Arcadia Falls

I finished the latest Carol Goodman novel, Arcadia Falls, last night.  It was quintessential Carol Goodman - a woman teaching at a boarding school, a murder, an old mystery with echoes in the present, details about art history, a police officer love interest... I could write a computer program that would create the plot of a Carol Goodman novel MadLibs-style, which sounds mean, though I don't intend it to.  I like these books.  She's reliable.  And although I can predict the overall themes, I can't predict what precisely will occur in a given book (who the murderer is, who's hiding something, etc.).  I like her writing, and I like discovering those things.

One thing I noticed in Arcadia Falls is how current her cultural references are.  The main character has a seventeen-year-old daughter, so there are lots of mentions of iPods, Anthropologie, texting, bands like The Decemberists and The Vivian Girls, and other of-the-moment stuff.  It's weird, because that should make the story seem more real, and yet I felt distracted by it.  Maybe it was because I kept thinking about how out-of-date that will make the book seem in a few years.

Overall, it was a good one - not my favorite of hers, but enjoyable nevertheless.  Enjoyable enough that I stayed up till 2:30am last night to finish it.  Should you read it? If you like her books, or like any of the themes she focuses on, then yeah, sure.  It's a quick read, too.

Up next? Another book of P.G. Wodehouse's short stories about Jeeves.

The dress!

I finished my 1940s dress yesterday morning, about half an hour before I had to leave for my cousin's wedding.  Things got rushed towards the end - the hem certainly could've gone better (it is significantly shorter in the back than in the front), and some weird twisty things happened along the back of the neck, but overall, it's cute.  It's an actual dress; I wore it all night, ate in it and danced in it and drove in it, and it didn't fall apart.  This was my first attempt at anything more complicated than a cotton sundress, so despite its flaws, I'm happy.

I'm the one on the right.

Types of Reading

Different types of reading I do, from best to worst:

1. Reading a novel for fun.  

A good novel is so engrossing, so wonderful.  When I put one down, I really feel like I'm leaving a physical (and temporal) place.

2. Reading a nonfiction book for fun.

Here, and with the novels as well, I only mean books that I actually like, not any random nonfiction book.  There are lots of cool nonfiction books out there (I tend towards the ones about physics or math), but they don't usually have the plot urgency of novels that makes reading them feel like a compulsion.  Also in this category are cookbooks.  I love to read cookbooks while I eat, I don't know why.

3. Reading an article/blog post online

I learn a lot of cool stuff on the internet: what are some good independent films, how to feel more peaceful (one tip I keep reading is to always make your bed), what it's like having a child with autism, how it feels to live in China as an American, etc.  

4. Reading info online

This takes up a lot of my time.  By "info" I mean getting movie times, responding to student emails, searching for a house to rent on craigslist, learning how to conjugate "to bark" in Dutch, etc.  All important stuff, some of it absolutely necessary, but it fills up hours quickly - and it's not exactly fun.

5. Reading comments on articles online

The intelligence signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low on this one.  Is the best use of my time really reading what some random teenager thinks of Transformers 2, or what some random woman thinks Prudie should have said in her advice to the sister of the bride?  No, it really isn't.  And yet a disturbing amount of my time gets sucked up in that fashion.

My goal? For one week, starting tomorrow, I'm going to track how much I read (and correspond - so if I am posting a blog entry or writing back to a student, that counts), and what category that reading falls into.  Then I'll make up a nice excel pie chart or something, and display it - most likely so we can all be horrified that I somehow manage to spend 25 hours a day reading old movie reviews on The AVClub...

Hooked Now

I love it when you reach that point in a book that previously hadn't quite grabbed you when you realize you  cannot put it down.  I hit that point with The Good German.  It's fast-paced, it's a mystery, it's a wrenching portrait of post-war Berlin (for example, one minor character is a Jewish woman who saved her own life by ratting out other Jews, and even her portrayal is three-dimensional enough that you ache for her).  I love it.

I can't really talk about the plot, because almost anything revealed would be a spoiler.  So let me just say it's great.  Occasionally Kanon's many characters are hard to keep track of (this was a bigger problem in Stardust) but about a quarter of the way in, I had everyone pretty set in my head.  So no big problems.  And for once the central romance is between people who are roughly the same age!

Slow Progress

I'm working on The Good German, but it's slow going.  I like it, but for some reason I'm just not picking it up that much.  It takes place in Berlin right after the end of World War II, as the Americans, British, and Russians are trying to put the city back together.  The main character, Jake, is an American journalist who previously served in the army in Berlin, and left a (married) woman he loved there.  Now, of course, he's trying to find her.  And while looking for her, he stumbles upon a murdered man, a G.I., who's pockets are stuffed with cash.

I like it.  I've never given a lot of thought to what it must have been like in Berlin after the end of the war, the amount of destruction.  But it's slow going.

Whole Foods article

After reading my thoughts on grocery shopping, a friend sent me a link to this USA Today article on Whole Foods.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/usatoday31005.cfm

Apparently an Austin Whole Foods has been revamped and made into a "shopping experience." The writer compares it to Disney World, where there are separate little lands (one for sweets including a chocolate fountain, one for veggies where you can also sit and have a salad, etc.).  It sounds gimmicky, but it also sounds AWESOME.

Grocery Shopping

When I moved into my first apartment, grocery shopping was exciting.  My roommate and I would drive to the store at midnight because we'd suddenly decided we needed blueberries, or cereal, or microwave popcorn ASAP.  I enjoyed making lists, picking things out, examining the produce.  This was also in the days when I enjoyed writing out checks to pay my bills.  It was like "Hey, I'm an adult! Cool!"

I've been buying groceries and paying bills for long enough that the novelty has worn off.  I still usually enjoy cooking, and I love food, but grocery shopping has gotten to be a real drag.  Something in me protests at the idea of walking through a huge, cold supermarket, racing around trying to speed things up and inevitably forgetting some staple.  These stores are just too big.  

Woodman's is the cheapest in my area, and also the biggest.  It's like a small village.  My usual choice is Copp's, of moderate size and price, comparable to a Jewel or an Eagle in other cities.  It's fine, I guess, but I still hate being in there.  I go to Trader Joe's sometimes, and it's nice because it's small (and there's always a sample of some sort), but they don't have everything I need or all the brands I like, and their produce selection is bad.  There's also the local co-op, which similarly doesn't have all I want (I can be very particular), although their produce is great.

So okay, we have a Whole Foods, which I used to go to more, but haven't so much lately.  We all know it: "Whole Paycheck", right?  I've been avoiding it in an attempt to save some money.  But I stopped in the other day just to pick up some tamarind paste (it's the only place in town that has it, and I was making the tamarind lentils in The Veganomicon, my favorite cookbook).  I ended up buying fifty dollars worth of groceries! (And no, the paste alone was not fifty dollars.  I got a couple bags of stuff.)  More importantly, I sort of enjoyed myself.

Why? Well, they have a ton of samples, just a ton.  I had mango slices and orange slices and chips with salsa and little cubes of cheese from a local farm, among other things.  I happened to go at a time of day when it wasn't too crowded.  It's an attractive store.  And, perhaps most importantly, it's pretty small.  I realize that these qualities are not important to everyone, but they apparently matter to me.  I felt good while shopping, felt good unpacking my things when I got home, and felt good cooking them.  

Their products are not the most economical, but they're fun.  Whole Foods has my tamarind paste, it has bulk spices, it has lots of local leafy greens.  My imagination runs wild creating theoretical meals.

I am well-aware that if I had bought similar items at Copp's it would've been cheaper by at least several dollars.  But - isn't there a cost associated with the quality of my experience?  Isn't it worth paying a little more to leave the store feeling excited about my new foods, not stressed out and irritable?

I realize not everyone is in a position to spend lots on groceries.  It's a privilege, and really it's not like I have bunches of money burning holes in my pocket.  But I don't have a car payment right now, I have no credit card debt, I manage to put money into savings every month - those things are enough for me to feel justified spending more than is absolutely necessary on food.  I may not go to Whole Foods for every shopping trip, but will definitely go more than I have been.

Perhaps sometime I'll compare prices on specific items between Copp's and Whole Foods, and put an exact dollar amount on my grocery-shopping happiness.

New Shoes

For the past two summers I've had a pair of blue sandals that I loved.  They were made by Pink Studio,  turquoise flats with medium-width straps - perfection.  I've adored them.  The back strap (the slingback part of them) broke last fall, so I finally took them to be fixed about a month ago, when I was getting a zipper fixed on one of my boots.  The shoemaker (cobbler?) told me he had a garbage can in the corner for them.  Not only was the back strap broke, but the soles were worn down, the straps were stretched and cracked and old - he had a point.  Mostly I trusted him because I figured he'd fix them if at all possible, just to get my money.  If he wasn't, I knew they must be pretty bad.

You can see them on me in the photo below (you can also see my sister's super-awesome gray high heels and my mom's cute gold flats):

Today I bought new blue sandals.  Not only are they awesome and seemingly sturdier than my last pair, they are the exact shade of the dress I'm in the process of sewing (nearly done!).  Admire them below.

The End of Oscar

I stayed up late to finish The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao last night.  Man.  It was really good - at first I thought it was pretty funny, but as I made progress through the book it seemed more and more serious.  I still have a couple questions about how some things actually happened, but overall I felt satisfied at the ending (if sad).

I had never heard of Rafael Trujillo before, the Dominican dictator from 1930 to 1961 (when he was assassinated).  What a monster - a tyrannical, megalomaniacal murderer.  There's so much I didn't know: his army slaughtered over 20,000 Haitians in a massacre, he had secret police, he had his opponents tortured and killed, he took young women from their families for himself... Ugh.  The whole book didn't focus on him (at least half took place in the 1980s in New Jersey), but enough history was in there to horrify and educate me.

I start The Good German by Joseph Kanon next.  I already read his book Stardust last year - a good thriller  woven in with the beginnings of McCarthyism.  I look forward to this next one.  It was made into a movie in 2006, and it got good reviews, so I take it as a good sign.  Aren't books always better than movies based on them?

On a related note: as a ten-year-old I read the novelization of "Batman Returns" and thought it was a book about Batman that the movie was based on.  It was one of my favorite books.

Small woes, big skirt

I moved on to the skirt of the dress I'm sewing, finished sewing it - did not attach it to the bodice yet - and realized it's HUGE.  Like maybe 6 sizes too big.  I have no idea why.  The bodice fits perfect, and yet the skirt is just hilarious.  Luckily, it will be really easy to alter.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao remains awesome, keeping me up way too late at night.  So far there have been four different sections, narrated by different characters - two about Oscar, one about his sister, one about his mother.  It's captivating.

White Sox lost tonight, but the season opener was fantastic - a shutout, and Mark Buehrle pulled off the neatest play - throwing the ball backwards from between his legs, and Paulie caught it.  Great.

Oscar WOW!

I started The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz last night.  I've been meaning to read it for over a year, but couldn't commit to buying it for some reason.  Well, I got it out of the library, and based on what I read last night, I better buy myself a copy to own, because it's fantastic.

I'm about a third of the way through - very tired today, although it didn't help that one of my greyhounds was shaking in my bed afraid of the thunderstorm for half the night.

It's about Oscar, a Dominican Republic immigrant who lives with his family in Paterson, NJ.  He's a nerd, unpopular - and Diaz really gets this right.  Oscar is like the nerdy kids I've known, not some sanitized version that just likes math, or plays chess, or has glasses or something.  He's obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and a bunch of other books I honestly haven't even heard of. He has no sense of how to talk to girls, he's overweight but won't bother to exercise, he stays inside - you can tell when a character is true or not, and Oscar is true, he's real.

The story is told in a mix of geeky references (which I love, when I get them), profane slang, and Spanish.  In addition to charting the lives of one Dominican family, it's also acting as a quickie course in Carribean history for me.  This sentence is a good example:

"In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe's most efficient ringwraiths."

It's funny, it's fast-paced, it's moving - here's the problem.  It's made no secret that Oscar dies (hey, the word "brief" is in the title) when still a teenager.  I have no idea how, but I don't like it.  I hate having characters I care about die.  I just hope it's earned, and not the sort of thing done solely to tug on people's heartstrings.

Another one bites the dust

I finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle this morning instead of grading papers, which meant I had to grade while out watching the White Sox season opener (5-0 good guys).  It was less than ideal, but hey, books have to be read.

I liked it a lot.  It had a really unsettling tone, and I spent the whole time waiting for answers and dreading what would happen.  But I wanted a bit more.  Yes, I got answers, but I really wanted one character's motivation for something, unless I somehow missed it.  (Sorry for being vague, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers.)

Should you read it? If you like creepy stuff, sure.  It's a really quick read.  And then maybe you and I can discuss whether things at the end were clear or not.

Finished one, started another

So I finished A Beautiful Math last night.  It was pretty good, but my enthusiasm was waning in the last half of the book.  I would've liked at least a little explanation of the background math - the author treated everything at a pretty surface level.  But I'm a physics teacher, so for the average, non-sciencey reader, it could be perfect.  Should you read it? Well, if game theory sounds interesting to you, and you aren't looking for anything rigorous, yes, go for it.

I also started We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.  The only thing I knew of Shirley Jackson's before this was "The Lottery," that creepy short story (if you haven't heard of it, I won't spoil the end, but it's super creepy, let me just say that).  So far this book is creepy as well.  Mary Katherine lives with her older sister and handicapped uncle in a big house removed from their village.  The villagers hate them, and I've just found out that it has something to do with Constance, the older sister, being accused (and acquitted) of murdering the rest of the family.  Yipes.  It's short - I should have it done today and will report back.

I have completed the bodice on the 1940s dress I'm making.  The skirt should be done soon.  So far, it's awesome.