This book had a lot of promise. A youth librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself attached to a precocious ten-year old patron. The kid "kidnaps" the librarian and they travel across the country finding adventure along the way.
Add in the fact that the librarian has a bit of bite to her wit, and I found myself really enjoying the beginning of the book. Then it went downhill.
The kid's parents are nutjobs. They (and apparently other people) think that the kid, Ian, is homosexual and they have been sending him to religious classes to "cure" him. The mother is very strict and is very particular in what she lets Ian read. The librarian, Lucy, sneaks Ian some of these "bad" books like Roald Dahl or books with wizards.
One night Ian hides out in the library and when Lucy comes in the next morning she finds him and agrees to take Ian to his grandmother's house. Only Ian is sort of fabricating the destination and they end up leaving Hannibal, then Missouri, then Chicago, then Pittsburgh, and ultimately find themselves in New England. The longer they are away, the more terrified Lucy gets at being caught and accused of kidnapping and the more difficult it is to extricate herself from the situation.
Along the way, though, she finds out a bit about herself. When Ian does finally return home, Lucy does not join him and she moves and pursues another career.
The book had some potential to be an uplifting story but it got a little too outlandish for my liking. Lucy's parents are from Russia and apparently still have some ex-mob connections. The whole kidnapping thing is a bit preposterous. I think the most annoying thing, though, was the attempts to cure Ian's homosexuality and how everyone seemed to think Ian was gay. Really? At age 10 the entire world can identify a child's sexual preference? Was it the subscription to Playgirl or his preference for show tunes and fashion design? Sadly, there wasn't anything so stereotypical to suggest why EVERYONE thought Ian liked guys. It just was a noticeable fact about Ian and that bothered me. I also thought Lucy, despite starting off as a strong figure, really is rather weak as the story develops.
This once again was a between ratings book and I'm siding with the lower rating again. Outlandish and disappointing despite a promising main character and it being a generally feel good story.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Cooking for Gracie by Keith Dixon
I reviewed Dixon's novel, the Art of Losing, a year ago. Dixon came across my review and left a nice comment so I figured I'd read his newest book, Cooking for Gracie, when it came out.
I got around to it and I enjoyed it. Unlike Art of Losing, this is a memoir and not a novel. Dixon enjoys cooking. He and his wife have their first child, Gracie, who is born four weeks premature. Dixon finds that his life is turned all topsy-turvy and he has to make adjustments from his pre-kid life (go figure).
I have to admit I was skeptical about liking this. As any parent can tell you, life changes dramatically when you add kids to the mix. I thought to myself, "Gee, Keith. Really? You don't have time and energy to do something you enjoy anymore because you have a kid? Welcome to the club". It had the potential to get worse. Dixon goes on to detail the first year of the life of his child and the changes he and his wife have to make.
If there's one thing I really can't stand, it's new parents. I may have been the same irritating way but I really hate the "Look what Junior is doing!" accolades and the "discovery" of parenting techniques practiced by gazillions of parents before them. Your kid isn't special and you aren't reinventing parenting. It's all been done before for thousands of years. So I really had my doubts. I figured in the end I'd be reading some good writing but rolling my eyes at the story itself.
I was wrong. Dixon didn't go too overboard. And Gracie is special in a way. There was some sort of genetic disorder involved that is pretty much fatal to the kid before it's born 99.9999% of the time. So Keith and his wife were fortunate.
And while I'm complaining about all these things I thought the book might be, it really wasn't. It's a strange book in that it is part cookbook. Almost every chapter, each which roughly covers a month of Gracie's life, ends with recipes that Dixon fixed for one reason or another. When Gracie initially had troubles after birth with eating, Dixon made some changes hoping to influence his wife's nutrition and in turn, Gracie's. When Gracie wasn't finding a sleep pattern, other changes were made and other things were cooked. As Gracie became more attached to Dixon's wife than to him, Dixon adjusted his attitudes. When Gracie got teeth, yet more changes.
So despite not being entirely positive about this book (I really doubt I would have even wanted to read it if not for Dixon's comment), I found myself enjoying it a lot. I fixed a couple of the recipes and enjoyed them. It would have been nice as a two-book set, one the memoir and the other the cookbook. If I had bought a copy instead of borrowing a library copy, I'd have a tough time figuring out where to house the book; the kitchen or the bookshelf.
Although it took me a long time to find something worthwhile, it was nice finally reading something this year that was a good story (with good writing to boot).
I got around to it and I enjoyed it. Unlike Art of Losing, this is a memoir and not a novel. Dixon enjoys cooking. He and his wife have their first child, Gracie, who is born four weeks premature. Dixon finds that his life is turned all topsy-turvy and he has to make adjustments from his pre-kid life (go figure).
I have to admit I was skeptical about liking this. As any parent can tell you, life changes dramatically when you add kids to the mix. I thought to myself, "Gee, Keith. Really? You don't have time and energy to do something you enjoy anymore because you have a kid? Welcome to the club". It had the potential to get worse. Dixon goes on to detail the first year of the life of his child and the changes he and his wife have to make.
If there's one thing I really can't stand, it's new parents. I may have been the same irritating way but I really hate the "Look what Junior is doing!" accolades and the "discovery" of parenting techniques practiced by gazillions of parents before them. Your kid isn't special and you aren't reinventing parenting. It's all been done before for thousands of years. So I really had my doubts. I figured in the end I'd be reading some good writing but rolling my eyes at the story itself.
I was wrong. Dixon didn't go too overboard. And Gracie is special in a way. There was some sort of genetic disorder involved that is pretty much fatal to the kid before it's born 99.9999% of the time. So Keith and his wife were fortunate.
And while I'm complaining about all these things I thought the book might be, it really wasn't. It's a strange book in that it is part cookbook. Almost every chapter, each which roughly covers a month of Gracie's life, ends with recipes that Dixon fixed for one reason or another. When Gracie initially had troubles after birth with eating, Dixon made some changes hoping to influence his wife's nutrition and in turn, Gracie's. When Gracie wasn't finding a sleep pattern, other changes were made and other things were cooked. As Gracie became more attached to Dixon's wife than to him, Dixon adjusted his attitudes. When Gracie got teeth, yet more changes.
So despite not being entirely positive about this book (I really doubt I would have even wanted to read it if not for Dixon's comment), I found myself enjoying it a lot. I fixed a couple of the recipes and enjoyed them. It would have been nice as a two-book set, one the memoir and the other the cookbook. If I had bought a copy instead of borrowing a library copy, I'd have a tough time figuring out where to house the book; the kitchen or the bookshelf.
Although it took me a long time to find something worthwhile, it was nice finally reading something this year that was a good story (with good writing to boot).
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
Yet another book trapped between ratings. The Leftovers was a captivating read. I knocked it out quickly because I didn't want to put it down.
The story takes place in a town where a rapture-like even has taken place. One afternoon, people all across the world just vanished. One moment they are there, the next they aren't. No explanations. No traces of evidence. Just gone.
The people who remain are left trying to determine the reasons why this happened and why some people were gone and others were not. There seems to be no rhyme or reason and naturally, religion is called into question. A local minister is furious that he was not "called" to be one of the vanished. One woman's entire family disappears. Husband, kids, but not her.
Cults form. There's the Guilty Remnant (who have a great website), a group that has taken a vow of silence and walks around witnessing sin. There's also a fellow who has discovered he can absorb people's emotional pain and has started the Healing Hug movement where people can come to him to have their pain removed.
The book focuses primarily on the mayor's family. The mayor's wife joins the G.R. and his son leaves college to run off to assist Mr. Healing Hug (he has a name, I just forget it) leaving the mayor alone to raise his teenaged daughter.
Time passes quickly in this book. The daughter sort of loses her own way, hanging out with the wrong crowd. Mr. Healing Hug impregnates a member of his legally underaged harem with the "chosen child" but when Mr. Healing Hug is put in jail, the mayor's son is left to care for the girl and then the child (who turns out to be a female and not the anointed male he is supposed to be). The G.R. has their own secret agenda. The mayor falls for the woman whose family vanished.
The book ends all tidied up. It has a happy, albeit forced, ending. Sort of. And while there's no real casting of stones, the book does seem to be a cynical commentary on organized religion.
Perrotta's style is captivating. Although the story seems to be about how people cope (which I don't particularly find fascinating) and the characters didn't interest me much, I couldn't put it down. I'm giving it one star for the writing even though the story itself didn't quite merit it.
The story takes place in a town where a rapture-like even has taken place. One afternoon, people all across the world just vanished. One moment they are there, the next they aren't. No explanations. No traces of evidence. Just gone.
The people who remain are left trying to determine the reasons why this happened and why some people were gone and others were not. There seems to be no rhyme or reason and naturally, religion is called into question. A local minister is furious that he was not "called" to be one of the vanished. One woman's entire family disappears. Husband, kids, but not her.
Cults form. There's the Guilty Remnant (who have a great website), a group that has taken a vow of silence and walks around witnessing sin. There's also a fellow who has discovered he can absorb people's emotional pain and has started the Healing Hug movement where people can come to him to have their pain removed.
The book focuses primarily on the mayor's family. The mayor's wife joins the G.R. and his son leaves college to run off to assist Mr. Healing Hug (he has a name, I just forget it) leaving the mayor alone to raise his teenaged daughter.
Time passes quickly in this book. The daughter sort of loses her own way, hanging out with the wrong crowd. Mr. Healing Hug impregnates a member of his legally underaged harem with the "chosen child" but when Mr. Healing Hug is put in jail, the mayor's son is left to care for the girl and then the child (who turns out to be a female and not the anointed male he is supposed to be). The G.R. has their own secret agenda. The mayor falls for the woman whose family vanished.
The book ends all tidied up. It has a happy, albeit forced, ending. Sort of. And while there's no real casting of stones, the book does seem to be a cynical commentary on organized religion.
Perrotta's style is captivating. Although the story seems to be about how people cope (which I don't particularly find fascinating) and the characters didn't interest me much, I couldn't put it down. I'm giving it one star for the writing even though the story itself didn't quite merit it.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Baseball Book Club #2 - Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert
For the next baseball book club book, we're going to go with Timothy Gay's Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert. Please leave a comment if you think you're going to read it. Probably shoot for an early April discussion.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery
I really enjoyed Muriel Barbery's book The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It started slow but thanks to a precocious kid as a main character, it ended up being a real pleasure to read. So when I saw Gourmet Rhapsody took place in the same building that Elegance was set in, I was really excited about the possibility of an entertaining sequel.
The book is about a food critic living in the building who is on his deathbed. The chapters alternate between him and (mostly) people he knows. In his chapters, he recalls meals he has had as he searches for something he craves but cannot quite place. In the other chapters, we find out more about what a jackass he is. That's assuming that you can't figure it out from the fact that the guy is on his deathbed and only cares about finding something to eat. The hell with the actual people in his life who care about him.
It turns out that he has pretty much always been that way. People don't matter to him. Food does. When the book concludes, he seems to have come to a bit of a realization about himself but by that point, I didn't really care.
I also didn't care for the style of the book. Despite every other chapter being told from the point of view of someone else in his life, they don't sound different at all. Everyone, male or female, young or old, has the same vocabulary and tone. Nitpicking?
When the guy's cat says, "I would instantly jump up onto my velvet paws and make a beeline for the hall and there, on the somewhat ochre kilim, between the coat rack and the marble console, I would wait obediently", you have to wonder. Most cats I know say things like "Meow". Most people I know don't know what the word kilim means (and Blogger thinks it is spelled wrong) and I'm to believe that this learned cat knows? Why isn't the cat performing heart surgery and saving his master for crying out loud?
All in all, I didn't like it. There were no character crossovers from Elegance of which I was aware which sort of made the whole point of keeping the setting the same a tad silly. No likable characters. A lack of discernible voices. Blah.
The book is about a food critic living in the building who is on his deathbed. The chapters alternate between him and (mostly) people he knows. In his chapters, he recalls meals he has had as he searches for something he craves but cannot quite place. In the other chapters, we find out more about what a jackass he is. That's assuming that you can't figure it out from the fact that the guy is on his deathbed and only cares about finding something to eat. The hell with the actual people in his life who care about him.
It turns out that he has pretty much always been that way. People don't matter to him. Food does. When the book concludes, he seems to have come to a bit of a realization about himself but by that point, I didn't really care.
I also didn't care for the style of the book. Despite every other chapter being told from the point of view of someone else in his life, they don't sound different at all. Everyone, male or female, young or old, has the same vocabulary and tone. Nitpicking?
When the guy's cat says, "I would instantly jump up onto my velvet paws and make a beeline for the hall and there, on the somewhat ochre kilim, between the coat rack and the marble console, I would wait obediently", you have to wonder. Most cats I know say things like "Meow". Most people I know don't know what the word kilim means (and Blogger thinks it is spelled wrong) and I'm to believe that this learned cat knows? Why isn't the cat performing heart surgery and saving his master for crying out loud?
All in all, I didn't like it. There were no character crossovers from Elegance of which I was aware which sort of made the whole point of keeping the setting the same a tad silly. No likable characters. A lack of discernible voices. Blah.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
This was the other book mentioned in the article in The Millions that I cited in my review of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. Crawford is an interesting fellow for a variety of reasons and I think I would have liked to have read more about his life than about his philosophies.
Crawford joined a commune at age nine and rather than go to school, he moved around to various abandoned hotels with the folks of the commune. Because he was small compared to the adults, he was recruited for fix-it projects where his diminutive size was an advantage, such as electrical wiring. He could squeeze into crawl spaces and such.
This was his first exposure to manual labor and despite going on and earning a doctorate in philosophy and working for a Washington, D.C. think tank, he missed working with his hands and left the think tank to start his own motorcycle repair shop.
Crawford waxes poetic on the pleasures of working with one's hands and feels that our move to an information society has caused there to be less of an appreciation of "blue-collar" labor. Shop classes have vanished in schools. He questions how we have pushed people to become educated to take "white-collar" jobs which often require little to no thought or creative energy to do the work. This was one of the reasons I moved out of statistics. People thought that since they had the software, they could push a button and get results, ignoring the actual skill involved in interpreting and understanding which I, as a statistician, brought. But that's neither here not there. I think Crawford is right that more and more work is done automatically and that the human element has been removed.
Crawford has claimed that the arguments he makes in the book are "nested" but it seemed more repetitive to me than anything. He does tend to philosophize too much and sometimes the book seems to be more of a defense of his choices than an actual demonstration that there is a problem with societal trends. Because of this, I struggled yet again in determining where in my rating system this book belonged. I'm going to go with zero starts but I could certainly be convinced otherwise. I think Crawford's tone could rub people the wrong way and it's one of those books that isn't something to just pick up and read. I think you have to want to read about the subject matter. If you do, though, I think it's pretty good. He has some good ideas.
Crawford joined a commune at age nine and rather than go to school, he moved around to various abandoned hotels with the folks of the commune. Because he was small compared to the adults, he was recruited for fix-it projects where his diminutive size was an advantage, such as electrical wiring. He could squeeze into crawl spaces and such.
This was his first exposure to manual labor and despite going on and earning a doctorate in philosophy and working for a Washington, D.C. think tank, he missed working with his hands and left the think tank to start his own motorcycle repair shop.
Crawford waxes poetic on the pleasures of working with one's hands and feels that our move to an information society has caused there to be less of an appreciation of "blue-collar" labor. Shop classes have vanished in schools. He questions how we have pushed people to become educated to take "white-collar" jobs which often require little to no thought or creative energy to do the work. This was one of the reasons I moved out of statistics. People thought that since they had the software, they could push a button and get results, ignoring the actual skill involved in interpreting and understanding which I, as a statistician, brought. But that's neither here not there. I think Crawford is right that more and more work is done automatically and that the human element has been removed.
Crawford has claimed that the arguments he makes in the book are "nested" but it seemed more repetitive to me than anything. He does tend to philosophize too much and sometimes the book seems to be more of a defense of his choices than an actual demonstration that there is a problem with societal trends. Because of this, I struggled yet again in determining where in my rating system this book belonged. I'm going to go with zero starts but I could certainly be convinced otherwise. I think Crawford's tone could rub people the wrong way and it's one of those books that isn't something to just pick up and read. I think you have to want to read about the subject matter. If you do, though, I think it's pretty good. He has some good ideas.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Wrapping up Catcher Was A Spy and the next baseball book club choice
If there's anyone else who wants to chime in with their thoughts on Catcher Was A Spy, please do so. Otherwise, I'm going to bring this one to an end and see if anyone is interested in another book. I think we had more readers than commentators judging from the post traffic.
I liked Mark's idea of doing Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert by Timothy Gay. I know Gay from SABR and he does nice work both researching and writing. He has also done a biography on Tris Speaker. I also think this would be a good choice in that we have some interesting characters in Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller. Lastly, I used this book to do research while I was at the Hall related to a question on Paige's barnstorming so I have a soft spot for it.
Other suggestions are welcomed as well but unless we get a couple "No way, forget it" comments, I'd like to make this the next book. You in?
I liked Mark's idea of doing Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert by Timothy Gay. I know Gay from SABR and he does nice work both researching and writing. He has also done a biography on Tris Speaker. I also think this would be a good choice in that we have some interesting characters in Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller. Lastly, I used this book to do research while I was at the Hall related to a question on Paige's barnstorming so I have a soft spot for it.
Other suggestions are welcomed as well but unless we get a couple "No way, forget it" comments, I'd like to make this the next book. You in?
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