Books, update

I can’t remember if I posted about Ape House or The Night Circus. I definitely haven’t posted about If You Were Here and The Hangman’s Daughter.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern – This is one of those books I that I read/heard about a thousand great reviews about and finally just caved and picked it up. In fact, I paid more than my $9.99 limit and it was worth every penny. I kind of loved it. It’s told by an omniscient narrator which provides a bit of distance from the characters but the story was so compelling that I think it would have lost something or gotten muddled in first person. The descriptions of the circus are captivating, as is the premise itself. The two magicians in battle are incredibly different and yet drawn together. If you’re looking for a modern fairy tale, you could do a LOT worse than this.

The Hangman’s Daughter, Oliver Pötzsch. I think I picked this up as a Kindle Daily Deal and I’m very glad I did. A seamless historical mystery with rich characters and a troubled town, I just kept turning pages. Engaging and satisfying.

Ape House, Sarah Gruen. I listened to this on audiobook and JESUS there were parts I wished I could fast forward. Alas it was actually on CD so I just had to gut through it. Don’t get me wrong, the story premise is great – a lab housing Bonobo apes which have learned and are utilizing ASL is bombed. Mystery ensues. Unfortunately she decided to try and tell THREE stories – the story of the apes, the story of the lead scientist and the story of the lead reporter. Sadly the reporter, the least compelling of all, gets the lion’s share of the book and the book feels a bit scattershot and loses some momentum as a result.

If You Were Here, Jen Lancaster. I’ve heard a lot of great things about Lancaster’s books but haven’t picked up any before. This was also an audiobook and it had a great performance but fell a bit flat for me. First, I like HGTV. I really do. I watch a sad amount of DIY house remodel TV, including the oft-referenced Holmes on Homes. This book was like a love letter to HGTV and I was tempted to fast-forward through the bits about fixturing and cabinet hardware and I’m sure I would have skimmed those parts if I’d been reading the book. It  was funny and yes, a wake-up call if (like me) you’re contemplating a kitchen remodel. I liked enough of it to talk about but I think it’s niche enough to not link it.

As to the Book goals this year, I’ve read 49 of the 55 books I’m hoping to reach before the end of the year. I’m about 73% of the way through Juliet, Naked and just downloaded TC Boyle’s When The Killing’s Done. Now that I’m using library books on the Kindle and my phone, I’m pretty stoked about getting a few more new releases. Also, I’m hearing raves about Alice Hoffman’s latest so in all likelihood I’m going to just buy it because I love Alice Hoffman. Before that, however, I’ve got to get through Lit (library book) and Infidel by Kameron Hurley.

Yoga, Bitch

This weekend I plowed through Suzanne Morrison’s Yoga Bitch and I’m stuck in a mixed response. First, the back cover logline: “What happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating twenty-five-year-old atheist decides it is time to get in touch with her spiritual side? Not what you’d expect…”

Anyone who knows me is not going to be surprised that I picked this up. That said, I can’t put my finger on exactly what I was expecting but this wasn’t it. Don’t get me wrong, I think she nailed some of the yoga “pesonalities” but on the whole it just rang a bit false with me. How can it be false when it’s a memoir, you ask? I think that given enough time and space it’s pretty easy to armchair quarterback any of our decisions- especially those made when we’re young, hopeful and more than a little naive. The novel was a bit of that and while it seems to have been written as a response to Eat, Pray, Love it still has a fair amount of that thing where, hey, wouldn’t it be great if EVERYONE could spend two months in Indonesia doing yoga?

I suppose a chunk of my response is also prompted by the vast difference of my yoga experience to Morrison’s. While I got to yoga at around the same time, I came from an utterly different point of view which makes me think I should maybe write about THAT experience. While there’s plenty about yoga to prompt cynicism (you can ask @melissarocks, I’m not immune) there’s also a side that prompts no expectations and therefore no disappointment.

Looking at that paragraph makes me think I could write an entire SERIES of yoga posts about this.

Week end!

TGIF, motherfuckers!

Coming back to work after a yoga conference has been simultaneously great and awful. Great because I think I’ve got a better lens on things and my role in things and, frankly, the amount of energy I find worth expending on work things. Awful because it’s the same old place and by this point chock full of people who are not only unhappy but thoroughly unable to pretend otherwise or see the bright side of anything. That said, I’ve had a pretty good week.

I’ve been a bit uninspired by my reading material of late – that’s not to say I’m short on options as I’ve got a bunch of stuff on the kindle – but nothing I’m just scrambling to read. After hearing the bajillionth amazing review of The Night Circus, I’m going to start it this weekend. Yes, it breaks my $9.99 rule but the reviews have been SO GOOD that I’m making an exception.

Due to the yoga conference, I missed my guitar class last week and DAMN was that a bad idea. Tonight in class we had to write a song. WRITE A SONG. IN CLASS. And then PLAY it. Holy shit is all I”m saying.

In vaguely related news, I’m kicking around the idea of starting a non-profit organization to provide free yoga classes in my community. I’ve thought about it for a couple of years but a confluence of events (including the yoga conference) have me seriously pursuing it for the first time. Details as they are available.

Week ending (books, tv, food)

This morning we started the day by watching the Food Network, which is never a good idea. Why? Because instead of relaxing at home, practicing guitar, doing homework or washing the dishes, you’re suddenly at the grocery store to buy ingredients for whatever was just on Paula Deen’s Best Dishes.

We had the Turkey Black Bean Burgers with Corn Salsa for lunch, accompanied by Lemony Slaw and with Chocolate Milkshakes for dessert. It was all delicious and all DIRECTLY from the tv show.

I finished The Very Thought of You the other day and I’ve been wrestling with how to talk about it. The cover is what first caught my attention and I was heartened by the description on Amazon (though I will admit to not reading the reviews) and I believe that I heard something about it on Books on the Nightstand. Then when the price dropped to $9.99, I bought it. I loved the book, even if I wouldn’t necessarily classify it as my typical fare. It’s a contemplative read, which doesn’t mean boring so much as nuanced, and an amazing story about love and complicated relationships in difficult times. It doesn’t have a barnburning pace but I found I had a hard time putting it down because I wanted to know where it went (which was, incidentally, thoroughly satisfying). My mission is now to find other people who have read it.

Speaking of love: I spent yesterday and today re-watching Defying Gravity which was a purchase with birthday money. It’s maybe the best series to never get a full first season in television and seeing it again just made me sad that shit like the Charlie’s Angels reboot is going to air and probably be wildly successful. I’m hoping that Ringer is going to satisfy my interesting/smart tv niche for the fall but it’s on the CW so my hope is limited. Defying Gravity was great because it was smart and touching and challenging about topics that make me unsurprised that it didn’t get picked up but is just so goddamn good that I bought the DVDs. It’s the kind of fiction I love.

State of Wonder and Supergods are both topping my wishlist currently but my $10 ceiling prohibits them. I’m going to settle for digging into Wildwood. If you want to see what else I’m interested in, the list is here. It’s not entirely up to date as I’ve taken to sending samples of the books I’m interested to my Kindle and using that as a list of sorts.

The Distant Hours

I’ve wanted this book since I saw the cover. I read the back copy and was convinced I’d enjoy it but as it was $9.99 on the Kindle (the top price I’m willing to pay) I waited to get it for my birthday. Truth to tell, I’m not at all disappointed.

The Distant Hours is a wide-ranging story- vaguely gothic as only a story which begins with three spinsters in a castle CAN be – and reminiscent in tone to the writing of the Bronte sisters. Family, war, love, loss, responsibility and tragedy are sprawled across five decades and woven neatly together in a thoroughly compelling read. Highly recommended.

I’m about a third of the way through Beauty Queens but The Distant Hours brings me to number 40 (of 55 books I want to tell people I read) this year.

Horns, Joe Hill

I liked this so much that while I started reading this during my breaks at work today, I plowed through the rest of it AS SOON as I got home tonight. A seriously great book with all of the good, bad and ugly you could possibly hope for from a big story. Tragedy, misinformation, murder, guilt, good and bad decisions, impossible fallout. When god and the devil aren’t exactly what you think they are and you’re looking for reasons why people suffer, this book provides a pretty incredible and engaging tale.

Related, I’ve updated the recent book posts with the 2011 books tag again (including the vacation reading post from last week).

The Help

I finally got around to reading the book, largely because everyone on the planet has read it and it’s inspired passionate responses (positive AND negative) and I figured I’d see what the fuss was about. This is important mostly because when I first read the back cover of the book, I thought GOOD GOD, someone created a White Magical Negro story. I was not interested or even a bit intrigued. Mostly I was waiting for the fallout.

Many months have passed and the fallout has been more or less what I figured I’d see, with the multiplier of a film release. I have not seen the film. I’m not interested in seeing the film, as I’m fairly certain any nuance captured by the novel will be bludgeoned out of the screenplay but this is definitely worth a read. I’ll wait.

In conversation with some friends at a dinner party this weekend, we were talking about the danger of viewing our history through the perspective lens of now. Is it good to do? Sure. But in doing so, it’s important to remember that our history WAS. It was a living, breathing and fallible time of its own – not unlike those who lived in it. It’s difficult to point to any piece of art and say THAT IS BAD BECAUSE IT’S NOT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. We can SAY it, but the truth is there isn’t much art that IS historically accurate, because everyone lives their OWN history. No one’s is exactly the same, despite sharing the same historical context and major events. We all live out our own melodramas with our complex relationships and interactions, our arrogance and colossal fucking errors. They are the things that help to shape us and our worldview. History is complicated and how we interact with it is moreso.

So here’s what I’m going to say about The Help: it’s an engaging read. It’s a bit of a window into a place and time not many of us inhabited. Is it perfect? No. Is it historically accurate? Probably in parts and based on the afterword, it’s true to the writer’s own personal history. Should it make you think? Yes. And given all that, it’s worth the read.

Home Impairment Day

When I woke up this morning, I’d pinched something in my neck badly enough that I couldn’t turn my head. It might have been heavy lifting at work yesterday, or sleeping funny last night or – more likely- a combination of the two. At any rate, it didn’t seem wise to drive 45 miles over a mountain pass without the ability to turn my head and as a result I’m at home. Since we did a MAJOR housecleaning project last week, I find myself with nothing to do.

Said cleaning project even included the Disaster Room, also known as the room boxes go to die or never be opened or, once opened, never get sorted out and put in proper places. All of the aforementioned boxes were opened, sorted and (with the exception of the things we are donating)  have been sorted to their appropriate locations. I am very impressed with myself, which can only lead to bad things.

Since I’m at loose ends, I’ve put in the first disc of Justified and thought I’d catch up my reading list from vacation which required me to go back and see when the last book update was. It turns out it was Dreadnought and Little, Big and at some point I stopped using my ’2011 book list’ tag which was just dumb.

I’ll start with the most recent first, then.

The Raising by Laura Kasischke. I’d been eyeing this book for a while but it was still priced above my $9.99 threshold for the kindle (I just can’t see paying more than $10 for a book when the paperback is still going to cost $6-7). We happened to be in a Borders last week and I’d forgotten they were closing but I managed to find a couple of things (including this book) that I wanted to read that – shockingly- the 60% off price made reasonable. If you’re looking for why Borders went out of business, the APA style guide at 40% off was the same as Amazon’s REGULAR price.

The Raising is a ghost story, of sorts. Very atmospheric and and interesting plotline. I found that even though I predicted all of the turns and sometimes skimmed through the (what seemed to me unnecessarily) wordy parts, I REALLY liked the book. It’s the first time that’s happened that I can recall. It reminded me of the movie The Life Before Her Eyes and then, when perusing the information in the back of the book, lo and behold she wrote the book. So there you go. It’s a moody and langurous read, perfect for a hot and humid day. Sufficiently creepy and ominous and just in general a really good read.

The Dead and The Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer is a YA book that I got for about $1 at Borders and it had an interesting premise- a meteor hits the moons and causes apocalyptic climate change on Earth (not to mention obliterating a fair chunk of each coast).

[interjection  from Justified "You want me to kill 'em or wing 'em?" "Let's start with wingin'." I already love this show.]

I liked The Dead and The Gone, I REALLY liked the premise, and while the descriptions and situations were pretty great it just fell kind of flat for me. Like describing the day in the life over and over but ultimately not really GETTING anywhere. So it was good and sufficiently apocalyptic but (for me) lacked forward momentum.

Magic Slays, Ilona Andrews. Another solid book in a series that I love. The main character gets to grow up a bit (about time) and the story and action are slam-bang. I am, as usual, looking forward to the next book in the series.

Poison, Sara Poole. I thought maybe I’d talked about this but it was a free Kindle read and I dug it. A young woman takes her father’s place as Borgia’s poisoner while she tries to find out who killed him (and does various deeds for Borgia as well). The opening is one of the best scenes I’ve read in a while.

The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancy. I kind of loved this. It’s a straight up monster book and if you like those, you’ll love this. It’s one of the first books I got on my Kindle and I can’t figure why I got around to it so late but it’s got a varied cast of creepy and inscrutable characters, a fantastic narrator, plenty of action, suspense and general creepiness. I had no idea it was part of a series when I got it but I’ll definitely be picking up the rest. Love.

Territory, Emma Bull. This was slow going for me to start, possibly because Westerns don’t generally grab me right off. This takes place not far from my stomping grounds (Leadville gets a shout out) and I’ve been to Tombstone. I like the alternate take and the depiction of Wyatt Earp (safe to say you won’t have seen this before) and I especially loved Doc Holliday. That said, the ending felt… short. Unresolved. And while I liked everything that came before, it just seemed like either it’s meant to be a series and leaving you wanting or just unfinished.

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood. I love Atwood. Really, I do. There are a handful of authors whose work I’ll pick up just because they wrote it and she’s one (Alice Hoffman, Robin McKinley, Carol O’Connell) . I love the concept of this book and the execution was just as great as you’d hope. While Ulysses got to adventure, Penelope was trapped with a hundred men who didn’t really want her but pretended to and she was holding out hope for the missing husband she loved. Hearing her side of the story is kind of brilliant.

Zoo City, Lauren Beukes. In a South Africa where magic has erupted in a peculiar way, giving those who commit crimes an animal to which they are bonded for life (Animalled, she calls it). The dialogue is snappy, the imagery is great, steamrolling action and the story is unique. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

I think that gets me caught up and I’m still on track for 55 this year.

In the meantime, I’m madly in love with Justified based on a single episode. This is amazing.

Vacation

I can’t BELIEVE I haven’t posted since the end of July. In my defense, there was vacation and book reading and PLENTY of twitter and G+ posts. So while this is not a real post, there is soon to be a long post about vacation book reading and how I recently bought (*gasp*) two actual PHYSICAL books. Shocking!

Why I love cooking

Unlike baking, recipes can be more of a guide than a ‘you must use these measurements’ step by step.

My latest favorite thing is the Hungry Girl books. Yes, they’ve got a fairly hideous name that was probably cute when she started the blog/website/email but now rather unfortunately pigeonholes her product. No chance my husband would even pick UP one of those cookbooks, let alone BUY THEM.

To be clear, that’s the only downside I’ve found with these cookbooks. The design is pretty great, kind of a fun retro font and my absolute favorite thing is the “pantry list” of frequently used items in the front of each book (200 under 200: 200 recipes under 200 calories & 300 under 300). They’re basically the same list, but the latest cookbook (300) has some updates with new brands available.

Here’s the story of why I bought the books:

The Spouse and I are just looking for healthier ways to eat things we already like, rather than dramatically changing our diets. We’re both active and neither of us have a TON of time to cook. I picked up the 200 book and the very first recipe was for Banana Wheat Mini Pancakes. If you remember my post about The Delectable Egg and their AMAZING Banana Wheat Pancakes, you can imagine that I was pretty intrigued. I picked the book up and put it down about a half dozen times. Then I picked up the 300 book and saw that it had an entire “International Favorites” section – including a Chicken Pad Thai recipe. SOLD. I did something I NEVER do; I bought both cookbooks at the same time.

I started with the Egg Mugs. Basically, egg substitute and a variety of vegetables/cheese/bacon added to a large mug and cooked. Takes less than 5 minutes and means I get a hot breakfast on my way to work (in a nearly non-spillable container). Spouse has also gotten on board with these in a big way.

The Banana Wheat Pancakes are just as awesome as I’d hoped – I made them Saturday AND Sunday morning. I double the recipe and it makes about 7  palm-sized pancakes, which is perfect for us (4 for Spouse, 3 for me) and instead of using the sugar-free maple syrup we have agave syrup. They’re delicious and VERY easy to make.

The Chicken Pad Thai was fantastic, but this entry is about tonight’s adventure with Fish Tacos.

I used the recipe for the marinade/rub and purchased vacuum-sealed frozen Mahi Mahi. After my workout, I made the marinade and threw it in with the thawed fish while I got the other stuff ready and heated the grill. Instead of making the Avocado Cream according to recipe, I used an entire avocado and a matching amount of fat free Greek yogurt (rather than sour cream). I was a bit more heavy handed with the chili powder and garlic powder, but it was DELICIOUS. Add chopped tomato, coleslaw mix cabbage and wheat taco-sized tortillas and it made a pretty excellent dinner.

The absolute best part of these cookbooks is that the recipes are designed for 1 or 2 servings: no having to shrink the recipe OR leftovers for a week. I suspect this is designed to help with portion control (smart) but if you don’t have kids, it’s wicked awesome to have MY family-sized recipes.

The author states pretty clearly that the recipes are not designed for extreme caloric limitation/dieting. They DO however make it easy to combine several dishes for a larger meal or to have several small meals throughout the day.

Everything has been very easy to prepare and the only really esoteric item (I live in a rural area) was pasta-shaped Tofu noodles that I found at Whole Foods. They’re kind of an awesome substitute for regular pasta, though pricey enough that I wouldn’t probably use them in place of all pasta recipes.

So that’s my latest  schedule addition and it’s been pretty good for the budget. Cooking this many meals at home has saved more money than I’d have expected.

In related news, I had a Coke Zero for the first time in over a week and it turns out I didn’t really miss it. I didn’t have any crazy caffeine withdrawal – in fact I haven’t ever since the first big caffeine boycott when I was in college (now THAT was miserable).

In thoroughly UNRELATED news, I’m kind of looking forward to SyFy’s new Legend Quest show.

Dreadnought and DroidX

Let me start with the good – once the story gets underway, it doesn’t slow down. Set in Cherie Priest’s Clockwork universe, the Civil War is still raging and the country is carved into (at least) 4 distinct regions all with their own baggage, complications and torn loyalties. For those who’ve read Boneshaker (which I liked a bit more, I must admit) the Sap won’t come as a huge surprise but the story ticks along with plenty of acrobatics.

The bad: it took me FOREVER to get into this book. I started it and stopped at least a half dozen times and I don’t really have a good explanation why. Maybe I liked Mercy (the main character) less than the characters in Boneshaker? At any rate, once I got through that first stretch it was much more smooth. In comparison, I DID like Boneshaker better. I found the story more compelling and latched onto all the characters a bit more tightly.

All things considered, I’ll keep on with the Clockwork books because they’re entertaining and make a nice change of pace from the usual mass-publishing.

On the DroidX front, Verizon customer service (win again!) thought the update may have b0rked my SD card and fo sho,they were right. They mailed me a new one post-haste (and free as it’s still under warranty) and as of installation today all my apps and my camera seem to be functioning again. Yay! Once again I have to give love to Verizon for great service, although their new data plan stuff seems to indicate I’ll make a change when our contracts are up.

I’ve been using Google+ on it quite a bit (more than twitter, to my surprise) and despite all expectations, I’m enjoying the Google datamining pointing me to people I might/will like. The only thing the app is missing is connectivity to Google Reader, where I could share the articles I like on GReader with G+ (which in retrospect is a failure of the GReader app). Because I AM doing that (like, share in Greader), if you follow me in the Buzz tab you’ll see the stuff I share but that only seems accessible on the web – please correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, anyone still wanting an invite please feel free to hit me up.

Updates

New header photo for the blog.

Google +1ification buttons, among others.

Finished Dreadnought, back into Territory (still ahead of my 2011 goal of 55 decent books read).

20 miles logged walking this week.

Sync – free audiobooks all summer

If you haven’t already checked this out, you should. Sync has free audiobooks (totally painless sign up and they don’t spam you with email) and their selection tends to be one current(ish) novel and a classic. I’ve still got my downloads from last summer and was really disappointed I hadn’t found them sooner. This summer’s offerings have been pretty great as well.

In related news, DoggCatcher has decided to STOP WORKING on my phone. Mother fucker. So I’m open to your podcatching app recommendations. Currently I’m using iSyncr to grab some of my faves from iTunes and Stitcher for the ones that update while I’m at work.

Little, Big

2011 books update

I finished Little, Big this morning. (Goodreads review here) I enjoyed it and I know the review is a bit vague but I rather think that’s what the book needs. Summarizing plot points isn’t helpful and it’s hard to characterize a novel like this. It’s fantastical but not strictly fantasy and, as in most ‘genre’ books tackles questions that are bigger than the book (see also: title).

While listening to a Books on the Nightstand podcast last week, I got annoyed because they were discussing authors making the ‘leap’ from literary to genre fiction and how the “characters in horror can sometimes be two dimensional” and that literary writers can bring “more to them”. This is the sort of commentary I expect from people who don’t read books. I’ve not read a single GOOD novel that had two dimensional characters REGARDLESS of genre. Slapping that generalization on any one genre should be embarrassing to the person providing commentary.

They were discussing The Passage and while I liked that book, I didn’t love it. Read Feed or Boneshaker or God’s War and tell me that a ‘literary’ writer would do better. I don’t believe it. As evidence, I’ll offer that all these books are ones I WANT to read the sequel to (unlike The Passage).

This is it

I’ve been engrossed in Little, Big virtually all day. All day, people. We’ve had a lovely Saturday up here in the mountains: grilled Bleu Cheese and Bacon burgers, made sweet tea and spent the entire afternoon reading on the deck. Spouse saw my paperback and asked, “Why’d you buy an OLD FASHIONED book?”

Truthfully, I purchased this book in our pre-Kindle days and had forgotten about it. When cleaning a couple weeks ago, I re-discovered it (as well as two others) forgotten in a drawer. Little, Big is one of those books I’ve heard many people rave about, including authors I respect. It’s been a while since I read anything this lyrically dense – sentences packed to overflowing – and it took a bit to adjust but then I just fell in. It’s been a lovely read and I’m already sad that the end is near.

As the sun began to drop and the air chilled, I came inside and dropped onto the couch in the basement. We’d had some musical accompaniment upstairs and I clicked on the TV for background noise. It just happened that Michael Jackson popped on the screen. Other than previews, I never saw anything of This Is It so imagine how surprised I was that it pulled me directly out of my novel and captured my attention just as intently.

Part of it is Michael’s final performance but the rest of it is just FASCINATING. Logically you know the guy had to be a perfectionist, but the extent to which he’s involved in every aspect – and seeing HOW MUCH of his project vision they were able to execute – is stunning. MJ holds a special place in my heart and the musical memory of my childhood. Probably I should be more embarrassed that my best friend Ruby and I designed and performed a tumbling routine for school set to Beat It, but I can’t muster it.

So yeah. Completely unexpected, I’m sitting here watching the making of a concert video and can’t tear myself away.