My god of books

I believe in a god of books. This belief rests side by side with my devout atheism, illogical and yet true.

My god of books is a cranky god, with a heart in the right place. They are genderfluid--shifting their appearance between a woman and a man when they come to me. They are always wearing a soft, old favorite cardigan. They are old, hair graying, reading glasses perched on their nose, and eyes that also shift color--sometimes icy blue, sometimes a warm brown, sometimes an indeterminate hazel--depending on their mood and their opinion of me.

Yes, they have opinions of me. Sometimes they judge me harshly. Sometimes they see me with kindness. Sometimes they like to watch me squirm, not able to find anything to read that satisfies what I need from words. Then they will send me a generous burst and the books I most need to get through the day will arrive one after another after another. These are the blessings I receive from my god of books. This past year, it was Deacon King Kong, then Apeirogon, then The Night Watchman, and then Hamnet which arrived in a succession that felt like an intervention, to give my brain a reprieve from all the worry and fear that this world has thrown at us this year. I received them like a life preserver thrown to someone drowning. I can't imagine having functioned through those months without them. Some people read to understand themselves better. I do not. I read to escape myself because I think I understand myself a little too well. 

There are days when I would do anything to escape being me. And reading can do that--like a parasite I can latch onto someone else's thoughts and imagine the world looking out of someone else's bony eye sockets, such a relief after being trapped for most hours of most days looking out from my own. 

My god of books often does not care if I am uncomfortable. They withhold as often as they gift. I pick up and read the first chapters of one, two, three, four, five books and nothing takes. I put the book down and I am still me. I mutter incantations, I restlessly read book reviews, I keep my ear to the ground for recommendations--messages from my god of books--that I am supposed to follow. My husband has learned to recognize these times: I am squirrely and restless and prone to irritation. 

Sometimes re-reading a book will work. I don't know how I would have survived adolescence without my annual re-read of Steinbeck's East of Eden; I read it for the first time when I was about 12 and I am certain that it was a gift from my god of books, a time when they looked at my squirming, prickly, uncomfortable being and put the tome in my hands, saying, "Try this. I think this is the book you need." I wore out two copies of that book.

And sometimes re-reading doesn't cut it. This year I tried to escape into known good books and it rarely worked. The world was too cockeyed and I had the discordant sensation of sitting with my previous self and how I would have read the book before all the crises of the year rained down one after another. I was too envious of my previous self and thus, the known books could not whisk me away. Among those books that were pulled off the shelf with hope and then re-shelved were beautiful works like Hild by Nicola Griffith, Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff and The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies. I felt my god of books watching and tapping their foot. The books didn't fail me; I failed the books. 

Sometimes my god of books gives me permission to stop thinking big thoughts, to go relax into a comforting mystery like settling into a warm bath and just feel soothed for a while. Or, with a mischievous twinkle, they'll guide me to a book that makes me laugh out loud. Or send me on an escape to another planet to think about what it would be like to be an augmented human for a while. I am very grateful that my god of books is not a snob.

The latest evidence of this god's existence happened this morning. Yesterday evening I finished listening to the audio book of Ann Patchett's latest novel, The Dutch House, read by Tom Hanks. And then, this morning I found this amazing essay in Harper's written by Patchett about her link to Tom Hanks and what that link ended up gifting her in 2020. I cried when I read the essay, it's that beautiful. And there is simply no way to put down my discovery of the essay to chance: that was my god of books nudging a little something into my hands so I could start the year feeling the magic of existence again, refreshing and refilling my dried up supply of hope.

Dessert for breakfast and other things of joy in this absurdly stressful time

 

The world is a shit-show so let's all tear our eyes away from the news and latest catastrophe and share a few things that bring us joy. There should be a little something for most people who find their way to this blog. Please chime in in the comments if you have suggestions for things that are getting you through because I could use as much joy as I can drag over the threshold.

Culinary Joys

Fruit Desserts for Breakfast

Based on what I've been eating this month, it might be hard to believe that I don't really have a sweet tooth. I do, however, love the process of baking and I love summer desserts that are made from fruit whose season is fleeting. One of the benefits of having picky eater kids (yes, still...) is that there is usually left-over dessert that I can enjoy for breakfast. 

Lately, I've made these three recipes and they are all freaking fantastic as dessert but also can be enjoyed the next morning for breakfast:

Blueberry Cream Cheese Galette

(scroll down to the third recipe in the linked article)

The only change I made was to use my own single pie crust recipe and I put all the crushed blueberry mixture on the cream cheese to bake while the original recipe reserves half to have a mix of raw and cooked (why? I have no idea. The raw squished berries looked kind of gloppy and unappealing so I just tossed it all on the cream cheese layer.)

Texas Peach Cobbler

I used more peaches than the recipe called for, about 4 cups sliced, and I didn't peel them. I also served it with heavy cream rather than ice cream. Brown butter, peaches, cream, and absurdly easy.

Italian Lemon Almond Cake with Honey Lemon Peaches and Honey Whipped Cream

I followed this gluten-free recipe to a T and added my own spin by serving it with diced peaches that had 1/2 a lemon squeezed over them and a spoonful of honey stirred in and about a cup of heavy cream whipped up with another spoonful of honey.

(For those of you thinking, "Wait, this is the only recipe that's gluten free but not that long ago Kate said she was avoiding gluten," well, I have an update on that at the end of this post.)*

Visual Joys

I use Instagram differently from any other form of social media: it is where I curate my retreat from the world so there's a lot of joy there and not a lot of news. I follow recipe developers and knitting designers and people who post beautiful photos of far away places that allow me to dream of traveling again someday. Lately, I've been following lots of illustrators and two in particular have on-going projects that I look forward to and which bring me joy.

Watching a cephalopod poster come to life by artist Kelsey Oseid (@kelzuki)

Kelsey Oseid started a project last week to draw and paint 31 creatures from the order Cephalopoda (that's right! Octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, nautiluses!) to create one of her beautiful "Creatures of the Order" posters. It is simply magical to watch a sped up time-lapse video of a strawberry squid come to life. I already own a print of her Creatures of the Infraorder Cetacea (whales and dolphins) and am looking forward to purchasing a companion print when she completes this one. 

  

Transmundane Tuesdays prompts by artist Carson Ellis and the resulting submissions

Artist and illustrator Carson Ellis posts a prompt made up of 3 random phrases on a Tuesday and then people submit their creations. The results are absolutely stunning and create such a sense of shared humanity: there are professional artists who submit, there are little kids, there is everyone in between. I look forward to her curated display of the previous week's prompts and am contemplating becoming more than just an observer and trying my hand at it even though words, rather than visual art mediums, are more my thing. This week's prompts were: 1. has a long beard 2. has butterfly wings 3. wearing glasses. The prompts always surprise and send my mind down myriad paths that aren't our current reality. One of my past favorite weeks was 1. is a baby 2. is made out of mud 3. is wearing a helmet. You can follow her feed @carsonellis where she has stories featuring some of her favorites of the week's submissions, follow the hashtag #transmundanetuesdays where all the submissions for all of the weeks reside or follow a tag for each individual week: this week's #beardedandwingedinglasses has some absolutely stunning works in there (a papercut! an embroidery! one that is made, I kid you not, entirely from pressed flowers!)

Literary Joys

I've read a string of amazing books lately that have been balm to my soul in very different ways. If you are looking for some fiction to get you out of your present reality, maybe one of these will also appeal to you. I think all will make it onto my "best books of the year" list:

Deacon King Kong by James McBride
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Apeirogon by Colum McCann

My reviews are posted both on my Books Read in 2020 page and on my Goodreads account.

Fiber Joys

I'm knitting two sweaters right now that bring me great pleasure: not only are the patterns well-written, but the two yarns I'm using are so different and both so lovely.

First up is the Wave of Change Jacket by Denise Bayron that I'm knitting in a linen tape yarn called Kestrel. Linen isn't the easiest fiber to knit with because it has little to no stretch (I likened the last time I knit with linen to the sensation of knitting with dental floss...) but this tape yarn is way better: the construction means that there is a little bit of give to it and the pattern uses big enough needles that it won't be an endless project (I still have a linen t-shirt that I started 3 years ago and didn't finish--fine yarn, little needles and just really not enjoying the process. I'll finish it someday, but not someday soon!) The linen is cool in my hands on a hot day and has a lovely sheen.

Here is a picture of the stunning designer wearing her linen version (the pattern is also written for chunky wool and my friend Carol is making a version so I'll get to see my jacket's winter sibling!)

And I also just cast on to make this Bronwyn sweater:

I'm using different yarn than what is called for in the pattern, Kelbourne Woolens Germantown in the color Natural; it's less expensive than the yarn pictured above and has really lovely stitch definition that should make the cables pop! I'm thinking of this as practice since one of my kids requested that I make them a version of Chris Evans' Aran sweater from the film Knives Out (the link takes you to a New Yorker article that discusses said sweater. Yes, it is a phenomenon). I found this pattern which looks pretty damn close to the movie sweater. We'll see if I'm burned out on cables when I finish the Bronwyn sweater (this is a pattern that I'll need to pay close attention to so I don't criss when I should cross) or on fire and reluctant to stop!

Please share your joys in the comments. I'd love to know how other people are coaxing their brains out of daily panic mode!

__________

*The status of gluten.

So I started going gluten-free at the beginning of February and I felt better: less joint pain, less digestive upset. I kept it up for a good 4 months while the world went fucking nuts. And then I decided to see what would happen if I tried gluten again. I made a batch of our favorite pasta al limone (fantastic recipe) and had a big bowl. And I didn't notice any difference. I went a few days, then tried gluten again with a big slab of my dad's homemade bread (he's an amazing bread baker.) Again, no difference. Huh. So what was going on that I had felt better when I went GF? A bunch of things I think. Placebo effect most likely contributed: I had felt helpless in the face of pain and discomfort and felt better because I was doing something. That feeling was probably compounded during the helplessness of the initial COVID-19 shut down when everything felt out of control (not that everything is hunky dory now, but at least we have more information so I don't feel quite so afraid of everything.) I also made some substitutions while GF that were probably pretty healthy: eating more whole grain brown rice and cornmeal instead of items made from white flour probably helped out both in the digestive realm and in controlling inflammation. I also frankly had the time and energy to focus on getting good at GF baking and welcomed the distraction from endless worrying. I am glad that I learned a lot about GF cooking and particularly baking since it led me to invest in ingredients that I didn't usually have around and to learn how to make safe, delicious foods for my GF friends. Going forward there will probably be some featured GF recipes here, but not exclusively GF. 

Book Give Away: Round 2

Round two of the great shelf clean-off continues with two of my favorite categories, Contemporary Fiction and Fantasy/Speculative Fiction. This time I got kind of excited and put little annotations next to the titles below the photos because I have loved all these books at one time or another and don't really want to shut up about them even though I want the shelf space back. 

Locals, let me know if you want any of these and we'll work out how to get them to you. If a title has been crossed off, it has been claimed.

Contemporary Fiction
Top to bottom:
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley: a Scandanavian-style epic written in clean, clear prose; you can lose yourself in this world
Hard Laughter by Anne Lamott: I think this was Lamott's first novel, semi-autobiographical, definitely before she was sober/found Jesus
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson: possibly one of the most beautiful books I've read about a father
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields; a compelling story of one woman's life from 1905-the late 1980s with surprising lightness and bursts of humor
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich; the book where so many of Erdrich's recurring cast of amazing characters were introduced, on the North Dakota reservation where many of her books are set
Postcards by E. Annie Proulx; a sad but exquisite story of two brothers in New England
The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro; a collection by one of the best short-story writers, most set in Canada
The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor; a collection by one of the other best short-story writers, most set in Ireland or UK
The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter; a retelling of Midsummer Night's Dream set in Ann Arbor
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith; not fiction, but essays by the whip-smart novelist, and many of the essays are about fiction

Fantasy/Speculative Fiction
Top to bottom:
Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor: probably technically YA, fierce fairies and talking crows, together battling an invading evil darkness
Foundling by D.M. Cornish: Fantastic world-building, the first book in a series, the kind of book that has an 100+ page "explicarium" with a dictionary of terms, maps, and drawings which you either love or hate; I love that kind of stuff
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell: Mitchell's first book with linked narratives; if you liked Cloud Atlas, you will probably like this
Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell: a little more intimate (one character, rather than linked stories) but still weird in a beautiful Mitchell way
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell: a head-spinning plot, both witty and strange
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie: a fantasy novel by one of my favorite Science Fiction authors, excellent world building

Book Give Away: Round 1

With the libraries closed and plenty of people I know facing financial stress, I'm starting the book re-distribution project. Today we have some food-related books and YA fiction. All of these were good enough to take up residence on a shelf in my home for a period of time, but I don't plan to reread them.

Here's the deal: if you are local, let me know if you want a book or books, either in the comments or via the contact me in the right side bar. I will try to update this post with the books that have been claimed crossed off so you know what is still available. Anything no one wants will go into a bin to be delivered to the Friends of the AADL Bookshop once it is safe to donate again.

No, I won't mail these to you. I walk (a lot; don't assume you live too far away. I once decided to walk home to Evanston from the Art Institute of Chicago which is something like 13+ miles. It was a great walk) and can drop them off at your residence and then you should either set them somewhere for 3+ days or wipe them down with disinfectant. If you want a lot of books (fine with me, I want to liberate my space for more new books) then I'll find a time when I'm driving to run an errand and am in your vicinity and will drop them off. If I know you and am comfortable giving out my address to you, I can leave them on my porch for you to pick up.

And if you are feeling really guilty about getting books for free (don't. There's enough shit to feel bad about right now, free books should not be one of them) and have the means, please support one of our local bookstores by buying yourself a gift certificate to use at a later date. Here's the link to Literati and here's the link for Bookbound. See, you're giving yourself something to look forward to!

Food Related Books

From top to bottom:
The Michigan Gardner's Companion by Rita C. Henehan
The Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden by David Hirsch
Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads by Bernard Clayton, Jr.
Field of Greens by Annie Somerville
Put 'Em Up: A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook by Sherri Brooks Vinton
A Well-Seasoned Appetite by Molly O'Neill
Tasty: Get Great Food on the Table Every Day by Roy Finamore

YA Fiction:

From top to bottom:
Let it Snow (3 novellas) by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Paper Towns by John Green
Chime by Franny Billingsley
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Blood Red Road by Moira Young

A well-stocked request list helps me feel secure

I'm feeling a level of mental contentment that is due primarily to the state of my library request list. It is stocked with lots of juicy books that will keep me content at least until early December, maybe even longer for the books that have really long wait lists. My whole family should be breathing a sigh of relief because they know that I am a nicer person to be around when I have good reading material to soothe me. What with the oldest critter starting High School (and come to think of it, now that he's taller than me, I probably should come up with a term more apt to describe him than "critter."  Maybe "great galumphing creature"?) and all of us adapting to lots of new situations and schedules, I need all the soothing I can get.

Thankfully the publishing industry seems to have anticipated my need because there are lots of terrific sounding books that have just come out, many of which I have requested and one which I bought.

I bought and started David Mitchell's latest, The Bone Clocks (and oh my god it is already so good).  I know I'll want to re-read it, so I went ahead and bought it rather than patiently waiting for a library copy. I have even cleared a bit of shelf space for its future home next to Black Swan Green, Ghostwritten, Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas.

Here are some highlights of books that I'm looking forward to:

Tigerman by Nick Harkaway. I loved his book The Gone Away World.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Return to the world of Gilead? Yes please!

Some Luck by Jane Smiley. Sometimes I love Jane Smiley (The Greenlanders, A Thousand Acres) and sometimes not so much (Moo, Horse Heaven), but I always look forward to seeing what she's up to.

Lock In by John Scalzi. Time for some fun sci-fi to keep me from going into literary fiction overload.

Lucky Us by Amy Bloom. Her books don't always stick with me, but I do enjoy the process of reading them.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I've read/heard a few reviews of this book and it sounds fascinating--speculative and fantastical.

Sweetness #9 by Stephan Eirik Clark. I heard a Fresh Air interview of the author and the book sounds interesting.

Elephant Company by Vicki Croke. A little non-fiction history to keep me grounded.

Are there any new releases that you are eagerly anticipating? Send the titles my way and I'll add them to my (extensive) request list!

Books books books

It has been a while since I've written about books but that isn't because I haven't been reading anything worthy. I've just been lazy about putting my thoughts together. So without further ado, here are four books that I recently read and loved, for wildly different reasons.

 Hild by Nicola Griffith
This was a really gratifying read, though not an easy one. I had sticky notes marking maps of 7th C Britain, lineage charts, glossary and pronunciation guides. But I loved this story of Hild, the Angle king's seer. It may have helped that I felt a connection to the location--it's set in what is mostly present day Yorkshire--because my grandmother lived in a town called Ingleby greenhow (which translates to Angles by the Green Hill), so I could superimpose my memories of the landscape onto the text. What stood out for me in Griffith's writing was the incredible vividness of the natural world--plants, birds, animals, weather, rocks--it all was so detailed and rich in this book, particularly tastes, smells and sounds (which I think are much harder to capture via the written word than visual descriptions). Here's a sample:

"She walked in the evening through her domain, as aware of it as of her own body. The dragonflies and damselflies zooming over the water; the gush and rush and mineral bit of the millrace compared to the softer babble of the beck. The clatter of reeds by the pond scented with green secrets; the chatter of wrens and goldcrest flocks, squabbling with each other like rival gangs of children." p.482 

There are descriptions like this on pretty much every other page which made me slow down and read with all my senses. I'm looking forward to the next installment of Hild's life.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
This is an amazing first novel about the wars in Chechnya. It feels particularly relevant with the present Russian crap going on in Crimea--another place that I find hard to picture. But after reading this book, I have a far better understanding of what happened in a part of the world not far from today's conflict. 

The ending was perhaps a little bit tidy as far as tying the different story lines together, but the novel was forceful in its humanism and the author so clearly loved his characters that I found the decision to be understandable. 

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
This novel is a really interesting distopia (for grownups!) It takes present economic conditions (increasing disparity between haves and have nots) and extends them to their extremes. Then the author plops down an unshakeable every-woman character to experience all three economic models that are depicted. It's told in a compelling "group" voice using "we" as the main pronoun and makes the journey of the main-character into something mythic. I've read some reviews where people were bugged by this voice, but I was charmed by it. I've found myself thinking of this book as I read stories in the news about civil unrest, the environment and clashing political systems and wonder what the future will look like.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
Wow, what a voice! This novel blew me away (and that sentiment seems pretty universal since it won the National Book Award). The story and the language it is told in manages to be poetic and ribald and funny and poignant, all at the same time. Here's a little taste:

"The Old Man was a lunatic, but he was a good, kind lunatic, and he couldn't no more be a sane man in his transactions with his fellow white man than you and I can bark like a dog, for he didn't speak their language. He was a Bible man. A God man. Crazy as a bedbug. Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy. At least he knowed who he was." p.343

I had a hard time reading the last 75 or so pages because the sense of loss for the Old Man was so intense that I didn't want to experience it. But when I steeled myself and dove in, it was worth it--a beautiful, funny, sad goodbye to such a memorable character.  

I miss him

I finished reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch about a month ago and I've had the strangest response. I enjoyed the book immensely, but it isn't the pleasure of reading the book that I miss (well, a little because it was a wonderfully immersive read). I miss one of the characters: I miss Boris.

Boris isn't the main character (that would be Theo) and he isn't in the first big chunk of the book and disappears for a good long while later in the book.  He's first a school boy and soon becomes an Ukrainian mobster with a heart of gold--unethical in a traditional sense yet highly loyal and thus admirable in a completely different way.

I would probably be terrified of Boris if I ever saw him in person. I rarely choose to spend time with people who are simultaneously erratic, violent, drunk and stoned. But I want to see him walk around the corner because I miss how interesting he was.

I've read a few reviews that compare the book to Dickens, and there are a ton of similarities. I've read a lot of Dickens and enjoyed a lot of Dickens and I think it's pretty clear that Boris is modeled on the Artful Dodger. But I've never I've felt this sort of affection for a character in Dickens.

I found that after I finished the book, I missed Boris the way I miss Falstaff, particularly the Falstaff in Henry IV Part II (and by the way, Simon Russell Beale's portrayal of the role in The Hollow Crown production of the plays was amazing). He lies and cheats and steals and is selfish and excessive, but he loves Hal and for that the audience forgives him everything (Hal doesn't, but that's part of Hal's character's growth). Similarly Boris loves Theo--he's the one person who really sees who Theo is, even when Theo is clueless about himself. And for that the reader loves Boris even when he's embarking on what appears to be a completely disastrous tangent.

There were things about the book that drove me crazy--sometimes it seemed like it was trying too hard to be like Dickens. And (similar to Dickens) the younger women characters were not satisfying which surprised me, since Tartt's other two novels have fully-drawn, complex women characters. (Was their flatness an homage to Dickens' heroines? If so, I'd like to have told her she had plenty of Dickensian similarities already packed in almost 800 pages and could chuck the Victorian roles of angel and devil.) And there's one completely simple solution to Theo's predicament with the stolen painting that never appears and the willful dodging of it got me pissy at times (I'm not going to list it here because maybe you can read the book and not have it bugging you in the back of your mind.) I put this book down and stalked huffily away a few times, but I kept being drawn back, and Boris was a big part of that.

But even with all these issues, I can still say that this book gave me so much more. It made me want to go sit in an art museum again and spend time with a painting (I haven't been in a museum without kids in way too long). It made me want to tramp the streets of NYC. It made me want to go to Amsterdam again (even though the main character is completely miserable while there). But most of all it made me appreciate interesting people who may not be safe people.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Perfect book for the perfect place

While off on our canoe camping trip to Georgian Bay in July, I had the perfect book to read.  This has not always been the situation: I have problems in my hum drum daily life when I don't have a worthy book and, even worse, get very anxious about running out of reading material entirely while on a trip. In particular the memory of a camping trip to Isle Royale where I was an 8 hour boat ride away from the main land and any reading material replenishment opportunities haunts me. I read and re-read everything I had with me, including an insipid children's book that I brought for my kids.  When I don't have a story to occupy my mind, even when I'm not actively reading, it's like I can't track where I'm going, like I'm out of balance and even things that have nothing to do with reading are harder to do without the undercurrent of an in-progress story to keep some part of my mind going.

One move I made was to buy a Nook. I'm a big fan of paper and don't really enjoy the feel of reading on the screen, but I do like the security of having a whole lot of books at my fingertips when I am away from home (and all my New Yorker issues are uploaded to it automatically so even after I've recycled them or passed them on to my dad, I still have access!) I went for a basic black and white screen, not one of the color ereaders because battery longevity is a primary concern for me. When you are camping out on an island, hours away from the nearest electrical source, you want that battery to last as long as possible.

I am not the ideal ebook customer because I am a tightwad and what with how much I read, if I had to purchase each book I'd be broke. I am a BIG library supporter so the other clincher in the decision to buy an ereader was that the library now has a way for you to borrow ebooks. The website is tedious to navigate and their classification of lots of trashy romance under "literature" makes searching for titles an exercise in practicing calming breaths, but there are some decent titles buried in there that are available to borrow for 2 or 3 week periods of time, including some books that my kids want to read. My daughter has inherited my book-dependence and gets pretty crabby if she doesn't have something good to read so this ensures a basic level of happiness for her on camping trips, too. The only problem comes when we both want to use the Nook at the same time.

I did make an exception to my tightwad principles to buy the ebook version of Neil Gaiman's latest book The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Barnes and Noble had a special which made it half off, which helped with the decision, but the book was so good that paying full price for it would be fine.  I'm not a rabid Gaiman fan--I didn't really like American Gods and I'm not a big fan of the Sandman graphic novels that brought him a lot of his early fame and while plenty of people love the tv show Dr Who and his contributions to it, it just hasn't clicked for me. I enjoyed his novel Neverwhere, but it didn't capture me as much as his last two books. It may have something to do with the age of the main character's in both Ocean  and The Graveyard Book. The perspective of a child is a natural fit for books where the prose is elegantly simple while the story is fantastical. I love this combination. Florid prose would detract from the story content and but the "clean" style that Gaiman uses in these stories makes wacky ideas (like a vampire guardian for Nob, or a hole in a boy's foot serving as a doorway to another world) seem completely plausible and even natural. There's a bare minimum of "explaining" any of these things--they just are. And that lends the stories a sense of wistfulness and it feels as though I am remembering something like this from my past, a time when reality was less solid and the world contained more possibilities.

This was the book that I had when we were out on Big McCoy island, a 6 hour paddle from the mainland, a quiet and beautiful place where this book was the perfect companion. I read it once and then, despite all the archived copies of the New Yorker available to me, I went back and read it again. It's magical when book and place line up so well and I'm pretty sure that when I think back on this camping trip, among the islands and water and swimming, I'll remember this story, too.

books books books books

It's getting close to the time of year when I start to think about gifting books so I was perusing my 2011 books read list and trying to decide which were the clear winners.  I came up with 6 total.

For YA readers (particularly girls because the main characters are so terrific) and adults who like YA:
Plain Kate by Erin Bow
Chime by Franny Billingsley
Blood Red Road by Moira Young

For adult readers (who won't/don't read YA):
Percival's Planet by Michael Beyers
A State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Some of these are no surprise. A State of Wonder is already showing up on lots of people's/publications' best of lists and Chime was nominated for the National Book Award.

Any clear winners on your lists? I'm always on the look-out for the next wonderful book.

December catch up

Just a little update for those who still check in here. As you may have noticed, blog posts have been scarce of late. I blame that on the 1600+ words I've been churning out for the 1st draft of the novel. By the end of my fiction writing I'm so sick of sitting still (and my wrists hurt) that even if I have an idea for a blog post, I'm too wiped to write it. So here are a few miscellaneous things that I've been meaning to post:

I finished NaNoWriMo! Unfortunately 50,000 words only took me to just past the half-way point in my novel so I'm trying to keep up the momentum. December is harder than November as far as making the time to write. I'm giving myself a break and not expecting any writing on the weekends--it's just too crazy.  But I've managed to add a little more than 15,000 words since the end of NaNoWriMo. I'm approaching the end of part 3 (of 4) so that feels good, though I'm thinking I probably won't be able to finish the draft before the New Year. The kids get out of school next week and finding time to write will become even more challenging.  

Gift/book wise: I'm giving a few family members The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. Somehow I neglected to blog about it here but it was probably my favorite read of the year.

I have a hard time staying hydrated in the winter because drinking cold water when it's freezing flipping cold outside is something that I have to force myself to do. So lately I've been making an effort to make and consume the following two hot, non-caffeinated beverages. The first I call
Winter Comfort:  Make a half a mug of strong peppermint tea--let it steep for about 10 minutes. Then glug in vanilla soy milk to the top of the mug and nuke until the whole thing is warm. I know, it sounds kind of disgusting, but I really love it.

The second is Cheaper than Sweetwaters' Lemon-Ginger Tea: Put about 5-6 cups of water in a pot. Take a piece of ginger root, about 2 inches long, and slice crosswise into 1/4 inch pieces (no need to peel it). Chuck the pieces in the pot. Dump about 1 T of powdered ginger in there too (more if you really love the ginger burn). Then bring to a boil, cover and simmer for a few hours. Stir in the juice of 2 lemons that you squeezed and about 1/2 cup of honey or sugar and stir until dissolved. Taste and adjust for your own sweet/sour preference. You can strain out the chunks of ginger and keep this in a jar in the fridge for a while. Then give it a shake (the powdered ginger settles to the bottom), pour in a mug and nuke until hot. It's also very nice to settle a tummy that may have overindulged in holiday treats.

The friend that gets you through it

I don't want to return this book to the library. It would be like dumping a friend after they got you through a rough patch. And oh my, have I been through a rough patch. A big old comeuppance.

For those of you who have tolerated my comments these past few winters about how healthy my family has been (despite my kvetching about my kids' crappy diet), today is the day you can sit back and say HA! Because the nasty, nasty norovirus hit us and hit us hard. And that is not a virus that you expose your friends to unless those friends are made of paper. But if your friend is The Art Student's War, by Brad Leithauser, then maybe you will get through without losing your marbles (while you continue to lose your lunch).

I won't go into the fascinating details of all the puking and mopping and digestive discoveries we have made over the last few weeks (except for this one--it is way better to puke up ginger ale than to have the dry heaves. Nuff said.) But I feel like I've been through the wringer and without this book I'm pretty sure I would have also gone crazy. Or more accurately, crazy in a lasting, she-might-not-be-ok-until-Spring kind of way.

This is a wonderful book (though I realize I've now wrecked it by making you associate it with puking...) that managed to distract me from my misery. It is NOT a fast read which is particularly good when you are not recovering quickly. The prose isn't impenetrable, but it is rich and layered and you want to savor the observations. It doesn't have a driving sense of plot--it is gentler than that and will wait patiently while you collapse and moan for a while.

The title seemed very accurate for the first part of the book, where we are following Bea Paradiso from her art classes in Detroit to her USO volunteer work sketching wounded soldiers. Her artist's eye is a wonderful perspective from which to view the strange vibrancy of Detroit in this period. When I moved into the second half of the book which takes place after the war, where Bea is married with kids and rarely has time to do any art, it wasn't immediately clear why the author had chosen the title. But it made sense in the end. The war defined who she was for her whole life--it wasn't just an episode that took place and then was in the past. The fact that she was an art student during this momentous period in which she defined herself and became aware of who she was gave the title a poignancy. She may never have become a full-fledged artist, but she will always have been an art student during the war.

I think this book would have a whole other level of richness and meaning for people whose parents lived in Detroit in this period. By the time my family moved to Michigan when I was 7, Detroit was post-riot and not a place we went except to scurry inside the DIA or some such cultural institution and then scurry back to our safe little enclave. I occasionally got a glimpse of people's affection for the city through some friend's parents who knew the old Detroit. I remember being taken to Eastern Market for the first time on a Saturday by a friend's family and being awed that such a teeming, alive place with amazing food (yes, I liked food a lot even back then) existed in a place I had heard referred to as a wasteland on weekends. I particularly appreciated the fact that the author, who clearly loves the city, does not overly romanticize it. He lays down the sources of the later riots, shows the bubbling ethnic mixture of the city and how the war both led to prosperity and excitement and also set down certain patterns that were later to explode.

For those of us interested in Detroit's future who weren't around for Detroit's past, this book is a very helpful way to envision the uniqueness that Detroit offered--it really wasn't like any other city I've ever heard of or envisioned--and to try and see how the best of this past can fit into its future.

And now, since I still have a cough and thus can allow myself to sit for another couple of hours, I'm going to go watch the new PBS documentary Beyond the Motor City.

Links and lists

I'm too low-January-energy to write a proper blog post so a link-heavy, list-type post will have to do.

Books you should read:

• Best book I forgot to blog about last year: The Gone Away War by Nick Harkaway. This is one of those books that I feel inadequate to comment on because it is so brilliant (sort of like my author hero worship where I approach a much admired author and stutter like an idiot.)
  
• Most quirky-fun book of poetry I've read in a long while: Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler. The people around me had to put up with me reading this out loud to them.
  
• Amazing historical fiction I just finished: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It has been a long time since I read such a compelling and elegantly written piece of historical fiction.  (And it is particularly good if you are a late-medieval/early-Renaissance English history buff. This made me want to see the whole series of Shakespeare's war of the roses plays again.)
  

Food you should eat, especially if you are doing a healthier-food resolution:

• This cauliflower cous cous combo. I substituted shaved Parmesan for the manchego and topped it with a healthy squeeze of lemon juice (which I think it needs). Serve with a spinach salad.
• Fish in a packet--take a piece of tin foil, spread a little left-over brown rice on it, slap on a piece of tilapia. Salt and pepper it. Top with abundant quantity of: scallions, chopped dill, sliced red peppers, halved cherry tomatoes, spinach and feta. Drizzle with good olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Seal up packet and bake at 400 for 20 minutes. Slide onto plate.  Super fast and super good.
• My friend Emily's curried bean thread noodle bowl which I will post about soon since it deserves a recipe write up.

Shaun Tan

The NY Times has their special Children's Books section in the book review today! And one of the books they review is a book I love: Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan. I just searched my blog and realized that I never mentioned it when I read it (a serious memory lapse on my part). Personally, I wouldn't classify it as a children's book, though my girl critter did like it a lot (her favorite story was "Eric" about a wee creature who comes to a family as their foreign exchange student--it is full of whimsy and light).

My favorite story in Tales is called "Grandpa's Story." I'd love to get it in stand-alone booklet form to give to people on their wedding day or anniversary: in it a pair of newlyweds embark on a surreal journey that best exemplifies the potential challenges and joys of the marriage endeavor. It is sweet and sad and hopeful and beautiful all at once.

I think of Tales as illustrated stories for everyone. Tan's previous book, The Arrival was a wordless moving meditation on immigration and cultural adaptation. Sure, kids who can't read could understand it, but that doesn't mean that it was intended for the pre-literate. In Tan's work images are just as communicative as words, and carry a poignancy and impress the mind in a distinct and powerful way. (I have always been biased towards words; my sister is very visually inclined). I find Tales particularly lovely because it contains both!

Faceted

I recently finished a book that does something quite remarkable: it presents all the sides of a conflict so evenly that as soon as you have sympathized and supported one side of the conflict, the author makes you see and understand it from the polar opposite perspective.

Paulette Jiles' The Color of Lightning begins with a scene of remarkable violence: a Comanche and Kiowa raid on a northern Texas frontier settlement, the murder of some, the torture of others, the brutal rape of two of the women and their capture along with four of their surviving children. If you told me that 100 pages later I would feel heartbroken when one of the captive children who has been adopted by the tribe has to leave the Kiowa to return to his family I'd have thought you were off your rocker. But that's what happened.

Jiles has written an historical novel that does not flinch at the complexities of history: she shows the flaws and the virtues of three disparate cultures that collided with tragic results. There is the story of Britt Johnson,* a freed slave, and his wife and children who are negotiating the freedom of the Texas frontier while tiptoeing around some very angry white people who are pissed about losing the Civil War. There is the story of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker from Philadelphia, who is sent as an Indian Agent to some of the most war-like and violent tribes, to preach peace and convert them to Christianity and an agrarian lifestyle (unsuccessfully in both cases). And there is the story of the Comanche and Kiowa whose traditions and way of life are disappearing and who react with both extreme violence toward the settlers, and extreme tenderness toward the captive children they adopt. Most vivid is the portrait of a particular warrior, Tissoyo, whose love of gossip and befriending of Britt make him a complicated bridge between two of the worlds.

Using Samuel and his friend the illustrator James Deaver as her mouthpiece, whose biblical morals (in the case of the former), and liberal cultural appreciation (in the case of the latter), make them echo the contemporary questions that were popping into my head as I read, the author probes the clash of the cultures: at one point Deaver remarks to Samuel that "Americans are uncomfortable with tragedy." Near the end Samuel, who finally sees the futility of his position, violates his principals of non-violence, and says to Deaver, "And here [tragedy] is. We are regarding it. Like an audience." Shortly after this statement, he leaves the territory and the role he has played forever. In a way, he is less like a member of an audience, and more like a character who walked off the stage when it is clear that things will turn out very badly (something that I've always secretly hoped Edgar might do in King Lear...)

I thought that one of the most memorable and heartbreaking moments in the book (and there are many) was watching Jube, Britt's son who was captured and adopted by the Kiowa, decide to return to his family. His loyalty to his parents, particularly seeing the sacrifices his mother made to keep him and his sister Cherry alive, motivate his actions. But he is ripped up inside because on an individual level, staying with the Kiowa would have been much better for him as a black man. For his own sake I wished he could live in a place where he could grow into an equal member of the community. His longing for the freedom and the self-esteem that he left behind is a difficult compromise to watch.

And on the other side, I loved Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a white captive woman who dubs one of the wives of the man who captured her "the Dismal Bitch." She is so terrifically foul tempered (with good reason since she is a slave and treated brutally, not adopted like the young captives) that she eventually causes the Dismal Bitch to commit suicide. After this, the Comanche are convinced that she is a witch and eventually when Brit arrives to ransom the captives, they pay him to take her back. Moments of levity like this help keep the book from sinking into a morass of historical misery.

The book kept me emotionally charged by my feelings for all the different characters and their cultures. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention all the physical beauty in the book: the way the mountains rise out of the plains, the horses that gallop in giant wild herds, the quick on-set storms rushing towards a settlement, the view of a buffalo calf tottering near its mother. The author's gorgeous prose makes this a tragedy that is drenched in beauty. Jiles facility with language makes the landscape sounds so exquisite that I understood why people loved it so fiercely and fought so hard to claim it for their people.

________
*I only discovered in the author's end-note that Britt Johnson was a real person and many of the events that she depicted were based on historical records.

Internal voices

I can't remember the last book I read that relied so heavily on internal voices. John Pipkin has written a remarkable book, Woodsburner, that not only takes on a fascinating little blip of history (the day that Thoreau accidentally set fire to the Concord woods) but that does it through the thoughts of a kaleidoscopic collection of characters. There is very little dialog in the book--it mostly occurs only as the characters remember the past.

All the characters are suffering from some level of crisis whether it be spiritual, ethical, or emotional. Eliot is the excruciatingly bad want-to-be playwright--a man who desperately wants to be perceived as artistic and literary, but who can't appreciate what he has and does well. There is Caleb, a self-righteous guilt-riddled, hellfire-spouting and opium-addicted preacher. Oddmund is probably the most sympathetic character, a humble almost to the point of invisibility immigrant who silently loves his employer's wife. Emma, the rotund recipient of Oddmund's adoration, is a barely literate lover of books. There are a pair of strange old women, Anezka and Zalenka, who bring a touch of magical realism to the proceedings. And of course there is the star of the show: Thoreau.

Because you are inside the character's heads, there isn't much back story--there's no external narrator who brings you up to speed. This results in some really lovely reveals: the characters' pasts come out unexpectedly. There are delicate inferences which help move the book along, crucial for the pacing since without it, the internal nature of the book might get claustrophobic and leaden.

The fire serves as the catalyst and the crisis for each of the characters. It motivates their thoughts and propels their actions. The ending is beautiful and liberating: all the characters have had their trial-by-fire and all come out the other side transformed, liberated, and changed though in very different ways.

I thought the author did particularly well with Thoreau's voice. We follow Thoreau's mind through complicated shifts from desperate panic trying to stop the fire, to justifications and excuses that he comes up with to shift the blame for the fire off of himself, to the exhilarating pleasure that he takes in the force and intensity of nature. It has been a long time since I read Walden but I remember a bit of these shifts--methodical accounting, lyrical enjoyment of nature and underneath, some justification sneaking in ("I didn't ask my neighbors to feed me a nice dinner so I don't really have to incorporate it into my narrative of simplicity and living off the land"). Pipkin doesn't come right out and say "the fire led to Walden" but he makes his opinion about the cause and effect nature of the actions clear and well reasoned. It seems almost duplicitous that people teach Walden without this piece of authorial context.

About half-way through, I did think I'd need to start a drinking game where I did a shot every time Oddmund sucked on his tiny dead tooth. That repetition started to drive me a bit batty and I think about half of the instances where the phrase was used could be cut. But that's a tiny quibble with a really remarkable book.

Exquisite

I think that writing about poetry is hard because my prose feels so clumsy, so heavy and earth-bound, after reading poetry. But I'll have to give it a go.

Exquisite: that's the word that comes to mind when I think of the book I finished recently, Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica.* I tried to cobble together my own summary of the book, but let's face it, The New Yorker already crafted a fine summary:

Dove’s verse sequence re-creates the life of the biracial violinist George Bridgetower, best remembered for being the first performer, and the initial dedicatee, of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. ....The book remains highly accessible, reading much like a historical novel. Dove is fascinated by Bridgetower’s life as a black musician...[but] she is concerned equally with the status of musicians in a world of precarious patronage—even Haydn, at the Esterhazy estate, has “no more leave / to step outside the gates / than a prize egg-laying hen”—and with “the radiant web” of music itself.

Dove's book reminds me of another of my other favorite books of all time (still a part of my top ten list!), Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Both use poetry rather than prose as a means of creating a portrait of a historical figure. The shifting gaze and varied rhythms of the poems makes the portraits more vivid to me than a linear prose biography or novelization. The lives of interesting people are messy and don't always make sense and a series of poems is the perfect medium with which to express this. This is particularly true in the case of Dove's subject about whom the historical record is fragmented at best. While I understand the value of communicating facts in clear narrative prose, these two books make you feel the history rather than just intellectualize it.

Both books are painfully beautiful--I found myself forgetting to breathe while reading some of Dove's poems and only realized that I'd been holding my breath at the end of the poem when I had to gulp for air. Dove's book keeps from putting the reader into lyrical overload by also being funny and playful, sarcastic and sad. She creates such a kaleidoscopic portrait of George Bridgetower that, like Ondaatje's Billy, I find him haunting my thoughts. Of course there are poems about race and I noticed that the book was shelved in the Black Studies section of the library. I would also like the library to buy three more copies and to file them in the poetry, biography and fiction sections. The themes of the book are so layered that it defies simple categorization: it's about relationships, about why people compose and why people play music, the tensions of patronage and fickleness of society. It is about admiration and jealousy, grandeur and pettiness.

To get the most out of this book I would recommend two courses of action. First, get some music. The playlist should include plenty of the two composers who are featured in the book: Haydn (that's "Papa" Haydn to George) and Beethoven, particularly the Violin Sonata No.9 in A Major, Opus 47. But it also might be good to add in a little Bach, Mozart and Handel. I found listening to them helped me appreciate how radical Beethoven must have sounded to his contemporaries. Second, read the chronology located at the back of the book. This will set out the time line and help to clarify the voices of some of the minor characters--people who witnessed Bridgetower or Beethoven. Their poems provide refreshing perspective on the main characters but could be confusing if you can't place the voice.

Of course, the most intense poems were the ones where Bridgetower contemplates Beethoven and vice versa because they lay bare the particular intimacy between the musician and the composer. Here is Bridgetower commenting on Beethoven as he sight reads the Violin Sonata No.9:

He frightens me. I've never heard music
like this man's, this sobbing
in the midst of triumphal chords,
such ambrosial anguish,
jigs danced on simmering coals.
Oh, I can play it well enough--hell,
I've been destined to travel these impossible
switchbacks, but it's as if I'm skating
on his heart, blood tracks
looping everywhere, incarnadine
dips and curves...

Beethoven's view of Bridgetower is also shot through with the anguish he feels at going deaf. His experience of watching Bridgetower play his compositions almost transcends sound itself:

I was careless then, I squandered the world's utterance.
And when my muddy conspirator swayed and quaked
like the tallest poplar tossed by the lightest wind

so that I could read his playing, see my score
transcribed on the air, on the breeze--I breathed
his soul through my own fingers and gave up

trying to listen; I watched him and felt
the music--it was better than listening,
it was the last pure sound...

At the end of Dove's interview with Diane Rehm, she mentioned hoping to record an audio version of the book. The only thing I would like more than re-reading this book, is listening to Dove read the poems to me.
_________________
*I heard Dove on the Diane Rehm Show (you can hear the interview here) and immediately requested the book from the library.

Humanist fiction

I realize that humanism is viewed as passe, particularly in any sort of scholarly company. I swallowed enough of the post-structuralist, Foucauldian cool-aid in grad school to know that there are plenty of people who think that humanism is a dirty word when referring to serious literature. Maybe that's why I left grad school! And this is probably also the reason that I enjoy YA fiction which seems to hope for people to treat each other decently more often than its "adult" counterparts.

I admit that I often do enjoy fiction that isn't written from the humanist perspective; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is one book that comes to mind. But sometimes one just needs a break from irony and anger and narratives that want to mess with your head. In short, sometimes I need to read fiction that is heartily humanist in its perspective.

I'm not sure what took me so long, but I finally got around to reading Anne Patchett's Run. I enjoyed Bel Canto which, despite the subject matter of hostages, terrorism and third world politics, is a startlingly humanist book. People who thought they had nothing in common turned out to find commonalities and connections, to respect and value each other despite their differences. Humanist doesn't mean happy-clappy--there's tragedy and pain, but the underlying sentiment is one that does not invoke despair, at least not in my cynical brain.

Run has a similar feel to it. The book has important things to say about family and love and it never makes them feel simple. If anything, love is treated as a complex and confusing force: respected, longed for, and at times scarily beautiful. I know that there were unbelievable bits: the girl, Kenya, is a bit too good to be true and the events (with the exception of one plot twist that I didn't see coming) are a little predictable. It was clear that Patchett was echoing (and at one time, directly quoting) James Joyce's "The Dead", (which I confess is his one work that has really moved me and made me understand the fuss) and maybe there were a few too many similarities for my taste. But these were really minor issues that didn't hamper my enjoyment.

Technically, the book fascinated me by the author's ability to shift the point of view without any apparent awkwardness or confusion. On one page I counted 8 shifts in point of view! It was lovely to get to hear all these voices, to have a scene rendered kaleidoscopically. I also appreciated the author's judicious use of lyrical language--she doesn't douse the whole book in it, but reserves it for emphasis so that when it is used to describe the beauty of a dead fish floating in a jar, or to describe a girl running, or to render the hallucinations of critical illness, the significance of these moments reaches the readers.

The YA flood continues

The good YA reads just keep coming and coming! In the past few weeks I have been lucky to read two new YA books, both of which focus on distopian futures. Each has a strong main character who is shown struggling to conform to oppressive regimes and ultimately resisting them. If you like happy versions of the future, these might not be for you. But if you get inspired by the resilience of people who are faced with way worse situations than you have ever found yourself in, then you might want to pick up these two.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness grabbed me at the first page and didn't let go. Actually, it grabbed me at the first sentence: "The first thing you find out when your dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say." Of course, if you don't like excitable talking dogs, perhaps you won't be charmed as quickly as I was.

I don't want to summarize the book, because the world is revealed as the main character, Todd, learns what is real and what is propaganda and much of the narrative momentum comes through his perceptions with all of the limitations. His voice is distinct and grouchy and confused and beautiful. And then there is Noise. I don't want to wreck it for you, but I have to say that the author's rendering of Noise was fantastic.

This is a "chase" book and the pace is appropriately breathless. So it combines distopia/thriller with a poignant story about a boy coming of age. In plenty of hands this combo would be a royal mess, but Ness pulls it off.

The only negative comment I have is something that wasn't exactly unexpected. The subtitle of the book is "Chaos Walking: Book One" so from the get go I knew that the story wouldn't end at the end of the book. But did it have to be quite so cliff-hanger-y? I promise, I wanted to read book two even without the anxiety producing ending.


I wasn't the biggest fan of Allegra Goodman's most recent grown-up novel, Intuition, but I did really like two of her other novels: The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls. The Other Side of the Island is her first YA novel and it imagines the world after global warming has raised the sea level to such an extent that the only habitable land consists of former mountain tops, now islands. A repressive regime controls most of the islands and sees anyone who does not subscribe to their goals to enclose the islands under domes and submit to an extreme regulation of life as a threat. The main character's parents are non-conformists and one of the more compelling strands of the novel involves her conflicting feelings towards them and her understandable desire for the easy answer to be the right answer (which, of course, it rarely is).

It's a good read, not a book with the depth and intensity of Knife, but I enjoyed it and think that it would make a pre-teen/teen think a whole lot about conformity, the price that is paid for fitting in, and the meanings that lie under patriotic slogans.

Favorite things of 2008

Time for a little looking back at my obsessions in 2008 before launching into 2009.

Books
In the books-intended-for- grown-ups department:
1. My favorite book of the year is one that I just finished last week: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link. I give this book credit for keeping me in a good mood while the kids were out of school. (Well, at least in a better mood than I would have been without the book...can't be cheerful all the damn time.) Link's stories are strange and ominous and surreal. But this collection also had a touch of whimsy and optimism that I don't remember in her other collections, and which I appreciated very much. I loved "The Wizards of Perfil," "The Surfer," and "The Constable of Abal," particularly the last story which has permeated my dreams. Even better was the fact that each story began with a drawing by the immensely talented Shaun Tan (I love his book The Arrival). Putting Tan and Link together is a perfect match and I commend whatever editor or publisher had the vision. I have the book sitting here, ready to go back to the library, but I really don't want to let it go. I don't feel that kind of greediness very often.

2. Runner up: Monsters of Templeton (yes, another book with Monsters in the title...)

In the intended-for-children department:
The revelation of the year was the audio version of Tale of Desperaux. I'd read the book before, and enjoyed it, but the audio version is a whole different level of wonderful. It has become a part of our family lingo with lines like "Whoopsie" and "Cripes" resonating through our speech on a daily basis. In fact, we even named our new car "Whoopsie" (an explanation of the name will be in an upcoming post). And you couldn't pay me to go to the movie--every clip I've seen has rendered the story "cute" which is the opposite of the book.

Crafting
I didn't make a whole lot of progress on the knitting front in 2008, just a baby sweater and a lacy scarf. That's not too impressive. It does look like I will finish the Urban Aran before it is 90 degrees out though. So my two favorite crafting things from the past year were sewing related which is a bit of a surprise since I'm not a natural with a needle.

1. My most satisfying project were these super simple little bags which I use to hold my MP3 player and digital camera:

I made the first one following (loosely) the plans in Bend-the-Rules Sewing, and made the second one even more basic with fewer seams (and it is just as functional for something this small). They keep the crap off my electronics when they are bumping around in my purse next to my wallet and the bag of dried apricots I always carry for blood-sugar-level crises.

2. Runner up was pimping the dragon which made me feel like a competent parent for a change.

Recipes/Food
1. The recipe that I tried for the first time in the past year and will probably make more often than any other in the coming year is tahini lemon sauce. I have pretty consistently kept a container of this in the fridge at all times and it has provided countless "relief" meals when I haven't had a clue what to make for dinner. I dig through the fridge, find the tahini lemon sauce and then am able to improvise something pretty tasty and low effort: dollop it on roasted vegetables, toss it with some sauteed chicken, thin it with a little extra lemon and water and use as a salad dressing. Really useful stuff to have around.

2. Runner up: lamb/yogurt pasta stuff. This isn't the easiest recipe, nor the most challenging, but it has a flavor profile that I seem to crave often.

In the food someone-else-cooked-for-me department:
1. I am so happy to have a friend who makes the effort and invites us over to consume his wonderful smork.
2. Runner up: the three Lady Food Blogger events I've been to have made me feel nourished by my community (and by the terrific and widely varied cooking passions of the members).

Writing
1. My longhand editing project was my favorite writing experience of the year. It was particularly comforting to me since I had a year of rocky computer experiences (at this time, my computer is the only one in the house that is working so while the computer gods still are not smiling on our house, at least they've decided to spread the pain around among our family members.)

2. I don't really have a runner up in this obsession, except for the fact that I'm still having fun writing my novel.

Now onward to 2009!