Pairing Beer and Books

Michelle Kerns, of Examiner.com is one of my favorite book reviewers, because she's fun to read. Her periodic roundups of book reviewer cliches help keep me honest. Or at least, remind me to cringe at myself when I do use the word "riveting" or "engrossing."

One of my favorite features of her reviews is that she ends each with a recommendation of what to drink while reading a book.  Here's her review of The Chimera Seed.

After dinner, I decided to linger over the last of my beer, and my book. I am drinking a Weyerbacher Simcoe IPA. Although the beer tastes great with just about any food I can imagine...it's a total misfire for the book.

I'm reading The Black Sheep, by Georgette Heyer, and it feels very, very weird to be sipping my beer as I read about drawing rooms and morning dresses and waistcoats and gentlemen who are "of the very first stare." I should be drinking port (it's too hot for port!), or sherry (ick!) or a nice claret. It's almost  making my beer taste funny.

Almost.

I think this beer would go better with a good detective novel.

Oh well, live and learn.

Cult Classics?

My review stash for the Star-Ledger includes two books devoted to cult classics. 500 Cult Classic Books, and 500 Cult Classic films.

As I prepare to dig in, I'm wondering:

• What makes a cult classic?


• Are there any books or movies in there that I already know and love? My tastes skew towards the not-scary, and my sense of "cult classic" is that it's often a synonym for "freaky and disturbing."


• How much overlap is there going to be between the two lists? I'm betting that A Clockwork Orange makes both lists, for example.

Any guesses as to what books and movies would make the list?

The Happiness Project made me happy.

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Gretchen Rubin
HarperCollins 2010 $25.99 301 pages

For a year, Gretchen Rubin sets out to find happiness. She writes with such honesty and candor about her struggles and triumphs. She researches it extensively, and across disciplines- psychology, sociology, history.  Using what she learned, she sets up a year of projects, themed across the months.

It makes sense that January begins with get more energy. After all, it's the big gym-joining month. What impressed me, though, was that she folded de-cluttering into her intention for more energy. And, after working her way through keeping and tossing unneeded clothes, she discovered she really liked de-cluttering closets. (Oh Gretchen, you can come organize my closet any time you want! Please???) Also- proof that the Happiness Project has got to start with getting organized.... I had absolutely written a review of this book, longhand on a piece of paper I have now lost. This impinges upon my happiness. Attempting to reconstruct what I wrote....

What's impressive about February's focus on love is her own candor, her own willingness to acknowledge her flaws and frustrations.  (Show love better, stop nagging and dumping, really appreciate people.) That carries out throughout the book, inviting empathy, even inspiration... if she can try to change, fail, and resolve to do better, so can any reader.

Rubin's candor carries her throughout the work of the book, the themes and projects she encounters. She's a smart woman, a striver, hard on herself and independent. (Nope, don't identify with that at all. Heh.) "Ask for help" has to be a specific part of her project- because it doesn't come naturally. "Lighten up" gets its own month, followed by May's "Get Serious About Play," for someone who takes on a lot of stress and drive and family responsibility. (No wonder I loved this book. It's like the pages are holding up mirrors!)

Happiness? Over a year devoted to the project, it seems less like happiness; more like she's collecting ways to be calmer, more grounded, better focused, and healthier.  But still, acknowledging her flaws and struggles.

This might be a book that you turn to, looking for more happiness in your own life. If it is, the practical, methodical nature of these projects, and Rubin's candor, will inspire you. (There are more specific tools for your own Happiness Project on her website. Which she started a few months into the project.) It's more helpful than an actual self-help book, I think.

Or, it could stand alone as a memoir of ordinary pleasures and struggles, peppered with historical asides about everyone from Ben Franklin to Samuel Johnson to Elizabeth Enright. It's a rich and busy book, with confessions, warmth, dailiness, attempts, lists, trivia, and yes.... happiness.

Loving Every Discovery in "Shelf Discovery."

Shelf Discovery: The Classics We Never Stopped Reading
Lizzie Skurnick
Avon A, 2009. $14.99 448 pages

Lizzie Skurnick was a speaker at BEA, on a panel about the cross-over appeal of YA books. I loved that panel! Libba Bray, Lizzie Skurnick, and others, getting together to talk about what makes YA novels so compelling that we read them over and over, or read new ones as adults.

As she started talking about Shelf Discovery, I knew I had to get my hands on this book! Got it out of the library... and I wish it were my own copy.  I also think it should be reissued as a spiral-bound journal. So the great essays about everything from The Westing Game to the Little House books to Judy Blume, would have a few blank, lined pages in between, for me to write down my own memories.

You can't read this book without remembering, without thinking about how old you were when you read the book. What color cover it had, where you were, what you thought. It turns out I didn't remember Danny the Champion of the World until the essay brought up the raisins. Even though I haven't read anything by Judy Blume in over a decade, wow, even thinking about Sally J. Freedman or, worse yet, Blubber, makes me cringe in sympathy.

Yes... to absolutely nobody's surprise... I totally had a Harriet the Spy phase, complete with notebook. I remember it most vividly on a trip to Washington D.C. with my parents. I did a bit of skulking around the hotel lobby. It kept me entertained.

Turns out there are a whole bunch of these books I haven't read- I might be just a little bit younger than Lizzie, and a gap of a few years propelled me towards different books. Who knew Beverly Cleary wrote for teens, about boys and marriage and stuff? And I never read Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume. Or Forever.

I'm just a few essays in, so who knows what I'll discover as I read on.

Seriously-- needs to be reissued as a journal. Because I would feel really weird writing in this, even if I owned my copy. Also, not enough space in the margins.

Betraying Season: Marissa Doyle Does it Again

First of all, hurrah for the NYPL. I put Betraying Season on my hold list a couple of days ago, and it came in, fast!

And I read it. Fast, and delightedly. It was wonderful to be back in the Leland sisters' magic-infused early Victorian world. With Persephone happily married, Penelope feels at loose ends around the lovebirds. She and Ally head to Ireland, so Pen can continue to study magic. A chance encounter with the imperious but hospitable Lady Keating gives Pen a ticket into the best drawing rooms.  With Ally out of commission again (their governess seems to spend a lot of time offstage) Penelope is on her own, navigating unfamiliar social worlds with Lady Keating's kind but manipulative guidance. And then there's the handsome son, Niall Keating.

I zoomed through this, and will probably go back to read and savor both books again. I liked getting Pen's point of view, instead of seeing her and her motivations through Persy's eyes. I liked seeing Pen's  social confidence and academic flightiness (what Persy saw) fleshed out into some awkwardness, thanks to her internal monologue.

What I loved best of all was seeing a different magical culture. In the Irish world Doyle creates, there's a separation between the magic tradition of England, based on Latin spells, and a Druid-Goddess fueled magic of Ireland. It brings up interesting gender discrepancies too, from the young men who aren't sure about having a female student at their lessons, to the Maiden Mother Crone set of roles that crops up in some witchcraft traditions. On reflection, it also reminds me of Diane Duane's A Wizard Abroad. In the best possible ways.

Now, when I get a chance to read Georgette Heyer, I"m going to expect some levitation!

But more to the point, I can't wait for Marissa Doyle to write the next book. I hear it's a prequel....

Required Summer Reading Lists

I'm starting to think about summer reading lists. The books we were assigned, for English class, to get ahead of the next school year, or just to keep the brains from leaking out our ears in the summer's unstructured humidity.

I remember really hating a few of them. I felt so doomed and mutinous having to read Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy that my Uncle Ron read it with me, and we discussed it. It's very nice to have an English teacher in the family!  Member of the Wedding spooked me. I think because Frankie was so lonely.

I actually liked reading Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, because it was a strange, humid take on Jane Eyre. And I still feel bitter at having read the wrong Hemingway book the summer before my junior year. I don't remember which I was supposed to read, but I read both A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. Which is two more doses of Hemingway than I feel I need.

What about you? What books do you remember being assigned over the summer? Loved 'em? Hated them? Grabbed the Cliffs Notes? Discuss!

Bewitching Season wins a Cinderella Award!

The Cinderella Awards

Another book joins the ranks of  The Cinderella Awards

This is my entirely subjective list of books that have made me stay up well past midnight, reading avidly and fighting sleep, because I do not want to stop reading or being in the world these characters inhabit.  Totally worth a sleepy morning where I've slept so little I feel like a pumpkin.

Bewitching Season

Marissa Doyle

Square Fish

April 2008 $16.95 paperback

352 pages.

It's as though two of my favorite authors, Lauren Willig and Diane Duane, sat down together and decided to write a book I was guaranteed to love.  And, best of all, Marissa Doyle wrote  sequel.  Her only two novels so far. Hope she's writing a third!

I knew I was going to like this book. Set in Regency England, it is the story of twins Persephone and Penelope, who are about to make their society debut. And they must keep the secret that they are trained to do sorcery. Intrigue and a series of lushly described society parties, and fun banter between the sisters ensue. Also wonderful: their precocious younger brother, Charles, nicknamed Chucklehead. While trying to make their social debuts, they are also solving the mystery of a disappeared beloved governess, and using just enough magic to get by, but not reveal themselves

Honestly, I was more interested in the magic and the social whirl of ballgowns and quadrilles and suppers with lemon ice, than the romance plot. It was a predictable romance plot, I suppose, but so goodhearted that I didn't mind. That, and the magic was so much fun. Not enough descriptions of the foods and the social constructs within the ton for my liking, but plenty of humor. Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series set the standard for me to read Regency romances. I have to have humor, and quirky characters, and a good dose of intrigue. but mostly the humor. That's key.

I'm new to the Regency genre-- Willig was my first real exposure, and wow did it get me hooked. I need the dialogue and characters to be good, with plenty of humor, and adventures that border on goofy capers. The magic didn't hurt, either.

Keri, a very dear college friend of mine, writes fiction with elaborate magic plots and intrigue. Nothing published so far, but this morning, I sent her a note recommending this book. Because reading Bewitching Season reminded me of some of the stories Keri's written. I teased her that I was wondering if she was Marissa Doyle, writing under a pen name. So far, they're two separate people. (That, and Keri tends to torture her characters more with every possible calamity!!!)

Marissa Doyle's world of the magically gifted Leland sisters reminds me of other stories that are among my favorites, both published and unpublished. That tells me that I'm not the only one with an appetite for smart, well plotted Regency, with a zippy sense of adventure and humor. Magic is a nice plus. I've read Lauren Willig and I've got the next Marissa Dudley on my hold list at the library.

Guiltily, I realize I should probably go back and read the classics that I've missed. Add that to my confessions. Can't get through Wuthering Heights, and most of the great Regency writing I've loved, with manners and ballrooms--- was written in the 21st century. (Wow- okay, typing that feels weird.)

What else should I read, in the genre? Got any funny, smart Regency for me? I know what I'm reading next: Marissa Doyle and Regina Scott, another YA writer of the same historical period, have a blog: NineteenTeen, a discussion of what teen life was like in England in the Regency period.

The Cinderella Awards

Skinny Italian: Cookbook Review

Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It Live La Bella Vita and Look Great, Too!
Teresa Giudice, with Heather Maclean
Hyperion June 2010,
256 pages $19.99

I'm a very basic cook. When I read a cookbook, I like simple recipes, with easy-to-find ingredients, and easy-to-follow instructions. Beautiful pictures, and funny anecdotes throughout the text are a plus.

Flipping through Guidice's book, I found a number of recipes I knew I wanted to try. Another plus for basic cooks like me is the guide she provides to some herbs common in Italian cooking. For basil, oregano, garlic, and parsley, as well as some others, Guidice lays out a helpful guide: where to store them, how to use them, and follows it up with an easy recipe that spotlights that herb's flavor. I made the Gorgeous Garlic Shrimp over rice for two friends, and we were all delighted with our easy Italian dinner.  Though- I did tweak her recipe a little, by adding spinach and more garlic. Yum!

Others I'm eager to try: Pasta puttanesca, and steak pizzaiola.

Even though her instructions are accessible, and her prose is inviting, I'm going to hold off on both pizza, and attempting to make my own marinara from scratch... Tiny apartment kitchen, the impending summer heat. I will make the attempt when I'm a little more certain of my kitchen-fu.

Full disclosure: I've never watched The Real Housewives of Anywhere, so I wasn't familiar with Teresa Guidice from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Some of the book's intentionally humorous asides and references to people on the show blew right past me. But I enjoyed her upbeat prose, and the way she built her cookbook persona. Her references to her mama, her family and her Italian heritage make the book cozy and approachable. I like that she makes a point to get her family and her kids involved in cooking and eating good food.  Maybe she goes overboard with the adjectives and effusion. (Not sure how snapper gets to be sexy- but I'll make sure and cook the recipe before I make final judgment there.)

My only other minor quibble with the book is one of style. The page layout makes it difficult to pin down what the serving sizes and quantity information for the recipes are, at a quick glance. Which could be important in a cookbook that's all about staying healthy and maybe even weight loss. I do like that the emphasis is on enjoying flavorful recipes with friends and family, rather than feeling deprived or restricted.

Definitely planning to return to this cookbook, and make it one of my go-to books for learning the basics of Italian recipes.

Thanks to Allison at Hyperion for sending me this cookbook.

Forensics

Although I'm absolutely squeamish about hospitals, doctors, needles; or even that shade of blue and green they make scrubs out of, I do love a good forensic mystery.

The first forensic mystery I read was for an excellent class at Vassar, called The Archaeology of Death. Professor Anne Pike-Tay taught it in the anthropology department. After we had learned a good amount about skeletons and bones, and the marks a life, and a death, could leave on bones, she had us do a group project reading mystery novels. We were broken into groups, and handed Gideon Oliver mysteries, by Aaron Elkins.

Our project was to use our textbooks, read the mystery, and present a few decisive, clue-revealing scenes, then evaluate whether Gideon Oliver actually could have made those deductions from the bones and the evidence he had, or whether he was grandstanding for the dramatic plot. I loved that assignment, so much. And the class. It not only changed the way I think about anthropology and bodies, but it's informed my mystery watching and reading since. Always wondering- could you prove that much from the evidence? Or am I willing to take the leap with the author, in service of pushing a dramatic plot forward?

I've never had an interest in actual criminology and forensics... not sure I ever want to really know what kind of malice and violence people are capable of. But I do love crime drama, televised, or novelized. I love Kathy Reichs novels, and then the TV series Bones... I keep promising myself to write a good comparison of the book-Bones to the younger, more stilted and strange and simplified, Tempe Brennan. I think the TV writers are trying to make her look stilted, maybe even on the autistic spectrum, which does a disservice to how vital and forthright her narrative voice is in the books.

On TV, I also love N.C.I.S., which applies forensics and routine police work to Marine and Navy related crimes. I love that it combines crime drama with military honor codes, a good sense of humor, and eccentric characters. Most of all, for the character of Abby Sciuto, the Goth forensics tech.

I'm finishing reading a book that explores Sherlock Holmes and the evolution of forensic science, using Sherlock Holmes plots as an anchor for historical anecdotes. Review coming soon, but I guess you could say I've got forensics on the brain right now.

What other mystery novels give good forensics, or better yet, good forensic anthropology, with some bones? I love the plot device/recurrent joke in Gideon Oliver novels where he can handle bones of any age, of any gruesome death, with aplomb, but actual dead bodies make him nauseated. I'm pretty much the same way.

No other way to end this than with a clip of Abby Sciuto's Forensics Speech from NCIS. I'm sorry the quality's so awful. Turn the sound up, and be inspired by her devotion to truth.  Also, a quick imdb search tells me, the episode's airing this Sunday afternoon on USA. Go watch it. Or at least the last third or so, to see Abby preaching from the pulpit of her mass spec.

Video here.

On a Dollar A Day (book review)

On a Dollar a Day: One Couple's Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America

By Christopher Greenslate and Kerri Leonard

Reading about two teachers who experimented with living on a dollar a day for a month, of course I wonder: could I do it? The answer is a pretty emphatic no. I live in a major metropolis, full of seven dollar sandwiches. Chris and Kerri have been vegans for several year. I eat meat and dairy. (I eat tofu, too. But I'm a pretty dedicated omnivore. Too much tofu makes me kind of mean and grumpy.)

Chris and Kerri, two San Diego teachers, tell their story in alternating chapters. I give them credit for making a dietary choice reflecting their beliefs about the environment and their personal health. I especially give them credit for writing very forthrightly and evenhandedly about that choice, so they're constructing their own well-reasoned arguments and exploring what it means for the project, without preaching or pushing that choice onto the reader. Given how much of the book hinges on food, economics and politics, the friendly conversational tone they maintain is outstanding.

As they take on additional challenges, eating organically, and eating according to the SNAP food assistance program subsidy, both Chris and Kerry discuss food, economics, and politics, while maintaining  their cogent and noninvasive arguments. Being vegans, and teachers, probably gives them an advantage. They have had to explain vegan dietary choices to their families, and maybe also their students, and they're both practiced in teasing out ideas and communicating messages clearly.

Alternating chapters gives a good sense of Chris and Kerri's perspectives on the project. It's Chris's brainstorm, and he's clearly the driving force behind the dollar-a-day project. Rationing their intake to a dollar's worth each day has the teachers powering through full schedules on a diet of rice, beans, the oatmeal Kerri hates, and a tablespoon of peanut butter savored as a treat.

Watching them run on fumes made me feel simultaneously hungry and guilty. Because, of course, my fridge and pantry are full, and if they weren't, I could walk outside and pick something up.Could I give up animal products? Milk and dairy would be a massive sacrifice. And I'm not sure how many days I could cut out meat and fish before I started to get debilitatingly grouchy about the deprivation. Maybe I could hack some version of the SNAP guidelines, though I notice it calls for lots of orange juice, which I don't hate quite as much as Kerri hates oatmeal. But close.

Having a garden was a massive asset for the couple, as well as the San Diego sunshine. My tiny apartment is sunny, but I have fairly murderously bad luck about plants... so not going to transform my windowsill into a dietary supplement, just yet.

Overall, the book makes me thoughtful about food politics, the culture of eating in cities and suburbs, value, and veggies. It ties in with Julie and Julia, a crazy foodie blog stunt turned book deal.

I have got to think of some strange challenge to set myself then blog about.

Thanks to Allison at Hyperion for sending me this book.

Zombies Book round-up for the Star-Ledger

'The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks' and other tales of nasty undead

By Star-Ledger Staff

June 06, 2010, 12:10AM

By Elizabeth Willse

When the recent resurgence of zombies, a fixture of film and literature for decades, began to infiltrate legitimate historic literature — last year’s literary mash-up “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” (Quirk Books), by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, comes to mind — one had to wonder if anything is sacred.

A prequel earlier this year by Steve Hockensmith, “Dawn of the Dreadfuls” (Quirk Books), attempts to explain — albeit with the help of a ridiculously campy set of new supporting characters — how zombies invaded Austen’s England.

The enduring popularity of zombies, according to John Skipp, editor of the chilling, eclectic anthology “Zombies: Encounters With the Hungry Dead” (Black Dog & Leventhal, 704 pp., $19.95), is their capacity to “unearth deep reservoirs of darkness within . . . they are us, stripped of everything that makes life worth living.”

Genre greats like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King have contributed their visions of the undead, and Dean Koontz’s latest — “Frankenstein: Lost Souls” (Bantam, 368 pp., $27) — has everything a fan of classic zombie horror could want. Lurid mad scientists and body snatchers ripping their hosts to shreds, set against the witty banter of a police procedural, gives it a decidedly B-movie thrill.

Zombies can be funny as well as disgusting and scary.

“Never Slow Dance With a Zombie,” E. Van Lowe’s first YA novel (Tor Teen, 256 pp., $9 paperback) wraps up a zombie gore-fest in the smart sarcasm of Margot, an awkward teen who realizes her dreams of popularity when the rest of the students are zombies, and discovers dating the star athlete isn’t much fun when he’s trying to bite her face off.

David P. Murphy’s “Zombies for Zombies: Advice and Etiquette for the Living Dead” (Sourcebooks Inc., 272 pp., $13 paperback), illustrated by Daniel Heard, helps the recently bitten victim transition to post-life as a functioning member of zombie society, with hygiene and etiquette tips delivered in a cheerful, self-help tone, tongue firmly planted in un-dead cheek.

For genuine horror, there’s Max Brooks’ “The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks” (Three Rivers Press, 144 pp., $17 paperback), a sparsely-narrated graphic novel, illustrated in bloodthirsty detail by Ibraim Robertson, in which ordinary historical events suddenly erupt into flesh-tearing carnage.

Alex Eckman-Lawn’s and Nick Tapalansky’s collaborative “Awakening Volume One” (Archaia Graphic Novel Press, 144 pp., $19.95), is a fusion of grisly zombie murders with a gritty private-eye mystery, expertly woven into a story that is as compellingly dreamlike as it is edgy and scary.

Diary of a Confessions Queen: A Plum of a Book

Diary of a Confessions Queen
Kathy Carmichael
Medallion Press
$12.95,  350 pages

This was another BEA pick. Independence, Kansas, is a tiny and insular town. Everyone knows that Amy Crosby's husband, Dan, disappeared seven years ago, walking home from a chess match at the local bar. Everyone knows that Dan, an inventor of quirky household gadgets, has been missing since.  And Amy has been trying to make her own way, writing "true confessions" for magazines. So- when Amy begins the court proceedings to have her husband declared legally dead, and use the insurance money to save the house from foreclosure, nobody is surprised.

The blackmail note Amy gets, claiming Dan is alive? And the house burglaries? They come as a surprise.

A smart-mouthed female narrator somewhat inept as she brushes against danger, in a close-knit regional community? Fierce independence combined with a whimsical streak? Amy Crosby, trying to get closure and a solution to her husband's murder, reminds me a lot of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum.  Even to the man-juggling between Brad Tyler, the  sexy cop, and the wealthy but overprotective businessman Jerome, reminds me of Stephanie Plum's Ranger/Morelli indecision.

It's a fun mystery, with plenty of suspense and surprises, and some excellent whimsy. Seances, a domineering and batty next door neighbor; Amy's mother in law, who makes the next-door neighbor look rational. Dan's oddball inventions. One, slightly tongue-in-cheek quibble of unreality.... while I love the setup that Amy makes a living writing persona pieces of "true confessions," I have trouble believing that, with attempts on her life, and her husband's murder to mourn and solve, Amy is able to do that much writing.

By tracing all the comparisons between Amy's small-town sarcasm and Stephanie Plum, I don't mean to say that Diary of a Confessions Queen is derivative. In fact, I hope the similarities draw new readers to Kathy Carmichael's novel. You're not likely to find a mechanic named Ecclesiastes in Evanovich's Trenton, but both Carmichael and Evanovich explore the humor and suspense possibilities of a determined female narrative in an insular community. (Having written that last sentence-- I have to laugh at myself. I've got Bones on TV in the background, and it's affecting my prose!)