Comma Dot Comma

Awhile back I complained about a Francine Rivers audio book. I think there’s something wrong with my selection technique (run into library, grab items with interesting titles) because my follow-up selection, the Devil Wears Prada, was quite a slog as well. It is sometimes okay to listen to real people complaining, but to listen to fictional characters complain for hours on end gets to be a chore. Also, there were a lot of double and triple “reallys” to contend with. As in, “I’m really, really, really sorry, Miranda.” As usual I listened the whole way through anyhow. Why do I do this?
But I have been rejoicing on the commute the past two weeks at the perfection of Pride and Prejudice, which is probably more enjoyable to hear read aloud in a proper British accent than it is to read it quietly to oneself. There is not a wasted word anywhere, and while I sometimes wished for direct speech instead of reported speech at crucial moments (such as Mr. Darcy’s first and second proposals), I could not begrudge Ms. Austen the efficiency of simply giving me the gist. I don’t know how I failed to appreciate this properly before, but it is actually giggle-aloud-in-the-car funny. Though a world of landed gentry and servants and days spent doing needlework and walking around the grounds could hardly be more foreign to me, the foibles and vanities of the characters are as 21st century as an ipod.
It is hard to resist going around talking like them.

You are all most amiable readers and I should be very shocked indeed to discover that any of you deserved to marry into less than 10,000 pounds a year, at the least.

One thing about books on tape is that you can’t skim, and you can’t skip around. I find this excruciating. Some books stand up really well to being read aloud– especially those Hemingway-esque ones where every sentence is stripped down. You don’t have to worry about a writer trying to get fancy with a sentence and going awry. Other books suffer, and I along with them. Case in point: The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers, one of those Christian historical romance sagas. That genre is typically not my thing, but the whole series was sitting there on the library shelf, and I had hear more good things about her than most authors in that genre.

So. The plot was interesting, a few of the characters engaging, the latin prhases thrown in a nice diversion (apart from “peristile” which got old pretty quick). But. Way, way, way too long and repetitive. With these epic stories, I think the writers have to focus on keeping the plot moving forward, getting their characters in the right places at the right time, more than wordsmithing like they would for a shorter book or story. That’s fine, and that’s why we invented skimming. In this one, certain phrases were used dozens of times, and I heard every syllable of every one.

His mouth tipped
He said sardonically
He said huskily
A muscle twitched in his cheek/jaw
She went cold
Her hand trembled
Fear gripped her
He smiled ruefully

Yikes! Watch out for those adverbs, Ms. Rivers. Well, you can kind of get the gist of the story from them, excepting the happy ending.

Note: Some of the following instructions may not apply to all parties. Adjust accordingly.

1. Sleep. Get up at 2:40, when your perpetually awake spouse shakes your foot.
2. Stumble onto the balcony in your pajamas and sneakers, blinking at the sky.
3. Note how the bright edge of moon looks like something you could eat. And how blurry the edge is, throwing off lozenges of light.
4. Look at it through the monocular.
5. Look at it through the antique brass spyglass.
6. Look at it with the naked eye.
7. There it goes!
8. The moon is a dirty penny.
9. Through the spyglass, it is a pocked orange-brown rubber ball.
10. Take umbrage at the constant references to “blood red” in the press.
11. Blood can be many colors and none match the moon. Blood red indeed!
12. Announce that this is your first time watching a full eclipse.
13. It is not your first time. Several years ago, on another continent, you and the spouse stacked furniture in the hallway to climb through a hatch onto the roof. The moon was not full and the sky was cloudy. Then you called it a thumbprint.
14. It feels like the first time.
15. That’s got to count for something.
16. Stop counting. It’s the middle of the night.

http://www.space.com/news/070828_lunar_eclipse.html

Karen kindly tagged me for a post about what I’m currently reading, which means I don’t have to come up with my own idea for today. It’s timely because I just discovered the riches of my local branch of the city library. There are plenty of partly-read books scattered around the house, and I think of them like volocanoes, in varying stages of activity. Here are the most active:

Hard Revolution, George Pellecanos.

Pellecanos is a gritty Washington D.C. crime writer, and in this book he takes on the period in D.C.’s history leading up to the riots. Having spent a few years living in the neighborhoods that were once destroyed by the riots, I have a strong sense of place as I listen to this book (it’s a book on CD). Old-timers there refer to certain sections of the city as “before the riots” and “after the riots.” The lead character, Derek Strange, is a newly minted cop charged with patrolling his part of town with a white partner. What I enjoy most in this book is the delicate, charged interactions between blacks and whites as some of them try to find new common ground in the Civil Rights movement, while others don’t. What I don’t like is how masculine this book is. There’s a lot of talk of muscles and respect and weapons and cars and “that’s a damn good woman” type of stuff. Can’t relate.

Blink, Malcom Gladwell

My coworker left this book sitting out on her desk for a few days in plain sight so of course I snagged it to read on lunch breaks. It’s an interesting exploration of the snap judgment and its usefulness and pitfalls, by way of art forgery, marriage, New Coke, and implicit bias.

Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier

Just finished this one; historical fiction about a white orphan who grows up among Cherokees as President Jackson makes it his mission to remove them to the far west. I really enjoyed Cold Mountain; this book is a little more diffuse and meandering, but still satisfying. There are lots of good descriptions of food in it, which reveal plenty about class and culture in the mishmash mix of people at the frontier.

Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf

The plan was to read a chapter of this book a month and discuss each one with friends. The reality is that I read it in chunks of a few paragraphs at a time, and it seems that my friends have fallen completely off the Volf wagon. Volf is talking about the new community in Christ and how it relates to place, forgiveness, relationships, and identity. Good stuff, but you see why it could take awhile.

On deck: The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama; Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver; Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, Norman Dubie.

If you’re reading one or more books at the moment, consider yourself tagged.

I’ve finished Forster’s A Passage To India, which is a wonderful book. Reading it is akin to eating watermelon with a spoon. It just gets redder and jucier as you go along. The quote is taken from a scene near the end and struck me as a lovely image of intercessory prayer, in addition to being one of the most purely redemptive and hopeful moments in the book. The character, the Indian Hindu Professor Godbole (I daresay not a coinicidental name), is contemplating on a moment in a ceremony when he remembered an old woman from his past:

“It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, ‘Come, come, come, come.’ This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each according to his own capacities, and he knew that his were small. ‘One old Englishwoman and one little, little, wasp,’ he thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. ‘It does not seem much, still it is more than I am myself.’“

Karen Joy tagged me– a list of popular books. I wish there were an option for things I’ve partially read, or things I read but afterwards wished I hadn’t. Also a mark for books you used to own, but got rid of in the winnowing-before-a-move process. I’m curious as to how this list was compiled. All the Harry Potters but only one Narnia? Two Jane Austens and no Anton Chekhov? “The Bible” as one book? I guess they do sell it that way.

Here are the instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, underline the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk* the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)*
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)*
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire(Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)*
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)*
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon* (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth* (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One* (Bryce Courtenay)

38. I Know This Much is True* (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone* (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)

57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife* (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business* (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)7
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree* (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)*
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners* (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage* (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule* (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries* (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness* (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel* (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion* (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance* (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

I tag Tara, Kelsey, and Nerdygirl.

I read a book by Dan Brown, the guy who wrote Da Vinci Code. Been successfully ignoring him for years. But, someone had the book, enthused about it, put it in my hand. I will read any virtually any printed matter that someone puts into my hand. Our generic baking soda box, for example, has instructions on the side for using the soda as an antacid. 1/2 teaspoon in 4 oz water. Dissolve completely before drinking.

The Dan Brown book, Angels and Demons, was a fast read. I got it done in a day, with many interruptions for normal life. It had twists and turns, Roman architecture, and an immolation. It also had many, many incomplete sentences. At a point of crisis, there was a whole paragraph of fragments. Early in the book a mysterious particle physicist declares that he and his kind did, indeed, invent the internet. Brown also used the word “indignity” instead of “indignance.” It gets one thumb down and one thumb sideways.

I also read advertisements on people’s cars. Today there was a PT Cruiser with “Make Money By Selling Jerky” sign painted across the back window.

Sometimes if there’s nothing good on TV I will read the listings on channel 97. Dr. G. pointed one out the other day: When Surgical Instruments Get Left Behind. It was a full hour show, I believe.

I’m STILL getting a lot of reading done. And tomorrow I get to pick up my glazed stuff at the pottery studio. Yay. Still no word on my most recent interview.

I’m getting a lot of reading done.

When the internet gets stale I like to pretend I’m old-school Cajun. To aid in my fantasy, I rely on Talk about Good: Le Livre de la Cuisine de Lafayette, a cookbook that Dr. G picked up at a garage sale back in the early days, in an edition that looks to be from the 70′s. He found a recipe in there that he liked so much, he copied it down and took it with him to Peace Corps, and it has followed us to every place we’ve lived. It’s called Plantation Cake, and it’s essentially a thick pool of dark molasses with sweetened biscuit dough floating on the top. I hate it. But of course on the days when I’m Cajun I re-read the recipe with relish. Even more fun is spot-checking a page for something interesting.

For example, the Poultry and Game section has recipes for “Doves in a Pot” and “Squirrel Sauce Piquante,” whose first listed ingredient is “17 squirrels, marinated.” The names of the contributors are interesting, too. We’ve got Mrs. Haskell Walker, Brigadier General Carl J. Dueser, Mrs. Walter B. Comeaux, Jr. The women kept their first names hidden and the men announce their credentials.

Then there’s the sheer metaphoric power of some of the recipe names. Cookies called “Mothballs” and “Oreilles de Cochon.” “Cloud-Top Cherry Pie.” “Sand Tarts.” “Feud Cake.” I’m a particular fan of “Tipsy Pudding,” which calls for two jiggers of hard liquor.
The texts of the recipes are sometimes puzzling and sometimes exquisitely satisfying. There are six recipes for the mundanely titled pecan pie (I, II, III, IV, peach-pecan, pecan-cream). “Prism Cake” is not cake at all, but a variety of jello flavors on a graham cracker crust. There is a note at the bottom of the recipe for Traditional Lebkuchen: “Cover tightly and store from 1 to 2 weeks to MELLOW. Excellent Holiday Cookie. Can be Baked one month ahead.” In the Mardi Gras mixed drink section, “Bowle a la Kumpa (A Festive German Wine Punch)” “Serves 4 lusty drinkers, or 8 bon vivants, or 16 ‘party drinkers.‘” Mrs. Charles Sanders calls her shrimp dip recipe “Courting Dip” because “This recipe was given to me during our courtship. It has proved to be a real favorite all these years.”

A dip titled “For Men Only” reminds us, “Don’t let the name fool you; women like this too!” And Mrs. William E. Wallace advises how to make a good roux: “Never make it too brown, because it must continue browning as other ingredients are added. The secret of good cooking lies in following implicitly the gradual introduction of the component parts in the order specified. There is an easier way!!!”

So excuse me, mes cheris, but I have to go read all about aspic.