August 2014

I read:

• Izzy, Willy Nilly: 80s YA written by someone who I don’t believe has ever actually met or was ever a teenager, or, when they were a teenager, were a teenager like me, quiet, studious, asleep each Saturday night by nine to be awake for church at eight. Every character has one trait and one trait only. No one has depth. But the book is a hardcover from the library and smells the way old hardcovers from the library do (the rotting bookbinding glue) so I breathe it in. But then the story is full of girls who only care about being pretty and popular, so I am sad again. Why is Izzy so concerned with giving Rosamunde a makeover? Rosamunde doesn’t want one. Being pretty isn’t everything.
• After the Fire, A Still Small Voice: A so what? book, i.e. I got to the end and thought so what? Beautiful writing doesn’t make up for characters whose change is so subtle that I guess I missed it. The same at the beginning, the same at the end.

  Also, this is very, unapologetically Australian novel. I spent much time on http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html to decipher what was going on. Australians. Reminds me of Costa Rica and the Australians I worked with, people who have faded from me in the ten years since then. There are days when I would give anything to go back to that. So I think of this book and I yearn for nothing that this book even touched on, other than people who live in another hemisphere where summer and winter are reversed, people who get long summer breaks over Christmas.

• The Language of Flowers: A book that kept raising my hopes, but then would veer into melodrama and over-explanation. So I’d get frustrated and want to quit, but it was for book club so I kept going. To be fair, I would have kept going anyway. Books like this make me wonder what happened to editors.
• The One and Only: Each time I complain about Jane Austen, I always say that I feel like I’m reading the 1810’s chick-lit. Then I wonder if the chick-lit of today is going to end up classic 2010’s novels of manners in the same way. I hope not, especially since that would mean books like The One and Only will stick around for ever. I didn’t mind the other Emily Giffen books nearly as much as this one, which I’m close to despising. Perhaps its the very-and-obviously-so photoshopped author’s photo (although this may be a marketing decision). I don’t care what my author’s look like. Maybe it’s the issue of the week feel with the domestic abuse/violence in sports situation, which, rather than natural, feels like someone told her to pick and issue to lend your book gravitas and manipulate your readers into thinking that this is a serious novel. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I liked Emily Giffen better when she was writing silly books about people in farcical situations.
  
  In any case, I think this will be the last Emily Giffen book I read.
• Secret of Grim Hill: Some children’s books are enjoyable for adults (like Roald Dahl). Some less so. This one is less so.
• Walking Dead Compendium One: You know how you read about cults and fringe groups how they normalize the crazy. Everything starts out normal and then small changes and more small changes until you are in all the way and don’t realize it. I keep feeling that The Walking Dead is kind of like a MRA-misogynistic version of that, like it’s trying to nudge your thinking that way. Or maybe I’m overthinking it and Robert Kirkman is just a dick.
• The Westing Game: I hadn’t read this in a long time. It’s still engaging, but maybe I stayed engaged because I remember a world without cellphones. This is one of those novels where a lot could have been solved in minutes with cellphones.
• School for Good and Evil: Probably fitting that a book about being either good or evil ends up being neither with a bunch of muddled motivations and characters. Tries to subvert fairy tale essentials, but then ends up reinforcing them (most glaringly the good/beautiful evil/ugly dichotomy) alongside a heavy-handed subplot with GLBTQ overtones regarding love. Plus the endless italics and ambiguous pronouns getting in the way. Verdict: One of those books that I want to just take and fix it by rewriting it myself. It’s like How did this ever get published at the same time as I’m so jealous I didn’t think of this first.
• Lemony Snicket #1: The Bad Beginning: As I mentioned before, I am really liking Lemony Snicket. I always think of the writer/storyteller divide. Some writers are writers and some are storytellers (yes, I know it’s confusing that a writer could not be a writer. I’m used to this nonsense considering a did a PhD in Combinatorial Game Theory where game means a set of mathematical objects that satisfy some certain conditions, the ruleset for a specific game, or a position within a game depending on the context). Some are both. J.K. Rowling is a storyteller (I think, I haven’t read Harry Potter in years): you’re reading Harry Potter for the plot, not for the language. But Lemony Snicket, I’m reading for both. It amuses both me and Tesfa.
• Niko: Q: How does a five (out of five) star novel become a three (out of five) star novel? A: Have a protagonist suddenly be struck with amnesia on page 143. We’re not a novel in from the 1800s. Amnesia as a plot device has been thoroughly played out. Then have the last twenty pages have dialogue that sounds like it was written by a computer AI from the 1980s. This seems to be the month of book disappointment for me. Maybe it’s less the books. Maybe I’m just sour this month.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

I’ve read some good reviews. So there it is.

I watched:

• The Mindy Project: I am rewatching The Mindy Project is a very obsessive way.
• Southcliffe: I watched one episode. I might watch more when Tesfa is back in school.
• The Hunger Games: Oh my this movie stressed me out, even though I’d read the books and knew what would happen. I’m still stressed out now, a few days later. I need to stop getting so emotionally involved in movies.
  
  Right before we started watching, I saw our DVD of The Princess and The Warrior sitting on the shelf of DVDs that we have yet never watch. Maybe it was because of that glimpse, but I had the same feelings about the male protagonists of both movies – I would never see how he could be attractive, but by the end, I was like “Yeah, I can see it.” So yeah, I would totally, in an age-appropriate way, see how Peeta would be attractive. I think, even if I hadn’t read the book, I would have got the subtext, that Katniss is convincing herself, at some level, to play the audience in regards to her and Peeta. I remember reading articles about that when the movie came out. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Who knows. Yay movies!

I wrote: Nothing. See here.

But, my chapbook, which I submitted to The Rusty Toque Chapbook contest got an Honourable Mention (I got an email about that this morning, will link to announcement when it goes public). Any publishers looking for a chapbook, I’ve got one with an honourable mention all ready for you.