Book #93: The Magician's Book

Title: The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
Author: Laura Miller

I can't tell you how long it took me to finish The Magician's Book. I bought it early in the spring, when Miller appeared on RadioWest here in Salt Lake City, and I felt intrigued enough by Miller's interactions with C. S. Lewis's Narnia books to download it to my phone (it was before I had the Kindle). I read the first chapter, and the book wasn't what I expected. I'd thought it was going to be a memoir, guided mainly by Miller's personal experiences in Narnia, and I loved the idea of reading a book about how a single literary series could shape a childhood. In the early chapters, I got some of that. Miller wrote about how a teacher influenced her to start reading, and how she read the books over and over from the time she was about eight until she reached her early teens. Then, when she was an adult, she got wind of the Christian symbolism in the books and felt betrayed, but gradually came back to appreciating them. I thought that was enough for an entire story. But apparently Miller didn't, and the book quickly morphed into a study of Lewis's life and influences, and in later chapters, segued over to Tolkien and his friendship with Lewis and how the Narnia books differed from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Frankly, if I'd known I was buying a bio of C. S. Lewis, I would have bought Surprised by Joy instead. At least that's a memoir. This book felt like it didn't know what it was-- was it a memoir of Miller's experience, a bio of Lewis or scholarly articles about Lewis and Tolkien? I was never sure. I can appreciate genre-busting at times, but it didn't really work here. If I had taken the book out of the library, I would have returned it after several chapters. But I paid $10 for this book, so I was determined to get my money's worth. As it was, I skimmed the last few chapters, which seemed to go on forever. If you want to read about Narnia, go to the primary source.

Book #92: The Case of the Missing Servant

Title: The Case of the Missing Servant: A Vish Puri Mystery
Author: Tarquin Hall

If you like Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency books but are tiring of Botswana or Precious Ramotswe, the tireless "traditionally-built" detective, then follow Tarquin Hall to India, where Vish Puri, also a little on the chubby side, sneaking pakoras on the sly, solves similar sorts of stories, with a colorful cast of characters and a Brit's perspective on a former colony. I like Alexander McCall Smith's books when I'm in the mood for a light read, and I eventually determined that Hall's book was similarly entertaining and not too challenging. I've enjoyed most of the books I've read that are set in an India that is changing and modernizing so quickly, and found Delhi to be the most engaging character in Hall's novel.

Book #91: Innocent

Title: Innocent
Author: Scott Turow

More than twenty years have passed since Rusty Sabich's trial for the murder of Carolyn Polhemus ended with him getting freedom... of a sort. For the last twenty years, he's lived with the knowledge that his wife, Barbara, was both mentally unstable and capable of murder. And for the last twenty years, Sabich has advanced his career (he's now a judge, running for State Supreme Court, or something of that ilk), while Tommy Molto has worked to redeem himself after his thrashing during the first trial. Rusty's also done a good job of staying on the straight and narrow with other women, because the only time he had an affair things ended very badly.

Eventually Rusty finds himself in the arms and bed of Anna Vostic, his law clerk. After a few months, his responsibility for Barbara outweighs his passion for Anna, but keeping a secret from Barbara proves as impossible in 2007 as it was in 1987, and he soon finds himself on trial for murder once more, facing Tommy Molto again as his prosecutor.

While Presumed Innocent was a good whodunit, with impressive courtroom scenes, Innocent feels more domestic in nature. Turow spends significant amounts of time exploring complicated marriages, relationships between parents and children, remote older men, and finding love late in life (Tommy Molto is married! With babies!) In that sense, I enjoyed the book more. While the mystery, given the events of the previous book, wasn't all that mysterious, probing the whys of the mystery gives readers a lot to think about.

Book #90: The Cellist of Sarajevo

Title: The Cellist of Sarajevo
Author: Steven Galloway

I added The Cellist of Sarajevo to my Kindle on recommendation from Melissa at Gerbera Daisy Diaries, who said it was one of the best books she's read recently, and she's read a lot. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I didn't know much of the back story of the conflict that rendered Sarajevo a war zone in the mid-90s, and had certainly never heard of Vedran Smailovic, the cellist who honored the 22 people killed in a bread line in 1992 by playing his cello in the spot of the massacre every day for 22 days, despite the fact that his life was constantly in danger from snipers. I read most of the novel yesterday on our drive from Salt Lake to Moab, where internet access is spotty, so I wasn't able to educate myself about the story until I was almost done with it.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a beautifully-written, short, spare novel. Galloway tells the story of four or five of the residents of Sarajevo during the siege (Galloway compresses the siege, which really lasted almost four years, into the span of a few months for the sake of the story), and captures their fear, their despair, their cowardice, their bravery, and ultimately their hope. Although the story was definitely changed for the sake of the novel, it, like other great fictionalized accounts of historical people and events (think A Beautiful Mind) captured the essence of what life was like during the siege. Interestingly enough, Smailovic was not happy about his portrayal in the book and demanded compensation from Galloway.

Book #89: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Title: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Author: Aimee Bender

Rose Edelstein has a gift. Or a curse. It's hard to tell which. She can taste the emotional state of the person who has cooked the food she eats. She's able to sense her mother's depression, and later her extramarital affair, by what she serves the family for dinner. She never knows whether she'll be elevated or crushed by her meals, so she learns to rely on prepackaged, factory-made meals, which taste less like emotion and more like cardboard. Rose eventually learns that she's not the only one in her family with unusual powers. Her father's intense fear of hospitals seems to stem from his belief that "something will happen to him" if he goes there. And Rose's brilliant older brother gets absorbed, literally, by the "gifts" he possesses.

I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of magical realism as a genre. I think that Bender gives us adequate knowledge that things aren't always what they seem, since Rose's "gifts" become apparent in the first chapter of the book, but everyone else in the novel seems so normal, that just seems like a personality quirk. I expected the story to end with Rose finding a way to resolve her gifts with her ambitions, but it moved to a completely different place, and the ending felt unsatisfying. I liked the premise, but wish that Bender had gone in a different direction with the plot.

Book #88: Presumed Innocent

Title: Presumed Innocent
Author: Scott Turow

Eddie read Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent at what must have been a formative time in his life, because more than 20 years later, he still remembers details of the story that are hazy for me a week after finishing the audiobook. There are some definite gaps in my cultural literacy, and until I ordered both Presumed Innocent and the long-awaited sequel Innocent for my iPod a few weeks ago, this was one of the glaring holes. If you, like me, were a preteenager when the book was originally released, then you may not know that Presumed Innocent details the story of prosecuting attorney Rusty Sabich, is put on trial by his former colleagues for the death of a former colleague. Did Sabich kill Carolyn Polhemus, an attorney in the office with whom he, and several other guys at work, were sleeping? Is the case a vendetta for political and personal reasons, or is there reasonable doubt? Most importantly, did Rusty do it?

I really enjoyed listening to Presumed Innocent. The narrator, Edward Herrmann, read the story well without being annoying or doing weird things with his voice. The story is also suspenseful and intelligent, but relatively easy to follow. If I had to stop for a second to help a kid or say hi to a neighbor while I was out running, it wasn't too hard for me to pick up the story. I'd compare it to a smart John Grisham story of the early days, but I guess that it predated those good early Grishams (weirdly enough). The only thing that sticks out a week later that bugged me about the story is that it was set in the fictional Kindle County. It's fairly obvious even to the uninitiated that Kindle County is Chicago, but I don't understand exactly why he didn't just set the book in Chicago. I breezed through the 16 hours of the story in a few days, and immediately plunged into Innocent, so that testifies to its readability and the strength of the story.

Book #87: Medium Raw

Title: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Author: Anthony Bourdain

I like Anthony Bourdain. I enjoyed his first memoir, Kitchen Confidential, when I picked it up a few years ago, and No Reservations has been my laundry-folding Netflix show of choice lately. I like watching him stroll the streets of the world's cities, eating weird things, and looking like he doesn't have a care in the world. Here's a guy who will eat things like raw seal meat and the intestines and genitalia of just about anything, but in Medium Raw, he talks about his biggest food fear-- the Chicken McNugget.

I'll admit to feeling a little bit defensive when I read Bourdain's passages in which he gleefully brainwashes his preschool-age daughter into believing that Ronald McDonald abducts children and smells bad. For someone who gained his cred eating anything and everything, who didn't even have health insurance until a decade or so ago, he certainly seems to have adjusted to life on the Upper East Side pretty quickly. Seriously-- he can poison his body with all kinds of drugs and alcohol and consume multitudes of weird stuff, but the very thought of his precious baby eating a chicken nugget has him quaking in his boots? Gag me.

Other than that, I found the book fairly typical (which means good) Bourdain fare. I enjoyed the stories about people he's met and worked with in the food world, even those I don't know much about. I also loved hearing about his family. My favorite chapter was the food porn chapter-- it made me want to travel the world, or at least stray a little further than the familiar Wendy's (or McDonalds-- the horror!) the next time I take a road trip.

The dog days

When we lived in Texas, I had a visiting teaching companion who spent her summers fretting over the fact that, come August, she'd have to send her girls back to school. She loved being with her daughters, and it stressed her out to put them in the hands of the public schools for seven hours a day. I had a lot in common with this friend-- we were both married to cardiology fellows and had four kids and had lived in the same town before moving to Houston, but I always felt a little bit guilty that I didn't share her ardor for summers with my kids.

Bryce and Annie go back to school on August 23rd-- that's 18 days from today, and I cannot wait. While I always think that I'll enjoy the laid-back days of summer, the popsicles, and the long afternoons reading-- the truth is that popsicles inevitably melt into red puddles on the table, the floor or the back porch, the kids beg for their reading "time-outs" (Bryce calls it the "hour of pain") to be over, and I just don't do laid-back.

I'm a much better mom when there's structure-- when I can say, "You must be in bed at 8:30 tonight because you have school tomorrow" and when I can use piano and swimming lessons as the reason why they can't have play dates after school. I'm more patient when I can escape to my bedroom for 30 minutes after lunch to read and I know that no one will be up there jumping on the squeaky bed, watching iCarly or playing a DS. They're awake before I finish my morning run, often still awake by the time I fall, exhausted, into my bed, and frequently crawl into my bed at night. I want a few hours with no responsibilities, no tattling, no requests for grape juice in a sippy, no Moose A Moose, no elaborate schemes for lemonade stands, no pseudo-swearing from my ten-year-old, no popcorn on the couch, none of the extra laundry running through the sprinkler provides, no taking everyone to the grocery store, no "I'm bored"s.

When I had three toddlers, I often felt crazy. Not just overwhelmed or tired, but insane. They were omnipresent, like a burr I couldn't shake off my sock. Now they're bigger, and during the school year, I approach a feeling of competence and sanity with Isaac and Maren around. When Maren started her hour and a half of preschool twice a week this winter, I even got three whole hours of time to myself each week. It wasn't much, but it was enough. But the summers still depress me. Isaac starts kindergarten on August 30th, and instead of feeling nostalgic about him growing up, I'll push him out the door to join his brother and sister in the big wide world.

Mostly, I want an hour or two of silence and NO ONE TOUCHING ME. No ambient sounds of video games or older brothers torturing younger sisters, no Phineas and Ferb providing the soundtrack of my life. The sad thing is, I'd probably fall stone cold asleep. Or else I'd miss them.

Nah....

Monica's Closet

If you, like me, came home from college classes and sacked out in front of reruns of Friends, you probably understand the title of this post. If not, let me explain: the "Friends" usually hung out at Monica's apartment (when they weren't at Central Perk, the downstairs coffee shop). Monica's apartment was obsessively neat. When Joey and Chandler really wanted to mess with her, they'd do things like shift a picture frame an inch to the right and watch her self-destruct. In her apartment, she had a locked closet in the hallway. Everyone wondered what she kept in there. Ski gear? Out-of-season clothes? Sex toys? Dead bodies? Finally, the Friends found a way to get into the closet, only to find that it was just a jumbled mess-- a spot for her to stuff all the junk that didn't have a place in her obsessively-organized life. She could throw it in there, lock the door, and forget it existed.

There's a Monica Closet in my house too (more accurately, it's behind the house). I'm pretty good at faking neatness and organization in most of my spaces (don't look too closely in my kids' clothes drawers), but my garage is an absolute disaster. There are cardboard boxes spilling out the doors, tools hopelessly jumbled in bins, and a month or so ago, I got a six-inch gash on my shin when I tripped over the kickstand of one of the many bikes lying on the floor. Every so often I halfheartedly pick up the bikes, take the boxes to the recycling center, haul a load to DI, and sweep it out, but I lose my enthusiasm for the project before I tackle the tools or actually figure out a way to efficiently store the bins that are out there. Even when I take an afternoon to neaten it up, there are five other people living here, and it seems to mess itself up again, a fact which I don't notice until it's back at an overwhelming state. A few weeks ago a friend's husband was helping me with a project, and I was mortified by the idea of taking him out to the garage to see the utter disorganization of my tool bins.

Is there a Monica Closet in your house? Do you try to do something about it or just let it be? Do you think it's psychologically important for neatniks to have a place like a Monica Closet?

Book #86: Wolf Hall

Title: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel

I've heard so much buzz about Wolf Hall (it won last year's Booker Prize) that I knew that I'd have to read it eventually. I'm no novice to books about Tudor England. I've read Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser's books about Henry and his wives and, yes, The Other Boleyn Girl. I found all of those books more readable and accessible than Wolf Hall. I've been in a bit of a slump with my running lately, and I finally decided that it was because I was dreading putting my earbuds in and listening to Wolf Hall for another hour. It's funny, because in retrospect, I feel like I learned a lot about Thomas Cromwell (or at least Hilary Mantel's portrayal of him here as intelligent and paternal-- he's viewed quite differently in A Man for All Seasons, which favors Thomas More), but all of the action in the novel seems to take place in dialogue instead of in actual things happening.

Once again, I didn't love the narrator of the audiobook and was irritated by the voices he assumed for each character, which seemed to insinuate too much about what the characters were like instead of allowing a reader to decide for herself if she liked them. I loved the domestic scenes in the book-- the snapshots of Cromwell as a young man, the snippets of him walking through his orchards and losing his wife and daughters and marrying off the men in the family, but frankly, I found a lot of the chatter between Cromwell and other members of the court to get pretty tiresome after a while. It makes me imagine that being a member of Henry's court was pretty tiresome too. Tiresome, that is, when you weren't worrying about being sent off to the Tower of London. Now that I've finished Wolf Hall, I hope that running will become fun again.