Let's try this again

I posted this yesterday, but apparently it wasn't an authorized version and YouTube took it down. The actual creators seem to have posted this one, so here's hoping. Enjoy!

The blogger plays catch-up

Hello. Remember me? I am Ellen the Freelance Ne’er-do-well, but other than monthly book reviews a more accurate description lately would be Ne’er-blog-well. Herewith, the harrowing yet somehow tedious history of the past four months or so.

I'll do it backwards. Not, however, in high heels. (If you're under, oh, say, 45--and therefore perfectly capable of reading tiny type--this is a reference to the dancer Ginger Rogers, who "did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and in high heels.")

First, SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS has a new cover. I say “new” because this is the third one I’ve seen, and I understand there was yet another that I never saw. This is, fortunately, the best of the bunch. See?

Gorgeous, right? Plus, I’m told there will be glitter. I’ve never been a glitter sort of person—more denim and fleece. But clearly fleece fairies weren’t going to cut it.

The book comes out January 20, so it’s a fair bet that it’s gone to press now. If I bolt upright at midnight and realize that something makes absolutely no sense, I’ll just have to live with it.

Working backward through the ages, we reach the cider-pressing at the John household. We all brought apples—I stole some from our summertime neighbors’ tree—which got dumped into a grinder and then squished so the juice ran into a bucket and the apples were a juiceless pulp. If you’ve never tasted minutes-old cider, I’d suggest you try putting yourself into that position next fall.

What you see below is Rob and Nathan John running around and around to wind down the squisher.*

Let’s see. Still earlier, there’s Labor Day Weekend's Blue Hill Fair, which we attended en mass with friends. What I always like best is the juxtaposition of large animals, kids (the one in the middle is trimming her goat's toenails*), tractors, and honky-tonk. Oh, and french fries.

In the “no fool like an old fool” division, Rob and our friend Michael spent all their free time last spring building radio-controlled model sailboats. They sailed the boats, fending off interested canines, when Michael and his wife Linda visited in August.

And, for truly heart-rending nostalgia in deepest, darkest November, here's Rob and our friend Lisa watching the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta the first Saturday in August—all wooden boats, many of them vintage. Every year we kayak out to an island to eat lunch and watch the boats go by. This year the wind was so good we actually watched the boats come back, too, which is what’s going on here.

And now it’s 4 p.m., cold and dark as a witch’s armpit. But I’m going to see the new Harry Potter film tomorrow night (speaking of witches), and Thursday we hobnob and eat and drink. So who’s complaining?

*Technical term.

November Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

We got our first killing frost last night at Castle Ne'er-do-well, so it's definitely time to hunker down. If you're already sick of the blip-bleet-blip of video games, try this one on your reluctant reader. Or grab it yourself for a laugh.

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid
By Jeff Kinney
Amulet Books, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8109-9313-6

The Wimpy Kid series spawned a movie last spring that’s out on DVD now, but that’s not why I chose it for this month’s review book. I chose it because of Arthur (not his real name).

A student at our local elementary school, Arthur’s an imaginative, potentially talented kid who doesn’t like to read—not the first I’ve run into, I’m sorry to say. In Arthur’s case, the chief competition is video games, surprise, surprise. He and I worked together on a short story last year, and I tried like hell to get him to read a book that was kind of the same genre as the story he was writing. He politely took the book home and just as politely ignored it. He told me he’d never read a book outside of school. Not once.

This year, he said he’d like to write something funny. So we went to the library and found DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, the first book of what will be a five-book series as of November 9. I got my hands on a copy of my own, and we agreed we’d read a chapter a week and discuss it briefly when we met.

Last week, he announced that he’d finished the book ahead of schedule and wanted to start the second. He’d gotten bored on a Saturday and picked it up, he said, and all of a sudden he’d finished it. He suggested he might finish the second one by the time he saw me today. He’s not a fan of the movie.

Author Jeff Kinney was at the Boston Book Festival a couple of weekends ago, which I attended. I went to another panel instead of his, but now I wish I’d sought him out and kissed his feet. It’s not for nothing that this book has a “Maine Student Book Award Winner” sticker on the front—that award is voted by Maine school kids, and this is obviously a kid-friendly book.

I mean, just look at it. The typeface is fun but readable, and the cartoons are hysterical. I often managed to read through a scene without inhaling my hot beverage, only to choke half to death when I saw the drawing that accompanied the action.

This first book is the sad tale of narrator Greg Heffley’s first year in middle school, which he describes as “the dumbest idea ever invented. You got kids like me who haven’t hit their growth spurt yet mixed in with these gorillas who need to shave twice a day.”

In middle school, someone like Greg is acted upon more than acting. Parents, older brother, teachers, bigger or more popular kids—they’re the ones with the power. We share Greg’s abortive attempts to control his own destiny, whether by running for class treasurer (in a smear campaign involving head lice) or by joining the safety patrol in order to get hot chocolate and miss some pre-algebra.

The great thing about his odyssey is that Kinney allows us to see where Greg’s going wrong without one single word of preachiness.

At one point, Greg allows his dopey best friend Rowley to take the fall when one Mrs. Irvine reports a Safety Patrol member terrorizing the kindergarteners in his charge. He admits to Rowley that he was the culprit, having borrowed Rowley’s coat.

“Then I told him there were lessons we could both learn from this. I told him I learned to be more careful about what I do in front of Mrs. Irvine’s house, and that he learned a valuable lesson, too, which is this: Be careful about who you lend your coat to.”

To Greg’s indignation, Rowley turns him in. He loses Rowley’s friendship for a while, eventually gaining it back. We know he’s being punished for being evil, but Greg never admits to the connection. He’s a modern-day Tom Sawyer.

My friend Arthur thinks he’s awesome.

October Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

We had a spectacular summer here in New England, but now reality is closing in. The leaves are changing, the days are shorter, and there's a small evening fire in the wood stove. It's a funny time of year--we're sad that summer's over, a little worried about the darkness and the cold, but also looking forward to hunkering down by the fire and taking a break from the good times. No wonder Banned Book Week is in October--anybody who tries to take a book away from me right now gets whopped with an over-sized zucchini.

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The Catcher in the Rye
By JD Salinger
Little, Brown & Co, 1951

Last week was Banned Books Week, in which we pay particular attention to what seems to be a particularly American pastime: Trying to prevent other people’s children from reading books you don’t want your own kids to read. We spend a lot of time in this country arguing about “government interference in our lives.” Fairly often, it seems that those who argue against Big Government are the very same ones trying to control other people’s reading. Go figure.

Anyway, in honor of the season, last week I re-read JD Salinger’s THE CATCHER IN THE RYE in the battered 1961 Signet paperback I last opened in high school. (Book hoarder? Me?) CATCHER is number two on the American Library Association’s list of frequently banned classics, right after THE GREAT GATSBY. I’m baffled why GATSBY is so frequently targeted, but I certainly understand why CATCHER strikes terror into the ultra-conservative breast. Along with John Updike and John Cheever and a few others, Salinger helped to terrify me away from the buttoned-down, suburban, 2.5-kids lifestyle my parents would have preferred for me. They did the same for most of a generation.

To understand why, you have to understand the uneasy world we Baby Boomers shared with protagonist Holden Caulfield—no more terrifying than this one, but maybe a bit weirder because everybody was so intent on creating an illusion of regularity and safety. Our parents had kept Hitler and Emperor Hirohito from our shores, but now The Bomb defied armies and oceans. Our country was in what seemed like an endless war to contain the Communist Menace; meanwhile, unpleasant men with five-o’clock shadow tried to root the Reds out of our own society. It was important to keep reality at bay: Body odor of any kind was our enemy, euphemism was king, bellies were girdled, and heaven forbid that women’s breasts should sag or wobble or look anything like actual breasts.

Then along came Holden, a kindly, befuddled teenager trying desperately not to become a “phony” like the adults and most of the other adolescents in his world. He swears, drinks, and thinks a lot about sex—and of course real kids never did any of that. About to be kicked out of his umpty-umpth prep school, he sets out for a picaresque couple of days in New York City, its wet, cold streets teeming with pimps and whores and barflies and would-be pederasts.

The story’s told first person, from the mental hospital where Holden ends up. You don’t know what will happen to him—maybe he’ll avoid phonyhood, but maybe he won’t. The reason we care so much is Holden’s voice, because he’s us. Nowadays, we’re used to a narrator talking the way we do, with all the halts and repetitions and verbal ticks of real life. Back in the Sixties, when I first met Holden, his voice was a revelation. It was like reading somebody’s actual diary, except the writer was brilliant at story-telling.

I knew Holden was me and I was Holden. I suspect that at least three-quarters of the audience at Woodstock had exactly the same experience.

I’m not saying there would have been no hippies or back-to-the-landers or lifelong Democrats without Holden—there were plenty of other factors at work. All I’m saying is that I’m grateful Holden was there when I needed him, grateful my parents bought that book (and Updike and Cheever) even though it contributed to their daughter’s headlong flight from their lifestyle—and even though the climate of the times was such that my town’s school board banned THE SCARLET LETTER. (As Holden would say: Really. They really did.)

I’m grateful no one prevented my parents from letting me read whatever I wanted. Happy belated Banned Book Week, Holden.

September Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

August was such pandemonium that I didn't even post a review. But I did manage to read, because otherwise what is life? And now it's September, and our world begins to creep back toward normal. An excellent time for a good book, right?

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson
Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland
Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010

This review will be short, because I am TERRIFIED that I’m going to spoil the book for someone. And it’s idiotic that I’m reviewing this at all, considering that I did the first two books a year ago.

On the other hand, the third book of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy is the best of the lot, and that’s saying something.

It’s significant that my partner Rob, an avid but normally disciplined reader, totally lost it on this one. Usually he reads for an hour before going to sleep, and it takes him ages to get through a book. I think he finished this one in three days. I arrived home from a day out Sunday to find Mr. Workaholic Painter hunched over the dining room table in the twilight, having been frozen in exactly that place and position since lunchtime. Dinner had consisted of a cheese sandwich. He was 20 pages from the end, and if I had anything to tell him about my day he didn’t want to hear it.

Since you’re obviously a person who reads book reviews, you already know that Larsson is the Swedish investigative reporter, magazine editor, and anti-fascist who died shortly after handing his publisher these three manuscripts. The three were supposed to be the start of a ten-book series, but I’m happy to report that HORNET’S NEST does come to a reasonable conclusion and is not a cliff-hanger. (That was my biggest fear.)

To answer the other question I’ve been hearing, yes, you do have to read the first two first, otherwise this one will make no sense whatsoever. I even had to go back and read the end of the second book just to get my head in the right place. (Maybe that’s a criticism of Larsson’s recapping techniques, or maybe I was just impatient.)

In a Swedish-English translation by Reg Keeland, whose name is on the flyleaf but not the cover, the book is a pleasure to read for the careful language as well--slightly Swedish in flavor (at least to American eyes) but colloquial and unobtrusive.

The weird thing is that this is by no means your typical suspense thriller. Unlike the first two books, which involve the usual amount of people tiptoeing around, getting caught, getting beat up and killed, racing around in mechanized vehicles, and all the rest, this one consists almost entirely of people talking to one another, standing in the shadows watching one another walk around, and using technology to snoop on each other. And yet it’s every bit as exciting as the car chase in “The French Connection.” (Yeah, that’s right, I’m dating myself. Wanna make something out of it?)

Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist return as targets and collaborators, although I don’t think they’re physically in the same room at any time during the action. He is the investigative journalist whose poking around got things moving two books ago. She is the deeply damaged, anti-social, gorgeously goth professional computer hacker Blomkvist brought in to help him in the first book. Over the course of the second, her mysterious past began to take over the story. In this book, it IS the story.

I won’t go into detail, but we find out in this book that every scrap of the abuse Lisbeth suffered in childhood happened for a reason. That reason has national implications in Sweden, and its unraveling is a terrifying example of how fragile democracy can be. Watching how it unravels—who works together, what Mikael and Lisbeth accomplish together and separately—is the most literary satisfaction I’ve experienced since I watched Frodo and friends retake the Shire back in high school.

If this book has a flaw, it’s the same as the first book’s: The main plot concludes with loose ends dangling, and for that reason the book goes on for forty pages beyond what feels like finis. On the other hand, you’re reluctant to let go of Lisbeth, and you know this is the last you’ll see of her. So you’re really not inclined to complain.

Rest in peace, Stieg Larsson. But not for too long—I’m hoping for reincarnation.

A Series of Vapid Excuses

So, I haven't been blogging. Again. This is because I am a very busy woman.

I have been:

Growing flowers. And then looking at them, which is even more time consuming.

Taking pictures of other people's flowers so I can look at them later.

Taking pictures of other people taking pictures of other people's flowers to look at them later.
(That's my friend Larry, visiting in June.)

WHAAAT? How did that get in there? How dare you imply that I just...

Now, wait just a gol-durned ... *Hits blog upside the head.*

Okay, that's better.

Actually, that's a picture of one of the summer's early triumphs: My 20-month-old Sears Kenmore vacuum cleaner, whose motor pooched this spring. Since my last Kenmore lasted 18 years, I wanted Sears to fix this one for free; Sears's best offer, after considerable to-ing and fro-ing with various customer service reps, was to pay half.

Then I found out that Maine has a consumer protection law that imposes a four-year "implied warranty" in cases like this. The last of the reps told me he wasn't equipped to deal with that news and I'd have to contact the corporate offices in Illinois. He declined to suggest any particular person or department, just gave me the overall mailing address and said,"anyone there can help you."

So I chose the CEO.

And this turned out to be a good choice, because I got a personal letter of apology from Interim CEO W. Bruce Johnson and a call from the executive offices arranging to fix the vaccuum cleaner for free. I have it back now, and it works like a charm. And I have to say I'm glad, because it's the best designed of all I checked out while I was waiting to hear from Mr. Johnson.

Now, what else have I been doing? Writing every day. Dealing with the Brooklin Youth Corps and its usual summertime ups and downs. Going through the last phases of production on SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS (out January 20) and developing a proposal for a next book. Preparing for a panel discussion July 25 at Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, NH.

And feeling guilty about not blogging, which mostly means wondering why anyone would want to read a blog by me anyway.

Really, I've been working very, very hard.

*Sigh.*

I hate it when a blog goes rogue.

July Book Review

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@Barrie Summy

Hear that crinkling sound? That’s me, turning over yet another New Leaf. From now on, instead of waiting for the Perfect Blog Post to wander in and crawl up my leg, I will simply Post. Oh, the excitement.

I bet you don’t believe me. Such a skeptical world this has become.

Anyway, what better time to start than with the monthly Book Review Club? (Which, oddly, appears exactly one month after my last post—thank you, Barrie Summy, for making sure I at least do this much.) Don’t forget to click on the icon to find this month’s other reviews.

A Murderous Procession
By Ariana Franklin
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010

Sicilian pathologist Adelia Aquilar is an anomaly in 1176 England—a college-educated feminist, and a practicing doctor schooled in the forbidden art of autopsy. She is, therefore, utterly unbelievable. And I don’t care.

A MURDEROUS PROCESSION is the fourth book in Ariana Franklin’s “Mistress of the Art of Death” series, which follows Adelia from her arrival in England to help Henry II find out who’s murdering Cambridge’s children and blaming it on the Jews. She’s always homesick for Salerno, where her foster father is a Jewish doctor who has no objection to his wife and daughter following the same profession. In England, the role of women is such that she can only escape a witchcraft accusation if her Arab servant/mentor/friend, Mansur, pretends to be an Arabic-speaking doctor while she “interprets.” But she’s a talented forensic pathologist, and Henry won’t let her go home. By the second book she has tied herself to England further by acquiring a lover and a daughter.

This fourth book sends Adelia, Mansur, and the lover (I won’t say who he is in case you want to start the series at the beginning) traipsing through Europe as part of a royal procession accompanying Henry II’s eleven-year-old daughter, Joanna, to her wedding with the King of Sicily. Along the way, it becomes apparent that an old enemy of Adelia’s is also part of the procession and is plotting a gruesome revenge.

I adore these books, despite the odds. Okay, it’s a stretch that a twelfth-century woman would be quite as enlightened and accomplished as Adelia. (Although Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s queen, would have kicked butt in any era.) Yeah, her lover is too consistently open-minded. And yes, it’s weird that a woman as smart as Adelia would be quite so stupid about religion, politics, and her own safety—the factors that keep getting her into trouble. It’s even a little hard to believe that Henry II would have so much work to offer a Sicilian woman doctor, no matter how talented.

But, oh, the medieval world! The details about food, clothing, daily life, travel, religion, politics, world view, and on and on! Franklin knows this era inside and out, and paints it in rich colors that seem true to life. Even Adelia and friends ring true, with suspension of disbelief.

The medieval world was equal parts erudition and ignorance, sophistication and credulity, restriction and freedom, comfort and misery, religious certainty and fear of damnation. Franklin weaves it all into a living, moving tapestry, as real as your foot. And she does it with humor—Henry’s a hoot (as he always is, especially when he’s Peter O’Toole), as are most of the characters burdened with testosterone. Adelia is exasperatingly, comedically befuddled when her status as a woman interferes with her medical practice. Supporting characters add deadpan humor without a modern author’s usual condescension toward “the Dark Ages.”

And there’s more than a touch of terror, appropriate to a time of hellfire and gargoyles. Franklin is capable of truly horrifying villains and means of murder. For sheer gruesomeness, there’s little to top the fate of Henry II’s Fair Rosamund in THE SERPENT’S TALE, a couple of books back.

In the current episode, we are privy to the villain’s thoughts, and therefore see devastation on the horizon when no one else does. You know a book has you by the gizzard when your brain screams, “No! No! Get out of there!”

It’s summertime. You don’t have much disbelief on hand right now anyway. So suspend it and enjoy.