A Wrinkle In Time

For a long time when I was a kid, A Wrinkle In Time was my favorite book. I haven't read it in 30 years, but I still remember so much about it: the opening scene with Meg in her bed under the quilt and the storm raging outside, her brother Charles Wallace sitting in the kitchen in his footie pajamas, the father in his lab, the old women of increasing mysteriousness (Mrs. Whosit, Mrs. Whatsit, and who was the other? The really weird one), the word tesseract, the crazy thing that happens to Charles Wallace's eyes in the end.

I had tried to read it when I was younger, seven or eight or so, but it was too hard. Still, I found it intriguing enough that I took it out of the library a year later and that time I got through it. It made me feel smart and grown up -- it's a novel of ideas for children.

Madeleine L'Engle didn't condescend to children -- she knew how much they can grasp if the story is empathically and intelligently told. She leaves behind a body of work and a legacy we should all envy.

Compulsory Crappy Crime Novel Elements

*sigh* I'm not going to bother naming the incredibly boring mystery I just gave up reading in the middle of that has inspired this post, but here is a partial list of all the mandatory elements of crappy crime fiction. Feel free to add your own!

- If a detective is about to do something, but then is called away and never gets around to it, then that thing must be the most important thing in the whole book.

- The detective must like music, and when he/she listens to it, it must be identified. If it is jazz, it must be lushly described, and the detective must muse about how he/she personally relates to Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis or Bill Evans or whomever. THE RANKIN EXCEPTION: Detective may not like music as long as his partner does, and HER music is lushly described and named, so that detective can express his distaste for it in an informed manner.

- If there is a crazy person wandering around uttering nonsense, that nonsense must actually hold the clue that solves the crime!

- The hunter must become the hunted.

- Serial killers must be brilliant and love taunting cops.

- Any characters who are writers, artists, photographers, or people with any creative talent at all must be secretly vain and shallow, and their art a crass attempt to draw attention to themselves.

- Detective cannot be happily married.

- Detective cannot ever experience feelings of joy or even vague personal well-being.

- When a dead body is found, its odor must first be "unmistakeable," then "indescribable." Bonus points if the smell then "assaults" someone's "nostrils."

- When the medical examiner arrives, he/she must be asked to make a snap judgement, then must reply that this is impossible, then do it anyway and be exactly right. Later, the autopsy report cannot be delivered by phone, fax, or e-mail. Instead, the detective must visit the morgue and discuss the case over the eviscerated corpse. At this time, the ME should be eating a sandwich.

- All recurring underworld nemeses must at some point say to detective, "We're not so different, you and me."

- Hunches are always right.

- Detectives' strategic encroachments upon citizens' civil liberties must be frowned upon by preening, camera-hungry police chiefs, but then must be proven to be the only real way to "get things done."

- Detective may accidentally kill somebody, if the victim "deserved it"; however, detective must still beat him/herself up over it.

- If detective has children, they must be estranged.

- Detective must have special tavern/bar hideaway, preferably named after an animal.

- Witnesses who can't remember lots of details are idiots.

BONUS POINTS FOR ADDING THESE NONVITAL BUT USEFUL ELEMENTS!

- Detective staring into body of water

- Detective attending victim's funeral and gleaning valuable information

- Detective going through the "murder book" just one more time

- Street festival, town celebration, or huge benefit concert

- Big storm

- Detective's apartment ransacked and threatening message left behind

- Cryptic phone call that cuts out abruptly

- Effusive acknowledgements section naming dozens of helpful police officers

- Cover image of person in fog, hunched in a trenchcoat

- Seven-figure advance

Guardian List of Ignored Books

Perhaps the ultimate project of this blog ought to be appreciating the under-appreciated. The Guardian's list is interesting and even exciting, and I haven't read a thing on it (except for Flannery O'Connor, who must be under-appreciated in Britain). However, I've already checked abebooks.com -- some of these books will be a challenge to track down.

Whoops, I just noticed there's a page 2, and I have read a couple on that page -- Breece D'J Pancake's collection (mentioned here a couple months ago, I think) and, intriguingly, Mary Robison's strange, manic, and wonderful little novel Why Did I Ever. I first read her stories in college -- An Amateur's Guide to the Night is unforgettable, a masterpiece of 80's "minimalism" (I put that term in quotes because it doesn't really do justice to that whole decade's literature, but it's still apt. The stories are short and tightly constructed. How would they come off today, I wonder? Some books time-travel better than others.)

JRL will be pleased see that one of his favorites, Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, is there, too.

Of course, appreciating the under-appreciated is an endless task, since most books are completely ignored, and many, many good ones among them. A few more just came to mind:

Rachel Cusk's The Country Life: an extremely funny novel about a woman with a mysterious past who starts her life over as an au pair for an upper class family with a disabled son. The language is convoluted in places and the ending falls to pieces, but this is a highly original novel and great fun.

Kathryn Davis's Labrador: an imaginative and highly idiosyncratic novel about a pair of sisters and a polar bear. Davis is not everyone's cup of tea, for sure, but this is a wonderful book.

Charles Baxter's First Light seems to have been reprinted last year. Good! I think it's his best novel, though I feel bad saying so, since it was also his first. It's about an astrophysicist and her brother, and it goes backward in time. One wouldn't think that could work, but it does.

Lara Vapnyar's "Luda and Milena"

I don't have a great deal to say about this week's New Yorker story. It's about a couple of Russian ladies in their seventies, immigrants to New York and indistinguishable from one another, who take an English class together, grow to hate one another, and soon compete for the attention of a charming widower named Aron by cooking increasingly elaborate dishes for him to eat on the class's "International Feast" night. And at the end...he chokes on one of the dishes...and dies!

The story actually contains this passage:

Luda and Milena had, of course, heard that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, but they had never believed it. Aron Skolnik convinced them.

Sigh. I don't really want to take Lara Vapnyar to task, personally, as she's my age, in the same business as me, and has an impressive life story: having moved here from Russia in her twenties without any English, she has (like Nabokov, probably the best thing we ever got from Russia) mastered the language well enough in ten years to make a career of writing in it. But this is not an ambitious piece of work, is essentially sentimental in outlook, and depends upon the kind of hackneyed reversals of fortune that used to be the hallmark of fiction in, say, Cosmopolitan in the sixties.

Did the New Yorker publish it because it's, you know, immigrant-y? Is that enough? Am I even allowed to say that, being a guy who would, you know, love to be in the New Yorker more often? In any event, insofar as the New Yorker is considered to be among the last remaining mass-market outlets for "serious" fiction, I think they should have passed on a story in which the response to a man's choking to death on a yummy meatball is "And he died happy, didn't he?"

For Writers Who Need Ideas

Must be the end of the summer or something, but I feel about as inspired as an old sock. If you, too, need some new ideas, here are a few small goldmines of material:

The BBC asks people to talk about their unusual jobs

ListAfterList's list of some of the world's missing people

The endlessly fascinating Weird New Jersey

Room- and office-mate dysfunction at passiveaggressivenotes.com

How about culture-specific diseases?

CrimeLibrary, of course

Notes and ephemera at FOUND magazine

Hey, I'm thinking W6 needs some kind of a Writing Challenge. Any ideas? I'm clean out.

Odds -n- Ends

There are several things I've been wanting to post about, but none that warrant an entire post all to themselves--so here's a little clearinghouse of thoughts and recommendations.

First off, I just finished reading The Exception and wanted to throw in my two cents on top of Rhian's buck fifty from last week. This is really a terrific book, and I highly recommend it. As soon as I realized it was a novel about workplace bullying, I was instantly envious--this is an amazing subject, and Jungersen cleverly uses the microcosm of the office to explore big truths about the nature of evil. He also employs the bizarrely direct tactic of including little essays on the topic in the text of the novel, ostensibly written and published by the main characters. I must say I appreciated it; the essays were fascinating. My only complaint is that the ending, while it certainly satisfies as the culmination of a thriller, imposes itself from without, and I couldn't help but wish that the book had managed to wrap itself up without leaving the hothouse of its setting. In any event, a great read, and very scary.

Second, I wanted to recommend the Drawn & Quarterly Showcase series, a kind of short-fiction literary magazine for cartoonists. I've got books two and three and now need to go back and find the first one--great little stories from up and coming artists and writers, brimming with the vitality that this new art form seems to have an endless supply of.

Finally, and OK, this could have been its own post, but I can't think of enough good examples to support it, I'd like to say that product manuals just aren't what they used to be. Time was, you could buy something, and the manual would include a concise little history of that thing, and put the item into some kind of practical context. These days it isn't unusual for manuals (often poorly translated) to actually serve as an impediment to using the item, as is the case with the documentation for the Oregon Scientific WMR968 Cable Free Complete Weather Station, a great item that is almost impossible to install. I got this thing for Rhian for her birthday, and it is now working great, but it took me weeks to buckle down and figure it out, and the manual was no help at all, packed as it was with references to nonexistent parts, incorrect assembly techniques, and misleading usage tips.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you're into home audio recording, there are some great product manuals out there, like the free-to-download Mastering With Ozone guide, from iZotope, Inc. "Mastering" is the process music is put through before being committed to CD and sold in stores; it seeks to eliminate errors in the recording and give it greater impact when heard on your stereo. It's a rather arcane science, difficult and many-faceted, and this guide not only explains Ozone, the mastering software it serves as the manual for, but what mastering is, why it's done, and whether it's even necessary. It might be the best product manual I've ever read.

This is probably not likely to be very interesting to the average reader, but why can't your hammer come with something like this as well? Your toaster? Your coffee maker? Why can't manufacturers go the extra mile and provide a context for the stuff you own, making the experience of owning and using it more rich and interesting? Perhaps they feel that this would prevent you from throwing it out and buying another one in six months.

Can Publishing Be Better?

A little while back Literary Rejections on Display had some interesting stuff going on in the comments . A commenter who works in publishing wrote: "The publishing world is as good as it can be."

As someone who lived for ten years mostly off the fat of publishing-land, I'm not going to complain too loudly about it. But let me draw your attention to Exhibit A: The OJ Book.

Rejecting that book would have been a good first step toward rehabilitating the industry.

Audio Podcast: Willie Perdomo

School's begun again, so I'm back to posting interviews with writers on the Writers At Cornell blog. This time around I spoke with poet Willie Perdomo, the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996) and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), which won the 2004 PEN American Beyond Margins Award; he is also the author of Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, and has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry.

We talked about class, race, and culture; whether academic acceptance is a good thing for spoken word poetry; teaching writing to young people; and the classical origins of poetry performance. It's a quick download; give it a listen.

Books on Writing

Some of us are addicted to drugs; some to gambling. Others of us are addicted to books that tell us how to write. Not that there are many really good ones. Mostly they tell you how to write just like the author, which is not always helpful. Pretty much all Ray Bradbury says in Zen in the Art of Writing is to pick a noun each day, and write about that! It's not a bad exercise at all, but it is just an exercise. Bradbury might have thought he was writing all his stories that way, but since his stories stopped coming decades ago, maybe he should have looked more carefully at what was really going on. (I hate ragging on Bradbury, since his collections of stories blew my mind when I read them as a child, and I credit him with single-handedly stocking my imagination. But he turned into a bitter old conservative, so oh well.)

These books fall into two camps: the inspirational ones and the technical ones. Of the inspirational ones, there are two that everyone loves but me: Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg and Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott. I'm not a spiritual person and the authors' quasi-religious take on writing grates on me. Not that they don't have lots of good things to say -- they do -- but there is a definite emphasis on feeling good first. Eh. Feeling bad about yourself makes for better writing, if you ask me. Anyway, if you read Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write first, as I did, you might not need any more inspiration for the rest of your life. Ueland was an absolutely lunatic old woman -- lunatic in the best way. She believed that "Everyone is talented, original, and has something to say" and that the trick of it is being honest enough to figure out what that is.

John Gardner's books are a bit stuffy but excellent, too, though unfortunately I got them all out of the library and can't remember exactly why I liked them. William Stafford's books on poetry -- Writing the Australian Crawl is one -- are very good, too, though he was a bit of an insufferable old guy. He got up and wrote a poem every morning, whether he felt like it or not, or whether he had any good ideas or not. His point was that it wasn't his job to edit, but just to write. Fair enough! But he didn't have much patience for anyone who might have difficulty doing just that. Writers' block, he said in so many words, is just arrogance, what happens when a writer tries to be better than he is. Okay, I buy that. But some of his poems are awful. (I have one of his poems stuck over my desk. I don't have anyone else's poems tacked up, so there you have it: love/hate.)

While we're talking about poetry, I have to mention Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. I've never written poetry, actually, but this book makes me want to. Just thinking about it makes me want to. The title refers to Hugo's obsession with towns, particularly the towns of Washington and Montana, and how place informs and inspires writing.

All the above books offer an entire worldview in addition to, or all muddled up with, writing advice. One really terrific book that does NOT do that is Peter Elbow's Writing With Power. I first read it in high school (it was my dad's) and it is probably the one book, along with Elements of Style, whose advice, direction, and techniques I use every time I write (blogging not included, ahem. I don't think of blogging as writing. Is that weird?) even though I lost the book years ago. Elbow assumes you're inspired and have lots of things to say, and focuses instead on actually getting your ideas on paper, and then once you have them down, moving them around. I love it. It's refreshing and practical. He devotes a whole chapter to Nausea, the feeling you get when you reach the inevitable point when you begin to hate your writing. Hmm, maybe I should read that book again.

Your Writing, um, Habits

Back in the day, when Rhian and I were in grad school, the workshop was having a discussion about writing habits. Not as in when or how often we did it, but what we did when we were doing it. You know, you sit there for three hours--if you were typing the whole time, you'd do about thirty pages, and none of us ever manage that. No, you do other stuff--pick your nose, scratch your ass, read the news, whatever. Then you impulsively type, like, three sentences, and then you go back to picking your nose for half an hour, then you erase them all. And so on.

Anyway, back in workshop, one of our esteemed peers announced that masturbating was a regular part of the writing regimen. Good lord! We didn't want to know that!! Well...actually we did, and I personally am still glad to know it; and God forbid should I ever forget all my other memories of this person, that one will always remain.

My privates shall remain private here, but I will name some of the things I do while writing that aren't writing. Eating is a big one. On a big writing day, I always eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich right there at the computer. (Here, you can watch me do it in this video.) When I was writing my (still, and possibly permanently, unpublished) crime novel, I played a hell of a lot of Mr. Do!, using MAME on my laptop. I post incessantly on a messageboard for recording geeks, and often take ten-minute breaks to play a little guitar. The guitar playing is actually mentally useful anyway, as it draws on the mathematical part of the brain, leaving the language bit alone to recharge.

So what do you while away the empty minutes with? If it's masturbation, I don't think we want to know, although if any of you manages to have actual sex while writing, we could definitely put aside our squeamishness to admire your mad skills.

The Fate of Independent Book Stores

I spent the afternoon at a staff meeting for the book store I work in. It was at my boss's house and there was a nice spread: wine, shrimp, cookies. Some of us joked, Ha, ha, looks like a wake, is the store dead at last? But, to our surprise, it turns out the store is doing just fine. It's actually not in danger of closing, at all.

Wow! Even though a huge percentage of Americans read nothing but cereal boxes, TVGuide, and the Bible, even though hardcover books are overpriced, even though, thanks to the internet, you don't need to buy dictionaries or baby name books or travel guides anymore, even though Amazon has free shipping and the books show up in your mailbox, even though Barnes and Noble and Borders are just a couple miles away and have discounts, way more books, and acres of free parking... our little (but truly excellent) store is hanging in there. I almost can't believe it.

I think the reason it's surviving is because the people in our town really want it to. They want to live in a town with a real bookstore -- not just a book warehouse out on the highway. Independent bookstores are an organ of the town they're in: they're formed by the tastes of the town. Not everyone cares, of course. I've had friends argue strenuously in favor of the book warehouses, because of the obvious (lower prices and larger selection) but also because of their anonymity and uniformity. They want to get lost among the Dummies Guides and endless shelves of remainders, and they find the giant head of Jane Austen staring down at them to be vaguely reassuring. They dislike the way the owner of an independent store inevitably stamps the inventory with his or her personal taste. These friends also tend to believe that it's not their job to support a store, that the store should make them want to patronize it, and they should not have to sacrifice any kind of convenience just because a store happens to be independent rather than corporate-owned. They get a little bit pissed off if you imply otherwise.

I don't know. I hate chain stores. I hate entering a store in New York and feeling as if I could go out the door and find myself in Ohio. I hate the feeling of enormous psychic boredom I get when I look at those murals, or smell that Starbucky smell. I feel overwhelmed by the huge, spilling piles of books. Of course, I have a choice: I actually live in a town with a decent bookstore. When I lived in the rural south, I might have cried tears of bliss if a Borders showed up within an hour's drive of me.

As my boss, the store's owner, said, small bookstores have outlived their usefulness. But usefulness is not the only virtue.

T Cooper's "Swimming"

Well, I found it. I hadn't recycled it after all--it was sitting on the radiator next to the bed, underneath volume 16 of The Onion and a handbook on drum kits. So, a week late, I have read "Swimming," which I am afraid I really intensely dislike.

I don't want to overstate this, because I think T Cooper is possibly a very good writer. It's all in the rhythm--the story has a nice coiled-up energy to it, and repeats itself in musical ways, and feels precipitous, all fine things for it to be and do. But the story itself--the protagonist, the situation, the moral universe it inhabits--seems odious to me.

The narrator is an American living in Cambodia. He moved there after he backed over and killed his own son with the car, and his wife left him. He's a doctor, and his manner is casual and numb, until his anger comes spurting out in random ways. He states that his accidental murder of his child has given him "the right to fuck the youngest, hottest girl with the tightest pussy in town and make her fall in love with me and yet bear no responsibility toward her or her family beyond shuttling them to the clinic when their grandchild was ill."

In other words, he's an asshole. The assholitude, I think we are supposed to understand, is in some kind of compensation for his guilt. At the story's end, he seems to be supposed to be learning some lesson by gagging on some sharkmeat while hearing about his girlfriend's father's escape from the Khmer Rouge, but I dunno--it seems like horseshit to me.

The thing is, a guy who killed his own son doesn't sound like this, would not be telling this particular story in this breezy way, because who is he telling? Who would listen? Guilt is hard to write about, and I feel that Cooper isn't bothering--he's writing about displaced guilt instead, and anybody with a laptop can displace guilt onto any emotion he likes, and run with it. The dead kid is an excuse for the displacement riff--it's not a real experience, it's not real guilt.

I can think of two stories you should read instead--Lorrie Moore's horrifying "Terrific Mother," about a woman who accidentally kills her friend's child; or, better still, Andre Dubus's fantastic "The Doctor" (is that in fact the title? I don't have it in the house, I think that's it), about a doctor who fails to save the life of a drowning child trapped under a heavy stone in a creek, and then later sees a garden hose, slices off a twelve-inch length of it, and stows it in the trunk of his car. Simple, beautiful, and perfect.

I admire Cooper's ambition here, because it's damned hard to write a story that starts the way this one does. And I will gladly read more of his stuff. But--and I say this as a guy who imagines backing over one of his kids every time he gets into a car and will probably do so long after they've grown and moved away--this one eluded me.

UPDATE: Well this is interesting!! Rhian remembers "The Doctor" differently--she recalls the garden hose already being in his trunk--thus making him more culpable for the child's death. Who's got this story handy? Maybe we're both wrong!

The Exception, by Christian Jungersen

W6 pal Jeffrey Frank has written a review of this terrific novel that pretty much covers anything I would have to say about it, except for one thing: its non-Americanness. Though it's a psychological thriller, which is a pretty familiar genre for an American reader, the differences between this Danish novel and a hypothetical American one about the same subject show how much of what we read is more or less formulaic. Even in much of our so-called literary fiction, characters are developed in a certain way, with a predictable mix of "sympathetic" and "flawed"; "plot points" are meted out at regular intervals; dialogue always serves the same functions, etc. A book like this one, which is in many ways very much like an American thriller (there are bad guys, and guns), is just different enough to draw attention to the staleness of some of our habits.

The novel's about four women who work at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide, whose workplace-persecution of each other reflects, and is possibly a result of, the subject of their work. As the relationships between the women become more and more strained, Jungersen includes articles on the psychology of evil written by one of them (all interesting). The novel is about the ways people deceive themselves and allow themselves to be cruel -- and it really is about that, working at the problem from different angles, examining it closely (how someone might rationalize snubbing a coworker) and from afar (why populations decide to wipe each other out).

Anyway, I'm interested to see how it fares here in the US. What will Americans think about a book that draws parallels between office bullying and genocide?

Daniyal Mueenuddin's "Nawabdin Electrician"

So...I think I missed a week of the New Yorker story there...it's recycling day too, and I wonder if it has already been trucked off to the shredder. In any event, the new issue arrived yesterday and I read this story on the bus this morning, while trying desperately to shut out the blaring country music with nothing more sophisticated than my mind.

This one's a winner. Mueenuddin doesn't have a book out--he's described on the bio page as a former New York City lawyer who now lives in Pakistan, where the story also takes place. It's about a rural electrician, entrepreneur, and all-around handyman named Nawab, who ostensibly works for the local absentee landowner but is known by all as the guy who can fix the electricity meters so they run more slowly. He rides around on a bicycle, and later a motorcycle, and is the father of thirteen children.

There is a subtle, deeply irritating, and condescending tone that some writers fall into when they write about working-class characters, especially "colorful" ones. This is inevitable, I suppose, as most writers either have never been working-class themselves, or, alternately, grew up working-class but have since gotten educated and have mixed feelings about their relationship to their origins. I'll even go so far as to say that class consciousness is one of the most important and most ignored elements in contemporary fiction. In any event, it's not unusual to see a writer struggling with the topic without seeming to be aware that's what he's doing; the result is a kind of patronizing cuteness that mars the authority of the narrative.

Zadie Smith is one writer who handles this issue well. Chekhov was another. This guy, Daniyal Mueenuddin, is also good at it--"Nawabdin Electrician" is quiet and assured, serious in tone, yet funny. Moreover, Mueenuddin brings this firm hand to bear upon a character who, in less skillful hands, might come off as ridiculous. As written, Nawab is a fascinating figure, a goofy person whom Mueenuddin entrusts, at the story's conclusion, with a difficult decision. Nawab makes the decision swiftly and mercilessly, revealing a deep hardness to his character only hinted at before.

The writing style is sophisticated but straightforward, a strong third limited that lifts itself up into omniscience from time to time for some selective and useful contextual detail; it is at its best when unpacking character and place, as this little gem of a sentence about Nawab's aquisition of a motorcycle:

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing.

The narrative goes on to describe the road Nawab now takes home to his wife, explaining, in a quick excursion 150 years into the past, how it came to be lined with the dying trees the motorcycle is passing beneath. It's a lovely blend of good humor and narrative privilege, and really effective.

This is my favorite New Yorker story in a while, and I'll be looking forward to the collection Mueenuddin is said to be working on.

Books I Never Finished

I've heard of people who finish every book they start, and I admire those people. My own record is pretty bad, though -- lately I finish maybe half of what I start, and not always through any fault of the book itself. There are actually some very good books on the bottom shelf of my bedside table, where those poor abandoned volumes end up. Here are the latest, both good and not so good:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I love this book -- what I've read of it, anyway. I've been reading it for years, each time getting a bit further, but I might have gotten as far as I'm going to get: I skipped the final third and read the end. Somewhere about halfway through the book Hans Castorp falls in love with a woman, and it's about the least convincing depiction of loving a woman I've ever read. It's all about her arms, and the medical stuff gets mixed in, and it all became hard to stomach. (The ending is incredible, though.)

Apathy by Paul Neilan. I got this book because I liked the title and cover (image of a mens-room icon guy shooting himself in the head) and because page 69 starts like this:

on the too-high seat it felt like I was riding a slinky down a flight of uneven stairs. Only the front brakes worked so whenever I stopped short I was almost thrown over the handlebars, and the front brakes didn't work in the rain so I had to stop by dragging my feet on the ground like fucking Fred Flintstone.

Pretty fun, but I kind of forgot to read it. Maybe I had a tiny intimation that it *probably* isn't my thing, but I never got far enough to find out. Soon I will give it another chance.

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. I hoped this would be another big, juicy, trashy book like Valley of the Dolls, but it isn't. It's sordid and depressing. Oh, well.

Lay of the Land by Richard Ford. I got maybe a quarter or a third of the way through this before feeling awfully bogged down. I loved Independence Day, but the beginning of this novel is all driving around, and around, and around. JRL tells me it picks up shortly after I left off and becomes excellent, so I should definitely try again.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I enjoyed it for a while, but then it began to feel claustrophobic. I would certainly have finished it if I were on a plane or a bus, but since there were other books begging to be read...

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. I bought this book to read to my kids, thinking that since it won the Newbery it couldn't be that bad. It is. It's dreadful. I stuck it out for four nights, and then I said, Kids, I can't take it anymore. It's a "romantic fairytale" about a mouse who falls in love with a princess, told in a smirky, winky, pleased-with-itself voice. I just didn't think you could write about princesses without acknowledging the essential lameness of the princess thing, but apparently you can.

Gosh. That's more than I thought...