesome library resource

This book came into the library today and I have to say, as a fervent comic book geek, that it is GREAT. Seriously, Michael Pawuk is the first person to really get it right, in my opinion. He includes all the comics/books I'd include, and really nails all the genres within graphic novels. This is an invaluable resource for any librarian interested in a graphic novel collection--and I may buy my own copy for personal use. :)

300

We went to see 300 tonight, and I really liked it! Sure, it was uber-violent, but that was balanced out by really over-the-top acting, a drag-queen-looking villain, and plenty of man candy. The battle scenes were straight out of the Lord of the Rings movies, and I'm not just saying that b/c Faramir was one of the cod-piece-sportin' Spartans. King dude's wife was a total bad-ass, too. All around an enjoyable movie, and the cinematography was amazing.

2007 book 30

Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter
I reread this one for the next book group meeting, and it was just as good as I remembered. Tan brings in her usual mother/daughter culture-clash themes, but adds in several new layers as a daughter whose mother has been stricken with Alzheimer's discovers her mother's handwritten memoir. Both women's stories are compelling. A.

2007 book 29

Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl
When I first read the description of this book, I sort of rolled my eyes--it was so Summer of my German Soldier*. I don't know if the jacket-writer didn't read the novel closely or didn't want to really give it away, but it doesn't do this excellent story justice. Yes, there is a POW camp in a small Welsh town in the waning days of WWII, and yes, one soldier and one girl sort of notice each other . . . but that's hardly the main plotline in the book. The girl's story and the German soldier's intertwine, framed by the story of a German-Jewish interrogator working for the British to interrogate Rudolf Hess, who's being held in Wales. See, I'm not giving anything away either, but I'm not making it out to be about some illicit romance, which it really isn't. It's much better than that! Totally an A!



__

*When I was in middle school, I met the author of this book at some bizarre book knowledge competition. I would give you more details, but that was about 15 years ago and it's pretty hazy. I do remember my team debating Animal Farm or something, which we weren't actually prepared to do. Otherwise that whole day is a blur. [Except, one of the other girls on the team, Annie, was from the grade below me. She was the daughter of an actress on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and a talented performer in her own right--she danced, I think. When I was a sophomore in college, I found out from a girl in my dorm that Annie had died in a car accident the year before. They'd been church friends.]

this american life

Good news for those of us whose lack of digital cable precludes us from seeing the TAL tv show--downloads will be available on iTunes! Yet another reason to invest in a video ipod one of these days . . .

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I finally got my Holga pictures back from when I was in South Florida! They're very random, as per usual.

2007 book 28

Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul
I'm not really sure what to make of this novel, so I'll just dive in with a brief summary. It's basically about two girls, one a Turkish girl, an illegimate daughter who lives with her mother, her three aunts, and various other female relatives. The other is a half-Armenian American girl who travels to Istanbul on a whim to try and find a connection to her grandmother's past. Since the American girl's stepfather is the Turkish girl's uncle, she ends up staying with her family, bonding, learning life lessons, whatever. Parts of the ending are quite shocking and parts were really predictable, and maybe would have been more so if I'd had an easier time keeping track of all the various grandmothers' stories. One of the more interesting things about this book is that the author was put on trial for denigrating Turkishness because the characters discuss the Armenian genocide (she ended up not going to prison). I will say this for her novel: the story turned out much differently than I was expecting (an early mention of a character with eyes full of "fiery intelligence" made me worry I was getting into Danielle Steel territory). I am still going, "wait, WHAT?" about the ending, although actually I wish it had gone on a little longer. Um, I have no idea what grade to give this. We'll go with a B.

yum

Chow gives us a list of indie rock songs about food.

Now I know there are way more than that--just from Shonen Knife!

Also, here is an article on Heidi Swanson (of 101cookbooks) and her new cookbook (which has been on my Amazon wishlist for ages!).

PS. Heroes is on hiatus for 7 weeks! I'm sad.

2007 book 27

Julia Alvarez's Saving the World
This novel starts off strong, focusing on a 50-year-old novelist who's struggling to write a sequel to one of her previous books, and is distracted by a story of an expedition to provide a smallpox vaccine to Central America in the early 1800s. The novel-within-a-novel mostly works, but the novelist's story descends into melodrama and pointless tragedy quite suddenly, and it just didn't work for me. I hesitate to give anything by Alvarez a mediocre grade, but this is my least favorite of her novels. B-.

happy purim!

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Originally uploaded by wordnerdy.

I made hamentashen in honor of one of my favorite holidays! Unfortunately most of them came unfolded while baking, but they still taste pretty good. :)

2007 book 26

Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon
Levy's follow-up to her novel Small Island,, which won a ton of awards and was one of my favorite books of 2004 (or 2005, I forget), is the story of a young British girl with Jamaican parents who is struggling to find her place in the world, I guess. She has to deal with all sorts of bizarrely casual racism--is England really like that? After a small breakdown, her parents send her to Jamaica, where her aunt tells her all the family stories her mother and father never shared. The protagonist gets totally lost in the second half of the books as these family stories are shoehorned in; we never see her reactions and see very little of her apparently life-changing experiences in Jamaica. The ending feels a little bit like a cop-out too. It's not that this is a bad book--I did read it all today--but it is disappointing. B-.

2007 book 25

Daniel Alarcon's Lost City Radio
Alarcon has written a fairly compelling novel involving a woman named Norma, the host of a radio show that attempts to locate and reunite people after a war has devastated their country. Norma's own husband has been missing for ten years; when a young boy arrives at the radio station from a village near where her husband disappeared, will she finally discover his fate? The twists this story takes are pretty obvious, but nonetheless are satisfying. I have no issue with Alarcon's name being on the list of awesome young American writers that I mentioned in my last post (although like several other members of the list, Alarcon actually grew up in another country).

best young writers?

Granta has published a list of the best American writers under 35 (link via Bookslut, who was really snotty about it for some reason). A lot of writers I like made the cut--Daniel Alarcon, author of the book I'm currently enjoying, Nell Freudenberger, Dara Horn, Yiyun Li, Maile Meloy, ZZ Packer, and, yes, even Nicole Krauss. Sure, I hate Jonathan Safran Foer, and think Uzodinma Iweala is a little overrated, and haven't read a few of them b/c I'm sick of short stories, but it's not a terrible list by any means, and it's a pointer toward some authors I may actually like, if nothing else.

2007 books 23 and 24

Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, eds. God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture
This was a collection of essays by people trying to identify religion-related themes in pop culture. Some of these essays worked (the one on the Simpsons was interesting, and I liked the one on southern barbeque for nostalgid reasons), but most were pretty specious. I mean, come on, I've been to enough Jimmy Buffett shows (what???? don't laugh!) to know that Parrotheads aren't in a religion. And don't even get me started on Cathy, the worst comic strip of all time.

Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice: On the Segregation of the Queen
A great recommendation from Elizabeth, this was the story of a young girl who finds herself apprenticed to Sherlock Holmes after his semi-retirement (for real, in which Holmes story does it say he retired to keep bees? Chabon's Final Solution had him doing that, too). Of course mysteries ensue and the two find themselves in a struggles for their lives! Actually this was the sort of mystery I really like--the twists were all surprises but they fit the story really well. A-.

Back to watching ANTM! That wacky Tyra!

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Originally uploaded by wordnerdy.

Just 'cause.

2006 book 22, quilts

Emily Mitchell's The Last Summer of the World
An excellent first novel about the noted photographer (not a noted fashion photographer, ANTM fans!) Edward Steichen and his experiences as an aerial photographer during WWI. While dealing with the horrors of war, he flashes back to various past events that led to the dissolution of his marriage. Interestingly, the author downplays some of his celebrity circle; although his close friendship with Rodin comes up a lot, and Gertrude Stein is mentioned now and then, the fact that Carl Sandburg was his brother-in-law only becomes apparent when reading the historical note at the end. I suppose those things are taken for granted by people familiar with Steichen; I'd never really heard his name, though cursory research revealed that I was familiar with many of his photographs. Anyway, I liked it well enough to read it all tonight, even during Battlestar Galactica. A.

In other news, I've started assembling the t-shirt quilt that I began working on back in 2001. Here's the quandary: when this stage is done, I'm going to have six rows of six squares each (and the next stage will be another six rows of six squares). Should I sew all of those together and make one big square and then stuff it and stuff, or should I sew each one of those a back and then stuff it and then sew them all together? Also, my mom suggested I actually make two t-shirt quilts instead of having it be double-sided. Besides the fact that that would be way more expensive, I kind of like the idea of it being double-sided, but I'm certainly open for suggestions as clearly I'm clueless about quilts.

2007 book 21

Colleen McDannell's Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America
This was a really fun book examining the ways art and objects are used by Christians. It looks at everything from fancy bibles in the 1800s to cemetaries to Mormom garments to the current spate of Christian, well, everything. Its ample illustrations are pretty useful as well.