(no subject)
The best tantrum ever: Joe Mikulik, the manager of the minor league Asheville Tourists, snapped after one of the league's temporary umpires made a call he didn't like. In what was a fabulous show, he reenacted the slide that lead to the call, he ripped up a base and threw it around, he threw bats and nearly took out a bat boy. All after he had been thrown out. Don't you want him to coach your kid's Little League team? (Oooh, the best part is totally all the players trying to get out of his way. And not laugh.)
I was at Bookland one night last week, and had a woman come up to the info desk, asking if I could help her find a book. "The title is, like, Doc Pritham? Or something?" We looked and looked and nothing. I asked if it was a novel, kids book, what, and she replies, "I think it's, like, um, a bibliography? Because he was real? You know?" She had to be at least 30. And, like, an idiot, you know?
I am so far behind in book reviews:
Middlesex has been sitting in a milk crate next to my bed for the last six months, which was a waste. I knew it had won the Pulitzer, and I knew my senior AP English teacher had replaced The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay with it the year after I took his class. So clearly it was good. I just didn't know how good. I finally ended up digging around in my milk crate in search of a book to take to Boston with me. I didn't read it in Boston, and the torrential downpour got to it, so I dragged my waterlogged book to work with me the next day. I then failed to put it down for the 48 hours it took me to read it. Like Sarum last year, I picked the prefect time to read this book. It was raining, and things were dead at the Park, which gave me 6 hours of an 8 hour day to read.
Enough introduction. I would love to have studied this book in school. There's just so much there. The circles - in their life cycles, in Detroit's tires, in everything; the smoke from the fire and the ship and the factories and the Obscure Object's cigarette (and on the cover); the odd first-person, virtually omnipotent narrator. Fascinating.
Jeffery Eugenides makes the reader suspend some belief - how can Cal know the details of his grandparents relationship when Desdemona barely mentions the truth at the very end of her life? But I love that so much was explained.
kukukesem said that she found the beginning slow, but that was my favorite part. It would have been so easy for Eugenides not to tell the reader the story of Desdemona and Lefty, and then have a Big Reveal! at the end, when Desdemona tells Cal. Instead, he tells us. I love it when authors fill me in; I'm not underestimating the power of a scene left to the imagination, but sometime's it's nice to get a little bit more to work with. (That's half the reason people read and write fanfiction. What happened in the moments we didn't get to see?)
I get that Tessie and Milton had a tough act to follow - how can you be more interesting than Greek incest during the middle of a war? But they were a little boring. (Also - did Chapter Eleven's name ever get explained? Am I stupid?)
So I guess what I'm saying is the Pulitzer prize winning novel was good. So go read it.
I followed Middlesex with But Enough About Me. Jancee Dunn was your average Jersey girl... who ended up working at Rolling Stone, VJing on the brand new MTV2, and interviewing the likes of Brad Pitt and Dolly Parton.
It has a great format - she alternates chapters with anecdotes disguised as advice for celebrity interviewers. And as entertaining as Dunn and her family were (their family trips to their cemetery plot? how she got her name? Comedy gold.), the anecdotes were the best part. She hung out in Tibet with Brad Pitt while he played air guitar! Dolly Parton sent her home with Velveeta! Scott Weiland offered her heroin!
Rock on.
The ending (well, the final chapter) was a little forced, because she did need to wrap it up somehow, and she had discussed a few of her dating mishaps. It didn't work, but I don't know what else she could have done, and it didn't really detract from the rest of the book. (And, hey, she describes the Olsen twins just as I pictured them.) Fantastic, but a library read. Buy Middlesex, and borrow Enough.
My mother chaperoned an eight grade class trip to Washington DC earlier this month, and the gift she brought me back was The Secret Lives of First Ladies. She bought it at the National Archives, and then spent most of the twelve hour ride home worrying because she was pretty sure I already had it. I didn't, but my point is that I'm surprised I didn't have it yet. (And she shouldn't have worried too much - last year she didn't get me anything in DC, so she ran into a Bath and Body Works and bought me some body wash. So even if I already owned it, she was doing better than last year.)
I finished the entire thing in one day at work, and it was pretty good. It was entertaining to see who Cormac O'Brien liked and disliked, who he thought was overrated, etc. And the whole book was worth it for the illustration they put in for Jackie Kennedy. (I saw Republican leanings - Eleanor Roosevelt was effectively called a pushy lesbian and Hillary Rodham Clinton was called a pushy adulterous grasping bitch, while Barbara Bush was a charmingly down to earth and outspoken lady and Laura Bush knows her place, dammit. Also, there was much more on Whitewater than Watergate, though to be fair, Hillary was more involved with Whitewater than Pat Nixon was in anything beyond choosing the flowers. So.)
But the early First Ladies were particularly interesting - a good half of the first ten First Ladies had all been married previous to their Presidential spouses. And some of the anecdotes were ones I'd never heard before - did you know that there are no surviving portraits of Margaret Taylor? or that Frances Cleveland was enormously popular, and her face and name were used to promote tons of products while her husband was president?
(Though it is a little funny how each First Lady was surprisingly indispensable in getting their husband elected, and they all had an unprecedented amount of influence on their husband. Except Laura Bush, who knows her place. Dammit. And! Did you know that when she was 17, Laura then-Welch was in a car accident where she ran a stop sign going fifty, killing a young man, and her blood alcohol level was never tested, and no charges were ever pressed? And she was a Democrat before meeting dear little Dubya. But she keeps her mouth shut now!)
I read Mark Dunn's Ibid a couple of years ago, when it first come out. (As an ARC, for the record.) And it was a neat idea; restrictive, but that was the point: the premise of the book is that Mark Dunn (a character in his own novel!) wrote a biography of the fictional circus-performer-cum-entrepreneur Jonathan Blashette. His publisher than proceeded to drop the only copy of the book in his tub. All that remained were the footnotes - and those made up Ibid. It was a fun read, and I'm kicking myself for not holding on to it.
I was not aware of his earlier book, Ella Minnow Pea until last week, and then promptly stumbled across one in the used section of Bookland. It isn't a good as Ibid. This one is based on an even shakier premise: There is a statue of Nevin Nollop, author of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", in the capital of Nollop, the autonomous island renamed after its famous native son. The famous sentence is set across the base of the statue, and as the glue holding up the tiles gives out, the letters begin to fall. The Island Council steps in and decrees that the spirit of Nollop is making the tiles fall, and his message is this: these letters are not to be used. The council makes it law. The letters continue to fall.
This could have been very cool if it had been a story told in a unique fashion, rather than a word trick put into novel form. (which came first, the chicken or the egg? which came first, the plot or the gimmick?)
It was entirely in letters (hence the multi-layered subtitle: A Novel in Letters.), but they were to and from too many people. (By halfway through, the original letter writing cousins are together.) There's also a random insertion of a love interest for one of the cousins who then wimps out of the whole situation, and vanishes fifteen pages later. Um, okay? Finally, Dunn had not mastered the art of writing letters that told a story without being flagrant exposition. The first letter is particularly guilty; the writer rattles off most of their country's history to her cousin - who is also a citizen, and would presumably know that information, and would be annoyed that her cousin was lecturing her through the mail. Very weak.)
It wasn't bad, but it wasn't engrossing. Worth a read if the gimmick appeals to you, but otherwise, don't worry about this one. Read Ibid instead.
I just finished Persuasion, and I'm in the middle of Emma, so I should have something intelligent to say about either or both of those at some point. Also, Ganging Up on the Sun has gotten better with more time, but their older stuff is better. Guster! What is going on?
I was at Bookland one night last week, and had a woman come up to the info desk, asking if I could help her find a book. "The title is, like, Doc Pritham? Or something?" We looked and looked and nothing. I asked if it was a novel, kids book, what, and she replies, "I think it's, like, um, a bibliography? Because he was real? You know?" She had to be at least 30. And, like, an idiot, you know?
I am so far behind in book reviews:
Middlesex has been sitting in a milk crate next to my bed for the last six months, which was a waste. I knew it had won the Pulitzer, and I knew my senior AP English teacher had replaced The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay with it the year after I took his class. So clearly it was good. I just didn't know how good. I finally ended up digging around in my milk crate in search of a book to take to Boston with me. I didn't read it in Boston, and the torrential downpour got to it, so I dragged my waterlogged book to work with me the next day. I then failed to put it down for the 48 hours it took me to read it. Like Sarum last year, I picked the prefect time to read this book. It was raining, and things were dead at the Park, which gave me 6 hours of an 8 hour day to read.
Enough introduction. I would love to have studied this book in school. There's just so much there. The circles - in their life cycles, in Detroit's tires, in everything; the smoke from the fire and the ship and the factories and the Obscure Object's cigarette (and on the cover); the odd first-person, virtually omnipotent narrator. Fascinating.
Jeffery Eugenides makes the reader suspend some belief - how can Cal know the details of his grandparents relationship when Desdemona barely mentions the truth at the very end of her life? But I love that so much was explained.
kukukesem said that she found the beginning slow, but that was my favorite part. It would have been so easy for Eugenides not to tell the reader the story of Desdemona and Lefty, and then have a Big Reveal! at the end, when Desdemona tells Cal. Instead, he tells us. I love it when authors fill me in; I'm not underestimating the power of a scene left to the imagination, but sometime's it's nice to get a little bit more to work with. (That's half the reason people read and write fanfiction. What happened in the moments we didn't get to see?)
I get that Tessie and Milton had a tough act to follow - how can you be more interesting than Greek incest during the middle of a war? But they were a little boring. (Also - did Chapter Eleven's name ever get explained? Am I stupid?)
So I guess what I'm saying is the Pulitzer prize winning novel was good. So go read it.
I followed Middlesex with But Enough About Me. Jancee Dunn was your average Jersey girl... who ended up working at Rolling Stone, VJing on the brand new MTV2, and interviewing the likes of Brad Pitt and Dolly Parton.
It has a great format - she alternates chapters with anecdotes disguised as advice for celebrity interviewers. And as entertaining as Dunn and her family were (their family trips to their cemetery plot? how she got her name? Comedy gold.), the anecdotes were the best part. She hung out in Tibet with Brad Pitt while he played air guitar! Dolly Parton sent her home with Velveeta! Scott Weiland offered her heroin!
Rock on.
The ending (well, the final chapter) was a little forced, because she did need to wrap it up somehow, and she had discussed a few of her dating mishaps. It didn't work, but I don't know what else she could have done, and it didn't really detract from the rest of the book. (And, hey, she describes the Olsen twins just as I pictured them.) Fantastic, but a library read. Buy Middlesex, and borrow Enough.
My mother chaperoned an eight grade class trip to Washington DC earlier this month, and the gift she brought me back was The Secret Lives of First Ladies. She bought it at the National Archives, and then spent most of the twelve hour ride home worrying because she was pretty sure I already had it. I didn't, but my point is that I'm surprised I didn't have it yet. (And she shouldn't have worried too much - last year she didn't get me anything in DC, so she ran into a Bath and Body Works and bought me some body wash. So even if I already owned it, she was doing better than last year.)
I finished the entire thing in one day at work, and it was pretty good. It was entertaining to see who Cormac O'Brien liked and disliked, who he thought was overrated, etc. And the whole book was worth it for the illustration they put in for Jackie Kennedy. (I saw Republican leanings - Eleanor Roosevelt was effectively called a pushy lesbian and Hillary Rodham Clinton was called a pushy adulterous grasping bitch, while Barbara Bush was a charmingly down to earth and outspoken lady and Laura Bush knows her place, dammit. Also, there was much more on Whitewater than Watergate, though to be fair, Hillary was more involved with Whitewater than Pat Nixon was in anything beyond choosing the flowers. So.)
But the early First Ladies were particularly interesting - a good half of the first ten First Ladies had all been married previous to their Presidential spouses. And some of the anecdotes were ones I'd never heard before - did you know that there are no surviving portraits of Margaret Taylor? or that Frances Cleveland was enormously popular, and her face and name were used to promote tons of products while her husband was president?
(Though it is a little funny how each First Lady was surprisingly indispensable in getting their husband elected, and they all had an unprecedented amount of influence on their husband. Except Laura Bush, who knows her place. Dammit. And! Did you know that when she was 17, Laura then-Welch was in a car accident where she ran a stop sign going fifty, killing a young man, and her blood alcohol level was never tested, and no charges were ever pressed? And she was a Democrat before meeting dear little Dubya. But she keeps her mouth shut now!)
I read Mark Dunn's Ibid a couple of years ago, when it first come out. (As an ARC, for the record.) And it was a neat idea; restrictive, but that was the point: the premise of the book is that Mark Dunn (a character in his own novel!) wrote a biography of the fictional circus-performer-cum-entrepreneur Jonathan Blashette. His publisher than proceeded to drop the only copy of the book in his tub. All that remained were the footnotes - and those made up Ibid. It was a fun read, and I'm kicking myself for not holding on to it.
I was not aware of his earlier book, Ella Minnow Pea until last week, and then promptly stumbled across one in the used section of Bookland. It isn't a good as Ibid. This one is based on an even shakier premise: There is a statue of Nevin Nollop, author of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", in the capital of Nollop, the autonomous island renamed after its famous native son. The famous sentence is set across the base of the statue, and as the glue holding up the tiles gives out, the letters begin to fall. The Island Council steps in and decrees that the spirit of Nollop is making the tiles fall, and his message is this: these letters are not to be used. The council makes it law. The letters continue to fall.
This could have been very cool if it had been a story told in a unique fashion, rather than a word trick put into novel form. (which came first, the chicken or the egg? which came first, the plot or the gimmick?)
It was entirely in letters (hence the multi-layered subtitle: A Novel in Letters.), but they were to and from too many people. (By halfway through, the original letter writing cousins are together.) There's also a random insertion of a love interest for one of the cousins who then wimps out of the whole situation, and vanishes fifteen pages later. Um, okay? Finally, Dunn had not mastered the art of writing letters that told a story without being flagrant exposition. The first letter is particularly guilty; the writer rattles off most of their country's history to her cousin - who is also a citizen, and would presumably know that information, and would be annoyed that her cousin was lecturing her through the mail. Very weak.)
It wasn't bad, but it wasn't engrossing. Worth a read if the gimmick appeals to you, but otherwise, don't worry about this one. Read Ibid instead.
I just finished Persuasion, and I'm in the middle of Emma, so I should have something intelligent to say about either or both of those at some point. Also, Ganging Up on the Sun has gotten better with more time, but their older stuff is better. Guster! What is going on?