Tarot? Heck, no.

I never really got into tarot cards.  I always saw them as lame and cheesy, and the people that I knew that liked them REALLY liked them.

Speaking of lame and cheesy, now I will discuss The Castle of Crossed Destinies.  Basically these people gather in a castle and can't speak.  Instead they use tarot cards to tell each other their stories.  So the whole book is like this:

I surmised from the fact that he laid down the Seven of Cups that something had happened to him in the wood.  Could it be an attack?  Yes, it must have been, since next he put down the Eight of Swords.

No thanks.

In other news, I would like to share the best recipe for Migas I have found on the Internet.  We LOVE this.  Rachael Ray's Mighty Migas  Recipe is (optionally) cheesy, but NOT lame!

Tedium.

Some people think that stay at home parents have tedious lives.  I don't think I do.  At least, it is not tedious to me.  Sure, there is laundry, and there are poop diapers and dirty dishes, but there are also amazing, interesting, fun things that I get to do.

Every once in a while though I get the most mundane dreams.  I'm talking a whole dream where I carry a basket of dirty clothing to the basement, put each item in the washing machine, measure out the soap, etc.  The worst part about it is that I don't end up with actual clean laundry in real life from it.

Summary: happy, interesting life.  Tedious dreams.

You know what was really, really tedious?  The Castle.  I did not like this book one bit and it became such a drudge to get through.  I held out hope that it would be interesting (hey, it's about a castle after all!) but it's a story about how this guy got summoned to be a land surveyor at the castle, but can't go inside the castle because of mountains of bureaucracy.  Everyone in the village accepts the bureaucracy and makes excuses for the officials, but the main character is just baffled by the whole situation.

I read a summary of it on Wikipedia because I wanted to figure out how much I missed and the suggestion was made that it had religious overtones.  If that was indeed Kafka's intent, I think Kafka was wrong.  Perhaps it's just my own religious viewpoint, but I don't think the path to salvation is tedious or fraught with bureaucracy.

In any case, I'm glad to be done with this one and moving on!

Allow myself to introduce...myself.

"Danger Powers.  Oh, that's not quite right.  Danger is my middle name."

I could not read Casino Royale without imagining Mike Myers as the main character.  The whole time I was reading, I was just chuckling to myself what a fantastic spoof of the James Bond movies Austin Powers actually was.

Casino Royale seems so dated now.  There's a lot of stereotypes and what is now predictability in this book.  At the time it was written though, I could see how it could have been gripping reading.  The first of a genre that launched a thousand copycats and spoofs.  I just happen to read them out of order.

The one issue with this book that isn't the fault of its age is the inconsistency of Vesper's character.  She's portrayed on the one hand as this cold seasoned spy and on the other hand she gets caught making a phone call early in the morning.  It just didn't make sense that the cold spy would behave as she did.

I enjoyed this book a lot and it kept me giggling.

You don't really want that onion.

Pea is extremely cautious about food.  We suspect that it is partially from having reflux as a baby - everything hurt her belly.  Now at almost 4, she sticks to a few safe foods and is reluctant to try anything new.

Except this one time.  I was chopping onions for risotto and she was standing next to me on a stool watching intently.  She nonchalantly says, "I'm going to go play...but first I'm going to just eat this onion."  And pops a piece in her mouth.

Oh, Pea.  She reacted as you could imagine a 3 year old trying a raw onion for the first time would.  I felt so bad for her.

My onion is similar to Communist Party membership in The Case of Comrade Tulayev.  Pea thought she would like the onion because she saw me cooking with it and decided to try it for herself.  Most of the non-Party members in the book wanted to become Party members because they saw it as a way to advance in society and gain particular advantages.  However, like the onion, the Party membership winds up being terrible.  The Party members can't do anything without fearing the consequences and have to deal with other Party members actively trying to usurp their positions, or being sent to exile in Siberia for some minor transgression, or being executed despite innocence.

This is particularly evident when a non-Party member murders a high Communist official pretty much on a whim.  It is inconceivable to the people in charge of the investigation that the murder could be anything but a vast conspiracy within the Party, so they investigate, charge and eventually execute 3 Party members for the murder.

This book was a great commentary on Stalin-era Russian life and the corruption and intrigue within the Communist Party of that era.  It was a little slow in parts, but I am glad I read it.

I don't think that Pea will be eating any more onions anytime soon - and I don't think any of us will be joining the Communist Party either!

Oh no. Ohhh no. Oh no.

My son has said his first word!  And it wasn't "ball!" as he crawled around after a ball, or "mama," as he gazed at me lovingly, or "doggie," as the neighbors' dog sniffed him.  No, my son's first word is "oh no!"

"Oh no!"  Which he then repeats several times in a row.  "Oh no!  Ohhh no!  Ohh no!"  I'm not sure what this says about our parenting that our little 10 month old son crawls around fretting like a housewife trying to remove ring around the collar.

I could not put down Special Topics in Calamity Physics.  This was a book I stayed up late to read and also read a paragraph or two at pretty much every opportunity throughout the day.  It was SO good.  The main character, Blue, is a 16 year old girl who gets caught up in a murder mystery.

Blue, however, behaves a lot like my little son.  Sure, she tries very hard to solve the mystery and unravel what is going on, but there is a LOT of handwringing.  I'm not going to give away too much of the plot because this book should not be missed and I don't want to ruin it for any prospective reader.  But I came away feeling like there was maybe a bit too much "oh no!" going on and not enough good old fashioned sleuthing.  But that is just a minor criticism (and I also need to take into account that the main character IS 16, and is probably behaving exactly as a 16 year old would - even if I wanted her to be more proactive about certain things, it is probably more plausible the way the author has written it).

This book is creative, clever and fun and I loved it.  I'm SO glad I read it.

Thoughts on Cane.

Usually the fact that a book isn't available in my library means it is going to be some obscure, random book that is often difficult to read or understand.  Cane, an ILL book, did not let me down in this regard.  I can tell it is good literature.  Dealing with the experience of being African American in the early 20th century.  Unfortunately, I don't have the educational background or historical understanding to really appreciate this book for the excellent literature that it is.  It's embarrassing - I'm like, uh, yes, I can tell that this is good literature, but I can't get much more out of it than that.

Pea has discovered Where's Waldo the last couple of weeks, which has been really fun.  I fondly remember enjoying those books when I was young.

The big fat Greek book.

Corelli's Mandolin started off very slow, and very long.  I just couldn't get into the portrait of life in Cephallonia - it was all very nice, but just didn't do it for me.  I feared a long slog through the 430 pages.  Thankfully, the character of Corelli showed up and saved the book.  I read the portions dealing with the love story between him and Pelagia with interest, and read the sections dealing with the horrors of the war with somewhat less interest.

Here's the thing about war books - we know that war is terrible.  And I acknowledge the effort on the part of the author to make us understand what it was like for the Greek people to go through what they went through at the hands of the oppressors.  It doesn't make it less sad, or easier to read about.  I am not suggesting that writers should not write about it - I just personally don't like to read about it.

Mike says that this book was made into one of the worst movies!  It did get a 29% on the Tomatometer.  I did not know that Penelope Cruz was in the role of Pelagia.  I think I'll skip the movie on this one.  (Not a shock, I know - I don't watch movies)!

Cannery row...or, why I am a doofus.

Today I finished Cannery Row, which I really liked.  It is not often that one finds literature idealizing the poorest members of Depression-era society.  But that is what this book does.  Everyone is reasonably happy with their life and the overall goal is to make Doc happy by throwing him a party.  These are people living in storage sheds, an industrial boiler, and prostitutes.  But they are good people who are trying their best.  Interesting book and interesting perspective.  The image of the starfish clinging to each other will be in my mind for a while.  That's what humans do when they are nervous, too.

Here comes the embarrassing part.  So I'm reading this and in my mind, comparing it to Absalom, Absalom.  I'm thinking to myself, wow, these sentences are shorter and this is a lot more readable.  It was only after finishing the book that it dawned on me.  Steinbeck and Faulkner are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AUTHORS.  I had sort of amalgamated them in my mind.  Faulkbeck, or something.  Whoops.

Books 131-140

Not quite there yet, but need to get this down so that I can start figuring out library holds, etc.

131. The Case of Comrad Tulayev by Victor Serge (1949)
132. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953)
133. The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
134. The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino (1973)
135. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1765)
136. Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (1800)
137. Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope (1860)
138. Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass (1961)
139. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
140. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)

Lot of castles on here!

Always look on the bright side of life.

Last night, it rained and thundered a lot at our house, and our windows leaked again.  I learned this because Fuzz was up at 10PM, and his fussing sounded different.  Usually I can run in and soothe him and he will fall right back asleep.  This time, I ran in, and he was all wet, and there was water spraying everywhere.  Whoops.  This was an annoying thing to have happen at 10PM, because I had to get him up, Mike had to get Tupperware containers to catch the water, we had to get a whole bunch of rags to mop up the mess, and I think that Fuzz is going to have a bit of a water stain on the paint underneath his window in his room.

In the big picture, this is not a huge deal.  I don't think that God or the universe is out to get me because of the annoying window leak or anything.  It's unfortunate but we have moved on (and will have to figure out how to repair these things).

Voltaire, in Candide, mocks people who are optimists, and the view that things are generally for the best.  He does this in a pretty entertaining way, by creating this character and having this ridiculous series of unfortunate events happen to him.  The idea is that by the end of the novel, he essentially has his optimism beaten out of him.  It's pretty clever and creative, especially when you consider that it was written in the 1750s, so it certainly has stood the test of time.

I don't really agree with the idea though that optimism is silly.  It is silly to rely on optimism only and not do something about one's situation.  I can be optimistic that it won't rain again and hence our window won't leak, but that would be silly.  I will instead be optimistic that we will find the right repair person and get the windows fixed and it won't be an issue any more.

So I will continue to look on the bright side of life, although that may seem silly to Voltaire.

What could possibly be more depressing?

...Than a mid-1950s cancer hospital in the middle of the Soviet Union?  When I started Cancer Ward initially, I could not think of anything that would be more depressing.  Solzhenitsyn actually lived through this experience and the novel draws in part on his experiences.  As I learned from Wikipedia, this novel serves as a metaphor for the Soviet Union after Stalin.  (Definitely wouldn't have figured that out on my own.)

I really found this book interesting, though, once I got into it.  Yes, it was depressing, but the characters were really well written and I learned a lot reading about their experiences.  I also found the book hopeful - many of the characters have goals that they intend to achieve, and their cancer is viewed as a minor obstacle along the way.

Russia has always interested me.  I studied the language for a few years in high school and college (and retained very little of it, certainly not enough where I could read any of this novel in the original language).  The history and the diversity of cultures there has always interested me as well.

Sometimes books like this leave me feeling depressed and sad, but not this one.  I am very glad I read it.  I learned a lot.

The long, long, long adventures of Camilla

It's been a while! Before we left on vacation, i looked up the next 3 books on the list and hurried to the library to collect my vacation reading. Well, it turned out i did not need any of them.

Camilla is one of the longest books i have read so far. One estimate online has it at 350,000 words. (i read it on the kindle, so I have no sense of how many pages that is). I started it before we left and it occupied me the whole 2 weeks of vacation. I really, really liked it though. Sometimes these older novels are hard for me to get into, but this one was really interesting.

Of course there are some things about it that do not translate well to modern times. Camilla is one of those passive heroines. Things just keep happening to her and she does very very little on her own behalf to make things different. The few decisions she does make often lead to disastrous results until a man comes in to fix things for her.

However, it is a happy, uplifting story and things all turn out the way they should in the end. I like when that happens in books.

Now we are back from vacation and fall is almost here!  Hard to believe!

You can call it whatever you want.

When you have a baby, people always ask you, all concerned, how the baby sleeps.  I tend to answer something like, "oh, fine" or my favorite "you know, just like a baby".  The reality is, neither of my children has been a particularly great sleeper - if you define sleep as going to bed easily at night, then not being heard from again until the morning.  But that's OK.  It ends.  Pea is actually a very sound sleeper now at 3.5.  On the other hand, her baby brother woke up the other night at 11PM and all he wanted to do was wrestle.  I tried to calm him down, soothe him, rub his back, and he was like, kick!  punch!  lay on Mama and pin her!  roll around!  If there were ropes around the bed, he would have tried one of those moves where he bounces off the ropes, I'm sure.  Babies are funny.

Despite its title, Call It Sleep is not actually about sleep very much at all either.  The story follows Davy, a little boy, a recent immigrant to New York in the 1900s.  It is all about assimilation and growing up, learning the new city, new language, new customs, etc.  I really enjoyed this book - it was long and some of the language was hard to understand at times (the author uses a very phonetic method of showing the different accents that people have, and it can be confusing and hard to understand what people are saying) but I really did like it.

Even if it isn't about sleep.  Not that I'm getting big chunks of sound sleep anyway.

A woman ahead of her times.

Literature is full of men who are celebrated, not vilified, for doing just what they want. When a woman does it, it's controversial. The heroine of Cakes and Ale does exactly what she pleases with views and decisions that are well ahead of her times. She manages to be memorable enough to her first husband's biographers that they are determined to keep her out of his biography. But what is amazing about this book is that you don't really fully understand Rosie and what is driving her until the very end of the novel. When I read the last part, I was like, Oh! A lightbulb clicked on.

Looking back at this novel, I really liked it.  It was slow at first and I didn't think I would enjoy it, but it picked up steam and I wound up really liking it at the end.

EEE-diot!

Having children has taught me to watch what I say.  Pea started calling people "EEE-diot" after hearing me rail against some doofus driving like, well, an idiot.  EEE-diot has thus made it into our family lexicon.

EEE-diot is an apt description of the hero of By the Open Sea.  I couldn't stand this guy.  He was arrogant, overly impressed with his intelligence, and continuously put down everyone around him to make himself look better.  I can't say I was disappointed that the community eventually pretty much threw him out at the end.  I'm glad this book was short, because I was certainly fed up with Mr. Borg by the end of it!

Sad story of a childhood.

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe is a tough one for a mom to read. This young kid has all these terrible things happen to him and he winds up struggling mentally and becoming very violent. It reminds me how powerful childhood is and how fiercely I love and want to protect my kids. It was a confusing story too, because it was written in a very stream of consciousness style. I wasn't always exactly sure what was going on, or whether my impressions of what was happening were true. Anyway, I see why this was on the list, but it's not necessarily one that I particularly enjoyed.

Thanksgiving 2000

Do you remember where you were Thanksgiving 2000?  I was on the Cape with my family, having driven down from Boston where I was in school.  It was gray, and I went for a run.  I remember that it was very empty - no summer tourists, so I was actually able to run on a busier road than I normally would have.  That's about all I remember.

The Lay of the Land is a very detailed look at the 3 days up to Thanksgiving 2000 in Frank Bascombe's life.  He's a 55 year old realtor on the New Jersey shore.  He does a lot of things and the novel is a commentary on society at the time, as well as a story of him and his life and kids and stuff.  I liked the book a lot - I liked Frank and I was glad to see the outcome at the end.  It was detailed and slow, but enjoyable.

Ye auld blog post. Fer F's sake.

I started The Busconductor Hines and was just baffled by the dialect and profanity used in the book.  It was almost like a different language at first until I got used to it.  I finally figured it out about 100 pages in, and then the story went fairly quickly.

Robert Hines struggles with the monotony of his life.  The protagonist has a tough job as a Busconductor and lives in a no bedroom apartment with his wife and 4 year old son.  The circumstances of his life totally weigh on him.  Throughout the book, his wife suggests ways that they can get things better - such as moving to a different location, or saving money for a year with the eventual goal of possibly moving to Australia - but Hines can't ever seem to get it together to make a change.  Even at the very end, where he winds up quitting his job, he goes back to it after a little while because it would be foolish not to work the week's notice and get the extra money.

This is a moderately interesting portrait of working class life in Glasgow.

Why you aren't supposed to throw carrots in restaurants.

When Peanut was 2, she sort of understood the general rules but couldn't figure out the logic behind them.  For example, one time she tossed a carrot stick in a sandwich shop.

Me: Peanut, don't throw the carrot in the restaurant.
Peanut: You can't throw a carrot in the restaurant.  Other kids will want to play with the carrot.

You could tell she was sort of understanding how things worked, but couldn't really fully grasp the logic behind why yet - and in situations that were not directly related to health or safety, it took some time before she figured out the why behind the rules.  At 3.5, I promise that she hasn't thrown a carrot in a restaurant for at least a week or two.

I just finished Nadine Gordimer's book Burger's Daughter.  I felt a lot like Peanut while I was reading this.  I definitely got the gist behind what was going on, but I completely lack the historical/social context to understand the book more fully and clearly in the way the author intended.

Thus seems to be a recurring theme for me with these books.  I really enjoyed history when I studied it in high school but we obviously didn't cover the history of every country through every time period.  Hence, my knowledge of South Africa is very lacking.  I found this book was useful to help me understand in some small way what apartheid South Africa was like - but I can also tell it only scratched the surface.  I get that you aren't supposed to throw the carrot, but I don't understand why.

Life in a British colony.

IIt's Memorial Day weekend and I'm finishing up Fuzz's nap before we have a cookout and relax with our friends and family. It is about 90 degrees and in the distance, I can hear the roars of the Rolling Thunder motorcycles as they come to their convention. That is Memorial Day weekend for me- our cookout and the Rolling Thunder.
I just finished reading Burmese Days, a novel by George Orwell set in the early 1900s in Burma, a British colony. This book amazed me simply by the different attitudes about different races that were so prevalent and accepted 100 years ago. Colonialism itself. The way the white inhabitants treated the natives. Even Flory, who seems to like native culture, treats his Burmese mistress terribly. It was an interesting book because it was so different than anything I'm used to in my life. I can't imagine just going a place and proclaiming my way of life to be superior.
happy Memorial Day!