Damn, Nature, you scary. part II

Category: dribblings

snake01 

so there i was all minding my own and taking pictures of the 15 dragonflies that were zipping around when all of a sudden i spied a Mr. No-shoulders.

game over, man.

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Summer of the Dragonfly

Category: dribblings

dragonfly08 

i was out taking more pictures of dragonflies today in the hot, hot sun. it’s only 103°. that’s F not C, for you Rest Of The World.

my neighbor came out and asked if i was taking pictures of birds.

“no, i’m taking pictures of dragonflies. there are so many out here.”

“dragonflies? i don’t think i know what that is.”

“oh.”

“…”

“um, snake doctor?”

“oh. oh! the big long ones?”

“yes.”

“oh yeah, there are a lot of them about.”

“yes, sir.”

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23. Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

Category: 50 Books

This is one of those “most anticipated books of the summer!” type of books. It was reviewed by tons of peeps including thumbs up from  Stephen King and Scott Turow, and when other authors really dig a book I think that says something.

from the jacket:

 David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.

Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart—and a first novel of the highest order.

I’m glad I read the book, it has loads of things in it I love in my fiction:

1. cleverness. I’m a sucker for it.

2. meta-fiction. I’m also a sucker for this.

3. homages. I love it when authors borrow from other authors in such a way that it’s obvious but not gimmicky.

4. pop-culture references. Does this make me shallow? probably.

This book was very good, but I did not like it. This may have to do with me being a girl. This book has a lot to do with marriages. Long marriages that have run out of steam for whatever reasons, and they are looked at from the husbands points of view. Three different marriages, three different husbands, and there seems to be one point of view, so the whole static marriage-trap-wife murder-but no wait, i love my wife-i hate my wife-let’s kill my wife-no, let’s not-i’m still trapped-mobius strip, get it? GET IT?!-i love my wife-she’s dead!-or is she?-i love her-i miss her-i’m trapped-marriage thing feels not only incredibly redundant, but also like beating a dead horse (or poodle, zing!) and maybe I could look past that if it weren’t that all the wives (and all the women in the book, really) come off as selfish harpies.

Do I think that the author hates his wife/women? No, I don’t, I think he really loves her/them.

It’s not like the husbands are perfect. They are pretty weak. It’s just that the women all seem so unreasonable. Especially Hannah all, “You still don’t get it.” –  “Don’t get what?”-“exactly.” kind of thing.

And? since it seemed like really all the men were the same man, all the women were the same woman and all the marriages were the same marriage? The book felt too long and overdone.

I did love the Hitchcock stuff in the book. However, all of that stuff? COMES IN ON PAGE 301. Yes. What is mentioned in the first sentence of the jacket cover? STARTS AT THE LAST 30 PAGES OF THE BOOK. I probably can’t fault the author for this as he probably didn’t write the jacket cover. And while I’m blasting the jacket cover let me also add, “police proceedural of the soul” is a bullshit description. I don’t think anyone who has read this book would describe it as a police proceedural of any kind.

So the Hitchcock stuff: good. I liked the meta-fiction. I like the Dr. Lector/Mobius jail cell scene, a really nice touch.

The Dr. Sheppard/detective Sheppard bit was way too long.

I also liked the touch of Poe/Borgian/Fight Club feel of is David really Mobius? is David really Harold? I loved that, really.

I really love how ambitious this novel was. I think it may have been an impossible undertaking, but I love all the effort. If this book could’ve been shaved down to 250 – 275 pages I think it would have been perfect. So to sum up: I’m glad I read it, I didn’t like it, it really made me think, but I can’t think of a single person I’d recommend it to.

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22. Woman With Birthmark by Håkan Nesser

Category: 50 Books

This is an older book (first published in Sweden in 1996, maybe?) but it was published in the United States in 2009.

It was a really good police procedural type of crime fiction. The main detective is Inspector Van Veeteren. I loved the way the detectives interact with each other. They were all very droll and sarcastic and you could tell that they all worked pretty well with each other. That was a nice change up from many books where the detectives don’t get along in that cliched kind of way.

from the jacket cover:

Inspector Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by the curious murder of a man shot twice in the heart and twice below the belt. He was a quiet, utterly dull man, and the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can recall is a series of peculiar phone calls. Repeatedly the telephone would ring, offering nothing but the words of an obscure pop song from the 1960s. This siren song is linked to an identical murder, but the true link between these heinous crimes remains unknown, while a daughter’s pride grows with the satisfaction of vengeance and another detective’s lover offers telling insights that only an outsider could deduce.

This book did not have the huge amounts of character development that some of the other Scandi crime has, and I think that made this book go much faster, but it didn’t seem like a ripoff. It seemed to work well. The solving of the mystery seemed to be very realistic, the drudgery of questioning witnesses, the dead ends, and especially that it took months to solve.

Good Book. I’d like to read Nesser’s other books as well.

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why aren’t you reading more swedish crime fiction?

Category: Uncategorized

hey, check it, Johan Theorin wins the CWA International Dagger 2010.

I’m so glad he won because that was THE BEST crime fiction book I read last year.

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21. Dancing With the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue by Christopher Wilson

Category: 50 Books

The first thing wrong with this is the title. It should’ve been called The Jimmy Donahue Story.  The Windsors (who get first billing in the title, right?) are not in this book much. But I realize that if  the author had left them out of the title no one would have read the book because no one knows or cares about Jimmy Donahue. I admit freely that while reading the book I didn’t care for Jimmy Donahue, and after finishing it I care even less for JimmyDonahue. I was just reading it for dish on the Windsors.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting book, and it’s short and sweet, but the life of Jimmy Donahue (and the rest of the Woolworth heirs) is just so gross to me. They wasted so much money that I can’t even comprehend the dollar amounts nor the waste. I don’t understand that lifestyle. But let’s face it, this isn’t high brow reading, it’s dishy biography, and that makes for some good summer reading.

It was disappointing that it wasn’t mostly about the Windsors (who are my new obsession by the way. Sorry Patty Hearst.) The Windsors, for my friends reading this, were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. So his brother became King George VI (Elizabeth II’s father.) Good times.

You hear different stories on this. Some people are all, “OMG what a love story! He GAVE UP his THRONE for his LOVE.”

Some people are all, “The Duke was gay and the Duchess just married for money and prestige.”

and others are all, “Actually, Edward VIII was a huge Nazi sympathizer so the prime ministers were wanting to get rid of him anyway. They just used the marriage as an easy way out.”

The Windsors, kicked out of England, did hobnob with the nazi’s until England was all, “Give them a job before they fuck something up!” So they made the duke the governor of the Bahamas while World War II was going on. They hated having to live there.

Anyway, towards the end of this book is where the Windsors come in. The book discusses the affair that the duchess had with Jimmy Donahue while the duke just sort of acted polite and played golf. It is an intersting affair seeing as how Jimmy Donahue was a homosexual and the duchess was nearly twice his age. They seemed an unlikely hook up.

Anyway, interesting book. I wouldn’t recommend it though unless you were specifically interested in the Windsors or the wacky high society of the ’40s and ’50s.

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words stuck in my head

Category: dribblings

this week’s word that is stuck in my head is Taliesin.

and i’m not particularly fond of FLW.

weird.

***

last week i watched  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  Liz and West were kind enough to watch it with me. This was good because they had not read the book. And what we learned is that if you’ve not read the book you’ve no idea what is going on in the movie. well, maybe that’s not true, maybe it’s that you don’t know the motivations of what’s going on in the movie.

also, the movie left out the REAL reason that Blomkvist took the Find Harriet job: Vanger was dangling a bogus carrot of Wennerstrom Information in front of him. in the movie it’s just Harriet once babysat Blomkvist, which felt weaker than a FLW roof. (snap!) i mean, what kind of thing is that?

“hi, i need you to find my niece.”

“but i’m a reporter. not the police.”

“exactly.”

“when did your niece go missing?”

“1966.”

“that was quite a long time ago.”

“remember that summer you spent here on this island?”

“no.”

“and my niece babysat you. here’s a picture.”

“vaguely.”

“so will you find her?”

“of course!”

weak. weaky weaker weak.

and the movie left out how Blomkvist has sex with everybody.

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20. The Way I see It by Melissa Anderson

Category: 50 Books

20. The Way I see It: A Look Back on My Life on Little House by Melissa Anderson

I Had to read this since I’d read Melissa Gilbert’s Little House memoir last year. If I remember correctly, I didn’t like the Melissa Gilbert book. I didn’t like this one either. In fact, I liked this one even less. So this book is written by the actress who played Mary Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie.

1. It was boring.

2. The majority of the book was her recapping her favorite episodes. I mean, she literally goes through whole episodes. 

3. There was a severe lack of dish. Hi, this is a movie star memoir, the reader wants some dish, okay? I’m not saying to trash on someone, but when your book is all nice and vague? It’s not interesting.

4. She’s not a very good writer. I wouldn’t expect her to be an awesome writer, but I would have expected someone to work with her on this and maybe clean up some of the tangent-y spots.

5. The book seems too nice and glossed over.

6. There is no number six.

7. At least it was short.

8. The title is The Way I See It, this makes no sense. Is this a play on how her character goes blind? There are a couple of Little House memoirs out now, so is this her saying that this is her version of what went down? Because if it is she shouldn’t have bothered. It’s bland. And what gets me is that she probably had some really great things to say. She could have had a chapter on what it’s like being a child star instead of just mentioning it offhand like she does.

I appreciate that she doesn’t want to come off all braggy and bitchy, i do. But it’s taken in such exrememe blandness that it makes for a pointless read. If I wanted to watch Little House I would turn the channel to TV Land. I don’t want to read full recaps of episodes (with full quotations).

What is it with all of these milk toast bios and memoirs lately?

This book was so disappointing that I had to break out the Cansecos again.

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19. Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein

Category: 50 Books

19. Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swingin’ ’70s by Dan Epstein

I so enjoyed this book. It was very entertaining.

They layout was perfect. The author would make each year it’s own chapter, and he’d talk about the teams and the players. He’d go through the playoffs and World series and any other shenanigans. Then bwtween the year chapters he’d have a chapter on general ’70s stuff. Sort of like a snippet history lesson. It wasn’t anything too daunting. So it seemed to flow really well. The author kept a light touch on everything.

Most baseball books focus on one player or one team, but this one wasn’t like that. Sure the superstars get more mentions, but since the author went year by year, he was able to talk about a lot more players. It was great to read about the Big Red Machine and the A’s Mustache Gang and not have to read a full-on bio of say, Pete Rose. (Not that i don’t like Pete Rose, mind. he was a bastid, sure, but he was a great ballplayer.)

My only problem with this book is that there needed to be more pictures. There were only 15 pictures. And NONE of them were in color. The hell? One third of the book is about how crazy hilarious the uniforms were and we don’t get to see pictures in color? I’m sure this is the publisher’s fault, trying to save money on printing or whatnot. The book would have been damned near perfect with some color pictures.

Easy read, very entertaining. If you like baseball books you’ll like this one.

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more Baylor

Category: dribblings

baylor5

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